Industrial rock guitarist, liar, and accused international canine trafficker Johnny Depp may face up to 10 years in prison or a maximum fine of $340,000, The Sydney Morning Herald reports, penalties related to sneaking his dogs into Australia in April.

During an Australian Senate committee hearing on Monday, the paper also learned that Depp’s pilot could be jailed for up to two years for his role in the illegal importation of the undeclared Yorkshire Terriers the country’s Minister for Agriculture threatened with the doggie death penalty earlier this month.

“If he doesn’t take Boo and Pistol back we do have to euthanase them,” Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce told ABC at the time. “Just because he’s Johnny Depp doesn’t make him exempt from Australian laws.”

The warning was apparently persuasive. Just a day after his ABC interview, Barnaby announced the contraband canines had been booted from the country:

Dogs gone.

May 15, 2015

Because of Australia’s geographic isolation, the country is particularly vulnerable to invasive species and pathogens and has some of the strictest biosecurity laws in the world. The nation’s stringent quarantine rules apply to pet dogs, cats, birds and especially rabbits, but somehow not their (frankly) pretty ill-seeming celebrity owners.

[Image via Getty Images/Instagram]

According to Buzzfeed, Pope Francis—who really, really, really wants you to think he’s cool—told Argentine newspaper La Voz Del Pueblo this week that he, like, doesn’t even own a TV.

“I have not watched TV since 1990,” Pope Hipper-Than-Thou claimed in the interview published Monday. “It’s a promise that I made the Virgin of Carmen on the night of July 15, 1990. I told myself: ‘It’s not for me.’”

If true, that means dude still doesn’t know who killed Laura Palmer. Unbelievable.

In the same interview, Francis reasserted his supposed desire to go to a pizzeria and enjoy a chill slice of ‘za—a shameless attempt at appealing to today’s food meme-loving Millennials.

Reasonably, the interviewer suggested the Pope could get delivery instead.

“But it is not the same,” replied Francis, surely flipping back one wispy bang.

God, just give it a rest, guy.

[Image via Getty]

Penn State administrators announced Wednesday that a fraternity that maintained a well-curated secret Facebook page full of pictures of unconscious, naked women will lose its official recognition until 2018, pretty much ruining senior year.

In some of the photos found on the Kappa Delta Rho-operated Facebook page, a search warrant application alleges, it appeared “that the individuals in the photos are not aware that the photos had been taken.”

The three-year ruling was apparently intended to compensate for an earlier and more lenient ruling by the school’s Interfraternity Council, which had voted to allow Kappa Delta Rho to stay on campus under certain conditions.

According to NBC, the frat was also implicated in sexual harassment, hazing, drug dealing and the “persistent harassment of two females.”

Although they’ve lost official recognition—good luck getting into homecoming as a group now, KDR—they apparently won’t have to suffer the indignity of moving out of their frat house, which is privately owned.

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

Today, the New York Post published something so ill-informed, so inaccurate, so dangerous, that my head is spinning.

The hottest new cast member of “The Real Housewives of New York” has a gut, chest hair and sweats at the mere sight of sun.

That’s right. The Post is trying to tell us that John Mahdessian—dry cleaning entrepreneur, boyfriend to new Real Housewives castmember Dorinda, reanimated meatball (I’m sorry!)—is the new “breakout star” of The Real Housewives of New York City.

Counterpoint: No, he isn’t.

Mahdessian is the show’s breakout star this year, thanks to his and Medley’s cantankerous relationship, his shameless flirting and his larger-than-life personality.

In one episode, the 49-year-old is caught grinding against Housewives Sonja Morgan and Kristen Taekman like a horny spring-breaker; in another, he’s partying it up solo, to everyone’s horror, at midtown’s Beautique.

Last week, Ramona Singer called Mahdessian “crass” and accused him of using her pal for her swank uptown pad and connections.

The “Sultan of Stains,” as the Post refers to him, is unruffled by the (relatively little) attention he has received from fans of the show.

“It really doesn’t do anything for me because when I go to the Met Gala, the richest, most prominent people recognize me,” says Mahdessian, who keeps a pack of Marlboro Lights within reach.

Cool. He maybe goes to the Met Gala, he’s a horrible boyfriend, he’s clearly in the mafia, and if I have to imagine him having sex with Dorinda one more time I’m going to die.

