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Last weekend, this year's Super Bowl matchup was decided when the Seattle Seahawks defeated the Green Bay Packers and the New England Patriots blew out the Indianapolis Colts. But instead of talking the Super Bowl, sports fans are obsessing over a hilarious controversy involving the Patriots deflating footballs.

Yes. Deflated footballs: This is indeed a real thing that people care about. Allow us to guide you, non sports fan, in understanding why anyone would care.

What happened?

Essentially, the Patriots are accused of deflating their footballs beyond the acceptable limit. Following a complaint from the Colts after the Sunday game, the National Football League reportedly found that 11 of the 12 footballs used by the Patriots in that game were significantly under-inflated.

Why would you deflate your footballs?

Footballs with less air in them are easier to grip, especially in cold or inclement weather. When air is pumped into a ball it becomes increasingly stiff, so letting air out of one makes it softer and squishier.

According to ESPN, the Patriots are accused of putting balls in play that were two pounds per square inch lighter than NFL regulations. Denver Broncos defensive tackle Terrance Knighton posted this on Twitter about how the balls would be affected:

(He appears to have deleted his Twitter account since then.)

But as Barry Petchesky argues on Deadspin, it's not clear that the Patriots were going beyond the bounds of what's generally acceptable in the sport:

The more context that emerges, the more it feels like messing with footballs is akin to pitchers doctoring baseballs: everybody does it, and nobody looks too closely until an opponent publicly complains. Aaron Rodgers says he likes his balls overinflated. Brad Johnson says that before the Super Bowl, he paid "some guys" $7,500 to illegally rough up 100 game balls. Quarterbacks are understandably particular about the feel of their footballs, and teams seem to have an unspoken agreement to respect each other's freedom to squeeze and scuff and shine their own balls to their preference, as long as it stays within the bounds of decency. Either the Patriots went beyond those bounds, or the Colts were extra-salty and felt they had nothing to lose.

So why do people care so much here?

If this scandal involved any other team besides the Patriots, it wouldn't be nearly as big. But the Patriots are an incredibly successful team (12 division championships in the last 14 seasons) from a loathsome city (Boston), plus they have a background in bending the rules: In 2007, the Patriots were forced to give up their first round draft pick and were fined $250,000 (head coach Bill Belichick was fined $500,000 personally) after it was determined that they stole signals from opposing teams.

The Patriots have appeared in two Super Bowls since then, but have lost both, and there's a certain segment of NFL fans that believe the Patriots are cheaters, and always will be cheaters, and further believe that they are unable to win championships unless they are cheating. If you are an NFL fan who believes both things, the ball deflation scandal has probably made you enraged and delighted in equal measures.

How would the Patriots be able to deflate a ball?

In the NFL, each team supplies the balls used during the game. Certain quarterbacks prefer their balls to feel a certain way (this is a real sentence you can type when writing about sports)—Tom Brady, for instance, appears to prefer lighter, more malleable balls, whereas another quarterback might prefer ones that are a bit more inflated. The league allows each team to tailor the balls that will be used by their quarterbacks, provided they stay within certain guidelines dictating how much the balls are allowed to weigh.

All teams mess with the weight and air pressure of footballs, but in this case the Patriots are accused of deflating balls far below what the NFL allows.

When did the deflation occur?

Here's an alleged timeline of the ball inspection (sports!), per ESPN:

League sources have confirmed that the footballs were properly inspected and approved by referee Walt Anderson 2 hours and 15 minutes before kickoff, before they were returned to each team.

ESPN Sports Radio 810 in Kansas City reported that the Patriots' footballs were tested at the half, reinflated at that time when they were found to be low, then put back in play for the second half, and then tested again after the game. All of the balls the Colts used met standards, according to the report.

If the balls were in fact inspected two hours before the game and then again at halftime, the Patriots would have had to go out of their way to circumvent the rules.

How did they get caught?

Colts linebacker D'Qwell Jackson reportedly told his coaches that a ball felt too soft after intercepting Brady in the second quarter of Sunday's game. He handed the ball to the Colts' equipment manager, and it was eventually brought to the attention of the league.

But this wasn't the first time the Colts thought the Patriots might be cheating. ESPN says that the Colts suspected the Patriots were underinflating balls after playing them in Novemeber:

During that game, Colts safety Mike Adams twice intercepted Tom Brady and gave the balls to the Colts' equipment manager to save — and both times there were concerns about the balls feeling underinflated, sources told Schefter.

What will happen to the Patriots?

This has yet to be decided, but illegally manipulating balls almost certainly isn't a severe enough crime to overturn the result of the game or bar the Patriots from the Super Bowl. If the NFL decides the Patriots are guilty of tampering with the balls, the team will likely be fined and perhaps stripped of draft picks, which is what happened in their last cheating scandal.

What makes this a real question is that the NFL has a weird relationship to its rules, both for on- and off-the-field behavior. Recent punishments handed out by the NFL have tended to be all over the place. Most famously, of course, Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice was initially suspended for only two games after punching out his wife at a casino. On the other end of the spectrum, multiple New Orleans Saints coaches were suspended for an entire season after it was discovered that they were paying players for big hits, some of which were allegedly intended to injure other players.

Obviously people are losing their minds over this, right?

Yes! It's glorious. Some people want Patriots coach Bill Belichick to be fired. Or to be banned from the Super Bowl. Others want the entire team banned from the Super Bowl. Deadspin has the rundown of insane Deflategate sports columns.

Are there any good conspiracy theories?

Thank god, yes. Here is NFL commissioner Roger Goodell with close friend and Patriots owner Robert Kraft the night before the Patriots and their deflated balls thrashed the Colts.

As Roger Goodell evaluates DEFLATEGATE, let's remember he was at Robert Kraft's home night before AFC title game. pic.twitter.com/VFWc3P1PAB

— Jimmy Traina (@JimmyTraina) January 21, 2015

Regardless of the punishment handed down by the NFL, plenty of fans will accuse the league of going light on a franchise that has been caught cheating twice in seven years—and, as Deadspin's Barry Petchesky notes, the ensuing circus is going to be a hell of a lot of fun.

Nothing can happen easily around here, because the NFL is a control-freak league uniquely unsuited to the practical exercise of that control. And we, the unaffiliated fans and unabashed scandal-groupies, are all better off for it.

Last year, Gawker identified 17 big media companies that still drug-test their employees. Today we’re broadening our curiosity about corporate testing policies to other industries, too. So: Does your current employer or company drug-test employees? Is your employer larger than 50 people?* If so, please fill out the short and anonymous survey below.

Mobile Users: Click here to take Gawker’s Drug Test Survey

After we collect enough responses, we’ll publish them here on Gawker.

* Note: We’re generally looking to document the drug-testing regimes of midsize to large corporations, not mom-and-pop companies whose policies only affect a small number of people. However this is only a guideline, not a rule; if you work for a small but otherwise notable employer (such as a tech startup), feel free to take the survey.

Questions? Email me at trotter@gawker.com · Photo credit: Shutterstock

Before you know anything, know this: Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy is a masterpiece. It is the first movie of 2015 that you must see, and I almost want to warn you against reading the interview below because it is better to know nothing about this movie let it shock you. It is the kind of movie you will need to talk about after you've seen it—my boyfriend and I watched it (it was my second viewing) and we talked about it for the next two days. If you happen to see it alone, and need someone with whom to discuss it, I'm just an email away.

Principal characters Cynthia and Evelyn live in a secluded estate, somewhere in Europe, at some point in time (maybe today, maybe 30 years ago). Their sex life involves an elaborate role play ritual in which Cynthia (older by about 10 years) is the ostensible sadist and Evelyn is the masochist. But, as anyone who's had it knows, sex is rarely so simple and among the several things that makes The Duke of Burgundy brilliant is its exploration of the fluidity of power in the sexual arena. The dynamic portrayed in The Duke of Burgundy goes beyond "bottoming from the top" or "topping from the bottom" and wraps around those concepts several times so that by the end, you're left unsure of who's truly calling the shots or if it even matters. I've never seen a more specific exploration of sexuality on film, and because of that, I've never related to on-screen sexuality more, regardless of the gender of the characters.

"I'm trying really hard to throw these questions out to an audience, not to judge it and say, 'You should do this,' or, 'You shouldn't do that,'" Strickland (Berberian Sound Studio) told me last week in the office of IFC, which is handling the distribution of his film. "I'm just showing a world." Below is a condensed and edited transcript of our chat, which Strickland, who's British, prefaced by explaining he was feeling jetlagged. Over the course of our discussion about his film, Strickland explained why his characters aren't gay, but refused to label himself either way.

Gawker: To focus on this particular dynamic between two women strips the gender politics out of topping and bottoming, right?

Peter Strickland: Absolutely. I was wondering what [it would be like] having two men, being male. I came very close to that, but I'm saving that for a different film. I think it would have been a very different film in terms of the way we shot it. I can't pretend I'm a woman when I shoot something, but I'm aware of some male trappings as a male director—I want to be less directional with the camera, less mechanical. I guess I wanted something a little softer, and maybe not too sensational as well. The subject is sensational enough.

