Winnie-the-Pooh, a beloved companion to generations of children, has reportedly been banned from a Polish playground for his lack of pants and his allegedly fuzzy gender identity. Oh, bother.
A.A. Milne's famous character was being considered as the face of a new playground in Tuszyn, Poland, the Croatian Times reports, but members of the local council found certain aspects of the bear "disturbing" and "inappropriate."
"The problem with that bear is it doesn't have a complete wardrobe," said Councillor Ryszard Cichy, referring to Pooh's lack of pants. He felt a Polish fictional bear, which is completely clothed, would be a better pick.
Pooh, of course, doesn't wear pants because he doesn't have genitalia and is a bear. He's a totally non-sexual children's character (except on the internet, where rule 34 exists and everything is terrible).
But that argument didn't fly with the local council, which apparently spent a lot of time considering the finer points of a cartoon bear's anatomy.
"It doesn't wear underpants because it doesn't have a sex. It's a hermaphrodite," one official reportedly said.
"This is very disturbing, but can you imagine?" councillor Hanna Jachimska added, "The author was over 60 and cut [Pooh's] testicles off with a razor blade because he had a problem with his identity."
They haven't decided which character will represent the playground, but the inappropriate, disturbing, sexually dubious, silly old bear has been officially removed from consideration.
The girl of Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is not like other girls. She is, for one thing, a vampire, but she's not like other vampires, either. She wears a hijab and prowls the fictional Iranian town called Bad City (actually Bakersfield, Calif.). Her inevitable feeding seems to come as much from personal needs as it does a sense of social justice: she feeds on the bad guys and spares the ones that she seems to regard as good or at least having potential. She is lonely and almost entirely silent. Her best friend is her record collection.
I met with Amirpour and her titular girl, actor Sheila Vand, earlier this week in the office of her film's distributor, Kino Lorber. We discussed their Persian backgrounds (both came of age in California), the enduring relevance of vampires, and the "feminist" label that is so often applied to this movie in the press. A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation is below.
Gawker: Ana, you said in your director's statement, "I wanted to make an Iranian film, but the question was how?" Can you talk about the logistical difficulties you faced at the onset?
Ana Lily Amirpour: I think the thing about making a film or making any kind of art is you start to identify the boundaries or obstacles and then find a Bruce Lee way to look at it and move around it and actually turn it to your advantage is when you can really be set free. It was a thing where I wanted to do this Iranian vampire film, but it wasn't going to be in Iran and then it was like no, it's going to be in my own place. An invented place. I'll make my own place. A film gives you a wonderful opportunity to do that, and then it's limitless, too, because it's just a fairytale and a fantasy and it can be anything you want. It really just reminds me of being a kid. I feel like I get to be a kid with my mind.
Why did you want to set a vampire story in an Iranian environment?
ALA: It's just the Iranian environment inside my brain, which is Iranian and American and all these things. I wanted to make this Iranian vampire, but really just a vampire. It becomes more universal in a way, a vampire, because they don't die and they get to pass through all time and never have to quit. I hate death.
You're afraid of it?
ALA: I hate it, I don't want to do it. I also don't like old. I don't care how many fuckin' Ansel Adams photos you take of old people and try to tell me it's beautiful. It smells bad and shit's failing. You're rotting inside yourself, inside your own body. That's what it is, in my opinion.
So there's an aspirational aspect to telling this story?
ALA: Yeah, this is like a mating call. I made it for vampires out there. If you're out there, I'm down. I'm ready.
The word "feminist" has been used to describe this movie when people write about it. I see "feminist Iranian vampire" movie a lot. Any thoughts on that?
ALA: I think people tend to see themselves in films. It's the same way that a song makes you feel the way you feel. You feel that because it's stuff you have in you, not necessarily the songwriter. You don't really know exactly what went down for that song to be written. All the stuff that's written, the more I see it and read it, I think it tells more about the person writing it. A film is an opportunity to look at yourself, really.
Personally, do you find this film to be feminist?
APA: Personally, I find that these philosophies are the disease for which they claim to be the cure. I am afraid of categorization in general. I don't really see a usefulness to it. For me, what it does is it stops thinking. I want to live in a world where people have to constantly think. You see a guy with a bumper sticker on his car that says, "World peace," and then you see him kicking a dog. You don't get a get-out-of-jail-free card for being like, "Well, that's what I am." I don't like that stuff.
I am not trying to speak for anyone or give answers to anyone other than myself. I'm more interested in asking questions than finding a specific answer. It's weird, too, because doing the press I started to think about it. I'm a filmmaker, not an answer-maker. I would have become a teacher or activist or something if I was trying to tell you stuff. I get more excited when people are asking their own questions and seeing their own stuff.
Sheila Vand: It really didn't come into play for me. [The character] is a girl, but it's not about her being a girl, in the same way that the movie is set in Iran, but it's not about Iran. But there is a tendency, for whatever reason, for people to want to understand things via these tropes. I guess it's legitimate, whatever your interpretation is your interoperation, but for me it's like a film is meant to be experienced. The movie is the movie. The movie isn't all these other things that are around it.
I couldn't help but feel the movie was politicized, though. I mean, take the irony of the title. If a story is told about a girl walking home alone at night, it's usually because she's prey or somehow in danger. In this movie, in fact, she is the predator.
APA: That's for sure conscious. I'm not trying to be completely nihilistic and say, "I don't believe anything." I'm in the world and I'm seeing stuff. But giving someone something to look at doesn't mean you're telling them what to see. There's just a huge difference. I do think, though, I'm very interested in the fact that in this world, in this crazy world, what you see is never what you get. People are not this (motions to appearance) only. These outside systems of existing here are fronts for very, very strange shit that's in the juicy core. All that weird, juicy, unexpected stuff forces you to question the outer system. That's what I'm interested in. It can be anything. It can be clothing, religion…
SV: I'm really into dreams, like a Jungian approach to dreams. I'm really into filmmakers that operate in dream logic like David Lynch and Jodorowsky. You can explain your dream to somebody and they might, depending on what kind of philosopher they are, say, "This means that about you," or, "You're repressing this and it's in your subconscious." But you don't have to explain it. It's legit because it happened. You dreamed it. It existed. It's not necessarily your place to examine it. Sometimes when I hear people's interpretations of [A Girl Walks Home], it's like, "I get it now," but it was intuitive. It's not like Lily was like, "This means this and this is symbolic." Jodorowsky says that if you have the impulse to do something, that justifies doing that thing. The impulse is the justification. You don't have to explain it in a bunch of words.
APA: Like murder.
(Everyone laughs.)
It seems like a vampire setting is a good place to explore your interest in what's under the external veneer. Vampire rules are rigid, but this character isn't a blood-sucking machine. She has agency.
APA: I think vampires are very bipolar. You can either go this existential, romantic, historian route like I did and Jarmusch and Anne Rice. If you are living through watching the dance of history and existence, what happens? Ultimately, it's super emo. The bloodsucking, killing violent side is the other side. Nosferatu is the first monster, but he's kind of lonely. 30 Days of Night. Blade. With vampires, it could go either way.
SV: There are strict rules, but because it's mythology, whatever you make just adds to the lore. When we were making this, I thought that was really cool. It was like, "If this gets out there, we're going to inform the mythology." In Let the Right One In, you never see her fangs. You can take some liberties, I think. It was cool to think about it that way: there is a certain box, but within it, you can push and play.
It's surprising for a vampire movie released in 2014 to do something different with it. It felt like we were at the point of saturation five years ago.
APA: No way, man. This shit is O.G. This is Dracula, Nosferatu, Coppola, Bigelow, Lost Boys, Spike Lee did it…It's like the juiciest, juiciest kind of character. What is like a vampire? You've got eternity and not dying. That by itself is just fucking crazy. And then you've got the fact that it's a killer. It has to kill. So then you negotiate that: Who do you kill and when and where and how does it go down. And then there's like what is the meaning of watching all human history. Vampires look at people and it's like watching an ant farm, observing this weird order.
SV: You described it once to me that it's like being in a room where everyone else is on the drugs but you. Everyone has taken ecstasy, and you feel alien, wondering, "What is this trip these people are on?"
APA: On top of that, they're lonely. For me, [this movie] is about loneliness. I'm very much into [being] lonely. It's not a sad, losery thing. It's like an arty, romantic thing. I love my loneliness. I feel like solitude is one of the places where you can really find yourself. It's also why I find a psychedelic experience on LSD so valuable. It brings you into yourself in a really present way. In the best case scenario, filmmaking can be like that, where you're really here with yourself. Vampires are the loneliest. It's, like, so romantic.
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is now playing in select cities.
Seventeen-year-old Ricardo Javid Lugo, who authorities say posed as a 12-year-old to enroll at Hurst Hills Elementary School as a sixth grader, was arrested for possession of child pornography. Police believe Lugo recruited victims at school for himself and a 28-year-old man with whom he lived.
Local news outlet WFAA reports that Randy Ray Wesson—who was also arrested—posed as Lugo's father, using a forged birth certificate and immunization records to gain admittance to the Hurst, Tx., grade school in August. According to the New York Daily News,the teen attended school for three months before the pair was caught.
Police received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children before searching Wesson's home, where they found the alleged porn. According to the arrest report, Wesson told police he had 42,000 child porn images "on his computer, thumb drives, phone, and SD card," and admitted to sexually abusing "over 100 children between the ages of 14-17," identifying 12 of his alleged victims by name.
Lugo, a U.S. citizen, had reportedly been living in Mexico when he first made contact with Wesson, who used social media to convince the teen to come to Texas and live with him in March, the Daily News writes. According to the arrest report, a video of Lugo spanking a boy seen in other photos taken at school was found on his phone, and in one text, he asked Wesson "Horny?" after describing a possible victim:
A logical search of Ricardo Lugo's cell phone, which was on his person at the time of CPS contact and included in the search warrant, was conducted by Hurst Detective Par McGrail. The phone contained photographs of children at school, dated August 25 thru August 26, 2014. A video dated August 31, 2014, shows Ricardo Lugo spanking a child. The child is in a previous photograph taken at school.
Messages on the phone between Randy Wesson and Ricardo Lugo indicate that Ricardo Lugo is recruiting possible victims from school for himself and Randy. Ricardo tells Randy about seeing one of the kid's penis. He also talks about telling other kids not to tell and having to follow them home to see where they live. Ricardo tells Randy on September 12, 2014 that a kid told him he has always wanted someone to touch him and invited him over. Ricardo tells Randy "he said we could do it if I promise not to tell, and I said the same thing. Ricardo replied to randy "horny?".
The arrest report also states that police found emails sent by Wesson with text like "I want to be your daddy. I want to change your diaper," and that when they interviewed Wesson's father, he said that the boy living with his son—Lugo—was a 12-year-old who "wears diapers." Wesson's father told police he had previously caught his son watching child porn, and according to the arrest report, Wesson had been previously investigated for "inappropriate touching of a 4-year-old male," but charges were never filed.
A statement from the local school board said that "Hurst Hills staff followed all procedures regarding enrollment when the student was enrolled in August," and that their was "no indication" that Lugo's documents were faked or his behavior was cause for concern.
According to CBS's Dallas/Fort Worth outlet, police said they haven't found any victims that attended school with Lugo. Considering the content of the arrest report, it's probably only a matter of time before they do.
The third movie in the Hunger Games series is supposed to be the one where the frame pulls back and reveals a bigger world than the teen arena of the first two. Instead, Mockingjay Part 1 does something more daring: it shows how all of the dystopian land of Panem is just the Arena writ large. Minor spoilers ahead...
(And by minor spoilers, I mean that the movie's trailer will probably be a better source of plot information than this review.)
