Is this more or less pathetic than “please clap?”

Contact the author at brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Very presidential.

Contact the author at brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Contact the author at brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

A new national survey from Public Policy Polling has confirmed what we all already knew to be true: As far as a good portion of the American public is concerned, Ted Cruz might as well be the Zodiac killer.

http://gawker.com/a-major-poll-i...

PPP surveyed over 1,000 registered voters total, and of those people, an alarming number were not just suspicious but confident that oversized flesh coat Ted Cruz was, in fact, the Zodiac Killer.

Unfortunately for Cruz, it looks like voters aren’t too keen on electing a cryptogram-loving mass murderer President. Of the remaining Republican lineup, Cruz gets a mere 10 percent of the vote while Trump takes home a remarkable 45 percent of the vote.

Is that 10 percent who voted for Cruz the same 10 percent that believe him to be the Zodiac Killer? It’s impossible to say for sure—but yes, probably. Florida is a terrible place.

On the Democratic side, things aren’t looking to great for Bernie Sanders.

It’s worth noting that a lower percentage of Democratic voters are willing to vote for Bernie Sanders than the percentage of total voters willing to believe that Ted Cruz might be the Zodiac Killer.

You can see PPP’s poll in full below, and for whatever reason, Ted Cruz’s campaign has yet to respond to our request for comment on whether he is, in fact, the Zodiac Killer. Do with that information what you will.

Earlier this week, LawNewz.com unearthed a $125 million federal sexual assault lawsuit, filed against Donald Trump in 1997, which alleges that the real estate developer violated the plaintiff’s “physical and mental integrity” by touching her intimately, without her consent, after her boyfriend entered into a business relationship with him.

The 12-page complaint was filed on April 25, 1997, by Jill Harth Houraney, whose (now ex-)husband George was partnered with Trump on something called the American Dream Festival, “an event-oriented affair that includes a ‘Calendar Girl’ competition, whereby young, often vulnerable female contestants compete for prizes and titles.”

The complaint alleges that Trump asked his business partner if he was sleeping with Jill Harth Houraney, who was also employed by the festival, and if it was “just for the night or what?” It also alleges that Trump groped her, violated her “physical and mental integrity,” and engaged in “Svengali-type acts to control and subjugate” her to his “will with demeaning and perverted communications” demanding that she become his sex slave. The allegations continued:

According to the complaint, after a business meeting in January 1993, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump “forcibly prevented [Harth Houraney] from leaving and forcibly removed [her] to a bedroom,” where he subjected her to his “unwanted sexual advances, which included touching of [her] private parts in an act constituting attempted ‘rape.’” That same month, he allegedly assaulted her in his daughter’s room:

Harth Houraney had made similar accusations against Trump in a breach-of-contract suit the couple filed against Trump in 1995, which a federal judge had agreed to seal. The 1998 civil-rights lawsuit was initially put into the public record, until Harth Houraney dropped the suit about a month after filing it.

At the time, Trump denied all of the allegations, suggesting to the New York Daily News that the suit “was a desperate attempt to get me to settle a case they can’t win.” Reportedly, Trump did settle the breach-of-contract suit for a six-figure sum later that year (after the sexual assault suit was dropped).

In a statement to LawNewz.com, Trump’s special counsel, Michael Cohen, described Harth Houraney as her ex-husband’s “pawn.” He said: “There is no truth to the story at all. The plaintiff in the matter, Jill Harth, would acknowledge the same.” Harth gave a similar account, saying that she had been “under duress” and “pressured” to file the suit.

“I saw him [Donald] recently, and he said I looked good,” Harth said. “The allegations were twisted and embellished. Everything could be looked at in different way.” However, when asked by the Guardian whether she stood by the allegations made in the lawsuit, Harth wrote, in a text message, “Yes.”

Photo via AP Images. Contact the author at brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Emails obtained by the Detroit News reveal that top aides to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder were issuing warnings over the water quality in Flint as far back as October 2014—a year before the city switched out its own contaminated water supply and reconnected to Detroit’s.

The emails in question were sent by Valerie Brader, then the governor’s environmental policy adviser, and Mike Gadola, then his chief counsel. The governor himself was not a recipient, but his closest advisers were, including his chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, and communications director. Snyder staffers told the News they did not take their concerns directly to the governor until October 2015, when the water supply was switched.

On October 14 2014, after General Motors said it would stop using Flint water because it was corroding auto parts, Brader advised that Flint reconnect to the Detroit water supply. Gadola concurred, adding a sense of personal urgency—he grew up in Flint, and his mother still lived there, he wrote. From the News:

“To anyone who grew up in Flint as I did, the notion that I would be getting my drinking water from the Flint River is downright scary,” Gadola wrote. “Too bad the (emergency manager) didn’t ask me what I thought, though I’m sure he heard it from plenty of others.”

...

“Nice to know she’s drinking water with elevated chlorine levels and fecal coliform,” Gadola said. “I agree with Valerie (Brader). They should try to get back on the Detroit system as a stopgap ASAP before this thing gets too far out of control.”

Michigan’s open records law exempts communications from the governor’s office release. Snyder released over 1,000 pages of emails to the News this week, saying that he wanted to increase transparency.

These are the latest in a series of released emails suggesting state and local authorities could have moved more quickly than they did to fix the crisis in Flint. Previously, emails showed that concerned government workers in Flint were given bottled water to drink over a year before it was given to ordinary citizens, and that Snyder’s office knew of a link to between elevated levels of lead in the water and an outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease much earlier than it previously let on.

Snyder chief of staff Dennis Muchmore told the News that he and other staffers shared Brader and Gadola’s concerns, but that the state Treasury Department deemed a switch back to Detroit’s supply too expensive. “The assessment was you couldn’t do it because it was a cost that should have borne by the system,” he said.

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

If this whole “being president” thing doesn’t work out, Donald Trump’s company is ready to get the big man back in the casino business. A capital idea!

As you may know if you are not a Donald Trump supporter (Donald Trump supporters tend to be extremely low on factual knowledge about Donald Trump), Donald Trump’s company opened a huge high rise residential building on the Las Vegas strip in 2008, during the recession. He had a very hard time selling all those luxury condos for some reason! In fact, a third of them remain unsold to this day, though the building is reportedly doing well as a quasi-hotel.

