Andre Hatchett was 24 years old when he was convicted of murdering a woman in a Brooklyn park. This week, he was exonerated and set free at the age of 49.
Hatchett, who reportedly had an IQ of 63, was convicted of the 1991 beating death of a woman in a park in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn—despite the fact that he was still on crutches after being shot the previous year. From the New York Times:
Though he cooperated with the police and provided an alibi, Mr. Hatchett was arrested and convicted almost entirely on the testimony of a career criminal named Gerard Williams, who said that he had seen, from 30 to 40 feet away, Mr. Hatchett striking a body on the ground in the park that night.
Mr. Williams offered the account after he was arrested in connection with a burglary a little over a week after the killing, and after having initially identified someone else as the killer — information the prosecutors never gave the defense, as was required.
Casual chain restaurants are given a lot of leeway with their decor. Want to put some college pennants on the wall? Go right ahead. A fake porthole on the bathroom? Sure, why not. A dirty old Squier Stratocaster hanging from the ceiling? That’s America, baby! Lynching photos? Slow your roll, my man.
The Joe’s Crab Shack location in Roseville, Minnesota did not get the memo. Tyrone Williams and Chauntyll Allen were dining their Wednesday night when they noticed the above photo, which is captioned “Hanging at Groesbeck, Texas on April 12th 1895.” The man in the photo, who is black, has a speech bubble which reads “All I said was I didn’t like the gumbo!”
Heh. Get it?
The local NAACP chapter condemned the restaurant fiercely. “This disturbing incident that occurred at Joe’s Crab Shack, demonstrates that racism is still alive and well in this country. It is sickening to know that someone would make a mockery of black men being savagely lynched and then use that imagery for decorative purposes in a restaurant,” Minneapolis president Nekima Levy-Pounds told NBC affiliate KARE.
The New York Daily News dug into death penalty records and found that the man being hanged in the picture is Richard Burleson, who was accused of killing someone with a rock. The specifics of Burleson’s alleged crime are not clear, but plenty of black people were lynched on specious charges.
Joe’s Crab shack quickly apologized. Its statement read:
“We understand one of the photos used in our table décor at our Joe’s Crab Shack location in Roseville, MN was offensive,” said David Catalano, COO Ignite Restaurant Group, Joe’s Crab Shack parent company. “We take this matter very seriously, and the photo in question was immediately removed. We sincerely apologize to our guests who were disturbed by the image and we look forward to continuing to serve the Roseville community.”
Image via Tyrone Williams/Facebook. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.
Every four years we Americans become spectators in a circus known as the presidential election. For most of us, participating in the process of electing the next president involves watching televised debates, discarding flyers from local and state candidates, and muting the slugfest known as campaign advertising. We’re spectators in the sense that we are watching, listening, and processing the event, but most of us remain far from the table of influence, which is increasingly reserved for a very small, very white, very male, and very rich group of individuals. These individuals— titans of industry, captains of retail, lords of finance—are the pipers calling the tune.
That’s not to say that politics hasn’t always been a game dominated by elites. But generations ago the power elite included the labor movement and the millions of working-class people organized through that now threadbare remnant of economic democracy. Over the past fifty years, as labor’s political influence has waned, the power of the wealthy has mushroomed, aided in great part by several Supreme Court rulings that opened campaign spending floodgates. But perhaps one of the most effective, and cynical, strategies to trample the interests of the working class has been a very strategic and deliberate use of race to undermine class-based solidarity. Finally, there’s the stubborn and historical gap in voting, in which college-educated and more affluent voters almost always show up at the polls while the working class watches from the sidelines.
But speculation about how the working class will vote— especially white working-class men—is a favorite topic of the political pundits. The conventional wisdom is that this group is solidly and impenetrably conservative and a predictable base for Republican candidates. But on some key issues about the role of government and the power of big money in our political system, the white working class is actually much more liberal than its college-educated counterparts, revealing key opportunities for progressive candidates to earn their votes.
Let’s be clear. The Sleeping Giant, with its larger share of women and people of color, is shifting the center of gravity in politics. Thanks to largely working-class movements such as the Fight for $15 and Black Lives Matter, candidates of both political parties have been compelled to address economic and racial inequality in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. There is more working-class solidarity right now in the United States than at any time since the 1970s, and on almost every measure this new working class is much more progressive than its college-educated counterparts. But it would be a mistake to consider the working class a monolith when positions on some key issues still diverge by race and gender.
Who Are the New Populists?
One of the most stubborn pieces of conventional wisdom about the white working class is that they are red-meat conservatives, with a strong knee-jerk reaction against anything that smacks of a government program. But an extensive survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) uncovered a populist streak among the white working class that is way more Elizabeth Warren than Jeb Bush or Rush Limbaugh. Take, for example, the fact that white working-class Americans are more likely than white college-educated Americans to report that a lack of good jobs (67 percent vs. 52 percent) and a lack of opportunities for young people (56 percent vs. 46 percent) are major problems facing their communities. Moreover, 70 percent of working-class whites believe that the economic system in this country unfairly favors the wealthy, 53 percent say one of the biggest problems in this country is that we don’t give everyone an equal chance in life, and 62 percent favor raising the tax rate on Americans with household incomes of over $1 million per year. And finally, nearly eight in ten white working-class Americans say that corporations moving American jobs overseas are somewhat (25 percent) or very (53 percent) responsible for Americans’ current economic distress.
