CJ Pearson is, I guess, some sort of viral star because he used to say shitty things about Ahmed Mohamed and President Obama, and until very recently identified as a conservative at the age of 13. As recently as October, he announced that he was supporting Ted Cruz’s campaign for president, not that anyone should care since he is 13 years old, which guarantees that he 1) cannot vote in the U.S., and 2) will inevitably say stupid things. In fact, there’s a good possibility that he’ll only say stupid things. Children are the future in the future; in the present, their brains aren’t fully formed. CJ Pearson does not have a single opinion that couldn’t be better stated by someone older than him. A teenager with the ability to talk like an adult political pundit is a sideshow novelty, like a horse that “knows” arithmetic.

In all likelihood, he does not realize this, but the adults who have enabled him do. I wish that CJ Pearson knew better, but I don’t fault him. I do fault someone like Ted Cruz for participating in this farce by pretending that Pearson’s voice somehow matters. (Cruz officially named Pearson as the chairman of Teens for Ted, a post Pearson has since surrendered. Pearson’s successor as chairman of Teens for Ted is as yet unknown.)

Now, Pearson is endorsing Bernie Sanders for president, which is clever insofar as it keeps Pearson in the news with a new plot line. Is he sincere? Are 13-year-olds sincere about anything besides their self-investment?

CNN interviewed him about his supposed change of heart, which you can read about if you are so inclined. He speaks with the emptiness of a politician (“This election will make a pivotal difference in the future of our nation”). He is very good at acting like an adult, which is key to his novelty. He takes himself so seriously because people older than him have. “If it takes changing your mind to make the right choice as to who should lead our country, I am willing to do it. Screw the optics,” he says.

We live in a democracy, where everyone can say pretty much anything they want. We also possess reasoning that allows us to ignore the immense noise that amasses as a result of living in a democracy, where everyone can say pretty much anything they want. My advice in this situation is to not listen to a child about who the president should be, especially one who is being enabled by politicians...

...and particularly one who is enjoying the attention his grand proclamations (and ensuing repudiation of them) are garnering him.

Here, let me fix that for him: “I’m looking forward to going on TV.”

Let’s not pay CJ Pearson’s opinions on presidential politics any attention until they come from someone of voting age. And even then, chances are they won’t be worth listening to.

Tenants-rights activist and former mayoral, gubernatorial, and (briefly) presidential candidate Jimmy McMillan, best known for his affiliation with the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, which he founded, announced today his retirement from politics.

Gawker endorsed McMillan in his 2005 mayoral bid, despite some ambivalence over comments he had made in an interview alleging that the rent, which even ten years ago was too high, was so because of—at least in part—the Jews. McMillan lost that election, and again in 2009.

The next year, he turned his sights on higher office, running for governor.

Despite a spectacular performance in the gubernatorial debate that year, he lost again, winning about 41,000 votes out of more than four million cast, according to the New York Times.

Now, after a final failed gubernatorial bid in 2014, McMillan has announced his retirement (sic throughout):

McMillan a disable Vietnam Veteran has been spending his own money a disability pension he receives for injuries he received during combat in Vietnam Was 1966-1967-1968. I am walking away because I have know other choice the people have ignored my warning and my cry for help that the rent crisis was getting worse. The kind of help they cannot get from not one elected official, not the Governor neither the Mayor can give them.

A rent reduction for the people in the cities of Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan and Queens is easy to accomplish but NO one has asked me to help. The people are being totally brainwashed and lied too about Low in Come Housing by NYC Mayor who knew he could do anything to prevent the Homeless from escalating. Rent is too damn high is an international crisis.

There are many questions the people should ask themselves. I which them the best - I’m out.

Governor Andrew Cuomo—who, at the debate in 2010, agreed with McMillan that the rent is too damn high—not only has done little to ameliorate that situation but may very well have exacerbated it.

McMillan, a veteran of the Vietnam war who was treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, was evicted from his apartment in the East Village in January. He filed a federal lawsuit alleging that his landlord, Lisco Holdings, had been trying to harass him out of his rent-stabilized apartment since at least 2009, locking him out of his apartment and refusing to accept his rent checks.

From his complaint:

“Undergoing treatment for (PTSD) I can’t remember much more than that other than I was offered me money numerous times and I wouldn’t take it,” McMillan writes. In an earlier suit, he claimed that Lisco had offered him $107,000 to leave the apartment.

What McMillan describes is not uncommon behavior for landlords in New York looking to renovate and increase prices in rent-regulated buildings in desirable neighborhoods like the East Village. Earlier this year, the mayor appointed a Tenant Harassment Prevention Task Force and signed legislation barring repeated buyout offers, for a duration of six months, if tenants refuse them.

McMillan’s suit, however, was dismissed, because federal courts do not have jurisdiction over eviction issues. He was paying less than $900 per month for a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village. In October, according to market analysis by MNS, the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village was $2,850 per month.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality.” Not that it matters anyway.

A federal judge handed down a significant ruling in favor of the Uber drivers suing the ride-hailing start-up in California for misclassifying workers, expanding the class to a potential total of 160,000 employees.

This summer, after U.S. District Judge Edward Chen granted class-action status to the three drivers who brought the initial suit claiming that they were not just contractors for Uber, and therefore deserved things like health benefits, Uber argued that its drivers aren’t really employees. “The reality is that drivers use Uber on their own terms: they control their use of the app,” the company said in a statement.

http://gawker.com/heres-ubers-ri...

After Chen ruled that that was a bunch of baloney, Uber argued that the class should be limited to drivers who did not accept arbitration agreements when first signing up to work for the company, radically diminishing the size of the class in the suit.

But, the Los Angeles Times reports, Chen ruled that that was a bunch of baloney as well. On Wednesday, he certifying an additional subclass of UberBlack, UberX and UberSUV drivers—regardless of whether they accepted a contract an arbitration provision.

“[Judge Chen] has now ruled all of Uber’s arbitration agreements to be unenforceable,” plaintiff lawyer Shannon Liss-Riordan told the Times. “We don’t know yet how many drivers will be covered, but it will be many thousands more who can now be included. We are very pleased with this ruling.”

http://gawker.com/ubers-labor-fr...

