The Ripper · The Lodger · The Girl From Plainville
Plus "Sleepers," lamsters, and feminist sex workers
the true crime that's worth your time
Trevor Bauer is suing The Athletic. The site and former reporter Molly Knight are both named in the proceeding; Bauer accuses them
of "creating and spreading the false narrative" that he had fractured a woman's skull during a sexual encounter.
The 26-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against The Athletic Media Co. and Knight, alleges two counts of defamation.
I’ve bitched about Trumpy shitbird Bauer a number of times in this space; I’ve also linked to Craig Calcaterra’s Cup Of Coffee newsletter to break down legal issues better and more knowledgeably than I could hope to. Calcs explains in his Wednesday newsletter what Bauer is claiming vis-a-vis the skull fracture, then compares the suit to Sarah Palin’s recent suit against the New York Times:
In both cases a widely loathed figure cites a misstatement of fact — Palin had a much stronger claim on that score, I’ll add, as the New York Times didn’t say something that was accurate but leave out a clarifying point; it asserted something that was 100% false — and then cites the fact of their being widely loathed as evidence that what appears to be a non-malicious and promptly-corrected story was more than it was. It’s a neat trick, I suppose, but it’s not the stuff of a successful defamation case.
He goes on to unpack how “fucking stupid” it is for Bauer to bring any suit under his current circumstances, and while we don’t love send you behind paywalls for content, I’ll note again that COC is well worth it if you enjoy analysis of baseball, pop music, footie, right-wingnut Ohio politics, and occasional legal proceedings. Damn fine commenters, too. However, Calcs did us a solid this AM and pointed us to a (free!) Twitter thread that breaks down the litigation; it’s below. — SDB
Speaking of paywalls, my April bonus review will live behind ours…but you can vote on the topic at any subscription level! Mash that button to make your voice heard…
…and just a reminder: a paid subscription gets you almost three years of extra content, including my March write-up of the Running From COPS podcast. Not to mention it lets us pay our freelancers better!
Thanks for considering it! — SDB
Anyone watching The Girl From Plainville? I screened the first handful of episodes so I could talk about them on Extra Hot Great earlier this week with our esteemed guest, Blotter Presents veteran Stephanie Early Green.
Stephanie liked the series better than the rest of us did, but I should note that I didn’t dis-like it, and I think Elle Fanning is very good — it’s not badly done. But there is a void at the center of that case; we’ll never really know or understand why Michelle Carter did what she did, and Plainville doesn’t get us any closer to that information. It does bring us right into the awkward, cringey Girl World aspects of Carter’s history, and while I respect the tonal accuracy and I appreciate that the series conveys the torturousness of teen-girl existence at times without getting all “estro sorcery!!1” about it, I…don’t need to go back to that time.
tl;dr: It’s more compelling than I’d anticipated, but…it’s too compelling for me to keep going. Anyone else trying it, or are y’all burnt out on the case for good? — SDB
“Ethical pimp” Antonia Murphy’s unpublished memoirs will get a dramedy adaptation. Murphy “founded an escort agency built on a philosophy of protecting women’s legal rights, emotional well-being, and financial independence” five years ago, after emigrating from San Francisco to New Zealand. If her name sounds familiar, you may have read her HuffPo piece about her day-to-day as a madam. I missed it when it dropped, but it’s very process-y; here’s a snip:
This client makes me a little queasy. It’s not that he’s a security problem — he’s always scrupulously polite. But he spends an awful lot of money at The Bach. Over the years, he’s probably dropped $50,000 on escorts — and I know he’s married. Does his wife know about all the money he’s spending? Could he be putting his grandchildren through college instead?
On the other hand, The Bach has employed dozens of women, helping many of them out of poverty. We easily offer the best-paid job available to young women in our New Zealand town. Even with a minimum wage of $17.70 an hour here, it’s difficult to make ends meet: Full-time jobs are hard to find, especially for young mothers. If Dave’s money is being redistributed to single mothers and students putting themselves through college, I’m OK with that.
tbh I think I’d rather watch a documentary about Murphy and “The Bach,” but we’ll see how I feel when/if this hits U.S. airwaves. — SDB
Running a true-crime bookshop is weird in a bunch of different ways (duh), but one of my favorite ways is the motifs that sometimes develop within a single box of inventory. Sure, sometimes the “motif” is that the lot came cheap because it’s full of #badpennies — like, Peter Maas’s mom didn’t have this many copies of Underboss, okay? — or there’s a “look, I’ll defend the smell of old books all day, but there’s a line between ‘old books’ and ‘old cats’ and it’s not actually that fine sooooo” situation. But sometimes, it’s a legit cluster of weird commonalities, all in a single lot that some secondhand bookshop in Decatur couldn’t be bothered with anymore.