But this populism fractures when it comes to issues of race. Six in ten white working-class Americans (60 percent) believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities, compared to only 39 percent of white college-educated Americans. And nearly half (49 percent) of white working-class Americans believe that over the past few decades the government has paid too much attention to the problems of blacks and other minorities, compared to 32 percent of white college-educated Americans. It’s important to note that the belief that too much attention has been paid to blacks and other minorities garners majority agreement only among southern white working-class voters, reflecting a racial anxiety steeped in the region’s brutal history of racial antagonism and terror. Today the racial anxiety expressed by working-class whites also extends to other people of color, namely immigrants. White working-class voters, unlike college-educated whites, blame immigrants for taking jobs that would otherwise have gone to them. Again, the PRRI survey shows a gulf between southern white working-class voters and their counterparts in the rest of the country. In fact, the South has retained its racial animosity to an incredible degree, and there is no dearth of politicians who still tap those reserves to win elections and stoke antigovernment sentiment. And the use of race to appeal to white working-class voters has a long and ignoble history, and today is being deployed most stridently and effectively by Donald Trump, with the other Republican candidates for President mimicking his nativist rhetoric.
The Big Class Divide
When we look at how Americans view the role of government in addressing poverty and providing opportunity, it becomes very clear that there are two Americas, one in which the people who live in comfort exhibit little empathy for those in the other America, who struggle. In one of the more illuminating yet depressing examinations of the difference between the fortunate and unfortunate, the Pew Research Center for People and the Press com- pared the responses of financially secure and financially insecure individuals to one of their major surveys conducted in 2014. The groups were created using an index of ten measures of financial security and financial distress, with individuals categorized into five groups, each representing roughly 20 percent of the population. At the ends are the most well-off and the least well-off. A glimpse at the demographics of the two most financially insecure groups reveals a near perfect overlay with the new working class— women, people of color, and people without four-year degrees. In fact, only 7 percent in the least secure group had a college degree.
The findings reveal, unsurprisingly, that when it comes to support for the safety net, views about poverty, and perceptions of business, financially insecure Americans hold much more consistently liberal views than their better-off counterparts. When given a choice between two statements about government’s role in helping the needy, over 60 percent of the most financially secure Americans chose “The government can’t afford to do more to help the needy,” while 60 percent of the least financially secure Americans chose “The government should do more for the needy, even if it means more debt.” One of the likely reasons the well-off don’t support providing more help for the needy is that they think the poor have it easy in this country. Just over half of the most secure Americans agree with the statement “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return,” while two-thirds of the least secure Americans agree instead that “poor people have hard lives because government benefits don’t go far enough to help them live decently.” Keep in mind that in 2013 just twenty-six out of every one hundred poor families received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, down from sixty-eight families for every one hundred in poverty in 1996, the year that President Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we know it.”
This polarization by class extends to views about business, with two-thirds of the least secure Americans believing that corporations make too much profit, while less than half of the well-off believe that to be the case.
What the Pew analysis shows is that on pocketbook issues, the new working class desires more action from government to improve their lives while the affluent exhibit very little support for such action. The implications are profound, given what we know about who participates in our political system, who contributes financially to our elections, and whose opinions get preferential treatment once candidates are in office. But the views of the least secure aren’t consistently liberal. In fact, of all the questions Pew asked, there was one economic item on which the least secure held more conservative opinions than the financially secure, and that was on the economic impact of immigrants. Forty-four percent of the least secure, compared to just over a quarter of the most financially secure, say that immigrants are a burden on the United States because “they take our jobs, housing, and health care.”
On other social issues, America’s class divide disappears. The well-off and the working class have similar views on regulation, government’s effectiveness, and national security. And on the question of black progress, the working class and the well-off are nearly identical in their opinions, with close to two-thirds agreeing that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition.”
Missing at the Ballot Box
There is no doubt that the United States has a serious voter turnout problem. Over the past four decades, turnout in presidential elections has hovered around 60 percent. In 2012, 62 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot. And among that meager percentage, wealthier and white voters show up in greater numbers than others. In 2012, 26 million eligible voters of color did not vote, and among eligible voters earning less than $50,000, 47 million did not vote. The big questions are why this is the case and whether it matters. For decades political scientists concluded that voters and nonvoters essentially held the same views, in essence meaning that low turnout among working-class voters or voters of color was insignificant in terms of representation. But this research examined only candidate choice—whether nonvoters would have voted for the Republican or the Democrat. There are lots of practical reasons that working-class and poor voters may not vote, such as time constraints and registration obstacles. But what if they don’t vote because they sense there isn’t much difference between the two candidates’ positions? It turns out that compared to higher-income voters, low-income voters have a much harder time discerning meaningful differences between the two political parties.
