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New York Times Keeps Changing Story About Jill Abramson’s Salary

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New York Times Keeps Changing Story About Jill Abramson’s Salary

Was ousted New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson paid less than her predecessor, Bill Keller, and other male colleagues who held lesser titles at the paper? The Times has several different answers.

After news of Abramson’s firing became public, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta reported that Abramson confronted Times executives after she learned that she was paid less than Keller. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy (sort of) shot down Auletta’s report in an email to Politico’s Dylan Byers:

Jill's total compensation as executive editor was not less than Bill Keller’s, so that is just incorrect. Her pension benefit, like all Times employees, is based on her years of service and compensation. The pension benefit was frozen in 2009.

Then Murphy sent a slightly different statement to Hunter Walker of Business Insider:

Jill’s total compensation as executive editor was not meaningfully less than Bill Keller’s, so that is just incorrect. Her pension benefit, like all Times employees, is based on her years of service and compensation. The pension benefit was frozen in 2009.

Asked about the discrepancy between the two statements—which mean two different things—Murphy provided the following statement to Gawker:

There is no discrepancy. Jill’s compensation was directly comparable to Bill’s during their times as executive editor. Not less, not meaningfully less, not considerably less (as reported in the NY’er), directly comparable.

When asked if the paper could provide hard figures (so the public could judge whether Abramson’s and Keller’s salaries were in fact “directly comparable”), Murphy responded: “Obviously, no, we can’t. Directly comparable is pretty clear, in my view.”

To contact the author of this post, email trotter@gawker.com

[Photo credit: Getty Images]


Ravi Somaiya and David Carr of the New York Times report that executive editor Jill Abramson’s depar

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Ravi Somaiya and David Carr of the New York Times report that executive editor Jill Abramson’s departure was prompted, in part, by her attempt to recruit top Guardian editor Janine Gibson to serve alongside then-managing editor Dean Baquet without consulting Baquet himself.

“It escalated the conflict between [Abramson and Baquet],” Somaiya and Carr write, “and rose to the attention of Mr. Sulzberger, who was already concerned about her style of newsroom management.”

Baquet replaced Abramson as executive editor on Wednesday.

Know more? Get in touch.

Oscar Pistorius Murder Trial Put on Hold

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Oscar Pistorius Murder Trial Put on Hold

The murder trial of Oscar Pistorius will be suspended for at least a month so that the former Olympian can be assessed by a team of psychiatrists.

The mental health screening was ordered over Pistorius's objections this week after an expert witness for his defense suggested he could be suffering from an anxiety disorder.

Under South Africa's Criminal Procedure Act, a court is required to order a psychiatric evaluation when the possibility of a mental illness or defect is raised.

The aim, the judge said, was not to punish him twice, but to ensure that justice was done. She raised the possibility that Pistorius would not have to stay overnight in a state mental hospital for the entire 30-day assessment, but could be an outpatient.

Pistorius's lawyers have been massaging the case theory that Pistorius's latent anxiety, coupled with the fear that a burglar was in the house, led him to believe that firing four shots through a locked bathroom door was a reasonable thing to do.

Pistorius's defense team objected strenuously to the court-ordered assessment, which could have implications on his defense strategy.

The court-ordered psychiatric panel could help Pistorius' case or reduce his sentence if he is convicted if it finds that the Olympic sprinter suffers from generalized anxiety disorder. But a finding by the panel that he was fully functional at the time of the crime, able to control himself and had full criminal liability, could complicate his defense.

[image via AP]

The Person Who Leaked the Jay Z Elevator Video Got Caught Today

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The Person Who Leaked the Jay Z Elevator Video Got Caught Today

A spokesperson for the Standard Hotel said on Wednesday that they identified and fired the employee who sold the now-infamous Met Brawl video to TMZ.

According to the AP, the perpetrator was terminated for "breaching the security polices of the hotel and recording the confidential CCTV video" from one of the hotel's elevators. As the Washington Post points out, these cell phone videos of surveillance tapes have become commonplace.

A rep for the Standard told reporters the hotel turned over "all available information to criminal authorities," after firing the employee earlier today.

But whoever the leak is, he or she can probably spring for a good defense attorney—according to Page Six, TMZ shelled out around a quarter-million for the footage.

[image via AP]

State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

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State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

At least half a dozen raging wildfires spread through San Diego county today in what one observer is calling "a scene from Armageddon."

California governor Jerry Brown called the emergency on Wednesday after spreading wildfires raged through hundreds of acres of land, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate.

Thanks to unseasonably hot and dry temperatures, the fires have been spreading rapidly, forcing evacuations of area schools, residences and businesses, including the Marine base and the Cal State San Marcos campus.

