Johnny Depp · Andy Dick · Mario Batali
Plus: whatever happened to the reporter who threw it all away for the Pharma Bro?
the true crime that's worth your time
You remember Christie Smythe, I’m sure. She’s the Bloomberg reporter who broke the news that the feds had arrested widely disliked white-collar criminal Martin Shkreli, aka Pharma Bro. She’s also the person who, as detailed in a remarkable Elle report from late 2020, fell in love with that dislikable man and set her journalism career on fire to be with him…while, even in prison, he seemed to be rebuffing her affections.
A lot to unpack there, so this quick detail on her current employment slid right past me:
She sold movie rights to her book proposal last year, although the book itself hasn’t been sold, for a small sum. She now works remotely for a journalism start-up, where her boss is aware of her relationship with Shkreli. Because COVID safety protocols have ended most prison visits, Smythe hasn’t seen Shkreli since February 2020. In April, when he asked for early release because of coronavirus spread inside prisons, Smythe wrote a letter, which he approved, describing their commitment and proposing he live with her. (Though his lawyers called her his fiancée in their own request for early release, Smythe says she and Shkreli are actually “life partners.”)
Well, here we are a year and a half later, and still there isn’t a film in the works (at least, not one that’s been announced). Her book, called Smirk: How I Fell In Love With the Most Hated Man in America, is apparently a Substack. I also haven’t heard anything about her book. But The Daily Beast has some scoop about that journalism startup, which appears to be doing what most startups do: flame out.
The headline is a little unfair — Things Just Went to Hell at Pharma Bro Ex’s Newsroom — but it got me to click so well done, I guess. Here’s the deal: a business news startup called The Business of Business has reportedly stopped paying its staff, and its co-founder was just dumped from the company.
Smythe is the editor in chief of TBoB, and tells TBD that she’s “really proud” of what the publication — a media outlet owned by data-mining company Thinknum — has accomplished, and said its tech company ownership didn’t influence coverage. Here’s Smythe telling Elle more about the website:
But a few months later, she came across a listing for a job at a digital startup publication called The Business of Business. “It was a very well-written ad and I was like, you know what, let me just tell them the truth,” Smythe says. She wrote a cover letter explaining who she was and what exactly she had done and, within five days, she was hired as a senior writer. “The ad was asking applicants to have a sort of unique perspective on business. The publication prides itself on participating in the story, so long as we make that clear. We don’t have this distant objectivity. We like to have a voice. So I was like, ‘If that’s what you want, I can give you lots of that,’” Smythe says. “Let me tell you about myself and what unique perspective I bring to this situation. And they loved it.”
By the end of 2021, Smythe was promoted to be the publication’s editor-in-chief. “There were many, many doomsayers who were proclaiming the end of my journalism career, but they were wrong,” she says. “This is a small world where people get a sense like, ‘Oh she’s good and she knows what she’s doing.’ Sometimes that outweighs ‘Oh, her ex-boyfriend is a famous white collar criminal.’”
The apparent business model at TBoB was that VC-backed Thinknum would generate the revenue to pay for the publication, but last month, workers at TBoB didn’t get paid. Now co-founder Justin Zhen, who also co-created Thinknum, has been deactivated on Slack, and employees have been told not to contact him. It’s all very mysterious, and certainly not Smythe’s fault!
And yet, what are the odds that she’d end up in yet another situation in which a founder appears to be operating in a questionable manner? Especially since she just told Elle that her Pharma Bro times gave her a bit of a sixth sense when it comes to this stuff:
Smythe says everything she went through with Shkreli has given her a leg up in her reporting, which often centers on white collar crime and scandals. “I feel I have this ability to see into peoples’ minds—it’s almost like this amazing 3D vision that I didn’t have before. I get this sense of, ‘Oh I can see what this is like from your perspective,’” she says. “I can get interviews that I might not have been able to get before, because people can see that I understand.”
I’d love to know Smythe’s take on Zhen’s perspective, but so far, she’s keeping mum on that bit. So here’s where things stand at TBoB today:
Employees still have no idea if the outlet is liquid or whether they’ll receive the money owed to them. Executives had said they hoped to clear things up last Friday, but they punted such conversations to early this week.
One person close to the company wondered what other lies may have been told. “It's like, were the sales really there? Where is this money?”
Like I said, what are the odds? — EB
The Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial is sad and gross and I’m not going to mess with any central aspects of it. But there are two tertiary narratives I’m fascinated by: the folks willing to pay thousands to watch from the courtroom, and the overall weird meme-iness of the whole shebang.
Meet the Fans Who Line Up to Watch Johnny Depp Trial in Person, Including One Who Spent $30K [People]
People traveled to Fairfax, VA from around the world just to watch the trial, spending more money than I spent on rent last year. (To be fair, I have rent control.) Said one 26-year-old trial spectator who said that she got up at 2 a.m. to secure a seat in the courtroom, “My friends think I'm insane for doing it but I think it's a historic trial.” She seems like an amateur compared to this person:
Ivan De Boer, 59, from Los Angeles, tells PEOPLE she used her paid vacation time for the year to attend the trial. So far, she has spent about $30,000 on expenses.
"I took my whole year's vacation so I could be here for Johnny," she says. "I'm the same age as Johnny. I'm single, so I do what I want to, basically."
When asked if she has any regrets about spending so much, De Boer replies, "No regrets. I'd regret it more if I wasn't here."