In their book Who Votes Now?, Jan Leighley and Jonathan Nagler examine differences among lower-income and higher- income voters in rating each of the presidential candidates’ ideology on a liberal-conservative spectrum and on the question of government’s role in guaranteeing a job for everyone who needs one. What they found is that in both the 2004 and 2008 elections, high-income voters perceived a much greater difference in the ideology of the two candidates, while low-income voters saw each candidate as less ideological and had a harder time perceiving his stance on the issue of government guarantee of jobs. This matters because the perception of a real difference in the positions of the candidates affects whether someone thinks it matters to vote. The finding that lower-income voters don’t perceive candidates to be either strongly liberal or strongly conservative is telling, and reflects how neither party is directly speaking to the economic concerns of the working class while being quite effective at communicating the party’s positions to people with higher incomes. Without a meaningful perception of a difference between the presidential candidates, many working-class voters make the rational decision not to cast a ballot—and our nation’s policy priorities are skewed as a result.
Since 1972 the difference in the policy preferences of voters and nonvoters about government’s role in our society has widened, with voters much more aligned with conservative preferences and nonvoters more aligned with progressive policy preferences. Missing voters, who are more likely to be low-income, are more liberal on questions of redistribution in particular, specifically on the need for government to provide jobs, services, and health care.
Politicians focus their campaigns, and all of their polling, on motivating “likely voters” to cast their vote for them. But structural barriers, including burdensome registration procedures, combined with an enthusiasm gap means that the working class is more likely to be missing from the pool of “likely voters.” And so the agenda is set by an electorate that is more white and more affluent than the nation as a whole. This has profound consequences on the types of issues candidates campaign on and what they prioritize once in office. And those decisions have deep implications about the kind of social contract our elected leaders deem appropriate for our country, generation after generation.
Research on turnout and policy outcomes in other countries corroborate the idea that countries with less class bias in voting and higher turnout have more generous social welfare policies. Researchers examining our nation’s depressed levels of voting came to the conclusion that “low turnout offers a potentially compelling explanation why the American welfare state has been so much less responsive to rising market inequality than other welfare states.” A study of eighty-five democracies found that higher voter turnout leads to higher total revenues, higher government spending, and more generous welfare state spending.
One could conclude from this research that the recent conservative attacks on voting rights—from requiring photo identification to shortening early voting opportunities, both of which dampen turnout among younger, lower-income voters, as well as voters of color—are clearly designed to preserve an ideological hegemony that doesn’t reflect the needs of all the people in our democracy. Most recently, in 2013 conservative legislators were given even more leeway to curtail voting rights by the Supreme Court. In Shelby County v. Holder, the justices struck down a provision in the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of voting discrimination (mostly southern states) to get pre-clearance from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting laws or practices. In the year immediately following the decision, Texas, Alabama, North Carolina, and Mississippi all enacted strict new voter identification laws, which either had been blocked under “pre-clearance” or would likely have been blocked. North Carolina went a step further and repealed a series of laws that increased turnout, including early voting.
Our democracy is far from inclusive of all the people it purports to represent. And that status quo is highly desirable to, and vigorously defended by, elites of all stripes, using a combination of suppressive voting laws and big-money donations that undermine the Sleeping Giant’s political power.
In this golden age of Obama giving nary a fuck about anything at all, the president took some time out of his playdate with Smallville understudy Justin Trudeau to give his new standup routine a spin. The highlight of which was, of course, poking fun at a birther movement that (finally) had nothing to do with him.
“Where else could a boy born in Calgary grow up to run for president of the United States?” Obama jokingly commends Canada for having rejected a wall along the Southern border.
Obama is, of course, referring to Donald Trump’s insistence that Ted Cruz is ineligible for the presidency because of his Canadian roots. But Cruz wasn’t Obama’s only target—Justin Bieber was also the target of some choice words from the President:
Referencing singer Justin Bieber, POTUS said Trudeau in America may well be “the most popular Canadian named Justin.”
Overall, a terribly embarrassing night to be either Ted Cruz or Justin Bieber. Or put another way, just another night.
At a Donald Trump rally in North Carolina on Wednesday, an old white dude blindsided a black protester with a punch simply for being a non-white person publicly showing his opposition to Donald Trump. This is not in dispute: On Inside Edition (lol), the sucker-puncher, John McGraw, said, “The next time we see him, we might have to kill him. We don’t know who he is. He might be with a terrorist organization.”
Nonetheless, this morning Donald Trump went and told a big, obvious lie about the punch:
Wrong! John McGraw is very open about why he punched the victim, Rakeem Jones, and it is not because Jones was hitting people first. It’s because McGraw—who was charged with assault yesterday—thought he might be in ISIS.
At last night’s debate in Miami, Trump said he had not seen video of the incident and had only heard about it. He also refused to rebuke anti-protestor, and probably racist, violence at his rallies, but he also had to be begged into saying the Klan is bad, so, you know.
Michelle Fields, the conservative reporter who was manhandled at a Donald Trump press conference Tuesday, has filed criminal assault charges against Trump’s campaign manager.
Fields was trying to ask Trump a question about affirmative action Tuesday evening when a man, identified by Washington Post reporter Ben Terris as Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, grabbed her arm and yanked her so hard she almost fell to the ground. Fields also posted a photo of her arm the next day, which appeared to be bruised.
According to the Independent Journal, Fields recently filed criminal assault charges with the Jupiter Beach Police Department, which has jurisdiction over the Trump National Golf Club, where the incident occurred. It’s not clear whether the charges were filed yesterday or today, though The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi reported yesterday afternoon that Jupiter police had no record of an investigation.
