As expected, Michael Johnson (aka “Tiger Mandingo”) has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. In May he was found guilty on one count of recklessly infecting a partner with HIV, one count of attempting to recklessly infect a partner with HIV, and three counts of recklessly exposing partners to HIV.

Are you a multi-millionaire real estate developer looking for a large mixed-use property that is chic yet gritty, gritty yet stylish, stylish yet authentic, authentic yet upscale, upscale yet downtown, downtown yet as expensive as anything uptown, as expensive as anything uptown yet appealingly sketchy-looking? I’ve got just the building for you.

Curbed reports that 190 Bowery is for sale again, months after its longtime owner Jay Maisel sold it to real estate rich guy Aby Rosen for $55 million. Was buying up the graffiti-covered hulk a less prudent decision than it initially seemed? Curbed notes that the listing promises the building will be “delivered vacant,” meaning that the consortium of tenants that signed on to occupy a few floors in April may have bailed out. http://gawker.com/downtown-manha...

From the listing:

The open floor plans combined with the property being delivered vacant, offer an unusually large blank canvas for a developer or user to execute a myriad of potential visions, including a boutique residential condominium, a retail flagship, or a truly historic and one-of-a-kind single family residence. Regardless of the strategy, the end result will change the landscape of the Bowery for years to come and will be a project unmatched in the price premiums it obtains.

That part about an opportunity to “change the landscape of the Bowery for years to come” is true, but considering the price tag, it’s not hard to imagine what sort of change will be coming.

Image via The All-Nite Images/Flickr. Contact the author at andy@gawker.com.

Twenty days of Kristin ago, Kristin Cavallari chose to forsake her followers in pursuit of cold, hard cash by making the once free-to-access Official Kristin Cavallari App for iPhone and Android cost $2.99. Per month. Readers (?) of the app revolted, and so seven days later, Kristin quietly expressed a change of heart.

She offered two (2) free articles for anyone (anyone...) to read. Six days after that, the benevolent Kristin posted another free article—an almost entirely plagiarized post about iodine titled, “Iodine by Kristin Cavallari.”

It appears now, however, that Kristin’s streak of generosity has come to an end. Today she posted a new, exclusive article that will cost interested parties $2.99 to view. What is the title of this post?

“Beach Day by Kristin Cavallari.”

An example of a post that Kristin believes people will pay to read is “Beach Day by Kristin Cavallari.”

I guess it’s fun to play app.

This has been 500 Days of Kristin.

[Photo via Getty]

Deadspin Hey, You Don’t Have To Read Harper Lee’s New Book | Gizmodo How Much Rain Would End the Drought? | io9 The Worst Badvertising and Best Radvertising of Comic-Con 2015 | Jezebel Resilience Is Futile: How Well-Meaning Nonprofits Perpetuate Poverty | Kinja Popular Posts

I can’t tell who’s having more fun in this video—the shark that was beached or the human that took it upon themselves to be good samaritans. Just kidding, it’s totally the shark.

A juvenile great white was trying to eat seagulls (gross) Monday morning on Cape Cod’s Chatham Beach and inadvertently beached itself (idiot). A bunch of people kept the shark (“basically a toddler” says CBS Boston) alive by pouring water onto its gills until shark expert Greg Skomal arrived.

“Still alive but very sluggish, barely moving, so we put a tag on it,” Skomal told CBS Boston, “and then resuscitated the shark by putting a bridle around it and with the harbormaster’s help put it out into deeper water where we were able to resuscitate it and let it go.”

I joke because I care. The video above is nothing short of a triumph of the Carcharodon spirit, which is similar to but not to be confused with a triumph of the of the delphinidae spirit.

Will this shark come back to visit its saviors and thank them in the only way a great white knows how (by ripping into live flesh with its teeth)? Maybe. More likely, when the tides rise and we all drown, it will remember this moment, chuckle to itself, and think, “See ya, suckers.”

Also relevant:

[h/t Gothamist]

People reports Louis Tomlinson, the member of One Direction whose features are most beautifully feminine, is having a baby with Los Angeles-based stylist Briana Jungwirth. Congratulations to the surprised couple!