One oddity about this huge Vegas strip project: it did not have a casino, Now, the Wall Street Journal reports, Trump’s company is considering partnering 50/50 with Vegas casino mogul and Trump pal Phil Ruffin (pictured above) on a new casino that would be attached to Trump’s hotel. So Donald can either go live in the White House, or he can go play comped blackjack at his very own Vegas casino. Either way, a winner.

And lest we forget his glorious history:

Mr. Trump owned casinos in Atlantic City for decades but never had any gambling interests in Nevada. The casinos he developed and owned in Atlantic City went through bankruptcy four times. He no longer has any interest them.

Why wouldn’t you want him as your casino partner/ commander in chief of the world’s most powerful army? We need to win, things.

[Photo: AP]

When Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died, he was on a free hunting trip sponsored by a friend who had had business before the Court the year before. Turns out Scalia took hundreds of “free” trips—more than any other Supreme Court justice on the bench.

http://gawker.com/scalias-huntin...

According to the New York Times, which examined the Center for Responsive Politics database, Scalia went on at least 258 so-called subsidized trips between 2004 and 2014. In 2014 alone, the paper reports, he took at least 23 free trips to places like Hawaii, Ireland and Switzerland.

(For comparison’s sake, the next most traveled justice over the same time period was Stephen Breyer, who took 148 trips. John Roberts took the least, with about 48 trips.)

At least some of Scalia’s free trips were for business purposes like “giving speeches, participating in moot court events or teaching classes,” but not all—Scalia was reportedly participating in a group hunting trip with a secret all-male society when he died.

http://gawker.com/antonin-scalia...

And at least some of those vacations were sponsored by people who had or could reasonably be expected to have business before the Supreme Court.

In 2011, Scalia declined to recuse himself from the Citizens United case after it came to light that he and Justice Clarence Thomas had attended a Palm Springs retreat funded by Charles Koch and the Federalist Group, which reportedly sponsored at least 21 trips for Scalia to places like Park City, Napa, and Bozeman, Montana. The group, which also sponsored a trip for Justice Samuel Alito, declined to fund any trips for the more liberal justices.

John Poindexter, the owner of the hunting ranch where Scalia died, is also the owner of the Houston-based manufacturing firm, J.B. Poindexter & Co. Last year a subsidiary of his firm, a company called Mic, received a favorable outcome in an age discrimination case that reached the Supreme Court.

And it’s all totally legal. Justices can can pretty much do what they want as long as they promise to be impartial. In fact, had Scalia returned from the hunting trip, he might not even have had to tell anyone he went—accommodations paid for by private individuals are apparently exempt from disclosure rules.

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

A viral story too viral to be a story hit the internet two days ago when a 16-year-old “gamer” in Moscow “won” a month-long hotel cohabitation experience with a porn actress after visiting a gaming website.

I don’t want to, but I must now take you through what is happening in this video, the flat theatrics of this very sad internet play and its various aromatic hues of bullshit. Our “story” begins at LifeNews.ru, a Kremlin-friendly website and 24-hour TV channel that none of you watch, except for maybe that time their “expert political analyst” said the CIA did Charlie Hebdo.

Boiling With Expectations

LifeNews introduces Ruslan Shchedrin, the 100,000th visitor of “a site where gamers purchase various weapons to use in other games.” And “here he is now, exactly where he was when he found out he won, at his favorite laptop,” casually scrolling through that very website, of course.

“First, I thought it was some sort of a scam,” says the turtlenecked teen cherub, gurgling through his grin. “But when I learned it wasn’t, I was beside myself with joy!” Has he seen her? “Ah, yes, I have seen her. I liked all of her. Good sizes.” He makes booby-circling motions. “Hmmmehh.” How does he feel? “I am boiling with expectations.” What will he tell her when he meets her? “Hi. I’m that boy that won you.”

Even More PR

Ruslan Shchedrin the boy gamer was quickly identified as Ruslan Shchedrin, the child actor. (Here’s a “sowreel.”) TJ Journal did a rundown of his acting profiles, as well as his sister Dina’s. But the press cycle sadness rolled on because sex might be happening.

LifeNews ran at least two follow-up video pieces — one with the father, creaking about how he will “take possession of the prize himself, as the boy’s legal guardian” and one with porn actress Ekaterina Makarova, discussing the logistics of this “acquisition” (“Will you be picking him up from school?”) and their cultural excursion plans to go the museum and stuff.

The host asked Ekaterina if some video broadcasting should be done so that the public can observe the hotel happenings for the boy’s safety. They don’t want him getting “attached.” Ekaterina said that yes, that’s a good idea and that LifeNews’ audience will appreciate it.

In the astronomically remote chance that this giveaway was real, the organizer is in legal trouble for not publicizing the full rules of the contest, to which the organizer responded, “Well, if authorities are gonna do something about it, we’re going to have even more PR.”

Who you gonna call? Rospotrebnadzor!

The cherry on top of this post-advertising media circus bullshit cake was a statement from Deputy Vitaly Valentinovich Milonov, a Member of the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg for United Russia:

Normal gamers are normal, and they don’t need any porn actresses. This is only for those pimpled Tolkienites who need such accessories. As a gamer myself, I can tell you that contests like these are an embarrassment to all the gamers of the world.

Milonov assures he’s personally urging the government internet watchdog Rospotrebnadzor to look into this. The age of consent in Russia is sixteen. A different politician concluded that if a real life meeting took place, there would be “some” charges.

Screenshot via LifeNews.ru. Contact the author of this post at marina.galperina@gawker.com.

At a Manhattan hedge fund conference this week, “A lot of attendees were scared” and panelists were “herded...off the stage to safer confines” when a group of protesters walked in chanting and waving signs about inequality. Damn—that does sound scary.

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Go ahead, commit cannibalism! Slaughter your neighbors and feast on their still-warm flesh. Nobody can judge you, because the mere existence of the film Gods of Egypt has dissolved all social contracts, and eliminated forever all concepts of good and evil.

