Bugsy · Brett · Bird on the lam
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A legit serious allegation leveled at George Santos is, per Jezebel’s Kylie Cheung, “being drowned out” by all the silly stuff he’s perpetrated in the last few months to a year. An accusation of sexual harassment/assault from an erstwhile staffer came to light over last weekend:
Derek Myers, a prospective staffer in Santos’ congressional office, sent a letter to the House Ethics Committee and filed a police report alleging that Santos sexually assaulted him on Jan. 25. Shortly after Myers says he rejected Santos’ advances, he had his job offer as a staff assistant in Santos’ office rescinded on Feb. 1.
The first incident occurred while Myers was sorting mail in Santos’ office, he said. Santos invited him to sit on the couch next to him. “I proceeded to move forward with a discussion about the mail, but the Congressman stopped me by placing his hand on my left leg, near my knee and saying, ‘Hey buddy, we’re going to karaoke tonight. Would you like to go?’” Myers wrote in the letter. After Myers turned down the invitation, he claims that Santos “proceeded to take his hand and move it down my leg into my inner-thigh and proceeded to touch my groin.” Further, Myers claims Santos told him that his husband was out of town and invited Myers to come over.
Myers, working “in a volunteer capacity” up to that point, had been offered a paid job with the (for now) congressman’s office — but that offer was withdrawn. Senior Santos staffers tried to make it out like they had concerns about Myers’s involvement in a separate flap late last year,
a since-dismissed criminal charge he’d faced last year for alleged wire-tapping. Myers pleaded not guilty to the charge, which came after he recorded and published audio from a murder trial while he served as editor-in-chief of a local Ohio newspaper. The charge against him was denounced by the Committee to Protect Journalists.
That story is of more than passing interest to us here as well, but I’m more compelled by Cheung’s choice to frame the Santos-misbehavior part of the story as typical GOP-pol squid-inking — and to note that “Often enough, men accused of abuse seem to get a pass when we can focus on their gaffes, or their more palatable transgressive behavior.” The first guy I thought of was Matt Gaetz; Cheung cites Trump and Armie Hammer as examples of dangerous men who get misfiled as joke fodder because it’s easier, or because they do so much dumb own-goal shit that, after a while, we just start tuning all the shit out, including felonies. (One possible exception, which I don’t think necessarily disproves the rule: OJ Simpson, who may have thought everyone was sufficiently worn out by his very name that he could operate under the radar…or may just have drunk his own Flavor Aid as to what he could get away with.) Cheung goes on to say that the Santos news cycle has worn everyone out, so she gets “the comparative lack of outcry” about the latest set of allegations. And so do I.
But whether or not guys like Santos and Gaetz et al. consciously count on our collective asshole fatigue in order to operate more nefariously, it always comes back to what I call The Reagan Conundrum: it doesn’t truly matter if the elected in question is a bonehead/cognitively compromised, or an active schemer, because if he didn’t know whatever fuck-up it is this time was wrong, he’s not competent to hold office, and if he knew but didn’t care, he’s corrupt. And as momentarily satisfying as it is to joke about, like, Santos packing DB Cooper’s parachute, or as tempting as it is to mutter to yourself, “Enough with the Santos heds, Buntsy; wake us when he’s ousted” (or tell yourself you’ll “get caught up with” all the Santos stories when they finally stop, which…I don’t think they will, but I get it), I feel like I have to pay attention to Santos’s nonsense, because if I don’t, he’ll slip some Class-C felony in there and expect to get away with it. — SDB
Brett Favre is suing a bunch of people for defamation. Favre is accused (credibly, in our opinion) of
participating in a scheme to divert $5 million to build a volleyball facility at the University of Southern Mississippi, where his daughter played the sport and he starred in college. The Mississippi native has repaid $1.1 million he received, ostensibly for speaking engagements that failed to materialize, out of a pool that originated with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.
