Deadspin More Than 100 ESPN Employees Signed Up For Ashley Madison From Work | Gizmodo These Former “Students” Say Trump University Was a Scam | io9 The Summer Movies Of 2015: What Worked and What Didn’t | Jezebel I Went Undercover to Find Out What It Takes to Be an Underpaid NBA Cheerleader | Kinja Popular Posts

In a video posted this evening, the Christian vlogger Sam Rader—best known for “surprising” his wife with her own positive pregnancy test in a viral video—announced to his followers that he and his family will be taking a break from posting daily videos on YouTube in light of recent events.

On Friday, Sam admitted to using a paid account on the cheating website Ashley Madison while being married to his wife, Nia. (God has forgiven him for this sin, he says.) On Saturday, Sam was kicked out of the Vlogger Fair conference in Seattle after threatening another vlogger.

Sam appears to have filmed the video directly after he was ejected from the conference. His wife, Nia, trails 10 feet behind him as he apologizes to his followers for “making a stupid, rash decision” to get into an altercation at the event.

At one point, Nia almost gets away.

At the end of the video, Sam promises, “We’re going to take a break [from vlogging] for about a week, maybe five to seven days. Could be less, could be a little more. As of right now we just know we need a small break.”

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

A man who allegedly scaled a White House perimeter wall in March was shot and killed today after slashing a sheriff’s deputy inside a Pennsylvania courthouse, CNN reports.

Authorities say 34-year-old Curtis Smith ran past metal detectors at Chester County Justice Center just before noon on Tuesday and began attacking a sheriff’s deputy with a knife. Another deputy then opened fire on Smith, killing him. From WCAU:

Smith was set to face burglary, assault and harassment charges at a preliminary hearing—that has been continued multiple times—in October stemming from a May domestic assault arrest, according to court records. He also pleaded guilty in late May to traffic violations.

Attorney Lewis Hannah III, who represented Smith in the domestic violence case, called his client’s death “really tragic.”

“He was a truck driver,” Hannah said. “He worked every day, had a family, a wife, you know, you would have never have thought.”

Hannah said his client was supposed to obtain counseling before the next hearing and that’s why Smith went to the courthouse Tuesday. “He had no terrorist claim or anything like that,” he said.

Earlier this year, Smith was charged with unlawful entry after police say he climbed a stone perimeter wall near the White House. According to The Washington Post, court documents say Smith “left [his] home of origin and drove to [the] White House to pass a message to the president.”

Officials told WPVI-TV they have not established a motive for Tuesday’s attack.

[Image via AP Images]

On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s security temporarily removed Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from a press conference in Iowa after the journalist tried to confront the presidential candidate about his immigration policy without being called on.

“Sit down, you weren’t called, sit down,” Trump told Ramos, who protested, “I have a right to ask a question.”

“No you don’t,” said Trump, adding, “Go back to Univision.”

After Ramos was escorted out of the room, Trump denied being responsible for his ejection and later allowed the Al Punto host to return and ask his questions, which the GOP frontrunner largely ignored. From CBS News:

[Ramos] asked Trump how he plans to deport 11 million people, to which Trump replied, “The one thing we’re going to start with immediately is the gangs.” Undocumented criminals, he said, are “going to be out so fast, your head will spin.”

Acknowledging that “most” immigrants are good people, Trump added that he’d like the Mexican immigrants he plans to deport to come back legally. “We’ll have a wall, and the wall’s going to have a big, beautiful door where people can come in legally,” he said.

When Ramos pressed for specifics of his plan to deport undocumented immigrants and build a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump insisted, “I’m a great manager, I know how to manage things.”

Challenged about his claimed support among Latinos, Trump told Ramos, “How much am I suing Univision for?”http://gawker.com/delusional-che...

In a statement, Fusion CEO and president of news for Univision Isaac Lee later said, “We’d love for Mr. Trump to sit down for an in-depth interview with Jorge to talk about the specifics of his proposals.”

Amazon, the modern-day Moloch Machine that makes it perilously easy to buy a $75 Natalie Imbruglia single while blackout drunk, revealed a plan on Tuesday to remove the bleary-eyed middleman and bring the stupid juice directly to their customers’ doors. http://gawker.com/dont-forget-th...

In 60 minutes or less.

“Residents of Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond and Kirkland can now get one-hour delivery on tens of thousands of items like paper towels, wine, beer, chilled and frozen items like milk and ice cream, televisions and Kindle devices,” said Amazon in a press release.

Sure, sure, just regular “I need it within the hour” stuff like TVs, Kindles and oh yeah, fuckin’ boooooze.

Luckily, the service—called “Prime Now”—is currently only available to Seattle-area Prime members, but Amazon says it’s open to enabling impulsive drunks in other cities.

“Like with any product offering, we will evaluate customer response and if customers love the convenience of having alcohol delivered in under an hour right to their doors then we’ll look to expand the offering,” an Amazon spokesperson ominously told BuzzFeed News.

[Image via Shutterstock]

Uh-oh, is there a doctor in the house? Because I think I’m having a cute-mergency!

This week, an Australian man’s bike ride ended in utter cute-astrophe when he stumbled upon a cuddly conclave of kangaroos, each unearthly beast silently returning his gaze with a pair of abysmal, ever-watchful eyes.

Can you say “adorbs”? LOL!

[Image via YouTube]

According to a post that just went up on the Duggar Family Blog, Josh Duggar has officially entered himself into “a long-term treatment center.” So when did the Duggars get a chance to sneak Josh into rehab? And where exactly are they stowing him away? We have a pretty good idea.

Here is the full statement from the Duggar Family itself:

We are so thankful for the outpouring of love, care and prayers for our family during this most difficult situation with Josh. As parents we are so deeply grieved by our son’s decisions and actions. His wrong choices have deeply hurt his precious wife and children and have negatively affected so many others. He has also brought great insult to the values and faith we hold dear. Yesterday Josh checked himself into a long-term treatment center. For him it will be a long journey toward wholeness and recovery. We pray that in this he comes to complete repentance and sincere change. In the meantime, we will be offering our love, care and devoted support to Anna and our grandchildren as she also receives counsel and help for her own heart and future. During this time we continue to look to God—He is our rock and comfort. We ask for your continued prayers for our entire family.

So we know he’s somewhere—but where?

As FreeJinger.com discovered*, it just so happens that John David Duggar, Josh’s younger brother, has his pilots license and a plane to use it on. Now, should you look up the plane’s identification number (which is clearly visible here) on FlightAware, you can see that, on the night of August 24, the Duggars made a trip from Springdale, Arkansas to Rockford, Illinois at 10:45 p.m.

Where it stayed for less than ten minutes before turning around and heading right on back to Springdale.

Which is certainly a quick trip to be doing absolutely anything more than a simple drop-off—and in the dead of night, no less.