Lewandowski has so far denied the allegations, calling Fields an “attention seeker” and “delusional.” Trump has also commented on the incident, telling CNN’s Dylan Byers, “Perhaps she made it up. I think that’s what happened.”
Kathleen Matthews, a former Marriott executive who is probably best known as the wife of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, is running for Congress in Maryland’s 8th District. As it turns out, guests on Hardball, Chris Matthews’ political talk show, have been quite generous to Kathleen Matthews’ campaign.
The Intercept reports that Hardball guestshave contributed $79,050 to the Matthews campaign as of December 2015. Some of these guests appeared on the show long before they donated to Matthews’ candidacy, but at least 11 of them appeared after she announced her run, and none of their contributions were disclosed on the air, according to The Intercept.
Steve McMahon, a consultant who donated $2,700 to the Matthews campaign and appeared on Hardball after her candidacy was announced, insinuated that criticism of her relationship to the show is sexist:
McMahon told The Intercept that “it is inherently sexist for anyone to suggest that Kathleen Matthews isn’t doing this on her own.” He added that he donated to Matthews because “I support candidates I believe in,” and that he hopes to “continue to (appear on “Hardball” long after my friend Kathleen Matthews is elected to Congress.” He did not respond to whether donations by on-air “Hardball” guests should be disclosed.
“Kathleen’s name has rarely come up” on the show since her candidacy has announced, the Intercept notes, and it does not appear that any of the donors’ Hardball appearances were related to her campaign.
Chris Matthews is not the only MSNBC personality to be accused of allowing personal ties to affect his coverage of the 2016 campaign season. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of Morning Joe have been heavily criticized for their relationship with Donald Trump, after a series of reports including a voicemail the pair left for the candidate which was obtained by Gawker.
A few days ago, Jeb Bush reportedly met with Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Marco Rubio in Miami. Why would three of the final four Republican candidates agree to a summit with the campaign’s giant-ass loser? Well, Erick Erickson has a pretty good theory:
If the theory is that the Republican party needs—and wants—to do anything possible to keep Donald Trump from amassing enough delegates to secure the nomination so it can then steal it from him at the convention, the three other candidates maneuvering behind the scenes so that they can all plausibly stay in the race would actually make sense.
And this conspiracy is at least based in some sort of reality. Erickson appears to be referencing this CNN report stating that Cruz super PACs are divesting money from Florida and pouring it into other states, and Rubio campaign manager Alex Conant did say today that Republicans in Ohio should go ahead and vote for Kasich if they want to keep Trump from getting the nomination.
If Erickson is right, then all parties involved are at least keeping up the charade. In Cruz’s closing statement at last night’s debate in Miami, he urged the Republican party and its voters to coalesce around him. The Kasich response to Conant urging Republicans to vote against his own boss was a squarely-landed jab:
And yet it’s still very fun to think about the remaining candidates, with Jeb Bush as their leader, acting in concert to deny Donald Trump a fairly won election. Trump is essentially a wrestling heel-as-presidential candidate anyway, so it’s not that hard to believe that his opponents have conspired to seize his championship belt in the most dramatic way possible.
You might not know her; she has 4 million total views on Twitch and 11.2k subscribers on YouTube, which are comparatively low numbers these days. Earlier this week, she uploaded an announcement video in which she explained why, after years of doing Twitch streams that prominently highlighted her breasts, she was going to give up her old schtick:
“To be honest, I’m just no longer happy with what I do,” she said. “I don’t have the energy to do it. I got to the point where I could no longer watch myself. And I feel like once you get to that point, where you can’t even watch your own material, or you don’t want to think about your own material, you’re no longer in a good place.”
Raihnbowkidz said that her “boobie streams” were causing her to focus on the wrong things, rather than the game itself. She worried that, by doing breast-centric streams, she was contributing negatively to the League of Legends community.
“My stream has just reached this point of, it’s not even a League stream, you know? My most successful days, I feel like I didn’t stream anything productive.”
Most of all, Raihnbowkidz said that being a “boobie streamer” was causing too much of a strain, both physically and emotionally.
“I would play ranked games on stream and I would lose every single one because I was just so focused on the fact that my fucking straps on my stupid push up bra were digging into my shoulders,” she said. “And I would look over at chat, and like every second comment is calling me a slut and a whore. It’s just not fun for me anymore.”
Raihnbowkidz uploaded a follow-up video as well, in which she gave a behind-the-scenes look at all the work involved in setting her old stream up. In it, she breaks down the makeup she uses to prep her looks and gives a sped-up view of of the typical 30-40 minutes of application it required. She also takes the time to talk about her uncomfortable push-up bras, and why they made her “[want] to fucking die.”
“I’m not saying that it’s wrong to do this,” Raihnbowkidz said, clarifying that she doesn’t want to condemn women who show cleavage while streaming. “If you are a female and you feel sexy doing this, all the fucking power to you, man. All the fucking power to you. I just wanted to explain to everybody why I personally am sick and tired of doing this, not comfortable doing this, nor do I feel like its right for me to do this.”
Over the years, there have been a number of minor controversies surrounding women on Twitch. Often, you’ll hear people accuse women on Twitch of being “camwhores.” Their thinking tends to go, women are taking over Twitch and tricking swaths of men into donating money, where ‘real’ streams would focus more on gameplay. That fear doesn’t have much basis in reality: back in 2015, only a handful of women cracked the top 100 streams on Twitch, and none of them relied entirely or even mostly on mammary glands to get there. Style and substance do matter on Twitch, at least when it comes to the big leagues.