“As employees, drivers would lose the personal flexibility they value most—they would have set shifts, earn a fixed hourly wage and be unable to use other ride-sharing apps,” Uber said in a statement to the Wall Street Journal that was surely not meant to be interpreted as a threat.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Today, 195 countries will announce that even a global effort to reduce emissions probably won’t prevent the catastrophic warming of the planet. But there is a way we can reach our climate goals. It’s not a pledge. It’s not a tax. It’s easier than that. We ban cars.

There are over a billion cars crawling the Earth’s surface right now, a number that might double as soon as 2030. How fast that figure grows depends on how dramatically developing nations like China and India experience increases in vehicle ownership. But no single country is currently driving more cars around this planet than the United States of America. We got the world into this mess. And this is our problem to fix.

Aside from a single panel discussion, the COP21 summit hasn’t addressed cars much at all. The United Nations issued a statement that 25 percent of all energy-related emissions in the atmosphere are from transportation, a percentage which is expected to grow to a third. To attempt to reach the climate goals, it says, at least a fifth of all vehicles worldwide should be electric by 2030.

But that’s not the right way to think about it. Right now, virtually every single electric car—which represent only 0.1 percent of all cars—is still burning fossil fuels. In the US, you are literally shoveling coal into your EV. Even if every car on the planet was magically converted into an electric vehicle overnight, we wouldn’t have the grid infrastructure in place to plug all those cars in; we’d have to actually build out the grid to support it. Plus we’d have to power the factories to make all those electric cars to replace the gas-guzzling ones we have now. And if we did either or both of those things right now—and we need to do it right now—it would mean burning a lot more fossil fuels.

Like there is no clean coal, there is no clean car. So we don’t have to get more electric cars on the road. We have to get more cars off the road. Fast.

Car bans are as simple as they sound: They restrict private automobiles from entering a city. You might have already seen how this works in a pedestrian-prioritized historical district, which is common in bigger cities. So we start the ban there, in the biggest cities: Where about half the world’s population lives now, where car ownership is already low, and where existing housing density and transit infrastructure allow people to easily live without automobiles. These are also the places you can make the greatest impact as the population in cities is growing—70 percent of the world will live in a city by 2050, as part of multiple urbanizing trends around the world.

But it’s not just about banning cars. Cities also have to help their citizens live without a car. This means they must approve taller buildings, get rid of parking minimums, and expand public transit options. Build rail instead of roads. Turn gas stations into bike kiosks. Convert parking lots to sidewalks. Provide a fleet of low-speed zero-emission vehicles (like golf carts!) to make deliveries and help residents get around. And introduce better technology solutions to help everyone navigate the city more efficiently.

Does it sound impossible? It’s already happening in a lot of places. Oslo is working on banning all cars from its city center by 2019. So are Helsinki, Madrid, Hamburg, and Paris in various ways. London has heavily restricted them in its downtown. A thriving business district in Johannesburg got rid of all its cars for a month. Even the US has done this, on a smaller scale: New York City has barred them from Times Square, and San Francisco has kicked them off a stretch of its Market Street.

In fact, on any given weekend, cities all over the planet set aside large swaths of their neighborhoods for walkers and bikers as part of regularly scheduled car-free festivals. These are bringing about permanent change: Bogotá began banishing cars from its streets every Sunday and used that momentum to develop one of the most inspiring, low-cost transportation systems on the planet in less than 20 years.

Cities are already doing this because we know it’s better for the humans who live there. Science has proven that almost every other way of getting around is better for our bodies and our minds. Banning cars from major cities worldwide would save millions of lives, and not just by reducing crashes: Removing cars from roads shows a drastic and immediate improvement not only in carbon emissions, but in dangerous particulate matter—the kind that kills about three million people globally a year. Banning cars part of the time, like on alternate days, doesn’t work in the long run because cities are still allowing some cars. People find ways to get around the rules and cities don’t have the money to enforce them. All cars must go.

Although we can see with our own eyes how much better the air in our cities will be without cars, there’s another crisis happening on the ground. Cities that are built for cars require goods and services to be moved across farther and farther distances. Each building’s carbon footprint includes not only the materials and methods which are required to build it, but all the infrastructural systems required to sustain it. If those systems are served primarily by the cars—deliveries, workers, residents, visitors—the building’s carbon footprint balloons. A city built for cars requires far more energy to power it.

Making too much room for cars is also making our cities more expensive. Parking, for example, takes up as much as 14 percent of all land-use in some cities. In Los Angeles County, that’s 3.3 spaces for every vehicle. Less room devoted to cars frees up more space for the additional housing we so desperately need. A city instantly becomes more accessible to all when it plans for the well-being of its citizens, without the assumption that everyone has an extra $9,000 per year to pay for a way to get around it.

Autonomous, zero-emission vehicles can be part of the solution, but only if we think about them as another form of public transit: As shareable, summonable vehicles which will replace taxis (or other on-demand rides). By some estimates, when autonomy arrives, cities will need to reduce the overall space allotted to cars by 85 percent.

But wait! What if autonomous cars don’t happen—or at least not as quickly as we’d like? That’s exactly why the process of evicting cars from all major cities right now is more critical than ever—because this is really about remaking cities into more livable places long before that future arrives.

And if you don’t live in a city—or don’t want to—banning cars benefits you, too. Besides the obvious health benefits, more efficient transportation systems will make it easier to get where you need to go and reduce the overall costs of goods and services brought to your door. If you need a vehicle out where you live, you can simply borrow one from a local zero-emission fleet. It will take many years and a lot of work to reverse the US away from decades of engrained commuting culture, but it can happen. We start with the cities and let the positive impacts ripple out.

One thousand mayors were in Paris this week, pledging to move their communities towards a renewable energy future—even if an international accord wasn’t reached. City leaders have a lot more power to bring about change than 195 countries trying to strike an agreement. A mayor may not be able to shut down a power plant even if it’s inside city limits. But she can make it impossible to bring one more car into her downtown.

If you don’t think that one car will make a difference, consider this. Right now, about three percent of all trips globally are taken by bike. A big study by UC Davis and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy says that reducing car use enough to double that figure to six percent by 2050 could make a game-changing impact. Cities would save $24 trillion and the planet would reduce CO2 emissions by nearly 11 percent. That’s enough to prevent the increase in transportation-related emissions that the UN predicts. And the world would be happier and healthier for it.

A generation from now we’ll look back on this one-hundred year blip in human history and shake our heads. We’ll remember this failed experiment, our temporary lapse in judgement. But we have to reverse this trend now, before we hand over any more of our cities to an antiquated, dying technology that’s killing us right along with it.

