Instagram Scams · Schadenfreude · Scrubs
Sliding into the holiday weekend with some longreads and snickering
the true crime that's worth your time
What are you watching this (in the U.S.) long holiday weekend? Top of my list is House of Hammer, for which I have been saving my free Discovery+ trial. I’m curious enough that I made that decision even before I looked at the write-ups, but let’s take a look:
Armie Hammer’s sordid family drama is center stage in ‘House of Hammer’ [Washington Post]
This piece is less critical review than SEO play (no shade there, we all gotta eat), but says the three-part series “digs in to find that the allegations against Hammer are much broader and more disturbing — and concludes that they are part of a dark family tradition.” OK, into it.'House of Hammer' tries to connect Armie Hammer allegations to his family history [CNN]
OK, this is a review, and critic Brian Lowry wasn’t having it. “The series frequently feels as if it's significantly overreaching, not only in its stylistic choices -- with eerie music and cameras panning down darkened hallways -- but by seemingly attempting to paint the Hammers' alleged behavior through the years as something more than excesses associated with power and privilege, but almost some sort of inherited evil.” Sure, I get the point, but doesn’t that make it sound kind of fun?House of Hammer review – the dark truth about Armie Hammer’s downfall [Guardian]
Four-star review from Jack Seale, who compares HoH to Succession; I hate it how every show about rich people is now compared to Succession, it’s like how every on-demand app is now “Uber but for [whatever product/task].”
But say you’re either done with rich people and their bullshit, or you want some REAL horror. In that case I am happy to note that about a month after true-crime eminence grise Joe Berlinger announced that he’d be diving into fictional content, his year 2000 fictional masterpiece, Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows, just dropped on Amazon Prime last night. (Thanks to BE bestie Thalia for reminding me of JB’s franchise foray!)
How about you? What are you watching this weekend?— EB
And now for some longreads! I strongly recommend all these stories, without reservation. As opposed to larding on the praise, I’m just going to give you a snip of each, and you can do the rest.
A judge’s affair with Tom Girardi, a beachfront condo and a $300,000 wire from his firm
Tricia Bigelow, then a presiding justice of a state appeals court in downtown Los Angeles, wanted a weekend place at the beach.
She found an ocean-front condominium in a prime area of Santa Monica in 2015 and embarked on a luxurious makeover later described in a rental listing: custom kitchen cabinets, high-end appliances, a built-in wine fridge, a soaking tub and furnishings in an elegant nautical theme.
To pay the substantial price tag, she did not have to rely on her judicial salary alone. Tom Girardi, the powerful attorney with whom she was having an affair, wired her $300,000 in the week she closed on the Ocean Avenue property, according to financial records filed in a state court lawsuit.
Is Eric Weinberg Hollywood’s Most Prolific Predator?
In February 2019, Gil Ramirez put out a query on Twitter on behalf of his friend, Avian Anderson. “Hey folks in the LA region: I have a friend that has been asked by a Eric Weinberg to take photos of her,” he tweeted. “Can you help me do a little research on him? Has anyone heard of him?”
Weinberg initially approached Anderson, then a 29-year-old storyboard artist, in the parking lot of a Ralphs in North Hollywood. The then-58-year-old introduced himself as a writer-producer for the hit show Scrubs, in addition to being an amateur photographer. She recalls that he asked if she modeled and would like to shoot with him.
“I think if you just look at it as an appreciation of the sculpture of your body, you’ll really love your photos. It’ll be empowering for sure,” he later texted her.
Read it all at The Hollywood Reporter.
People cry at airports all the time. So when Jai Cooper heard sobbing from the back of the security line, it didn’t really faze her. As an officer of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), she had gotten used to the strange behavior of passengers. Her job was to check people’s travel documents, not their emotional well-being.
But this particular group of tearful passengers presented her with a problem. One of them was in a wheelchair, bent over with her head between her knees, completely unresponsive. “Is she okay? Can she sit up?” Cooper asked, taking their boarding passes and IDs to check. “I need to see her face to identify her.”
“She can’t, she can’t, she can’t,” said the passenger who was pushing the wheelchair.
Soon, Cooper was joined at her station by a supervisor, followed by an assortment of EMTs and airport police officers. The passenger was dead. She and her family had arrived several hours prior, per the airport’s guidance for international flights, but she died sometime after check-in. Since they had her boarding pass in hand, the distraught family figured that they would still try to get her on the flight. Better that than leave her in a foreign country’s medical system, they figured.