Smaller streams like Raihnbowkidz’s have it tough, and it can be difficult for an entertainer to find things that will set them apart. Thousands of people try to make it every day on Twitch, with many of them counting themselves lucky if they even get a handful of viewers, nevermind money or sponsorships or internet fame.
It sounds like Raihnbowkidz wound up doing something she really wasn’t happy doing anymore, and now she’s course correcting. Raihnbowkidz’s story is most interesting to me because it pulls back the curtain on the work and sacrifice that goes into making yourself look good. People in our society scrutinize the hell out of women, constantly expecting them to look hot and fuckable while also insisting that they never betray the amount of work involved in looking “natural.” Every woman grapples with managing her makeup and appearance in one way or another. Those challenges are doubtless hugely magnified by streaming on Twitch, which is basically the same as signing up to be a TV broadcaster.
Navigating all of that—the shittier aspects of Twitch culture, suffocating societal expectations, and the stress of pursuing fame—would be enough to make anyone’s head spin. There’s no one answer or best path for women who stream games, but I’m glad Raihnbowkidz seems to have figured out what will make her happiest.
Enger Javier, a Bronx man who was arrested for manslaughter and spent a year in Rikers Island before charges against him were dropped in February, will file a lawsuit against the City of New York on Monday. In the suit, Javier’s attorney alleges that an NYPD detective said, “We got the right spic,” in reference to his arrest, and that he was repeatedly denied when he asked for a lawyer.
Javier was arrested in 2012 for the gang-related killing of Hansell Arias, a 19-year-old. Javier, who was present in the Bronx McDonald’s parking lot where Arias was killed, was detained on the scene and later arrested. He steadfastly maintained his innocence. Over time, evidence piled up in his favor: DNA under the victims fingernails was found not to match Javiers’; the key witness claimed that his testimony against Javier was coerced; and several other witnesses emerged, all of whom pointed to a different man as the killer.
In February, Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark dropped charges against Javier, and the ankle bracelet he’d been wearing since his release from Rikers on bail in 2014 was removed. “Our duty as prosecutors is to do justice, and since I am not convinced that the identification of Mr. Enger as the perpetrator is correct in light of these recent statements by the witnesses and other evidence that we reviewed, this indictment must be dismissed,” Clark said in a statement at the time.
Javier’s lawsuit, an early copy of which was provided to Gawker by his attorney, recounts many of the details of his criminal case, which were reported by Gawker and other news organizations. It claims that police and prosecutors willfully ignored or withheld evidence that would have exonerated Javier.
The suit also makes two allegations that were not previously reported. The first is that Carlos Faulkner, an NYPD who interrogated Javier and investigated his case, once referred to him as a “spic.”
Javier claims to have told officials early on the identity of the man he believed to be the real killer. The complaint alleges that Faulkner made the “spic” remark when Javier and a private investigator asked him why he did not follow up on that claim. From the complaint:
After being released on bail, Mr. Javier and his private investigator Manuel Gomez went to the 44th Precinct to ask Detective Carlos Faulkner why he didn’t investigate the person he was told by Mr. Javier who committed the murder in an effort to get a lead so that they could clear his name. Detective Carlos Faulkner responded to Manuel Gomez “We didn’t need to. We got the right Spic.” Detective Carlos Faulkner failed to even recognize Mr. Javier although he was standing next to Manuel Gomez at the time.
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.
The complaint also alleges that prosecutors interrogated Javier at length without a lawyer, despite his repeated requests to be provided with one. “After Mr. Javier asked for an attorney the Assistant District Attorney turned off the video camera and then proceeded to continue to interrogate Mr. Javier for over an hour. During this illegal interrogation the Assistant District Attorney repeatedly told Mr. Javier that he needed to confess to this murder,” it reads.
John Scola, Javier’s attorney, believes that Detective Faulkner’s alleged “spic” remark fits in with a larger pattern of racial profiling within the NYPD. “The deplorable usage of a racist remark towards Mr. Javier is indicative of the racial profiling which is all too common within the NYPD, especially in Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods. In these neighborhoods any Hispanic or African-American male will do, regardless of their guilt or innocence, so long as the detectives can close their case,” Scola told Gawker.
“Every step of the way, the case was mishandled,” he added.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, claims false imprisonment, false arrest, malicious prosecution, and other charges. The City of New York and the Bronx District Attorney’s Office are named as defendants, as well as Faulkner and several other individual employees of the NYPD and Bronx DA’s office.
Image via John Scola. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.
Michelle Fields, a reporter for the archconservative news outlet Breitbart, was asking Donald Trump a question this past Tuesday when a man, identified by at least one eyewitness as Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, grabbed her arm hard enough to leave a bruise and pulled her forcefully away from the candidate. Since then, pro-Trump reporters, flacks and even Trump himself have attempted to discredit Fields, but the most egregious discrediting efforts have come from Breitbart itself—a cozy, pro-Trump outlet that began gaslighting its own employee almost immediately after the incident, and has not let up since.