Cars are an old idea from the past. But believing that cars are the future could destroy our entire civilization.

Follow the author at @awalkerinLA

Illustration by Sam Woolley

Justin Massler, a.k.a. Cloud Starchaser, believes that he is Harry Potter, Superman, and Jesus Christ. These narratives, he says, are all one and the same, various retellings of his life story populated by supporting characters that also exist in the modern world. He has explained this theory of the world hundreds and hundreds of times, in nearly every email he sends to those who he believes to be the real-life Hermiones, Jessica Rabbits, Lois Lanes.

Massler (who goes by a number of pseudonyms, including Scott Massler, RL Harry Potter, and RL Jesus Christ) is a known threat among law enforcement as a dangerous diagnosed schizophrenic who has spent the past several years in and out of mental hospitals and jails. He has been primarily known for physically and cyber stalking a handful of people he believes to be supporting characters in his hero story, most notably Ivanka Trump and several of the Kardashians. Massler gained notoriety in 2010 when he bombarded Trump with hundreds of emails, texts, and tweets, bought her expensive jewelry from her own collection, and ultimately threatened to kill himself in Trump’s jewelry store if he did not receive a signed photograph of the heiress.

But the Trumps have abundant resources to ensure their safety. In fact, the family has hired a security detail to prevent Massler’s threats from becoming anything more, once hiring a bounty hunter to locate him and have him extradited from California to New York. The same is not true for his many targets who possess fewer resources: in particular, Lenora Claire, an art curator, entertainment personality, and casting producer who has earned enough notability to be vulnerable to creeps, but hasn’t made enough money to be able to hire her own security detail.

Massler became preoccupied with Claire in 2011 when she was named one of LA Weekly’s People of the Year. He had made his way to Los Angeles after making bail for one of his offenses against Trump, and likely spotted her and her gallery’s address in the magazine on that trip.

“This guy who was about 30 years old at the time shows up in a spacesuit,” Claire told Jezebel. “I’m not even kidding. Like, I can’t have a normal stalker.”

Claire assumed it was some kind of fun art prank, so she had her friend take a photograph of him and they started talking. He complimented her hair, which he said was like the character Leeloo’s from Fifth Element. “Then he looks at me and goes, ‘And you’re a supreme being and I’m gonna stalk you.’”

She didn’t learn that her unsettling encounter had been with the same man who had been stalking Trump until gossip sites confirmed that Trump’s stalker had been extradited from Los Angeles back to New York just days later.

In 2012, Massler finally pled guilty to aggravated harassment and criminal contempt charges and sentenced to six months in jail and five years of probation. While the ruling was a small relief, it didn’t do anything to deter Massler from continuing to harass Claire, who was repeatedly told by the police that the only action she could take was to file a report. She never did; she didn’t see what good it could do.

Claire was receiving “20-page, schizophrenic, nutty, handwritten” letters, along with hundreds of emails, tweets, Facebook messages, and YouTube comments from Massler. One tweet read, “@lenoraclaire Sometimes you have to be a friendly stalker for someone’s own good if you need to talk to them but they don’t understand why.” He even created several Google accounts under her name.

In one such email dated August 28, 2015, Massler wrote:

Lenora I figured it all out: I really am Jesus Christ and the real Clark Kent/Superman but the people from Phillips Exeter Academy which is the real Smallville High School have all been literally brainwashed to not think or talk about this. i just ran into some people from Exeter here in Waikiki and I asked them about it and they froze up and stopped talking in the exact same brainwashed fashion that Scientologists do when you ask them about Xenu, like I know what brainwashed people act like as it is really easy to see if you go ask Scientologists about Xenu since they are all brainwashed not to think or talk about Xenu so I ALWAYS ask every Scieftologist [sic] I see at every Scientology center how I can reach the secret Spaceship Level where you fight Xenu as Space Heroes with Tom Cruise as commander and they always act brainwashed like they don’t know anything when they all clearly do. Now Lenora I’ll try to rescue you from brainwashing because you really have great tits and I’m sure that if I could unbrainwash you and you could see I’m really the real Clark Kent/Superman you’d totally be into me so I could tittyfuck you and cum all over your face which is the goal here.

One of the difficulties in reporting on Massler’s obsession with Claire is the absence of certainties about his location. Claire has generally been based in Los Angeles for the past several years, but Massler could have been anywhere from New York City to Waikiki, where he allegedly spent some time, to Los Angeles. Massler’s activities have never been dependent on place—YouTube videos depict him speaking into a computer in what seems to be an Apple store or a library.

Claire tells me that Massler’s obsession has cost her work—even her good friends are reluctant to recommend her for various jobs because they know that he could easily flood anything posted on the internet with violent comments, or target others for choosing to associate with Claire.

“At times he’s fascinated with me, fixated. Other times he’s angry at me for some weird infraction that I’m not even aware of,” Claire said. “Then, a couple of months ago, they started escalating to essentially rape threats.”

Jezebel first started reporting this article in mid-October, just three weeks after Massler sent an explicit death threat—not to Claire, but to her boss, a reality television casting producer who would prefer to remain nameless. In an email, Massler warned:

“Do not continue to pursue any kind of relationship with Lenora Claire or we will kill you. Lenora is part of the messiah’s operations for the future of Israel now and you are unworthy to be part of this or be in his company. If you continue to pursue a relationship or social influence over Lenora you will be killed.”

Shortly after, Claire told Jezebel, he sent her boss a proposal for a reality show based on his experience as a celebrity stalker.

She finally went to the Los Angeles police with the concrete threat in hand—surely they would be able to protect her now that there was an explicit threat, she thought. But there was still nothing they could do; police refused to track his ISP address or file a restraining order, Claire told Jezebel, since Massler is a homeless vagrant, and in order to place a restraining order against someone, you need to know his address.

“They didn’t do a damn thing,” Claire said. “It’s really impacting my life. I’m a public person in that I do events and I curate art shows and I do signings, but I haven’t done anything like that because he’s made it out here before.”

Instead, she used her media connections (which she admits she is lucky to have) to get on a cable show called Crime Watch. The show paired her with Los Angeles District Attorney Rhonda Saunders (who quite literally wrote the book on stalking, as well as California’s revamped cyberstalking law), who agreed to work on her case.

