A message from Kristin Cavallari regarding her jewelry line, Emerald Duv (pronunciation unclear):

Don’t forget!!!

In case you forgot:

In case you forgot but you only have Instagram, not Twitter:

Also,

Thank you.

Contact the author at allie@gawker.com.

Kayla Morris, just a regular 20-year-old British woman, loves to do loads of things with her mum, Georgina Clarke. Such as: Wear the same clothes, get the same clothes, borrow each other’s clothes, get their nails done together, have their nails done the same, and get plastic surgery to look like British model and TV personality Katie Price. They’re very close.

So close, in fact, that when Kayla, at 17, decided to get a boob job to look more closely resemble Price—who got her start as a model under the mononym Jordan, and is primarily known for her gaudily huge breast implants—her mom was all for it. In fact, it had been her dream to become a Katie Price lookalike, too. So they both did it, getting boob jobs and lip implants to more closely resemble their idol.

(To translate Katie Price into imprecise American terms, think something like a cross between Anna Nicole Smith and Courtney Stodden, but with a couple of decades worth of inexplicably successful TV shows and books.)

“I was pleased that Kayla wanted a boob job,” Georgina told News Dog Media, “I wanted her to be like ... that kind of person.”

With her mum’s blessing, Kayla began stripping at 17, and soon found a sugar daddy to pay for her new boobs. She kept stripping to pay for her mom’s surgeries as well, something neither of them regrets. In fact, they’re “happy,” “so lucky,” and “living the dream,” and they plan to get more procedures because they haven’t quite reached their goal.

Here is a recent photo of Katie Price, via Getty Images:

Now we know that almost none of the woman in the Ashley Madison database ever used the site. The question is, was this a deliberate fraud? Or was it just a dating site gone wrong?

Yesterday I published the results of my analysis of the Ashley Madison member database, which contained 37 million profiles of people seeking discreet affairs. What I discovered was that, at most, about 12 thousand of these profiles seemed to belong to women who were active on the site. The rest of the 5.5 million women had profiles that appeared to have been abandoned directly after they were created.

How could this have happened? To find out more, I searched the data dump of Ashley Madison corporate emails that hacker group Impact Team released last week.

Ashley’s “Angels”

There are many reasons to call fraud on Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media, including the fact that they forced men to pay to delete their profiles—and then kept their personal data anyway. But I would argue that Ashley Madison’s fraud goes beyond the paid delete scam. The real scam is false advertising. In commercials and on the site itself, the company promises men that they will meet real women who want to have affairs.

Men can even pay a premium rate for a “guaranteed affair.” To email women, men have to pay extra, and then they have to pay more still if they want to send a “gift” of a silly gif or picture. Using the site as a man is a little bit like playing Farmville, except instead of blowing your money on fake cow upgrades, you’re blowing it on messages to fake women. At least Farmville is up front about the fact that you’re burning money for a dumb fantasy.

Still, the business model worked. According to CNN, Ashley Madison’s parent company Avid Life Media made $115.5 million in revenue in 2014.

Ashley Madison never promised men that they would find women easily, but they did promise that real women inhabited the site and were active there. Eventually, if a man paid for enough messages, he’d meet his match. But instead of talking to real women, men were mostly fielding robo-mails from the system that say things like, “Sexicindi has indicated she is interested in someone just like you. You should send her a custom message to connect.”

Of course, the “custom message” costs money. When he hits reply, the man is redirected to this page, below.

So the man has to pay to send a message to what is undoubtedly a dead profile. At which point the cycle starts again, with another robo-message from another inactive profile.

In the data dump of Ashley Madison’s internal emails, I found ample evidence that the company was actively paying people to create fake profiles. Sometimes they outsourced to companies who build fake profiles, like the ones Caitlin Dewey wrote about this week in the Washington Post. But many appear to have been generated by people working for Ashley Madison. The company even had a shorthand for these fake profiles—“angels.” Perhaps this is a tip of the hat to Victoria’s Secret models, also known as angels.

Ashley Madison created their angels all over the world, and the dump contains dozens of emails where Avid Life Media management arranged to generate more. Here you can see a July 4, 2013 email from Avid Life Media’s director of internal operations, Nora Abtan, to CEO Noel Biderman and other managers, with the subject “summary angels status”:

After the last launch meeting I just want to confirm on a few points to ensure that we are all on the same page.

Please confirm the below:

*India (June 11)*: 500 Angels complete (298 photos)

*Japan (June 24)*: we hired a new resource who will focus on this. Keith confirmed that the angels will be ready for June 24.