“I was able to develop methods and techniques that allow us to be leaders and pioneers now in our industry,” he says from his tiny, windowless office, its fridge stocked with bottles of Notorious Pink, the line of rosé his girlfriend is hawking.

John is not a pioneer. John is a dry cleaner, which is totally fine, but what’s not fine is the fact that he is a real live caveman who frequently turns puce for no good reason. Literally anyone else in the world would have been a better subject for this article. For example:

• Dorinda, John’s girlfriend, who is an actual member of the cast and wore the same dress a bunch of times in a very relatable way.
  
• Carole’s extremely hot 28-year-old boyfriend Adam, who deserves more screen time.
  
• Fredrik from Million Dollar Listing, who keeps showing up to pat Bethenny’s shoulder when she cries about her apartment renovation.
  
• The mouth guard that flew out of the ring and landed next to a screaming Kristen Taekman at that weird boxing match Carole made everyone attend.
  

This was a gigantic mistake.

Image via Getty.

Contact the author at ellie@jezebel.com.

According to The New York Times, Swiss authorities in Zurich* have arrested several top FIFA officials in a dramatic early-morning raid connected to federal corruption charges soon to be filed in the United States.

The Times reports that FIFA vice presidents Jeffrey Webb and Eugenio Figueredo and former vice president Jack Warner are among the officials expected to be charged, but not FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

Citing law enforcement sources, CNN reports that as many as 14 people in all will be charged Wednesday, the result of a three-year FBI investigation into the world governing body of soccer long plagued by accusations of bribery. From The Wall Street Journal:

Investigators reached a turning point in their probe in 2011 when an American member of the FIFA Executive Committee, Charles “Chuck” Blazer, began cooperating with them, one of the people said. Mr. Blazer, a Queens, N.Y., native, began providing FBI agents with information about alleged fraud and money laundering within FIFA’s ranks, according to [a person familiar with the matter].

Mr. Blazer, who from 1990 to 2011 was the general secretary of the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football, or Concacaf, agreed to record conversations with other FIFA executives after authorities threatened to bring tax evasion charges against him, the person said.

In 2013, FIFA hired former U.S. attorney Michael J. Garcia as an independent investigator to look into widespread allegations of corruption in the bidding process that awarded Russia and Qatar the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

In November of last year, FIFA announced the investigation was closed and no serious wrongdoing had been found, but Garcia immediately disputed that summary of his findings, alleging it contained “numerous materially incomplete and erroneous representations of the facts and conclusions.”

UPDATE 1:45 a.m.: According to the Associated Press, the charges involve “millions” in suspected bribes.

BREAKING: Swiss authorities: 6 soccer officials arrested, suspected of getting, paying millions in bribes

May 27, 2015

[Image via Getty Images]

Last Wednesday, several students released 72,000 ladybugs inside Maryland’s Chopticon High School as their class’ senior prank, a practical joke that sounds unfair to the ladybugs (and also just not very funny?).

Even more not very funny, however, is the fact that seven of those students now face charges ranging from disruption of school activities to fourth-degree burglary, having broken into the school at 3:30 a.m. to release the beetles.

“They set the burglary alarm off and the police did respond and we arrived there,” a spokesperson for the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office told WTTG. “Then it takes it to a different level and we certainly don’t want to see anybody get hurt.”

Classmates, however, disagreed with the decision to punish the pranksters, holding a protest Tuesday morning.

“Everybody got a good laugh out of it,” student Kyle Fisher told WUSA9, “I don’t really see what the big deal is about it.”

According to The Washington Post, it took janitors several hours to vacuum up the bugs, which had been ordered online.

[Image via WTTG]

The hosts of the Fox morning show that’s named like it should heavily involve puppets, Fox & Friends, aren’t exactly the sort of people that instill any sense of, oh, competence. They tend to have more of a gleeful bedshitter quality about them. So when two of them tried to change a tire, the results were predictably sad.

The tire-changing was part of a segment featuring former Navy SEAL Derrick Van Orden, who has just written a book on ‘manhood’ and has a series of ‘manhood tests.’ The idea of ‘manhood tests’ is something I normally associate with rapid jerking of one’s manhood, but whatever. Changing a tire is a valuable skill whether or not your manhood is the penis kind or the vagina kind. I even wrote how to do it for our (well, Deadspin’s) own sort-of-basic-manhood blog, Adequate Man.