Saunders referred her to the LAPD’s threat management unit, which is specifically trained to deal with stalkers like Massler. In fact, they already were aware of him due to multiple celebrity complaints. The only reason Claire wasn’t initially referred to the unit was because the LAPD clerk she spoke with wasn’t aware that was what they were supposed to do.

“It’s not my goal to shame the LAPD,” Claire said. “I just feel like they should immediately be trained enough to say, ‘This is a legitimate thing, go over to this unit.’ And they failed me on that.”

Now, in regards to her case, Claire said she’s heard the term “mass shooter potential” more than once.

The legal definition of stalking, Saunders explained to me, is simple. The stalker needs to make repeated contact with the victim (following or harassing them at least twice), they need to make credible threats (which can be explicit or implicit), and they need to have the intent of placing the victim in fear. In California, those three qualifications are enough to charge someone with felony stalking and put the criminal in state prison. According to recent figures from the Department of Justice, 3.3 million adult Americans are victims of this kind of aggravated stalking every year.

Massler certainly appears guilty of the above infractions many times over. So why is he still at large?

“I can tell you, the mental health system in this entire country is broken,” Saunders said by way of preface. “It’s a revolving door. Right now I’m dealing with sexually violent predators who also have mental disorders, and they are locked up and then they are able to get out and they are put back on the street. There’s not enough beds in the hospitals, and there are people in the hospitals who really want to think the best and don’t look at the entire scenario and set these people loose.”

Stalking, in particular, is hard to prosecute because it isn’t incident-based, like a robbery or an assault. Instead, it’s a course-of-conduct crime, meaning that it is made up of a lot of actions over a period of time.

“Texting someone, calling someone, posting on someone’s social media page... individually, those typically are not criminal acts,” Michelle Garcia, director of the Stalking Resource Center, told Jezebel. “So it does pose a challenge for law enforcement that when they do get reports, there’s this initial belief that there’s nothing we can do about it because that in and of itself is not illegal.

“However, when we do look at our stalking laws across the country,” she continued, “when we see those individual behaviors as part of a course of conduct and they’re causing either that victim or a reasonable person to feel fear or substantial emotional distress, then we can start looking at them as the crime of stalking.”

Massler’s case is particularly tricky because he’s stalked a combination of celebrities and non-celebrities, often across state lines.

“When we look at a lot of the celebrity cases, often the victim and the offender are complete strangers,” Garcia said. “But when we look at stalking in general, across the United States in most cases the victim and the offenders know each other in some capacity.

“And in about half the cases it’s going to be a current or former intimate partner. So when we do look at most stalking in this country, most of it is done between people who know each other.”

Claire’s case is somewhere in between.

“I’m from New York, and it really bothers me a lot that New York doesn’t have a better stalking law,” Saunders told me, noting that most kinds of stalking are classified in New York as misdemeanors, meaning they legally aren’t punishable by anything over a year in prison. “It’s basically giving stalkers a tap on the wrist. They’re in jail for a couple of days and then they’re out again.”

She continued: “It’s the only law that prevents something even more horrible from happening, whether it’s a rape or a murder. Because, if we know what we’re doing, we can use this law to step in and save some lives.”

The two states’ laws are different in that California recognizes more actions as prosecutable offenses (including internet stalking), and treats stalking as a felony.

“In both states, judges can issue restraining orders. Once issued, any single contact, regardless of whether it is harassing or threatening, can violate the restraining order and result in arrest,” explained Carrie Goldberg, an attorney specializing in internet stalking and sexual assault cases, in an email to Jezebel. She went on:

Somebody convicted of stalking faces up to a year in jail in California, which can be increased to as much as four if the stalking violates an order of protection or the stalker is a repeat offender. In New York we have four different degrees of stalking depending on how serious it is and the prior stalking history. At its most serious in NY, it can lead to a maximum sentence of four years, but at its lowest, it is a misdemeanor Class B which gives the judge the leeway to sentence between 0-3 months.

“In California and in a lot of other states, there’s a provision in our penal code,” Saunders explained. “We can prosecute cases that either originate in California or where the effects are felt. So someone is making phone calls, someone is sending emails, someone is sending letters, let’s say, from New York to California, and this is fairly common in celebrity cases... they could prosecute it in New York or we could prosecute it because our victim is here.”

Massler has only ever been convicted in New York, and is mentally ill and seemingly insufficiently treated, which is why his stint in jail did little to provide any lasting relief for his victims.

“The [cyberstalking] laws are ineffective and they need to change in order to reflect the technology,” Claire said, noting the law’s archaic insistence that restraining orders be served in person or by mail. “If you can send a foreclosure over email and it’s recognized as a legal document, then why can’t you serve a protective order? If you can threaten me in my life over email, why can’t I protect myself?”

Claire told me several weeks ago she was under the impression that LAPD’s threat management unit has reached out to the FBI. Meanwhile, the unit was supposedly also tracking his movements in order to make an arrest (by stalking Claire and dozens of others, Massler has officially violated his probation).

Claire is, incidentally, good friends with Miya Matsumiya, a musician who recently received publicity—wanted and unwanted—for her @perv_magnet project, which documents her decade of cyber harassment.

“She wanted to open up a dialogue about cyber harassment, that was her purpose,” Claire said. “I’m trying to lobby for laws. After this happened to me, I was like, change needs to happen. It isn’t as though I’m coming forward after four years [because] I need attention. My goal is to frighten people and let them know that this could totally happen to you. And if it does, the system currently set in place doesn’t really help or protect you.

“Let’s try and create laws that are proactive instead of reactionary.”

On November 5, Claire informed Jezebel that she had finally heard from her contact in the LAPD that Massler is nowhere to be found and is virtually untraceable. His numerous Twitter accounts have been suspended, which means his harassment died down for a few days, but he soon began a campaign of harassment on multiple new Facebook accounts.

The last Claire heard from the detective assigned to her case was in an email sent the same day:

I spoke with the New York officer that arrested him regarding the Ivanka Trump case but he was not able give me any info regarding his whereabouts. I was able to talk to a probation officer that has his mothers info. I called his mother but she stated that she has not spoke to him in a couple of years. Whether thats true or not I couldn’t tell you. I left my number with his mom but I have not received a phone call.

Regarding the case, Northeast Detective Gale is the Investigating Officer. I thought I could help you find him so you could get a restraining order. Gale would be the officer that would handle any filing

I hope this helps

The LAPD threat management unit has been reviewing Jezebel’s request for an interview since October 26.