*Netherlands (July 15)*: Keith sent files to translation.com and confirmed that angels will be complete hopefully by July 15, but no later than the start of the media tour July 22

*Portugal (July 15):* Keith needs help from Carlos team. Carlos confirmed that he can provide Keith with resources. Keith can complete the Angels hopefully by July 15, but no later than the start of the media tour July 22 using Carlos’ resources

*Hong Kong (August 1):* Keith, please put together a plan for this as well and share with us.

In another email from October 27, 2012, with the subject line “profile builders,” Biderman wonders whether they should contract with some more companies to create additional profiles:

Wonder what countries they cover?

* SalesProfiles.com

* Evercurrent.com

* Saledatingprofiles.com

* Saledatingprofiles.net

* Buyprofiles.com

* and Profilenetwork.com

An email chain between Sandra Simpson and an employee named Eduardo Borges, dated July 30, 2012, suggests that quality control on the angel profiles was actually pretty rigorous. Borges asks whether it’s OK to reuse photos if they are in different states, and Simpson says no—she notes that many members travel and they might spot the duplicates. Then Simpson writes more about how to make angel profiles realistic (emphasis mine below):

There needs to be some personal content written in the details along with the preselected choices. It doesn’t have to be a lot, but there should be something personal in most of them.

[In the profiles you provided] the Ethnicity were all set as Rather Not Say, they must be selected as multiple profiles all looking the same is an issue.

There are dozens of other emails where employees share profiles using database ID numbers, and request for them to be reviewed to see whether they are up to snuff. Apparently the company had a lot of trouble with creating angels in Japan, as one email from Avid Life Media employee Simon Pawlowski suggests on June 3, 2013:

This is really a comedy of errors for Japan. So the girl that was supposed to do the Ashley angels (a person Dave “knew” and recommended to Carlos), is not responding to Carols’ emails on whether she can do the work. I told carols he should just use the people he interviewed himself.

Madoka is doing the engager profile creation (username/captions) at this moment.

On June 27, 2013, in an email thread with the subject line “how angels are made, ”Noel Biderman scolded some of his employees for failing to create a decent automated process for making angels:

I will tell you what the flaw is—simply listening to hourly employees complaints and then building an unmanageable system around their so called “creativity” block when all that needed to be done was to hire a group of language related individuals to manually build X number of profiles over the span of y month(s) and then have someone on the photo side add relevant and reliable images.

What has been created now is a bureaucratic convoluted nightmare of a process that not only takes longer, costs more money, involves more “management” and ultimately produces a worse product.

Over a year and half ago I approached the two of you to try to automate this system as I did not want to have a CSR level rep making mistakes that lead to transparency issues that they could not comprehend the impact of.

Our ability to productize this approach failed but this nightmare of a quagmire stops now. We just need to learn how to properly staff up for a project and then staff down ...

It appears that as much as they tried, Ashley Madison was unable to create a process that was more automated and efficient than simply hiring people to generate fake profiles by hand. There’s definitely something dark and hilarious in Biderman’s huffing about profile-makers’ “creativity problems.” But generating thousands of real-sounding fake profiles is hard work.

These emails make clear that the company engaged in a deliberate, elaborate, multi-year campaign to create fake profiles for audiences all over the world. And it was something that many senior employees know about. Indeed, earlier this week, the Daily Dot’s Dell Cameron reported that former Ashley Madison spokesperson Louise Van der Velde threatened to expose the “false data” on the site, writing in an email to the company’s general counsel that there are “really no women.”

In a possibly deliberate irony, Ashley Madison’s logo is nearly identical to the poster for the remake of The Stepford Wives, a movie about a gated community where all the men replace their wives with beautiful, cheerful robots.

And yet somehow, Ashley Madison kept growing and luring more men into its house of mirrors. Two software auditors who looked at the recent dump of the site code told me that you could see that the company’s main technical struggle had been with scaling. The original database appears to have been dumped into a newer, bigger schema at some point, and admins kept stretching the database beyond its limits, adding more and more profiles to keep up with demand.

“A Female-Focused Brand”

A lot of lingering questions remain, but a major one is whether the site was deliberately conceived as a honeypot to snare men, or if it grew into that by the time these emails were sent in 2012 and 2013. Biderman, who created the site in 2001, said in an interview with Bloomberg News that Ashley Madison was focused on attracting women, not men:

Ashley Madison is what Biderman calls a “female-focused brand.” Everything from the site’s girly colors to the name is meant to entice those elusive XX chromosomes, the target of ladies’ night two-for-one drink specials the world over. It was a particular dilemma, in this case, trying to appeal to the very demographic—married women—who were most likely to be disgusted by the nature of the goods being offered. “I was very confident that men would gravitate towards a service to conduct these otherwise anonymous affairs. They were seemingly doing it already,” says Biderman. “I was much less confident that women would behave that way.”