The latest clump of coincidence: books that became movies…despite the crimes described being maaaaybe not as “true” as the authors alleged? Well, that’s two of them. The third one is a mother-son Ripper-musical situation, but we’ll get to it. Let’s start with Lorenzo Carcaterra’s Sleepers. The movie, which I saw after I’d read the book, is really not good; the book isn’t going to touch the hem of Lacy Crawford’s garment prose-wise or anything, but it’s gripping, and it lingers. I had no idea either version of Carcaterra’s story had come under fire, but the NYT noted questions about the veracity of the source material for Barry Levinson’s 1996 film:
The book was published as nonfiction last year by Ballantine Books and promptly stirred a surge of controversy when various critics and journalists termed as bogus its account of four New York City teen-agers who are sent to a brutal reformatory and take revenge on their tormentors. Mr. Carcaterra, a onetime New York Daily News reporter, said last year: ''The story is true. Names and dates are changed.'' But others have challenged virtually every detail in the book. Hollywood studios often take liberties with facts. The current ''Michael Collins,'' about the Irish independence leader, and in recent years ''Schindler's List,'' ''Malcolm X'' and ''JFK'' all offer highly interpretive views of actual events. But few movies claiming to be based on truth have been questioned to the extent that ''Sleepers'' has.
…
Strong challenges to the book's story were raised by the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church and School on the West Side of Manhattan (which Mr. Carcaterra attended), where priests expressed outrage about the author's assertions, and by the Manhattan District Attorney's office. The office said there were no records of a case like the one described in the book.
A year earlier, WaPo’s David Streitfeld had dug into the controversy about the bestselling book, which prompted Carcaterra’s publisher to bar print journos from interviewing him. Streitfeld is a bit more gleeful in his recounting of the “scandal” than is entirely seemly, but well-executed clock of Joe McGinniss’s Ted Kennedy book is always enjoyable.
So is Sleepers fiction? Wikipedia has decided it is, listing it in the “Novels” section of Carcaterra’s bio, but whatever it is, 1) it’s a solid, albeit grim, read; and 2) Carcs went on to a nice little sideline in the Law & Order-verse.
Then there’s Papillon. I didn’t know until the book turned up that it even was a book; I’ve seen the 1973 film several times (is this the grimiest set design in 20th-century film? I think it might be! Discuss!).
I think I knew it was based on a real place, but I must have assumed it was an aggregate of prisoners’ experiences…which is what the questions about Henri Charriere’s account boil down to, that he incorporated memories of other men incarcerated at Devil’s Island. But just in the escapes department, he had plenty of tales to choose from; it appears there’s an entire subgenre of Devil’s Island lamsters who later wrote books about their jailbreaks.
The final book, The Gainesville Ripper, did not become a movie…but get this! The author, Mary Ryzuk, also wrote books about John List and Christopher Hightower, as well as co-writing a musical called Jack the Ripper with her son Regan. Kind of a rando detail all on its own, but all the intel I could find on JtR said it was based on The Lodger…written by Hilaire Belloc’s sister, Marie, which also became a film, directed by one Alfred Hitchcock. That story is based on the Whitechapel murders, and I’ve never read it or seen the Hitchcock picture, which is funny, because
The book tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, owners of a failing lodging in London, who see in Mr. Sleuth, their only guest in a long time, their chance to salvage their business. As new murders happen in the surrounding neighborhoods, the couple slowly begin to suspect their lodger might be the one responsible for them.
Also featuring in the tale: the Buntings’ daughter, Daisy. Which is my husband’s nickname for me. Omens abounding!
…So, yeah: the bookshop sends me down these wiki-holes multiple damn times a day and I do not hate it, and in fact I try to set the online shop up so that customers can wander through the tags, trailing a kite string of Boolean search terms behind them that a cat is pouncing on. Come on by, take 10% off with code BestEv10 through 4/27. If you’re not seeing what you want, email me and I’ll find it. (If I’m not too busy watching The Lodger on HBOMax.) — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: Bet-Crapping, Deceit, and EB on the TV.
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