An alleged mutual friend spoke to People about the happy news:

“Louis is happy and very excited about becoming a dad and he thinks Briana will be an amazing mother. It was a surprise at first, but he and Briana are very, very close friends and this has brought them even closer.”

It’s so nice to have a friend.

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

Reddit has a choice: it can either detox its increasingly loud racist, sexist, backwards quarters, or slowly die. An announcement by the site’s new CEO says a change is on the way.http://gawker.com/no-one-wants-t...

From CEO Steve Huffman:

Hey Everyone,

There has been a lot of discussion lately —on reddit, in the news, and here internally— about reddit’s policy on the more offensive and obscene content on our platform. Our top priority at reddit is to develop a comprehensive Content Policy and the tools to enforce it.

The overwhelming majority of content on reddit comes from wonderful, creative, funny, smart, and silly communities. That is what makes reddit great. There is also a dark side, communities whose purpose is reprehensible, and we don’t have any obligation to support them. And we also believe that some communities currently on the platform should not be here at all.

Neither Alexis nor I created reddit to be a bastion of free speech, but rather as a place where open and honest discussion can happen: These are very complicated issues, and we are putting a lot of thought into it. It’s something we’ve been thinking about for quite some time. We haven’t had the tools to enforce policy, but now we’re building those tools and reevaluating our policy.

We as a community need to decide together what our values are. To that end, I’ll be hosting an AMA on Thursday 1pm pst to present our current thinking to you, the community, and solicit your feedback.

PS - I won’t be able to hang out in comments right now. Still meeting everyone here!

Emphasis added. Could Reddit finally decide that it doesn’t want its operating budget to include running websites dedicated to creepshots and /r/CoonTown? We might find out on Thursday.

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

A baby put down for a nap in an unlicensed daycare Monday never woke up, police say, leading the city to shut down the center, which was apparently housed in a loft in SoHo.

Karl Towndrow, the three-month old son of visual artist Lee Towndrow and Scholastic producer Amber Scorah, was fed a bottle of breast milk and put down for a nap on Monday morning at SoHo Child Care, the New York Times reports.

The Daily News reports the daycare’s facilitator, Maryellen Strautmanis, tried to burp Towndrow after feeding him, but “he was fussy,” so she placed him in a bassinet for a nap around 11:45 a.m.

An employee reportedly found the baby unresponsive, with blue lips, around 12:15 p.m. He was later pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital.

It was the baby’s first day at the daycare, which was reportedly recommended to Scorah by friends. It was also her first day returning to work from maternity leave, according to the Daily News.

The Times reports that 14 other children between the ages of three months and three years were present at the day care.

Police say the business was never licensed, though it had apparently been open for more than a decade—according to its Yelp page, Strautmanis began operations in 2001. The facility, located on the second floor of a walk-up building on Greene Street, was shut down by the city Tuesday.

Strautmanis refused to speak to police without her attorney present Monday, the Times reports. The city is reportedly waiting for the results of an autopsy on the baby before pursing any charges against her.

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

Kindhearted giant Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was on the set of his upcoming film Central Intelligence Tuesday when a “little accident” occurred that caused him to give forth a hearty chuckle from the depths of his gargantuan throat.

“Are you bleeding?” asked tiny director Rawson Thurber (actually 6’1”, but standing next to The Rock). The Rock was not bleeding; bleeding does not fit into the busy schedule of a man who has time for balling only. Why would the Rock be bleeding, Rawson Thurber?

Jesus christ The Rock that is not a natural alignment for a human finger and I think you understand that because you’re laughing and making a video but why are you laughing and making a video when part of your finger is perpendicular to its usual alignment.

It seems that The Rock transcended pain itself sometime after Pain & Gain (2013). Pain is no more. Now there is only gain.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Now let’s pop that sumbitch back in.

Update: A rep from New Line tells Variety The Rock was just faking, which is really hard to believe from a former professional wrestler. Shame on you, Mr. The Rock.

[h/t Complex]

Earlier today, an eight-minute “undercover” video surfaced purporting to show Planned Parenthood’s senior director of medical services talking about selling the body parts of aborted human fetuses for the non-profit’s financial gain. Which would be shocking, certainly—if any of it were true.