According to the research he cites, women are most likely to have affairs in one of two places: at the office with a “work husband,” or within their social circle, with “a friend’s partner, a sister’s partner,” or someone else they are close to. “For them to go and have anonymous affairs, I was almost gonna have to create that paradigm,” Biderman says. “And to do that I felt that women were going to have to feel that there was...I don’t want to say a woman behind it, but definitely that they were the focal point.”

Is it possible that Biderman built a site hoping to attract women, but failed miserably, then tried to hide that fact by creating all those fake profiles?

Just looking at Ashley Madison advertisements, it’s unclear how exactly he tried to target women. All the ads are aimed at men, and many depict wives as repulsive and terrifying. What woman (especially a married woman) would feel drawn to a site that depicts her that way?

Plus, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to create an account on Ashley Madison if you’re a woman. When I was researching this article, I opened several fake Ashley Madison accounts — one male, and two female (one straight; one bi). I posted fake pictures and information in all three. But within seconds, my fake picture and self-description were erased from the straight female account, and when I tried to replace them I was told they would be posted later, “pending approval.” Meanwhile, my fake male picture and profile remained undisturbed — it even attracted two robo-emails from women who “indicated they are interested in someone like you.” My female account, despite having no picture and information, was flooded with emails and chat requests from men who seemed pretty real, including one who helpfully sent a dick pic, complete with stained underwear.

In the profile I created as a woman seeking other women, I found that the site is so heavily focused on heterosexual pairings that their software developers hadn’t even bothered to create dialog box for women interested in women. Instead, when I was promoted to fill in my personal details, I was asked to “let the men on Ashley Madison know” what I’m interested in.

But after my profile was created, I did get listings for women in my fake hometown. And I had to pay to message them, just like a male member of the site would.

Not to put to fine a point on it, the site seems unambiguously geared toward straight men. Even if I had wanted to create an account that reflected who I really am as a woman, my profile information would be purged. Or I would be asked to gear my profile toward men, even if I was trying to hook up with women. And that meant I would be contacted by men who had no idea what I looked like, or what I wanted sexually.

Compare this setup to, say, Tinder, an app that many women use to find casual sex. When a woman creates a profile there, it is not trimmed of personal information “pending approval.” Moreover, a woman on Tinder will never be forced to interact with a man she hasn’t already identified as attractive by swiping right on his picture. On Ashley Madison, I got nothing but guys I hadn’t chosen, who didn’t know anything about me other than my nickname (which was PseudoNym666) and my fake location (New York City). It’s no surprise that very few real women use Ashley Madison.

So either Biderman is a terrible marketer who has deluded himself that women will use Ashley Madison despite all evidence to the contrary; or he’s a brilliant fraudster who knows exactly what he’s doing with his marketing and site design.

That said, I think it’s crucial to keep in mind that my research does not suggest that no women used Ashley Madison. Jeremy Smith has written a moving essay at Modern Luxury about the site’s female users, and I have received about a dozen heartfelt emails from women who used (and enjoyed) Ashley Madison since I published my article yesterday. But this anecdotal evidence actually fits what I found in the member database. There were probably thousands of real women active on Ashley Madison at any given time, but they were lost in a sea of lifeless profiles.

I cannot emphasize enough that my findings do not prove that women are uninterested in casual sex. Nor does it prove anything about how many women have extramarital affairs. All it proves is that Ashley Madison was a site designed for men, by men. And it hit its target market very well.

Instead of looking at Ashley Madison as a dating site, I think it’s more accurate to call it an anti-community—a hugely popular social site where it’s impossible to be social, because the men can’t talk to each other, most of the women are fake, and the only interaction available is with credit card payments. It is one of the purest representations of dystopia I’ve ever seen. Or, as one of its more famous users have put it, Ashley Madison is like something straight out of Hell.

Art by Tara Jacoby

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

Today’s New York Daily News cover shows yesterday’s murder of an CBS reporter in Virginia from the perspective of her killer. It’s horrific, graphic, and gruesome—and it’s important that everyone looks at it.

Reading about gun violence isn’t enough. A shooting is a visual tragedy. There’s a muzzle flash, bullets, a wound, blood, and bodies. When we see an upsetting image, our brain draws on tens of thousands of years of evolutionary training for a proper response. We are flooded with chemicals that make us feel the badness of what we see, so that we can adjust our behavior accordingly. Maybe that means running away from a tiger, or maybe it means passing gun control legislation. But horror is healthy and normal, and means your brain is working as intended. It’s a useful response, because it might convince you—it might force you—to viscerally react to our nation’s epidemic of gun violence. If people see photos of Alison Parker being effortlessly slaughtered by a disgruntled former co-worker with an easily obtained firearm, maybe they will conclude that guns are devices of horror and easy death. If so, it will be worth the discomfort. It’s a nice fantasy, but you can’t pretend that discomfort is optional; feeling like shit is a necessary part of being alive.