(And, according to an alert sent out earlier today by San Diego fire officials, there's also a "fire in your pants.")

The blazes are unusual, experts say, pointing to the speed with which they've spread and the fact that wildfires usually tend to peak toward the end of the summer.

"This is May, this is unbelievable. This is something we should see in October," Chief Michael Davis told FOX. "I haven't seen it this hot, this dry, this long in May."

Many local residents were given only minutes to pack and evacuate.

Fire officials said Wednesday that nine separate fires in the San Diego area burned through more than 9,000 acres.

"I think between this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon, things are going to get worse," meteorologist Philip Gonsalves told the LA Times. "Only because the conditions will be prolonged. But you can't get much worse than it is right now."

State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

State of Emergency Declared in San Diego

[images via AP]

How Do "Firenadoes" Form?

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How Do "Firenadoes" Form?

Some of the scarier images coming out of the abundant wildfires this year are fire whirls, or "firenadoes." They are tornado-like swirls of smoke and fire that form in intense wildfires. Despite their popular name, firenadoes more similar to dust devils than they are to tornadoes. How do they form?

Most people are familiar with (or have even seen) a dust devil before. Dust devils are rapidly rotating columns of air that form over large, flat patches of land on days with hot temperatures and light winds. Under the right conditions, the land may be able to heat up enough to cause the air immediately above the surface to quickly start to rise.

When the winds are just right, it may cause the rising column of air to begin to rotate much in the same way that a tornado does. As the column of air continues to rise, it stretches out, causing the column of air to spin more quickly, which kicks up dust and dirt and creates a dust devil.

Some dust devils can reach the intensity of an EF-0 tornado, blowing around light objects and doing damage to poorly constructed buildings. Several people are known to have died from flying debris caused by dust devils.

The same general principle extends to firenadoes. When the right conditions are present, the incredibly intense heat caused by the wildfire allows the air to quickly rise, stretch out, and rotate, creating the "tornado" of fire and smoke.

How Do "Firenadoes" Form?

Regarding the question of whether or not they're dangerous...it's a spinning column of fire reaching a hundred feet into the sky. Of course it's dangerous. The whirl wouldn't be able to survive outside of the wildfire itself, so it wouldn't spread beyond the fire to terrorize a town, but the intense winds are enough to help spread the fire and send it further out of control.

Firenadoes have made the news several times in the last few weeks, including the one spotted in California yesterday (pictured at the top of this post), and an incredible shot of one in Missouri last week.

This is not a new phenomenon. The odds of people spotting firenadoes increases with the frequency of wildfires. Not only do more fires provide more chances for these whirls to form, but the fact that almost everyone has a smartphone these days allows people to take a picture and share it with the world the moment they spot one.

[Images via Eric Fisher and Topeka News]

Nicole Kidman's Grace Kelly biopic, Grace of Monaco, opened the Cannes Film Festival this week and i

Michael Sam Is Doing A Reality Show, And That Sucks

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Michael Sam Is Doing A Reality Show, And That Sucks

So Michael Sam has a reality show now, and I'm just gonna go ahead and align myself with the HOT TAKES crowd and say that Sam just pissed away a whole lot of the goodwill he'd built up for himself these past few months. They can class up the announcement all they like. They can call it a "documentary" series even though it's a dirty little secret that even acclaimed documentary filmmakers will coach subjects and have them do multiple takes. They can do all that and it still won't scrub away the fact that reality shows are fucking beat and no one worth a shit bothers to do them.

This isn't a football issue, or even a matter of distraction. This is me just saying that a reality show is always a transparent and pathetic exercise in self-branding. It's what Darren Rovell would do if he were an athlete. There's no reason to expect Sam to be any more authentic a public figure than any other football player. But between the carefully scripted public-relations campaign that inaugurated his coming-out and now the news that his life will be a reality show overseen by Oprah Winfrey, the queen of aspirational disingenuousness, our first openly gay NFL player seems to exist now entirely within quotation marks. He is another packaged product being sold to us at heavy markup—commodified smarm at best, and at worst something downright cynical, something that leverages real emotions in service of a marketing strategy. No one wants to find out that Lou Gehrig's farewell speech was copywritten by a dude at Pfizer.

We're just coming off of David Ortiz luring the president into a stupid Samsung ad campaign and Eric Ebron proposing to his girlfriend as part of a scheme by Gillette and that one video of "strangers" kissing that, again, turned out to be a stupid ad. As a result, I can't trust any genuine moment to be genuine anymore. I always suspect I'm looking at the soft end of a product pitch. Now that Sam has a reality show, can anyone believe with 100 percent confidence that the kiss he shared with his boyfriend on camera last Saturday was a real and true moment? They probably had a dress rehearsal. Sam was probably standing on a taped X to make sure he hit his mark. The whole thing was probably choreographed by Macklemore. God, Macklemore sucks.