In the video, Planned Parenthood Senior Director Deborah Nucatola says some pretty graphic and seemingly disturbing things about tissue donation:

A lot of people want intact hearts these days, because they’re looking for specific nodes... Some people want lower extremities too, which, that’s simple. I mean, that’s easy.

She then goes on to talk about what sounds like Planned Parenthood’s monetary reward:

Every provider has had patients who want to donate their tissue, and they absolutely want to accommodate them. They just want to do it in a way that is not perceived as, “This clinic is selling tissue, this clinic is making money off of this.”

Except that, as Planned Parenthood told The Hill, its affiliates “can legally receive reimbursement from a tissue donation procedure for the ‘additional expenses related tissue donation, which can vary based on individual circumstance,’ but it does not go to staff members or providers.” These “additional expenses” might be the $10-30 it costs to transport the tissue being donated, which Planned Parenthood notes is “standard across the medical field.” And no, the patient donating the tissue doesn’t receive any financial reimbursement either.

In reality, the donation of fetal tissue is no different than any other situation in which a patient might donate tissue to scientific research. No money changes hands, and the donation could help pave the way to any number of medical breakthroughs.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the people behind the video’s release from going to great lengths to try to paint Planned Parenthood as operating outside the law. According to The Center for Medical Progress’s accompanying release, “The video is the first by The Center for Medical Progress in its ‘Human Capital’ series, a nearly 3-year-long investigative journalism study of Planned Parenthood’s illegal trafficking of aborted fetal parts.”

While Planned Parenthood notes that the group is “a long time anti-abortion activist that has used deceptive and unethical video editing, and that has created a fake medical website as well as a fake human tissue website that purports to provide services to stem cell researchers.” (For what it’s worth, the Center for Medical Progress did finally release the full video, though its claims remain just as flawed.)

The video itself opens with a short clip of former Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt that is edited to give the appearance of condemning the recorded conversation that follows. But the 20/20 segment on which Feldt appears is actually an investigation into abuses made by private sector “tissue and organ procurement companies.” And Feldt even went on to later affirm that “Planned Parenthood supports research using fetal tissue in accordance with legal and ethical guidelines and are deeply concerned about the attempt by some to profit from the humanitarian contributions of courageous women.”

In other words, this is a case of words being taken grossly out of context. Planned Parenthood is doing nothing even remotely shady here, nor are they doing something they haven’t publicly discussed before on multiple occasions. The real question now, though, is who’s behind this whole campaign in the first place.

The video, which had supposedly been held onto for a year before being released earlier this morning, was put out by The Center for Medical Progress, which describes itself as “a group of citizen journalists dedicated to monitoring and reporting on medical ethics and advances.” Oddly enough, 10 of the the 11 total tweets made by the group’s Twitter account are from today, while the only two posts on its website seem to be about the Planned Parenthood video. And just like its Twitter account, the group’s Facebook page is only a few months old.

However, cached Google results reveal that way back in May of 2013, there were quite a few more posts on the group’s website. Trying to click on any of them now, though, brings you to this:

We do at least know that this is not the same group as the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Medical Progress, which has made sure to put up the following banner on its landing page in light of the recent drama.

It’s also worth noting that that Center for Medical Progress (which is part of a larger conservative think tank) has received quite a bit of Koch brother funding. So even Koch Brothers affiliates are trying to keep themselves the hell away from whatever it is this group is actually up to.

But Bobby Jindal sure isn’t! He’s taken the deeply flawed (not to mention false) attack and run with it, issuing an order for the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals to investigate Planned Parenthood. Despite no indication in the video itself that it had any relation to Louisiana in the first place.

But according to The Times-Picayune, “Jindal said he was ordering an investigation in part because Planned Parenthood is planning to open a clinic in New Orleans.” A clinic that, now, won’t be able to open at all thanks to Jindal’s order including the suspension of any new licenses. How convenient.

Update 6:46pm:

According to Snopes, the man currently being credited as the “leader” of the Center for Medical Progress, David Daleiden, is directly linked to James O’Keefe—otherwise known as the right-wing zealot behind the heavily edited and profoundly misleading videos that instigated the ACORN controversy back in 2009.http://gawker.com/5508190/okeefe...