But let’s take a step back and address the arguments against the Daily News cover: 1) That publishing the images is “giving the murderer exactly what he wanted,” and 2) It’s tasteless, indecent, and offensive.

Vester Flanagan committed this horrible act because he wanted the feeling of power that comes with killing people and getting attention for it. He plainly laid out his motives on Twitter immediately after he murdered two people. It’s fair to say that he relished the attention he received before killing himself, but we’ve already given Vester Flanagan what he wanted. He hated his two victims, and he wanted them dead, and so he bought a gun and shot them until he killed them. He gave himself what he wanted, with the help of insanely lax gun laws that permitted a disturbed man to get a gun in the first place. Now that he’s dead, his hopes and desires cease to exist along with the rest of him—you can’t give a dead man what he wants any more than we can deprive him of it. I’m sure he enjoyed the hysteria his Vine videos and Facebook uploads caused in the wake of the bloodshed, but that’s irrelevant now.

(There’s also the fear that granting exposure and attention to the killer inspires copycats. The absurd hypothetical of a copycat killer motivated by imagery alone is little more than speculation—mass shooters are motivated by the deeds of mass shooters, not their press alone. Besides, the best way to prevent a similar crime from happening in the future is to make it as hard as possible to get a gun, not to hide images of that gun.)

The second argument against publishing images of a murder that happened in real life appeals to our sense of common decency, a mixture of earnest personal discomfort and “think of the children” moralizing:

In practice, the objection looks like this:

New York kids on summer break, walking around their neighborhoods, are going to see that Daily News cover at every bodega and newsstand.

August 27, 2015

I won't share the image, but the New York Daily News cover today is a shameful pile of trash. Everyone involved should feel ashamed.

August 27, 2015

NY Daily News is on every street corner in New York. Kids walking to school tomorrow will see that. I hope bodegas refuse to put it out.

August 27, 2015

The “protect our kids” argument assumes that children in 2015 have no means of media consumption other than print newspapers, which is a pretty funny thing for two writers to say on Twitter. It’s also a red herring: the fact that Moral Twitter is simultaneously concerned about the children of New York being exposed to the cover while loose on summer vacation and seeing the cover on their way to school shows how phony this argument is.

There’s also the obligatory claim that such images are exploitative, that they feed on human tragedy for economic gain, whether it’s a newspaper cover or the internet “clickbait” canard. This too is off the mark—literally all news coverage of tragedy profits from that tragedy. It’s why Gawker’s traffic spiked yesterday, and why I imagine more people tuned into CNN all afternoon. This isn’t a reason to avert your eyes. CNN didn’t kill anyone.

Maybe the appeal to the safety of children and TV screens is a means of dealing with our own adult unease with graphic images of murder, which is an entirely understandable reaction. Upsetting things make us upset. Parents will be mad, yes—and they should be, mad that they have to raise kids in this fucked up gun-filled world. Be mad about it! You’re right to be mad. But don’t mistake the picture of the man holding the gun for the paper that printed it.

But where were these scolding schoolmarms and moralizers 14 years ago, when a tragedy on a far vaster scale was repeatedly and unavoidably thrust under our noses? Were they too shocked by these newspaper covers to even speak, or had they not yet turned into pearl-clutchers because Twitter mass-morality didn’t exist at the time?

You’re giving the killers exactly what they want! (In this case literally true, by the definition of terrorism)

What if the schoolchildren see!

Yeah, what if? What if children (and their parents) are forced to confront the fact that guns are a horrible force of destruction, killing, fear, and mayhem? What if everyone sees an image that makes them uncomfortable and upset because the world is uncomfortable and upsetting? We should be uncomfortable! Be upset! Feel like shit this week!

If someone is mad at you and you both live in America, it’s very easy for that person to get a gun and murder you with it. That fact should scare you, every single day, until we do something about it. Pictures will help.

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

Miley Cyrus is hosting this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, which, you may or may not be aware, airs this Sunday. In honor of the event, she did an interview with the New York Times, in which she reveals that future two-term president Donald Trump personally called her up to say how much he loved her much-derided 2013 VMA performance with a man named Robin Thicke.

Miley says:

I was in the studio with Kanye [later] that night, and we watched it back and we didn’t say anything. He was like, “That was sick,” whatever. We woke up the next day, and he was like, “Whoa.” He called and said, “Turn on your TV.” I was staying at the Trump Hotel and Donald Trump literally called and said, basically, “I know everyone’s talking about it, but I loved it.” I had no idea anyone was talking about it yet.

Donald Trump loved something garish and grotesque. Crazy.

In the interview, Miley Cyrus also said dumb things about Nicki Minaj, who is opening the awards, if that’s more your thing.