Really, the blonde dressed like a banana didn’t need to stand there being “in distress.” Grab a wrench, Elisabeth!

Here, just look how this shitshow went down:

The drooling simpletons in suits are the noted higher primate Brian Killmeade and ex-senator Scott Brown, now much more sensibly employed looking like a numbnuts on national television. The two start to change the rental-car Toyota’s tire with some enthusiastic simultaneous jacking and lug-nut removal.

Killmeade was getting the nuts off, and they were coming off surprisingly easily — I suspect some poor PA loosened them before the segment to spare viewers the sight of Killmeade’s straining face and inevitable unplanned urine stream. Cleverly, Killmeade just let the nuts roll freely wherever, helping to confirm to the viewers that they’re dealing with an idiot.

Soon, the car began to roll off the jack Brown was vigorously cranking. Which is bad. It looked like, somehow, they’d neglected to set the car’s emergency brake, chock any other wheels, or perhaps even place the car in park.

Thinking quickly, Killmeade runs in front of the car to insure that if it does roll out of control, it’ll roll over him, and then says the same lame joke about “this is why I have a AAA card” not once, but twice, just to be sure we know that yes, he has a AAA card.

Then his brain-OS crashes and he stands frozen, arms dangling uselessly, while he reboots. Seriously, look at him from 2:14-2:24. What the hell happened to him there?

So, way to go, fellas. Another triumph.

Oh, and also, what the hell is up with the car in the little bumper animation? They have a crappy 3D animated Mustang/Cobra-ish car that looks like a refugee from some local cut-rate insurance company ad or a Nintendo 64 driving game, and then they zoom in to what’s supposed to be the engine, but I can’t tell what the hell any of that crap in there is supposed to be. I think I see an alternator fan in the lower right, but I’m not sure what that stack of chrome pancakes is next to it, or the big gold flap out front, or the big silver tombstone thing.

Maybe give the car stuff a rest for a bit, Fox & Friends?

Republicans in the Texas House of Representatives rushed to approve a “campus carry” measure last night that will allow students at the state’s public and private universities to carry concealed weapons in classrooms, buildings, and even dorms. The bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Allen Fletcher, said the measure would address crime on campus.

Democrats tried to block the bill by adding amendments, but ultimately the amendments were dropped and the bill passed 101-47. It will go to the State Senate now and then to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who’s expected to sign, according to the New York Daily News.

Per the Dallas Morning News, Democrats pushed to include private universities in the legislation in the hopes that “powerful people” will pay attention and protest. There’s also the caveat that students must be 21 years or older to carry guns under this legislation. Democratic State Rep. Terry Canales told the Morning News that the whole bill is crazy, basically, but what can he do? “I own a boatload of guns, and it still doesn’t make any damn sense,” he said.

CBS News points out that at the same time the House voted to approve campus carry, the State Senate’s Republican majority dropped a bill “that would have protected child welfare agencies that block gays and same-sex couples from adopting children on religious grounds from lawsuits.” So that’s something.

Photo via AP. Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

If you watch the TLC show 19 Kids and Counting starring confirmed child molester Josh Duggar, chances are you’re familiar with the Bates family. From their frequent appearances on the show since 2009, to a 2012 TLC special entitled “The Bates Family: And Baby Makes 19,” to a now-canceled 2012 TLC show United Bates of America, to the new ratings success Bringing Up Bates on “family-oriented” network UPtv, Gil and Kelly Bates have never been shy about their friendship with the Duggars.

While there is much speculation regarding the origins and extent of the family’s actual relationship with the Duggars, according to TV screens, they’re as close as can be, constantly “fellowshipping” around disposable flatware, manual labor, and rolling cameras.

Many fans of Bringing up Bates believe the Bates family is “better” than the Duggars; Kelly Bates genuinely seems to love her 19 children, Gil Bates actively parents (and can also paint glow-in-the-dark eagles at impressive speeds), minimally talented country-singing son Lawson is more sociable and fun than any Duggar boy, and Erin Paine nee Bates is compelling to watch as she shares everything in her life from makeup tutorials to her struggles with fertility.