“Nobody has helped me,” Claire said in a recent communication. “I’m going to finish filming [Crime Watch] soon and that’s the story. People in my situation are just fucked and that’s scary and horrible.”

“I’m living in constant anxiety from my boss getting death threats to now almost daily sexually explicit emails,” she said a few days later, noting that she didn’t want to block Massler to accrue evidence for the police. “The system fails victims.”

Claire and Saunders plan to travel to Sacramento to lobby for stricter protections as well as the creation of a federal stalker database, which would be similar to the sex offender registry. But until then, civilians and victims of stalking will have to be their own advocates. Many police departments are still insufficiently informed about how to deal with these reports.

“The only solution is to educate the public,” Saunders said. “A lot of victims feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, I never should’ve said hello to him.’ Or, ‘I never should have been nice at first, it’s all my fault.’ And it’s not. That’s one thing we’ve gotta emphasize to these victims. They have done nothing wrong. The problem isn’t with them. The problem is with these stalkers.”

The Stalking Resource Center recommends disengaging with the stalker (although Saunders recognizes that can be easier said than done), as even negative contact can reinforce the offender’s behavior. Saunders also recommends reaching out to local victims service providers, as well as keeping a record of every interaction with the offender (SRC has a log you can print out and use).

If you’re getting emails, letters, or voicemail messages, don’t throw them away, advises Saunders. Every piece of correspondence from a stalker is valuable evidence that juries need to see or hear, and that may help convince a police officer or clerk that your case is worth their attention.

Finally, don’t be afraid to report your crime.

“Come to the police department, if you don’t get satisfaction ask to speak to a supervisor, a detective. Because you go to the front desk sometimes of a police department and there’s a young rookie there or even a civilian. They don’t get it. But hold your ground and just say, ‘I want to talk to a watch commander, I want to talk to a detective.’ And just stand firm. Don’t let them brush you off because it can lead to a really dangerous situation,” Saunders said. “We need to take it really seriously.”

In a recent blog post titled, “God has conspired to ruin my life,” Massler wrote:

“Like I’m a really simple guy, all I want out of life is a girl I love who has big breasts and that’s it but it’s like God just won’t let me get it even though that’s all I’ve ever wanted in life. I mean I could be married now to a wife with really big boobs if only God hadn’t conspired to ruin my life but maybe one day I’ll overcome it.”

He continued: “I just have to hope that if I go on one day I’ll meet the woman who’s right for me and she’ll have a really awesome rack and it will all have been worth it in the end somehow I guess.”

Contact the author at joanna@jezebel.com.

Photo by Austin Young/lenoraclaire.com, screenshot via Youtube

There can be nothing more Facebook than a photo of “a printout of a timehop of a chain letter” containing a cheerfully told joke about Barack and Michelle Obama dying. Mark Zuckerberg should donate his entire fortune to this guy’s aunt.

[thanks Tom]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

A grand jury has indicted on murder charges the two deputy marshals arrested last month in connection with a shooting in which a 6-year-old boy, Jeremy Mardis, was killed and his father, Chris Few, wounded in Marksville, Louisiana.

Norris Greenhouse Jr. and Derrick Stafford have both been formally charged with second-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder, WAFB reports.

In the earliest reports on the incident, it was claimed that Few was backing his car up into the officers, who had to defend themselves. Police later disavowed that account.

A lawyer representing Few claimed that a third officer’s body cam had captured footage of the incident, and showed that Few, with whom one of the marshals may have had a prior, antagonistic relationship, had his hands in the air when the marshals opened fire.

From the Acadania Advocate:

Greenhouse and Stafford were among four officers present at the shooting, which occurred following a brief chase around 9:30 pm on Nov. 3. Only Greenhouse and Stafford fired their weapons, according to State Police.

It remains unclear why the deputy marshals initiated the chase of Few, who was unarmed. Jeremy, an autistic first-grader who was buckled into the passenger seat of the car, was shot multiple times in the head and torso and died at the scene.

The two other officers, Lt. Jason Brouillette and Sgt. Kenneth Parnell, have been cleared of any wrongdoing, the town’s mayor, John Lemoine, said Thursday. Parnell has returned to work with the Marksville Police Department, Lemoine said, while Brouillette is out on sick leave. Stafford, a lieutenant and shift supervisor who’d worked for the department for eight years, has been suspended without pay, Lemoine said.

Mardis’s grandmother, Cathy Mardis, said she wants the footage of her grandson’s shooting to be made public. “There may be some graphic, disturbing images, but I think it needs to be seen,” she told the Advocate.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced Thursday that he would sign an executive order barring people on federal terrorism watch lists from buying firearms in his state. Congressional Republicans have resisted President Obama’s call for a similar ban at the national level.

This week, Baltimore Police Officer William G. Porter is the first of six cops to stand trial for his alleged role in the death of Freddie Gray, who died in the back of a city prisoner transport van earlier this year. Tomorrow, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes airs an hourlong special about Gray and the city that raised him.

The trailer, released today, purports to tell “the story of what happened after the cameras left.” That is, how the vibrant and sometimes troubled city lived one after the media frenzy that ensued when demonstrations over Gray briefly broke into full-on riots in late April. Watch it tomorrow at 9 p.m.

Image via AP. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder, chairman, and CEO of Facebook, shared his thoughts yesterday on the place Islamophobia has on the billion-person-strong social network. (That is: there is no place for it.) In the process, he described himself as “the leader of Facebook.” Haha, what?

“As a Jew, my parents taught me that we must stand up against attacks on all communities,” he wrote. “Even if an attack isn’t against you today, in time attacks on freedom for anyone will hurt everyone.”

“If you’re a Muslim in this community, as the leader of Facebook I want you to know that you are always welcome here and that we will fight to protect your rights and create a peaceful and safe environment for you.”

There is no more reason to doubt Zuckerberg’s sincerity here than there was regarding his fraudulent philanthropy, although to whatever extent this sentiment is sincere it is also frighteningly naive.

http://gawker.com/mark-zuckerber...

That having been said, As the leader of Facebook is a very weird way for Zuckerberg to position himself in relation to the site and its users! Especially so as Election 2016—which will no doubt come to be seen as having been influenced by Facebook in an unprecedented way—is already dominating our news cycles, in no small part thanks to a terrifying demagogue who is either a cynical genius or an unhinged madman. So. In whose interests does the leader of Facebook act? Were the, uhh, people of Facebook aware that they had a leader? How long has he been leading us? And...where?