[image via Getty]

Contact the author at jordan@gawker.com.

Tropical Storm Erika is a mess today, barely holding itself together as it draws closer to Puerto Rico. Despite its ragged appearance, the storm is producing very heavy rain along its path; devastating flooding on the small island of Dominica killed at least four people last night. Erika is still a threat to Florida, and current forecasts show the storm closing in on the Sunshine State as a hurricane early next week.

As of the 5:00 PM EDT advisory, Tropical Storm Erika has 45 MPH winds as it moves toward the west-northwest, which puts its eventual track closer and closer to the tall mountains of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. These islands have a nasty habit of destroying storms as they pass overhead, so there’s a real possibility that Erika won’t survive to the other side of the Greater Antilles. It’s such a short distance either way that it’s impossible to tell exactly what will happen until it actually happens.

The latest forecast shows the storm—assuming it survives—moving into the Bahamas and strengthening into a hurricane as it approaches Florida. The track uncertainty at this point is very high, so the storm could wind up anywhere from Cuba to the Carolinas or even out to sea. The forecast indicates general direction at this point—we’ll worry about its exact track this weekend. Anyone in or around the cone of uncertainty should be concerned, though, and it’s a good idea to start gathering supplies and revising plans just in case you come under threat.

Above is the probability of tropical storm force winds according to the National Hurricane Center—warmer colors indicate a higher risk of encountering tropical storm conditions over the next five days. This will change as Erika strengthens or weakens and as forecasters refine the track, but it gives you a good idea of the risk as it stands right now.

For its entire life, Erika’s looked like a storm that stumbled out of bed with the flu—save for a few rare occasions, its center of circulation has been completely removed from its thunderstorms, and the convection itself is throbbing between virtually nothing and deep torrents that reach the top of the troposphere.

The culprit behind the tropical storm continuous struggle is dry air and wind shear, the latter of which is having more of an effect these days. Wind shear prevents thunderstorms from organizing around the storm’s center of circulation, blowing them downstream and keeping the system from strengthening.

Weaker storms tap into a different current of winds than stronger storms, so Erika’s track is directly related to its strength. Since it’s stayed on the weaker side, the storm is caught in low-level easterly flow pushing the center farther and farther west than originally forecast.

Even though Erika is a marginal tropical storm at best, the system is a prolific rain producer. The small island of Dominica got stuck under the heaviest rain in the storm, producing devastating flash flooding that killed at least four people and caused untold amounts of damage. The Associated Press also reports that parts of the island received up to fifteen inches of rain last night, which is an incredible amount of water in such a short period of time. It doesn’t take a strong storm to create a disaster.

Puerto Rico is now in the line of fire for very heavy rain and gusty winds as the storm crosses the island tonight and tomorrow. Much of the island stands to see several inches of rain from the storm, and locations at the foot of hills and mountains could see much higher totals. The rain will help with the drought, but too much rain all at once will lead to life-threatening flash flooding and landslides—scenes like the one that played out in Dominica today would create a much larger disaster in Puerto Rico, and island that’s home to fifty times more people than the former.

The future of Tropical Storm Erika is highly uncertain. Don’t ignore the threat, even if you’re not in the cone of uncertainty. Keep a close eye on the forecasts, and make sure you’re prepared for this and any storms in the future. Gather food, water, batteries, candles, flashlights, fuel, medicine, first aid supplies, and cold hard cash now just in case the storm hits and you’re stuck without power or water for several days. If you do it now, you won’t be caught in the mad rush on grocery stores if/when the storm gets closer to land.

The next full forecast from the National Hurricane Center comes out at 11:00 PM EDT.

[Images: NOAA, author | Video: CBS News via YouTube]

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.

On Thursday, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, announced that his office would be joining the Dutchess County district attorney’s investigation into the suspicious death of Samuel Harrell, a prisoner at Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, N.Y., in April.

The New York Times broke the story of Harrell’s death last week: on the evening of April 21, the inmate got into a confrontation with corrections officers after packing his bags and declaring that he was going home. (Harrell reportedly had “a history of erratic behavior linked to bipolar disorder.”) The corrections officers allegedly threw Harrell to the ground, handcuffed him, and beat him:

As many as 20 officers — including members of a group known around the prison as the Beat Up Squad — repeatedly kicked and punched Mr. Harrell, who is black, with some of them shouting racial slurs, according to more than a dozen inmate witnesses. “Like he was a trampoline, they were jumping on him,” said Edwin Pearson, an inmate who watched from a nearby bathroom.

Mr. Harrell was then thrown or dragged down a staircase, according to the inmates’ accounts. One inmate reported seeing him lying on the landing, “bent in an impossible position.”

“His eyes were open,” the inmate wrote, “but they weren’t looking at anything.”