Grover Cleveland High School sat a few blocks from the epicenter of the Northridge earthquake. The school’s low-slung buildings suffered so much damage that students couldn’t attend classes for several weeks afterward. When they returned, they couldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria because the facility had been condemned. Instead they ate in whatever nooks and crannies they could find—in hallway corners, on concrete quads, or in classrooms, sometimes with their teachers.
In E Hall, part of the northernmost section of campus, eating lunch in a teacher’s room was a badge of honor. The faculty of E Hall were celebrity educators, rock stars of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). They ran Cleveland’s renowned humanities magnet, an interdisciplinary program combining instruction in history, literature, art, and philosophy. “We were like a little Sarah Lawrence in the middle of a Title I school,” an alum told me, referring to the federal program that provides financial assistance for schools with a large population of low-income students. Since its founding in 1981, the magnet had been the subject of glowing news stories, and schools across Los Angeles had replicated its curriculum. The program, which called itself Core, produced so many graduates bound for top-notch colleges that some alumni referred to the University of California at Berkeley as “Core north.”
Core teachers prided themselves on being radicals. They encouraged students to eschew taboos, expand their horizons, and question conventional wisdom. They lectured on systemic racism and postmodernism, and they treated the teenagers they were tasked with educating as “young men and women,” a phrase the program’s founder, Neil Anstead, was fond of using. In turn, the students worshipped them.
Real Money, Fake Musicians: Inside a Million-Dollar Instagram Verification Scheme
To his more than 150,000 followers on Instagram, Dr. Martin Jugenburg is Real Dr. 6ix, a well-coiffed Toronto plastic surgeon posting images and video of his work sculpting the decolletage, tucking the tummies and lifting the faces of his primarily female clientele.
Jugenburg’s physician-influencer tendencies led to a six-month suspension of his Ontario medical license in 2021 after he admitted to filming patient interactions and sharing images of procedures without consent. He apologized for the lapse and is currently facing a class-action lawsuit from female patients who say their privacy was violated.
But on Spotify, Apple Music and Deezer, and in roughly a dozen sponsored posts scattered across the web, Jugenburg’s career and controversial history was eclipsed by a new identity. On those platforms, he was DJ Dr. 6ix, a house music producer who’s celebrated for his “inherent instinctual ability for music composition” and who “assures his followers that his music is absolutely unique.”
It’s an unconvincing persona — perhaps even less so once his “music” is played. But it was enough to secure what he wanted: a verification badge for his Instagram account.
I’ve been saving this one for this moment, because I want to send you off on your weekend with a smile. I’d sort of assumed that everyone in involved with the revived version of Live PD had done their due diligence, but I guess not? Creator Dan Abrams made a big to-do in June when the canceled-since-2020 A&E pro-cop show was (in his words) revived at Reelz…and now A&E is using Abrams’s word against him.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, a lawsuit filed by A&E states: “Defendants intentionally have confused the public into believing that On Patrol: Live is Live PD and is associated with AETN’s brand…Defendants and Live PD’s former principals openly and repeatedly have referred to Live PD as ‘returning’ and ‘coming back’ on REELZ. These public statements were not gaffes or misstatements; they were part and parcel of Defendants’ bad-faith strategy of capitalizing on AETN’s reputation, trading on AETN’s goodwill, and passing off On Patrol: Live as the same product as Live PD.”
In its filing, A&E called Abrams’ new show “a blatant rip-off” of his old one, which is pretty brutal: can one rip off oneself?
Interviews like this one with EW are cited in the filing, which names Amazon (by way of recent acquisition MGM)-owned producer Big Fish and Reelz. According to court docs, A&E is seeking multiple tiers of damages and payments from the run of On Patrol: Live so far, and asks that a permanent injunction shut down “On Patrol: Live and any other Live PD derivative” for good.
Abrams has wisely kept mum on this (for once), but a spokesperson for Reelz issued a statement on Tuesday that “ReelzChannel, LLC, has not been served with nor had an opportunity to review the Complaint in detail, and thus has no comment at this time beyond denying liability and expressing its ongoing commitment to On Patrol: Live,” and hasn’t said anything since. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: Brett Favre, carceral voyeurism, and Cloudflare.
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