According to a 2009 Claremont Conservativearticle (written by none other than everyone’s favorite alleged floor-shitter and conservative blogger Chuck Johnson):

James O’Keefe is a friend of David Daleiden’s. O’Keefe and Hannah Giles have been going coast to coast documenting instances of ACORN employees willingly giving advice on how to avoid paying taxes and shielding a would be pimp (running for congress) and a prostitutent from the watchful eye of the law.

Whether James O’Keefe is involved this time remains to be seen, but considering the journalism school laughingstock’s history, it certainly wouldn’t be a surprise.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

A recently filed federal lawsuit has accused police officers in Alabama of tasering a 16-year-old girl multiple times, binding and gagging her and threatening to have her committed to mental hospital—all for the apparent crime of having a seizure in public, The Washington Post reports.

“A Taser was used three times on a child’s chest, during a medical emergency, while she was pinned to the ground by officers,” attorney Gregory Harp, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the teen and her mother, told AL.com. “Other officers present at the scene failed to intervene. Her mother was knocked to the ground, handcuffed, and then she herself Tased and arrested.”

According to the complaint, the incident occurred when an unruly crowd triggered the girl’s epilepsy at hip-hop concert this January. From AL.com:

This caused the crowd to part around the girl, and her younger sister informed employees of Center Stage that she was suffering a seizure. The suit states an employee picked her up and carried her to the lobby, where she was “unceremoniously dumped” onto the floor and held with a chokehold.

The suit alleges the mother learned of her daughter’s condition from the sister and came to the venue. When she arrived at the lobby dressed in a T-shirt and pajamas, the mother was “held down on the ground at five different points of her body” by police, then restrained to hold her wrists, hands and fingers immobile. After a police officer twice instructed another officer to “get her,” an officer fired his Taser at the mother while she was restrained, causing her to urinate.

The Taser was also employed three times against the teenager, who was “face down with her arms secured behind her,” the suit states. She temporarily lost consciousness and was taken to Gadsden Regional Medical Center, while the mother was arrested for disorderly conduct.

The lawsuit claims officers then bound and gagged the girl while joking about her mother’s arrest and threatening to send her to a mental facility.

WBRC reports the plaintiffs are seeking punitive and medical damages and an injunction against police to provide officers with “proper training and supervision.”

[Image via AP Images]

On Tuesday, street artist Shepard Fairey turned himself in to Detroit police, who issued a warrant for his arrest on vandalism charges last month. Fairey reportedly pled not guilty and has been released on a $75,000, 10 percent bond. He is expected back in court on July 21.http://gawker.com/street-artist-...

A specter is haunting Portland—the specter of dildos.

According to Reuters, hundreds of “phallic sex toys” have recently started appearing on Rip City power lines, prompting numerous complaints to the city and several delightful Twitter posts.

#Sex Toys Appear on Portland Street Power Lines http://t.co/TusMvDfdZw #NewsTicker #Toy pic.twitter.com/6m916fOCFK

July 14, 2015

Throwing dildos over the power lines has become a thing in portland. #keeportlandweird They're all over town. pic.twitter.com/FIc1COao27

June 27, 2015

portland oregon is on a high dildo alert pic.twitter.com/LI5TxruB5R

July 12, 2015

But fear not, penily-menaced Portlanders, because officials say the synthetic dicks pose no immediate threat. From Reuters:

A spokesman for public utility Portland General Electric said he did not believe the rubber products posed a fire hazard.

Still, area power companies would prefer you didn’t use their lines as ad hoc nun-chub hangers.

“The temptation may be there for tittering,” a Pacific Power spokesperson told The Oregonian, “but we want to keep the lines as safe as possible.”

[Image via YouTube]

Hey @asvpxrocky & @ActionBronson thx for the shout out on “1Train." Not sure what it means, but let’s blaze one & talk about it some time.

July 14, 2015

[h/t Uproxx]

Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong is having a goddamn ball this week, bouncing around announcement threads and spilling site secrets to his heart’s content. His latest big reveal: Reddit’s board has been itching to purge the site of users’ precious hate-based subreddits since the beginning. And recently, the only thing stopping them had been... Ellen Pao. Whoops.