Also: “In the past, Mr. Zuckerberg had mainly used his personal Facebook page for product announcements,” the New York Times reported. “But he has shown a new level of openness since July, when he announced that he and Dr. Chan were expecting a baby.” What’s the difference??? LOL. But seriously folks. The leader of Facebook.

Update 8:25 pm – And then there’s this! From BuzzFeed News:

Asked if Trump would be removed from the platform for political speech that arguably fits Facebook’s definition of hate speech, a Facebook spokesperson responded:

“When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration. That context can include the value of political discourse. Many people are voicing opinions about this particular content and it has become an important part of the conversation around who the next U.S. president will be. For those reasons, we are carefully reviewing each report and surrounding context relating to this content on a case by case basis.”

Everything is going to be fine.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Ben Affleck has a tattoo on his back. Reporters first noticed it in July, after someone photographed what appeared to be dragon tail peeking out from under his shirt. Could it be...? No, it couldn’t, we all thought at the time. But thanks to a more revealing image of Affleck on the set of his new film Live By Night published today by Us Weekly, we know it both could be and is a tattoo of...a big fucking dragon.

Due to the complicated (and expensive) issues surrounding image rights, we’re unable to publish the incredible new photograph of Affleck’s new ink, so you’ll have to settle for our descriptions of it:

Kate Dries:

“The physical manifestation of a mid-life crisis. The thing a man who doesn’t realize he won’t be able to fuck whoever he wants forever does.”

Emma Carmichael:

“Triggering. A tramp stamp for a magic the gathering league.”

Clover Hope:

“Ben’s youth.”

Julianne Shepherd:

“Hit the Chronic(WHAT!)les of Narnia.”

Kelly Faircloth:

“A 15-year-old mega nerd’s tattoo. It’s also very DragonLance cover art.”

Hillary Crosley Coker:

“Not even sure Bobby, not even sure. Divorced dad sadness, personified in ink.”

Jia Tolentino:

“Visual disembowelment.”

Bobby Finger:

“When Jennifer Garner saw it, I bet she just sighed and went into another room.”

I reached out to Affleck’s publicists for comment on whether or not his big fucking dragon tattoo is permanent or for a film role, and doubt they’ll ever respond to me.

UPDATE:

Kate: oh shit the tat is a phoenix

Kate: how did we like

overlook that

Bobby: RISING FROM THE ASHES

hoiasndfkusgfykajydgahsd

Kate: wanna update in a funny way

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Image via Bobby Finger.

Americans are more afraid of terrorism than at any other time since 9/11’s immediate aftermath, according to a new poll. Meanwhile, Democrats find themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to take seriously the man who declared tonight anyone who found guilty of killing a cop should be executed.

Nineteen percent of Americans think that terrorism is the most important problem facing the country today, the New York Times and CBS News poll found, up from 4 percent just a month ago. Seven in 10 likely Republican primary voters said Donald Trump was well-equipped to handle a terrorist threat and four in 10 were “very confident.”

From the Times:

Only Senator Ted Cruz of Texas comes close to those numbers.

But it is not only Republicans feeling renewed fear about terrorist strikes on American soil. Forty-four percent of the public says an attack is “very” likely to happen in the next few months, the most in Times or CBS News polls since October 2001, just after the deadliest terrorist assault in the country’s history. Seven in 10 Americans now call the Islamic State extremist group a major threat to the United States’ security, the highest level since the Times/CBS News poll began asking the question last year.

All of which is to say that nobody has capitalized better on the jingoistic expression of Americans’ existential dread than Donald Trump—so well, in fact, that establishment Democrats, seemingly to their great reluctance, have to start taking him seriously.

From the Times story—which ran under the headline, “To Democrats, Donald Trump Is No Longer a Laughing Matter”—on that shift:

In Washington on Thursday, Mrs. Clinton’s pollster, Joel Benenson, told a campaign briefing that he believed Mr. Trump would linger and be a “dominant” force, but that he could not predict whom the nominee would be, according to an attendee.

Former President Bill Clinton has been particularly intrigued by Mr. Trump’s appeal, referring to his campaign as ideal for what he dismissively calls an “Instagram election” of quick sound bites and easy responses (“Build a wall!” “Close the borders!”) to extremely complex problems, said one of these advisers with direct knowledge of Mr. Clinton’s conversations.

“I don’t know that anybody imagined how compelling the Trump candidacy would be,” said Paul Begala, a former adviser to Mr. Clinton. “He’s winning because the Republican Party is older, whiter and angrier than ever — but America’s not.”

“I think for weeks, you know you and everybody else were just bringing folks to hysterical laughter and all of that,” Hillary Clinton said in an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers on Thursday. (Hmm.) “But now he has gone way over the line. And what he’s saying now is not only shameful and wrong—it’s dangerous.”

Really though, the only thing more depressing than Trump himself is everyone pretending to be surprised about him.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, accused of sexual assault by 13 different women, and who prosecutors said targeted women of color (especially drug addicts, alcoholics, and sex workers, because he thought no one would believe them if they reported him) has been found guilty on 18 of the 36 counts he was facing, including four counts of first-degree rape.

In his closing arguments, BuzzFeed News reports, Holtzclaw’s defense lawyer Scott Adams said that Holtzclaw was an “honorable and ethical police officer.”

“He was aggressive, he was vigilant, and he was honest,” Adams said. “Without people like Daniel Holtzclaw patrolling the streets, what are we?” According to BuzzFeed, a woman in the gallery responded: “Safe.”

Last month, an Associated Press investigation found that, between 2009 and 2014, nearly 1,000 police officers nationwide were either decertified or lost their badges for crimes like rape, sexual shakedowns, and possession of child pornography.

The jury recommended a total sentence of 263 years for Holtzclaw. His formal sentencing is set for January.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Following Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s recent announcement that all combat jobs would now be open to women, results of a survey given to more than 7,600 of America’s special ops forces have been released, showing an overwhelming majority of male commandos are opposed to the decision.