Not once in the 743-word analysis of photographs and video from the press conference—none of which show the actual incident—does Pollack quote Fields. Still, Pollack concludes she and Washington Post reporter Ben Terris, who witnessed the incident, got it wrong:
Fields was indeed hurt in the altercation, and published a photograph of her bruises. Yet the available evidence from WPTV and ABC suggests that it was unlikely that Lewandowski was the person who caused her injuries.
Given the similarity in appearance between Lewandowski and the security official, and given the fact that Lewandowski was walking on the other side of Trump from where Fields was at the time, the possibility of mistaken identity cannot be ruled out. Indeed, given Lewandowski’s adamant denials (coupled with statements inappropriately impugning Fields’s character), it is the likeliest explanation.
In addition, the injury may have been accidental, owing simply to the chaos of the press scrum. A video filmed by a local CBS reporter earlier in the evening shows Fields standing near Trump and the same security official, with no concern or alarm on the part of Trump campaign staff.
This is, objectively speaking, insane! For Pollack to conclude, without seeing footage of the actual incident, that his own colleague either lied or misrepresented the facts, is insane. For Breitbart to publish the story is insane. For Breitbart to hang its own employee out to dry is insane—even the White House has condemned the Trump campaign over the incident. It makes no sense, until you consider that perhaps the media outlet’s relationship with the Trump campaign is worth more to it than the safety and health—mental and physical—of its own employees.
There’s some evidence to support this theory. Breitbart has been, even for a conservative media outlet, one of Trump’s biggest supporters. So much so, that employees tell BuzzFeed they suspect Trump might be paying for some of the fawning coverage (emphasis ours):
According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website — using it to hype his political prospects and attack his enemies. One current editor called the water-carrying “despicable” and “embarrassing,” and said he was told by an executive last year that the company had a financial arrangement with Trump. A second Breitbart staffer said he had heard a similar description of the site’s relationship with the billionaire but didn’t know the details; and a third source at the company said he knew of several instances when managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest. Additionally, a conservative communications operative who works closely with Breitbart described conversations in which “multiple writers and editors” said Trump was paying for the ability to shape coverage, and added that one staffer claimed to have seen documentation of the “pay for play.”
Whether Trump is paying the site or not, Breitbart was, from the start, disinclined to defend Fields, whose boyfriend broke the news of the incident on Twitter, calling Trump and Lewandowski “thugs.” Indeed, it was only after a Politico report went live that the website issued a passive, doubting statement that appeared to question Fields’ account:
It’s obviously unacceptable that someone crossed a line and make physical contact with our reporter. What Michelle has told us directly is that someone “grabbed her arm” and while she did not see who it was, Ben Terris of the Washington Post told her that it was Corey Lewandowski. If that’s the case, Corey owes Michelle an immediate apology.
It’s a strange statement for a media outlet to make about an alleged assault on its own reporter, made all the more strange by Breitbart’s decision to pin the accusation on Terris, who was not named in the Politico report. But by blaming the whole thing on the Washington Post, Breitbart managed to avoid formally accusing the Trump campaign of misconduct.
(It also served to burn Terris, who had a scheduled interview with Lewandowski the next day and reportedly planned to ask Lewandowski about the incident. That interview was canceled, due to “scheduling conflicts,” just hours after the Breitbart report was published.)
But that was just the start of Breitbart’s campaign against its own reporter, if an account published yesterday in The Daily Beast is to be believed. According to their sources, Lewandowski that same night openly admitted to Breitbart Washington political editor Matthew Boyle that he had grabbed Fields, claiming he thought she was “an adversarial member of the mainstream media,” rather than a friendly Breitbart reporter.
In the meantime, Breitbart began containing the story. According to The Daily Beast, Breitbar PR consultant Kurt Bardella immediately instructed Fields not to speak publicly about the incident and further ordered her to “get your boyfriend under control.” Her only public comment so far has been in a statement, attributed to her, published on Breitbart. And pretty much the only thing Breitbart has done to support her so far appears to be suspending her colleague, Patrick Howley, who sent a series of now-deleted tweets calling her a liar. (Today he merely linked to the Breitbart story calling her a liar.)
With the current state of political discourse in the GOP, it’s understandable that reporters—even friendly conservative ones—are considered the enemy. But their employers should be the ones protecting them—not vilifying and gaslighting them. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to work for Breitbart, if this is how Breitbart treats its own.
In an interview conducted at Nancy Reagan’s funeral today, Hillary Clinton recounted a version of history that didn’t happen, lauding the former first lady’s “low key advocacy” for the cause of HIV/AIDS awareness. “Low key” is one way of putting it. In fact, the Reagan White House is infamous for its lengthy, deadly silence on the epidemic.
Clinton’s remarks came after an extended explanation of Nancy Reagan’s efforts to expand stem cell research after her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimers. Then, in a bizarre turn, Clinton began talking about AIDS in the 1980s, a topic anyone looking to remain civil and complimentary would go far out of their way to avoid at the funeral of Nancy Reagan:
“It may be hard for your viewers to remember how difficult it was for people to talk about HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. And because of both President and Mrs. Reagan, in particular, Mrs. Reagan, we started national conversation when before no one would talk about it, no one wanted to do anything about it, and that too is something that really appreciated, with her very effective, low-key advocacy, but it penetrated the public conscience and people began to say ‘Hey, we have to do something about this too.’”