The moment I walked out of a screening of Gods of Egypt, I set about building a massive throne out of human pelvises. I worked feverishly through the night, barely pausing to listen to the sounds of the city fracturing into seven brutal revels: a chainsaw maze, a great pit full of vengeful lobsters, a poisoned rave, and so on. As I climbed at last atop my pelvic majesty, I had a perfect view of the inundation of viscera that had turned the very streets into canals: For even if nobody else ever saw this movie, its very existence was enough to sunder every human relation for once and ever. There could be no language, no society, no kindness, after Gods of Egypt.

How did this happen? Why didn’t somebody involved with the creation of Gods of Egypt realize what they were setting in motion, and that this movie was not just bad, but obscenely, devastatingly bad? I wondered this the whole time I was watching Gods of Egypt.

I’m going to give you a spoiler warning here, even though spoilers are a concept that belongs to the old order, before the rise of the murderpocalypse.

So Gods of Egypt is loosely based on Egyptian mythology, if the Egyptian gods were mostly white people who could turn into animal robots, sort of like Transformers. Basically, director Alex Proyas and his crew tried to turn the ancient beliefs of the Egyptians into a standard action-adventure movie, full of wacky set pieces and wild romps. And they wound up something that actually makes a river of entrails seem totally reasonable.

This movie starts when the god Horus (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau from Game of Thrones) is about to be crowned King of Egypt—until his uncle, the evil god Set (Gerard Butler), overthrows him. To get back his power and reclaim the throne, Horus must work with a plucky human thief named Bek (Brenton Thwaites) to pass a bunch of tests, with a little help from the sun god, Ra (Geoffrey Rush.) So yeah, it’s a buddy comedy about a god and a mortal teaming up to save the world and stuff—which could actually have been good, in theory.

In fact, in theory, this movie could have been awesome—generally any film with giant fire-breathing snakes, huge scarab-drawn chariots and holy spaceships is automatically great, in my book. But instead, Gods of Egypt squanders all of its incredible potential.

Gods of Egypt has been justly criticized for its policy of casting white people as almost all of its Egyptian characters—to the point where it might be the first movie whose director apologized months before it was released. But the casting is just one of the many problems that eat away at this movie, which seems to have fed slices of Egyptian cultural traditions into a typical Hollywood “Save the Cat Goddess” structure, to try and create something familiar and comfort-foody, with an exotic veneer.

The result is a movie in which nothing particularly makes sense. The stakes are completely unclear, and the moment that you think you have a handle on what’s going on, the movie lurches off in another direction. The actors stand around in front of greenscreens, saying terrible dialogue that they know is meaningless, and none of it carries any weight at all. This is also the umpteenth movie I’ve seen lately that has 90 minutes of action padded out to over two hours.

Bek, the movie’s ostensible main character, is supposed to be desperately in love with a mortal woman named Zaya (Courtney Eaton) who dies early on—so Bek is helping Horus in the hope that the god-king can bring Zaya back from the aferlife. But Zaya’s death puts barely a dent in Bek’s chipper action hero banter, and he just carries on leaping from CG obstacle to CG obstacle, while saying things like, “roll the bones!”

Meanwhile, every few minutes, the movie asks us to care about stakes-raising weird ideas like, “Set has changed the rules of the afterlife!” and “Set has stolen the glowing blue brain of the only black person in the movie!” At the same time, you don’t get the impression that any of the human characters actually worships these gods or considers them more than just oversized people with random powers.

But the result of taking all this grand metaphysical weirdness and putting it into a formulaic action-movie template is to create a movie where nothing means anything, but the film keeps dragging you from set piece to set piece every few minutes anyway. This isn’t just a film where it’s impossible to care, but one that negates the very idea of giving a shit.

Nothing has meaning! Everything is monstrous.

And that brings us to the central problem of Gods of Egypt—this movie can’t manage to find an interesting tone. At all. It’s either a comedy, in which there’s exactly one funny line of dialogue, or it’s a breezy action-adventure romp in which the characters are unlikable and the plot is mush, or it’s a semi-serious epic about the struggle of the gods. The overwhelming tone is one of blandness, like a rejected Disney Channel TV movie starring the younger brother from Hannah Montana and one of the less gifted wizards of Waverly Place.

And meanwhile, this movie’s aesthetic is a weird mixture of Egyptology pastiche and VFX overkill. As I mentioned, the Egyptian gods are sort of like off-label Transformers. Their fights, for the most part, look pretty awfully rendered, with a lot of bits that look like 90s video games. And the film’s aesthetic is pretty much a solid gold—all the buildings are gold, the gods are blinged out, and they bleed gold blood.

And one of the film’s most interesting visual innovations turns out to be its greatest liability: all of the gods, including Jaime Lannister, are much bigger than ordinary humans. Like, maybe 10 or 12 feet tall, I’m guessing. This yields a few startling shots early on in the film, but also means that at no point can the actors just be in a scene together, without everything being rendered digitally. I have a feeling that’s one reason for the utter lack of chemistry or personality in any of this movie’s character-building moments.

This movie feels like a dull, joyless monument to excess and cultural exploitation.

I’m just going to repeat the word “joyless” a few more times—joyless, joyless, joyless—while reminding you that I’m writing this review on a computer keyboard that I fashioned out of the fingernails and ribs of my former best friends. (The keyboard’s not connected to anything; I’m not even sure how you’re reading this, to be honest.) I love an over-the-top bad movie as much as the next Joe Bob Briggs acolyte, but Gods of Egypt is just too fucking bland—even with Gerard Butler shouting his heart out in a few scenes—to be anything but brain-compacting.

That said, there are a handful of incredibly beautiful images, that leave you with a sense of just why anybody thought this film was a good idea at all. At one point, when we first visit the spaceship belonging to Geoffrey Rush’s Ra, there’s a stunning visual of the flat Earth that Ra is sailing over. A few bits inside the land of the dead are also just gorgeous. You can sort of see how someone might have seen a few of those renders, early on, and thought this might be a distinctive, even eye-popping, film.

But for the most part, Gods of Egypt feels like such an abdication of story, and such a bastardization of culture, that the only sane response is to abandon sanity, and enlist in the murder-police of the senseless new era. As I write this from atop my pelvic cathedra in a world of unspeakable mayhem, I testify that Gods of Egypt has liberated us all.

