Revenge Of Sh*tty Media Man · R. Kelly · Jamie Spears
Plus Princess Doe, a missing O'Jay, and more
the true crime that's worth your time
Next month’s bonus review: a look at You’re Wrong About’s episode on Henry Lee Lucas. I don’t find Lucas-iana terribly interesting, on balance, but I’m still intrigued by YWA’s deep dive into “the most prolific serial killer in American history,” who “may have been something much more ordinary—and why we keep trying to make violent men seem much more powerful than they are.” Partly that’s because the episode guest is Rachel Monroe.
You can listen to that YWA episode right here, but only paid subscribers get my bonus review of it, so if you haven’t already, grab a sub
and prepare to wallow in the review-nip of years’ worth of paywalled content — including last month’s Dorothy Kilgallen two-fer. — SDB
I spent a lot of the holiday break cleaning house — literally. Rearranging furniture, purging the basement of craft supplies I’ll never use, and of course clearing off my office DVR and chopping the teetering magazine TBR pile down to size. The timeline on that latter thing is not nearly as grim as the last time I plunged into a stack of glossy pages, which brought me face-to-face with cutesy mid-2020 New Yorker humor columns on the United States of Zoomerica that seemed to come from another planet. But it was threatening to get out of control, so here’s a chronologically ordered selection of longreads from Q4 of 2022.
“The Mysterious Death Of An O’Jay” [Rolling Stone] // Brenna Ehrlich’s account of the disappearance of Frankie Little, Jr. — an early member of the legendary R&B group, he’d left the band by the time its most memorable seventies hits dominated the charts — and the genealogy/DNA database that not only explained his vanishing but cracked a cold case for the Twinsburg, OH PD. Ehrlich does an expert job creating tension, and re-creating a decade in which it was eminently possible to be a memorable part of a downtown, then depart from the grid.
[Det. Eric Hendershott] studies the papers in front of him: an Akron Beacon Journal article, a photo of a 2009 sketch that was supposed to be a replica of the then-John Doe, an image of a clay 2017 model, and the only photo anyone has of Little, an old high school snap that looks nothing like either.
Something about “the only photo anyone has” just comes between one and the sun.
“Inside the Ransomware Gangs That Extort Hospitals” [New York] // A book excerpt from Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden’s look at “one of the most pervasive and fastest-growing cybercrimes,” and how the pandemic upped the charging stakes — i.e., to negligent homicide — if hackers got caught.
“Princess Doe Identified After 40 Years” [Weird NJ #58] // “Princess Doe,” found in mid-July (there’s that cluster again) of 1982, was buried “in a widely attended ceremony that was filmed by HBO for Vanished,” a docu produced by Unsolved Mysteries creator Terry Dunn Meurer. Princess Doe was also “the first entry in the FBI’s brand-new [in 1983] National Crime Information Center computer database.”
But it took multiple DNA assays before authorities could identify Princess Doe as Dawn Olanick (police had a fairly solid suspect in mind, despite not knowing just whom he’d killed). WNJ’s writing and copy-editing is…well, let’s just say it’s remained consistent, because I love this publication like it’s a lead-eating baby cousin and I’m not trying to talk shit. Grab a hard copy and marinate in the ads/deranged local-news blotter.
“Bad Reputation” [New York] // Moira Donegan, creator of the “Shitty Media Men” list, is getting sued by Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott, one of the problematics on the list. As of the late-October logline on this issue of NY, the case is supposed to go into discovery and then maybe to trial in 2023; article scribe Lila Shapiro notes the difficulty of winning defamation cases, and that it’s a little surprising Elliott’s action has gotten this far.
It’s also a little surprising to this scribe that Elliott hasn’t gotten himself kicked to death already:
“Not a single person in the literary world publicly defended me when it happened. And I launched a lot of people’s careers,” he told me. “Roxane Gay. Cheryl Strayed. I discovered all these people.” (Gay and Strayed, who sold Wild before writing for The Rumpus, disagreed. “The reverse is true,” Strayed told me. “It was through my ‘Dear Sugar’ column that people discovered his website.”) He mentioned his old managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald, whose memoir was getting rave reviews. After Elliott filed his complaint, Fitzgerald denounced the lawsuit on Twitter as “an outrageous act of violence.” Elliott shrugged. “Isaac was this guy who’d be homeless if it wasn’t for me, you know?”
That last quote really told me everything I need to know about Elliott. What you need to know about Shapiro’s work here is that she starts with a black-and-white sketch and then skillfully shades it in on both sides, all while teasing that familiar bile up into my throat. Like, right, of course, if I name the boss who had us “take meetings” in strip clubs, I’m liable. Infuriating.
“The Curse of Kentwood” [New York] // This one is something of a neighborhood play, depending on whether you consider the Britney Spears conservatorship a crime; Kerry Howley’s prose-poetic psych-bio of Brit’s father’s family does imply that Jamie’s father may have killed his first wife, and probably drove his second wife mad. Either way, it’s excellent writing; by the time you get to the description of Britney’s “bare” childhood bedroom, strip-mined so that the contents could appear in a local museum, Howley’s control of the claustrophobic tone is firmly established.