A few months ago, Sam asked fans to let their guards down and invest in him in a very different way than they do in, say, Johnny Football or RGIII. Now he's chosen the favored path of every D-list asshole in America. Go ahead and look at the list of NFL athletes with their own reality shows: T.O., Chad Johnson, the Jets—things ended badly for them. No one escapes this shit with his dignity intact. I'm going to guess that Oprah's people—they include the guy who brought you American Chopper and someone who ran Lindsay Lohan's reality show—give exactly zero shits about Michael Sam's actual football career. Their only interest is in taking his little claim to history and absorbing it into Oprah's big phony inspiration mill. Michael Sam busted out of the closet, and Oprah was there!

It does him no favors to be part of this, but here we are anyway, and everything feels just a little icky. Our first openly gay player in the NFL is a total abstraction, a commercial for himself, an actor named Michael Sam playing the role of "Michael Sam" on The Michael Sam Show. Those quotation marks he's trapped inside of are looking more and more like another kind of closet.

Related: http://uppercutting.kinja.com/michael-sam-is...

Photo via Getty


Hedge fund manager David Tepper warned yesterday that the stock market is "dangerous right now," and

A man in America's poorest county, Wolfe County, Kentucky, says he "will vote for anybody against Ob

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A man in America's poorest county, Wolfe County, Kentucky, says he "will vote for anybody against Obama... I don't care if it's a Democrat, a Republican, an Indian, a Pakistani, even a Frenchman!" Also, Obama isn't running again, and Wolfe County is 98 percent white.

The Sexism Surrounding Jill Abramson's Firing

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The Sexism Surrounding Jill Abramson's Firing

Yesterday, when Arthur Sulzberger announced to the Times staff that he'd fired editor-in-chief Jill Abramson, he reportedly told the staff something like, "When women get to top management positions, they are sometimes fired, just as men are." A lot of the women I know who have similar professional ambitions to mine are stuck on that phrase: "Just as men are."

In my experience, quite a large number of people are prepared to admit that sexism exists, but only in the abstract. They have seen the same statistics, I guess, which makes it hard to deny that in fact women are not generally treated "just as men are," as a group.

For example: Reports are that people did indeed feel Abramson had certain failings as a manager. Reports are also that she did not get along very well with the man who had given her the job. Men who have such things said about them may also face firing, yes. But none of these things necessarily obviate that Abramson's gender played a role. And there is this persistent problem of the pay gap, which everyone seems to admit existed, even the Times itself, though it disputes the size.

And yet people are trying to pretend we can rule out the gender angle.

Have a look, for example, at what the New York Times' public editor, Margaret Sullavan, has recently posted about this idea that Abramson might have been expelled from the castle because she was too abrasive in some way:

As an observer, I don't think this decision had much to do with Ms. Abramson being "pushy," which is gender-related code for strong and opinionated. It was more that she was undiplomatic and less than judicious in some management and personnel decisions. That matters when you're supervising 1,250 people in a business being forced to reinvent itself.

Shifting the word used to describe Abramson from "pushy" to "undiplomatic" is making a distinction without a relevant difference. The problem with women being called "pushy" is not that that particular word is used. The problem is that it is not always clear that a lack of diplomacy is considered a failing in a male manager, particularly one as high-flying as the editor-in-chief of the New York Times.

It's like people think that if sexism is not the only explanation, it can't be any part of it.

I am not naive. I know that no amount of explaining that women's voices are typically characterized as shrill and grating, or that women are perceived as pushy where men are perceived as bold, will do. Mary Beard, the Oxford classicist, recently traced the attitudes back to antiquity in the London Review of Books, but I've a notion the nasty comments directed at her haven't changed much.

After all, as I said, everyone seems to agree that sexism is bad. It's just always happening somewhere else, and the somewhere else tends not to be a specific place and time, happening to a specific woman. People often say they are just focusing on the "facts." But the "facts" never seem to include gender. If anything else at all is in the picture, there's no sexism. Which I suppose makes things tidier, if also demonstrably untrue.

[Image via Instagram.]

Indian workers prepare sweets anticipating election victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party at its Ne

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Indian workers prepare sweets anticipating election victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party at its New Delhi headquarters on Thursday. Official results are expected on Friday, but exit polls by at least six TV stations show the BJP is likely to win enough seats to form a coalition government. Image via Manish Swarup/AP.

Ohio Issues Bright Yellow License Plates To Shame DUI Offenders

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Ohio Issues Bright Yellow License Plates To Shame DUI Offenders

I recently learned that the state of Ohio, whose official state rock song – this is a completely true fact – is "Hang On Sloopy" by The McCoys, issues bright yellow license plates to people convicted of driving under the influence. That's right: the folks in the Ohio state legislature have come up with an entirely new, brightly colored way to make its DUI offenders miserable, as if simply living in Ohio wasn't punishment enough.