But lurking behind the admittedly gorgeous family are the same ugly beliefs that drove the Duggars to keep their child-molesting son hidden from authorities for over a year and in the same house as the sisters he molested for many more. Alongside Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, Gil and Kelly Bates share a devotion to God, an affection for TV money, and a strict adherence to the ATI (Advanced Training Institute International) homeschooling curriculum.

It’s not a secret that the Duggars follow the ATI curriculum, an educational program that tells young women to cover up their bodies lest they “defraud” the horny men around them, and an educational program that blames victims of sexual assault. But the Bates family ties to ATI run deeper and present a troubling dynamic in the Duggar molestation scandal: regardless of whether or not Gil Bates knew of Josh Duggar’s actions—an open secret in their shared tight-knit religious community—Gil Bates himself is a driving force in ATI, peddling an actively harmful and scientifically inaccurate curriculum to young men and women, and doing so while making significant amounts of money charming viewers with his family’s full-frontal hugs and exclusive breeding announcements in People.

Bates, a 50-year-old tree trimmer from Lake City, TN, currently sits on the board of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), the parent group of ATI:

Also on the board of IBLP is Dr. Stephen Paine, a practicing physician and “the father of ten outstanding sons and daughters.” One of those sons is Chad Paine, now the husband of Bates daughter Erin, and the father of the Bates’ newest grandchild.

Another Bates daughter, Alyssa Webster, is also married to ATI-enabling royalty. Webster’s new father-in-law, Florida Representative Daniel Webster, is known for passing the 1985 Home Education Program Act which legalized homeschooling in Florida. He used the ATI curriculum to educate his own children and has stated that Bill Gothard’s teachings “absolutely changed my life.”

But it’s not only men in the Bates orbit who profess a devotion to ATI’s teachings. On the Bates family website, Kelly touts the importance of the ATI curriculum in their household:

These Widsom Booklets that teach character lessons each morning are the same Wisdom Booklets that ask children “How can graphs help to visualize the consequences of lust?”

But most damning for the Bates family’s “better than the Duggars” image is their close relationship with Bill Gothard, the founder of IBLP, who was ousted from his leadership position in 2014 after 34 women came forward with accusations of sexual harassment and abuse. Yet just months before those allegations were made public, Gothard was a guest at the November 2013 wedding of Chad and Erin Paine where he, according to Kelly Bates, gave the opening prayer. It was also Gothard’s birthday and, at this big Bates family wedding, they served their leader a big special cake:

And their now-disgraced leader stood in front of his special cake:

And then, three months later, when news of Gothard’s alleged misbehavior became public, sweet, loving mother Kelly Bates, the mom who—when compared to Michelle Duggar—seems so much more honest, took a move straight from the Duggar playbook. According to message board posters at FreeJinger.org, she allegedly deleted these pictures from her family website making it seem as though Gothard never happened. And while a picture of the Gothard cake is now back up on the revamped family site, it has a tag on the bottom: “Groom’s Cake.” Because if you can’t make your secrets go away, you can always give them new labels. Birthday celebrations for alleged creeps can easily become groom’s cakes just like molestation revelations can become a vehicle to bring a family closer to God.

It will be interesting to see how or if the Bates family responds to the Duggar allegations in the coming weeks, but for now they’ve stayed silent, no doubt choosing to protect their image and their new, successful show. But even if they do speak out against the Duggars (they won’t), don’t forget they still remain a fundamental part of the ATI / Gothard machine. And no matter how sweet they keep, no matter how nice they seem, there’s still plenty of evidence to suggest that the Bates family’s television ministry plays an active role in the horrifying problem of silence and abuse in fundamentalist families.

They believe this shit. And they wish your family would believe it, too.

Contact the author at lacey@gawker.com.

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Yesterday, a Cook County, Illinois, judge ordered the release of a photo of two Chicago police officers holding hunting rifles while standing over a black suspect dressed in antlers. One of the officers, Timothy McDermott, was fired last year over the picture, which was taken sometime between 1999 and 2003; the other cop, Jerome Finnigan, was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 2011 for his role in a cop-lead gang responsible for a series of robberies.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that federal prosecutors gave the photo to police investigators in 2013. Last year, a police board voted 5 to 4 to fire McDermott (the four members who voted against firing him suggested a suspension instead).

From the Sun-Times:

Sgt. Michael Barz of internal affairs interviewed McDermott in June 2013.