You do not need to see this movie to know that you live in the world it created. Mercy is a cast-off from the time before the coming of Gods of Egypt.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All The Birds in the Sky, which is available now. Here’s what people have been saying about it. Follow her on Twitter, and email her.

http://www.amazon.com/All-Birds-Char...

Big boy (who is sick of being treated like a little kid!!) Marco Rubio is mad. So mad, in fact, that he spent a good four minutes of his stump speech this morning trying to rail on Donald Trump. This included—but was not limited to—reading Trump’s misspelled tweets from his phone, effectively calling Trump a spoiled wimp, and insinuating that Trump urinated on himself during last night’s debate. Welcome to hell.

The whole clip would be remarkable on its own if just for the fact that “polite” Marco Rubio has clearly been instructed to do as Donald does. It is made even more remarkable, however, in light of last night’s little infantile display of bickering. Just when you think this election can’t possibly get more petty, our boys inevitably prove us wrong.

http://gawker.com/watch-three-ca...

I never thought I’d say this, but Lindsey Graham was right.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Chris Christie today endorsed Donald Trump for president by giving a speech about Hillary Clinton.

Christie, who dropped out of the race after New Hampshire, appeared onstage with Trump at a rally in Fort Worth, TX.

“I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump,” Christie said during his brief, two-minute speech.

So did Christie endorse Trump because he likes Trump or because he HATES Marco Rubio? It’s truly hard to say.

“Desperate people in campaigns do desperate things,” Christie later said of Rubio without a shred of irony.

Image via CNN. Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

Some companies work well with their employees’ unions. Some companies tolerate them. And some companies—like TEGNA, the media company that used to be Gannett—seeks to find the most small-minded ways to make union members’ lives miserable.

Last year, TEGNA spun off Gannett’s publishing assets. Now TEGNA owns TV stations. Last year, it became clear that TEGNA was seeking to purge its stations of union members, by getting union employees to leave and hiring non-union employees in their place.

One way to get union employees to leave: treat them like shit to the maximum extent possible. One great way to do that: nitpick and refuse to grant them any perk, no matter how tiny, that is not spelled out firmly in their contract. The TV news site FTVLive reports that TEGNA is now doing just that. First, the story says that TEGNA denied only unionized employees access to an employee discount program, just because they could. And then, in an even more assholish move, the company refused to include union members in a program that reimbursed workers for parking fees that they had to pay when one of their stations relocated to a new building with insufficient parking. FTVLive quotes an email from a TEGNA executive telling one union employee, “The current collective bargaining agreement does not require a parking subsidy for IATSE represented employees, hence the new Station parking subsidy benefit is not automatically applicable to IATSE represented employees.”

The company willingly offered the parking subsidy to its employees, because it knew that it was necessary, but refused to offer it to union members, because it was not spelled out in their contract, which was drawn up before they needed parking subsidies. Cool. (We’ve emailed TEGNA’s spokesperson and will update if they comment.)

Unfortunately for TEGNA, treating your employees like shit tends to make them embrace their union more, not less.

[Disclosures. Photo: FB]

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.

Last week, Vox Media’s SB Nation published “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?”, a 12,000-word profile of a 29-year-old former Oklahoma City police officer who this winter was tried for raping 13 black women while on duty; convicted on 18 of 36 charges of rape, sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, and burglary; and sentenced to 263 years in prison. The story was reported and written by journalist Jeff Arnold and edited by Glenn Stout, head of the SB Nation Longform vertical. It was published at noon on a Wednesday, and the response was immediate and swift. Those who read it were furious with the story, which was so sympathetic that it comfortably qualified as apologia and read as an attempt to humanize a monster at the expense of his black, female victims. It was pulled within five hours by SB Nation editorial director Spencer Hall and replaced with an editor’s note from Hall, who called it a “complete failure.” You can read a cached version of the story here.

http://deadspin.com/sb-nation-publ...

Two days after the profile was published and pulled, a pair of memos went out across Vox Media. In one, SB Nation vice president of editorial Kevin Lockland wrote that SB Nation had severed ties with Arnold and suspended the SB Nation Longform vertical, and that Vox Media was conducting an internal review led by Vox Media editorial director Lockhart Steele. In another, Steele divulged to the company that he, along with five women around Vox Media—Recode founder Kara Swisher, Eater executive editor Helen Rosner, Vox.com managing editor Lauren Williams, Katie Nimick of Vox Media human resources, and Miriam Nissly in the company’s legal department—will “seek to reconstruct, from pitch to publication, exactly what happened with this story at SB Nation, and why.”

Since the story’s publication, Deadspin has worked along a similar track. We found, in the course of our reporting, that the failure here was in part a function of structural problems at SB Nation, which set up a system that would allow it to enjoy the benefits of running longform stories without actually having to do much work on them, and in part a function of the style and sensibility of Glenn Stout, who has, we can report, already been fired. We also found that this failure could have been averted if only Stout and top editorial staff had listened to one of their colleagues, senior editor Elena Bergeron, who explicitly and repeatedly drew attention to the story’s flaws in the days leading to its publication—and was, somehow, ignored.

To understand what happened here, it’s important to understand the structure of SB Nation, a vast, tangled web of properties that exists in two parts. The first is SBNation.com, a website unto itself with a staff of about 30 writers, editors, and producers. Four people—Hall, Bergeron, Lockland, and managing editor Brian Floyd—oversee the site. The second is the SB Nation network, a community of over 300 sites dedicated to different teams, sports, and leagues around the world. Some of the sites in this network are run by a single blogger; others have rather large staffs; nearly all are basically autonomous. The site and the network are related but distinct.

SB Nation Longform is, or was, within the network. Stout, a 57-year-old author and editor who has curated the yearly The Best American Sports Writing anthology since the book series was launched in 1991, was its sole editor, brought on in 2012 after SB Nation’s editors decided that a longform program could create a more adult, robust site. He was chosen because of his experience and also because he was the editor of The Best American Sports Writing, the prestigious yearly anthology. With Stout at the helm, the idea went, SB Nation would be able to attract the kinds of pieces that fill its pages.