But it turns out that the Duggars actually have have a history, with one particular Christian-based addiction facility right in Rockford itself. As they themselves noted in this Facebook post from October of 2014, Reformers Unanimous (RU) is an “incredible... addiction program.”

Before the Duggars released their statement, Gawker reached out to them earlier this morning in an attempt to get confirmation as to whether or not Josh was currently at RU. This is the only response we’ve received thus far:

It only took just over two hours after emailing the Duggars for them to confirm that he is, in fact, in a rehab facility.

We contacted the Rockford airport for comment, but the person who answered the phone told me that there are no commercial flights after midnight. And since the Duggars’ plane is private, they would have no record of its comings and goings. We similarly called Reformers Unanimous, but as a private facility, they were unable “to confirm or deny” any of its current residents.

If you have any information about Josh’s current whereabout (or about the Reformers Unanimous facility in general), you can email us here.

*Update: The post has been updated to reflect FreeJinger.com’s work in uncovering Josh Duggar’s whereabouts.

Contact the author at ashley@gawker.com.

The Franklin County sheriff has confirmed that WDBJ gunman Bryce Williams is dead. He died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at Inova Fairfax hospital, seven hours after killing Alison Parker and Adam Ward.http://gawker.com/alleged-wdbj-g...

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Nineteen-year-old former St. Paul’s School student Owen Labrie, who stands accused of raping a 15-year-old student as part of a sex competition, testified today that he thought his accuser was having a “great time” during the encounter she says was rape. Buzzfeed notes that Labrie still denies the two had sex.

According to The New York Times’ Jess Bidgood, who is reporting from the courtroom, Labrie also denied putting “his fingers, tongue, or penis under the underwear of the accuser” during the encounter, which occurred just two days before Labrie graduated in 2014. This is, as Bidgood notes, not consistent with the accuser’s disturbing description of events.

This is in sharp contrast to alleged victim's account: she said he "scraped" inside her w/fingers, licked her there, and had sex with her.

August 26, 2015

Yesterday, four friends of Labrie testified in court that Labrie told them he did have sex with his accuser. Today, Labrie testified that while he put a condom on during the encounter, he ultimately decided not to have sex with her. “I was standing over the blanket looking down at [her], and I thought to myself, ‘maybe we shouldn’t do this,’” he said, per Buzzfeed. “It wouldn’t have been a good move to have sex with this girl.”http://gawker.com/prep-school-ra...

Additionally, Labrie noted that he thought his accuser “was having a great time” during the encounter. He said that when he left, he didn’t realize he was still wearing the condom. Per Buzzfeed, he admitted that when he disposed of it, he found “premature ejaculation” in it.

Labrie’s accuser reportedly left the courtroom in tears before he presented his version of events.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Today in a Colorado court, a judge sentenced James Holmes to a dozen life sentences and 3,318 extra years in prison for killing 12 people and injuring another 70 at a movie theatre in Aurora in July 2012.

Holmes received one life sentence for each victim of the massacre. He was then given thousands of years on top of that for the attempted murders of the injured moviegoers and for setting up explosives in his apartment in the hopes of injuring responding officers. The sentences will be served consecutively, for whatever that is worth.

After announcing the sentence, Judge Carlos A. Samor Jr. said that “if there was ever a case that warranted a maximum sentence, this is the case.” Earlier this month, Holmes’ life was spared after one juror refused to agree to give him the death penalty, citing his mental health.http://gawker.com/aurora-shooter...

[image via AP]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

After shooting a Virginia reporter and her cameraman at point blank this morning, Bryce Williams reportedly faxed ABC News a 23-page manifesto before calling the network to confess his involvement. In portions of the document, which were published today by the network, Williams expresses admiration for other recent mass shootings and claims he was mistreated because he was a gay black man.

According to ABC, Williams—who was pronounced dead at 1:26 p.m.—had repeatedly called the station claiming he had a story for them. But it wasn’t, apparently, until 8:26 a.m. that he actually faxed the information: a 23-page, unhinged, rambling manifesto. Less than two hours later, he called again, this time to identify himself as the shooter. He apparently told whoever answered the phone that the authorities were after him and “all over the place.”

After turning the document over to authorities, ABC published several excerpts, many of which reference other mass murderers like Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, Virginia Tech shooter Seung Hui Chon (“That’s my boy right there”), and Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

In the manifesto, Williams writes that he was “sent over the top” by the racism behind the Charleston shooting, putting a deposit down for a gun just two days later. From ABC News:

In one part of the document, Williams calls it a “Suicide Note for Friends and Family.”

—He says has suffered racial discrimination, sexual harassment and bullying at work.

—He says he has been attacked by black men and white females.

—He talks about how he was attacked for being a gay, black man

“Yes, it will sound like I am angry...I am. And I have every right to be. But when I leave this Earth, the only emotion I want to feel is peace....”

“The church shooting was the tipping point…but my anger has been building steadily...I’ve been a human powder keg for a while…just waiting to go BOOM!!!!”.

Williams, a former multimedia reporter, was apparently well-versed in pitching networks. After suing a Tallahassee station for discrimination in 2000 and losing his job at WDBJ in 2013, he reportedly—and to no avail—sent in applications to CNN and “other news organizations.” It does not appear that his entreaties resulted in any job offers.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.

When hacker group Impact Team released the Ashley Madison data, they asserted that “thousands” of the women’s profiles were fake. Later, this number got blown up in news stories that asserted “90-95%” of them were fake, though nobody put forth any evidence for such an enormous number. So I downloaded the data and analyzed it to find out how many actual women were using Ashley Madison, and who they were.

What I discovered was that the world of Ashley Madison was a far more dystopian place than anyone had realized. This isn’t a debauched wonderland of men cheating on their wives. It isn’t even a sadscape of 31 million men competing to attract those 5.5 million women in the database. Instead, it’s like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots.

Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared. Were they cobbled together by bots and bored admins, or just user debris? Whatever the answer, the more I examined those 5.5 million female profiles, the more obvious it became that none of them had ever talked to men on the site, or even used the site at all after creating a profile. Actually, scratch that. As I’ll explain below, there’s a good chance that about 12,000 of the profiles out of millions belonged to actual, real women who were active users of Ashley Madison.

When you look at the evidence, it’s hard to deny that the overwhelming majority of men using Ashley Madison weren’t having affairs. They were paying for a fantasy.

The Evidence Mounts

Nobody disputed the dramatic gender disparity in the Ashley Madison user base, including the company itself. 5.5 million profiles are marked “female” in a database of roughly 37 million people.

It’s also a matter of public record that some percentage of the profiles are less than real. A few years ago, a former employee of Ashley Madison sued the company in Canada over her terrible work conditions. She claimed that she’d gotten repetitive stress injuries in her hands after the company hired her to create 1,000 fake profiles of women in three months, written in Portuguese, to attract a Brazilian audience. The case was settled out of court, and Ashley Madison claimed that the woman never made any fake profiles.