But God forbid reporting actually call rich and powerful shitheads to account without having to lawyer up first, because Favre is going after “Mississippi’s state auditor and Shannon Sharpe and Pat McAfee, a pair of sports media personalities and former NFL players.” Favre continues to claim he’s done nothing wrong and was “unjustly smeared,” and evidently sent letters to various named parties in the suit, whini— er, “asking” them to retract their statements, which in Sharpe’s and McAfee’s cases included calling him a “sorry mofo” for stealing from the poor. When a retraction did not occur, Favre apparently chose the nuclear option, accusing at least one of the defendants of using the allegations to make a name for himself.
This is going to get interesting (read: “nauseating”) for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned headlock the fear of litigation has put on journalistic outlets big and small. Bateward and Buntstein over here don’t devote too much mental acreage to the possibility that, say, Joe Berlinger is going to swat us for needling him, but he could sue us out of existence pretty easily, and newsrooms large and small — and podcasters, and publishers, and evidently sports commentators — post-Gawker and -Heard/Depp now have to factor in the very real possibility that speaking truth to power is going to put a headstone on their projects.
Specifically to HOF tight end and FOX football analyst Sharpe, who made a few headlines of his own late last month after his courtside burn book got snatched by the Memphis Grizzlies, I said to DPB last night that I don’t know how the various powers here will end up aligning. Favre, like Joe Namath a generation ahead of him, seemed to have settled into a comfortable conservative twilight, making commercials aimed at old folks half-watching basic cable all morning1 and just sitting around being a more-or-less beloved figure of sport nostalgia; the allegations against him probably don’t materially affect that plan within his demographic, but he thinks that they do, and while the smarter play is probably just to shut the hell up until everything is litigated, Favre is going with the performative-outrage play.
Sharpe, meanwhile, is a famous enough commentator on the country’s true national pastime that I know his name, and is employed by a company synonymous with lunatic “anti-woke” conservative commentary, although its sports wing is far less virulent — but Sharpe is 1) also (self-branded as) something of a braying ass, this recent trash-talk kerfuffle entirely aside — he’s A Yelly “Ya Gotta Run The Football, Terry!!” Guy; but 2) in a job that relies more and more heavily on gambling-concern advertisers who, I imagine, expect their content providers not to distract too much from the primary business at hand, namely using Sharpe’s clickbait-ish opining to guide sportsbook decisions. tl;dr: what’s going to cost FOX Sports and/or the various casino-branded regional systems that carry its stations the least — backing Sharpe, or throwing him under the Favre bus?
From what I’ve read, McAfee seems relatively unconcerned, and while the WaPo piece I linked didn’t get a comment from Sharpe, it’s likely because he is too — but I can’t predict how it’s going to go, because Favre isn’t wrong to deduce that bully suits like this get results…but he may have overrated his own remaining importance in this ecosystem. Not for nothing, but: it’s Super Bowl Week, my guy. Read the room. — SDB
Or should we pass the hat for a down payment on the Bugsy Siegel “murder mansion” instead? Nothing about open houses in the TopTenRealEstateDeals.com write-up, but you can head to Nourmand.com for more details on the listing.
Upside down on his Flamingo Casino deal and accused of stealing from the mob, the notorious character was assassinated in 1947 by a sniper, who shot him with an M1 Carbine through the window of his mistress’s swanky Beverly Hills pad. The murder was never solved, but the “murder mansion,” a stunning Spanish Colonial, has hit the market at $16.995 million.
The guesthouse alone is probably big enough for my needs, but I don’t hate the sound of the loft BR in the “central tower” with its own balcony, the master suite’s marble bath and discrete fireplace, or being neighbors with Adele.
“Hey, wasn’t the guy who created Full House trying to unload ‘the Cielo Estate’? What happened with that?” Good (?) news: the price got slashed a few weeks ago by $25M. — SDB
If Flaco the Eurasian-eagle owl’s literal and figurative flight from the Central Park Zoo isn’t the next season of American Vandal, I just don’t know what. Gothamist has already coined the perfect subtitle — “Hoo-dunnit” — with its initial report from last week, and no, we’re not accusing Flaco of anything; this is a true-crime story because some dimwit vandalized Flaco’s enclosure, probably with an eye to freeing the bird, and Flaco hot-child-in-the-citied on out of there.