The autopsy report said Harrell died of a cardiac arrhythmia “following physical altercation with corrections officers,” according to the Times. The Orange County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

In a statement on Thursday, Bharara said that his office would be “coordinating and working” with Dutchess County district attorney William V. Grady’s office, who, in turn, the Times reports, said that he had been discussing “a joint investigation” with the U.S. attorney for several days.

“The very nature of this case calls for a full, fair and objective investigation into not only potential criminal law violations, but constitutional violations as well,” Grady said in a news release.

The present investigation will determine whether criminal charges will be filed.

Image via BET. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

The lawsuit filed against Derrick Rose, accusing him of drugging and gang raping an ex-girlfriend, provides more details about what the woman says happened that night in Los Angeles. The complaint actually names 13 defendants—Rose and his friends Randall Hampton and Ryan Allen, and 10 unnamed “John Does”—and lists nine causes of action, including sexual battery, battery, and trespassing.

Rose’s lawyer has responded, calling the lawsuit “a desperate attempt to shake down” the basketball player and “completely false and without any factual basis.”

The woman says she and Rose met in October 2011 at a Los Angeles party hosted by mutual friends and eventually started an “intimate relationship.” Before the alleged rape, she claimed Rose began asking her to do sexual acts that made her uncomfortable. She says he asked her to masturbate on Skype; she said no and stopped Skypeing with him. He asked her to “involve others in their sex life, in particular strippers and other couples,” the complaint said. In late 2012, she learned that Rose had a girlfriend back in Chicago, but she stayed in the relationship with him.

The complaint then goes into detail about two particular incidents with Rose. In the first, she took a trip to see him in Chicago in May 2013 and brought along her friend who also is a sex therapist “to help Jane [Doe, the plaintiff] become more comfortable with sex and especially oral sex as Rose had requested but never received oral sex from Jane.” The friend, called A. in the complaint, at some point started stroking Rose’s penis.

A. encouraged Jane to take over stroking Rose, and then Rose in turn instructed Jane and A. to stroke each other. A. and Jane were both offended by that suggestion, and Jane indicated that she would “never touch another woman like that,” while A. indicated that “it was a complete turn-off for her.”

During that trip, the woman also believes she caught Rose and A. after they had kissed, and learned about Rose’s child. She says decided to break it off, but still saw him again, on Aug. 26, 2013. The woman went with a friend to a home in Beverly Hills, where she claims the defendants put a drug in her drink. Her friend, called C. in the complaint, was not drugged. Here is how the complaint describes what followed:

The next day, she went to work where a coworker told her to call the police. She says she didn’t because she felt ashamed and embarrassed. She didn’t want her family to find out, the complaint says, and she was afraid of retribution from the men involved. She says eventually lost her job “because her productivity was severely affected by the rapes and she was unable to perform as she did before.”

Rose’s lawyer, Lisa Cohen, issued the following statement on the lawsuit.

The plaintiff’s allegations are completely false and without any factual basis. This is nothing more than a desperate attempt to shake down a highly respected and successful athlete. Mr. Rose was in a non-exclusive, consensual sexual relationship with the plaintiff for over two years. The plaintiff expressed no complaints about Mr. Rose until various lawyers began to surface and demand that the plaintiff be paid millions of dollars. This is the third lawyer the plaintiff has retained in this matter. Two years have passed since Mr. Rose ended the consensual relationship with the plaintiff, and her claims are as meritless now as they were two years ago. We have complete confidence that the case will be dismissed and that Mr. Rose will be vindicated. This lawsuit is outrageous.

The full complaint is below.

Update (9:30 p.m.): Rose also has released a statement, saying: “I am just focusing on staying healthy and getting ready for the season. I am not going to comment other than to say—I know the truth, and am confident I will be proven innocent.”

Is science real? Maybe! But also maybe not???

At a campaign event on Thursday, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson said, to a smattering of applause, “There is no war on women. There may be a war on what’s inside of women, but there is no war on women in this country.”

In video of the speech, published by Raw Story, delivered on the steps of the Arkansas Capitol, Carson said that leftist rhetoric was destroying America.

“If I was trying to destroy this nation and I was in charge, let me tell you what I would do,” Carson said. Haha, yes, please—do go on. “I would drive wedges between the people. I would have a war on women and race wars and income wars and age wars and religious wars.”

His honesty is refreshing, don’t you think?

H/T Raw Story. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Have you heard the one about the time Demi Lovato allegedly harassed a fan about her weight and flicked said fan in the vagina at a meet-and-greet? No? Neither have I, but apparently Demi is now denying the whole event. Okay, Demi!

Online legend has it that Demi was approached by a fan who told Demi that her music had saved her life. Demi’s rumored response: “You’ll die soon enough, fatty.” She then—ALLEGEDLY—flicked the fan in the vagina.