Still, there is a clause in the Ashley Madison terms of service that notes that “some” people are using the site purely “for entertainment” and that they are “not seeking in person meetings with anyone they meet on the Service, but consider their communications with users and Members to be for their amusement.” The site stops short of saying these are fake people, but does admit that many profiles are for “amusement only.”

Based on this evidence, we’ve got some clear indications that many of the profiles are fake. To find out how many, though, we have to dip into the company’s non-public information, contained in the data dumps.

The question is, how do you find fakes in a sea of data? Answering that becomes more difficult when you consider that even real users of Ashley Madison were probably giving fake information at least some of the time. But wholesale fakery still leaves its traces in the profile data. I spoke with a data scientist who studies populations, who told me to compare the male and female profiles in aggregate, and look for anomalous patterns.

My analysis had to be entirely based on the profiles themselves, not the credit card data. There is no such thing as a “paid account” for women because women don’t have to pay for anything on Ashley Madison. As a result, I couldn’t use “paid account” as a proxy for “real,” the way analysts have done with the male data. Plus, the credit card data does not list gender — so it would have been impossible to be certain of gender ratios in the credit card information anyway.

In the profile database, each Ashley Madison member has a number of data fields, including obvious things like nickname, gender, birthday, and turn-ons; but the member profile also contains data that is purely for administrative use, like the email address used to create the account, and when the person last checked their Ashley Madison inbox.

I started my search in an obvious place. Were there any patterns in the personal email addresses that people listed when they signed up? I figured that if I were an admin at Ashley Madison creating fake profiles, I would use ashleymadison.com for the email addresses because it’s easy and obvious. No real Ashley Madison customer would have an Ashley Madison company email. So I searched for any email address that ended in ashleymadison.com. Bingo. There were about 10 thousand accounts with ashleymadison.com email addresses. Many of them sounded like they’d been generated by a bot, like the dozens of addresses listed as 100@ashleymadison.com, 200@ashleymadison.com, 300@ashleymadison, and so on.

A quick comparison of men’s and women’s email addresses revealed that over 9 thousand of these ashleymadison.com addresses were used for female profiles, while roughly 1000 went to men or to profiles where no gender was specified.

This pattern was telling, but not damning. What it suggests is that the majority of obviously fake accounts — ones perhaps created by bored admins using their company’s email address, or maybe real women using fake information — were marked female. These fakes numbered in the thousands, which is exactly what Impact Team suggested.

Next I looked for patterns in IP addresses, which can reveal the location of the computers people used to open their accounts. The most popular IP address among men and women belonged to a company called OnX, which hosted Ashley Madison’s backups. That could mean a number of things, including that those were all accounts created by people working at Ashley Madison. It could also mean that there was a mass migration of data at some point and everybody’s IP address was changed to Ashley Madison’s host address. There were no weird gender anomalies in this data, though — about 82 percent of these OnX IP addresses belonged to men, which is close to the percentage of men in the database.

But the second most popular IP address, found in 80,805 profiles, was a different story. This IP address, 127.0.0.1, is well-known to anyone who works with computer systems as a loopback interface. To the rest of us, it’s known simply as “home,” your local computer. Any account with that IP address was likely created on a “home” computer at Ashley Madison. Interestingly, 68,709 of the profiles created with that IP address were female, and the remaining 12,000 were either male or had nothing in the gender field.

That’s a huge disparity. In a database of 85% men, you’d expect any IP address to belong to about 85% men. So it’s remarkable to discover that about 82% of the accounts created from a “home” IP address are female. This strengthened the pattern I’d already seen with the ashleymadison.com email addresses — obviously fake accounts were overwhelmingly female, and numbered in the tens of thousands.

Another weird detail was that the most popular female last name in the database was an extremely unusual one, which matched the name of a woman who worked at the company about ten years ago. This unusual name had over 350 entries, as if she or someone else was creating a bunch of test accounts. The most popular male name, on the other hand, was Smith, followed by Jones. This matches typical name distribution in the North American population.

That said, I also found millions of unique IP addresses and emails among the women, just as there were among the men. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a random batch of 37 million people. I also saw data for men and women in the “birthday” field that looked perfectly normal for a very different reason: both genders had obviously fake birth dates. Two-thirds of men and women claimed their birthdays fell in January. This is a standard sign of people picking the first month that pops up in the drop-down menu. Obviously, the actual population has birthdays falling fairly evenly during all months. But the online population, filling out forms on a sex site? Their birthdays tend to clump around the easiest month to pick on a form, and this kind of fakery is actually a sign of humanness.

Again and again, the female profiles showed patterns that suggested a disproportionate number of them were fake accounts or test accounts. Still, the numbers were only in the tens of thousands. And a lot of the other data looked relatively normal.

Where the Women Aren’t

Then, three data fields changed everything. The first field, called mail_last_time, contained a timestamp indicating the last time a member checked the messages in their Ashley Madison inbox. If a person never checked their inbox, the field was blank. But even if they’d checked their messages only once, the field contained a date and time. About two-thirds of the men, or 20.2 million of them, had checked the messages in their accounts at least once. But only 1,492 women had ever checked their messages. It was a serious anomaly.

The pattern was reflected in another data field, too. This one, called chat_last_time contained the timestamp for the last time a member had struck up a conversation using the Ashley Madison chat system. Roughly 11 million men had engaged in chat, but only 2400 women had.

Yet another field, reply_mail_last_time, showed a similar disparity. This field contained the time when a member had last replied to a message from another person on Ashley Madison. 5.9 million men had done it, and only 9700 women had.

What all these fields have in common is that they measure user activity. They show what happened after the account profile was created, and how an actual person used it by checking messages, chatting, or replying to messages. They measure what you might call signatures of real human behavior. Only a paltry number of women’s accounts actually looked human.

But what about that seemingly odd disparity between the numbers of women checking messages (1492), and replying to messages (9700)? Even that can be explained by looking at how actual humans use Ashley Madison.

When you log into your Ashley Madison account, you’re prompted to answer messages before you visit your inbox. A dialog box pops up, suggesting that you reply to all your messages in bulk, with a canned reply like “I only reply to full messages,” or “Please send me a message and photo.” In other words, you can reply to several mails at the same time without ever actually checking or opening your mail. So it’s easy to imagine that perhaps a few thousand real women had accounts, and replied to almost 10 thousand messages after being prompted. But only about 1500 of them ever clicked the button to open their inboxes.

Both the Impact Team and disgruntled users of Ashley Madison have called the site fraudulent, mostly because the company charged men to shut down their accounts — and then actually kept their data. I found ample evidence of this kind of fraud in the database. There were 173,838 men’s accounts with the email address listed as <paid_delete>, and 12,108 women’s accounts. All other data in those accounts had been retained.