“I do remember an incident where I took a photo with Finnigan and it appears that this is it,” McDermott said in a transcript of the interview. “Finnigan called me over, told me to get in the picture and I sat in the picture. The photo was taken, and I went back to the business I was doing that day.”

McDermott said he could not remember when or where the photo was taken, or anything about the man with the antlers.

“I am embarrassed by my participation in this photograph,” he said. “I made a mistake as a young, impressionable police officer who was trying to fit in.”

During an interview with federal prosecutors, Finnegan allegedly said that he and McDermott arrested the man for being in possession of “20 bags of weed” but that they later let him go—without filing an arrest report—because he didn’t have a serious criminal record.

McDermott, who is the step-son of former Chicago Police Superintendent Thomas Byrne, is appealing his dismissal, though it’s unclear if his attorney, Daniel Herbert, will attempt a different strategy than the one he employed during the initial police board hearing, during which he argued that the photo could’ve been a harmless Christmas gag.

“What’s to say this individual wasn’t performing at a Christmas pageant in the district and was dressed as a reindeer and had taken the reindeer suit off?” he said.

Later, Herbert suggested that the incident was similar to the Seinfeld episode in which Jerry was falsely accused of picking his nose.

According to the Sun-Times, McDermott was a defendant in four lawsuits prior to his dismissal. Settlements from those suits cost the city $162,000, plus hundreds of thousands more in attorney’s fees.

Photo of Jerome Finnigan, left, and Timothy McDermott via the Sun-Times. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

A year after Instagram paparazzi gave us the first look at Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace, here’s the trailer for The End of the Tour, a forthcoming film about the beloved author in the months following the publication of Infinite Jest. Watch it below.

The trailer appears faithful to Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s account of a five-day stretch of Wallace’s Infinite Jest book tour, which was published in 2010 and on which The End of the Tour is based. (Jesse Eisenberg plays Lipsky.) That book had its moments, but was more useful as a document of Lipsky’s own anxieties than as a portrait of Wallace, who committed suicide two years before its publication.

Physical resemblance aside, Segel aptly channels Wallace, who in interviews was always low-key and charming, seeming both impressed with and a little embarrassed by his own mind. The trailer nails this dichotomy in a slightly hokey exchange between the two leads: “I got a real serious fear of being a certain way—I treasure my regular guy-ness,” says Wallace, to which Lipsky replies, “You don’t crack open a thousand-page book because you heard the author was a regular guy. You do it because he’s brilliant.”

Wallace’s estate renounced The End of the Tour last year, saying in a statement given through attorneys that his family members “have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support” the film.

Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Rhonda Byrne got very very rich by writing a book called The Secret, which contains much pseudoscientific/ mystical horse shit. Why can’t Rhonda Byrne get THE SECRET to work for herself?

The Secret, an Oprah-flogged book which has sold 19 million copies (not exaggerating although I assure you that I wish I were), posits the existence of a universal “law of attraction” which means that “as we think and feel, a corresponding frequency is sent out into the universe that attracts back to us events and circumstances on that same frequency.” So if you want great things to happen to you, just think positive thoughts, and they will. If you believe this horse shit, well, I have something worthless to sell you for an inflated price (a copy of the book The Secret).

In any case, the Wall Street Journal reports that Secret-whisperer Rhonda Byrne (pictured) put her palatial California home up for sale for $23.5 million last year. But now—for some reason which no universal law can explain—she has been forced to lower the price by 20 percent, because the house didn’t sell. Rhonda... why didn’t you use THE SECRET? She has an answer, naturally:

Ms. Byrne is known for her philosophy that visualizing a goal until one absolutely believes it is true can make that goal a reality. She said she could have used that principle to attain her original asking price, if she’d made it a major priority and “put in the time and energy.” Instead, she said she gave a lot of her energy to the in-development film version of “The Secret,” which she is co-producing, because “it’s going to make a big difference in people’s lives.”

Okay, sure.

If only Karl Popper had Oprah on his side.

[Photo: AP]

For decades, gadget pundit Leo Laporte, the host of a variety of internet and TV talk shows, has served as the neighborly face of technology. And just like some actual neighbors, he has a history of accidentally exposing himself. This time, his audience was treated to a photo of a penis, spotted among a collection of personal photos.