Here’s the story in full (via The Mirror):

“[Lovato] was rude, not classy and she lost a long time lovatic that day. I walked into the $350 M&G [meet and greet] and say hello she replies with ‘fat’ and I shook it off because I thought maybe I had heard her wrong. As I approached her and asked to do my pose she stared at me blank faced. I continued talking ‘you saved my life’ I say ‘you’re the reason I’m alive today.’ She looks me dead in the eye and says ‘you’ll die soon enough fatty’ and then whispered ‘obesity.’

“I started crying I had never felt pain like this and she started laughing and said ‘are you crying? Stop it. Stop it now’ and she flicked my vagina.

This pop culture myth is not known by many, but was recently brought up when Demi (according to the The Mirror, Idolator, and the Daily Star) was asked about the craziest rumor that she’s ever heard about herself. “That I ‘flicked’ a girl’s vagina in a meet and greet,” she replied. Huhhhhhh.

(Note: None of the aforementioned pop news sites have provided a source or context for Demi’s response. Idolator includes a photo of a magazine article, but does not name the magazine. Believe at your own peril...the peril of getting flicked in the vagina.)

[The Mirror]

In the latest issue of Flare, Lea Michele is talking about healing and finding love after the loss of Cory Monteith. “I wanted to make sure that I was a whole person again...I needed to do that on my own,” she said. “I worked very, very, very hard and I got back to that place where I was genuinely happy and strong and ready to live again and see the world and, you know, bring in more beautiful experiences...That’s when someone miraculously came into my life.” [POPSUGAR]

Justin Bieber is sad because people “just want to keep seeing me fall.”

“I mean, maybe I’m a bad influence, but for me I was like, ‘No, I’m going to do this until I feel like I shouldn’t be doing this,’” he said on the Elvis Duran and the Morning Show, regarding his past bad behavior. “Maybe I was wrong, but that’s how I learn, and I feel like I’m much better for it. Would I do anything different? I would probably stay away from Miami.”

Crying 4 u, J. [Gossip Cop]

• Imagine: You’re a sick child in the hospital and the admin tells you that a special celebrity guest is coming to visit you. The special day arrives and it’s...Tyga and Kylie Jenner. [NYDN]
• Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt might be moving to London, GUVNA! [US Weekly]
• Oy. Poor Xander. [E! Online]
• Chris Brown didn’t get just one new skull tattoo. He got TWO new skull tattoos. [Gossip Cop]
• Good headline.
• Good chemical peel.

Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.

Images via Getty.

Two people are dead and four others have been hospitalized after being exposed to hazardous material at a townhouse in the suburban Chicago town of Des Plaines, authorities said on Thursday.

The Chicago Tribune reports that both of the dead are men. Their names have not yet been released. The hazardous materials in question have also not been named.

According to the New York Times, all four people hospitalized are officers from the Cook County Sheriff’s Department.

The chief of the North Maine Fire Protection District, Richard Dobrowski, told reporters that the officers were the first to arrive at the scene, and that they went to the hospital because “they started to feel a little sick” and may have suffered from “breathing difficulties.”

Image via Shutterstock. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these blogs, that the ground clave asunder that was under them, the Associated Press reports. And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed them up, and their bus stop, and all the men (and women) that were waiting at the bus stop in the northeastern Chinese city of Harbin, and all their goods, including a bus sign. They, and all that appertained to them, went alive down into the pit, and the earth did not, in this case, close upon them, nor did they perish from the congregation, but rather, four of the people sustained minor injuries to their feet, legs, arms, and shoulders, but were mostly okay, the whole thing having been captured on video by a nearby noodle shop’s surveillance camera, according to local station Heilongjiang Television.

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Cindy Mills, the former Subway franchisee who said Jared Fogle had suggested she advertise herself for sex on Craigslist, claims that she warned Subway about Fogle way back in 2008 and the company didn’t do anything about it. Mills, who was a Subway franchisee in Florida during 2006 to 2012, said that Fogle used to talk to her about his preference for young girls. He described sex with minors, including underage prostitutes between the ages of 9 and 16 in both the United States and in Thailand.

“I thought, ‘This man has a lot of money. Subway has a lot money. They have made each other a lot of money,’” Mills told Business Insider. “I was worried. I was scared to death.” Apparently, a high-level exec from Subway knew about Fogle and swept it all under the rug. From BI:

Mills says that when she contacted Subway about Fogle’s behavior in 2008, the company directed her to Jeff Moody, then CEO of SFAFT. Mills says that she spoke to Moody on the phone and told him about Fogle’s disturbing comments about children.

