Spokesmen · Weinstein · Office Chairs
An AP story sends Eve down a dark path
the true crime that's worth your time
An Associated Press story about vaccination mandates for California corrections workers sent me down a true crime wormhole last weekend. So, here’s the story, datelined August 20: it’s headlined “California Orders Some Correctional Employees To Get Vaccinated.” Pretty standard stuff, the kind of piece I always scan just closely enough to make sure there isn’t a mention of restaurant workers (I write about the food industry at my day job). Then this bit stopped me:
Even union leaders were in the dark. Glen Stailey, president of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, said through spokesman Nathan Ballard on Friday that the union is “awaiting CDCR’s plan for implementation of the order and the impact to our members.”
Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be yet another item on how so many cops are also anti-vaxxers. The bit that stopped me was “spokesman Nathan Ballard,” whose name was quite prominent in a slew of different stories just the day before, when he was sentenced after taking a plea deal in a disturbing domestic violence case.
Ballard’s a longtime California political strategist and spin doctor, and I vividly recall dealing with him many times when he worked at San Francisco’s City Hall. He was arrested in December 2020, after his wife, Mara Reinhardt, told police that he attacked her, then lay on top of their four-year-old daughter with a pillow, as Reinhardt struggled to pull him off the child.
So, Ballard was arrested in December, took a plea deal in July, and was sentenced to a six-year no-contact order last week that forbids him seeing his kids for two full years, after which he may begin supervised visits with them. As part of his sentence, he will be on probation for the next four years, and will be required to take parenting and “batterers’ intervention” classes, and pay around $1,300 in fines.
To be very clear, Ballard has never admitted to the crimes of which he’s been accused. Instead, he’s said repeatedly, he only agreed to plead guilty to save his daughter from having to take the stand at a full-on domestic violence trial.
That would be “unacceptable to me,” Ballard said in a widely-circulated statement. “I believe this settlement is in the best interests of my four children, which has always been my top priority.” According to Ballard, who says “I’m an alcoholic in recovery,” he relapsed last year after the death of his father; he was drunk and high on cannabis that night, but that he didn’t intend to hurt his wife or child.
At the sentencing, Reinhardt said in a victim-impact statement that “Long after we leave here today, I know that Nate will spend his life trying to spin yet another story, to destroy me, the children, and most likely anyone associated with this case.”
"It is terrifying because I am certain that Nate’s privileged arrogance makes him confident that he is getting away with this,” she said last week.
And a day after Reinhardt spoke in court, Ballard was back at work, providing a portion of the carceral narrative to Associated Press reporter Janie Har. Har’s based in SF, and I’m sure that her editors and she privately acknowledged the irony that a man who was sentenced for domestic violence one day was speaking for prison workers — many of whom spend their days ensuring that folks who committed crimes while drunk or stoned remain behind bars — the very next. But to readers across the country, reading syndicated content from the AP, all they’ll see is “spokesman Nathan Ballard,” an implicit suggestion of legitimacy from the reliable news org.
As Sarah and I often remind you, the point of Best Evidence is to unpack how true-crime content is told and sold. While that covers the fun stuff — your McMillions here, your Serial there — I spend a lot of time thinking about how our perception of the smarty-pants content is shaped by the day-to-day crime coverage we see on local broadcast and daily news outlets. That coverage, and those narratives, are often influenced by the Nate Ballards of the world, “spokespeople” we see with one on-the-record line in a story, but loads of background whispering directing the rest. They tell and sell law-and-order narrative to reporters, who then tell and sell it to you.
But should we still buy those pro-prison tales from a guy who’s considered enough of a threat that he can’t see any of his kids until 2023? And should we just go along with reporting that doesn’t question his strange position (since December!) in any crime-adjacent narrative? Friends, I am not so sure about that. — EB
While we’re on the topic of women speaking out against powerful men…Louise Godbold’s piece for Slate Monday, headlined “I Am Not the Vengeful Woman,” is a surprising and provocative read. You might remember Godbold’s 2017 account of two different incidents of alleged misconduct from Weinstein, both of which are “outside the statute of limitations and therefore will never be prosecuted,” she says.
She, (like Ballard, unintentional theme!), is also a frequent media source, and “Again and again, I am asked the same questions about whether survivors like me are angry—and what I hope will happen to Harvey.” It’s not that simple, she says. Here’s a snip:
Many seem intent, however, on propagating a one-size-fits-all response among survivors of sexual assault. It would be easy to point to continued male dominance in media as the reason for this lack of imagination, but in my experience, female interviewers are no less prone to posing questions that presume survivors are angry and bent on revenge.
Even when women get the chance to create a different sort of survivor with a more complex set of reactions, we often find female-written and female-directed dramas driven by rape-revenge fantasy. Such is the case with Promising Young Woman last year and the last season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The emphasis on bloody revenge makes me wonder whether these women writers are not sexual assault victims and are imagining what would be cathartic for a survivor or, conversely, if that is exactly who they are, and it is their revenge fantasies that we’re seeing.
The whole piece goes in a lot of directions I wasn’t expecting, and challenged a lot of (TV- and movie-created?) assumptions I have about the motivations and reactions of survivors toward their assailants. It’s a complicated piece with a lot of moving parts, and it’s worth a read for anyone eager for a greater understanding on what it takes to move past a violent assault. — EB
Up and Vanished is back on Sept 1. Atlanta filmmaker Payne Lindsey’s investigative podcast is heading into its third season/case, this time tackling the 2017 disappearance of Ashley Loring Heavyrunner.
Heavyrunner, a member of Montana’s Blackfeet Nation, was 20 when she disappeared after a party in the reservation town of Browning. This ABC piece from 2019 does a nice job of breaking down the details of the case.
I haven’t listened to the first two seasons of the show, I must confess: going into a show knowing that it’s unlikely to get any sort of resolution (hi, it’s not called “Up And Found After We Hit Record”) really cools my interest.
But Heavyrunner’s case is one that’s stuck with me, and the issue of violence inside this country’s reservations is certainly one that deserves more attention. So I’ll probably pass over seasons one and two and head straight for three, unless anyone here disagrees? Let me know what you think, and/or if you’ll be listening on Sept. 1, too. — EB
Please accept this small gift as my apology for being such a bummer today. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a very funny, very fashionable person who until recently was the editor in chief of seminal feminist website Jezebel.
In her final piece for the site, Shepherd followed up on a first-person true-crime story we pointed to in the very earliest days of Best Evidence, “What Is the Best Punishment for Someone Who Steals Your Office Chair?” One part The Office spec-script bottle episode, one part demented Nextdoor.com post, it’s a chronicle of relatable pettiness that feels very far away for all of us whose offices have yet to reopen.
Two years later, we finally get some (but not all) answers regarding the grand chair theft, in a piece dek’d “An urgent true crime story—but not a cold case—finds a long-awaited resolution.” Of course, as with the first article, this isn’t really true crime in any sort of classic sense. But watching an accomplished person obsess over the disappearance of an office chair is the type of crime content we need some days, especially days when every other item in this newsletter paints this world as a very frustrating place. — EB
Wednesday on Best Evidence: Discussing paltry offenses.
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