Mockingjay Part 1 adapts the first half of the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy, which takes place in a dystopian future America where kids are forced to take part in huge gladitorial games. In the book, without giving too much away, Katniss is finally free of the Games, but her fame has turned her into a valuable propaganda tool. She gets drawn into a web of politics, and has to step up and embrace her role as the Mockingjay at last. And things get very, very ugly.
Because this film is just the first half, it's mostly the part where Katniss is grappling with her role and who she wants to be. And a hefty dose of the "things get ugly" part.
Some people consider Mockingjay the weakest of the three novels. Others love its daring and its willingness to throw most of what people loved in the first two books out the window. Plus the way it ties off the themes of the series. It's sort of the Dark Knight Rises of Hunger Games novels.
But the surprising thing about Mockingjay Part 1, as a film, is how clear an arc it draws for Katniss, in particular, in just this one film. But also, how it goes out of its way to show that the Arena where Katniss fought and killed wasn't just a sideshow or a bloody piece of pageantry put on by the Capitol — it was the heart of this whole bloody mess, and the main form of cultural interchange between the rulers and the ruled. The Hunger Games was the only time the Capitol and the Districts really communicated. And thus, it turns out that everything else in Panem is best viewed through the lens of the Games.
In fact, the first half of Mockingjay on film does a better job at the task that the novel seemed to struggle with — making this radically different chapter feel of a piece with the earlier parts. There are unexpected references back to the Games as a defining cultural symbol for everybody, not just the Tributes. Politics in Panem, in general, turn out to be a reflection of these bizarre annual deathmatches.
Just like when she was competing in the Arena, Katniss has allies, but they're not entirely trustworthy. Even when the Districts aren't sending their children to be killed by the Capitol, they're sending Tributes of another kind, in the form of raw materials, something we see a lot of this time. The impossible choices, between survival and defiance, keep coming. The farther Katniss gets away from the Arena, the more everything looks like the Arena.
Director Francis Lawrence plays this up, alternating between two very different styles of camerawork — a static frame that intercuts between people's faces and their POVs on one hand, and a handheld "wartime footage" look on the other. The contrast between these two wildly different styles of film-making drives the movie and gives it energy, and recalls the inside the Arena/outside the Arena contrast in the first two movies.
This isn't just the most explicitly political of the Hunger Games movies — it's also the one that makes the political framework behind these bizarre teen death matches seem more sturdy and less like a painted backdrop. There's a lot of hard work that goes into making Panem feel like a plausible nation this time around, and it retroactively strengthens the scaffolding of the first two movies.
Most of all, we're reminded that this is a post-apocalyptic world, where the population may have dipped below replacement numbers, and the human race may not survive unless everybody sticks together. (At times, the most political scenes in this film remind me of Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer — except that the train is a long straight line, while Panem is shaped like a wheel, with the Capitol as the hub, which changes the shape of the film.)
Katniss Everdeen is one of the most fascinating heroes of our time
Jennifer Lawrence pretty much carries this movie, even more than the first two. She takes a character who has a lot of internal monologue in the books, which you would think would be impossible to convey on screen, and manages to create something even more layered and complicated.
From the first scene, which puts you up close with a Katniss who's basically a trainwreck, Mockingjay Part 1 builds an arc for Katniss that shows her coming to terms with her power without ever becoming bulletproof. Jennifer Lawrence's performance is full of vulnerability and barely-suppressed trauma, as well as huge bravery. And we see her calculating and figuring the angles, in a way that the impulsive bow-slinger never did in the first movie.
Just like this movie keeps everything connected to the Games as it pulls back the frame and gets bigger, it also keeps everything deeply personal. Katniss' game is still all about protecting a handful of people in her life, including her family and the two points of her love triangle, Gale and Peeta. And the cat, Buttercup, who gets a lot of this movie's best moments.
Instead of a fish-out-of-water storyline in the Capitol and the Arena, this movie places Katniss in a weird industrial/institutional setting, full of concrete walls — broken up only by the occasional visit to some rubble and the scene of some recent carnage.
The endless tight closeups on Katniss' face, as she wrestles with her emotions, keep the movie emotionally anchored in her — but meanwhile, the film is preoccupied with Katniss as symbol. A lot of the most complicated sequences in this film involve juxtaposition, with the audio track of Katniss talking or singing while people are fighting or struggling. Katniss' singing-as-earworm becomes one of her main superpowers in this film, and there's one bravura sequence that's basically an extended musical segue.
The focus on Katniss as damaged hero, and as idealized symbol, mostly works incredibly well and forms a compelling arc for this movie. Except for one or two moments that are not in the book, and which seem so ill-conceived that they threaten to undermine everything else that happens. One moment, in particular, seems to be created due to the need to add some extra drama to what is essentially the first half of a finale, but it feels like a mistake.
But in general, Mockingjay Part 1 stands on its own, better than I'd expected, and it confirms what the first two movies already told us: that this series has taken what could have been a teen-exploitation premise and turned it into one of the most potent, and complicated, political narratives of our time.
The hilarious late '80s aerobics boom has really made a comeback this year: First with a Taylor Swift remix, and now this sketch from Key & Peele. But behind the peppy music—K&P used the actual soundtrack from the '88 Crystal Light Championships—lurks some seriously dark shit.
Key & Peele has always had a grim side—the guys were kidnapped and tortured in season 3—but they've dialed up the dark comedy this season with bits like the evil Make-a-Wish kid and a murderous, telepathic Steve Urkel.
Jordan Peele's deranged psycho persona, which tends to pops out of his most innocent-seeming characters, is what ties all these sketches together. No matter how many times you see him pull his demon-possession act, it's still chilling. And hilarious.
"Aerobics Meltdown" might be the best example yet.
Last night's mildly explosive Scandal mid-season finale steals a page from the Joker's playbook and sees Olivia Pope properly scolded by her father for trying to shoot him in the face over the dinner table. Which, fair enough.
Shonda Rhimes has been very vocal about her dislike of the term "guilty pleasure," which is admittedly a rather condescending label—one people use to pat themselves on the back for being able to find entertainment in something that isn't worthy of attention. As a man whose DVR looks like a 14-year-old girl's, I very much agree with her. So instead of guilty pleasure, I'll settle for "a ridiculous fucking show." Scandal is a ridiculous fucking show, you guys.
Without any central conspiracy or electoral race to drive the plot this year, most of this season has been a balancing act between genuine character growth and the signature ridiculousness we have learned to expect from the show. And if the focus of the season so far has been 'Family', Olivia shooting a blank bullet into her father's face was the turkey hurled across the Thanksgiving dinner table. Washington and Morton's chemistry is one of the best things about Scandal and even with a full dance-card of presidents and war heroes, her relationship with her father has been the most interesting one this season.
However much she may loathe her father, Olivia has always lived under the safety blanket of being his little girl and generally immune from his wrath. His possessive love for her has withstood everything from weaponized meningitis to two of her boyfriends trying to kill him. No more; with this episode Olivia has officially been cast out into the cold. (Where she lasted roughly two hours before getting kidnapped by a third party.)
We also catch up with Mama Pope who, as it turns out, was exactly where we left her. To tell you the truth, I was never too impressed with Mama Pope. Sure, we first met her gnawing out her own wrists but what has she done for me lately? To me, she remains the lesser Pope parent.
Meanwhile, Cyrus' sex scandal has finally hit the fan. This year has been oddly kind to Cyrus who, lest we forget, was willing to let a church filled with innocent people explode to win the elections last year. With his manwhoring activities exposed, Cyrus is left no choice but to walk down the aisle with his roguish prostitute/business school student, costing him $1,000,000 per successful year of marriage in the process. Pretty Woman was name-checked in this episode but considering the as-of-now unaddressed assault from last episode, I'm really hoping for a War of the Roses situation come January.
Speaking of romance, Quinn and Charlie appear to have rekindled their sex-violence-magic relationship, which is fine by me. There are few couples on television that can seamlessly go from breaking each other's joints to banging to discussing Granny Fran's health.
On the other hand, Rhimes' penchant for having characters dance out their inner turmoil (a cornerstone of Grey's Meredith & Christina friendship) looks a bit odd on Olivia Pope, who is far more at home calling the White House Chief of Staff a "bitchbaby" for not wanting to enter a sham marriage. Watching her dance it out to Stevie Wonder's greatest hit is sort of like having Tony Soprano engaging in Manolo Blahniks retail therapy. It's not that Olivia's choice to focus on herself as opposed to quivering about her two boys isn't a welcomed one. It's just, well, kind of nonsensical. Olivia admits that she wants both Fitz and Jake, "Vermont" and "standing in the sun," but in choosing herself and letting whichever dance partner is available fill her dance card, no real choice has been made.
Look, in my days, romantic leads picked between their two suitors; that's just how I was raised. Derek chose Meredith over Addison, Blair chose Chuck over Dan, and Joey chose Pacey over Dawson, leaving the latter to cry like the original #bitchbaby he was. Frankly, it's just polite.
In any case, Scandal 2015 is set to began with high stakes with the next Big Bad revealed as being the Vice President himself, and Olivia Pope kidnapped in an attempt to force POTUS' hand. With Papa Pope no longer giving a fuck and Mama Pope sitting in a cell waiting for a monologue partner, it looks like the second half of season 4 is taking a shift for the maternal.
Thanksgiving: What is it? A holiday to celebrate the vaguest things we treasure, eat until we explode, and drink until we ditto. Whether you need a moment away, or enjoy your family so much you want to sit in front of a screen silently with them, here is a deluxe list of movies, TV shows, and zany moments available right now on your computer or other device.
Bob Newhart gets a lot drunk and only a little racist in 1975's "Over the River and Through the Woods." (Here)
WKRP in Cincinnati's 1978 classic "Turkeys Away"(Hulu) is a spiritual ancestor to Modern Family's "Punkin Chunkin," 2011: In both episodes, iconic holiday items are hurled.
Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973 and every year since then) is about what family really means, which is making room for all of Peppermint Patty's imaginary food allergies. Van Pelt pulls that shit with the football, also.
In The Ice Storm (1997), directed by Ang Lee and based on 1994 novel by Rick Moody, Tobey Maguire goes up a mountain to herd cattle and look for Katie Holmes, but doesn't come down again until he is quite gay. (Netflix and Prime)
Rocky (1976, Netflix) and Rocky II (1979) were both written by star Sylvester Stallone. A thankful man, who eats raw eggs for energy. (Raw eggs are not suggested for use in traditional Thanksgiving stuffing.)
Cheers: in 1986's "Thanksgiving Orphans," Carla invites everyone to the trashcan where she lives. Starring George Wendt's real-life wife as a mashed potato-covered Vera. (Netflix and Hulu)
History does not record if any episodes of Friends are set any other day besides the third Thursday in November, but if it's a Thanksgiving episode you're looking for, they'll "be there for you!" "Underdog Gets Away," the Gang finds "Chandler in a Box," remembers when "Ross Got High," learns "Chandler Doesn't Like Dogs," and Rachel's "Other Sister" pays a visit. There are also Ones with a "List," a "Football," a "Rumor," a "Late Thanksgiving," and one where Joey and Monica put turkeys on their heads! (They are cut-ups.)
Grumpy Old Men (1993), in which Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau stress everybody out!
West Wing is known for its Thanksgiving episodes "Shibboleth" and "The Indians in the Lobby" (Netflix). In the former, the POTUS pardons an attractive turkey, then gives a rousing speech about shibboleths. In the latter, he calls the Butterball Hotline.
POCAHANTAS
Plymouth Adventure (1952) stars Gene Tierney, Van Johnson, and Spencer Tracy as Pocahantas.
In Malick's The New World (2005), Colin Farrell plays John Smith to native princess Pocahontas.
In Disney musical Pocahantas (1995, Netflix)—only a decade earlier—trees can talk, the moon is corn, and wind is paint. We learned a lot about the world in those ten years, but not as much as we have since then:
In reality, Pocahantas was sold into sex slavery at 17 and died at 21, at which point her nemesis Smith invented a biography for her out of whole cloth.