It’s almost tempting to interpret this as withering, devastating sarcasm—the Reagans “started a national conversation about AIDS” in the same sense that George W. Bush “started a national conversation” about Iraq.
Peter Staley, an HIV/AIDS activist and founder of Treat Action Group, who was diagnosed with AIDS-related complex in 1985, told Gawker, “Thank God I’m not a single issue voter, or she would have lost my vote with this insulting and farcical view of early AIDS history.”
Update: The Clinton campaign has released the following incoherent statement, indicating that Hillary “misspoke” when she lauded the nonexistent HIV/AIDS advocacy record of Nancy and Ronald Reagan:
Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com. Public PGP key PGP fingerprint: PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7
New video from the Donald Trump press conference Tuesday appears to show Donald Trump’s campaign manager grabbing the reporter he swore he didn’t grab.
Michelle Fields, a reporter for the archconservative news outlet Breitbart, said she was manhandled by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after she tried to ask the candidate a question about affirmative action.
Yesterday, both Lewandowsi and Trump accused Fields of lying about the incident.
But in the video, recorded by CSPAN, you can see Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski reach across the man walking next to him to the spot where Fields was attempting to ask Trump a question. Next to her, eyewitness Ben Terris, who corroborated her account and identified Lewandowski as her assailant, is clearly visible. Terris can also be seen saying something to Lewandowski immediately after the confrontation.
The video also appears to invalidate a theory advanced by Fields’ own employer, Breitbart, which today published a story by Joel B. Pollack concluding there was no way Lewandowski could have done it.
Instacart, the revolutionary company that invented the business of “delivering groceries,” is damn near “profitable!” Well.. sort of. And working at Instacart is much less profitable than it was before.
Here, from Bloomberg, is the great news for Instacart investors: thanks to innovative business practices like getting consumer goods companies or retail stores to subsidize delivery prices, the company is now “profitable.” Scare quotes included!
Instacart said it’s “profitable” in four cities, including its biggest two, San Francisco and Chicago. It said 40 percent of the company’s volume is profitable—meaning most orders still lose money. It also said it will be profitable globally by summer. However, its calculation for profitability doesn’t include the cost of office space, the cost of acquiring shopper workers, or the salaries of its executives, engineers, designers, or other employees based at its San Francisco headquarters.
The company is “profitable,” on less than half of its deliveries, as long as you don’t include many of its major costs in the calculation. Hey, me too!
There is one line in the very past paragraph of the Bloomberg story that notes, “To further reduce costs, Instacart increased delivery fees $2 per order and cut some staff in December.” Sounds responsible! But on whose backs is Instacart’s profit margin really being built? For that, you have to read today’s Wall Street Journal story, which explains quite a bit more: the company is cutting its drivers’ pay in many markets by a lot.
The company’s contract drivers in its hometown of San Francisco who collect prepacked bags from grocery stores will earn $1.50 per drop-off, a cut of 63% from the previous guarantee of $4. The company is also slashing by 50% to 25 cents the commission it pays for each item in an order that drivers collect when shopping in stores.
All praise due to Instacart’s paradigm-busting new business model: slash employee pay to the bone and you may be able to be “profitable” on less than half of your business (not including costs).
Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for the far-right news organization Breitbart, resigned today amid a controversy over the company’s treatment of staff reporter Michelle Fields. When asked if he resigned because he disagreed with the way the company handled the Fields situation, Bardella told BuzzFeed “It would be fair for you to say that.”
On Tuesday, Fields was asking Donald Trump a question when a man grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the candidate, leaving a bruise. Ben Terris, a Washington Post reporter who was also on the scene, identified the man as Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, as did Fields herself. Fields filed a criminal complaint against Lewandowski today, and the Trump campaign—including Trump himself—has spent the last several days denying that Lewandowski was involved.
Rather than standing by its own reporter’s account of her assault—as Time did when a photographer working for the magazine was choke slammed at a Trump event, and as any journalist would hope that her employer would—Breitbart set about attempting to prove Fields wrong. A bizarre report published today by Breitbart’s Joel Pollak concluded that the manhandling “could not possibly have happened as Ben Terris reported,” despite presenting nothing close to conclusive evidence. Why did Breitbart hang Fields out to dry? Maybe to preserve its own ties with the Trump campaign, which it has covered in a mostly very positive manner.
“What I personally feel is one thing, but as someone who’s supposed to represent them at the public-facing side of this, I was at the point where I couldn’t give 100% of myself and best thing to do was to let them know that,” Bardella told BuzzFeed of his decision to quit.
Bardella also referenced an “escalating cycle of behavior” at Trump events on Twitter.
If you’re trying to keep an eye on your blood pressure, Amazon will sell you this Omron 7 Series electronic monitor today for $40, an all-time low. This monitor has a 4.3 star review average on over 8,000 reviews, making it one of the most thoroughly vetted Amazon products I’ve ever come across.
When it comes to smartphone dash mounts, magnetic solutions have dominated the sales charts over the last year or so. But if you don’t want to obstruct a vent, or use a case with your phone, a good old-fashioned suction cup mount might be the way to go.
iOttie makes some of the most popular solutions on the market, and their compact Easy Flex 3 is marked down to $11 on Amazon right now, an all-time low. [iOttie Easy Flex 3, $11]
Of course, if you do want to try a magnetic mount, Mpow’s solution has been on sale for $5 all week long. [Mpow Grip Magnetic Car Mount, $5 with code YNGL8BMN]
Hopefully you never need a dash cam, but owning one can really save your bacon in the result of an accident. Despite thelow price of this 1080p model, its user-uploaded videos and stills look really solid. It’ll even automatically detect accidents, and lock the footage accordingly.