The story’s taken a turn in recent days, because zoo workers aren’t…I’m so sorry; I have to…catching a lot of Flaco. Per Gothamist’s more recent report, the owl has
stayed tantalizingly close, spending most of the last six days perched atop nearby trees in Central Park, seemingly oblivious to the scores of New Yorkers who come to check on him daily.
…
Staff members with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which oversees most of the city’s zoos, have kept a round-the-clock watch on Flaco since his escape. On recent nights, zoo employees have attempted to lure the bird to the ground with his favorite meal – dead rats – while standing nearby with handheld nets, according to several workers.
Wildlife experts worry that Flaco, resident at the CPZ since 2010, no longer knows how to survive on his own — and that, even if he does remember how to catch rats for himself, the ones he snags will be loaded with rodenticides. Flaco’s large size apparently means that he can subsist on previously-loaded carbs and proteins for quite some time, so the hope is that he enjoys a little more owlspringa and then lets himself get caught before he can collide with a high-rise window.
The piece is worth a read, although a sidebar about a similar escapee, Gladys, doesn’t end well for Gladys or the house-cat she appropriated as a snack, and the current Plan B for the rescue op — involving a Super-Soaker and Palmolive — doesn’t sound super-promising. Neither do the chances of catching the abettor who broke into the enclosure; NYPD says it’s “investigating.” — SDB
Slenderman author Kathleen Hale “forensically reconstructs” the lives and loves of the four murdered Idaho college students for Vanity Fair. I don’t rightly know whether to recommend the piece; on the “pro” side, Hale is, well, a pro, and I found Slenderman diligently researched and sourced. I also found it juuuust a little bit self-conscious at a few junctures, and the Idaho case is one of those stories that is going to set myriad traps for writers and publications who like an end-of-section dun!…and VF isn’t not one of those.
I also wonder what/whom such a granular reconstruction is for, in the end. Given that the alleged perpetrator is no longer at large, it’s not especially salutary vis-a-vis the case proper. I don’t think a micro-victimology is especially enlightening per se, here — and if it’s an attempt to center said victims, not least by highlighting the “there but for the grace of Xenu” aspects of the tragedy, that’s certainly worth doing. But…maybe in just a single article, instead of a multi-parter, which this apparently is. And…maybe don’t make the alleged killer not just your lede but your entire first section. Yes, people want to know why this happened and what made Bryan Kohberger tick, for the same reasons people consume a lot of true crime — gathering information creates the illusion of a bulwark of control. As usual, though, the “why” is either unrelatably selfish and grubby, or inaccessible to the neurotypical and/or non-sociopathic.
I don’t judge Hale for writing it, I won’t judge you for reading it, and Hale does get some compelling background intel on previous “off” social interactions Kohberger had; one in particular is interesting thanks to the way it highlights the subterfuge women often feel we have to use to get rid of a guy. But I don’t think it’s a great use of your genre time. — SDB
Neither is Poisoned Blood, probably, but the Marie Hilley story is almost indescribably bonkers — when the “arsenic 2.5, Marie’s family 0” portion is only the first quarter of the book? bonkers, people! — and David Colacci is 100 percent elevating the material with his audiobook narration. The book by Philip E. Ginsburg is, thanks to the multiple subgenre tags it spans, on sale for a few more days at Exhibit B., but I’ve reached the homestretch of the audio version and I’ll have a review for you next week. There’s also a newish Wondery true-crimer I thought I’d try while finishing up a knitting project, and Eve’s digging into the Stolen Youth series on Hulu.
What true crime are you reading or watching this weekend? — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: Black widows, sex cults, and going cross-genre with the Weather Channel.
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not excluding my household from that cohort, for the record