Paul Blart Mall Cop (2009) is about justice as personified by a man whose name rhymes with "small fart."
National Lampoon's Thanksgiving Family Reunion (2003) is a TV movie based on the popular film franchise, which lampoons reunions and other vacation opportunities.
The Myth of Fingerprints (1997) stars The Librarian's Noah Wyle, who once received an automobile from George Clooney for his birthday!
B.C.: TheFirstThanksgiving (1973) is a fictional account of cavemen giving thanks. Historically, thanks were not invented until well after the birth, ministry and death of Christ.
Everybody Loves Raymond, "No Fat" (Hulu and Prime): In this 1998 episode, Marie forces everyone to eat tofurkey. Is the holiday ruined? No! Patricia Heaton was pregnant and therefore Debra was barely in the episode, sucking the life out of everybody with her constant bullshit.
Jack & Jill (2011) stars Thanksgiving, Adam Sandler and Adam Sandler.
The Other Sister (1999), a documentary about the friendship between actors Juliette Lewis and Giovanni Ribisi.
MAKES YOU THINK
The story of the first Thanksgiving is retold by eye-witness Don Draper wearing a pilgrim hat in Mad Men's "The Wheel" (2007), debunked by a radicalized Peggy in "Public Relations" (2010), and subverted in the infamous Manson Murder episode "Dark Shadows" (2012). (Netflix)
On Designing Women, racial profiling casts a pall over Thanksgiving during "Perky's Visit" (1986), when it's rumored that Anthony has murdered a client. Luckily, the demented Bernice Clifton is in the house—and wacky as ever! Now there's something to be grateful for.
The Blind Side scene where Blindside nobly reminds a bunch of white people what Thanksgiving is, by eating quietly by himself until they all stop watching TV, staring at their phones, working on their fantasy football leagues, and bedazzling their vaginas. Very good movie about what really matters.
In 1982's first-season Family Ties episode, "No Nukes Is Good Nukes" (Netflix), Alex P. Keaton must choose between his progressive, activist parents and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
"Last Call for Aunt Julie" (1996), "Thanksgiving/Gratitude" (2004), "Turkey" (2005), "Thanks and Giving" (2006) are all Thanksgiving-themed 7th Heaven episodes that you will never see on your TV set. Of these, "Last Call for Aunt Julie" is the most shocking, but "Thanks and Giving" the most grateful, and generous.
Of all the excellent Roseanne holidays, one of the best came late in the show's run, after its watershed lottery twist: "Home Is Where the Afghan Is" (1996, streaming at Logo TV), in which Roseanne's mother, Sea Hag, flips the fuck out about a gay adoption and then comes out of the closet her own self. This is later retconned when it reveals that Roseanne had gone insane sometime prior, and used the story element of her mother's latent homosexuality as a way of coping with her sister's very real, and in hindsight blatant, lesbianism.
In The Brady Bunch's 1970 episode "The Un-Underground Movie," Greg directs a film about the Pilgrims that is quickly overtaken by his blended brood, just like in post-Thanksgiving America. (Hulu)
In Bewitched's classic 1967 episode "Samantha's Thanksgiving to Remember," Samantha transports her family to the time of the Pilgrims and Darren is put on trial as a witch even though, like most accused witches, he is not one.
On Boy Meets World's holiday celebration "Turkey Day" boy meets class warfare, as champagne liberal Corey and blue-collar Shawn try to share their first Thanksgiving together as a couple after winning oodles of stuffing in a stuffing contest.
WILD CARD
Spider-Man (2002), in which Tobey Maguire goes on a journey of discovery with his changing body, "giving thanks" all over his walls, ceiling, and bedclothes.
Dutch (1991, Netflix), in which Ed O'Neill Over the Tops his girlfriend's preppy son (Ethan Embry!) home from boarding school.
Son-In-Law (1993), in which farm girl Carla Gugino gets her big-city buddy Pauly Shore to pretend to be her fiancé, and then everybody in her whole dumb family falls in love with him, because of his innate charm of course.
The Facts of LifeReunion (2001), in which lesbian couple Blair and Jo are jailed for "hot-saucing" their foster children, and the rest of the characters from the 1979-88 situation comedy of the same name band together to free them.
The "It," in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986), is pie. No pie, no Thanksgiving. Just kidding, it's sexual independence.
Frasier's Thanksgiving episodes are typically marred by bizarrely hateful and retrograde anti-Lilith rhetoric and propaganda, not unlike a malignant version of the show's anti-Maris complaints, and will no longer be considered canon. Therefore, Frasier has no Thanksgiving episodes. (Netflix and Hulu)
In The Cosby Show's sixth-season Thanksgiving episode, Cliff Huxtable (played by Bill Cosby, played by Bill Cosby) repeatedly braves the elements for Thanksgiving groceries. That episode's title is: "Cliff's Wet Adventure." You will never, ever see "Cliff's Wet Adventure" on TV again, but "Cliff's Wet Adventure" is still on Hulu. For now.
Happy Days: "The First Thanksgiving" (1978, Hulu). In this horror tale, Marion Cunningham is jealous of the attention her family pays to football that she retreats into a fantasy realm of her own imagining, animating the story of the first Thanksgiving with the rest of the family acting merely as her brutal flesh puppets.
In Doogie Howser, MD's 1992 episode, "The Big Sleep... Not!" (Hulu), Doogs meets a woman who's feigning illness to get away from her family for the holiday. Nice parenting... Not!
In 1996's "Kiss My Bum," a heterosexual Ellen accidentally invites a homeless person to Thanksgiving, thinking he is a regular person.
Hope & Faith: "Blood Is Thicker Than Daughter" (2003)
DOMESTICITY
For a woman like Lorelei Gilmore, who views every family dinner as a brutal murder and to whom the concept of gratitude is as repellent as decaf, a holiday called "Thanksgiving" would feel more like Halloween. Nevertheless, the Gilmore Girls spent at least two Thanksgivings—"A Deep-Fried Korean Thanksgiving," "He's Slippin 'Em Bread... Dig?"—just talking and eating, talking and eating, talking and eating.
Pieces of April (2003), in which Katie Holmes makes dinner for her nasty estranged family in her nasty New York apartment.
The fourth-season Friday Night Lights finale (Netflix) is bittersweet genius: Buddy Garrity's deep-fried turkey, Tami Taylor jumping ship to East Dillon after a hypocritical abortion brouhaha, Julie snarking right to Matt Saracen's face about "deflowering" her, and of course, Riggins taking the fall for his hot-as-hell ne'er-do-well of a brother.
One Special Night (1999) stars James Garner and Julie Andrews, and is described on Amazon as "A sweet story about 2 very different people who find themselves stranded in a cabin over Thanksgiving." (Amazing tribute video on Youtube)
This is also the plot of the 1990 film Misery, starring Kathy Bates, although the latter film is not associated with any particular holiday.
Martha Stewart's Thanksgiving Celebration (an eight-episode Hulu collection) asks, but does not deign to answer, what the Native Americans of the Plymouth Rock vicinity would have called a "corn" maze.
The Object of My Affection (1998). Almost a true story, but for Providence: Jennifer Aniston plays a girl who dies of thirst.
BEST OF THE BEST
5. Funny People (2009), co-written and directed by Judd Apatow, is easily the longest movie you will ever see in your life, but very worth it.
4. One of Adventure Time's all-time greatest episodes, 2011's "Thank You," tells the story of a snow golem, a fire wolf puppy, some sandwiches, and a graceful smooch.
3. Addams Family Values (1993, Netflix and Prime) is the third-best Thanksgiving movie even though it's about summertime, which is just one of the many mysteries of that movie.
2.Home for the Holidays with Robert Downey Jr., Dylan McDermott, Anne Bancroft, Claire Danes kind of, and starring the genius Holly Hunter—the best Thanksgiving movie ever made, in my opinion. Directed by Jodie Foster, before she went crazy.
1.The House of Yes (1997, Netflix) is the best Thanksgiving film of all time, directed by Mark Mean Girls Waters, and starring Parker Posey, Tori Spelling, and a young Freddie Prinze, Jr. A loving young couple is reunited just in time for Thanksgiving, if Tori Spelling doesn't fuck everything up with her bourgeois mentality.
So there you have it. More than enough television and movies to get you through the next weekend of love, togetherness and carbs. And if you start feeling low, please watch this amazing video of Monica Gellar dancing with a turkey on her head. It contains all the Thanksgiving magic you will ever need.
Right now, in a place you've never visited, a person you'll never know is dying. If he's dying in a particularly devastating way—and, more importantly, if he is leaving behind shareable content—it is possible that millions of strangers will mourn his or her death tomorrow. Why?
Last week, there is a good chance that Facebook served up to you a Buzzfeed post entitled "A Father Sings To His Dying Newborn Son After His Wife Dies Following Childbirth." Below the site's iconic yellow buttons—"LOL," "win," "omg," "cute"—sits, indeed,
a video of a father singing to his dying newborn son after his wife died following childbirth. As the incubator hums and clicks, you can, if you want, watch a man in anguish sing for the end of his small family. In a tab next to Gmail, you can watch his helpless son die.
"The video has spread across the world," BuzzFeed boasts. According to Buzzfeed and YouTube's public statistics, the post has been viewed over three million times; the video, over 14 million.
As you could imagine, Facebook played a large part in the story's proliferation. BuzzFeed's post remained pinned to the top of the blog's
Facebook page until Tuesday and, from there, was shared over 46 thousand times. For days after the video was posted and picked up on other sites, the story sat at the top of Facebook's "Trending" column, which appears on the right hand side of your Facebook page:
Facebook users shared Buzzfeed's post with captions like: "Speechless and sobbing"; "Omg so sad !"; "No matter what happens in your life,stuff like this brings it into perspective...Poor Guy....Heartbreaking." It bred a large community of people grieving in public over a single stranger's intense, seemingly private loss.
This most recent post is just one example in an Internet full of oddly hectoring tributes to fallen strangers.Gawker, true as always to our name, isn't exempt from cashing in on this desire. A quick look at our "tragedy" tag offers abundant examples of grief-for-grief's sake. Others push the category even further: A recent The Daily What post called (deep breath now) "Tragic Loss of the Day: 13 Year Old Anna Died in a Traffic Accident Two Weeks Ago. Share in Her Memory by Listening to Her Playing a Beautiful Rendition of Downton Abbey's Theme Song" embedded a now-popular video of a young girl who was killed while riding her bicycle. An UpWorthy post formerly titled "This Kid Just Died. What He Left Behind Is Wondtacular" (later given an SSRI and retitled "This Amazing Kid Got To Enjoy 19 Awesome Years On This Planet. What He Left Behind Is Wondtacular.") announces the death of a young man whose music career was aided by the help of a feeling Internet. It is an update on an older post: "This Kid Is Going To Die. He Is Also Going To Rock. And He Needs Your Help."
Grief porn is as old a tabloid category as sex scandal. Like regular pornography, it offers an packaged, heightened jolt that mimics a natural, human experience. It's voyeuristic, addictive, and compulsively attractive. It grabs at a desire to indulge when indulgence is otherwise unavailable. It promises a brief, satisfying release.
And, like regular pornography, the internet has transformed it. Freed from the already relaxed constraints of tabloid journalism, grief porn is no longer obligated to fake newsworthiness or importance. You don't need to die in a particularly tragic way; your death doesn't need to be the occasion for punishment or law-enactment. You just need to have produced consumable, shareable content before your untimely death. Rather than a news angle allowing a writer to smuggle grief porn into a paper, a grief-porn angle allows a content creator to smuggle a shareable unit onto Facebook.
There is an essential and almost appealing honesty to this (another way it resembles regular old sex porn): Look at This Video and Feel Sad and Then Tell Your Friends! And because in grief porn, unlike in porn porn, we imagine our indulgence in as noble rather than indecent, we feel comfortable—if not obligated—to share it with our friends.