It’s worth noting that those 12,108 <paid_delete> women’s accounts may represent the only true number we’ve got for women who used the site. After all, paying to delete an account is a sure sign of activity, though of course it’s evidence of disengagement rather than the amorous engagement that Ashley Madison promised.

Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created.

The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20 million men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10 million of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.

Sure, some of these inactive accounts were probably created by real, live women (or men pretending to be women) who were curious to see what the site was about. Some probably wanted to find their cheating husbands. Others were no doubt curious journalists like me. But they were still overwhelmingly inactive. They were not created by women wanting to hook up with married men. They were static profiles full of dead data, whose sole purpose was to make men think that millions of women were active on Ashley Madison.

Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy. The women’s personal email addresses and IP addresses showed marked signs of fakery. And as for the women’s user activity, the fundamental sign of life online? Ashley Madison employees didn’t even bother faking that at all.

There are definitely other possible explanations for these data discrepancies. It could be that the women’s data in these three fields just happened to get hopelessly corrupted, even though the men’s data didn’t. Or maybe most of those accounts weren’t deliberately faked, but just represented real women who came to the site once, never to return.

Either way, we’re left with data that suggests Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren’t there.

Art by Tara Jacoby

Thanks to Carlos Aguilar and Josh Laurito for tips and help analyzing the Ashley Madison dataset.

Contact the author at annalee@gizmodo.com.
Public PGP key
PGP fingerprint: 85E3 8F69 046B 44C1 EC9F B07B 76D7 8F05 00D0 26C4

Welcome to Midweek Madness, where we round up all our Besties For the Resties, go to the Taylor Swift show, run into our favorite celebrities, befriend all of them, text them casually for the next few weeks, start hanging out IRL a couple months later, appear in each other’s Instagrams, and go to the Oscars with one of them, because that’s just what happens in LA! This week, Kylie thinks her fans are “gross,” Josh Duggar dug a porn star, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson can’t find Chet, and the Kardashian sisters have so many sex tapes.

Now let’s hop in an Uber and get going! Actually, hold on. Can you accept my Uber fare split first? Yeah, just click through. I know, but it would just be easier if we split it now and didn’t worry about giving each other cash later. Yes. But that’s why the fare split feature exists. It’s easy. You just accept. Ugh, give me your phone. Tap this, then this, look. See? There. It’s split. We’re finished. I’m not rude I’m making things easier for both of us! I don’t want to talk about this now. Back to the tabloids.

OK!

KYLIE MEANEST GIRL IN HOLLYWOOD

This is the best cover I’ve seen since taking over Midweek Madness. The secondary stories aren’t very interesting, but the Kylie one—in headline/bullet form—is just unfathomably good. She thinks her fans are gross! She’s the meanest girl in Hollywood! Her ex-friends hate her! She lied about being pregnant! She thinks Khloe is ugly! SHE THREW HER BIRTHDAY GIFTS IN THE GARBAGE! She threw them in the garbage! This is how you sell magazines, magazine people. I want to buy every copy of this in town and wallpaper my apartment in it. I want the first thing I see every morning to be a pink circle, tilted about 20 degrees, that says, “MY FANS ARE GROSS.” But enough about the cover—let’s open it up and get more details! Kylie thinks she’s her family’s “fastest rising star,” but sources say “she’s demanding, arrogant, and incredibly rude.” The source also says that—unlike her sisters—she’s very mean to her fans. “At events...she actively avoided them, [and] on social media, she mocks them.” But fans aren’t the only targets of her meanness, she’s “pushed almost all [of her friends] to the side” and “people are starting to steer clear of her.” She also “trashes Kim for copying her style, [is] cruel about Rob’s depression, calls Khloe ‘the ugly sister,’ and threw 18th birthday “gifts she found tacky straight into the trash.”

And now, the rest of it. Joe Guidici has been partying like crazy, much to the detriment of his daughters. Sources say he’s a “completely unfit parent” and his children are “all scared to death of him.” You know the whole Kelly Rutherford/Daniel Giersch/kids thing? Well that’s still going on, and OK! says Kelly has a “shady past,” including an ex-husband she abandoned after he fell ill. You know what? I don’t want to write about this anymore.

And Also:

• Julianne Hough and Brooks Laich have “insane chemistry.”
  
• Megan Fox and Brian Austin Green “rarely shared a bed.”
• Ryan Reynolds is “really invested” in the success of his Deadpool co-star Brianna Hildebrand, whatever that means.
• Amy Poehler refuses to be photographed with her boyfriend, Nick Kroll.
• Bradley Cooper and his newest best friend Irina Shayk are moving in together.
• Jen and Justin are “loving” couples therapy.
• Chris Pine is constantly cheating on Vail Bloom.
• Vail Bloom is someone’s name.

Grade: B+ (You go through Kylie Jenner’s garbage and find a lot of great stuff to take home.)

In Touch

OTHER WOMAN TELLS ALL: JOSH DUGGAR CHEATED WITH ME

Well what do you know? In Touch has another Duggar exclusive. They interviewed a porn star named Danica Dillon who claims she “had sex with Josh in March and April,” and that he didn’t wear a condom. “Although the sex was consensual, she adds, ‘It was very traumatic. I’ve had rough sex before, but this was terrifying.” Dillon passed a polygraph test “conducted by In Touch by a top certified polygrapher.” The piece includes a picture of her, in lingerie, smiling happily while clutching a framed photo of Josh. Cool, now I want to barf. Moving on. One Direction is probably going to go from separated to officially broken up soon, because sources say they’re fighting constantly. “They don’t even attend recording sessions together anymore. Everyone is done.” Once Harry leaves, the band will collapse on itself like some kind of black hole, and then we’ll be able to travel through it to find Zayn alone on a distant planet in a distant universe. What else, what else. Oh! Jared Fogel is disgusting and not worth reading more than four words about. What ellllllse. Newly single Gwen Stefani “doesn’t want a boyfriend, she wants a daughter.” So she’s adopting a baby girl soon. Apparently Gavin didn’t want a fourth child, and now she’s free to do whatever she wants. Caitlyn Jenner was been doing whatever she wants, too, and what she wants to do is drink a lot. At a recent event, a very hammered Caitlyn allegedly “acted like a total wino” and “polished off a couple bottles of chardonnay all by herself” and soon became “totally disheveled.”

And Also:

• Every famous person is flyboarding.
• Every famous person is at Disneyland.
• Kim Kardashian set Kourtney up with Drake?
• Orlando Bloom is obsessed with buying underwear.
• Jordin Sparks is obsessed with eating pickles.
• Brian Austin Green wants Megan Fox back.

Wrong Answer:

Grade: C- (You go through Kylie Jenner’s garbage and find the gift you gave her.)