Wong posted the particularly illuminating missive in response to today’s official announcement that the site isn’t supposed to be a “bastion of free speech.” With the overarching message of the post being—way to get rid of the only person actually fighting for you, idiots:

AYYYYYY LMAO

How’s everyone doing? This is AWESOME!

There’s something I neglected to tell you all this time (“executive privilege”), but I’m declassifying a lot of things these days. Back around the time of the /r/creepshots[1]debacle, I wrote to /u/spez[2] for advice. I had met him shortly after I had taken the job, and found him to be a great guy. Back in the day when reddit was small, the areas he oversaw were engineering, product, and the business aspects - those are the same things I tend to focus on in a company (each CEO has certain areas of natural focus, and hires others to oversee the rest). As a result, we were able to connect really well and have a lot of great conversations - talking to him was really valuable.

Well, when things were heating around the /r/creepshots[3]thing and people were calling for its banning, I wrote to him to ask for advice. The very interesting thing he wrote back was “back when I was running things, if there was anything racist, sexist, or homophobic I’d ban it right away. I don’t think there’s a place for such things on reddit. Of course, now that reddit is much bigger, I understand if maybe things are different.”

I’ve always remembered that email when I read the occasional posting here where people say “the founders of reddit intended this to be a place for free speech.” Human minds love originalism, e.g. “we’re in trouble, so surely if we go back to the original intentions, we can make things good again.” Sorry to tell you guys but NO, that wasn’t their intention at all ever. Sucks to be you, /r/coontown[4] - I hope you enjoy voat!

The free speech policy was something I formalized because it seemed like the wiser course at the time. It’s worth stating that in that era, we were talking about whether it was ok for people to post creepy pictures of women taken legally in public. That’s shitty, but it’s a far cry from the extremes of hate that some parts of the site host today. It seemed that allowing creepers to post (anonymized) pictures of women taken in public, in a relatively small subreddit that never showed up on the front page, was a small price to pay for making it clear that we were a place welcoming of all opinions and discourse.

Having made that decision - much of reddit’s current condition is on me. I didn’t anticipate what (some) redditors would decide to do with freedom. reddit has become a lot bigger - yes, a lot better - AND a lot worse. I have to take responsibility.

But... the most delicious part of this is that on at least two separate occasions, the board pressed /u/ekjp[5] to outright ban ALL the hate subreddits in a sweeping purge. She resisted, knowing the community, claiming it would be a shitshow. Ellen isn’t some “evil, manipulative, out-of-touch incompetent she-devil” as was often depicted. She was approved by the board and recommended by me because when I left, she was the only technology executive anywhere who had the chops and experience to manage a startup of this size, AND who understood what reddit was all about. As we can see from her post-resignation activity[6] , she knows perfectly well how to fit in with the reddit community and is a normal, funny person - just like in real life - she simply didn’t sit on reddit all day because she was busy with her day job.

Ellen was more or less inclined to continue upholding my free-speech policies. /r/fatpeoplehate[7] was banned for inciting off-site harassment, not discussing fat-shaming. What all the white-power racist-sexist neckbeards don’t understand is that with her at the head of the company, the company would be immune to accusations of promoting sexism and racism: she is literally Silicon Valley’s #1 Feminist Hero, so any “SJWs” would have a hard time attacking the company for intentionally creating a bastion (heh) of sexist/racist content. She probably would have tolerated your existence so long as you didn’t cause any problems - I know that her long-term strategies were to find ways to surface and publicize reddit’s good parts - allowing the bad parts to exist but keeping them out of the spotlight. It would have been very principled - the CEO of reddit, who once sued her previous employer for sexual discrimination, upholds free speech and tolerates the ugly side of humanity because it is so important to maintaining a platform for open discourse. It would have been unassailable.

Well, now she’s gone (you did it reddit!), and /u/spez[8] has the moral authority as a co-founder to move ahead with the purge. We tried to let you govern yourselves and you failed, so now The Man is going to set some Rules. Admittedly, I can’t say I’m terribly upset.