This particular incident occurred on May 24th, during an explanatory segment on Apple’s new Photos app. Most of the clip is the same sort of David Pogue explainer-mush that’s been Laporte’s bread and butter for years. While clicking through his photo library, Laporte brings up a grid of imported images: family, friends, food, and an erect penis.

The moment was captured (and spread) by TotalDrama.net, a website that admittedly exists purely to harass Laporte’s lucrative video production enterprise. They claim the slip-up has been scrubbed from the episode, and sure enough, the episode below can’t be found on any official “This Week in Tech” channels. But TotalDrama.net saved a copy of the clip, and you can see the penis thumbnail in question below at around the 13 second mark—note the concerned Oooh sound by Laporte:

TotalDrama also posted this moment from another Laporte program on the 24th, where he alludes to a “public relations” crisis of his own making. This footage also appears to have been taken down.

I asked Laporte what’s going on here with the dick sitch, and he told me that “trolls posted a photoshop purporting to be my penis... But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.”

It wouldn’t be the first time he’s gotten “caught.”In 2011, Laporte accidentally revealed a steamy IM conversation (“i still smell and taste you. i adore you.”) with his business partner. A year later, he did pretty much the exact same thing with a horny on-screen email (“I want you. Your cock inside me. Wanna fuck?”). Just the tip, indeed.

Contact the author at biddle@gawker.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: E93A 40D1 FA38 4B2B 1477 C855 3DEA F030 F340 E2C7

There were a lot of important things to discuss at today’s Department of Justice press conference about the corruption charges being brought against FIFA, but let’s worry about that stuff later. For now, we can focus on this dude from the IRS, who stepped up to the podium and unleashed hell:

“This really is the World Cup of fraud, and today we are issuing FIFA a red card.” Someone hit the air horn!!!

If your subway commute was more fucked than usual this morning, here’s why: Last night, thieves reportedly made off with at least 500 feet of copper cable from the A train tracks in Queens.

The copper theft, which took place late last night near Howard Beach, forced a suspension of service between Broad Channel and Rockaway Boulevard and delayed thousands of other passengers who use the A line, in part because—as Capital New York notes—many A and C trains are stored in the Rockaway Park rail yard and were unreachable. Limited service was restored to A trains around 10 am, according to the New York Times.

Image via Shutterstock. Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

After InTouch published a 2006 police report last week that detailed Josh Duggar’s molestation of his sisters, Josh admitted to the abuse in a statement to People. His parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, also gave a statement declaring that “that dark and difficult time caused us to seek God like never before.”

But there’s another accusation in the police report that the Duggars have not addressed. In a police interview with an unnamed Duggar child, the child admits to an investigator that the Duggar parents spank their children, and that “they have a rod.” Here’s the summary of that conversation from the police report, which was redacted by InTouch:

Inv. Taylor asked [redacted] about getting spanked. [redacted] said that when [redacted] is bad that [redacted] mother and dad spank [redacted]. Inv. Taylor asked what they use to spank. [redacted] said they have a rod. Inv. Taylor asked if they do this to all the kids and [redacted] said yes. Inv. Taylor asked if they leave any bruising [redacted] said no.

Perhaps spanking children with a rod is what Jesus would do? It’s hard to say, because although Jim Bob and Michelle have been vocal about how they raise and homeschool their children, they’ve never publicly admitted to administering corporal punishment. When a fan asked Michelle directly in 2010, “Do or have you ever had to spank your children?” she wrote an evasive response on her TLC blog.

“We have people ask us that all the time,” Michelle began. “We’ve really chosen to focus on praising our kids for good character, for Godly character. And as we do that, we find that we have a lot less trouble with correction when we are constantly looking for ways to praise them.”

She then goes on to explain that “in training the little guys, day in and day out, if I see the little ones not being kind to each other, I will take them aside and I will deal with them and talk to them and have them work this out amongst themselves and learn to communicate and be kind to each other. And then when I see them being sweet and doing what’s right, I make a big deal!”

“Deal with them” could mean a lot of things; the key word in Michelle’s statement, however, is “training.” According to The Duggar Family Blog—the most trusted and thorough fan-maintained resource regarding the Duggars—Michelle practices “blanket training” with her children when they are toddlers.