Because the fact of the matter is that people can watch two women have sex more easily than two men.

That is probably something, in hindsight, I had to consider. What will be really interesting is with this other film [about a male/male relationship], how quickly I can get the money for that. That will determine whether that's true or not. I've got a feeling you're right. I certainly have come across people who are very conservative. At two women, they sort of raise an eyebrow, but kind of like it deep down. Where as with two men, they're just like [flustered non verbal sounds]. For me, it's weird, because my first-ever film job was in a gay porno film: Bruce LaBruce, Skin Flick. I'm no stranger to that, but ultimately I chose two women. But they're not gay. I'm not saying that because I want to reach out to a wider audience. They're not gay because it is this utopia, where it's not an issue. There are no men [at all in the movie]. I think if you make them gay, suddenly, even if you try not to, the issue of acceptance comes in, the issue of rejection comes in. There's a film I saw by [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder called Fox and His Friends, which is really liberating. [A character] takes his boyfriend to his parents' for dinner, and there's no question of, "He's gay?" He's just the boyfriend. That was really radical for a film in the '70s. Even now, the boyfriend comes to dinner and suddenly it's about coming out or whatever.

So you wanted to strip it of that?

Absolutely.

That's also very modern. You listen to young people talk about their sexuality and so many people hate labels, even bisexual, even if that's effectively what they're practicing.

I'm not young anymore, so I don't know what people say. I'm middle-aged now. I don't really get young audiences. I tend to get older people. Not by design.

Having the woman-on-woman dynamic is also truer to what you're referencing, like Jess Franco's work.

Absolutely. [Franco] was a starting point, but it certainly wasn't an ending point. This film doesn't feel like a Franco film anymore, but the beginning was: "Let's take some of these stereotypes—the female lovers, the sadomasochism—but let's take it somewhere else." I'm not trying to make it realistic, but I'm trying to explore the pragmatics of it. What happens if someone's tied up and there's a mosquito in the room? What happens if you can't always hit your cues? You've got to learn your lines as a dominant person. All the films I've seen, they were always on cue. They were always the perfect ice queens. I wanted imperfection to come in.

I really related to scene in which Evelyn masturbates and has Cynthia talk dirty to her and Cynthia eventually says, "I don't know what else to say."

That's also about performance as well. On one level it's a sexual arena, but it's also about fear—probably the director's fear as well—of being onstage. Of performing. I'm the lucky one, I'm behind the camera, but in a way, Evelyn is my proxy. She's shadow-writing the script. She's shadow-laying down these bits of tape on the floor for Cynthia to walk in line to the keyhole. Cynthia's fear of having to perform and that fear drying up, which happens when Evelyn's masturbating—I think what's fascinating about sadomasochism is these wonderfully rich dichotomies of the masochist controlling the level at which they are controlled by someone else, and the dynamics where Evelyn can happily give a back rub to Cynthia when it's commanded, but when Cynthia pleads for a back rub, when she's in pain, Evelyn won't do it. So much is in nuance and modulation, and that's my fascination as a director, when I work with actors or with sound and so on.

This movie is so specific and real that it has to come from inside of you.

It does, every script does.

But how biographical is it?

My films are never biographical. They're personal, they're all personal, but I'm not a big fan of pinpointing, "This is me." All the films, they're elements of something, but they're all mixed in with someone I know, or me, and this, and that. I don't know, I always try to keep my life as a blank page. I probably fail to do that.

Do you talk about your sexuality?

No, I never have, so no one knows if I'm gay or straight.

That's on purpose? You won't tell me?

No. Nice try, but no. You could probably find out, but I'm not the one to actively say to anyone my politics, my religion, my sexuality. I just feel...maybe subconsciously some of it is I'm a private person, but I think a lot of it is when you say you are something or not something, it kind of shapes the film too much.

Politically?

It cuts off other arenas to interpret, I think. "So and so was this, therefore this means that in the film." If I stay out of it—yeah, it's personal it has to be—but I wouldn't say they're biographical, no.

I wonder how this dynamic would (and does) play out in a heterosexual coupling. I relate to it because those gender politics are stripped away and I'm gay, but I don't know if the power can be that fluidly shared between a man and a woman.

I had one person tell me that when you have a male in there, the power dynamic does become corrupt somehow. That's the way that person put it. That's what I like about filmmaking—that curiosity. How are people going to react to it? I genuinely never know when I make a film how it's going to go down. Usually they go down pretty badly at the beginning. They get rejected by a lot of festivals. And I think, "OK, I fucked it up again." And then someone takes it and you see what happens. I think a lot of it is because I'm not good at expressing myself. That sounds like a cop out, but I think a lot of writers do write because they can't express themselves very well.

Express yourself how? This is an extremely expressive movie.

That's the thing: I can put it into a movie, but as a person when I speak...the pen is where I feel really comfortable. Even with actors, I find I know what I need but I can't express it sometimes. Quite often I just play them music: "Here's a piece of music that captures that mood." And that really works sometimes. It is a weird paradox of filmmaking: You want to communicate with an audience, you want to speak, you want to ask questions as well, but there is this...I don't know...

The Duke of Burgundy opens in theaters and on VOD on Friday. See it.

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Former Wall Street executive Michael Lucarelli's insider trader sentencing hearing was reportedly a sad, debased retrospective of his life as a wealthy, adventurous, ulcer-prone financier.

Lucarelli, a former Lippert/Heilshorn & Associates director, pleaded guilty to insider trading in September, admitting he had pocketed around $1 million in trades based on his clients' unreleased quarterly results.

But during a sentencing hearing this week, the New York Post reports, Lucarelli left no biographical stone unturned in his quest for leniency.

He talked himself up:

But that was a sideshow compared to Lucarelli's bizarre rant before Manhattan federal Judge Jesse Furman, in which he blamed his former bosses for cheating him out of his commissions.

He also talked up his bona fides as he bragged about working with supermodels Iman and Kathy Ireland and winning a fistfight with his father when he was 16.

He talked himself down:

Lucarelli also played the sympathy card, telling the judge that his marriage failed after he was hit and injured by a taxi.

"I couldn't perform my sexual duties, and she's 20 years younger," he said of the split from his wife two years ago.

He talked out of his ass:

The 52-year-old said his inside trading was fueled by drugs and resentment of the Midtown firm, which he said owed him money on commissions.

"I didn't take the drugs to get high, I did it because I can't drink coffee — that's a painful trip to the bathroom," Lucarelli said.

And then he talked himself into prison. He's set to serve two-and-a-half years, after which, he tells the court, he'd like to become a truck driver.

"If you're a good driver, which I am, they don't care about insider trading."

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL), so close to having his soon-to-be ex-wife declared a bigamist in open court, was foiled this week by the unlikeliest of opponents: a leaky breast implant.

The ugly divorce proceedings between Grayson and his wife of 24 years, Lolita Grayson, began when Lolita filed last year, the AP reports. Grayson responded with allegations that the pair were never actually married because Lolita had already been married to another man. Last March, Lolita obtained a restraining order against Grayson, claiming the congressman had shoved her. Video taken by one of Grayson's employees apparently showed Lolita was the one shoving, and no charges were ever filed.

Via the AP:

The trial had been scheduled for Thursday in Orlando but is now set for March.

Lolita Grayson had been suffering chest pains. When she went to a hospital to get checked out, she was told she needed emergency surgery to remove the leaking implants and scar tissue, according to court papers filed this week.

"Of course, if she has a true medical complication, we want her to take care of it," Grayson's attorney tells the AP. "It is ironic that in all the decades she has had the implants, on the very eve of a hearing in which there is a chance this purported marriage will be invalidated, that this issue surfaces."

[image via AP]

Jay Leno's response to a question about what he thinks about alleged rapist Bill Cosby wasn't direct, but it did make people laugh!

Just a few moments after declaring, "Comedy cuts through all the bullshit," Leno got his humor distractor out at a television executive award dinner while ostensibly answering a question about his take on Bill Cosby.

Leno: I always go back to the Rodney King incident. Rodney King was the first time we got news unfiltered... I think this whole Cosby thing—Hannibal Burress, it started with him. Stand-up comedian, he made a flat-out statement that reverberated around the world. If that was on TV, it would have been edited. If it had been on any other medium, it would have been edited. But because somebody just filmed it and put it out there, you're getting your news raw and unfiltered, which I think is fantastic.

Tom Papa: Yeah. Crazy. Do you, uh. [Pause] Do you watch that Cosby thing—and—just think, sad? [Laughs nervously] Or do you think... what's your take on that? [Pause] I mean this was a guy that was... [Trails off]

Leno: I don't know why it's so hard to believe women. I mean, you go to Saudi Arabia and you need two women to testify against a man. Here you need 25!

Tom Papa: [Laughs uproariously] Alright, we're out on that! Thank you guys so much, a big round of applause for Jay! So great Jay!

Leno, who said absolutely nothing at all about Cosby, is currently being celebrated for "candidly" "blasting" Cosby. All in a day's work, if you weren't working at all.

