Portnoy · Heirens · Capote
Plus Von Dutch and "Vanity Fair"
the true crime that's worth your time
I don’t love kicking off the week with a content warning for sexual violence and bullying, but that’s how it goes sometimes. As always, please read Best Evidence with care for yourselves.
Julia Black’s piece for Business Insider is a courageous, thoroughly reported overview on what many women who have the temerity to tweet about sports — or about anything else, if we’re not in our twenties and “hot” — has known for a long time: Barstool Sports cult leader Dave Portnoy is a toxic piece of shit. The “political incorrectness” (it’s straight bigotry, and the characterizations of Portnoy’s and his minions’ “anti-wokeness” is the one area where I felt Black and her editors were too careful) is and has been a known quantity; ditto the gleeful terrorizing by “Stoolies” — always, somehow, at a plausibly deniable remove from Barstool’s power elite, of Barstool critics. Here’s an account of one doxxing that actually went after a dude for a change:
Bob Murchison, a private-equity investor with no professional connection to Barstool, first began tracking Barstool's content in 2019 after it hired a radio host with a history of transphobic comments. Murchison, who has a transgender son, has taken it upon himself to privately warn advertisers of what he perceives to be the company's transphobic, misogynist, and racist content.
In 2019, a Barstool employee shared a tweet containing Murchison's cellphone number and email address; his home address was posted on fan-run message boards. In response, Stoolies sent Murchison death threats and packages (including one with an object meant to look like a bomb and another containing feces), staged a "prayer vigil" in his hometown that was also attended by Barstool employees, contacted organizations with which he was affiliated to make false claims of criminal activity against him, and showed up to his house, where they filmed videos of their trespassing, which they later posted online.
My esteemed colleague Craig Calcaterra summed it up pretty neatly in Cup Of Coffee last week:
Most of what is described in the story falls short of criminal activity, but there are specific bits which, even if the victims did not pursue the matter, in my view, fall under the banner of assault and could be prosecuted under even slightly different circumstances. All of it strongly suggests that Portnoy is violent and misogynistic and that eventually he will seriously harm someone and find himself in legal jeopardy as a result.
All of it likewise reinforces many things that have long been known both about Portnoy and his company.
Calcs goes on to link to several sites and YouTube channels that have cataloged Portnoy’s racist and misogynistic language, but you get the point: he’s like Trump, and Weinstein, in that nobody who could have a salutary effect on the situation is going to speak truth to their power as long as everyone’s making that much money. Eventually, he’s going to proposition a young woman he doesn’t know is underage, and then the biggest advertisers will slink away or denounce him, but it won’t be because they’re siding with women, or don’t want to contribute to bigoted toxicity in the discourse. It’ll be because he’s embarrassing.
As a woman who could have been shaken from a sound sleep and still given you two grafs on Dwight Gooden’s curveball arm slot by the time I was 15, I’m not unfamiliar with sexism in sports fandom, but with the exception of some shitty hollering when I was a Little League umpire (a parent, of course; the kids didn’t care), it mostly took the form of bafflement, and that always passed. It’s seemed like the “but girls only like figure skating” received wisdom I had to correct so often back in the day was fading out of the collective understanding of who “got to be” sports fans, commentators, and even executives — more slowly than you’d hope, but still, and I keynoted a baseball-in-lit conference in 2015. (NB: The piece linked makes it sound like Ken Griffey Sr. was the undercard; not really how it went down, hee.) But I managed to find the safe spaces, the college-caf lunch tables where I could win an argument about Jimmy Key and not feel like I might get punched in the face after. Internet ain’t like that. World ain’t like that.
An admiring hat tip to Black and to the women who spoke out, because they have to know they’re in for it. — SDB
“The difficulty was, one of the founders was charged with first-degree murder.” Have we found the most lawyerly euphemism in the annals of documentary trailers? Maybe! Wherever it ranks, it’s from the promo for Hulu’s three-part docuseries The Curse of Von Dutch: A Brand to Die For. I had no idea that company had so much true crime at its core, and honestly I would probably watch this shteez for the aughties flashbacks alone. Here’s the trailer:
The series hits Hulu November 18; hopefully an Ed Hardy: MAN That Shit Is Hideous doc isn’t far away, hee hee. — SDB
The readers have spoken: the November bonus review is on The Gits. You can watch that with a Prime membership (and I think it’s on Dailymotion also); thanks for picking this one, I’ve had it on my to-watch list ever since reading Everybody Loves Our Town a few years ago.
Psyched to read my coverage? You’ll need a subscription for that, but it’s not pricey, and you get the entire paywalled archive, including my most recent bonus review of 2020’s Tread. — SDB
A recent bookshop acquisition sent me in search of longreads on William Heirens, aka “The Lipstick Killer.” The book in question, a rare paperback and exemplar of mid-century true-crime design in publishing, takes its title from the message Heirens (allegedly? He maintained his innocence starting not long after his conviction IIRC, but as of his death in 2012 he was the nation’s longest-serving prisoner) wrote in lipstick on one victim’s mirror.