For those of you who don't believe me, I have here the official Ohio statute authorizing the creation of these license plates. It's located in The Ohio Statutes Bathroom Reader, chapter 11, section 15, row 9, seats 6 and 7, on the third-base side. It states, and I quote:

It shall be hereby decreed that the great state of Ohio, which has endured serious issues ranging from the time that river in Cleveland caught on fire to the time LeBron James moved to Florida and took approximately 4 percent of all state income tax revenue with him, will create a bright yellow license plate to shame DUI offenders. Oh, and one more thing: hang on, Sloopy. Sloopy, hang on!

I'm a bit surprised that the Ohio legislature would do something like this, but I have to admit that there is some precedent. Not from another state government, or from another jurisdiction elsewhere in the world, but rather from Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter.

Now, I know we all read The Scarlet Letter in high school, but just to refresh your memory, it tells the story of a young 17th century woman – for some reason, she's named Hester – who has an adulterous affair with a priest, bears an out-of-control child, and is eventually forced to wear a brightly colored "scarlet letter" on her dress because she blew a 0.16 one night on the way home from a league bowling match. Even in the 1600s, people took this sort of thing very seriously.

But anyway, back to Ohio. The state of Ohio says that a judge can make you use one of these license plates if you've had a DUI and you're on a restricted driver's license. In other words, you probably won't have any problems if you're driving a yellow-plated car during the morning commute in suburban Cincinnati. But you might draw the ire of local law enforcement if, for example, you're in the parking lot of Big Jim's Booze and Buffet at 2 a.m. doing burnouts in a Chevy pickup that's loaded down with live chickens. Although, to be completely fair, this is probably an activity that many Ohioans engage in while sober.

Now, I have to admit that this whole thing actually seems like a fairly good idea in theory. After all, many states have restricted driver's licenses, but there's no real way to enforce them from outside the vehicle. Enter the yellow license plate, right? Well, sort of. You see, there's one little problem with these so-called DUI plates: other people.

Here's what I mean: let's say you get a DUI in the great state of Kentucky, which does not have an official rock song, though I suspect if it did it would be "I Wanna Be Sedated" by The Ramones. Basically, what happens there is, you get the DUI, and you go before the judge, and you have to pay thousands of dollars, and you lose your license for a while, but no one finds out about it. You could get a DUI in Kentucky tomorrow and the only people who would know are the arresting officer, the judge, and your fellow overnight cellmates, who are so strung out on meth that they think Scarlet Letter is a dancer at the local strip club who will blow a lot more than a 0.16 if you tip generously.

But in Ohio, everyone knows you've gotten a DUI. You show up at your 9-year-old daughter's elementary school field day, eager to cheer her on? They see your license plate. They know. "Pepper's dad got a DUI!" one parent will say. "Well of course he did," another will reply. "He named his daughter Pepper!"

But it's not just a problem at school events. Arrive at a job interview, and they see your plates. "I'm sorry," they tell you. "But we just don't think you have what it takes to scrub our toilets… DRUNKY!" Show up at a date's house for a nice evening meal. "Oh, is that your car?" she'll say. "I'm sorry, but I think I'm coming down with a bad case of… YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE!"

Now, you might think I'm overreacting to all this, but here's the thing: everybody in Ohio knows about these plates. Before I wrote this column, I asked several people from Ohio about the yellow license plates, and they all agreed: when you get up next to these people in traffic, you stare at them as if they just ran over your puppy. Admittedly, one Ohioan said she sometimes confuses yellow-plated cars with "people from New Mexico," but noted that "they're probably all drunk too."

All of this got me thinking about our community standards. I think, at this point, we really have to ask ourselves: do we really want to do this to DUI offenders? Solid members of the community, who made one little mistake, now have to drive around for months like a social pariah? Mothers, pastors, friends, who were just a little over the legal limit should be shunned like outcasts? Is this really how we want to treat our fellow citizens?

The answer is: yeah, probably. So then I started thinking: why stop at DUI?

Well, it turns out that the excellent folks over at the Ohio state legislature are already waaay ahead of me on this one. You see, it seems they realized that the shame created by the yellow license plates is actually a bigger deterrent than the cost or punishment of actually getting a DUI in the first place. So way back in 2007, they also came up with the idea of giving green license plates to sex offenders, presumably so the rest of us would think twice before entering their unmarked white vans. Unfortunately, this bill died in committee, probably because they couldn't figure out what to do when someone has both a sex offense and a DUI conviction.