[image via AP]

Report-a port-a: Lindsay Lohan Got Chikungunya in Bora Bora. And had to be hospitalized for it. That's the news from TMZ, which reports that Lohan was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital in London for "high fever" and "unbearable" joint pain, but has since been released.

Lohan contracted the rare, untreatable virus while vacationing in French Polynesia in December.

On December 27th, the actress uploaded a photo of herself riding a jet ski to Instagram, alongside the caption "Before I got chikungunya [crying face] [cold sweat face] [sleepy face] use Big [sic] spray please [praying hands] God bless." The caption was subsequently edited to read: "[praying hands] God bless. #meditate."

Two days later, she posted a photo of herself and two acquaintances, writing: "In good faith with good people. I refuse to let a virus effect my peaceful vacation [praying hands] be safe and happy on the new year all [red heart] #wildfox and a positive, healthy new year [blue heart]." Wildfox is a clothing brand whose website offers free Shipping on all US orders over $100.

According to TMZ, Lohan became so ill after flying back to London (her current home base) that she was eventually left unable to walk. The website adds that while she has been released from the hospital, Lohan has also been put in contact with a chikungunya specialist. Her mother Dina, a life specialist, is reportedly on route to England to be with her eldest daughter, the new face of chikungunya.

According to the World Health Organization, typical symptoms of the disease include fever, severe joint pain, muscle pain, headache, nausea, fatigue, and rash. Word on the street (also from the World Health Organization) is that the name "chikungunya" is derived from a word in the Kimakonde language meaning "to become contorted," and refers to the "stooped appearance" of chikungunya sufferers afflicted with joint pain.

As mentioned up top, there is no cure for chikungunya. So for the rest of her life, any time you look at Lindsay Lohan, know that her body is but a hollow vessel for the rare disease chikungunya.

Sounds like 2015 is already shaping up to be a quite a year for Lindsay. (Contorted.)

[Image via Getty]

A new generation doth rise: Kardashian Q Score heir Kylie Jenner is reportedly quitting the high school of quitting high school (home school) to assume her rightful position as most beloved person related to Kris Jenner.

Via Radar Online:

"Kylie quit homeschool a few months ago," a family insider tells the magazine. "She told her mom is was getting in the way of her career, and that she wanted to focus her energies on building her personal brand and making money."

Though most mothers would be outraged with such an impulsive move, momager Kris Jenner allegedly didn't bat an eye.

"Kris gave in," the insider adds of the 59-year-old, who as Radar exclusively reported, allows Kylie to have sleepovers with 25-year-old boyfriend Tyga. "She feels the girls are smart and savvy and they don't need a piece of paper to show that."

Because the only paper they need is that paper, na'mean? Bruce Jenner reportedly does not approve but no one in the family cares so uh, I guess I'm just gonna head back out to Malibu, come visit whenever you want kids, maybe go paddle boarding, something fun like a family would do oh oh but no one notices him standing there talking, am i a ghost? can they still see me? he wonders, opening the heavy front door and escaping into the hot Calabasas sun.

[image via AP]

After a brief scare over reports that Rupert Murdoch-owned rag The Sun was pulling out of the softcore porn biz, some good news: big British knockers will remain available to look at via newsprint.

A breaking Sun tweet is setting the record straight for the many Page 3 fans of Britannia, those noble men too creepy or unpresentable to even look at porn on a library computer:

Tomorrow's #Page3... pic.twitter.com/pzyZ7Qhe9N

— The Sun (@TheSunNewspaper) January 21, 2015

Nice. I would love to stare at these breasts, printed on a newspaper, and eat a white bread and potato crisp sandwich in the pub. Three cheers for boobs, mate.

Good on ye, Nicole from Bournemouth. Also what is "EEKY BUM TIME," that sounds neat.

This morning, a group of McDonald's workers in Virginia filed a lawsuit against the company, accusing it of ignoring "rampant racial and sexual harassment" happening in its stores. Ugly details below.

The lawsuit is backed by both the local NAACP chapter in South Boston, Virginia and the organized labor groups that have been leading the ongoing fight to increase wages for fast food workers nationwide. In this sense, the suit constitutes one more front in the battle to apply enough pressure to the McDonald's monolith to convince it to make major concessions to its poverty-stricken work force.

McDonald's operates on a franchise system, and has long been able to avoid taking responsibility as a corporation for the actions of individual franchisees. That responsibility dodge is crumbling now, thanks in part to a recent government ruling that the company "could be held jointly liable for labor and wage violations by its franchise operators." Today's lawsuit seeks to do exactly that: establish a chain of responsibility leading up to the corporate offices From the suit filed today in Virginia district court:

The specific allegations of the ten plaintiffs—nine black and one Latino—include casually vicious racism and sexual harassment and on-the-job discrimination.

Any former McDonald's employee (hello) will likely not be surprised by the alleged existence of racism and sexual harassment inside a McDonald's restaurant. But if these plaintiffs can show that the corporate leadership ignored these complaints, something might actually change.

[Photo: AP]

We periodically run letters from death row inmates. Today we bring you a letter from Donnie Edward Johnson, a death row inmate in Tennessee, who was sentenced to die for the 1984 murder of his wife, Connie Johnson.

Donnie Johnson, who is now 64 years old, is scheduled to be executed in March of this year. He was convicted of the suffocation murder of his wife three decades ago. Johnson acknowledges being involved in the crime, but denies being the murderer.

In his letter to us, Johnson discusses his upbringing and life before prison, his religious beliefs, his work in prison, and other thoughts. To enlarge any of the pages posted below for ease of reading, click on the magnifying glass icon in the upper left corner.

We publish letters from death row inmates not to re-litigate their cases or to take any position on their guilt or innocence, but to hear from a group of people who do not often get heard.

Previously

The full archive of our "Death Row Letters" series can be found here.

[Image by Jim Cooke]

When Oregon was granted statehood in 1859, it was the only state in the Union admitted with a constitution that forbade black people from living, working, or owning property there. It was illegal for black people even to move to the state until 1926. Oregon's founding is part of the forgotten history of racism in the American west.

Waddles Coffee Shop in Portland, Oregon was a popular restaurant in the 1950s for both locals and travelers alike. The drive-in catered to America's postwar obsession with car culture, allowing people to get coffee and a slice of pie without even leaving their vehicle. But if you happened to be black, the owners of Waddles implored you to keep on driving. The restaurant had a sign outside with a very clear message: "White Trade Only — Please."

It's the kind of scene from the 1950s that's so hard for many Americans to imagine happening outside of the Jim Crow South. How could a progressive, northern city like Portland have allowed a restaurant to exclude non-white patrons? This had to be an anomaly, right? In reality it was far too common in Oregon, a state that was explicitly founded as a kind of white utopia.

America's history of racial discrimination is most commonly taught as a southern issue. That's certainly how I learned about it while going to Minnesota public schools in the 1980s and 90s. White people outside of the South seem to learn about the Civil War and civil rights movements from an incredibly safe (and often judgmental) distance.

Racism was generally framed as something that happened in the past and almost always "down there." We learned about the struggles for racial equality in cities like Birmingham and Selma and Montgomery. But what about the racism of Portland, Oregon, a city that is still overwhelmingly white? The struggles there were just as intense — though they are rarely identified in the history books.

According to Oregon's founding constitution, black people were not permitted to live in the state. And that held true until 1926. The small number of black people already living in the state in 1859, when it was admitted to the Union, were sometimes allowed to stay, but the next century of segregation and terrorism at the hands of angry racists made it clear that they were not welcome.

Oregon's Trail to Whitopia

Cape Horn, Columbia River, Oregon photographed by Carleton Watkins in 1867 (Getty's Open Content Program)

Oregon has had more than its fair share of utopia community experiments. The definitive book on the topic is Eden Within Eden: Oregon's Utopia Heritage, where you'll find plenty of those utopian communities catalogued. But the book kind of misses the forest for the trees in not recognizing the fact that the entire state of Oregon was founded as a kind of racist's utopia. Race isn't explored in the otherwise excellent book.

Thousands would travel to Oregon in the 19th and 20th centuries, looking for their own versions of utopia. Some brave and noble people made the journey that would become cartoonishly immortalized for at least three generations now in the computer game Oregon Trail. But unfortunately for people of color, that pixelated utopia and vision of the promise land was explicitly designed to exclude them in real life.

This is not to pick on Oregon in particular as being particularly racist and terrible. The de facto exclusion of any non-white people from a number of businesses, institutions, and communities occurred throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and West. Oregon seems to have been just a bit more vocal and straightforward about it.

I spoke over the phone with Walidah Imarisha, an educator and expert on black history in Oregon and she was quick to explain that the state is only really exceptional in that it bothered to proclaim its goals of white supremacy so openly.

"What's useful about Oregon as a case study is that Oregon was bold enough to write it down," Imarisha told me. "But the same ideology, policies, and practices that shaped Oregon shaped every state in the Union, as well as this nation as a whole."