Several people close to the site have described Longform as Stout’s “fiefdom.” It showed in the stories it ran, which just as BASW ran toward the overtly masculine and the stoic, and in the site’s set-up, unique among network properties. He worked as a full-time employee, answering only to Hall, with the two selecting pitches from freelancers to commission and then Stout editing the stories alone. Longform existed as a website adjacent but tethered to SBNation.com; Vox Media’s legal department looked over Longform stories where the law applied, Hall communicated with Stout, and SBNation.com’s copy editors and producers made last passes over Longform pieces when they were ready to publish. Longform stories published on both sites simultaneously, and SB Nation enjoyed the perceived prestige Longform and Stout provide.

Arnold had written for Longform once before the Holtzclaw story, and also freelanced for the Associated Press, Chicago Sun-Times and The New York Times. Per the bio below “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?”, he “covered Daniel Holtzclaw’s entire Eastern Michigan football career for The Ann Arbor News” when Holtzclaw attended between 2005 and 2009. He pitched Stout and Hall a piece on Holtzclaw; according to an apology Arnold published on Feb. 22, 2016, this is what Arnold set out to accomplish:

I hoped to present a more fully-rounded portrait of Mr. Holtzclaw than had appeared in the press. I hoped to explore the question of what had happened to this once-promising young man. I and my editor at SB Nation hoped to find possible answers as to what could have led to him to become a convicted rapist and sexual predator.

Arnold spent two months reporting and writing the profile, which largely focused on and sought profundity in Holtzclaw’s collegiate football career, which was that of a pretty good player who worked hard and liked to lift weights, but was too short and too slow, and, ultimately, not talented enough to contribute to a D-I powerhouse or play in the NFL. Holtzclaw was, as Jezebel’s Kara Brown succinctly summed it up, unexceptional.

http://jezebel.com/sb-nation-dele...

In reporting the story, Arnold spoke to Holtzclaw’s lawyers, parents and old teammates, coaches, and friends, who were either shocked by or in denial about Holtzclaw’s crimes and conviction. He investigated theories that Holtzclaw had possibly used steroids, or may have been suffering from CTE. Holtzclaw was sentenced Dec. 10, 2015; over the next two months, Arnold and Stout pored over the story together. Arnold declined comment for this story, but freelancers who have worked with Stout in the past have attested to his thorough editing. One recent Longform freelancer told Deadspin that his piece went through several drafts before it was ultimately published. Another, Matt Tullis, wrote about his experience on Twitter:

By the end of the process, what emerged was an overly long and painstakingly detailed account of Holtzclaw’s time as a college athlete, wherein a case was made through well-placed character witnesses that Holtzclaw was a good person with a “number of black friends.” The story gave voice to doubts about whether he raped these women at all, and floated the theory that if he did, it may have been because he’d “become unhinged” due to the heartbreak of not making the NFL and other circumstances outside of his control.

“Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” was to be a high-profile story for SB Nation. Sources with intimate knowledge of the editorial process told Deadspin that Hall, Lockland, and Floyd all read the story at various points over the course of the editing process, though Lockland tells us he did not. On Thursday, Feb. 11, Stout deemed the piece ready to publish, upon which, two sources close to the story said, he emailed the final draft to most of SBNation.com’s senior editors—though, curiously, not Bergeron. (Why she wasn’t included, we can’t say; Stout repeatedly declined to comment throughout the reporting of this story.) He also sent the piece to an SB Nation producer tasked with adding photos, graphics, and pull quotes to make the copy more presentable to readers. The story was added to SBNation.com’s editorial calendar to be published Wednesday, Feb. 17. On Monday, Feb. 15, Elena Bergeron was then forwarded Stout’s email by Brian Floyd, and read the piece.

Bergeron is an experienced journalist; before she started at SB Nation, she spent a year as the editor-in-chief of Triangle Offense, Complex’s basketball blog, and 11 years as a staffer at ESPN: The Magazine. At SB Nation, she works with staff writers and freelancers every day both on shorter posts and longer, more ambitious features.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” Bergeron tells me. Bergeron, who’s black, was so shocked by how bad the story was that she had to read it twice. She says she asked copy editors and a producer if they read the piece thoroughly while working on it, and that they told her they had and thought it was unpublishable, but didn’t think it was their place to say anything to Stout. On Monday evening, she took notes and compiled a list of all the piece’s shortcomings. Then she sent an email about her concerns to Stout, Hall, Lockland, and Floyd.

Bergeron says her basic critique was that the people Arnold spoke to hadn’t been prodded or treated critically enough, which gets at the piece’s real problem. For a story that centered on Holtzclaw to work, it had to look at the people around him, who thought they knew him best, not as sources, but subjects. Instead of retrying the case through one-sided interviews, it would be far more illuminating to explore exactly how and why these people couldn’t reconcile the facts about Holtzclaw with what they knew of him. Here was a beloved son, friend, and teammate; here, too, was a prolific serial rapist. If Arnold weren’t deluded, perhaps he would’ve seen that what he’d reported was a study of delusion.

“I wanted to go point by point and discuss it editorially,” Bergeron says. “I didn’t want anyone to misunderstand why it was harmful and offensive. I wanted people to understand why.”

On Tuesday, Hall was on vacation and Lockland was traveling, so Bergeron held a conference call with Floyd and Stout. Bergeron said the tone was, from the very beginning, off. She repeated that there hadn’t been enough journalistic due diligence, and that the stark reality of the situation—that the subject of the story was a man who had recently been convicted of using his station to rape and prey on 13 black women—was never met head on. If nothing else, given SB Nation’s partnership with the national anti-sexual assault organization It’s On Us, the very language used regarding the sexual assault was inconsistent with their new editorial standards. Stout, though, disregarded Bergeron’s objections, and the intense conversation devolved into an argument over the phone. When the three hung up, the problem was unresolved, and it was still unresolved on Wednesday morning.

With Hall and Lockland gone, Floyd had more editorial power than he was accustomed to, but, according to sources at the site, still didn’t feel he had the authority to unilaterally pull the article. Wednesday was Hall’s first day back from vacation, so he spent much of the morning getting settled, and Lockland was still traveling. When a producer scheduled the story, Floyd didn’t take it down, and at noon, “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” went live.