But I'm sad the green plates didn't work out, because I happen to think this whole "license plates for crimes" idea is a pretty good one. For example: people who let their dogs poop on my lawn should get a brown license plate. People who miss an entire green arrow because they're texting should get a green license plate. And people who name their child "Pepper" should just be taken outside and shot.

@DougDeMuro is the author of Plays With Cars. He owned an E63 AMG wagon and once tried to evade police at the Tail of the Dragon using a pontoon boat. (It didn't work.) He worked as a manager for Porsche Cars North America before quitting to become a writer, largely because it meant he no longer had to wear pants. Also, he wrote this entire bio himself in the third person.

Michael Jackson Died So His Music Could Live

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Michael Jackson Died So His Music Could Live

When Michael Jackson died June 25, 2009, it had been almost eight years since he hit the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. (and just barely—2001's "You Rock My World" peaked at No. 10). Billboard reports that in the nearly five years since his death, he's sold 12.8 million albums. It is an oft-made observation that death gave him the comeback he wouldn't likely have achieved again in life. By the end, he was gone–too self-absorbed, too clouded by drug addiction. Like many greats, his creative juices had an expiration date. After the earth-shattering release of Thriller, he spent the rest of his career chasing after that level of glory, achieving aftershocks at best.

His second posthumous album, Xscape, is out this week. It was overseen by another innovator who's probably past his prime, Timbaland. It is a minor work in the Jackson catalog, but that's refreshing compared to the bombast that defined Jackson's post-Thriller work. Xscape feels more akin to Off the Wall than any Jackson release that came after that 1979 watershed album. It's a collection of eight hummable songs, produced tastefully, and sung impeccably. If nothing else, Xscape is a wonderful reminder of the gorgeousness of Jackson's voice, which sometimes got lost in all the showmanship and layers of production. That voice was like cartilage—flexible and deceptively strong, despite its thinness.

If Jackson were alive, would he have released a collection of songs, as opposed to a misguidedly conceptual album whose title reiterated the chip on his shoulder (a rundown: Bad, Dangerous, HIStory, Invincible)? Unlikely.

If Jackson were alive, would he have been relaxed about being so retro (the lite disco of "Love Never Felt So Good," the My Life-esque hip-hop soul of "Loving You," the laid-back electro of "Slave to the Rhythm") instead of chasing the latest trends when it was already too late? Doubt it.

If Jackson were alive, would he be comfortable reaching back to revisit songs he recorded during more creatively flourishing times? (A lot of Xscape's contents are demos and unreleased recordings from the '80s and '90s.) Probably not, though some of Xscape's songs were product of years of work and didn't make the cut of several albums.

If Jackson were alive, would he have made an album worth listening to all the way through multiple times? He tried for years after Thriller and couldn't.

If Jackson were alive, would he have sounded this alive? I really don't think so.

[Image via Getty]

This Amy Schumer Sketch is Every Couple Trying to Decide What to Watch

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Streaming video services are a blessing and a curse. Trying to choose from among the documentary you swear you'll watch someday, a campy horror remake, one of Tyler Perry's 50 Tyler Perry movies starring Tyler Perry, and Cocktail is hard enough when you're alone. Throw another person into the mix, and you don't stand a chance.

Once again, Amy Schumer is all of us.

[H/T Digg]


Roommates Find $41,000 in Used Couch, Return Cash to Elderly Owner

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Roommates Find $41,000 in Used Couch, Return Cash to Elderly Owner

In April, three roommates were watching a movie in their New Paltz, NY home when they noticed several lumps in the side cushions of their new couch, which they'd purchased two months prior from a Salvation Army. Reese Werkhoven, Cally Guasti, and Lara Russo rooted through the couch's cushions and pulled out several large envelopes stuffed with $20 bills.

"We were just really freaked out by it," Werkhoven told CBS New York. "It had these bubble wrap envelopes, just like two or three of them. We ripped them out and was just like freaking out, like and inch and a half of hundred dollar bills.

"You keep counting more and more money and you get excited, like Reese was thinking about buying a car for his mom and a boat," Russo said.

By the time the final count was in, the trio had more than $41,000 stacked in front of them.

"When we were in the bedroom our neighbors thought we won the lottery or something cause we were just screaming," Guasti said.

Plans to buy cars and boats quickly turned to feelings of guilt, though, once they found the name of the cash's owner on one of the envelopes.

"The entitlement very quickly went away with finding that notice with her name on it. Because we didn't earn that money," Guasti said.

The trio tracked the money's elderly owner down and returned the cash. As you can imagine, the elderly woman was thrilled to have the money—her life savings, she said—back.

"This was her life savings and she actually said something really beautiful like 'This is my husband looking down on me and this was supposed to happen,'" Guasti said.