Today, while 13 percent of Americans are black, just 2 percent of Oregon's population is black. This is not some accident of history. It's a product of oppressive laws and everyday actions that deliberately excluded non-white people from a fair shot at living a life without additional obstacles being put in their way.

Life's hard enough as it is. But life as a person of color in Oregon would prove to be like trying to play Oregon Trail in a roomful of Klansmen while the computer lab is on fire.

The Messy Birth of Oregon

Oregon territorial map from 1840 (David Rumsey) Joseph Lane, the first territorial governor of Oregon (Wikipedia)

The question of whether Oregon should allow slavery dates back to at least the 1840s. The majority of Oregonians (which is to say the territory's new white residents who were systematically and sometimes violently oppressing its Native peoples) opposed slavery. But they also didn't want to live anywhere near anyone who wasn't white.

Even before it was a state, those in power in Oregon were trying to keep out non-white people. In the summer of 1844, for example, the Legislative Committee passed a provision that said any free black people who were in the state would be subject to flogging if they didn't leave within two years. The floggings were supposed to continue every six months until they left the territory. That provision was revised in December of 1845 to removed the flogging part. Instead, free black people who remained would be offered up "publicly for hire" to any white person who would remove them from the territory.

It seems to me unclear if that provision meant that free blacks would be auctioned off as slaves to people who were on their way out of Oregon. But one thing is clear: the territorial statutes would become irrelevant the following decade when Oregon would formally write its constitution. And that document was no more generous to the tiny black population.

The legislative founders of Oregon weren't exactly the cream of the crop as statesmen. Many of the sixty men who drafted the state's constitution loved to ramble on for hours making bold speeches about minor points of order. One significant subject of debate was how long members of the new government should be allowed to debate for. One particularly long-winded gentleman complained that he was just getting warmed up after 45 minutes.

These guys had plenty to say, but when it came to actually writing a constitution, they were pretty damn lazy. In fact, 172 of the document's 185 sections were directly plagiarized from the constitutions of other states like Ohio and Indiana.

The original parts? As David Schuman explains in his 1995 paper The Creation of the Oregon Constitution, they fell into two camps: limits on state spending and forms of racial exclusion. Somewhat ironically, the racial exclusion sections were included in an article called the Bill of Rights.

The constitution was put to a popular vote in the state in 1857 and included two referendums that were to be voted on independently. The first was whether they should reject slavery. Roughly 75 percent of voters opted to reject the adoption of slavery. The second measure was whether or not to exclude black people from the state. About 89 percent of voters cast their vote in favor of excluding black and mixed race people from the state. And thus, the exclusionary aspects of the state constitution were adopted.

The resulting Article 1, Section 35 of the Oregon state constitution:

No free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this State at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall come, reside, or be within this State, or hold any real estate, or make any contracts, or maintain any suit therein; and the Legislative Assembly shall provide by penal laws, for the removal, by public officers, of all such negroes, and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the State, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ, or harbor them.

The voters who overwhelmingly embraced this exclusion rationalized it not as blind hate, but as a progressive move that was simply keeping their new land "pure." Utopia often means starting from scratch, and just as often it means excluding undesirables.

As one "pioneer" voter who would later become a Republican state senator and a member of the U.S. House explained at a reunion in 1898:

Some believers in the doctrine of abstract human rights interpret this vote against admission of free negroes as an exhibition of prejudices which prevailed agains the African who was not a slave, but I have never so regarded it. It was largely an expression against any mingling of the white with any of the other races, and upon a theory that as we had yet no considerable representation of other races in our midst, we should do nothing to encourage their introduction. We were building a new state on virgin ground; it's people believed it should encourage only the best elements to come to us, and discourage others.

This language about virgin ground and "the best elements," burned into law in the new state, was used as a recruitment tool for other white Americans in the latter half of the 19th century — many of whom were white "refugees" from the south who were fleeing the dissolution of slavery.

"If you look at some of the recruiting materials, in essence they're saying come and build the kind of white homeland, the kind of white utopia that you dream of," Imarisha said. "Other communities of color were also controlled, not with exclusion laws, but the populations were kept purposefully small because the idea behind it was about creating explicitly a white homeland."

Technically the state's exclusion laws were superseded by federal law after the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted. But Oregon had a rather complicated relationship with that particular Amendment. Having ratified it in 1866, the state then rescinded its ratification when a more racist state government took control in 1868. The move was more symbolic than anything, but Oregon gave the sign that it wasn't on board with racial equality. Astoundingly, it wouldn't be until 1973 (and with very little fanfare) that activists would get the state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment yet again.

Naturally, the state's quest for an all-white utopia also included the oppression of other groups — especially those of Chinese and Japanese descent. Though Asian people were not specifically called out in Oregon's constitutional exclusion laws, the white people of many towns large and small did their best to drive out non-white people any time they got the chance.

As just one example, the white people of La Grande burned that city's Chinatown to the ground in 1893. The Chinese residents fled, with some people getting on the first train out. But some Chinese residents weren't about to be intimidated and set up camp nearby. This wasn't enough for the hateful mobs of La Grande, who broke up the camp and forced anyone remaining to get on trains out of town.

These efforts were decentralized and not officially sanctioned by the state. But as the 1910s and 20s would roll around, a new domestic terror group would re-emerge to expel, harass, and brutalize anyone who wasn't "100 percent American." Some pioneers of the era weren't going to stand for it.

The Golden West and a Place to Belong

Golden West soda fountain circa 1920s (Oregon Encyclopedia)

As rare as the presence of non-white faces were in the 19th and early 20th century, Oregonians of color found sanctuary in the few places that they were welcome.

The Golden West Hotel was unique in that it was owned, operated, and exclusively patronized by black people in Oregon. It was the only place that black people from out of town could rent a room, and it was the central hub of black entertainment, recreation, and dining in Portland.

First opened in 1906, Portland authorities continually tried to shut down the place on trumped up charges of prostitution, gambling, and later for not having the "proper licenses."

When the owners of the Golden West were forced to plea for their license back in 1921 they "pointed out that the hotel and club was practically the only place in the city where negroes could congregate."

Renting a room or patronizing the Golden West's many businesses on the first floor didn't mean that you would live without harassment from Portland's white population. But it did prove to be one of the few places in the city outside of church where black people could find a sense of community.

Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle in Oregon

Cannady in a 1922 newspaper article with a rather cryptic note about her possible death (Oregon Daily Journal) Beatrice Morrow Cannady in an undated photo (Oregonian Archives)

"The way this history gets framed often shows people of color as passive victims," Imarisha tells me. "I think it's important to frame it that people of color are actually active change makers. The changes that would've moved Oregon forward, especially racially, would not have happened without the determination, fortitude, and sheer stubbornness of people of color."

One of those people was Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Born in Texas in 1889, Cannady hopped around the country a bit, attending schools in New Orleans and Houston before moving to the Portland in 1912 and before long she was writing for The Advocate, Oregon's largest black newspaper. By 1914 Cannady was helping to found the Portland chapter of the NAACP and the following year was speaking out against D.W. Griffith's feature length film The Birth of a Nation — a movie filled with hateful stereotypes and glorified the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.

Cannady's life was filled with personal and professional struggles that seemed neverending. She and her children were refused entry to the main floor of the Oriental Theatre in 1928. And it wasn't even illegal. The Oregon Supreme Court had decided in the 1906 case Taylor v. Cohn that black people could be legally segregated from whites in public places. That particular ruling wasn't struck down in the state until 1953, and even then limits on segregation in the state were only loosely enforced.

Kimberley Mangun's 2010 biography of Cannady, A Force For Change, is both inspiring and depressing. Cannady's story is one of tiny victories hard fought over an incredibly long period of time. Frankly, that's the overwhelming thing about all social and political change. Virtually nothing happens overnight.

But if Cannady's story teaches us anything it's that if you work your ass off and foster a community where people can be a force for good, you too can eventually (one day, maybe, possibly) see minor improvements in the world.

It was in small victories that Oregonians of color had to take solace in the first few decades of the 20th century. Because once the early 1920s hit, the battle for the future of Oregon would involve a group of terrorist cowards who liked to dress up in their bedsheets and burn shit.

The Kowards of the Klavern Arrive

Frederick Louis Gifford, head of the Oregon KKK (1921-24) and a Klan pamphlet (Oregon History Project)

The arrival of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon was swift and terrifying. In 1922 the Klan in Oregon boasted membership of over 14,000 men, with 9,000 of them living in Portland. And they were setting the state aflame. There were frequent cross burnings on the hills outside Portland and around greater Oregon.

The Klan held meetings, openly participated in parades, and held enormous gatherings for initiation ceremonies. One such gathering in 1923 at the Oregon State Fairgrounds in Salem attracted over 1,500 hooded klansmen. They reportedly burned an enormous cross, of course.

As David A. Horowitz explains in his book Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, the entire state was being terrorized. And politicians at every level of government from the state to county to city officials were involved. In 1923, Oregon governor, Walter M. Pierce, and Portland mayor George L. Baker, attended and spoke at a dinner in honor of Grand Dragon Frederick L. Gifford's birthday.