I don’t know the case well, except the broad strokes, but it’s interesting to me in the abstract for TK reasons:
it’s one of those cases that, a generation ago, everyone would have remembered or recognized immediately, but that has fallen beneath the collective-cultural horizon now; and
probably shouldn’t have, because much of Heirens’s appeal surfaced inappropriate-at-best law-enforcement practices, to wit: cops gave Heirens, 17 at the time and not represented by counsel, truth serum to induce a confession.
Item 2b in this list is that the series of murders had an outsize influence on one of the fathers of profiling, Robert Ressler, per Adam Higginbotham’s 2008 GQ longread on Heirens:
Those who were children in Chicago at the time still remember Suzanne Degnan’s murder as a turning point in their lives. “It changed the innocence of neighborhoods where people had taken for granted that they could have unlocked doors and walk alone at night,” says Robert Ressler, the former FBI profiler often credited with coining the term serial killer, who was a 9-year-old living in Chicago at the time. The events of that summer inspired Ressler to become a criminologist, and the Degnan murder itself became a key element in his landmark theories about serial homicide.
And that’s of note because Degnan, the last murder in the series as it’s commonly understood, was six years old. The other two victims were women well into adulthood, one 43 years old, the other 32. Ressler interviewed Heirens, along with many other convicted serial killers, and still felt “certain” as of the late aughts that Heirens had been “a psychopathic killer” — but if we’re to understand the referenced “landmark theories” correctly, Degnan falls well outside the pattern, no? Or is this one of those “you can make any crime fit a profile by asserting that the killer ‘was decompensating’” things?
“The Long, Long Life of the Lipstick Killer” is worth a read, as is the lengthy list of alternate suspects — and the police brutality and ineptitude visited on pretty much all of them — in Heirens’s Wikipedia page. Time sands the compelling edges off cases like this, sometimes, but perhaps this shouldn’t be one of those times. — SDB
Ah, that halycon time early in the month when you still have a whole bunch of free Vanity Fair reads on your hands! A few recommendations if you haven’t burned your freebies yet:
Nate Freeman on what the Art Basel hack means for dealers and galleries — and IT chiefs — as well as the latest on forger Christian Rosa’s continued lamming;
Beth Levin on why the second grand jury called to consider the Trump Org’s financial dealings should have its executives crapping themselves rn;
Natalie Wood’s sister Lana’s new book re-ups Lana’s allegation that Kirk Douglas raped Wood in 1955. (h/t to FOBE Tara Ariano for the link, and also for her Slacked “LEAVE NATALIE ALONE” comment on the story.)
Got some recs from the archives — or fond memories of reading VF originals on Princess Di conspiracy theories or Kennedy cover-ups, perfumed by the sample inserts of Dior fragrance? Friday’s discussion thread is into it. — SDB
And speaking of oldies, here’s a Saturday Evening Post story by Truman Capote about the filming of In Cold Blood. I’d love to hear what y’all think of it, if you decide to take on the minor hassle of zooming in and out to read the whole thing (it is free, though!)…but I don’t want to influence you beforehand, so here’s a graphic from the piece; go read it and then I’ll get into my impressions after the pic.
…Hi. Now, maybe it’s because I’ve read Plimpton’s oral biography of Capote so many times, because it’s such a treasury of midcentury letters and locutions; I am steeped, more than most people, in the Möbius of ancillary crime and self-destruction the Clutter-family murders, and all the materials about it, created. But it felt very evident to me from only a few sentences in that, as alleged by many in his circle at the time of his research, Capote had loved Smith — perhaps continued to love him. Capote as an autobiographical prospect is hard to discuss, in a way, because he was so open to an almost avant-garde degree with so many aspects of his intimate life, but at the same time in his writing one gets the sense that he’s not entirely aware of the trauma he’s performing? And that’s the sense I got here, that the ways he talks about Smith and about Blake as Smith, the fond teasing meant as a private language, which it is, but its existence is not…I may know too much about the creation of In Cold Blood and I may also be projecting recent events in my own life onto the piece. But to read Capote’s account of the making of the film, and then his watching of the film, its attempts at archness, is to watch a man both trying and trying not to grieve a loss he’s afraid to name. And Capote wasn’t afraid of much, in my view.
When I talk about the blast radius of a case, this is what I mean. We call Capote the grandfather of the genre because of In Cold Blood, but we have to include the story of the story too. As a rare-coins expert I know likes to say, there’s the price, and there’s the cost, and there’s the value, and good luck lining them up. — SDB
This week on Best Evidence: We continue to be great fun at parties! Hockey crimes, prison wines, JFK revisited, and much more.
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