And let’s hope he’s right. Not only could this mean an end to the many festering, self-propagating pits of hate that exist throughout the site, but the many redditors who made so many people’s lives living hells—all under the pretense of crusading for free speech—would be getting one hefty dose of karmic justice. Everyone wins.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

Yesterday, the Oklahoma Republican Party posted a message on Facebook comparing America’s food stamp receipts—almost half of whom are children—to wild animals dependent on handouts.

Today, party official Randy wrote to say he was sorry, so very sorry, that some of you “misinterpreted” his since-deleted post.

Of course, Randy’s intended message is now clear: The needy should be out there foraging for their meals in our nation’s parks, just as God and Ronald Reagan intended.

The Oklahoma GOP apologizes for any confusion.

[Images via Facebook/The Washington Post]

Despite efforts by the city of Gardena, California to suppress the footage, a video showing officers killing an unarmed, seemingly confused man was made public on Tuesday, the L.A. Times reports.

Earlier that day, a federal judge ruled that there was a strong public interest in releasing the footage, rejecting the city’s argument that it had settled a lawsuit over the shooting for $4.7 million with the belief the video would be kept secret.

“The fact that they spent the city’s money, presumably derived from taxes, only strengthens the public’s interest in seeing the videos,” wrote Judge Stephen V. Wilson in his decision. “Moreover, defendants cannot assert a valid compelling interest in sealing the videos to cover up any wrongdoing on their part or to shield themselves from embarrassment.”

The video shows the final moments of Ricardo Diaz-Zeferino, who was killed by Gardena police two years ago. From City News Service:

Diaz-Zeferino was gunned down on June, 2, 2013, after police responded to a call that a bicycle had been stolen from a nearby pharmacy and noticed two men riding bikes.

The victim approached the officers and attempted to explain that his brother had reported the bicycle stolen and that the two men were not thieves but his friends, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit alleges that police shot Diaz-Zeferino eight times and that he laid on the street, crying out in Spanish “Hasta aqui llegue” or “This is the end of me.”

Gardena police maintained the shooting was justified because the victim was acting erratically and reached into his waistband despite a command to raise his hands.

Attorney Samuel Paz, who represented Diaz-Zeferino in the lawsuit, told the Associated Press he may ask for a federal civil rights investigation of the shooting.

“I think it is really helpful for the public to understand why they would be willing to pay $4.7 million to settle the case when we were on the eve of trial,” Paz said. “When the public sees the video and other law enforcement agencies see the video, this is very much a criminal act.”

If you were wondering what it looked like when Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán escaped from a maximum-security prison on Saturday night, good news: a security camera was running in his cell the entire time, and the footage was released tonight by Mexican authorities, along with a detailed look at the tunnel that led him to freedom.
http://gawker.com/sinaloa-cartel...

The video was released tonight during a press conference held by Mexico’s National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido. In the clip, you can see Guzmán—who currently has a $3.8 million bounty on his head—pacing in his cell, from the bed to the shower and back. At one point, he disappears behind the shower stall before emerging again. He walks back to his bed, appears to put on shoes, then returns to the shower and drops through what we now know was a two-by-two foot hole in the floor, gone for good.

The video also contains footage of Guzmán’s cell and the tunnel that led him away from the prison, taken by authorities after his escape. Here is a close-up of the hole he slipped into:

This is what the tunnel looked like from the inside. You can see pipes and wires lining its ceiling:

This appears to be some sort of transportation cart:

Some other supplies in the tunnel:

The ladder that brought him back up:

“El Chapo” was captured in Mexico in February of last year. He had previously spent 14 years on the run after his last prison escape in 2001, and he doesn’t appear to be shy about celebrating his latest trick.http://gawker.com/leaked-photos-...

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

On Tuesday, SNL alums Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joined SNL alum Jimmy Fallon to play “True Confessions,” which mostly consisted of the comedians deciding if their former coworkers were lying, bad at telling stories or just pretending to be bad at telling stories.

It’s not totally clear which former Weekend Update hosts is supposed to have won the game, but after hearing a (possibly fictional) story about Fey being mistaken for a prostitute at a Monaco casino while wearing a polka dot jumpsuit, I’m pretty sure it’s all of us.