This is by design, of course. On a crowded social internet that places a premium on generating outsized emotion and intense reaction, these stories are as close as a content producer can get to a guaranteed hit. Each social grief-porn story is surrounded by the jarring visual and verbal vocabulary of the social web: "TRENDING," "POPULAR," "SHARE," "LIKE," small upward-pointing arrows, tiny blue thumbs-up signs. We've already been trained, anyway, to present our best selves—the person we want others to believe that we are—on social media. The reaction to tragedy is not longer (just) a privately murmuredbetter them than me but (also) a public performance: I am a feeling human!
It's hard to criticize people for honestly feeling an emotion, or publicly expressing those honest feelings. Even grief porn's most active consumers would agree that the grief one feels for a newborn whose life has only been introduced to you in the context of its impending death is different from the grief felt in confronting the loss of people who made up a part of your life.
Where Facebook and the content providers that orbit it have succeed is in gamifying and monetizing that honest reaction, frictionlessly converting the near-giddy emotional rush received from a awful story into a compulsion: "You have to read how sad this is." We dress it up with sad emojis and condolences, we talk about crying, and sometimes do cry, but it's entertainment—an episode of Parenthood, but with real people. It's something to see, extract a rush of feeling from, and forget. I mean, let's say it: We get off on it.
Maybe there is something noble to it. Sharing "A Father Sings To His Dying Newborn Son After His Wife Dies Following Childbirth" on social media could do good: A fund to pay for the "Blackbird" family's expenses has raised nearly $200,000. Similarly, the young musician who Just Died had a song reach number one on iTunes before his death. ("Blackbird," too, made a grim appearance at the top of iTunes' rock chart, so bully for UMG chairman Lucian Grainge, or whoever it is that owns Beatles recordings now.) Millions of people have watched the young girl's cover of the Downton Abby theme song, which is, I suppose, nice for her, and pretty good for Downton Abbey.
Because we live in such an odd time, we can even watch the "Blackbird" singer address his newfound Internet fame at the memorial for his wife and son. Even in his grief, and in confronting the strangeness of being at the center of a viral tragedy, he is warm and charming:
"I've had an outpouring of love and support, most of them involve the words 'I know words aren't enough, but.' And now I know how that feels, because when I say 'thank you' to all of you, that's not enough. I could never articulate how much your support and your strength and your prayers and your emails and your Facebook messages and your text messages—I don't know how any of you got my number, but there's been a lot of me just, 'Uh, okay, thank you, um.' I didn't bother going into the whole, 'I don't know who you are, but thank you.' I just—it has meant so much to me, and so when I say 'thank you' I know exactly what you mean."
"Doesn't that make it worth it?" you might wonder. "Isn't it worth the possibly misguided intent and the showiness of our Facebook crocodile shares if it relieves even the slightest amount of sadness for those at the center of these tragedies?" As with most questions about the effects of social media the only real answer is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I certainly don't think that we always know it does. I can't imagine many in a state of overwhelming pain would feel as gracious about Internet strangers texting to express their sympathies for lost loved ones they have never met.
There isn't much of a chance the victim is going to see our sympathies anyway. Unless we somehow procure his or her cellphone number, which apparently some do, we're expressing grief and pain for the benefit of our friends and families, not for the victims of a tragedy.
Or, really, we're expressing it for ourselves—to show the world our sensitivity and our humanity. We immerse ourselves in ectype pain and then treat normal human responses to these enforced emotional tests as badges of honor. We've convinced ourselves that these adventures into the darkest moments of others lives' are a way to honor them, and to honor humanity in general. We put our compassion on display in a Facebook post. We turn grief into a shibboleth for humanity. We stare at someone else's death and then tell others to do the same. It's porn we can share, because demonstrates our compassion. If only porn porn were so lucky.
Bill Cosby's never ending horror story continues: Two more women have shared their accounts of allegedly being raped by the comedian, one as an underage girl in Pittsburgh, the other when she worked at a Los Angeles talent agency in the 1960s.http://gawker.com/former-actress...
Renita Chaney Hill
told CBS Pittsburgh that she was involved in a four-year, on-again, off-again relationship with Cosby after she was cast in his educational program Picture Pages at age 15 in the 1980s. She recounts, in what has now become an all-too-familiar motif, accepting an invitation to see Cosby, being offered a drink, and then not remembering what happens next:
"He would fly me to a number of cities," including New York and Atlanta she remembers. "He would be busy during the day, then I'd come to his hotel room at night," she said.
Hill says when she was alone with Cosby the scenario was always the same. Cosby would insist she have a drink even though she was underage. She says she now believes she was drugged.
"One time, I remember just before I passed out, I remember him kissing and touching me and I remember the taste of his cigar on his breath, and I didn't like it," Hill said. "I remember another time when I woke up in my bed the next day and he was leaving, he mentioned you should probably lose a little weight. I thought that odd, how would he know that?"
Hill says after a while she began to put two and two together.
"I always thought it was odd that after I had this drink I would end up in my bed the next morning and I wouldn't remember anything," Hill said.
She says she doesn't know if she was raped because she was unconscious.
"It just felt weird to me, and I remember being in high school saying to him, 'I'll come see you, but I don't want to drink because it makes me feel funny,'" Hill told CBS Pittsburgh. "And he would tell me that if I didn't drink, I couldn't come see him."
Cosby apparently went on to pay Hill's college tuition, but at 19, she decided to end the relationship.
"No one wants to be associated with something like this," Hill said. "But the bottom line for me is that no one has the right to violate someone else, no matter who they are. I don't care how big they are or how the community sees them, it's not right."
Kristina Ruehli was among the Jane Does named in Andrea Constand's lawsuit against Cosby from last decade; her accusation of abuse dates back to 1965, when she worked at Artists Agency Corp, a talent agency in Los Angeles. After meeting Cosby in the agency's office, he apparently invited the staff to a party at his home after he taped an episode of Hollywood Palace. From her interview with Philadelphia magazine:
What happened when you got to the house?
When I arrived at his house — it was probably around 10 p.m. — I was surprised that there was no one else there. He was very well liked at the agency, and so I expected others to be there. But no one else arrived.
But you went in.
Yes, I remember the front of the house was brick and it had a slight Tudor design. It was in Brentwood or Bel Air — they all start with a "B."
He said that his wife was out of town, but he brought me in and into one bedroom where there was an infant child in the crib. He actually showed me, a very young baby. The child was fast asleep. He seemed so proud of it. He wanted to show me his little baby. I don't know where the nanny or maid was, but someone had to be there, because he had come from Hollywood Palace.
We went out into the kitchen. He proceeded to pour some bourbon. I drank a bourbon-and-7 at the time. I could really hold my liquor. I'm Irish. And I had a couple of those — just two — and then I just don't remember much.
"So, I ended up by the pool, and, well, I was in quite a foggy state. I have vague memories of someone walking next to me at the pool, and the next day, I realized that the bottoms of my nylons were completely tore up. Not just a run, but tore up. So I must have been walking around the pool for quite a while," Ruehli told Philadelphia.
And like many of the women who have come forward with stories of Cosby assaulting them, Ruehli believes she too was given a spiked drink.
"He must have drugged me. There is just one point at which I was having a drink and feeling normal and the next I was somehow passed out completely," Ruehli told Philadelphia. "He must have slipped something into my drink. It's the only way to go lights-out like that."
When did you wake up?
It was all foggy, and I woke up in the bed. I found myself on the bed, and he had his shirt off. He had unzipped his pants. I was just coming to.
He was attempting to force me into oral sex. He had his hand on my head. He had his cock out, and he had my head pushed close enough to it — I just remember looking at his stomach hair. And the hair on his chest. I had never seen a black man naked before.
And it never went past that. I immediately came to and was immediately very sick. I pushed myself away and ran to the bathroom and threw up. I was feeling really ill. And I never got sick like that from alcohol, at least not that small of an amount.
Once I threw up — it was five in the morning by now, I think — I left the bathroom and he wasn't there. I don't know where he went. But I left right away. I was able to drive myself home. I didn't live that far away.
"Until I read about Andrea, I never really had a reason to tell anyone about it. But when I read about her, she's getting called a liar, and I don't like that, " Ruehli told the magazine. "So I am going to say these people are not the only ones. And now that more women are coming forward and people are calling them liars, I decided to come forward again."
Gibson is not just a great American guitar company; it is also a hard to place to work, run by a CEO notorious for micromanagement and general bad temper. Would you like a day off for the holidays? "NO."
Gibson's CEO is Henry Juszkiewicz (pictured, with Slash), who became something of a right-wing darling a few years back after he managed to insinuate that a federal raid on his company for illegally importing Indian hardwood was motivated by his own political beliefs, rather than, you know, his company's importation of Indian Hardwood. Over the years, rumors of Juszkiewicz's unpleasantness as a boss have occasionally come our way. The website Glassdoor, where workers can anonymously write reviews of their employers, is full of Gibson employees railing about the company's "poor ownership," micromanagement from the top, and gripes about senior management, and the CEO in particular. "They actually get a thrill from firing people, they actually want you to fail, I have never seen anything like it," goes one representative example. Says another: "all of this stems from the CEO and his manic psychotic neurotic management style (he has to sign off on EVERYTHING: new hires, transfers within the company, promotions, raises, budgets, any funding for new parts or machines."
Today, we were forwarded this email sent by Henry Juszkiewicz late last month, replying to an employee who had requested a day off around Thanksgiving. We're told that something like 20 people were CC'd on this email chain. Does Gibson really have a "manic psychotic" CEO? You decide.
Subject: RE: Personal Day-Thanksgiving Approval requested
NO
I do not allow leaders to be absent the days before and after a holiday. I had asked Tom to make it clear, but apparently people have not understood or the communication was not clear.
You cannot take long weekends or long holidays unless there are special circumstances. You are leaders and these are work days. During work our leaders need to be there doing their jobs. Taking time off when other people cannot do so or causing insufficient staff during working periods shows a lack of responsibility and consideration for all that depend on our business to be there for them.
Henceforth vacations must be taken for a minimum of one week and must be scheduled well in advance. I will expect a vacation calendar from my direct reports for an entire year.
I will turn down all requests for long weekends and for periods of less than 5 contiguous days without special circumstances.
I also do not believe it is appropriate for a request of this kind is to be shared with others. This suggests where you are coming from [employee name]. I also do not appreciate being lied to about being ill so you can game the system to get what you want [employee name]. As soon as I return from my travels, I will schedule a private conversation about this.
I have counted on the personal integrity of people working with me and have refrained from putting in place a rigorous oversight system. I have asked our HR department to oversee this activity on a spot basis which they have not followed through on. The result is I am seeing a continued decline in decorum, a deterioration in discipline in terms of appropriate attire, coming and going on time and other issues that do not belong in a professional situation with executives that are supposed to be examples of appropriate behavior.
It is not alright to leave early Friday afternoon or arrive late on Monday morning. It is not alright to take extended lunches. The list of unprofessional behavior goes on.
We will be implementing HR policies that were developed at Philips and we have appointed [person] as our global head of Human Resources. These new policies will be promulgated throughout our group of companies and these will be enforced strongly. I will take the time to review these new policies with the people that report to me directly.
I will schedule a private meeting with you [employee name].
Henry
Henry E. Juszkiewicz
CEO – Gibson Brands, Inc.
Happy Holidays :)
[Photo: Getty. Gibson employees, please feel free to forward similar emails to Hamilton@Gawker.com]
Joel and Julia. Sarah and Teacher and Ray Romano. Zeek and Impending Death. Kristina and Mild Consequences. This week on Parenthood.