Life & Style

LAMAR & SCOTT’S KARDASHIAN TELL-ALL: CHEATING, COCAINE & SEX TAPES

Scott Disick and Lamar Odom are “privy to nearly a decade’s worth of family secrets” and “are using the info to write a tell-all.” An insider says “they both feel played” and have enough dirt “to destroy the family’s brand and careers forever.” A celebrity publisher claims they could get as much as $5 million from the potential book deal, and there’s apparently plenty of dirt to fill its pages. For example: the entire family pops pills 24/7, Kris drinks vodka like it’s her job, “Kylie and Kendall were pushed to have Botox and fillers on a regular basis from a young age,” and everyone “taunts” Rob for being overweight. All it needs is a name. How about, uh, Catching Up With the Kardashians? No? OK, next topic. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez are back together! We’ve downgraded to Bennifer 1.0! Or is that an upgrade? Honestly, it’s not software I’m interested in using, so let’s move on again. Mila Kunis was spotted eating lunch in NYC recently and was drinking water, and that means she must be pregnant! It also means I’m pregnant! And my coworkers are pregnant! Yes, you heard it here first: all of Jezebel is pregnant! The whole planet is pregnant! Congrats, everyone! We did it!

And Also:

• Rumer Willis keeps having anxiety attacks.
  
• Madonna acted like a diva somewhere.
• Miley doesn’t want Stella Maxwell to move in with her.
• Brad is “jealous is Angie’s friendship with Billy Bob.” I am, too!
• Oh! Another report about Orlando Bloom being obsessed with underwear!
• Wear embellished hoop earrings this week or I will embellish your hoops, whatever that means.
• If you don’t colorblock this week, I just, haha, I just like, I might be done with you? For good? Honestly.

Wrong Answer:

Grade: C+ (You go through Kylie’s garbage and she screams, “MY FANS ARE GROSS,” from her window.)

Star

TOM & RITA’S HORROR: THEIR SON GOES MISSING!

Welp, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson lost Chet Hanks! They up and lost him. He’s gone! Have you seen him? Because they haven’t in over a month! This “Star Exclusive” claims Chet disappeared after a “cryptic” Instagram post on July 23 in which he wrote, “Getting the f**k out of Dodge for a in...Gonna go get my mind right. I’ll be back!” The fact that I just saw a photo of Tom and Rita looking happy as ever at a Carly Rae Jepsen concert makes me think they’re not concerned. This whole situation screams ***R E H A B*** to me, right? In which case, good for him! But what do I know? I’m not Star! Next! Duggar news. We’ve already covered it, so next! Khloe Kardashian’s boyfriend, James Harden, is a “player” and Khloe should watch the hell out. She’s “crazy about James,” says a source, “and has already told him she’s in the relationship for the long haul.” Hold your horses, Khloe, because James has allegedly been cheating on you with a woman named Rochelle Relf, who is a 23-year-old student from Australia. Aren’t they all?

And Also:

• Scott Disick is broke.
• John Stamos is off the wagon.
• Ariana Grande is going bald.
• Terrence Howard is “insane.”
• Kirsten Dunst and Garrett Hedlund are “engaged.”
• Alicia Vikander broke up with Michael Fassbender.
• Wear blue this week or you’ll never be happy again.

Wrong Answer:

Grade: D+ (You go through what you think is Kylie’s garbage for a few minutes and then you realize it’s actually Tyga’s garbage.)

Appendix:

Fig. 1 - In Touch

Fig. 2 - Life & Style

Fig. 3 - Star

Fig. 4 - Star

Fig. 5 - Star

Contact the author at bobby@jezebel.com.

Over the 4th of July weekend, riots broke out at a private state prison near Kingman, Arizona. Special forces were called in to restore order. Now, a new report says that the government’s response may have been worse than the riots themselves.

The new report from the American Friends Service Committee on the Kingman riot, the law enforcement response, and the aftermath, raises doubts about Arizona’s private prison operators’ ability to run facilities that are “safe, cost effective, humanely run, and accountable to the public.” State legislators there are currently considering accepting bids for private prisons to hold 2,000 more prisoners. The report says that MTC, the company that ran the 3,500-bed Kingman prison, had had a history of security problems in the facility, with more than a dozen instances in the past decade of of “large groups of inmates refusing directives or chasing MTC staff off the yard.” In 2010, the prison saw both an escape and a violent brawl in which 150 inmates participated.

In this riots, which spread over two days, five officers were injured. Nearly 100 SWAT-style officers from the state Department of Corrections were called in to quell the disturbance, and more than 1,000 prisoners eventually had to be transferred to other facilities due to property damage. But here is where the narrative gets interesting: “By most accounts, it is clear that the riots were motivated by prisoner frustration with MTC’s management and the actions of its guards. This frustration was directed at the physical facilities themselves. There were no altercations among prisoners.”

In fact, the report says that the riot was not only spurred by inmate anger at the brutality of guards (such as routine and unnecessary overuse of pepper spray), but that the law enforcement reaction to the riot was itself brutal, “to the point where prisoners who were completely incapacitated were still being beaten, tazed, and shot with rubber bullets.” Here is a portion of one prisoner’s account of what happened:

They guy next to me didn’t speak any English and when they came to his house and told him to get up off the ground and he didn’t respond they kicked him in the head and shot him twice and screamed at him again and again to get up. I yelled that he doesn’t speak any English and they kicked him again and shot him 4 more times and said “Do you speak English now mother- [expletive]?” Still he didn’t move so they dragged him out.

The kid that came out right behind me had his head slammed in to the metal bars on the windows and had to get 8 staples in his head. He now has a 4 inch scar on his head… The man next to me was kicked so many times I thought they broke his ribs. A young black kid not far from me was on the ground and made the mistake of asking an officer to please loosen up his cuffs his hands were numb, the officer walked over kicked him in the face and told him to “shut up [expletive] and move your [expletive] ass closer to the guy next to you.”

If a few state prisoners won a few million dollars in lawsuits due to police brutality, you can believe that private prisons would do a better job of discouraging police brutality. As it is now, it’s still profitable.

[The full report. Photo via AP]

Yesterday, the New York office of the largest online male escort service, Rentboy, was raided by the NYPD and Department of Homeland security. Its CEO, Jeffrey Hurant, and six other employees were arrested. They are accused of facilitating prostitution, among other charges. After the raid, a Rentboy escort and former porn performer reached out to Gawker, offering to share his experiences working as an escort via Rentboy (and briefly, in its office). I interviewed him last night for two hours and the results of that interview have been organized and lightly edited into the first-person essay below. The subject requested to remain anonymous.

The people at Rentboy weren’t doing anything wrong—they were doing something illegal. I think that’s an important distinction in this case. Really what they were doing was making things better for a lot of marginalized people. It’s like that line from The Simpsons: Their only crime was breaking the law.