The feedback was immediate, outraged, and, as one source remembered, uncannily articulate. SBNation.com’s social media editors, charged with pushing the story onto Twitter and Facebook, were the first to feel the blowback. Then came the comments on the article itself. Finally, SBNation.com employees began reaching out to the editors themselves.

Five hours later, Hall pulled the story. SB Nation Longform and Stout were both suspended indefinitely. Arnold will never write for the website again, and the Associated Press has cut ties with Arnold, as well.

In Hall’s apology, he called the fiasco a “complete breakdown of a part of the editorial process at SB Nation,” which is correct, but probably doesn’t go far enough. A breakdown—not necessarily one that attempted to redeem a monster while ignoring the suffering of his victims, but something serious and avoidable—seems in retrospect to have been nearly inevitable.

There is no such thing as longform writing. There is such a thing as features writing—profiles, investigations, essays—and if it’s prestigious, that’s mainly because of its association with careful selection of subjects and with vigorous research, reporting, editing, copy-editing, and fact-checking. A feature carries an implicit assertion that a publication has invested money, time, talent, effort, and care to produce something of depth. Longform is a variant of feature writing—a branding strategy, really—that confuses a secondary indicator (length) for the thing itself (quality). As the name implies, it asserts nothing more than that a certain mass has been attained.

When Stout launched SB Nation Longform in the fall of 2012, the idea was very much that Stout could bring prestige to the site by regularly running long stories—not stories aspiring to a certain complexity, note, but long ones. One freelancer said that per the terms of his contract, the story had to be at least 4,000 words long.

One problem here, as the name of the vertical implies, was the elision of the difference between features writing and longform. Another was that SB Nation never provided Stout with the infrastructure necessary to turn out work of consistently high quality, at whatever length. What he would have done with it is an open question; as he explained in the foreword to the 2007 edition of The Best American Sports Writing 2007, Stout believes that every additional edit by each additional editor strips a draft of its life:

Over time, this sensibility showed itself in the work Stout was doing. Many SB Nation Longform stories are 6,000-7,000 words long because, per one freelancer, Stout feels that is the ideal length for a reporter to tell a story and add detail. Nearly all of these stories are about embattled men, many of whom are white; football dominates. Gravity drips from each word and every filtered lead photo, and in all, most every piece reads as if the writer is trying to make it into The Best American Sports Writing. A pitch about a college football player with professional ambitions who became a cop only to find himself rotting in a jail for the rest of his life was precisely the kind of grim, muscular story Stout would go for. It came out predictably.

In an article nearly twice as long as those that usually come out of SB Nation Longform, the word “women” appeared 17 times; “rape” and variants, 11. Arnold described just one of Holtzclaw’s encounters with a victim, and never reckoned with the implications of the officer using his station to pillage the very women he swore to protect. The tone of the entire piece is fawning and forgiving; by the end, the terrifying, spectacular spree of rapes exists as little more than an unfortunate occurrence, and a 263-year sentence as an unjustly harsh burden Holtzclaw has to bear. Holtzclaw destroyed 13 women’s lives; “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?” told the story of how they destroyed his.

Arnold, who pitched a story to which he probably couldn’t do justice, forgot about the black women at the heart of this story. His feature could still have been salvaged with the right editors working through the piece, eyeing it from different angles, and interrogating the weaknesses of its assumptions and the reporting that went into it. But Stout, the older white man who worked alone with Arnold through the editorial process, also forgot about these black women. And nearly everyone else who touched it seems to have either forgotten about them or to have felt it wasn’t their place to say anything. This was true, apparently, of everyone but Bergeron.

Among other things, this story serves as an example of why diversity in the newsroom is so important. It isn’t because diversity is charity, or because giving opportunities to people other than white men is a Christlike thing to do, but because everyone has blind spots, and everyone fucks up. Bergeron was there, and the best-suited to work on the story alongside Arnold and Stout—not just because she’s the only person of color and the only woman among SBNation.com’s top layer of editors, but because she’s capable and experienced. Not only did Stout never enlist her to cover his and Arnold’s blindspots, though, but when she did so anyway, he disregarded her, and was empowered to do so. The habits of thought embedded in the name SB Nation Longform—the tendency to view the seriousness of a feature as a function not of rigor but of length—converged with the homogeneity of the senior staff and the structure of the operation itself, and ended in a disaster.

All media operations have flaws inextricable from their structure and the culture upon which they are built, which leave them open to very specific failures. Deadspin, for example, is both smug and defiantly skeptical; at our worst, we’ll assert we’ve proved a negative when we haven’t. Buzzfeed is an advertising shop with a journalism wing; at its worst, the company will pull its own articles at the behest of brands. SB Nation is a virtual monoculture, built to profit from writing done with minimal infrastructure devoted to it and deeply unserious about ambitious things. It’s not surprising that at its worst, SB Nation would badly mishandle a story like this one.

Wednesday, there was a daylong Vox Media meeting in Washington, D.C. Company brass spoke about SB Nation’s structure, demographics, and the failed safeguards that could have stopped the fiasco. After it was over, Hall told Deadspin, “Glenn has worked his last day at SBNation.com.”

In our reporting, we found that lots of people within SB Nation and Vox Media were more than willing to point to Stout and Arnold as bad actors here, and there’s no real reason to think they weren’t. (What the company finds may well remain unknown; we’re told the results of its inquest are unlikely to be made public.) With those two properly anathematized, though—Stout is gone and the SB Nation Longform program for all intents and purposes dead, with one well-placed source telling us that if it ever relaunches, it’ll likely be in a different form—the company must now go about fixing what was very much an organizational failure. Perhaps it actually will.

Image via Jim Cooke

Contact the author at greg@deadspin.com.

Multiple outlets are reporting that Chris Hughes has found a new owner for The New Republic: The Democratic fundraiser, Tin House publisher, and banking scion Win McCormack. The new owner, who is 71, told The Huffington Post that the deal would “preserv[e] the journal as an important voice in a new debate over how the basic principles of liberalism can be reworked to meet the equally demanding challenges of our era.”