With only a few episodes of Parenthood left in our lives, we are still spending an awful lot of time on Ray Romano's awful family. I haven't actually timed it, but if I were to estimate I'd say we spend roughly 45 minutes of each episode on drama surrounding Ray Romano's devil spawn, sacrificing precious time we could be spending with the devil spawns we care about, the Bravermans. This week: something about a play. Who cares.
This episode at least had a Braverman-related reason to spend time with Ray's family. Sarah ran into her ex, Mr. Teacher, while attending the young demon's rendition of Grease. Literally every time she saw him her eyes welled up with tears. Why? Were her contacts bothering her? Did she have a dream that he died and she's remembering her sad dream? Crying every time you make eye contact with your ex over the course of two days is not a normal reaction for an adult woman, EVEN if you mistakenly broke up with him to date impossible Ray Romano with his nightmare family.
Mark is married and having a baby, which makes Sarah cry (out of happiness, she claims). At the end of their brief conversation, Mark seems torn, as if he wishes he were still with Sarah. Later, when Ray Romano asks if Sarah is happy that she chose him over the smart and hot young teacher who had no baggage at all, she hesitates and later says yes. Hmm. I'm not convinced! But I suppose that's a Parenthood wrap on Mr. Teacher. Sometimes in life we make mistakes, I guess, and we have to live with them. Very depressing.
Speaking of very depressing, Zeek is putting an awful lot of pressure on Drew to lie to his grandmother and enable Zeek to act in ways that very well may kill him. Cool Grandpa! DON'T YOU KNOW DREW HAS TO STUDY ECONOMICS?! (Just kidding. Somehow Drew didn't mention Economics even once during this whole episode. Maybe he's already earned enough money to support his child I mean Amber's child?) Drew—who is very funny, by the way—I laughed out loud when he told Zeek that he had literally only given him "France" to go on, in search of a bed and breakfast where he once stayed—told on Grandpa, which led to Grandpa revealing his whole plan to Grandma. They decide to go to the bed and breakfast when Zeek is feeling better. Oh no.
That night, at the very end of the episode, Zeek has another heart something. Ohhhh no. He is not dead yet, because we see him on the preview for next week's episode, but he is not doing well! I imagine that, along with playing baseball over his ashes, the family will take some sort of trip to this bed and breakfast together after his death. Very depressing, again.
Next: Joel and Julia. I'm going to skip all the bullshit, because ugh, it has taken so long, but it seems they are finally—after a number of very sad cry faces from Joel—back together. They made out on the couch, at least. Finally. Can I tell the stupid lawyer boyfriend? I would love to tell him. Please let me tell him.
That brings us to Kristina. Oh, Kristina. Oh, buddy. It's "Parents Visit the School and Learn Things From Their Children" day or whatever, and for some insane reason Kristina has paired her adorable but off-the-rails son Max with Dylan, the object of his obsession. When Dylan objects to this dangerously incorrect pairing, Kristina tells her that she thinks it will be good for them. Hmm. Kristina, have you ever met your son Max? He's beautiful and I love him, but mostly he is insane and never lets anything go. Remove him from this poor girl before he murders her, please.
Kristina doesn't unpair the pairing and, on Parents' Night, or whatever, all of the parents catch Max attempting to force Dylan—who is screaming—to give him a hug. Oh no.
Blah, blah, blah, Kristina doesn't punish Max again, Dylan's parents threaten to take her out of the school, Kristina and Adam and Max stand in front of Dylan's parents and apologize. Dylan stays at school. Max is forgiven without suffering any consequences. Kristina is forgiven without suffering any consequences, I guess. (Though, what do the other parents think? Maybe they forgive her because she is so good at remembering their names.) Adam something.
Gawker believes that publicly airing rumors out is usually the quickest way to get to the truth. We also believe that Friday afternoons are a great time to share gossip with your friends. Here’s what we (and you) have heard lately.
Important note: We make every effort to track down and report out the rumors and gossip we hear, but for a variety of reasons we can’t always nail them the way we’d like. So let’s acknowledge that we can’t vouch for the veracity or truth of the rumors we’ll be sharing here—but maybe you can.
Rumor: A tipster tells us (via email) that Jonathan Franzen pulled a $5 million advance on his new novel, Purity. Thank you, tipster!
Rumor: Bill de Blasio is fucking a union rep. Via email:
Tipster: Heard an interesting rumor tonight. He is fucking a UFT rep.
Gawker: Which one?
Tipster: No idea. Just some woman and it has been for a while. Rumor is that is why there is still a guard post outside Park Slope (or at least was until he rented it out).
Gawker: Weird!
Rumor: Bill de Blasio is lying about his marijuana usage. A tipster writes in:
Apparently one of his concerns about moving to Gracie Mansion was the lack of privacy that house affords to engage in precisely this type of behavior. ... He may not be smoking at this very second, but the two different accounts I heard were from completely different circles, one in 2009 and one in 2013.
Rumor: Bradley Cooper used to troll for anonymous gay sex:
There is an old rumor that flew around CAA during my generation that Bradley Cooper answered an ad for anonymous sex and it happened to be this guy who was an assistant in the talent department. This was about ten years ago so I’m hazy on where it was placed. Anyway, the guy said that Bradley had a sheet up with a hole in it and had the assistant blew him through the sheet. — JugEndImpressionist
Rumor: Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow are annual fuck buddies:
Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow get a hotel room and still fuck, once a year. My apartment neighbor swears by this, because it is what his agent also swears by. — KittensAndUnicorns
Rumor: Tyra Banks has a very specific ritual for visiting the dentist:
Her assistant calls the office 20 minutes before her arrival and says, “Ms Banks will be arriving in 20 minutes. When she arrives, NO ONE makes eye contact. You do NOT speak to her unless necessary.” Tyra Banks walks in by herself, does not say anything, does not make eye contact. Only speaks to the dentist. — I should be studying
Rumor: Howard Kurtz and Lauren Ashurn—remember those two?—are no longer friends. A tipster writes in:
Howie Kurtz and Lauren Ashburn no longer follow each other on Twitter and are no longer friends on Facebook after she left Fox. Sadness.
Rumor: Anna Kendrick turned down Luke Russert. A tipster tells Gawker:
I heard Luke Russert once tried to get with Anna Kendrick and she turned him down.
Poor guy.
What gossip have you heard about politicians, athletes, businesses, celebrities? Leave the best in the comments, or drop us an email.
According to court documents obtained by E! News, actor and new father Ryan Gosling filed a temporary restraining order yesterday against a 34-year-old woman claiming to be his "twin soul." In the docs, Gosling says Grace Marie Del Villar has "harassed and stalked and sought to have personal contact with" his family.
According to court docs, Del Villar's repeated attempts to contact the Goslings culminated on Oct. 29, 2014, when she "traveled cross-country from New York to Los Angeles, tracked down and showed up uninvited late at night" at "a Gosling family-member residence and demanded entry and access to the Goslings."
According to Gosling, Del Villar has tried to contact himself, his sister, his mother, his girlfriend Eva Mendes, and his managers and directors.
In the court docs, Gosling claims Del Villar is "delusional" and "believes she knows the Gosling family, and that they know her, and that they are actually searching for her and have been for the past three-years." E! News notes these bizarre details:
In one disturbing message to Gosling's sister, his lawyers claim Del Villar said, "FYI…I am kicking your brother's ass and his head for his darkness..." According to the docs, she also sent "a church pamphlet with [her] hand-written notes on it" to his sister, a "page torn from a magazine which featured Eva Mendes" to his manager, and "oddly, a doll catalog" to a Gosling-family residence—each with her contact information attached.
Del Villar says Gosling is her "twin soul...literally the other half of our soul."
A judge will rule whether or not to extend the restraining order during a court hearing next month.
Adrain Fraim, a self-employed artist and web designer who used Comcast's business-class Internet in his Antioch, Tenn., home office, arranged to have his service transferred when he moved to nearby Clarksville.
But he told local news station WSMV that after his move, Comcast never showed up. And when he called, he learned the company doesn't actually serve his new location.
You may recognize "moving to an area Comcast doesn't serve" as one of Comcast's valid reasons for cancelling your home service. It's so common that people share non-Comcast zip codes online as a "lifehack" to help customers through the sometimes-arduous cancellation process.
In Fraim's case, though, that apparently wasn't good enough. He was locked into a 3-year contract for business service, the fine print of which included a massive early termination fee. Despite his protests that he never intended to cancel his service, he was billed $2,789.
"I wanted to keep their service," Fraim said, "I feel like I was being punished because they don't offer the service here."
The company has the ability to waive the fee for customers with "extenuating circumstances," including moving out-of-area, but they didn't tell Fraim that until he got WSMV involved.
As we've seen in the past, questionable charges that Comcast can't resolve sometimes magically disappear in the face of bad publicity.
The audio on the recording is clear and crisp. The boy slurs his words slightly, but the sentiment is unmistakable.
"She was asleep," he says. "She was, like, incoherent. Like, you could not talk to her at all... And I was just like, all right, get on your knees. And she did. And I just fucked the shit out of her, man. It just happened. She was passed out. I pulled her little tiny-ass shorts she had to the side and I just fucked the shit out of her."
The families and friends of three teenage girls in Norman, Oklahoma, have contacted Jezebel to allege that they were each raped by a former classmate at Norman High School. They say that the voice on that recording is their 18-year-old assailant, admitting to one of the rapes, a 16-year-old he allegedly assaulted on Friday, September 19. He allegedly also raped another girl, a 14-year-old student, four days later. After the families of those two girls began publicizing what had happened to them through a Facebook group, a third girl, also 16, came forward to allege that he had raped her in January, in a bathroom at Norman High during lunchtime.
The families say the teenager has been kicked out of Norman High—not for rape, but for disseminating the video of himself penetrating one of his alleged victims, the 16-year-old he raped in September, whom we'll call Grace. (The names of all three girls are being withheld, as they are both minors and alleged victims of sex crimes. The names of their family members have also been changed, and other details that could identify them are also being withheld. Since the teenager has not been criminally charged, Jezebel will also withhold his name until it is made public by law enforcement.)
Detective Ron Collett of the Norman Police Department confirms there is an ongoing criminal investigation into an alleged rape involving Norman High School students.
"There is an active investigation, yes," he tells Jezebel. "There is one suspect and multiple victims."
There's no timeline for when charges might be filed against the teenager, whom we will call Brian. In the meantime, he remains free. The girls he allegedly raped have all voluntarily left the school they attended together, Norman High School. Their families say they were hounded out of Norman High by merciless taunting from their classmates about the rapes, and, in one case, a physical assault.
A local feminist knitting circle in Norman has banded together to publicize what has happened to the girls. (They contacted Jezebel with their story and facilitated our contacting the girls and their families for interviews.) Together with the girls and their families, they accuse Norman High administrators of badly mishandling the aftermath of the rapes, allowing all three girls to be bullied mercilessly by their schoolmates until they saw no other choice but to leave. This is despite a detailed anti-bullying policy at Norman, one spelled out in
the school's 2013-2014 handbook, which clearly bans both in-person and online bullying, which all the girls say they experienced in spades.
Grace, the 16-year-old who was allegedly raped in September, returned to school after being absent for two weeks following the assault. Word had traveled fast, as had a short video of the assault, allegedly shot by Brian.
The day she returned, her mother told me, Grace was immediately approached in a school hallway by another student.
"I hear you love being raped in the ass," he said to Grace, as she remembers it.
Grace was holding a heavy book bag. She swung it at the boy. Her boyfriend, standing nearby, punched him. All three were suspended.
When Grace's mother contacted the school to complain about her daughter's treatment and its alleged cause, she says a school administrator told her, "Maybe you should keep her out of school until this calms down." When Grace's mother emailed the boy who'd made the comment to ask him to be kinder to her daughter, he replied, according to a screenshot of the exchange provided to Jezebel, "Your daughter sleeps around. A harlet [sic]. I saw a video of her and she was moaning like she loved it."