Mills says Moody cut her off in the middle of the conversation, saying, “Please don’t tell me any more.” He indicated that he had dealt with similar complaints in the past, according to Mills. “He said, ‘Don’t worry, he has met someone. She is a teacher and he seems to love her very much, and we think she will help keep him grounded,’” Mills recalls.

Horrible. Subway is currently investigating whether or not some employees were actually aware of Fogle. “When we first heard about an alleged complaint being made to the company about Jared Fogle, we immediately investigated and found no record that this was ever brought to our attention,” Subway said in a statement to People. “When we heard about the possibility of a second complainant, we began an investigation that is ongoing.”

Contact the author at marie.lodi@jezebel.com.

Image via Getty.

The five occupants of the Hummer into which Kim Howe, who was killed in February after Caitlyn Jenner crashed into her car, slammed are suing her estate for $18.5 million, TMZ reports.http://gawker.com/caitlyn-jenner...

The creditors claim Howe was negligent, alleging that she caused the collision. TMZ also reports that they plan to sue Jenner as well.

Last week, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department recommended that Jenner be charged with vehicular manslaughter.

Photo credit: AP Images. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Per an alert sent to students by school administrators, Savannah State University in Georgia is on lockdown while campus police investigate a shooting near the student union.

One man has been taken to the hospital, CBS 46 reports.

“The SSU campus is on lockdown following a shooting incident this evening at or near the Student Union,” the school said in a statement to Business Insider. “A male victim was transported to a local hospital for treatment.”

Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.

Coolest girls Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Schumer, BFFs since that one time they met on vacation, did a cool thing: they danced on Billy Joel’s piano while he played “Uptown Girl” at Wrigley Field Thursday night, which is quite similar to the ending of Amy Schumer’s film Trainwreck (still in theaters, I think?). Too crazy and cool!

Cool?

Cool.

Cool?!?

Best friends forever. Air high five. Wine chug.

[h/t Esquire]

Noel Biderman, the CEO of Ashley Madison’s parent company (Avid Life Media), is officially stepping down in the wake of the unprecedented leak. An act which will, presumably, allow him to give his nascent screenwriting career the attention it so very much deserves.

A Virginia teenager who ran a pro-ISIS Twitter account and helped a friend travel to Syria to join the Islamist group was sentenced this morning to 11 years and four months in prison. Ali Amin, 17, faced a maximum sentence of 15 years.

The Washington Post reports that Amin, who pleaded guilty in June to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, tweeted approximately 7,000 times from the apparently pro-ISIS account @AmreekiWitness, which had more than 4,000 followers and has since been suspended. He also introduced his friend Reza Niknejad to ISIS members online, and helped the 18-year-old travel to join the militia in Syria.

From the Post:

Prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo that Amin had affected “worldwide security” and ruined his friend’s life. They alleged that Amin radicalized Niknejad, though they conceded the older man “made his own decisions.”

“Under a best-case scenario, Niknejad will return to the United States to be prosecuted and incarcerated for his activities,” prosecutors wrote. “It is far more likely, unfortunately, that he will accomplish the goal that this defendant set out for him; martyrdom in the name of ISIL.”

Prosecutors, who described Amin as a “prolific, sophisticated Islamic State supporter,” as the Post put it, sought the maximum sentence of 15 years; Amin’s defense attorneys asked for a six-year, three-month sentence.

Before he was sentenced, Amin read a statement to the court. “I made my decisions, and I am prepared to bear their fullest consequences,” he said. He also renounced ISIS, saying it “takes the greatest and most profound teachings of Islam and turns them into justifications for violence and death.”

Contact the author at taylor@gawker.com.

Authorities have released new information regarding the truck filled with dead refugees that was abandoned on a Vienna highway yesterday, and it’s grisly: there were reportedly more than 70 bodies inside, including at least 8 women and 4 children.http://gawker.com/someone-left-a...

Although the bodies have not yet been identified, investigators are operating under the theory that the group were Syrian refugees sneaking into Austria from Hungary.

“We must assume now that these are refugees,” local police chief Hans Peter Doskozil said during a news conference. “It is possible this is a Syrian refugee group.”

The bodies, which had already begun to decompose, were discovered Thursday morning “after a highway patrol officer investigated a putrid smell and liquid coming from the back of a truck abandoned near the Austrian village of Parndorf on the main expressway between Vienna and Budapest,” the Washington Post reports.

Initial estimates put the death count at somewhere between 20 and 50—a gross underestimation. Overnight forensic work now puts the tally at 71, according to a police spokesperson, who says the group probably suffocated inside the truck.

Still, Austrian authorities aren’t exactly sympathetic to the plight of the refugees, hundreds of thousands of whom flee through Europe each year: they’ve reportedly announced plans “geared more toward blocking than aiding asylum-seekers,” including increased border controls.

Contact the author at gabrielle@gawker.com.