Of course, they were facilitating prostitution, which in the United States is illegal. But the bigger question is whether it should be illegal. I think it should be legal, but then again, I don’t have an objective opinion. I’ve been listed on and off Rentboy since I was 19. I’m 30 now.

“I felt handsome and desirable for the first time in my life.”

I got started in sex work because my dick is big—10 inches long, and thick. When I was 18, Manhunt was the most popular hookup site and I would consistently get offers to do porn. At the time, I didn’t realize to what extent my dick size made me an outlier.

I was a freshman in school and I had been having real problems with my family. It was mostly control issues. I wanted to be able to live on my own, so I finally agreed to do a movie. I was so nervous, but then when I did it, I found it incredibly empowering. I had social anxiety and very low self-esteem; here was something that made me feel good about myself. That’s just how it worked. I felt handsome and desirable for the first time in my life, and it was a wonderful feeling.

I dropped out of school because I didn’t want to be there, and I got a job at a go-go bar in Florida. I experienced financial freedom for the first time in my life. Working at the go-go bar was exhausting and it didn’t pay very good money. I knew I wanted to try escorting, but I felt shy and awkward about starting. It was better money than I was making and it was a much better experience.

Eventually, I was able to go back to school. I graduated in ’08. I was able to supplement the limited work I could get during the recession without having to take a web developer position or something like that. I’m an artist.

Going from porn to escorting was a natural progression. Even back then, when you could make way more money from porn because it was all DVD sales, you couldn’t make a living off porn. If you do porn, you make money from appearances, but mostly from escorting. You do porn to advertise your escort work, because then you have a name and people look for you as someone to hire.

Porn doesn’t pay very well because porn can be pirated with impunity. If you’re a porn company and you try to file a complaint with a district attorney over being pirated, good luck. Nothing will come of it, except maybe you’ll get audited so they can see if they can bust you for labor violations. I suppose voters love that shit.

I’m friends with some of my clients, which happens a lot more than people think. If you’re the kind of person who this work is a good fit for, you have to like people. When a lot of escorts/porn performers get to an age where they don’t think they should do it anymore or they can’t really do it anymore, they go to nursing school. I think it’s partially because both jobs require the same sort of patience and understanding and the ability to not get grossed out easily.

Also, if you’re going to be a nurse and be any good at it, you have to like people. That’s what escorting is about. You see a side of people that sometimes their very best friends don’t see. It’s sometimes a side they’ve never shown anybody.

“There are clients who are amazing at sex and you’d never guess it.”

The things you learn about sexuality are fascinating. You see the prevalence of certain fetishes that people won’t talk about. For example, race play is more common than you’d think. You see really interesting permutations of sexuality. You see interesting relationship structures. It’s amazing how many couples hire escorts, or how may couples have an open relationship but only with escorts. The clear-cut boundaries and explicitly transactional nature of the interactions generally ensure that escorts don’t fall in love with clients. It’s not impossible, there are people I know in long-term relationships that started this way, but it’s not common.

I’ve been with my boyfriend for about three and a half years. He was never a client of mine, but he’s fine with my escorting. He doesn’t love it, but he’s fine with it. It doesn’t cause fights, but every now and then, it’ll pop up in an argument. I’ll say, “I’m sorry, I wish I could stay home tonight, but I have to go make money. I have to pay the rent. You know this is the deal.” He’ll say, “Maybe you could have done more work this month instead of playing Civilization all day.” It’s kind of normal couple fighting.

I have people where I go in and they make me feel like I need to go back to the gym and stay there for a month. They’re in such perfect shape and so good looking. They’re hiring me because of my dick. It’s not, “Oh, you’re more beautiful than me, come on in.” I think they figure they could fuck around on Scruff for eight hours or just have someone come and give them exactly the experience they want. Sometimes I get guys who’ve never bottomed contact me, but usually I tell them, “I can try, but you might want to use someone smaller for your first time.”

There was a domme I worked with who would humiliate her male slaves by making them suck dick. It was really interesting for me. I’m super gay, never had sex with a woman. It was weird at first to have a woman there at all. There’s stuff like that.

There are people who are clearly on the autism spectrum, and some of them are great or interesting people but they’re just bad at that initial social contact. If they can afford it, hiring an escort mitigates that for them.

There are clients who are amazing at sex and you’d never guess it. Sometimes you’ll see someone and immediately you’re like, “I should be paying for this!” And then an hour goes by and you’re like, “Oh my god, I should have stayed home.” Sometimes you’ll go to somebody and it’s like, “You’re a little…round.” I’ll have a nasty, judgmental thought and then they’ll completely blow your mind. This job has changed how I look at people, and whom I’m attracted to. It’s broadened my horizons in a lot of ways.

I’m HIV positive, and I always share that information. If somebody wants to bareback, that’s the first thing I tell him. I list myself as a raw top. People will ask, “You’re clean?” I’ll say, “No, I’m positive. But I’m on meds, and I get checkups every three months. Since I’ve been on meds, I’ve never not been undetectable.” If someone’s interested in barebacking, 75 percent of the time, he’s on PrEP or also positive and fine with my status. The other 25 percent of the time, they say, “Oh, OK. I’m sorry, I can’t.” And that’s that. Sometimes we use condoms and sometimes we don’t hook up at all. Either is fine.

I was 27 when I contracted HIV. Before that, I always used condoms with clients, but I didn’t use them with the guy I was seeing at the time I contracted it. My clientele has changed dramatically since I contracted HIV. When you advertise as “safe only,” guys who are positive aren’t looking for that. They’re looking to bareback. Chlamydia sucks, gonorrhea sucks, but they’re easy to get rid of. Generally, it’s pretty easy to know if you have them.

I’ve only had STDs rarely, and when I do get them, I take time off. I think part of that is being a top. You’re less likely to get something if you’re a top. Most of the time when I’ve gotten something, it’s been from a fuck bud rather than a client. If you think about it, a lot of clients aren’t having a lot of sex. It’s not like they’re like, “You know, I have eight guys lined up today, but I need someone for the 1-3 p.m. slot.”

“I’m in the 99th percentile of dick size. If you’re in the 99th percentile of anything else, nobody faults you for using that.”

The way it worked on Rentboy is, as an escort, you’d pay to list. They make their money through listings, membership fees, and advertising. A basic ad is $60 a month, and they have a limited number of higher-ranking slots for more money that determine where you show up when people browse.

I charge $300 for an outcall. That isn’t necessarily for an hour—sometimes it’s longer, depending on the setup. Sometimes you get drinks before you fuck. You have to advocate to yourself for a certain extent but you can also determine: “OK, this is an enjoyable experience for me, so I’m going to continue it,” versus “It’s 95 degrees in this apartment. I have to get out the minute the second hand crosses the hour threshold.” In the latter cases, it’s rarely about the guy but the scenario. Maybe you’re really tired, or the place you’re in is filthy.