Both the governor and mayor would later claim that they didn't know the event was sponsored by the Klan. Which, if true, is perhaps less vindication for the politicians and more an indictment of just how far the Klan had seeped into mainstream culture in Oregon. But there's almost certainly no way that they were ignorant of what they were celebrating.

One reason to be skeptical? High ranking members of the Klan would meet with high ranking politicians in the state on matters of public policy. And we have the photos to prove it.

Members of the Klan meeting with Portland officials in 1921 (North Coast Oregon)

The August 2, 1921 issue of the Portland Telegram included a photo of Portland city and Multnomah county officials with two Klan members. The mayor of Portland, George L. Baker, is third from the right and the police chief, L.V. Jenkins, is third from the left.

The Telegram was one of the few newspapers in Oregon to openly oppose the Klan at the height of its power in the state. Despite being owned by white Protestant men, the newspaper's adversarial stance against the Klan's terrorism brought concerted campaigns to boycott businesses that advertised in the paper. The paper hemorrhaged thousands of readers and when it folded in 1933 many reportedly blamed the Klan's efforts.

The Klan themselves counted men like Governor Pierce as members in secret minutes obtained in 1968 from the estate of a former state legislator. Colon R. Eberhard died at the age of 86 and while his personal papers were being processed, a folder of over 200 pages of KKK meetings in Oregon was discovered, dating from 1922 until 1924. Those pages weren't handed over to the Oregon Historical Society until 1980. Public mention of their existence wouldn't happen until an article in The Observer newspaper in 1985. Klan membership lists were highly secretive, but politicians like Pierce were discussed in the minutes as being loyal KKK members.

But the Klan's presence in Oregon was far from a secret, even in the 1920s. Not only were the hooded cowards meeting with law enforcement, they were advising them on what they'd like to accomplish — all while getting their picture in the newspaper. As the Telegram would report, the Portland police department was "full to the brink with Klansmen."

Portland Klan meeting in the early 1920s (Oregon History Project)

The warped thing about the Klan's presence in Oregon is just how few people of color were actually living there in the 1920s. The town of La Grande as just one example, which as you'll recall had burned its Chinatown to the ground back in the 1890s, had about 7,000 people in 1920 and just forty-six people of Chinese descent. The town had a mere 15 black people.

People of color were naturally a target for the Klan during this period, but with so few people to irrationally hate for the color of their skin, they turned to campaigns against other groups like Catholics. The Klan, being for American-born Protestants, hated the Roman Catholic church and any of its followers.

Hate is a fickle game when there are so few "others" upon which to focus your gaze. The homogenous state of Oregon was fertile ground to whip young white men into a frenzy. But almost as quickly as it was whipped up, men who were surrounded by so many men like themselves quickly lost interest. People stopped paying dues, leading to a financial crisis within the quickly built organization. By 1926 the Klan in Oregon was a shadow of its former self.

White Oregon After the Klan

Sign in the window of a Portland restaurant circa 1943 (Oregon Historical Society)

Of course, the discrimination didn't stop after the decline of the Klan. White restaurants still wouldn't serve black people in Portland, black people weren't allowed in the city's swimming pools, and the local skating rink set aside a day for black people. This was as late as the early 1960s.

"I do remember the signs downtown: 'We don't serve Negroes, Jews or dogs'," one man recounts in a 1999 documentary from Oregon Public TV titled Local Color. The signs were everywhere. And they spanned over two world wars. War attracted soldiers from out of town, both black and white. Their arrival naturally led to resentment from soldiers who were used to a more tolerant atmosphere than Oregon provided.

The Oregon Daily Journal reported on some black soldiers from California who in the summer of 1918 were angered by a sign they saw in the window of a restaurant in Portland. The sign read, "We employ white help and cater to white trade only." The soldiers entered the restaurant and destroyed the sign. Similarly in 1943, soldiers going off to fight in World War II saw signs in Portland and were outraged.

The segregation in Portland was as stark as anything in the Jim Crow-era South. And Portland's bizarre dearth of black people (bizarre to outsiders who were unaware of the climate) really came to a head during World War II, when an influx of black workers came looking for the plentiful jobs offered by the Kaiser Shipyards.

"Portland was called the most segregated city north of the Mason-Dixon line," Imarisha tells me. "And so the question became where would these [newly arrived black workers] go? Suddenly you have tens of thousands of black folks pouring in when in Portland there was only one tiny neighborhood called the Albina neighborhood that was already overfull with about 2,500 black folks."

The company worked with the city to create Vanport, an enormous new housing development halfway between Vancouver, Washington and Portland — thus the name Vanport.

"At its height there was 100,000 people there and it was 40 percent black, which for anything to be 40 percent black in Oregon was astounding, Imarisha explains. "Vanport was built incredibly shoddily because it was never meant to last."

This temporary insta-town would become Oregon's second largest city, second only to Portland during the second World War.

"In fact the housing authority in Portland called it a blight and wanted Vanport obliterated. And in 1948 they got their wish when Vanport was completely flooded." Imarisha says. Amazingly, the flooding actually started modestly and people had time to leave. But Portland officials insisted that there was nothing to worry about when the first cracks started letting water into the community.

"Remember: Dikes are safe at present," a bulletin from the Portland Housing Authority read on May 30, 1948. "You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don't get excited."

People were not warned in time and the city was flooded as the dikes fully gave way. Fifteen people would die in the floods. Less than two weeks later President Truman would travel to Vanport to see the extent of the damage firsthand.

"Because it was made with shoddy material, houses literally washed away off their foundations. All of Vanport was destroyed and about 18,000 people who were living there were left homeless."

The Clash of History and Future in the Pacific Northwest

Ken Webber of Medford, Oregon wears a confederate flag hat and shows the Confederate flag that got him fired as a school bus driver in 2012 (AP)

Oregon today still exists as a white utopia in some respects. The state, much like so many others, is haunted by the residue of less explicit experiments in whitopia. These experiments form the basis of Rich Benjamin's 2009 book Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America.

In it, Benjamin travels the country, visiting places that are overwhelmingly white. He meets fascinating characters along the way, and helps to explain places like Oregon and how the actions of the 19th and 20th century bleed into the 21st.

From Searching for Whitopia:

Through most of the twentieth century, racial discrimination was deliberate and intentional. Today, racial segregation and division often result from habits, policies, and institutions that are not explicitly designed to discriminate. Contrary to popular belief, discrimination or segregation do not require animus. They thrive even in the absence of prejudice or ill will.

It's common to have racism without "racists."

I called Benjamin on the phone to talk about his book and what he experienced in the Pacific Northwest. He was quick to tell me that he met lots of interesting, lovely people in the region. But he was also unsettled by the unmistakable symbols of our country's racist history.

"There is and was some sense that the Pacific Northwest could amount to some form of utopia," Benjamin tells me referring to the white supremacist movement in the region. "And Richard Butler knew this himself, the old founder of Aryan Nations."

Butler died in 2004, but was obsessed as so many other white nationalist militants were, with establishing a white utopia in the area. Butler, much like the founders of Oregon, bothered to write it down.

"He identified the Pacific Northwest as what would become an Aryan homeland," Benjamin says. "So the Pacific Northwest has always had a utopic quality to white separatists."

"On the one hand, I saw a lot of can-do spirit, therefore one shouldn't be surprised by all of the technological start-ups both in Oregon and in Washington State. But I also saw a lot of Confederate refugees, to be frank," Benjamin tells me.

"I remember driving through swaths of Washington and Oregon and seeing a lot of Confederate flags," he says. "There are a lot of refugees from the South who I guess are attracted to Oregon not because they're racists but Oregon had a racial homogeneity and a conservatism and a gun culture that they really appreciate."

The Pacific Northwest offers a collision of the old and the new in so many forms. But there's something particularly disturbing about his description of the juxtaposition you can see in tech hubs — the romanticization of some particularly backwards symbols of a revolution that's supposed to be long since dead, yet nurtured in the very land that's supposed to be creating the industries of tomorrow.

"That was shocking, to drive through Oregon and witness so many Confederate flags, juxtaposed with the high-tech futurism," Benjamin tells me.

Oregon's White Utopian Promise Today

Senator Barack Obama looks out to a sea of supporters in Portland on May 18, 2008 (AP)

As Neda Maghbouleh pointed out for an article in the January 2009 issue of Center for New Racial Studies, the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama gave Portland newspapers a striking image of its racial makeup. Just look at the photo above from Portland during Senator Obama's presidential campaign. You'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe Dave Matthews Band was about to go on stage.

The racial composition of any American city is a product of its history. This may seem painfully obvious, but it's something that we need to say out loud and type in bold letters to fully appreciate. The racial composition of any American city is a product of its history. And its a history that so many people in Oregon, in Minnesota, in any other "whitopia" don't seem to be privy to.

The title of Imarisha's most commonly given presentation is Why Aren't There More Black People in Oregon? A Hidden History. She has given the presentation to thousands of people around Oregon over the past four years and she's understandably frustrated that so few Oregonians are aware of something so fundamental to the state's founding. Oregon's history simply isn't being taught in most Oregon schools. And it's because even the teachers have no idea.