What’s Really Driving the Memeing of the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard Trial? [Vanity Fair]
As our feeds have been flooded by Heard/Depp memes that seem to suggest that domestic violence is a joke, VF’s Delia Cai tries to figure out why. Why, in this case of all cases, are so many “women are crazy and not to be believed” internet-content makers coming out of the woodwork and into TikTok with analysis; is it something as simple as the pair’s fame? Here’s what Cai comes up with:
When #JusticeForJohnnyDepp content can flourish in the same online venues that incentivized #FreeBritney or #BelieveWomen en masse, is much of the underlying ideology behind any given meme actually irrelevant to the form? The meme as a neat container for holding a set of specific signals gives way to the meme as a mere vehicle in an increasingly beliefs-agnostic clout rush. Who cares if something allegedly horrific happened between two actual people, because isn’t it kind of hilarious? And aren’t we clever and provocative for saying so? Don’t forget to like and subscribe!
At what point will NewsRadio become too uncomfortable to watch? A brief rundown of clouds over various cast members (and I’m sure I’m missing some stuff):
Dave Foley (Dave) was threatened with arrest after shirking child support payments to the tune of $500K plus
Phil Hartman* was murdered by his wife mid-season; Jon Lovitz stepped in as his replacement
Lovitz, for his part, was a vocal defender of Bryan Callan, a comedian accused of rape by at least four women
I’m not even going to get into it over Joe Rogan, who seems like a corrosive and dangerous ding-dong but doesn’t have a true crime angle
And then there’s Andy Dick, so great as Matthew, who has been involved in cases including a 1999 suicide, multiple vehicular code violations (including DUI), a slew of drug convictions, a violent assault last year, and more charges of nonconsensual touching/groping/sexual battery than I have the energy to count at this point in the week. His latest arrest was this week, when, per The Hollywood Reporter, police say Dick sexually assaulted a man at the O’Neill Regional Park in Trabuco Canyon, CA.
The incident was apparently livestreamed, Page Six reports:
Police have not released the man’s name. However, a YouTube channel titled “Captain Content RV” — which captured the arrest and events leading up to it — revealed a man who goes by the name of “JJ” accused Dick, 56, of molesting him in his sleep.
Around the 3:10 mark of a clip from the livestream, a disoriented “JJ” can be heard telling another person in the recreational vehicle what he claims occurred.
He says hesitantly, “I was just in bed right now, and I smelled certain parts of my body … [I was] in the other RV with Andy, and … the last thing I remember, we were on the phone with his fiancée … I smelled parts of myself and they smell like artificial smells.”
We all stomach reruns of shows where maybe one person has been revealed to be a problem (see: Bob’s Burgers and Jimmy Pesto), but at a certain point, when there are more problems than not, it’s hard to enjoy. Has NewsRadio, arguably one of the best sitcoms ever, reached that point for you? — EB
*OBVIOUSLY Phil Hartman is not to blame for his own death at the hands of his wife! But seeing him does make me sad sometimes, because his loss was so pointless and tragic (I also feel that way sometimes when I see Paul Walker). Please take my inclusion of Hartman on the list as a note about an issue that casts shade over the show, not as a criticism of Hartman, himself.
Brace for a Mario Batali comeback. Five years ago, the news broke that celebrity chef Mario Batali — the red ponytailed and be-Croc-ed chef who had multiple network and cable TV shows, including one with Gwyneth Paltrow — had allegedly engaged in a longstanding pattern of sexual harassment, battery, and assault.
We’ve talked about this here before, of course, and how the claims against Batali resulted in a single criminal trial, one that wrapped up after two days this week. In the end, judge James Stanton said (this is from a NY Times report) that Batali “did not cover himself in glory on the night in question,” but that his accuser in this case “has significant credibility issues.” Batali was fully acquitted.
There have been other claims against Batali over the years, but all have been settled (like the $600K Batali and business partner Joe Bastianich paid a group of victims last year) or reached a dead end (like three other sexual assault accusations NYPD closed the book on in 2019). This trial, which ended Tuesday, was the last legal issue hanging over Batali since the allegations against him were made public.
Even before the trial, there have been rumblings that Batali was considering a comeback: as long ago as 2018, Kim Severson reported that “When Mr. Batali’s name comes up among groups of food professionals over drinks or between sessions at conferences, some say that if any of the men caught in the current wave of sexual harassment scandals can forge a path back, it might be Mr. Batali.”
If there’s been a theme to today’s issue of Best Evidence — which, I didn’t intend there to be! — it’s that even in this age of “cancel culture,” many people seem extremely prepared to forgive certain men who have been accused of terrible things! Batali, arguably, had a cuddlier and less troubling thing going than Dick, Depp, or Shkreli, and they have all found supporters that are as loyal as they come. Will Batali find a similar fate?
Anthony Bourdain, who certainly came with his own set of issues, said this about his longtime friend Batali when the claims against him first dropped:
Retire and count yourself lucky. I say that without malice, or without much malice. I am not forgiving. I can’t get past it. I just cannot and that’s me, someone who really admired him and thought the world of him.
I wonder if Batali will take his late friend’s advice, or if the call of a possible comeback-style food show, now unimpeded by pending cases, will prove too much for him. — EB
Next week on Best Evidence: We have a week to pick out a bunch of podcasts that I will listen to and review at the end of the month. Start thinking now, and I’ll circle back for your thoughts on Tuesday!
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