The roommates didn't leave empty-handed, though; the elderly woman gave them a $1,000 reward.

[Image via The Little Rebellion]

Knowles-Carters Release Statement Regarding Met Brawl

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Knowles-Carters Release Statement Regarding Met Brawl

The Beygency has just released an official statement to the Associated Press regarding the recently leaked elevator security footage captured at the Met Gala earlier this month. In it, Jay Z and Solange "each assume their share of responsibility" for the confrontation. They also dismiss reports that Solange was "intoxicated or displaying erratic behavior throughout that evening" as "simply false." She was just being herself. :)

Here is the full statement:

"As a result of the public release of the elevator security footage from Monday, May 5th, there has been a great deal of speculation about what triggered the unfortunate incident. But the most important thing is that our family has worked through it. Jay and Solange each assume their share of responsibility for what has occurred. They both acknowledge their role in this private matter that has played out in the public. They both have apologized to each other and we have moved forward as a united family.

The reports of Solange being intoxicated or displaying erratic behavior throughout that evening are simply false. At the end of the day families have problems and we're no different. We love each other and above all we are family. We've put this behind us and hope everyone else will do the same."

[Image via Getty]

Jason Stevens, the owner of popular Brooklyn wedding venue reBar, turned himself in to police on Thu

Dionne From Clueless Might Be Starring on Fox News

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Dionne From Clueless Might Be Starring on Fox News

Remember the summer of 1995 when Clueless hit theaters and you just knew you were gonna be "rolling with the homies" forever? That's the summer I fell in love with Dionne Davenport, played masterfully by Stacey Dash (fun fact: she is the cousin of Dame Dash, aka The Guy Formerly Known As Jay Z's BFF). But then the party came to an abrupt stop during the 2012 presidential election when Dash came out in support of Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Twitter damn-near skewered her, too (a lot of which had to do with Dash being a black women in the public sphere, but as my Uncle Rodney once told me: Haters gonna hate, son).

It is now being reported that Dash is currently "in talks to sign a deal with Fox News to become a regular network contributor." She became the darling of conservative media after backing Romney, so the announcement doesn't come as a total shock (not too mention she has previously appeared on Fox & Friends and Red Eye w/ Greg Gutfeld, among other Fox News shows).

One could speculate that Clueless was the height of Dash's acting career, and that, aside from her lead role in season one of Single Ladies on VH1, she's had trouble navigating Hollywood ever since (her performance in Kanye West's "All Falls Down" video in 2004 remains special).

I'm just going to pretend like none of this is real and focus on the good times we had. We'll always have 1995, Stace.

[Image via Fox News]

The Man Who Helped Bring Down Donald Sterling Is An Asshole, Too

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The Man Who Helped Bring Down Donald Sterling Is An Asshole, Too

If you were watching closely, you might've seen Kevin Johnson, the former NBA guard who's now mayor of Sacramento, sitting courtside at Staples Center during Game 4 of the Clippers-Thunder series. His arm was around his wife, Michelle Rhee, and the two seemed to preside over the action, conspicuous by design—their very presence in the fancy seats a further rebuke to the man whom Johnson had recently helped to oust from the NBA, Clippers owner Donald Sterling.

Johnson and Rhee seem to be everywhere these days. There was a joint appearance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. There was another at the Kentucky Derby. And of course before either of those was Johnson's cameo in the Sterling saga. Called in as an unofficial representative of the players, Johnson lobbied NBA commissioner Adam Silver to come down hard on Sterling. After the announcement of Sterling's lifetime ban and $2.5 million fine, The New York Times's Harvey Araton wrote: "[I]t is apparent that the league's response was shaped as much by the influence of a player turned politician who has no official affiliation with the NBA as it was by Silver's conviction."

It was a bitterly funny turn of events for some longtime Johnson observers, who remember when he was the guy making repulsive admissions on tape while speaking with a much younger female with whom he never should've been involved. At the very least, they believe Johnson—with an assist from Rhee—earned a lifetime ban from the moral high ground many years ago. "All I can say is the factually supported charges against Johnson certainly bring into question holding him out to be a moral compass," says New York attorney Gerald Walpin.

From 2007 to 2009, Walpin was inspector general for the Corporation for National Community Service. That's the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps. On that job, Walpin investigated St. HOPE Academy, a group Johnson founded to run charter schools in his hometown of Sacramento that got lots of AmeriCorps money. In 2008, Walpin issued a referral to the local U.S. Attorney for the "criminal and civil prosecution" of Johnson for "obtaining by law federal funds under a grant," and the "filing of false and fraudulent claims" in connection with subsidies totaling $845,018.75. The allegations included lots of bogus accounting. People on AmeriCorps's dime as St. HOPE tutors, according to a joint report on Walpin's investigation issued by Congressional Republicans, were being asked to "wash his car [and] run personal errands" for Johnson.