The voluntary survey, conducted by the Rand Corp. between May through July 2014, showed 85 percent of respondents do not want special operations jobs opened to women, with 70 perecent opposing having women in their individual units. According to AP, more than 80 percent said women aren’t strong enough and can’t handle the demands of the job while 64 percent believe they aren’t mentally tough enough. One respondent said, “I weigh 225 pounds, and 280 pounds in full kit, as did most of the members of my ODA (a 12-man Army Green Beret unit). I expect every person on my team to be able to drag any member of my team out of a firefight. A 130 pound female could not do it, I don’t care how much time she spends in the gym. Do we expect wounded men to bleed out because a female soldier could not drag him to cover?”

Most of the respondents were young, white married men who are worried that the presence of women in their small teams could create complications in their home life, sexual harassment or affairs. They believe the risk could affect the family-like trust of the group.

“There will be no exceptions,” Carter said at last week’s news conference. “They’ll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars and lead infantry soldiers into combat. They’ll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men.”

After Carter’s announcement, Gen. Joseph Votel posted a memo detailing the decision and noted that women have already moved into special ops jobs, such as helicopter pilots and crew, members of cultural support teams in Afghanistan and in civil affairs and information operations. The decision has opened about 220,000 military jobs to women.

In the memo, Votel explained, “If candidates meet time-tested and scientifically validated standards, and if they have proven that they have the physical, intellectual, professional, and character attributes that are so critical to special operations, they will be welcomed into the special operations forces ranks.”

Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

One of the nine most-wanted fugitives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Ladislas Ntaganzwa, the former mayor of Nyakizu, was arrested by Interpol agents in Goma, Congo, this week, the Associated Press reports.

More than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus died in that genocide, John Bosco Siboyintore, head of the genocide tracking unit at Rwanda’s Public Prosecution Authority, said. The United Nation’s international criminal tribunal closed its proceedings last week after nearly 20 years, transferring Ntaganzwa’s case to Rwanda.

The United States had offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Ntaganzwa’s capture, the New York Times reports. Accused of helping to organize the massacre of more than 20,000 Tutsis, he faces charges related to participation in genocide and incitement to commit genocide:

Nearly 22 years ago, Mr. Ntaganzwa was in his early 30s and a mayor, exercising “absolute authority, control and effective control over his subordinates” during the Hutu government’s genocide against the minority Tutsis, according to his 1996 indictment.

From his position, Mr. Ntaganzwa oversaw the murder of thousands of his countrymen in the area he administered, as well as the rape and sexual violence committed against women, the United Nations said in its statement. On April 14-15, 1994, his indictment said, Mr. Ntaganzwa distributed weapons to civilians surrounding a parish where thousands of Tutsis had taken shelter, then used a megaphone to order them to shoot into the crowd. Several days later, it said, he helped organize another massacre on a nearby hill.

“He personally participated in these crimes,” his indictment says.

Ntaganzwa had been a fugitive for 21 years, the AP reports.

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

A special grand jury in Ohio, convened on Thursday, charged Joel Jenkins, a recently-fired Pike County sheriff’s deputy, with murder and involuntary manslaughter in two separate incidents, the Chillicothe Gazette reports.

On March 28th, Jenkins allegedly shot Robert Rooker, 26, who fled at high speed after he was caught speeding, The Guardian reports. Jenkins is charged with murder, a first-degree felony, and reckless homicide, a third-degree felony, in connection with Rooker’s death.

According to the Gazette, Jenkins was put on leave after Rooker’s shooting, reinstated, and then put on leave again. On December 3rd, Pike County Sheriff Charlie Reader said, Jenkins, who was drunk, accidentally fired a gun (not his department-issued weapon), injuring his friend Jason Brady, 40. Brady later died at the scene.

Jenkins was charged with involuntary manslaughter, a third-degree felony, in connection with Brady’s death. (A gun specification was added to that charge.) He was fired on Monday after reporting the incident.

A special prosecutor from the Attorney General’s Office is handling the case, NBC4 reports, and, according to The Guardian, a warrant has been issued for the former deputy’s arrest.

Image via NBC4. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

How can you make a difference in the American political system? Bernie Sanders supporters are having preemptively defeatist arguments about this, about whether Sanders voters should swallow their principles and support Hillary Clinton in the general election, or sit back and let the Republican nominee win, in the hopes of shocking Democrats to move left.

It’s silly to be worrying about the end game, given that not one state has voted or caucused yet. What if Sanders wins the nomination? (What if Donald Trump wins the other nomination?) More importantly, though, if you want to expand the range of possibilities in American politics, you should not be thinking about how to most effectively throw your presidential ballot into the sea of 130,000,000 general election ballots. You should be running for office, now.

Bernie Sanders is not up on stage contesting the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination because he spent the last 40 years contriving the most meaningful ways to cast a protest vote. He is up there because he ran for office.

You can run for office, too. Yes, you. Why not? Why worry about how to send a message as a passive consumer of politics, when you can be an active participant? Democracy isn’t people arguing about how best to vote between foreordained options. Democracy is people running for office. You are a person.

All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election next year. You may have noticed that Congress is largely controlled by idiots, hacks, and crooks. Are these the people you want representing you? What if you represented yourself?

This message is not at all restricted to the true believers in Bernie Sanders. Maybe you find Bernie Sanders’ record on gun control or racial injustice inadequate. If you think nobody is talking about the issues that truly matter to you, why not get up on the stump and talk about them yourself?

Please do not mistake this for some sort of ironic Modest Proposal. I tried suggesting running for office to someone who lives in the Midwest and spends a lot of time lamenting the state of politics and political discourse on Twitter. He assumed I was being sarcastic. This is not a sarcastic position. His congressional representative, if I read the map right, is a destructive creep. And no one has even filed to run against him yet.

Is anyone running against your current representative? Find your district on Ballotpedia and check. If not, why aren’t you? If you live in Alabama, Arkansas, or Illinois, it’s already too late. But in the other 47, you’ve still got a chance. Check your deadline.

Texas and Ohio are coming up next Monday and Wednesday, respectively. There are 22 seats listed in Texas with no Democratic challenger and 10 with no Republican. In Ohio, there are 12 seats with no Democratic challenger and 4 with no Republican.

If you’re in Texas and want to go for it, it’s admittedly a little tight. You’ll need to come up with $3,125 or with 500 signatures before 6 p.m. Monday. For Ohio, you need $85 in filing fees and 50 signatures. That’s not impossible.

Otherwise, for other states, you have till after New Year’s, at least. Look up the requirements. Think about how you would go about meeting them. Every two years, 435 people are able to do it and to win office.