“The Police Lawyer’s Trial” [New York] // Sorry to keep sending you to NYMag — I subscribe, and their paywall is still trying to pick my pockets. Happily, Jake Pearson’s rundown of NYPD defender Karl Ashanti’s “walking while Black” run-in with a crappy cop is a collaboration with ProPublica, which means you can read it here instead. Here’s a snip in which Pearson, and Ashanti, frame what some readers might see as a conflict:
Within [the Law Department unit defending NYPD officers against civil-rights-violation lawsuits], Ashanti talked with Black colleagues about the difficulties of advancement. “It was kind of harder to build a career as a Black attorney than as a white attorney,” he said in the 2020 deposition. But he also put that observation in context: “It’s not specific to the Law Department,” he said. “It’s just society. The Law Department is a microcosm of society.”
When it came to his own cases, Ashanti says, he never felt angst. He could reconcile using his legal skills in defense of the police while at the same time recognizing that Black people were at greater risk of police maltreatment. Besides, the job provided him with a stable, middle-class life. He got married, and he and his wife, Jovanna, moved to Staten Island, where they would go on to raise two sons and be active in their church as born-again Christians.
The “moved to Staten Island” bit here does make me wonder if we shouldn’t read “never felt angst” as something more like “purposefully sought out this particular flavor of angst, the better to pointedly shrug it off”? Which, no judgments, but Staten Island…isn’t good trouble, IMO.
“The Untold Story of the Insular Texas Family That Invaded the U.S. Capitol” [Texas Monthly] // Robert Draper goes to see the Panhandle-town weirdos facing 1/6 charges en famille.
The Munns had become something of a national curiosity. After all, there had been married couples at the Capitol on January 6, as well as fathers and sons. No other family this size was known to have participated in the invasion, however. How had six members of the same family—Tom and his wife, Dawn, along with four of their eight children—become so swept up in Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election that they drove 1,600 miles from a small Texas town to help disrupt the peaceful transfer of power? It was, as the federal judge who presided over their case would later say with stoic understatement, “a puzzle.”
The evocative, warm-but-not-fiery writing I love from this publication; give it a read, and then we can talk about whether DOJ should add “misdemeanor ‘creative’ name-spelling” to the charges against the parents.
[CW for sexual assault, harm to children]
The crime
I forget, between installments, that both R. Kelly’s reign of trafficking terror and dream hampton’s determined documentary witnessing of same have been going on for quite a long time. Very long, very sordid story short: Kelly is a predator who is probably never breathing free air again.
The story
The entire pandemic has happened between the previous, second installment of Surviving R. Kelly, which dropped in January of 2020, and the current one, Surviving R. Kelly III: The Final Chapter, which hit Lifetime earlier this week. As a result, the “teaser for itself” sort of montage I usually decry in true-crime docuseries is very helpful, for two reasons; the first, obviously, is to remind viewers who’s who, and where/when we are in the life of various proceedings.
The second is that — and I forget this too, between “seasons” — it always takes a few “acts” to recalibrate to the profound lunacy of everything about the story: the flagrancy of it, the duration of it, the intransigence of Kelly’s “enablers” (the term we really want here is “co-conspirators,” and in fact a handful have already gotten convicted and sentenced for violent harassment of survivors, but…see above re: the fearsome power of a defamation lawsuit), the different reality Kelly perceptibly inhabits in public appearances. The Final Chapter doesn’t linger too long on the background, because there’s a lot of more recent “plot” to run down, and it’s as effectively edited and paced as in the past.
It’s as merciless and shocking as in the past, too. Kelly’s brother, Bruce, began the triptych as an informative and sympathetic figure who offered context for the creation of this monster; now he’s splitting hairs about the definition of sex trafficking, before asserting that “a lot of these girls, they want to be with an older guy,” so they lie about their ages, and then, “when it doesn’t go their way,” they claim victimhood. And what we already knew about the practices Kelly used to degrade and control his victims was nearly too much to bear, but in The Final Chapter, forced coprophagy used as kompromat (among other things) takes center stage for a while.
It’s so grim that the appearance of Kelly’s attorney to call survivors gold-diggers is almost a relief. Scathing talking-head interviewees drawing parallels between Kelly’s interest in children and his defenders’ childish sidewalk-chalk expressions of support do little to lighten the mood, given the doxxing and harassment these people have perpetrated on those brave enough to come forward. Faith Rodgers’s snarky assessment of her cross-examiners (“terrible job, guys”) is great, but offset by more than a few shots of her staring into her lap, exhausted.
I’ve said before about the Surviving R. Kelly franchise that it isn’t supposed to be easy to watch, that part of the point of it is for the viewer to witness the horror, and in doing so to pick up and carry some small part of it. I still think that, and it’s still true of The Final Chapter; it’s not material everyone can or should engage with, and if you just can’t, take care of yourself and do something else. For me, if these survivors and this production team could come this far, I can go the distance with them and hear the testimony out to the end. The true crime that’s worth my time, often, makes it its business to remind us to pay compassionate attention, to not let people disappear in front of our eyes, and on that basis and again with cautions, I recommend The Final Chapter. — SDB
Coming up on Best Evidence: Major-case premiere dates, putting a period on the college-admissions saga, and more.
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