But the seamiest stuff in those files, and there's a lot of it, comes when investigators take a break from possible fiscal malfeasance to accuse Johnson of physical misdeeds. According to the oversight committee's report, Walpin included allegations of "inappropriate sexual conduct" against Johnson in his criminal referral to the U.S. attorney's office because they could "seriously impact ... both the security of young [AmeriCorps] Members placed in the care of grantees and ... the ability of AmeriCorps to continue to attract volunteers." Johnson's past, as outlined by the committee, also includes alleged hush-money payments to make all this bad news go away. Judging by the non-mention in The New York Times's opus, it largely has gone away.

According to the reports, while investigators were in Sacramento looking into the misuse of funds, they "became aware of allegations of inappropriate contact between Johnson and three female St. HOPE students." Walpin's office later "uncovered evidence of two other female St. HOPE students reporting Johnson for inappropriate sexual conduct towards them."

Walpin's team also was told of various efforts by Johnson and his allies to stonewall the investigations, including one alleged victim who'd said Johnson "offered her $1,000 a month," ostensibly in exchange for her silence.

No alleged victims' names were given. However, Walpin's referral to the U.S. Attorney does name two St. HOPE staffers who left their jobs to protest the school's handling of the sexual misconduct allegations. St. HOPE teacher Erik Jones was said to have gone to school officials when a girl told him Johnson had approached her on campus and "started massaging her shoulders and then reached over and touched her breasts." The report says Kevin Hiestand, who identified himself only as counsel for St. HOPE, contacted Jones, and advised Jones that he had also spoken with the accuser and that the teacher's description didn't jibe with her account. Jones later found out that Kevin Hiestand, along with his father Fred Hiestand, also served as Johnson's personal attorneys. Jones quit the school in protest, and in his resignation letter wrote, "St. HOPE sought to intimidate the student through an illegal interrogation and even had the audacity to ask me to change my story." When Johnson began his run for mayor of Sacramento in 2008, Jones reportedly put up a banner in his front yard: "No Perverts for Mayor."

According to Walpin's report, Jacqueline Wong-Hernandez was the other St. HOPE staffer to leave the school in disgust after Johnson went unpunished. Wong-Hernandez reported allegations of sexual misconduct against Johnson to St. HOPE administrators, and got a visit from board member Michelle Rhee. (Rhee would later serve as the D.C. public schools czar and for a time was viewed as a savior of a broken education system by everybody except those who had ever actually dealt with her. She told Marie Claire magazine that Johnson didn't ask her out until after she'd quit the board and taken the D.C. job.) Wong-Hernandez later learned that one of the alleged victims she'd mentioned to Rhee had been contacted by Kevin Hiestand.

Reached at her current job with the appropriations committee of the California State Senate, Wong-Hernandez confirms that she did in fact leave St. HOPE in protest. She, too, is surprised to see Johnson tossing his two cents into the Sterling saga. "I have been avoiding that story because of [Johnson's involvement]," Wong-Hernandez says.

Rhee also got a personal meeting with Walpin, in which she requested that the IG call the dogs off Johnson. "She tried to talk me out of proceeding," Walpin says. "I took it as simply a non-substantive attempt to help a friend."

Walpin says Rhee's request had no impact. Yet the feds' look-see into Johnson's operation was ultimately overwhelmed in 2009 by a partisan brouhaha between Congressional Republicans and the then-fledgling Obama administration: Walpin was a George W. Bush appointee and is a member of the conservative Federalist Society; Johnson was a rising Democrat who'd proclaimed on the Colbert Report that he was so tight with the newly elected president that his nickname was "Little Barack." Johnson was never formally charged with any crimes relating to Walpin's investigation. He was, however, suspended from receiving U.S. government grants, which caused problems beyond St. HOPE since he was mayor of Sacramento. To be removed from the no-grant list, Johnson and his organization agreed to repay hundreds of thousands of misused federal dollars.

The Man Who Helped Bring Down Donald Sterling Is An Asshole, Too

Walpin says he made enemies in the new administration, and ultimately lost the IG job, because he said at the time that the settlement offers to Johnson were too lenient. The Congressional report on the IG's investigation, issued by GOP hardliners Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), blasts the Justice Department for making that deal, and in doing so touched on an older, even more sordid chapter from Johnson's past. The Issa/Grassley report asserts that the settlement with the St. HOPE founder "ignored Kevin Johnson's willingness to personally pay to resolve civil matters."

"In 1997," the report states, "Johnson agreed to pay $230,000 to resolve claims brought by a Phoenix teenager who alleged Johnson molested her."