Other details are scarce, but what we do know is:

• Hamilton Fish, who has been publisher of The Nation and The Washington Spectator, will become the magazine’s publisher and editorial director
• Noah McCormack, the publisher of The Baffler and the son of Win McCormack, will move from San Francisco to New York to “work on the magazine” in an unspecified role
  
• Neither Hughes nor McCormack have disclosed the price of the sale
• Like Hughes, McCormack has hosted a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton

Hughes, who bought the magazine in 2012 and invested over $20 million of his own money in its revival, placed the magazine on the market in January after concluding the outlet needed new leadership in order for to survive. (A little over a year prior, his decision to remove editor Franklin Foer resulted in a mass staff exodus.) The degree to which Hughes was motivated by purely financial concerns seems small, though. Shortly after putting the magazine on sale, Hughes and his husband Sean Eldridge purchased a West Village townhouse, complete with a detached carriage house and an underground tunnel, for $23.5 million.

Email the author: trotter@gawker.com · PGP key + fingerprint

Donald Trump and Chris Christie today held a joint press conference, ostensibly to announce Christie’s endorsement, but effectively to roast the hell out of Marco Rubio.

Here are the most savage burns of the event.

Chris Christie

I find it fascinating that someone who barely shows up for work in the six years he’s a United States senator is going to talk about someone else being unprepared. I mean, the fact of the matter is, Senator Rubio has shown himself over the course of time to be wholly unprepared to be president of the United States, I said that at the time I was in the race and nothing has changed my mind now.

We don’t need any more Washington politicians, especially some who have only been there for one term and never really show up for work to tell us how to run the United States government.

Donald Trump

It’s my honor this morning to introduce somebody who is a real standout. He’s been my friend for many years, he’s been a spectacular governor, he’s been just a wonderful person and a wonderful loyal person. Done a really good job. Totally destroyed Marco Rubio the other day, I have never quite seen that. I was standing next to Marco Rubio and he melted. I said, “Are you alright Marco?” I really give Chris credit, he’s a real talent.

He is pretty desperate guy. He’s down about 22 points in Florida.

I’ll tell ya about backstage, if you’d like. I walked back there and he’s with a pile of makeup putting it on his face. I said, “Marco, easy with the makeup, you don’t need that much.” You know the story with Marco, I watched him against this man, where Marco—he was right over here, and I actually looked at him, I said, “Are you okay?” He looked like he just came out of a swimming pool, he was a mess. So we’ll see what happens, we’re going to see what happens. I heard he had some very nasty, personal comments. But I saw him backstage, and he was putting it on with a trowel.

Marco Rubio is a lightweight. He doesn’t have the talent, he doesn’t have the temperament, he can never be president.

He’s desperate. Look. I watched a part of his little act. He’s a desperate guy. I’ve been watching him. He is not presidential material, that I can tell you. He doesn’t have the demeanor. He is a nervous nellie. I watched him backstage, he’s a mess. The guy is a total mess. And, you know, I joked recently about can you imagine Putin sitting there waiting for a meeting, and Rubio walks in and he’s totally drenched. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve never seen a human being sweat like this man sweats. So I don’t think he’s of presidential caliber, I don’t think he has the demeanor, I don’t think he’s going to do very well. He’s a mess.

For me to go into Florida and have like a twenty-point lead over the sitting senator. But remember, the sitting senator abandoned Florida. He left Florida. He was supposed to be there. He really defrauded, if you think of it, he really defrauded the people of Florida. Because they elected him as a young senator, he goes there, and before he sits down, he starts running for president. He’s not the right guy, in my opinion, very bad temperament. He’s got the absolute wrong temperament to be president.

I don’t think he has the right temperament. I watched Chris do a number on him. I’ve almost never seen a meltdown like that in my life. And you know, it’s interesting about people who choke. I’m, believe it or not, a good athlete. I’ve watched people choke over the years, and once a choker, always a choker. It never, ever changes. A guy that misses the kick, misses the kick. When he misses the first one, you gotta get rid of him because it doesn’t work. Once a choker, always a choker, and that was one of the epic meltdowns. He didn’t know where he was. I thought he was going to die.

And of course, whatever this was:

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

A few people that I talked to yesterday, in the wake of the news of the first documented case of a supposed daily PrEP user who nonetheless contracted a strain of HIV with drug resistance, worried about an almost gleeful, “See, told ya so!” sentiment they were seeing in some gay men’s responses. At this point in my life, I am actively trying to avoid the unreasoned opinions of strangers, particularly when these opinions come with the smell of disregard for the community to which those who voice them belong (if not outright self-hatred). That’s to say that I didn’t really interact with any of that. But it is plausible that because PrEP is a discursive lightning rod, its detractors feel justified and some sense of happiness or pride over what many have taken to be solid evidence that PrEP is not 100 percent effective in eliminating HIV—something, by the way, that no expert I’ve ever read has ever attempted to argue. In fact, every doctor or researcher or activist or counselor that I’ve ever talked to has been extremely careful not to claim 100 percent PrEP efficacy.

The people who feel good about this news were only going to feel good about this news. That’s a shame. Moving on, to those who were agnostic about PrEP, as well as the true believers whose faith has been shaken, I would like to present just a few thoughts from some very smart people who know a lot about this stuff. This is just some perspective that I think is worth considering.

BETA Blog, reporting from the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston, where the case of HIV contraction in a daily PrEP user was reported, spoke with Robert Grant, MD, MPH. Grant reported the finding at CROI, and he also is the principal researcher on iPrEx, a multiyear clinical trial of PrEP use in men who have sex with men. It is from iPrEX where the 99 percent efficacy figure derives.

To BETA Blog, Grant said this (in part):

The prevalence of viruses that are highly resistant to both tenofovir and FTC are rare, and are even less likely to be transmitted. Among 9,222 people taking PREP in trials, this kind of virus was never once seen.

The prevalence of this kind of virus among recently infected persons is less than 1%. Maybe much less. If PrEP is not fully effective against viruses that are HIGHLY resistant to both drugs in FTC/TDF PrEP, the efficacy of PrEP when taken may decrease from 99% to 98%. Or from 99.9% to 98.9%. Or from 100% to 99%. The decimal points are not certain.