Blanket training is a parenting method that comes from the dangerous, backwards, evangelical parenting book To Train Up a Child by Michael and Debi Pearl. The Pearl method relies on corporal punishment to teach children total obedience, and it’s terrifying—at least three child deaths have been linked to the teachings in the book.

Blanket training is the Pearls’ first step to molding obedient children: starting in infancy, parents put their baby on a blanket and flick them with a flexible ruler or other instrument if the baby tries to roll or crawl off. Eventually, the baby is “trained” to ignore his or her natural curiosity and stay on the blanket, because he or she is scared.

Michelle admitted to using this type of training in a 2011 interview with The Duggar Family Blog, but she did not specifically mention using the corporal punishment aspect. “It’s not waiting until they do something wrong to correct them, but actually taking moments to train them,” Michelle said. “What they’re learning is self-control. ...They’re learning to obey Mommy’s voice.”

The police report indicates the Duggar children were disciplined by more than just “Mommy’s voice,” but the Duggars and TLC don’t want you to know that.

Got a tip about the Duggars? Email me at allie@gawker.com.

Photo via Getty.

Go ahead, do it. Drag and drop. Hold down the “delete” button for 45 minutes. Throw away your entire laptop if you must, but just get rid of it. Please, enough with the goddamn memoirs.

I’m going to upset some people, but I’m willing to hurt the feelings of a few to help the population of hungry book-lovers who are inundated with the vanity projects of people we’d get bored talking to at a party. Frankly, the memoir genre is sagging under the hubris of celebrity, the desire for a fat check, and the desperation of pushy agents and editors. Aspiring memoirists need to recognize their odds here and quit.

Here is a short list of memoirs that have come out in the last few years: Mindy Kaling’s Is Everybody Hanging Out Without Me, soon to be followed up with her book with B.J. Novak about them; Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please; Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl; Sophia Amoruso’s #GIRLBOSS, Grace Helbig’s The Art of Pretending to Be a Grown-Up; Rachel Dratch’s Girl Walks Into a Bar; Lea Michele’s Brunette Ambition; Giuliana Rancic’s Going Off Script; Sarah Silverman’s The Bedwetter; Portia de Rossi’s Unbearable Lightness; Ellen Degeneres’s Seriously, I’m Kidding; Chelsea Handler’s Uganda Be Kidding Me.

Those are just memoirs by famous women. If we got into the male writers and the non-celebrities we’d be here all day. No one wants that. No one wants any of this.

The overwhelming boredom and exhaustion of their potential readership will not stop the many people who are five drafts deep and have already blown their advances, but hopefully I can use this space to extinguish the spark and optimism of those who are reflecting, thinking, wondering to themselves: “Should I write a book about my life and my experiences with the unique and sarcastic twist that is my individual voice?” No, you very well should not. Stop it right now.

You should delete your memoir because, among a long list of other reasons, the story of your life is not as interesting as you think it is. That is the Alpha and Omega of the memoir glut.

We seem to be living in the era of, “Everybody has a story to tell.” And yes, they probably do, but that sure as shit doesn’t mean they should. Just as not all opinions are valid, not all lives translate into captivating stories when edited to maximize the marketing dollars.

Simply having lived and grown into a competent human being doesn’t mean anyone wants to read 300 pages about it. Just because you’ve achieved something great doesn’t mean your path to getting there was a thrill. Being an interesting person does not mean your life story is particularly compelling. If you grew up in an upper-middle-class town in the contiguous United States and had loving parents but always felt “different,” don’t write a damn memoir.

We all have embarrassing moments that we can look back upon and glean a bit of wisdom from. We all have humorous anecdotes about growing up in this crazy world that we can weave into life lessons about trusting yourself and working hard and BLAH blah blah. All of our moms did weird things, OK?

All of this counts for double when you factor in the ages of most of the people writing memoirs these days. I’m not saying that at 29 years old you haven’t lived a pretty cool life, but you don’t really need to be filling our bookshelves with your ironic reflections on it. Do you think Miley Cyrus is glad she “wrote” her 2009 memoir, Miles to Go? I doubt it.

And what’s going to happen after your book comes out, anyway? Let’s say you’re 30 years old and you write a memoir. You’re probably going to live for another 60 years. What if the latter two-thirds of your life are significantly more interesting than the first third? What do you do? Write another memoir, like an asshole or a desperate politician?

Please, just don’t.