Perhaps you think you’re unelectable. You can’t be less electable than Bernie Sanders was in 1972, when he put himself up for the United States Senate and got 1,571 votes, or one vote for every 29 votes the winner got. He went on to lose three more statewide races, for Senate and for governor of Vermont, without ever getting more than 6.1 percent of the vote.

Then he lowered his sights and got elected mayor of Burlington, by a 10-vote margin. Four straight terms as mayor, accompanied by more failed bids for higher office, left his electoral record at 4 wins and 6 losses. And now here he is, on a 10-election winning streak, giving lengthy speeches about democratic socialism on the national stage.

So it takes persistence. It takes the willingness to lose. It takes money—a winning Congressional campaign costs, on average, more than a million dollars. But before it takes any of those things, it takes the willingness to run.

Why don’t I do this myself? I’m in the set of people who’ve surrendered their political power by moving to a big city, and in the subset of those people who’ve surrendered it twice over by joining a profession that regards direct political activity as an unethical source of bias in the work of indirect political activity. Meanwhile, the house I grew up in sits in a corner of a district represented by a ninny who’s best known for jumping in from his rural Maryland seat to block the voters of Washington, D.C., from decriminalizing marijuana. This is embarrassing.

As it happens, he will be facing a challenge in 2016—not yet from any Democrat or independent, according to the Ballotpedia listing, but from his libertarian flank in the Republican primary, because he interfered with other people’s pot reform. This is what happens on the right. Libertarians, creationists, tax rejectors, or nativists don’t spend their time arguing about the hypothetical disposition of their general-election ballots. When someone does something they disagree with, they run against them.

This is part of the reason that Congress is such a hideous and dysfunctional collection of crackpots at the moment. Far-right activists went ahead and launched insane doomed Congressional campaigns for themselves, and some of them won. Even more of them won local offices. They are reshaping the country right now. You could almost certainly shape it into something better, if you tried.

Illustration by Jim Cooke. Contact the author at scocca@gawker.com.

America! The greatest country in the world—where our robust free market system ensures that our economic growth is the envy of all lesser nations! Right?

Jeremy Grantham is one of the world’s most famous investors, a money manager who helps oversee more than $100 billion. His periodic letters to investors are widely read. His latest one, released this week, asks the question: is America all it’s cracked up to be? It is a great place for the extremely rich, but what about for everyone else?

For the 50 years I have been in America, Business Week and The Wall Street Journal have been telling us how incompetent at business the French are and how persistently we have been kicking their bottoms. If only they could get over their state socialism and their acute Eurosclerosis. And as far as I can tell we have generally accepted this thesis. Yet Exhibit 1 shows what has actually happened to France’s median hourly wage. It has gone from 100 to 280. Up 180% in 45 years! Japan is up 140% and even the often sluggish Brits are up 60%. But the killer is the U.S. median wage. Dead flat for 45 years! These are the uncontestable facts.

In another chart, Grantham looks at how much of our hard-earned (and barely growing) wages we are all paying to the jack-booted thugs of the U.S. government:

The data presented in Exhibit 6 examines the proposition that “more and more goes to the government and soon they will have everything.” You have heard that many times recently in the political debate. Sorry, “bull sessions.” You can see that the U.S. share going to the government in taxes is about the least in the developed world and that it has barely twitched for 50 years. Yet, apparently we have been steadily going to hell.

The conclusions that one might draw from these simple charts are:

• America’s wealth is being captured by the very rich to a greater degree than almost anywhere in the developed world.
  
• The average American worker has been getting screwed by corporations and the government for the past 45 years.
  
• We pay lower taxes than most everywhere in the developed world, and who saves the most money because of that? The rich, who by the way are also the only ones whose wages are growing at a healthy pace.
  
• We should raise our taxes and we should enact policies that direct economic growth towards the middle and lower classes.
  

http://gawker.com/the-middle-cla...

Or, you can vote for the Republicans, whose political platform is the exact opposite of these propositions.

[Charts via GMO]

At least eight students at The Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina have been suspended after photos of them dressed in white hoods surfaced on Facebook Wednesday night. Though Citadel president Lt. Gen. John W. Rosa was quick to explain the incident as a group of students “singing Christmas carols as part of a ‘Ghosts of Christmas Past’ skit,” that excuse looks even flimsier when considered in the context of the school’s racist past.

http://gawker.com/what-does-this...

Wednesday night was not the first time Citadel cadets have dressed up like the KKK. The Post and Courier recalls an October 1986 incident in which five white Citadel cadets “entered black student Kevin Nesmith’s room wearing white sheets and towels, and shouting racial insults. They left a charred paper cross in his room.”

According to a Washington Post report about the incident, Nesmith was one of 31 black students in a freshman class of 651. The cadets who terrorized him were not expelled—instead, Citadel officials ordered them “to walk 195 hours of punishment.” Nesmith, however, resigned from school citing continued racial harassment. The NAACP then filed an $800,000 federal lawsuit on Nesmith’s behalf, claiming that “racial bigotry has historically been tolerated and sanctioned by officials at the Citadel.”

Wednesday night’s incident, per Rosa, was just a festive skit about ghosts. Which ghosts?

While Nesmith’s case is perhaps the most high profile example of pernicious racism at The Citadel, The Post and Courier notes that the school has often been a place in which racists feel free to express themselves. In March 2013, for example:

[F]ormer Citadel cadet Jordyn Jackson told The Post and Courier that she was a victim of racial harassment at the military college almost from the moment she walked through its doors the previous fall. She was the target of racial epithets and racist notes, she said. Jackson quit the school rather than endure more insults, she had said.

And last year:

Charleston County Councilman Henry Darby received hundreds of phone and email messages after he asked The Citadel to remove the Confederate Naval Jack flag from Summerall Chapel on campus. Several of the messages from people identifying themselves as Citadel alumni included racial slurs and the use of the N-word.

The Confederate flag still hangs in the Chapel. As recently as 1992, the Citadel band waved it at football games, while playing “Dixie.”

Only this year did the Citadel form a “Diversity Council,” aimed at “promoting a culture of inclusion and equal treatment on campus” for minority cadets, who now make up 22 percent of the student population.

Lamont A. Melvin, chairman of the Citadel Minority Alumni Group, summed everything up, sadly, in a statement yesterday: “Much more needs to be done to address the culture that continues to house recurring prejudices against minority cadets.”

Photos via WCIV. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.