The other two girls share similar stories: they say they were raped by Brian and then mocked mercilessly at school for it. Norman administrators, they say, did little to respond.
Grace still hasn't returned to school. She's now being tutored at home by a Norman High teacher, although her family says it took nearly a month for that to be arranged. The other 16-year-old who says she was raped by Brian, whom we'll call Katie, has transferred to an alternative high school and is on track to graduate this year, but is still upset that she couldn't finish at Norman.
But while the older girls are (barely) hanging in and getting some kind of education, the 14-year-old, Amber, is struggling. She says she was confronted about the rape at both Norman High School and Norman North, the other public high school in town, when she tried transferring there. For the past two weeks, she's refused to go school at all.
"I'm scared," she says. "I know I'm not safe if I go back now. I just want to get my education and be happy at school and live a normal life."
I first called Grace and her mother, Jan, in early November. Jan got on the phone with me, because Grace couldn't. I could hear her in the background, sobbing.
"I've already told so many people!" she said, through tears.
Jan consoled her daughter, and told me that she first became aware that something was wrong on Saturday, September 20, when Grace came downstairs and said to her, "Mama, I hurt."
Grace had attended a party the night before. Brian was there, along with her boyfriend and a few other people. She was drinking and her memory is fuzzy, but she recalls leaving the party with Brian around 10 p.m. to grab a ride home. Her last real memory was arriving at a gas station three minutes from her house. Then she remembers very little until the following morning, when she awoke with pain radiating from her lower body.
"She said, 'Mama, I think something happened last night, I'm hurting,'" Jan remembers.
"What do you think happened?" Jan asked. Grace didn't know. She went to take a bath and found that blood and feces were coming out of her. Then the text messages started.
"She started getting messages saying that people knew she had cheated on her boyfriend," Jan says. Not long after, someone else sent her a video by Facebook message: It was a 10-second clip of Grace being anally penetrated. In the video, her mother said, she could faintly be heard moaning or screaming. (Jezebel has not seen the video and cannot independently verify its existence.)
Grace started texting with Brian, demanding to know what had happened. (Screenshots of those text messages have been provided to Jezebel; again, we cannot independently verify their authenticity. Grace's family says they have also been turned over to the police. Detective Collett writes, in response to our question, "Evidence gathered in one of the cases includes cell phones that do contain SMS and other messaging between victim and suspect.")
"I just remembered laying down in your truck..screaming.." Grace writes in the alleged exchange. "I know something happened."
According to Grace, Brian at first insisted that nothing had happened: "I think I'd remember fucking you, [Grace.]" He also said "u got to stop being the only hot chick drinking." As the conversation wound on, though, Grace kept pressing him, growing more and more upset and more certain that she'd been taken advantage of: "You took a video of you fucking me in the ass. You fucking rapped [sic] me. I can't believe you…"
Finally, Grace alleges—and the texts, if legitimate, confirm—that Brian owned up, texting back: "I wanted to forget about last night, I feel so bad.. that's why I said I don't remember." He also said he was "just as drunk" as Grace, adding, "You want me to send u the video, because you looked like you were enjoying yourself. So stop saying I took advantage of u and we can both learn from our mistake." He also threatened to "sell" the video to the freshman class, then said, quickly, that he was joking. (Note: After this story was published, a knitting circle member got in touch to clarify that Grace believed he was threatening to sell the videos to a "freshman"-themed porn site, not to the freshman class.)
Here are some of those screenshots, as provided to Jezebel:
Jan and Grace went to the police later that day. The first police officer they spoke to, a woman, "was really uncool," Jan says. "She didn't give us the right advice." According to her, the officer told them, "Well, because she already took a bath there's no need to go to the hospital for a rape kit." A rape exam was only performed four days later, when a detective was assigned to the case and told the family to go to a rape crisis center.
In the meantime, another student says Brian showed up at his house on Saturday morning and started talking about the rape.
"He was still drunk and stuff and talking about it," the boy told me over the phone recently. (His name is being withheld.) As he listened to Brian talk, he says, "I knew right off the bat it wasn't cool. Like, that's not cool to do. I don't care if you are my buddy, honestly, that's some heinous stuff to do somebody." He says he pulled out his phone and started to record the audio. "What bothered me the most is he thought it was funny."
Later, he shared the recording with Grace, playing the audio through the speakers in his car. She recorded it onto her own phone. Here is the video she recorded, as provided to Jezebel:
The rape allegedly happened on Friday night. Jan went to Norman High School the first thing on Monday morning, armed with the recording of Brian. She says she talked to one specific school administrator. (The school district would not confirm the administrator's identity to Jezebel.)
"They did expel him right away," Jan says. "They did great as far as that goes."
Norman Public School's public relations officer, Shelly Hickman, writes in an email to Jezebel that the teenager was actually suspended for the remainder of the year. She also forwarded us a letter to school parents from principal Scott Beck.
In the letter, Beck referred to one rape, which he said had occurred off-campus months ago, adding, "NHS took the strongest disciplinary action against the alleged assailant permitted by Oklahoma law, and we have also been fully cooperating with the Norman Police Department, who have been conducting an investigation."
Beck also hit back against allegations that the school had punished the victims, writing, "Despite what rumors on social media may indicate, we have not—and would never—discipline a victim for being a victim."
Hickman told Jezebel that federal student privacy laws forbid her from responding to some of our questions about the district's handling of the alleged incidents.
"The district is greatly restricted from commenting or providing information related to specific students because of the federal FERPA law," she said, adding:
While individuals can assert allegations against the district, we are often—as we are in this case—hamstrung to offer facts and information related to the allegations. I am legally able to share that the "strongest disciplinary action" permitted by Oklahoma law that is referenced in Principal Beck's letter is suspension for the remainder of the school year.
Brian, when suspended, was a Norman High senior. When we asked whether he would be permitted to return the following year, or if he planned to, Hickman replied, "It would be speculation on my part to predict what a student and his/her family may decide in the future. I really wish I was at liberty to provide more information, but I hope you understand that because of FERPA I'm just not." Hickman later wrote in an email that the district "categorically denied" Grace and Amber's interpretations of their respective suspensions:
We categorically deny we suspended alleged victims for being victims or are preventing a victim from attending school. Any time a student is suspended, signed paperwork is given to their parent and/or guardian. Moreover, it is illegal to arbitrarily prevent a student from attending school in the absence of a suspension, and suspensions by a school can be challenged by a parent before the superintendent and Board of Education if parents/guardians believe it was unjust. We also categorically deny we knowingly ignore, condone and fail to respond to bullying when we are aware it has occurred or receive complaints that it has occurred. Our policy is to immediately investigate, gather any facts and evidence, and respond appropriately and decisively. Facts and evidence could include but are not limited to documentation like texts, emails, screen shots and statements by victims and/or witnesses and, in the case of it happening on one of our campuses, we even have campus video from which to draw. As you have observed by the wording of our bullying policy, we take it very seriously in the Norman Public Schools.
The very first day Grace was finally able to return to school after the rape—or, in her mother's words, "when she was brave enough to go on and go back"—Jan says that her daughter was approached by the student who made the comment about her "loving" being "raped in the ass." After she swung the book bag at him, Jan says, "she was suspended for three days." As they were in the parking lot after signing the paperwork for the three-day suspension, Jan says, the administrator said it wouldn't be a good idea for her to come back at all this semester. (The administrator did not respond to a request for comment from Jezebel.)
"I just don't think she's ready for school," Jan remembers the woman saying to her. "She needs to come back when it calms down next semester."
Jan says she and her daughter were stunned into silence. "We just went home."
Grace's teachers were supposed to send work home for her, Jan says, but a few days went by without that happening. The school then promised to send a teacher to the house, Jan says, but it was over a month before he showed up.
Jan has gotten progressively angrier about the school's handling of the boy who made the comments to Grace. She wishes she had been prepared to fight it, to ask the school to get rid of the bully instead of her daughter. "
I've never dealt with this. I didn't know I could fight this and get rid of the bully instead of my daughter," she says. "I guess they just thought we'd take it laying down."
The following Tuesday, a 14-year-old girl we'll call Amber says she met Brian at a youth group night at a large local church. Although she knew some of his friends, Amber, a Norman High freshman, hadn't spent much time around Brian. But he immediately made a good impression as they all stood around his pickup truck in the church parking lot.
"He seemed really cool and relaxed," she said in a recent phone interview. His being kicked out quickly came up, she says. "We were talking and my friend goes, 'Hey Brian, why aren't you in school anymore?' He kind of rolled his eyes and said, 'They accused me of raping [Grace].'"
That allegation was met with scorn by the whole group, Amber says. "Multiple people said 'She's just a whore anyway.'"
Amber didn't quite know what to think. "I didn't know [Grace]. I'd seen her around at school. I thought that it was just some kinda joke."
As she remembers it, Brian soon said, "I obviously didn't rape her," and then showed the group the video on his phone of him penetrating Grace.
"It did not look like she was raped," says Amber. "It looked like she was screaming. If I wouldn't have known her side, then you never would've known."
After that, they all sat around in the parking lot for a while longer. Amber and her friend both said they had headaches, and Brian, she says, quickly offered them both pills from an Advil container. Her friend disappeared off with her boyfriend and Amber remained alone with Brian and a number of other people she didn't know well.
Then, she says, Brian produced a blunt and said to her, "This is for you." The blunt looked and sounded odd, she says. "It crackled a lot. It sounded like glass was in there. It sounded like something was being moved around in there."
She was already feeling lightheaded and dizzy before she smoked; after a few puffs, Amber started to "pass out on and off," she says. "I was hallucinating. I didn't know why it was hitting me so hard. It never crossed my mind that he could've drugged me."
As she sat there growing woozier, the boys in the group were getting "amped," she says. "They were like, let's go beat up [Adam]," Grace's boyfriend. They drove over to the apartment complex where he lives. She doesn't know if the boys actually beat Adam up; they disappeared, while Brian remained with her and a couple of other girls. At that point, she says, she was hallucinating fire in the distance, police cars driving by, and other things that everyone in the group told her weren't actually there. She could feel her eyelids drooping.
When the boys returned, Brian said he would take them and Amber home. After everyone else was gone, "I got kinda scared. We were alone together."
They drove to Brian's house. She didn't want to get out of the car. "He's like, 'You need to come in.'" She did.
"We had to be kinda quiet because his mom was there," she remembers. "He said something about that. We went into his house and I started falling. He said, 'Do you want to sit on my bed?' I said yes. And I passed out. I woke up when it was happening."
Brian, she says, was anally penetrating her. She started thrashing, kicking things off the bed in an effort to get him away or rouse his mother. Brian, she says, just said, "Good thing my mom is a heavy sleeper." (Brian's mother saw but did not respond to a Facebook message from Jezebel requesting comment for this story.)
"I would start to make as much noise as I can and he would just laugh at me," Amber says. She remembers saying "no" several times and asking, "Can we quit?" He didn't, she says. When it was over, he put her in the car and drove her back to a friend's house, who told her the next morning she came in the house "screaming and crying" and had to be held down until she fell asleep. She also says she immediately told the friend, "[Brian] raped me."
The next day, the friend's father drove the two to Norman High School. According to Amber, she tried to go to class, but was still feeling heavy and intoxicated from the previous night. By second period, she retreated to the school office, where she says she spoke to the same female administrator who handled Grace's case.
"I wasn't all there," she says. "I was in pain and still messed up from the night before. I was bleeding and I had a rip. I knew something had happened."
Amber told her story to the administrator and another school official with long blonde hair she didn't recognize. When she got up to the point where she entered Brian's room, memories of what he'd done starting to flood back. "I started crying," Amber says. The administrator, she says, told her to "never mind," and "keep on with the next part." Amber was left with the impression, she says, that, "she didn't want me to tell her that part"—the part about the rape.