The story of that payment, which goes otherwise unexplained in the Issa/Grassley report, is described at length in an amazing Phoenix New Times story about a series of alleged molestations committed by Johnson in 1995. The accuser, according to this story, initially met Johnson when she was 15, while both were filming a gun-violence public service commercial starring the Suns guard. That encounter led to a summerlong courtship; the girl's mother told police Johnson would call almost daily, and the New Times article says he showered her with presents "including bookstore gift certificates, a flute, a Swiss Army knife with his jersey number, '7,' engraved on it … [and] introduced her to great works of literature, including 100 Years of Solitude and I, Claudius."

In return, according to the story, the girl allowed Johnson to shower with her, get in the Jacuzzi with her, and lie naked in bed with her. After the relationship ended, the girl confided in her therapist. As required by law, the doc went to the authorities. However, the therapist told police and the New Times that she did not go to the police until after she'd confronted Johnson about his relationship with her patient. At that point, she told the paper, she "knew that there had been sexual contact."

In a letter written to Johnson by the accuser's lawyer and later scrutinized by the New Times, the accuser recounts their first improper encounter, which happened during a visit to Johnson's house.

He said I could sleep in his room or the guesthouse and I chose the guesthouse. ... We got into the bed and he took all of my clothes off and all of his but his shirt. He was on top of me touching me all over—my breasts, butt, in between my legs, and stomach. Then he took off his shirt. I didn't really know what to do—I was very confused because I thought we were friends, but I didn't know what else to do than to go along with it.

After one of the trysts, she told her lawyer, Johnson made her "pinky promise not to say anything."

"When I asked why," she said, "he said I knew why."

In July 1996, according to the New Times story, Phoenix police recorded an "ambush" phone call that the alleged victim made to Johnson in an effort to draw him out about their encounters. By then the accuser's therapist had contacted Johnson, the police report said, and perhaps even tipped him off that legal authorities were on the case. The story included a partial transcript of that call that the paper obtained from the cops, and in it Johnson comes off as guarded. He opens up the conversation telling the then-17-year-old: "I miss you bad. I don't like not being able to talk to you."

Here's a portion in which the girl is trying without much success to get Johnson to admit that what they did during one tryst was more than "hug."

Girl: "Well, I was naked and you were naked, and it wasn't a hug."

K.J.: "Well, I felt that it was, you know, a hug, and you know, I didn't, to be honest, remember if we were both naked at that time. That is the night at the guesthouse?"

Girl: "Yeah. ... Why would I be upset if it was just a hug?"

K.J.: "Well, I said the hug was more intimate than it should have been. But I don't believe I touched your private parts in those areas. And you did feel bad the next day and that's why we talked about it."

Girl: "Well, if it was just a hug, why were either one of us naked?"

K.J.: "Again, I didn't recall us being a hundred percent naked."

Local prosecutors didn't hear anything in the call to convince them that criminal charges against Johnson were warranted. Johnson's attorney, Fred Hiestand, told New Times that the girl's story was false: "I can say that [Johnson is] a healthy, red-blooded, American male, and he hopes to find the right wife and settle down," Hiestand told the paper. "There are lots of women who are [adults] who are sending him their photos, tape recordings and letters. ... If he was interested in any kind of sexual action, he had a lot more attractive offers than [the accuser]."

The New Times story said that Kevin Turley, a Phoenix attorney representing the alleged victim, had contacted Johnson before the story was published and demanded $750,000 from the NBA star to keep his client from filing a lawsuit for "sexual assault and battery." No such suit was ever filed. The Sacramento Bee reported in 2008 that Johnson had paid her $230,000 to make those allegations go away, a figure repeated in Walpin's reports. Turley, contacted at his Phoenix offices, hung up without responding when asked if the numbers were accurate.

Fred Hiestand, contacted at his law office in Sacramento, referred all inquiries about Johnson to the mayor's staff. In response to several questions about the fiscal and sexual allegations made against Johnson, the mayor's press secretary, Ben Sosenko, issued the following statement: "While appreciating that those who are in the news generate click-throughs, the Inspector General's report is really old news from 2009 that had no merit then as confirmed by the fact that the book on the matter was closed a long time ago by both local and federal officials, including the US Attorney who independently concluded that the report was misleading."

Sosenko's statement, through all its statementishness, holds some truths. Given the way Silver leaned so heavily on Johnson during the NBA's crisis with Donald Sterling, all the nasty things alleged in the Congressional and New Times investigations must have seemed like "really old news" to the commissioner. In any case, Silver was prevailed upon to bring down the hammer on Sterling, and Johnson enjoyed his "turn on the national stage," and the owner was left wondering what he could've done differently. "I wish," Sterling told an L.A. lifestyle magazine, arriving at a lesson his antagonist seemingly learned decades ago, "I had just paid her off."

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