I didn’t know a salad spinner could be beautiful, but this stainless steel OXO model will look great in any kitchen. More importantly though, it has great reviews, and can wash your lettuce with the push of a button. Today’s $40 price is $10 less than usual, and the lowest Amazon’s ever offered. [OXO Steel Salad Spinner, $40]
One of the best card games you probably haven’t heard of is marked down to just $16 today. Munchkin is a little bit like D&D, but much more approachable and silly. Other than Black Friday and a few other rare sales where it drops below $10, this is a about as low as it goes on a regular basis. [Munchkin, $16]
Anki Overdrive is like slot cars for the smartphone age, and the starter set is marked down to its Black Friday price. If it looks familiar, it’s because you probably played with it at an Apple Store. [Anki Overdrive Starter Kit, $120]
If you hurry, here’s a rare opportunity to save on PSN credit. While you can frequently find better deals on full games from other retailers, this would be a great deal if you like to buy DLC. [$50 PSN Gift Card, $43]
Big battery packs like the Anker PowerCore series have their place, but sometimes, you need something a little more pocket friendly. 5,000mAh batteries should give just about any phone a full charge, and $8 is a great price for this lipstick-style model from Aukey. [Aukey Mini 5000mAH Power Bank, $8 with code DCSQY6U5]
Featuring a unique 12-button side grid of buttons, Razer’s Naga Expert gaming mouse is perfect for MMOs, but you can actually program those buttons to perform functions in any just about any other app. Today’s $40 deal is the best we’ve ever seen. [Razer Naga Expert MMO Gaming Mouse, $40]
Steaming your clothes might not get them as crisp as ironing, but it does a decent enough job in a fraction of the time, and for $15, why not? [Pure Enrichment PureSteam Fabric Steamer, $15 with code STEAMR15]
Vacuuming is a miserable enough experience without dealing with a cord and all the tangles, trips, and accidental unplugs that come with it, so invest in these cordless 20V Hoover vacuums, marked down to all-time low prices today.
The hand vac is obviously perfect for furniture and your car, while the 2-in-1 upgright includes a hand vac, but also a wheeled base so it can act as your one true vacuum cleaner.
$18 for a rechargeable Cree LED flashlight would be a pretty good deal under any circumstances, but this one includes a seatbelt cutter, window hammer, and even a 10,400mAh USB battery charger. Plus, it includes IPX6 waterproofing, meaning you could even take it for a swim. [Suaoki 4-in-1 Rechargeable 10,400mAh Cree Led Flashlight, $18 with code SUAOKIA1]
Today you can grab a Fitbit Aria smart scale on Newegg Flash for an all-time low $58, as long as you don’t mind a refurb. The Aria will give you your weight, BMI, and body fat % and of course sync them to your Fitbit app to track changes over time. [Refurb Fitbit Aria Wi-Fi Weight/Body Fat/BMI Digital Smart Scale, $58]
If you’re curious about the Fitbit ecosystem, you’d be hard pressed to find a better entry price than $45 for a Fitbit Flex. It’s a refurb, but you’re still saving more than $30 off its current price on Amazon. [Refurb Fitbit Flex, $45]
If buying a movie ticket in your town on Fandango costs more than $8 (including Fandango’s convenience fee), you stand to save money with this deal from Groupon. [Two Fandango Movie Tickets, $16. $26 maximum value.]
Simplehuman dominated the nominations in our recent kitchen trash cans Kinja Co-Op, and Amazon’s running rare discounts on several different models today, plus a handful of soap dispensers and kitchen accessories to match.
Simplehuman sales are pretty rare, so if you’ve had one of these on your wishlist, I wouldn’t hesistate. Head over to this post to see the full list of deals.
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Rumor has it the contentious 2016 presidential election is tearing apart famous acquaintances Chelsea Clinton and Ivanka Trump. “I am also here!!!” says Georgina Bloomberg, who is, in typical horse-girl fashion, trying to make it all about her.
Bloomberg got in on rich kid the drama this week by commenting in a Politico article that both Chelsea and Ivanka declined to comment for. Were Chelsea and Ivanka ever even friends to begin with? I have literally no idea. Does Georgina Bloomberg know a thing about it? I’m guessing the answer is no, because she’s talking about it with a reporter and not, say, with Chelsea or Ivanka. Why is she talking about it instead of living her best life, as a horse girl? Again, I have no idea. Generally, “‘she’s into horses’ is all you need to know,” Gawker writer and resident expert Allie Jones explains.
But let’s let Georgina explain.
“I am good friends with two of Mr. Trump’s kids and no matter what happens in the presidential race, that won’t change,” Georgina says.
She adds: “Donald has always been, and still is, a great father, and I know she is very proud of him and what he has accomplished.”
A nice thing to say about someone else—but how does that relate to Georgina Bloomberg?
“Just like me, this doesn’t mean she has to agree with everything her father stands for — I certainly didn’t agree with everything my father did or believes, but we are our own people.”