"It's still a hidden history today. It's not part of the curriculum that's being taught in public schools in this state. I, in fact, gave a presentation that was mostly public school administrators and public school teachers and I asked them how many of them had known about the exclusionary law before they came to the presentation. Seventy to eighty percent didn't know that Oregon had racial exclusion laws," she tells me.

"The image that the rest of the nation has about Portland is founded a lot on the show Portlandia, right? Keep Portland weird — this sort of idea of this being a white liberal playground. And it's predicated on racial exclusionary laws and the surplus resources that were purposefully kept from communities of color that were redirected into the white community."

This humble blog post barely scratches the surface of the black experience in Oregon, be it the 19th century, 20th century, or today. And it truly isn't meant to pick on Oregon as a lone destination of warped quasi-utopian intolerance. But as Imarisha said, they bothered to write it down.

It's time for white northerners to wake up to the sometimes uncomfortable history of what are now liberal enclaves like Minneapolis, Minnesota and Portland, Oregon and Madison, Wisconsin. There are stories there that may surprise you. Even if the people committing heinous acts didn't write down their intentions first.

Secondary sources: Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 by Keneth T. Jackson (1967); A Force For Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936 by Kimberley Mangun (2010); Women in Pacific Northwest History edited by Karen J. Blair (1988); Inside the Klavern: The Secret History of a Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s edited by David A. Horowitz (1999); Race, Politics and Denial: Why Oregon Forgot to Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment by Cheryl A. Brooks (2004); The Creation of the Oregon Constitution by David Schuman (1995); Unwelcome Settlers: Black and Mulatto Oregon Pioneers by K. Keith Richard (1983); Negroes and Their Institutions in Oregon by Thomas C. Hogg (1969); Black Families and Migration to a Multiracial Society: Portland Oregon, 1900-1924 by William Toll (1998); A Great Inheritance, A Special Destiny: Barack Obama's Candidacy and the Performance of Racial History in Portland, Oregon by Neda Maghbouleh (2009); "Promised Land" or Armageddon? History, Survivalists, and the Aryan Nations in the Pacific Northwest by Eckard Toy (1986); Matthew Deady and the Federal Judicial Response to Racism in the Early West by Ralph James Mooney (1984)

New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver surrendered to the FBI today for federal corruption charges stemming from unreported millions made over a decade from the Manhattan law firm Goldberg & Iryami, the New York Times reports.

As the Times notes, Goldberg & Iryami is a firm that challenges real estate assessments and specializes in tax certiorari, something Silver "is not known to have any expertise in." The speaker failed to disclose income made from the firm; he only claimed money made from personal injury firm Weitz & Luxenberg.

The charges are a result of the anti-corruption Moreland Commission, first convened by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to investigate outside income earned by state legislators, and later led by Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, after Cuomo shut the panel down last April.

According to state financial disclosure forms obtained by the Wall Street Journal, Silver earned between $650,000 and $750,000 from "outside legal work" in addition to his $120,000 annual salary for his position as speaker in 2013. (Legislators are allowed to have part-time jobs.)

Silver, who has served as speaker for the past two decades and was easily reelected to the post earlier this month, has also been involved in—and dodged—a number of sexual harassment scandals. From Daily Intel:

Silver has also been accused of mishandling several sexual assault allegations in recent years. In 2001 he defended his chief counsel, Michael Boxley, when a 25-year-old Republican assemblyman's aide accused him of raping her. (She claimed Silver continued "eating pretzels, with nonchalance and with rudeness" as she described the rape.) The Assembly's investigation was inconclusive, and the woman chose not to go to the police. Silver continued employing Boxley, and the woman said his investigation was unfair. Two years later another woman charged Boxley with rape. He resigned and pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct.

After multiple women accused Assemblyman Vito Lopez of sexual harassment, such as groping them and making sexual remarks at work, a 2013 state ethics report found Silver failed to investigate and tried to cover up the allegations. Lopez was eventually censured and resigned. There were also complaints about Silver's handling of a young staffer's claim in 2013 that Assemblyman Micah Kellner sexually harassed her, though the speaker said he acted quickly after learning about the allegations.

Gawker's position on Silver has been clear since 2008, as put by Alex Pareene:

Sheldon Silver, Speaker of the New York State Assembly. Silver represents everything wrong with Albany and the New York Democratic Party. He fights relentlessly against accountability and getting anything done to benefit New Yorkers. He rules through backroom dealmaking and no longer even pretends to represent his district.

Update: Per the Times, Silver surrendered to the FBI in Lower Manhattan early this morning.

Update, 12:25 p.m.: According to the five-count criminal complaint by the FBI obtained by the New York Times, "there is probable cause to believe that Silver received approximately $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position." And per the Times, Silver was paid the money for "essentially no work"; prosecutors seized $3.8 million Thursday.

And then there's this mouthful:

The complaint maintains that for more than a decade, Mr. Silver devised a scheme "to induce real estate developers with business before the state" to use a real estate law firm controlled by a lawyer who had once worked as Mr. Silver's counsel who orchestrated payments to the speaker for referrals to the firm.

[Image via AP]

Tony Robbins is a fabulously wealthy self-help guru who recently wrote a book containing bad financial advice. Andrew Ross Sorkin is a business reporter for America's most influential newspaper. What happens when you put them together?

What happens is: an uncomfortably boot-licking interview full of only the most pillowy softball questions, because Andrew Ross Sorkin—while by all accounts a nice guy—should probably be in financial PR, rather than in journalism.

As someone reading (or viewing a video of) an interview of Tony Robbins regarding his new book of money advice, you may have been interested to learn that actual knowledgeable financial experts pointed out, when the book came out, that Tony Robbins is generally full of shit, when it comes to money advice. Barry Ritholtz pointed out that Robbins has been giving provably awful money-losing investment advice as far back as 2010, and that the investment portfolio that Robbins recommends in his book falls prey to the "rookie mistake" of containing all the stuff that has been doing very well very recently—the same stuff that, the principle of reversion to the mean tells us, will likely not do that well in that future. Ben Carlson put together an even more detailed critique of Robbins' suggested portfolio, showing not only that it is not very inventive, but that he probably constructed it by cherry-picking things that had performed well in the past. That does not take an investment guru. Any idiot with a calculator can do that.

In other words: Tony Robbins gives demonstrably bad investment advice, yet here he is selling a book full of investment advice. I would have been interested, as a reader of the business section of our nation's most prestigious newspaper, to hear Tony Robbins respond to this critique. Instead, what we get is... this. An interview in which Andrew Ross Sorkin asks Tony Robbins nothing—nothing!—about the detailed factual criticisms of his book, but he does ask him the following question:

"Help me with this. There are people who are believers. I know friends of yours, people who have been to your seminars, who live and die and breathe for Tony Robbins... but there are other people perhaps who haven't experienced it who are skeptical—they say 'Well how could it be, this guy's a magician? I don't get it.' So what is it?"

What is this guy—a magician???

And that's today's financial news.

[Pic via]

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Mike Huckabee learned a valuable lesson on today's episode of The View: Hell hath no fury like a Beyoncé stan scorned.

One lucky member of the Beyhive got to sit on the panel today as The View received Mike Huckabee, who's still hawking that book he's been hawking.

When the discussion shifted to Beyoncé, whom Huckabee cannot complete an interview without mentioning, the aforementioned fan named Michelle Williams interjected, "She's amazing!" She did this in a sing-song suggesting she might be able to carry a tune—not with the power and range of her hero mind you, but perhaps better than the average drone. Perhaps.

Huckabee resumed admonishing Beyoncé's sexual expression, although this time he did it with more specificity than before (it's as if he's listening to the critiques and using them to sharpen his tools). This time he named actual songs that offend his delicate sensibilities: "She doesn't need to do songs like 'Partition' and 'Drunk in Love' in order to be an effective and an amazing talent."

When Michelle got a chance to defend Beyoncé's honor, she started by saying, "As someone who has definitely come up in a group with her..."

Wait, what?

Oh right, Michelle was in Destiny's Child. Awfully defensive "definitely" in there, though.

She proceeded:

I just feel like that album and those songs is that one moment where she decided to probably do some songs she's always wanted to do to shed that 'I'm a good girl...' She had some freedom and she owned it and she took it, so I was definitely offended—I'm not the Carter spokesperson...

I'm gonna stop her there and say, she's damn right she isn't the Carter spokesperson (she did apply for that position, though, and ultimately wasn't deemed a good fit), and that I really, really wish this went more like, "Who the fuck are you to tell a woman that she shouldn't express herself however she seems fit?" instead of Williams essentially arguing the other side of Huckabee's assertion that Beyoncé singing about sex is for her image and not artistry. But whatever, at least she did get this in:

"...But to hear some of those comments that you said, I thought were very, very, very low. I respect you and this is not to throw mud and tomatoes..."

Better than nothing, I guess. Michelle Williams is only human, as by now we're all too aware.