This brings me to another point: Politicians are probably the only group of people who have some leniency when it comes to writing memoirs because they know nobody is reading that shit anyway. They didn’t write the book themselves and it’s solely a tool so they can appear on late night talk shows and seem personable and human-like before they announce that they’re running for office.

Still want to write that memoir? But Kara, my story—it’s different. Nobody who’s lived the life I have has talked about. I think I can really help people.

If you really want to help people, pay for their therapy sessions or volunteer somewhere. Collecting a check on your book is helping people in the same way that nixing the sour cream in your burrito bowl makes it healthy—sort of, but not really.

If you want to tell a story, do so without centering every single detail around yourself and your pithy afterthoughts. Maybe you have had a life experience that truly is unique and riveting and can teach us all something about life and love and loss and whatever other adjectives you suggest to the person writing your forward. If you can fill an entire book with that specific story, go for it—but nobody cares about the first time you saw a penis.

Better yet, go write some fiction that’s loosely based on your own life but much more interesting because you get to change all the stuff that nobody cares about. Be David Sedaris! He’s got it figured out!

Alternatively, as my colleague Jia puts it, you can write a memoir if you are “a fucking phenomenal flames writer.” However, at least seven different people across different professional backgrounds, ages, and races have to have used that exact phrase to describe your writing before you qualify.

How many memoirs are really that good? When’s the last time you a) actually finished reading an entire memoir and b) felt fully satisfied—that it was time well spent? Just write a pilot that’s canceled after two seasons and call it a day.

Contact the author kara@jezebel.com

Images via Amazon.

Dennis Sheehan, who served as U2’s tour manager for over thirty years, was found dead today in a Los Angeles hotel room. His death followed the first in a five-concert run for U2 at Los Angeles’s Forum, and is the latest in a string of terrible disasters for the group, which appears to be suffering under a mysterious, powerful curse.

TMZ reports Sheehan was found unconscious in his room at the Sunset Marquis Hotel early this morning. Paramedics were called for a reported cardiac arrest and he was pronounced dead at the scene. He was in his late 60s.

What did Irish rockers U2 do to deserve this curse and all of its remarkably unpleasant consequences? Man. We may never know.

Image via Getty. Contact the author at kelly.conaboy@gawker.com.

In 2005, Duggar Family patriarch Jim Bob brought his son Josh to the Arkansas state troopers’ office after catching him fondling a female minor. As reported by In Touch and Radar, the two met with Joe Hutchens, a 26-year veteran state trooper, who counseled Josh but failed to follow up on his offense against the young girl. Hutchens’ failure to act allowed the statute of limitations to expire on the incident.

Some have framed Hutchens failure to follow up as some act of Christian mercy and forgiveness (the sort which Mike Huckabee has espoused for the wayward Josh). However, it seems more likely that Hutchens didn’t follow up because he himself was into criminal sexual activity. That same year, Hutchens was arrested on child porn charges; he served several years for his crimes, but after he was released from prison he re-offended while on parole.

An investigation found that Hutchens’ child porn habit never truly ceased. According to court records, Hutchens’ Yahoo profile screen name was “dadsluv2002”; under his interests, Hutchens listed “Strangers With Candy,” “Kinki Kids,” “Child Play series,” “Puberty,” and “Pre School.” Court papers also show that Hutchens was in possession of pictures depicting pubescent girls engaging in oral and vaginal sex. Child porn was also found on the county-owned computer Hutchens used for work. During his police interview, Hutchens admitted that he masturbated to pictures of young girls ages 2 to 3 and 12 to 13.

In 2010, Hutchens took a plea bargain and was sentenced to 56 years. Below is a report on Hutchens risk assessment as a sex offender provided by the court.

Update: In an interview with In Touch, Hutchens “shoots down” Duggar’s version of events, saying Josh Duggar only disclosed one instance of molestation to him, which is why he didn’t report him to an abuse hotline.

He said the fact that it was a one-time incident influenced his decision not to report it. “I did what I thought was right and obviously it wasn’t,” he says. “If I had to do it over again, I would have told him immediately I am going to call the hotline and contacted the trooper that worked those cases and have a full report made. I thought I could handle it myself.

Contact the author at natasha.vargas-cooper@jezebel.com.

Images via Getty and the AR Dept. of Corrections.