We’ve got a long wait until Game of Thrones comes back, and there are a lot of situations we’re going to be freaking out about until then. Ser Davos Seaworth is in the middle of about three of them. So when we caught up with actor Liam Cunningham, we had a lot of questions for him. And he had answers!

Spoilers for Game of Thrones’ recent episodes ahead...

Mostly, we were just really curious to hear Cunningham’s thoughts about Ser Davos’ state of mind, and what the Onion Knight might be liable to do now that everything has fallen apart. We talked to Cunningham at the Entertainment Weekly party at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday night, and there are a lot more interviews from that event coming up.

To refresh your memory, here are the messes that Davos is surrounded by. His liege lord, King Stannis, is apparently dead, and Stannis’ army is destroyed or deserted. Meanwhile, Davos is back at Castle Black, where they just let a ton of Wildlings come into Westeros through the Wall. He’s up there with the Lady Melisandre, the foreign priestess who apparently just realized her faith in Stannis was misplaced. And of course, the Lord Commander Jon Snow was just stabbed, apparently fatally. And there’s that army of snow zombies. Interesting times.

You can watch the video above for our whole conversation with Cunningham, but here are the major points.

Did Davos know what would happen to Shireen?

Davos left Stannis’ side, to go back to Castle Black—but did he know that Stannis would burn the Princess Shireen alive as soon as he was gone? “He probably used his female intuition,” responds Cunningham. “That’s why he tried to take Selyse and Shireen with him... but what could he do? He tried three or four times to say, ‘I want take them with me, or let me just take the princess.’ So he knows that something is up—he’s obviously got a sense of that.”

But “there’s very little you can do” in the face of Stannis’ recalcitrance. “He’s my boss, or he was.” Having a scene where Davos tells Stannis, “Don’t burn your daughter” would have just been “cheap drama,” Cunningham says.

And if Davos had actually known that Shireen would get burned alive, “he wouldn’t have gone,” insists Cunningham. “He had a sense that something wasn’t right. But if he’d known that something like that was going to happen, no way. He would have whisked her away. He would have done what he did with Gendry, without a doubt—maybe not put her in a boat.”

And now, Ser Davos can never have it out with Stannis. “Life is like that,” says Cunningham. “You can have a big fight with somebody who’s near and dear to you, and they can get hit by a car the next day. The show is a reflection of life in all its complexity. It’s not a simple show. I think that’s why people like it so much. It doesn’t do the obvious.”

But will Davos have it out with Melisandre? “I don’t know. You would figure,” says Cunningham. “You can try and speculate. However, they have this weird need for each other, in a strange sort of way... She did save his life when Stannis wanted to kill him.”

Trouble at Castle Black

So now, Davos is in a bad spot—”Castle Black is on its head now,” says Cunningham, following Jon Snow’s assassination. He was “trying to get away from trouble. All he seems to find is trouble.”

The good news is, Ser Davos is probably the most level-headed person left alive at Castle Black at this point. “There’s not many [left], is there?” laughs Cunningham. “His powers of lateral thinking are very good,” says Cunningham of Davos.

Davos has lost everyone and everything he cared about at this point—but “we all battle through,” says Cunningham. “He’s not a guy that gives up easily.” At the same time, Cunningham hasn’t read the scripts for season six yet.

Is Davos somebody who needs to be a follower, or could he step up and become a leader, when he finds himself in the middle of a leadership vacuum? “He doesn’t have the stupidity to want to be a leader,” says Cunningham. “He’s much too level-headed. He’s not ambitious.”

“He’s definitely a great second in command, but I don’t think” Davos is leadership material, adds Cunningham. “Then again, some people get greatness thrust upon him. Maybe that’ll happen.”

Did Davos welcome the fact that Stannis cut off his fingers (for smuggling) out of Stockholm Syndrome, or a need to believe in someone else, no matter what? “It wasn’t so much that. He had a grudging respect for the honesty of it. As Stannis did with him. They had sort of similar feelings about the justice, or whatever you’d want to call it, of punishing him for his misdeeds. [Stannis had] also taken him out of the gutter, given him a solid education, and given him a much better life. So it’s that weird complexity thing, again, that I like so much in the show.”

Contact the author at charliejane@io9.com.