Bill Clinton took repeated trips on the "Lolita Express"—the private passenger jet owned by billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—with an actress in softcore porn movies whose name appears in Epstein's address book under an entry for "massages," according to flight logbooks obtained by Gawker and published today for the first time. The logs also show that Clinton shared more than a dozen flights with a woman who federal prosecutors believe procured underage girls to sexually service Epstein and his friends and acted as a "potential co-conspirator" in his crimes.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 in Florida to one count of soliciting underage girls for sex (and one count of adult solicitation), for which he served just over a year in county jail. But sprawling local, state, and federal investigations into the eccentric investor's habit of paying teen girls for "massages"—sessions during which he would allegedly penetrate girls with sex toys, demand to be masturbated, and have intercourse—turned up a massive network of victims, including 35 female minors whom federal prosecutors believed he'd sexually abused. He has reportedly settled lawsuits from more than 30 "Jane Doe" victims since 2008; the youngest alleged victim was 12 years old at the time of her abuse.

Epstein's predatory past, and his now-inconvenient relationships with a Who's Who of the Davos set, hit the front pages again earlier this month when one of his victims, Virginia Roberts, claimed in a federal court filing that Epstein recruited her as a "sex slave" at the age of 15 and "sexually trafficked [her] to politically-connected and financially-powerful people," including Prince Andrew and attorney Alan Dershowitz. (The latter, the filing claimed, had sex with the victim "on private planes"; Dershowitz vigorously denies the charges, as does Prince Andrew.)

Two female associates of Epstein—the socialite Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein's former assistant Sarah Kellen—have been repeatedly accused in court filings of acting as pimps for him, recruiting and grooming young girls into their network of child sex workers, and frequently participating in sex acts with them. Kellen in particular was believed by detectives in the Palm Beach Police Department, which was the first to start unraveling the operation, to be so deeply involved in the enterprise that they prepared a warrant for her arrest as an accessory to molestation and sex with minors. In the end, she was never arrested or charged, and federal prosecutors granted her immunity in a 2007 non-prosecution agreement that described her as a "potential co-conspirator" in sex trafficking.

Maxwell, the daughter of the late media mogul Robert Maxwell, has been accused by Roberts of photographing Epstein's victims "in sexually explicit poses and [keeping] the child pornography on her computer," and "engag[ing] in lesbian sex with the underage females she procured for Epstein." She has denied the allegations in the past.

Clinton shared Epstein's plane with Kellen and Maxwell on at least 11 flights in 2002 and 2003—before any of the allegations against them became public—according to the pilots' logbooks, which have surfaced in civil litigation surrounding Epstein's crimes. In January 2002, for instance, Clinton, his aide Doug Band, and Clinton's Secret Service detail are listed on a flight from Japan to Hong Kong with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and two women described only as "Janice" and "Jessica." One month later, records show, Clinton hopped a ride from Miami to Westchester on a flight that also included Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman described only as "one female."

In 2002, as New York has reported, Clinton recruited Epstein to make his plane available for a week-long anti-poverty and anti-AIDS tour of Africa with Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, billionaire creep Ron Burkle, Clinton confidant Gayle Smith (who now serves on Barack Obama's National Security Council), and others. The logs from that trip show that Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman named Chauntae Davis joined the entourage for five days.

That last name—Chauntae Davies—shows up elsewhere in papers unearthed by the various investigations into Epstein's sex ring: his little black book. Davies is one of 27 women listed in the book under an entry for "Massage- California," one of six lists of massage girls Epstein kept in various locales, with a total of 160 names around the globe, many of them underage victims.

Today, Davies is an actress with credits including HBO's Enlightened. In 2002, she was 23. According to her IMDB profile, in addition to her apparent massage work for Epstein, she landed a role that year as a "lingerie model" in Exposed, a movie produced by a softcore porn company called MRG Entertainment. (Other MRG films include Deviant Desires and Carnal Confessions; the company has since been purchased by Larry Flynt. Exposed, appropriately enough, was directed by a pseudonymous auteur who went by the name of Clinton J. Williams.) Davies's role in Clinton's flying AIDS-prevention circus isn't clear, and though her LinkedIn page claims a certificate in Swedish massage, there is no evidence that she ever actually treated Epstein to one. Reached via e-mail, she said only, "I really am not interested in being slandered in the media for having known this person a time ago. Some of the things being said are not things I have information on."

Clinton's office did not respond to an inquiry. Kellen and Maxwell did not return messages.

Other prominent figures whose names appear in the logs, which document globe-spanning flights on Epstein's planes during various periods from 1997 to 2005, include Dershowitz, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers, Naomi Campbell, and scientist Stephen Pinker.

The logs also cast doubt on public statements made by Dershowitz, who has been vigorously downplaying his relationship with Epstein since Roberts levied her accusations against him. Dershowitz has attempted to paint himself as a mere passing acquaintance of Epstein, suggesting to the American Lawyer last week that he only began hanging around the billionaire to fundraise for his school, Harvard.

Q. From what I've read, your relationship with Epstein seemed chummy. You socialized with him and you and your family stayed at his various homes. Isn't it a bad idea for a lawyer to be so close to a notorious client?

A. Let me tell you how I met him. I was introduced to him by Lady de Rothschild as an academic colleague. He was friendly with Larry Summers… He was in the process of contributing $50 million to Harvard for evolutionary biology.

Epstein did indeed pledge a substantial donation to Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, though it was $30 million, not $50 million. The first installment of $6.5 million was announced in 2003. And Epstein was indeed friendly with Summers, who assumed the mantle of president at Harvard in July 2001. The clear implication of Dershowitz's answer is that he didn't start hanging out with Epstein until it was in his interest to, because Epstein was the boss' friend and was donating money to his university.

What's more, Dershowitz told the American Lawyer, he is loyal to his wife, who is always by his side: "I've been married to the same woman for 28 years. She goes with me everywhere. People know that I won't argue a case or give a speech unless my wife travels with me. This is not the profile of someone who screws around."

But according to the flight logs, Dershowitz was close enough to Epstein to have accompanied him on a flight from Palm Beach to New Jersey's Teterboro Airport as early as December 1997. On that flight, the pair was accompanied by a number of people, including one unidentified "female," a "Hazel," a "Claire," and Maxwell.

The logs also show Dershowitz on a flight with Epstein from Bedminster Bedford, Mass., to Teterboro in October 1998, and a flight from Teterboro to Martha's Vineyard in 1999. And a 2005 trip from Massachusetts to Montreal shows him traveling with Epstein, "Tatianna," and others.

One things the logs don't show: Dershowitz's wife traveling with him.

In an interview with Gawker, Dershowitz repeated his emphatic denials of ever having sexual contact with any underaged girls, and acknowledged that he first met Epstein way back in 1997. "It was just before [ Epstein confidant] Les Wexner's 60th birthday," Dershowitz said. "My first substantive contact with him was to fly with him to Les Wexner's house to attend dinner with Shimon Peres and John Glenn."

As for who else was on those flights, Dershowitz couldn't recall. Hazel? "I don't know." Claire? "I have no idea." Tatianna? "I think that was a woman in her 20s who was Epstein's girlfriend, but I never flew with her." The unidentified female? "That could have been my mother."

As for why his ever-present wife didn't appear in the flight logs by his side, Dershowitz said that she did accompany him on several Epstein-sponsored trips that don't show up in the logs obtained by Gawker. (It is also possible that the logs, which pilots generally keep primarily to record hours of flight time, could also be incomplete or inaccurate as to the passengers.) "She travels with me all over. On occasion, she's working or travels separately. I travel with her almost all the time, not all the time."

One thing is for sure, though: "I have a very clear, unequivocal recollection that I was never on a plane with any young women, period."

In the same American Lawyer interview, Dershowitz claimed that his relationship with Epstein was "entirely professional," and that allegations that the two were "chummy" were "a total bum rap."

Contrast that with his testimonials to Vanity Fair in a 2003, pre-pedophilia profile of Epstein:

• "Alan Dershowitz says that, as he was getting to know Epstein, his wife asked him if he would still be close to him if Epstein suddenly filed for bankruptcy. Dershowitz says he replied, 'Absolutely. I would be as interested in him as a friend if we had hamburgers on the boardwalk in Coney Island and talked about his ideas.'"

• Dershowitz also said of Epstein: "I'm on my 20th book. . . . The only person outside my immediate family that I send drafts to is Jeffrey."

Asked how those comments tracked with his more recent portrayal of his relationship with Epstein, Dershowitz said simply: "He was a friend with whom I talked about ideas. We never discussed women or his social life."

If Dershowitz was a good friend to Epstein, he was a better lawyer. Along with a dream team of attorneys that included Gerald Lefcourt, Roy Black, and Ken Starr, he was successful in getting federal investigators not to charge Epstein with moving his victims across state lines and other associated crimes. The federal non-prosecution agreement Epstein's legal team negotiated with the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida immunized all named and unnamed "potential co-conspirators" in Epstein's child trafficking network, which includes those who allegedly procured minors for Epstein and also any powerbrokers who may have molested them. Although Dershowitz wasn't a signatory to the plea agreement, the latest filings in Roberts's case against Epstein accuse Dershowitz of essentially negotiating his own immunity:

Dershowitz would later play a significant role in negotiating the NPA on Epstein's behalf. Indeed, Dershowitz helped negotiate an agreement that provided immunity from federal prosecution in the Southern District of Florida not only to Epstein, but also to "any potential co-conspirators of Epstein". . . . Thus, Dershowitz helped negotiate an agreement with a provision that provided protection for himself against criminal prosecution in Florida for sexually abusing Jane Doe #3.