My point is that one chooses whether to focus on the glass 99% full or 1% empty.

After 32 years experience with HIV research, I have learned to never say “never.”

http://betablog.org/dr-robert-gran...

That’s to say, you can focus on this so far isolated incident, or you can focus on the great number of studies that prove PrEP’s effectiveness, again and again and again. For example, last year Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in San Francisco released the results of a 32-month study of over 600 daily Truvada users that found not one instance of a new infection within that group.

“There are more than 40,000 people using PrEP in the U.S. and this is one case,” offers James Krellenstein, a consultant to Treatment Action Group and a member of ACT UP New York. “That’s a pretty extraordinary success rate that is far superior to the efficacy of condoms in preventing HIV or birth control in preventing pregnancy. It’s kind of odd that we’re making such a huge deal about this one case, considering that PrEP is still the most (or second most) effective tool in preventing HIV infection that has ever been developed. No one says when a condom fails to prevent HIV acquisition, don’t use condoms. And the fact remains that people who are using condoms and not using PrEP are at much higher risk of acquiring HIV than people who are not using condoms and using PrEP.”

For a breakdown of numbers, I checked in with David Glidden, professor of biostatistics at UC San Francisco who has also served as the statistician in the iPrEx study and was instrumental in my own understanding of PrEP’s efficacy numbers. He sent me the following by email:

My “quantitative take”

- This is one case — out of > 40,000 people who have taken PrEP and research experience stretching back a decade.

- The infecting virus was very exotic and 0.44 percent of viruses infecting people are even close to similar (Chan et al, 2012). This has rarer features.

- Condoms have a 2 percent failure rate under ideal conditions.

- At the same meeting where the case was presented, Kaiser Permanante presented their PrEP experience. It has seen no infections during PrEP care; however, 2 people had their coverage lapse and left the program. When they returned to the program, they were HIV+.

- I am 2 times as concerned about Kaiser data as I am about the Toronto case.

My informal “take”:

- PrEP remains the most powerful and rigorous tested HIV prevention tool ever developed. We should, by orders of magnitude, be more concerned about barriers to, ignorance of, and nihilism about PrEP. ~50,000 people are HIV infected each year — we have our work cut out for us.

I also spoke with Dr. Demetre Daskalakis who’s the assistant commissioner at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Bureau of HIV Prevention and Control, and a gay health warrior. Daskalakis estimates that he has 50 patients on PrEP. He was present at CROI when Grant presented his finding. Here’s his takeaway:

Whenever there’s a biological intervention, there’s always a way to overcome it. That’s why I’m very cautious about never saying that PrEP is 100 percent anything. There’s always a possibility of figuring out a way of how to overcome it. The majority of viruses that are transmitted tend not to be resistant to the drugs in PrEP. Is it possible that someone met a virus that had enough baseline resistance to the drugs in PrEP to potentially allow for transmission? It’s possible, which is why I think rather than being like, ‘Oh my god, PrEP is over,’ the better message is, ‘Use condoms whenever possible.’ That reduces your risk of exposure. I know that’s not 100 percent, either, but a lot of the guys I have on PrEP use condoms at least some of the time. I have guys on PrEP, for instance, who use condoms with certain kinds of hook-ups and not others. Is it based on lots of data? No. But statically speaking, from my perspective, every time you use a condom, you reduce your risk no matter what, so groovy.

The other lesson this tells us is: Test for HIV every three months like you’re supposed to. We see people coming in on PrEP, and they need to get tested every three months, and it’s not really an, if, or could, or, ‘Maybe I’ll try.’ It’s that every three months of HIV testing makes sure that if they do get HIV, they can do what they did for this guy [in the study, whose HIV reportedly now is at undetectable levels in his blood] and put him on meds right away. That guy’s the dreamscape. If you get HIV on PrEP and you’re detected early on, you want to be on meds and you want to end it. You want to be undetactable and good to go. Rather than being a giant piece of bad news, this is more a reinforcement of what we already know.

Seems like this level of clarity from experts should be particularly useful during a time like this.

Image via Getty; Contact the author at rich@gawker.com.

The Wall Street Journal reports the end of a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art—one of the greatest museums in the world, though still not as good as most museums in D.C.—that alleged admissions-price trickery. Now, the Met will use less misleading language about the price of entry, but the sign will still be wrong, because it costs $0.

The suit was filed by some foreign tourists who were angry they paid to get in when the museum’s admission has always been a “recommended” sum, rather than obligatory. That sucks, but so it goes—ripping off suckers is one of New York’s best remaining traditions. Now, the sign’s wording will change to trick fewer dummies:

As a result, Met officials said language at the museum’s admission desks, self-service kiosks and website would be changed to say “suggested admission” instead of “recommended admission.”

The new signs will also include “an affirmative statement saying you can pay any amount you want,” said Andrew Celli, Jr., a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “If you put it next to the old sign there is a dramatic difference.”

Nope, still wrong: Admission is free. If, upon walking toward the world-class collection of stolen art and antiquities, you’re asked by a museum employee to perhaps pay some money in exchange for your visit, just say “no thanks, I’m good. The Met has an over $2.5 billion endowment.” And breeze on by. It’s true: the Met is extremely wealthy and doesn’t need your cash.

http://gawker.com/5992235/why-yo...

The Met’s president, Daniel Weiss, is still going to try to make you feel guilty for not forking over the suggested or recommended or whatever the fuck 25 bones for an adult who wants to see some art, a public good:

“For what the museum provides, a $25 fee is actually quite a bargain,” said Mr. Weiss. “But we don’t want the public to feel that they have to pay it. We want to strike a fair bargain with every visitor.”

Hey Dan: NO!!

Photo: Getty

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
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“A majority of New Yorkers who earn more than $100,000 a year feel they’re likely to be priced out of their neighborhood, according to a new poll.”

http://gawker.com/this-is-what-a...

http://gawker.com/you-cant-get-a...

http://gawker.com/dont-let-rich-...

Contact the author at Hamilton@Gawker.com.