If I made $1,000 a week from escorting, that would be a good week for me, and there are down periods. For the whole holiday season, I’m usually not doing any escorting. In a typical year, it’s a $30,000-$35,000 supplement. I think I make less than a lot of guys, because I’m more likely to turn work down if I’m busy.

You grow to depend on the money you make from escorting, or even if you don’t depend on it, you get used to knowing it’s there as a backup. Without that safety net, it’s scary. Recently, I had an art show that did much worse than I thought it would. I spent a lot of money preparing for it, a lot of time preparing for it. It just happens: Sometimes these things don’t go well. I could still pay all my bills on time, though. The week after, I said to myself, “Fuck that show. I’ll use the time I would have spent filling orders listing myself as available and making some money.” And now there isn’t that possibility.

I’m lucky because I have other things I can fall back on. I have experience in web development. I won’t starve to death.

But why should I have to give up escorting? I’m in the 99th percentile of dick size. If you’re in the 99th percentile of anything else, nobody faults you for using that. If you’re in the 99th percentile of beauty, of course you’ll be a model. You’d be crazy not to be. If you’re in the 99th percentile of charisma, you’ll be an actor or an anchorman. If you’re in the 99th percentile of dick or tit size, you’re supposed to tuck them away and go for whatever your second-place attribute is? “Well, I’m really good at folding clothes, so I guess I’ll work at the Gap forever.” There’s something fundamentally unfair about this level of control over what people are allowed to do with their bodies when there’s no demonstrable harm that comes from it. Everything I do would be legal if there wasn’t money involved.

“Rentboy has made this a safer business to be in.”

In addition to listing on Rentboy, I freelanced in-office for them doing graphic design. I knew Rentboy’s CEO Jeff Hurant and he was aware that I was very unhappy in my previous day job. The people who worked at Rentboy—seven of whom were just arrested—were there for ages. People stayed because they believed in what they’re doing. They’re making this kind of work safer for people.

You very rarely hear about pimps in 2015. There was a time 30 years ago where that’s how everybody worked. Even escort services are on their way down. Rentboy, by the way, isn’t an escort service, any more than Craigslist is a used car lot.

And it’s not just that Rentboy’s intentions were good, their outcomes were good. What they achieved through this site, while illegal, was an absolute, unalloyed good. I don’t think that going after the least objectionable form of prostitution is going to reduce coerced prostitution. I hope people realize the level of presence Rentboy has in the gay community. Or, had. They had floats at Pride parades. Their Hustlaball is a giant party they have in five or six cities around the world. It’s a giant circuit party, basically.

Even though common sense dictates that prostitution should be legal, people don’t use common sense much when it comes to sex. It’s very hard for American politicians in our system to go ahead and advocate for something like that. What surprised me about the raid was I thought there was sort of an understanding. That probably sounds naive. In a lot of countries, prostitution is still technically illegal but as long as there isn’t human trafficking and rape involved, they stay out of it.

What scared me about this is I just moved my business to a larger space. I’ve been buying equipment and trying to ramp up production for the holidays, and I was depending on the income I get from this. It goes to the business. What’s going to happen? I have all these obligations.

I have a small client base, but I think some people might be scared. The clients are compromised in this raid, too. When you write to a Rentboy escort, it masks your email address initially. Since you can read your masked emails through their interface, there’s a database with that information, which is probably among the information seized.

That’ll also be interesting because there are important, rich people who use that site. Rentboy was the No. 1 destination for this kind of work. Celebrities use it. Political figures. Sometimes, kind of important ones. I had one guy, a closeted foreign politician that I like very much. But when I realized how important he was, it was almost a little scary because it was like, “Ooh, boy. He is a really big deal. Let’s make sure that this information is kept fully under lock and key.”

Rentboy has made this a safer business to be in. It’s much easier to pick up and put down since you’re not tied to a pimp. If you get a day job or want to move or get in a relationship, there’s no one there telling you that you can’t because you have to keep working. There’s no one telling you, “If you do that, you’ll never be allowed to list with our service again.” It gives sex workers total freedom.

I was joking with friends: Do we all have to pick a bar we’re going to hang out in now? Maybe we’ll have to start hanging out at the Townhouse and learning show tunes. This site drove like 95 percent of traffic to us. Obviously, something else will step in. I put something up on Rentmen after the raid just because, to paraphrase Frank Herbert, the spice must flow. (As of today, it looks like Rentmen is down, too.)

I guess I could lay low, but I’m starting a new job: teaching at a public college. I’m very excited about this. I’m 30, I’m at a point where if I want to keep escorting, I need to make it my career. If I were going to keep doing it and want to actually retire one day, I have to get serious about it. I could still do art, but I’d need to do movies again, and that doesn’t really appeal to me.

I was thinking that I could fade out on escorting while I pick up more and more classes, and then eventually maybe I’ll be able to pay for a vacation a year with money from my loyal clientele, but I won’t need ads up or anything. Now I’m like, “Fuck, what am I going to do?”

[Image by Sam Woolley]

In a devastating interview with the Washington Post, the father of murdered WBDJ reporter Alison Parker described his reaction to his daughter’s death. “My grief is unbearable,” Andy Parker said. “Is this real? Am I going to wake up? I’m crying my eyes out.”http://gawker.com/everything-we-...

Parker told the Post about how he and his wife first heard the news. First, he said, they received a text telling them that Alison had been involved in a shooting. “Initially, we had some hope, but I knew in my heart of hearts,” the 62-year-old told the Post. “Alison would have called me immediately to say she was okay.”

From the Post:

He is still in disbelief that his daughter was killed as a journalist in such a seemingly safe place.

“Some journalists want to be right out there covering ISIL. She did not want that,” Andy said. “She was not keen on jumping into a middle of a firefight some place.”

Parker also spoke about the horror of learning that gunman Bryce Williams filmed the attack and posted it online.

“It’s like showing those beheadings,” he said. “I am not going to watch it. I can’t watch it. I can’t watch any news. All it would do is rip out my heart further than it already it is.”

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

“Just a little green, like the color when the spring is born. There’ll be crocuses to bring to school tomorrow. Just a little green.” Joni Mitchell once sang that about Jared Leto’s hair. Now what’s she singing? A different tune, no doubt.

Jared Leto announced on Instagram yesterday that he’s given up being a green guy, at least for the moment, writing:

Goodbye. This image of green locks strewn across a white something accompanied the green emojis:

Goodbye...

What now for Jared Leto’s haircut? Only Joni knows.

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

We’re fast approaching ten years since the last hurricane made landfall in Florida. Hurricane Wilma struck the southwestern tip of the state on October 24, 2005, and ever since then, this hurricane-prone panhandle has been incredibly lucky. That could change in the coming days if the forecasts hold true.