The other school employee asked, "Honey, were you sexually assaulted?"
"I was just crying," Amber says. "I didn't say anything."
The administrator, she says, quickly said, "Never mind. Moving on," and called Amber's mother. When Amber's mother, Lettie, arrived, a school nurse was taking her daughter's heart rate.
According to both Amber and Lettie, the administrator said, "Your daughter didn't do anything she said she did last night. She didn't got to church. She went off, did drugs, got into a car with boys."
Amber was horrified. Her mom took out of school and to the hospital, helping her to the car "because I couldn't walk on my own." The whole way there, she kept repeating the same thing over and over: "He raped me. He raped me."
At the emergency room, a nurse called police, and Amber says they did a rape kit while her mother tried to reach the adminstrator, who wasn't picking up her phone.
A couple days later, Amber says, the administrator left a phone message of her own for Lettie: Amber was suspended for 45 days, she said, for being under the influence of drugs on school property.
According to the terms of her suspension, Amber wasn't allowed on school property. Her mom had to pick up her work, but no one except her math teacher actually gave it to her.
Amber sat at home and stewed. "I was just left at home, no work, so stressed out," she says. "I kind of went into a great depression." Her mom set up an appointment with a woman she knew on the school board, and soon Amber got word that she'd only be suspended for 10 days, not 45. A stipulation for her early return was that she attend "drug meetings," she says.
Things didn't go well from the moment Amber came back from suspension, which she had half-expected. "Kids saw me get in a truck with him. My friend came over to my house and said it wouldn't be a good idea to go back because everybody knows." The prevailing speculation, she says, was that the allegations were "just a joke Grace and I came up with."
She says that as she walked in the front door of the school, another student approached her immediately. "You cheated on your boyfriend," she told Amber. "I know you're lying about [Brian] raping you." Another girl jumped in, Amber says, warning her, "You better watch out."
When she went to the office, she was told, "We're handling it." She refused to go back to class, telling school administrators that she was scared.
"They all said to leave school," she says. So she walked home. "My mom got so mad. I wasn't even there an hour."
The next day, Amber tried again. She made it as far as her first class, where, she says, another student turned around and said, "I hear you're telling people you were raped by [Brian]. You better watch your back, because that's my homie."
Amber went back to the office and told the administrator, who responded, "We're working on it." She was sent back to class.
"She seemed like she was really trying, you know?" Amber says. "And yet nothing was ever done."
Things got worse that day, Amber says, with two other female friends of Brian's as well as her ex-boyfriend telling her they were going to "jump" her. Her ex also informed her that Brian "would never do that, and that I was too messed up to really tell what was going on."
Amber retreated to the office of Norman High's main principal, Scott Beck, who sent her to one of the other counselors, a man with a tattoo on his arm whose name she didn't catch. "Just focus on your schoolwork and ignore all these people," she remembers him telling her.
Things were bearable for about a week, she says, and then "I messed up again. This time it was my fault." A group of boys came over to her house, and she performed oral sex on one. Another videotaped her without her knowledge, she says. "He showed the kids. Passed it around school. I was so, so embarrassed."
Amber says she went to the office, where the school administrators seemed to already know about the video. As Amber cried, she says, the administrator admonished her. "All she could say to me was 'You shouldn't have done that. Does this help your case with Brian?'"
She was supposed to go back to her fourth class of the day, biology. But she couldn't bring herself to go. "The teacher hated me," she says. "The kids hated me." So instead she ran across the street, to an abandoned grocery store, where she sat alone for a moment. Then, she says, the boy she performed oral sex on turned up.
"He said, 'First you lie about Brian, then you go and snitch you gave me a blowjob,'" she says, adding that he also told her, "you're going to be a in lot of trouble." He suggested that her boyfriend might be about to get jumped, and told her he'd send his girlfriend to beat her up, "if I have to."
Amber returned to school and made her way back to the office, intending to report these latest threats. "[The administrator] had been writing down a truancy ticket," she says. "She said if she can't help me and my mom can't help me she'd have to send me to the law, because maybe they can help change me. I didn't know what that means. She was dissing my mom, saying is she even at home, does she care about me, do I live by myself. She was talking about suspending me for the rest of the 45 days."
In an already-planned parent-teacher meeting the following day, Amber says her mother was told she was being "disruptive," although her grades were still straight As. Her mother pointed out that Amber had only started "being disruptive" after the alleged rape occurred, asking, "Does this not tell you something? Can you not tell it's because of this situation?"
Sometime during the meeting, Amber says, "someone in there came up with the idea to send me to Norman North," the other public high school. "My mom says it was [the administrator]. I felt like I was a lost cause. Nobody could help me."
Norman North went well for approximately one day, she says, until friends of Brian's told people there she was "bad news."
She started having panic attacks and became a daily visitor at the nurse's office. She made it two weeks and then quit going to school altogether. When I spoke to her, she'd been out for a week and a half. As yet, her mom hadn't been contacted about her truancy.
"Nobody likes me anywhere anymore," Amber says, matter-of-factly. "I can't do it."
Amber's mom says she's looking into online programs, but she remains frustrated that neither school did much to help her daughter.
For now, Amber says, "I just stay inside."
In early November, Grace and her mother Jan had grown increasingly frustrated with the bullying at the school. They decided to take their story to a local knitting circle, a group of women whom everyone in town refers to informally as "the feminist ladies."
Stacey Wright, who hosts the knitting circle, knew Jan only as a friend of a friend and didn't know Grace at all. She'd heard vaguely about what was going on at the high school, but didn't think too much about it.
"I thought there was just some high school drama," she tells Jezebel. After Jan and Grace relayed their stories, she says, "we just sat there with our jaws dropped. There weren't any of us in that room that didn't know that night we had to do something. These girls should be able to go to school."
Before they visited the knitting circle, Jan says, Grace was growing more and more despondent, and started to say she should have never told anyone about the rape at all.
"She just cried and laid around depressed," Jan says. She blames that in large part on the fact that she couldn't be in school. "You can't isolate someone who's been through something like this."
Jan says that, before long, Grace was saying she wished she'd never said anything. "Because she wanted to go back to school. That's sad. I asked the school when this was first happening about having an assembly, to bring light to the teachers and students to let them know this wouldn't be tolerated, but they were very hush-hush. [An administrator] basically said, 'We don't want everybody knowing. Only some of the students have seen it."
It's difficult to say how Norman High School administrators should have dealt with the allegations and the bullying, but a set of options nonetheless present themselves. If a video of Grace's assault was indeed circulating around the school, they could have warned the students that by watching it that they were breaking the law. Oklahoma state law specifically prohibits "the possession, distribution, or manufacturing of sexually explicit images of minors," a crime that is punishable with both jail time and mandatory registration as a sex offender.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has
a number of recommendations for preventing bullying in school settings, which, though very general, point to ways Norman could have improved their response. Among other things, the HHS guidelines recommend that staff should be trained to "intervene effectively on the spot," and hold follow-up meetings with both the bullied student and the students(s) doing the bullying.
But even to call what allegedly happened at Norman "bullying" falls short. If the girls' stories are accurate, their fellow students were engaged in a campaign of harassment, intimidation and silencing. Amber was specifically warned to "watch her back" if she talked about the rape, a statement that's tantamount to witness tampering.
Norman's own handbook warns that students who "bully, harass and/or intimidate others" will face "immediate disciplinary consequences." Students who participate in "making threats of any kind" are warned that they will immediately be suspended out-of-school for the rest of the semester. Yet none of that happened here. And neither the school district nor Norman High School mentions the words "sexual assault" or "rape" in their handbooks. The closest Norman High gets is saying that "touching someone without permission" is a form of harassment.
That kind of delicacy is unwise. It fails to acknowledge that sexual violence happens to high school students, or to give them a solid framework for how to respond.
According to the CDC, a 2011 survey of high schoolers found "11.8% of girls and 4.5% of boys from grades 9-12 reported that they were forced to have sexual intercourse at some time in their lives." A growing number of school districts are creating specific rape prevention education programs, many of them funded by the Rape Prevention and Education Program, created by the CDC.
The Norman Police Department does have a "rape prevention and self defense" program called
My Body My Life. But it's aimed only at women and girls and how they can "[learn] to live safely," without addressing boys at all or what they role might be in preventing sexual violence. On the program's homepage, Chief of Police Keith Humphrey praises it in an odd way, writing, " I applaud this program because it assists young women to develop an understanding that they are a precious commodity, and they can control their own destiny." (Calling a woman's body a "commodity" is a weird way to phrase things, and suggesting that they alone are responsible for protecting that "commodity" is perhaps not the precise message one wants to send to young girls.)
The knitting circle women created their own response: they set up a Facebook page on November 9,
Yes all Daughters, telling Grace's story and calling for a school-wide walkout on Monday, November 24 at 9 a.m.
"While the school has a 'zero-tolerance' bullying policy, they've not implemented any real anti-bullying education," the page read, in part. "Her friends and fellow students have organized a peaceful walk out protest against this atrocity and her further victimization. They will gather Monday, November 24 outside the school to protest the administration's inaction."
The Facebook organizers also got in touch with Jezebel, asking us to investigate the story. Soon after, they contacted the local news. Things in Norman quickly started to heat up: On November 19, an anonymous YouTube user put the alleged audio of Brian confessing to Grace's rape on YouTube, paired with images of him pulled from his Facebook profile.
On November 20, Stacey Wright, her sister and niece outlined the case for the local media, backed by a group of student protesters. From the
Daily Oklahoman:
Not long after the page was set up, a third girl got in touch with the knitting circle, alleging that she, too, had been raped by Brian during a brief relationship in January.
The girl, Katie, says she met Brian shortly after moving to Norman to live with a relative after being sexually abused by a parent.
"I met [Brian] and I really didn't like him at first," she says. "I thought he was a big douchebag, honestly. But I decided I was going to be nice one day. And so I got his number and we started dating. I was trying to be nice."
Katie says that he pressured her for sex throughout the relationship, demanding that she go into the bathroom with him at lunchtime. "So I would have sex with him—like, normal vaginal sex."
One day, the lunchtime routine started up: He pressured and cajoled her until she agreed to go into a bathroom. "I thought it'd be normal like the other days," she says. But instead, she alleges, he forced her into a corner and anally penetrated her.
"I tried to push him off me," she says wearily. "I said no. I told him didn't want to do it and it hurt and all that stuff. You know how that goes."
Afterward, Katie says, she stumbled outside and sat on the concrete, crying. She didn't want to go to her next class, which she had with him, but she pulled it together. "He said, 'Get your ass up, you're not making me late.'"
Katie says she didn't report the rape to anyone out of fear that she wouldn't be allowed to stay with her relative. She kept quiet, but, before long, started getting into fights: first, with a girl who called her a "slut" in the hall, then with another girl who told her to "stop talking shit" about Brian.
"The fights were all related to him," she says. "He also started a big rumor about me that I got trained on by four guys and I cheated on him. He'd sent around these pictures of me that he took. Everybody was mad at me and they were calling me a whore. I was this new girl—haven't even been there one semester and everybody hates me."
The worst fight was also Brian-related, she says. One morning between classes, "this girl comes up behind me, grabs my hair and slams my head down on the concrete floor. [Brian] instigated it." Katie says he later texted her, "You deserved that. I made that happen.'"
Katie was suspended from Norman High for two days for her involvement in the fight. Soon after, she says, "I dropped out of school. I walked out and told them I wasn't coming back."
She got her transcripts and considered going to Norman North, but only if she could attend a night program. "Everybody had seen it on Facebook. I was scared to go to that school."
Instead, she ended up in an alternative program, which she'll finish soon. It doesn't feel like a victory. "I'm graduating early but I missed the high school experience," she says. She gets sick a lot now, which she attributes to stress. She says she's now taking antidepressants, to "help with my anxiety," and that it's been helping. So does her friendship with Amber, whom she met through Stacey, from the knitting circle.