Dershowitz says the self-immunity accusation is preposterous, and that while he negotiated its broad outlines, he never read the agreement and wasn't involved in drafting the language. Besides, he says, "If I had had sex with Virginia Roberts, which I didn't, I wouldn't be a co-conspirator, I'd be a perpetrator," and thus not immune under the agreement, he told Gawker. "I did not know this woman, I did not touch this woman, and the entire story is made up out of whole cloth."

Dershowitz has pledged to seek disbarment of Roberts's attorneys, which include the respected former federal judge Paul Cassell, telling the American Lawyer: "Either [Cassell] will be disbarred or I will be. And if I knowingly had sex with a sex slave then I would deserve disbarment."

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Nick Bryant is the author of The Franklin Scandal, the true story of a nationwide pedophile ring that pandered children to a cabal of the rich and powerful, and the co-author of Confessions of a D.C. Madam: The Politics of Sex, Lies, and Blackmail, which will be published in March. Additional reporting by J.K. Trotter and Natasha Vargas-Cooper. If you have information to share about Epstein's activities, please email tips@gawker.com.

Top image by Jim Cooke.http://newsfeed.gawker.com/billionaire-pe...

A pregnant woman I didn't know struck up a conversation with me at a party recently. We chatted amicably about the weather (bad), the Golden Globes (fine) and the food at the party (great) before the conversation turned—inevitably, it felt—towards birth (hers). She told me she was nervous but excited, that she could not stop Googling, and how glad she was to be out of the infamously uncomfortable first trimester. "I know what you mean," I said. "When I was pregnant I was so tired I could barely move." Her eyes brightened. "You've got kids?" "No."

It went about as badly as I thought it would. The woman made a sort of what-now-how-do-I-get-out-of-this-god-oh-god-why face before subtly scanning the room for her husband and eventually making some kind of bladder excuse, hurrying away with an awkward "Well, good luck!" Good luck for what, I don't know. It was a stupid experiment, something I've tried a few times now to similar results.

Admitting the fact of my abortion to others is typically met with a lowering of voices, a tone somewhere between sympathy and pity, and something I can only describe as "soft eyes." While this approach is better than, say, being called a murderer or disowned by your loved ones, it does not leave much room for elaboration. No need to continue, they know this one. They've already got their soft eyes on, and are readying themselves for the left-leaning woman's abortion story mad lib: "I wasn't ready to have a child because [reason], so it was a relatively [adjective indicating ease] choice. It was a [adjective indicating difficulty] time, but I've never regretted it."

I have often felt constrained by this narrative. The "It was a hard choice but a good one I've never regretted" story feels like a reaction to the extremism of the pro-life movement's attitude towards abortion, just as extreme in its resolve towards positivity as the pro-life narrative resolves to be negative. But there are as many reasons to have an abortion as there are women who have had them. Focusing on the ideological debate instead of the reality of the procedure forces women's lived experiences into opposing camps: either it was a great choice you feel wonderful about, or you've always regretted it, and are sorry. Real life is not this tidy.

A story about abortion is not allowed to be a tale of nuance. My experience was difficult, in some ways, certainly. But most of my discomfort came from the feeling that I should feel discomfort. Wasn't this supposed to be the most difficult decisions of a woman's life? Wasn't it supposed to be, even if I was vehemently pro-choice, the kind of thing you always feel a little bit bad about? If that was the case, why did I have an appointment within five minutes of finding out I was pregnant? If it wasn't a travesty, did I still have the right to feel sad? During the week I had to wait for my procedure, I found myself worrying I wasn't doing abortion right.

Because there really are only the two options. Abortion is not, for instance, allowed to be a time you felt excited to be a mother, though my partner and I talked excitedly during this time about having children together, one day when we were ready. It is not allowed to be a tale of nationalism, although I have never felt more supported by the Canadian government than when I was pregnant and broke and scared, able in one phone call to secure an appointment at a clinic that would help me for free. It is not allowed to be a time my partner and I grew closer in love, or a time my friends and I ate and drank too much and for the most part carried on as normal.

It is not allowed to be a choice like any other choice, the kind of thing you think about sometimes and don't think about at others, the kind of thing you wonder about but are not worried over, because you made a choice and it's done. It is certainly not allowed to be funny, even if the easy-listening radio station quietly seeping into the clinic played "Papa Don't Preach" during your procedure, as happened to a friend of mine. In processing my own procedure I felt denied these options, though they were more accurately what I felt. With only regret or triumph as things I could normatively feel, I joked with friends that I would write the breakaway indie novel of the summer: How Should An Abortion Be?

In May of last year, a 25-year-old abortion counsellor from New Jersey named Emily Letts posted a video of her own termination online. She says she filmed the procedure because "[w]e talk about abortion so much and yet no one really knows what it actually looks like." It's tricky to know what talking about abortion means in this context. Arguably, contemporary society is more comfortable discussing abortion than ever. Conversations about reproductive rights have moved from a smattering of feminist publications to the mainstream media. In the realm of fiction, the procedure is no longer relegated to Very Special Episodes, but given plot space on primetime shows like Grey's Anatomy and Friday Night Lights. Looking at a movie like last year's "don't call it an abortion comedy" Obvious Child, it's easy to get swept up in the idea that the taboo surrounding abortion is lifting.

But Obvious Child was a filmic rarity—more often than not, contemporary characters who wind up pregnant (in movies like Juno, Knocked Up, or Blue Valentine) contemplate abortion and decide to carry the pregnancy to term, usually finding themselves, and love, along the way. We most frequently discuss abortion in a broad, news-y sense: the media covers the "debate" "around" abortion, the latest skirmishes between pro-choice and pro-life activists, whether or not CoolPope™ will weigh in on the "issue."

We talk about the controversy caused by Emily Letts and women like her, the controversy being that this woman shared her story, and the story was about abortion. As Molly Crabapple noted in an essay about her own abortion for VICE, the Manifesto of the 343—a 1971 document in which 343 women, including Simone de Beauvoir and Catherine Deneuve, admitted to having had abortions in France while they were still illegal—would not find many celebrity signatures today. While one in three women in America will have an abortion in their lifetimes, from a practical standpoint, we're more comfortable thinking the women we know are the other two.

At least this is how it has felt to me in the four years since my abortion. In the months and years since my termination I found that revealing this particular bit of personal history is somewhat of a devastating blow to an otherwise engaged conversation.

Crabapple, in her VICE essay, discusses feeling these constraints as well, responding by seeking out other women who had terminated pregnancies: "Compulsively, I searched out abortion stories online. Women for whom it had meant nothing. Women for whom it had meant everything. Most of all, women who were not sorry. I found no information on patching myself up again. For the right, recovery means repentance. For the left, you weren't supposed to have to recover at all."

I too found the understanding I'd sought by speaking to other women who'd had abortions. Disclosure of my own abortion to another of the one in three meant long, winding conversations with friends and family members and sometimes strangers who'd been processing quietly too. I found I could talk for hours about it, that I'd been silencing myself in polite company and hadn't realized. It felt like, outside this circle of women who had been there, the ability to speak freely about abortion applied only to disclosure. I felt free to tell anyone that I'd had a termination—"after all, it's your body so it's your choice, totally"—but the implicit request after the initial lowered tones was no more info please, you're bumming people out.

A few weeks before my abortion, I had had a wisdom tooth removed. When I tell people about my dental surgery, they share their own tales of laughing gas embarrassments, a kindly dental hygienist, or a gory brush with dry sockets. I feel free to tell mine too: how I was scared to be put under, how I came to and my mom was there, how the dentist over-prescribed oxycontin. I took the rest of the oxycontin while I was recovering from the abortion—I had not been prescribed any painkillers for afterwards, and had immediately gone back to work, keen to start the process of unobtrusively moving on.

Stories of abortions aren't going anywhere, despite efforts to the contrary. Today is the 42nd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and the 41st anniversary of the March for Life, an anti-choice rally that draws thousands to Washington as "a witness to the truth concerning the greatest human rights violation of our time, abortion." The GOP's Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, a bill which sought to ban access to abortions for women after 20 weeks, was expected to be signed into law but was dropped by House Republicans at the last minute.

To avoid conversations about abortion with the people in your life is to avoid thinking about abortion as a complex human experience, as nuanced as any other. Denying the range of women's experiences of abortion keeps the topic a taboo in reality and a vibrant topic of debate in the abstract. It is easier to give away the reproductive rights of an abstract idea. Abortion is not just something that happens to one in three women. It happens to one in three women you know.

Monica Heisey is a writer in Toronto.

[Image by Tara Jacoby]