Long Time, No See

To say that the Sunshine State has been “lucky” really is an understatement. Hurricanes are to Florida what tornadoes are to Oklahoma and earthquakes are to California. They’re just there, an ever-present part of life that residents have to watch for and occasionally worry about on a yearly basis. The state is in such a vulnerable position that it’s kind of hard to believe that it’s been almost ten years since they last experienced a direct strike from a hurricane.

Above is a map showing the track of every hurricane between 1842 and 2015 that came within 230 miles of Sebring, Florida, which is right in the middle of the state about halfway between Tampa and Lake Okeechobee. In other words, you’re looking at the track of almost every hurricane that’s hit or threatened Florida in the last 173 years.

They’ve seen so many hurricanes since we began keeping records that it’s hard to make out the state on the map.

Now, here’s that same map showing tracks of all tropical cyclones in the area between 2006 and today. The lines are color-coded based on the strength of the cyclone along that part of its path—green indicates that the cyclone was a tropical storm, while blue indicates that it was a tropical depression.

No hurricanes! There aren’t even all that many storms. That’s good in a sense, but it’s also scary because ten years is a long time for people to forget what to do and how to act when a storm is on its way. Florida was home to about 17.7 million people back in 2005, and now the state is home to almost 20 million people, which is an increase of about two million people since the last hurricane. With all of those births, all of those job transfers, and all of those fresh starts, it’s safe to say that many (if not most) of them have never gone through a hurricane in the hurricane capital of the United States.

Tropical Storm Erika

Yesterday, I wrote a long-ish, detailed discussion about why Tropical Storm Erika could turn into a Very Big Deal or fall apart into a blob of nothingness, and why the next day or two is crucial to what the storm will do when (and if) it approaches Florida.

The long and short of it is that Erika is struggling in the face of dry air and moderate wind shear. The storm looked like it was on its last gasps yesterday afternoon, and then it had a round of robust thunderstorm activity explode to the south of its circulation late last night. That convection has boomed and ebbed in the hours since, but the bulk of what makes Erika a tropical storm is stuck to the south of its center.

Tropical cyclones need deep, intense thunderstorms to completely surround their circulation in order to organize and strengthen, and as long as Erika continues to be a hot mess as it heads toward the Leeward Islands, it’s going to have a very hard time gathering strength.

Track Is Everything

Here’s this morning’s spaghetti model plot, outlining the various tracks Erika could take according to runs of different weather models:

And here’s the same chart showing this afternoon’s run of the models:

That’s a significant change! The models will continue doing this little seesaw exercise for the next couple of days, so there will be times when some models point the storm right at Miami, and others where it goes out to sea to annoy some fish.

Assuming Tropical Storm Erika is able to pull itself together, and assuming it starts to strengthen, and assuming it doesn’t get torn apart by the terrain of the islands it crosses, this could turn into a very real concern for interests in Florida. The latest National Hurricane Center forecast shows Erika making landfall in southeastern Florida as a category one hurricane. This can and likely will change as meteorologists get a better handle on the storm and what it’s going to do, but the fact that the forecast is parked over a major metropolitan area right now is enough to force residents to stay alert.

Cone of Uncertainty

The cone of uncertainty is the historical forecast track error in tropical cyclone forecasts issued by the National Hurricane Center. Historically, the center of the cyclone will stay inside the cone of uncertainty 66% of the time. Forecasters’ error in predicting the track of storms grows with time, so the cone of uncertainty grows larger as you get out three, four, five days in the forecast period. By day five, the average track error is 240 miles, meaning that the center of previous cyclones wound up within 240 miles of the five-day forecast point about two-thirds of the time.

As of 5:00 PM, the forecast shows the center of the cyclone tracking very close to the eastern coast of Florida, but everyone from Cuba, to Jacksonville, Florida is within the cone of uncertainty that far out as of the 5:00 PM advisory. Forecasts have gotten a lot better in recent years—the cone is much smaller today than it was ten years ago—but they still have a long way to go, and a dynamic, fragile storm like this is hard to nail down so far in advance.

There’s always a chance that Erika could stay weak and fall apart over the islands, or it could blow up into a major hurricane and curve out to sea, or it could skirt south of Florida and emerge in the Gulf of Mexico, or it could curve north and make landfall somewhere else on the East Coast. Even though there’s a wide range of possibilities as to what Tropical Storm Erika could do between now and next Monday, the fact that the forecasts and models continuously put Florida in play is something that should catch the attention of anyone in the region and force them to monitor this storm as we draw closer to next week.

The storm is still four to five days away from the mainland United States. Residents have plenty of time to prepare. Start thinking about what you’ll do and where you’ll go if you have to evacuate. Start getting emergency supplies together—make sure you have enough non-perishable food, water, supplies, fuel, and cash to last you at least a week in the off-chance that the worst case scenario unfolds. Even if it turns out that the storm moves safely away from land, at least you’ll have the comfort of knowing you’re prepared for the next threat.

*A huge thanks to Jordan Tessler, who took the time to write up a formula that rounds wind speeds on hurricane maps to the nearest 5 MPH and kindly shared it with me. If you’re on Twitter, your feed will be better for following him @TerpWeather.

[Forecast Map: author | Hurricane Tracks: NOAA | Satellite: NOAA | Models: WeatherBELL | This post was updated at 5:00 PM EST to reflect the latest advisory.]

Email: dennis.mersereau@gawker.com | Twitter: @wxdam

If you enjoy The Vane, then you’ll love my upcoming book, The Extreme Weather Survival Manual, which comes out on October 6 and is now available for pre-order on Amazon.

“They packed the bowl of the pipe (the terminology of which I found on reddit), and showed me how to smoke it properly.” America’s least cool 23-year-old tries weed (slang for marijuana). http://gawker.com/5931367/mariju...

Amelia Boynton Robinson, a civil rights activist and organizer who helped secure the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, died Wednesday. She was 104.

On March 7, 1965, Boynton Robinson, along with Hosea Williams, James Bevel, and John Lewis, led 600 protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Montgomery before being attacked by a mob of officers. The day became known as Bloody Sunday, and was the first of three historic marches that helped put an end to voting rights suppression for blacks across the country.

Boynton Robinson—who was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1911 and devoted her life’s work to civil rights—co-founded the Dallas County Voters League in 1933 and later became the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama in 1964.

In July, Boynton Robison suffered the first of several strokes and was hospitalized as a result. The Los Angeles Times reports she was “surrounded by relatives and friends” before passing early Wednesday morning, around 2:20 a.m.

“I have been called rabble-rouser, agitator,” Boynton Robinson said in 1992. “But because of my fighting, I was able to hand to the entire country the right for people to vote.”

[Image via AP]