"We're like best friends now," Amber says proudly. The knitting circle also helped her to recently file a police report against Brian. (Detective Collett writes, "Two of the victims did submit to exams by a SANE [Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner]. There is a recently filed report on an incident that occurred in January. There was no SANE examination in that case.")
Jezebel contacted Brian for comment on this story, asking if he would like to respond to the allegations or refer us to an attorney who could do so on his behalf. He responded by asking, "How did you hear about this?" He declined to talk on the phone or via email, responding, "How about in person? Bc im still not sure what your intentions are so id like to meet u." When I offered a Skype or FaceTime interview with him or his lawyer, he stopped responding.
On November 18, principal Beck circulated the letter to Norman High's parents, generally referencing the allegations about Brian and Grace and promising no one was being victim-blamed. It concluded,
We want to assure all our parents that we continue to monitor behavior both in and out of school, and we continue to respond quickly and decisively whenever we are provided facts and information indicating any student is in danger or has been harmed in any way.
The letter also said that the students would not be prevented from protesting on November 24, and that the police and school administrators would be present to keep the students safe.
If you have more information about this story, please contact Anna Merlan.
Not every great pool must be a grand pool. Like a pair of Keds, sometimes satisfaction is attained through well-executed simplicity. Let us consider the above pool, which belonged to Jake Gyllenhaal for nearly a decade before being sold this week for just over $3 million. It is the crisp white sneaker of pools.
The first thing you notice about this pool is that it is small. For $3 million, one could certainly purchase a larger and more ostentatious pool, one with a hot tub or a water slide or rocks or fountains. I'd wager that many a guest at Jake Gyllenhaal's house—mostly models, probably, and also Taylor Swift—were taken to his pool where they secretly thought "Eh, really? This is his pool?" while telling Gyllenhaal to his face that it is a very nice pool that they really liked.
But I'm telling the truth: this is a very nice pool that I really like.
It is small and simple, yes, but it is small and simple as a work of minimalism. It has a very specific design aesthetic—with a bungalow perched at its steps, it has the feel of a private pool attached to the nicest suite of an expensive boutique hotel. It is shrouded in various types of leafy greens, affording it a certain privacy that most pools do not offer. If you wanted to fuck in this pool, you certainly could, and I bet Jake Gyllenhaal has. (Owning a pool that Jake Gyllenhaal once fucked in is what they call "value-added" real estate.)
The pool leads out to a backyard that offers what appears a gorgeous view of the Hills (L.A. talk). This just seems like a very nice place to sit.
I really like Kim Kardashian. I usually have nothing but disdain for celebrities, or celebrities in training. There is not a thing less interesting, or useful in the world, than an "artist" of dubious talent who has risen to fleeting fame because of sex connections, family connections, or money connections. But I think Kim is great. Here's why: She asks nothing of her fans. She's not all like: Download my new .mp3! Or: Sit through my new three-hour movie about the end of earth and how we all have to eat corn now! She hawks no talent. She knows what her best asset is, and she plays it up. She has a truly remarkable butt, so she showed it naked on the cover of Paper. Why go through the trouble of being a "singer" or an "actress" when you can just be a butt? Kim knows.
Also, the family dynamic displayed on Keeping Up With the Kardashians is nice. Staged or not, who cares. It's good TV, a lot better than most of the crap that's out there. It's interesting to watch how a modern family interacts through the burning lens of E!. I also enjoyed watching Kim and Kanye's relationship develop on screen. It was funny and endearing when Kanye hid in corners when he was on the show, like a ghost.
When pundits criticize the Kardashians, Kim especially, I become embarrassed for them. The latest offender is Sally Kohn, who wrote an abominable column in the Washington Post this week titled "How the Kardashians exploit racial bias for profit."
Apparently, the Kardashians, as a unit, are a slap in the face to racial justice and the situation in Ferguson (?) because they joke about race relations:
Just a week ago, Kim's sister Khloe Kardashian posted a picture on Instagram of herself, Kim and sister Kourtney Kardashian with the caption: "The only KKK to ever let black men in."
It's like saying, "Hey, people of color, don't be so freaked out about the Ku Klux Klan threatening 'lethal force' against protesters in Ferguson because, ya know, the KKK is a joke. The Kardashians said so!"
Lest we not forget: false equivalence is the fallacy of our time. It gets worse from there:
But I think Kardashian does have a talent — exploiting the fetishization of women of color to line her own pocket. She's like a buck-naked Trojan horse for a devious message: that the rest of us shouldn't get our panties in a bunch about sexism and racism because, hey, Kim Kardashian is laughing about it. All the way to the bank.*
* Correction: This article has been amended because it's unclear whether Kardashian identifies as a woman of color. An earlier version of this post also misidentified Scott Disick.
So I guess this column basically does not exist because it is canceled out by its correction? Cool. Let it serve as a warning to future commentators: If Kim Kardashian, or the Kardashian family at large, bothers you, say it to a stone, crush the stone, and chew the pieces of stone until your teeth crack and blood fills your mouth. Do not write about it in a national newspaper. If an editor accepts your pitch, that person is a bad editor. There is nothing to say about the Kardashians, except that they are good businesspeople with an entertaining family dynamic and nice butts.
On Wednesday night Jacqueline Woodson won the 2014 National Book Award for Young Peoples Literature. After she left the stage the host of the National Book Awards, Daniel Handler, told the crowd that she, a Black woman, "was allergic to watermelon" and then implored the crowd at the National Book Awards to "let that settle in your mind." I found myself staring at my laptop and choking on a waterfall of watermelon seeds.
What was spit and spoken out into the celebratory New York City night was bigger than Daniel Handler's racist joking comments and Jacqueline Woodson's stunning marvelous win.
News reports immediately called the comments "unfortunate." Really? That's it? That's all you have to say?
What was spit and spoken, was spit and spoken, into a National Book Award microphone, in front of a National Book Award logo, and launched out into a world that hears such "unfortunate" comments all the time and rarely does anything to try and make it right, in order to abort the next racist moment to come, rarely steps into the moment courageously, by saying something, anything, about it, no matter who said it, but decides instead to simply wait for the present "unfortunate" storm to pass so that we can get back to life as normal.
Life as "normal" for this Black girl's life has meant that every day in America I have to be prepared to endure the shotgun fire of old watermelon jokes aimed at my heart and my life. After the shotgun fire of these "unfortunate" words I am then told to stand there and "let it sink in" as if it wasn't already lodged beneath my skin like a spray of bullets and then I am expected to just move my broken Black girl heart along. The old LP record starts to play: Pick up some Duck tape on the way home Black girl, bandage up your wounds for the umpteenth million time—you'll be fine in the morning.
The words Handler spoke were spit and spoken into my face just as they have been spit and spoken into my Black face for most of my life. The truth is: his words were spit and spoken into all of our faces. His racist "unfortunate" words are part of what keeps us where and what we are as a country that refuses to deal with "race."
I was born into this violent and strange Black people and watermelon world. I grew up hearing and seeing watermelons, not as ruby sweet fruit, but as strange fruit slung into my face and hanging from trees as accompanying racist representation of Black people and the cutting emotional and physical violence that stalked us two hundred years ago and keeps stalking to this day.
Before cutting on the National Book Award ceremony I had come home from a day at my office, an afternoon spent preparing notes on Claudia Rankine's book CITIZEN, which my MFA students are reading and discussing, which happened to be one of the five 2014 National Book Award poetry book finalists.
I thought I was safe. I thought I had left all of Rankine's moments of "invisible racism—moments that you experience and that happen really fast" at the office.
Suddenly and without warning Handler throws his watermelon joke up into the air like a Monday night football pass that anybody in America can catch. The watermelon breaks against the posh black-tie Cipriani restaurant lights and shatters into the keyboard of my computer without warning. I stare down at my fingers.
Everything is red and sticky.
The Zora Neale Hurston quote that Rankine uses in her book as oar, " I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background," launches into my chest and begins to pound me against the laughing cyber audience at the National Book Awards.
I hear some in the audience laughing into the cavernous room along with Handler and his ridiculous rocketing racist joke. I stand up in my house and stare at the lap top screen. I look at the door to make sure it is locked. I look around to make sure I know where I am. I look down at my feet to make sure I am not standing in front of my 13, all-white, MFA students, in a calm discussion about quotidian racist moments in America, in our end-of-semester text, a week before Thanksgiving.
I am in my house, right? With the door locked, right? Safe on my blue couch, right? I have left all of that other behind, for now, right?
Not, right.
A few hours pass and I calmly and with respect send an email to the National Book Foundation suggesting that it might go a long way if they were to issue an apology—on behalf of the organization—who gave the microphone to the man, who we now know, did not deserve a microphone. I am told, by the National Book Foundation, that it does not feel an apology is warranted—by them. I am told that if the National Book Foundation apologized it might seem as if they had done something wrong and not the host himself, who had already apologized on TWITTER. I am told an apology would place the light on the racist remark and not on the winners themselves.
While washing my red sticky hands off in the kitchen sink I wish that the National Book Foundation had known my grandmother.
One summer at my grandparent's farm, when I was 9, I spent the day fishing with two friends. On the way back to our individual homes, one of those friends picked up a handful of river rocks and aimed his proud elbow at a trio of bottom windows in Mr. Elijah's barn. I stood there watching with my jaw dropped, amazed at his accuracy and his blind arrogance.
Later that night, after word made its way back around to our individual families about what had happened that day, all three of us were marched together back to the Mr. Elijah's house. I didn't understand. I told my grandmother that I had done nothing wrong. I tried to make my case for my innocence by even showing her how I had kept my hands in my pockets, as Eugene had been the one who picked up and threw the rocks. But my case fell on wise deaf ears.
"You were there," she told me. "You are not responsible for breaking the glass but you are responsible for walking away as if you were not involved, as if you were not there, as if you did not have the power or the courage to do something to try and make it right."
Winning the National Book Award for Poetry, in 2011, was a great honor but before that I won something far greater, what my grandmother taught me about collective responsibility.
I am sending this missive out today in order to keep reaching for the writer in me that Ursula K. Le Guin spoke of yesterday as she accepted the 2014 National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the one who writes for freedom, and I will refuse, forever and a day, to remain silent about the cozy racism that the National Book Foundation, and the rest of us who occupy the human race, but sit silently by while the watermelon jokes fly, spraying their staining red meat and black seeds on us all.
Even if our mouth was not the mouth that said it—we still must have and find the courage to speak out against such moments as these, lest all our windows be broken, lest all our great literary celebrations be reduced to a watermelon patch.
Nikky Finney is the author of Head Off & Split, The World Is Round, On Wings Made of Gauze, and Rice. In 2011, she won the National Book Award for Poetry. This post originally appeared on her website.
What is the wind? Is it a fluid, like water? Is it, like, fire, which would be some sort of magic, or maybe, not a solid, but the other—a gas?—or a category of "heat thing" that is named for its temperature, because what else would you even call it? It's almost a fluid as well, which would be ironic. Anyhow. Is it
As winter's frostbitten hand bitch-slaps the east coast with flurries, two men emerge from the frozen tundra in Worcester, Ma. to make what appears to be a drug deal as a very enthusiastic reporter tells everyone: snow day!
Everyone (including the news anchors back at the station) is laughing, but here's the thing: The video taken by giggling concerned citizens ("That was the biggest live drug deal!!!!!") is almost too good to be true. This could be fake. Look how those guys walk up to each other—you get the sense that they are aware of the cameras. But I don't believe anything on the internet anymore!
If the video is not a fraud, and these two men actually completed a drug deal on live TV, then they are heroes to blizzard-defying druggies everywhere.
Update: Apparently, this video was recorded from a 2013 broadcast but for whatever reason only made itself known today.
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