Music superstar R. Kelly's criminal trial for taping himself having sex with an underage girl has been so bland and subdued, we've just been waiting for a newsworthy reason to cover it. And now we have it: there's a legal issue in the case that affects a member of the media in some way! Why, this is almost as exciting as a music superstar's kinky child sex tape scandal!
A pornographer known as Max Hardcore is on trial for obscenity in Florida. The judge originally said that the jury should watch eight and a half hours of his porn tapes, so they could get a complete picture. But she had to reconsider, because the jurors got so squeamish after less than an hour that she feared they wouldn't be able to make it all the way through. A mere 8.5 hours of filth? We call that a "weekday." [THR Esq.]
Click to viewMoral of this story: if you're digging yourself into a hole, stop digging. Yesterday, we got a tip about a self-described "Mr. Right" on NYC's Craigslist, who posted a personal ad with 30 pictures of himself, several of which feature him waving a stack of $20 bills. We put up a few of his photos and chuckled. But he was upset! So he called up the Gawker offices to voice his grievances. He charged us with fraud. He threatened to "punch the fucking guy whoever did this" and "fuck him up." And he warned us, "I'm ten times smarter than these people, cause I"m gonna record it right now." So are we! You have to hear it to believe it. Remember, kids: Craigslist is a public place. Click to listen to the highlights. (To refresh your memory, three of his moneymaking personal ad photos are below):
Here's the key section from the legal complaint against wacko famous girl Lindsay Lohan for stealing a college student's mink coat from a club in New York. She didn't just pick it up accidentally, the complaint says; her actions were "intentional, oppressive, and malicious," and the coat-deprived girl was "injured." Ouch, my mink is gone! Click to enlarge. [via The Insider]
The UK government body that regulates advertising passed new rules this month banning TV commercials that are too loud. That's right; ads shouldn't be "excessively noisy or strident." Nor should they be excessively blaring, deafening, roaring, or stentorian, if the thesaurus has anything to say about it. The ostensible reason for the rule is to prevent your neighbors from hearing commercials on your television. "This might sound straightforward," says the New York Times. Um, no it doesn't. Has the British government come up with a magic volume button-disabling law?
You've surely seen a copy of it on the walls of your local Sunday school, A.A. meeting, or weed-filled hipster apartment, ironically: Footprints in the Sand, the mawkish little poem/ parable about Jesus carrying you when you couldn't carry yourself. The work has become a gold mine of merchandising opportunities, which is what everyone, including Jesus, really cares about (sandals aren't free). So naturally three different people have been squabbling for years over who wrote it. Now, the son of one proclaimed author is taking the other claimants to court for copyright infringement. Sigh. It would really be tidier if Jesus could just settle this himself. After the jump, the three slightly different versions of the poem that claim to be the original. One thing we can all agree on is that god needs to pick more creative messengers:
The New York Post has canned Leonardo Blair, the black reporter who earlier this month filed a federal lawsuit against the NYPD alleging racial harassment. Blair probably got the sense that his employer didn't really have his back when the Post ran an editorial ho-humming racial profiling complaints the same day that Blair filed his suit. Neither the Post nor Blair would comment on the end of his employment there. At least the Daily News is now free to commission Blair to write a scandalous tell-all of racial discrimination in the inner bowels of the Post. If they don't, you have to wonder whether they're sufficiently bloodthirsty (or rather, justice-thirsty) to play with Rupert Murdoch. [NYDN]
Harvey Levin, you clever dog. The amoral TMZ founder is helping to launch on online version of the People's Court, called PeoplesCourtRaw.com. It features pairs of videos, one arguing each side of an issue, which users can vote on to pick a winner [Mixed Media]. See how he plucked a concept from TV and put it right on the web? It could work! Levin used to work for the People's Court on TV, so he has the scholarly background needed to pull this off. After the jump, one example of the site's work: a couple debates whether the boyfriend should shave his back hair. Well, Judge Wapner never had any important cases either.
Wow! As a nerd on the PR and marketing beat I find this to be absolutely astounding and heartening: the UK is about to make it a crime for companies to misrepresent themselves as consumers in their online marketing. That means, for example, that a company setting up a fake blog to hype its own products could be prosecuted, fined, and jailed. Free speech? Whatever. This is an awesome development. And bloggers can be locked up, too!
For reasons utterly unknown to your non-fashion mag-reading day editor, Elle has a lengthy feature this month about "Anna," the FBI agent provocateur (in the COINTELPRO sense, not the lingerie sense) who brow-beat some lazy, unemployed pot-smoking self-proclaimed "anarchists" into planning a mild act of terrorism they didn't actually have the resources or intelligence to pull off. The story is a largely sympathetic interview with "Anna" ("The car stank of body odor and sweat, thanks to the extremists rejection of regular bathing and hygeine products.... Vicks VapoRub, which Anna routinely dabbed inside her nose, made it barely tolerable."), who rented the would-be bombers a cabin and bought them bomb-making supplies and provided them with bomb-making plans and demanded they stick to the fucking plan the night they all decided they'd rather smoke pot and make pasta. If it sounds like we're condoning either terrorism or lack of personal hygiene, well, entrapment makes us queasier than hippie stink. Now the ringleader of the The Collective That Couldn't Shoot Straight faces 20 years in prison. So let's all make like anarchists and insert these little culture-jammy 'retractions' into copies of Elle! That'll help, right? Sigh.
First, they came for photoshop, and I said "good luck putting a magazine together." The American Society of Magazine Editors may put together a panel that will brainstorm some "best-practice guidelines" for digital manipulation of photographs in our glossies. Not that they'd ban it, of course! They say they just don't want readers to be misled. We say SLIPPERY SLOPE. Because now, in France, they're taking this to its logical conclusion: they're banning pretty people. Or skinny people, anyway.
Sheriff Santiago Barrera Jr. of Duval County, Texas would like you reporters to shut the fuck up, or else he will throw you in jail. It's really just that simple. After the Alice Echo-News Journal ("A Pulitzer-Prize winning newspaper serving Jim Wells County and the area for over 100 years") wrote a front page story about the sheriff's son getting arrested for public intoxication, Barrera told a reporter, "If you guys keep interfering with my business, I'm going to have you arrested." Old school! Unfortunately, what with all the electronic communications and so forth these days, word spread quickly around the nation, and now the sheriff just looks like a crooked old bastard, which he surely is. But it does make you pine for the days when the lawmen were dirty, the reporters were in cahoots, and small towns were dusty fiefdoms ruled by power-mad, ignorant scumbags. Not really. [AP]
This is the one little sentence of text [click to enlarge] from the legal complaint that may bring down Spitzer. The Times confirms that "The man described as Client 9 in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, Emperors Club VIP, on the night of Feb. 13. Mr. Spitzer traveled to Washington that evening, according to a person told of his travel arrangements." [NYT] The full text of the legal complaint can be found here.
A state legislator in Kentucky has proposed a bill that would make it illegal for anyone to post anonymous comments on websites, setting penalties as high as $1000 per violation [WTVQ]. Representative Tim Couch (NOT the former NFL quarterback by the same name, unfortunately—this is the Tim Couch of "Self-employed, Hyden Grocery, Couch's Shell.") says that the bill would cut down on online bullying, which has "especially been a problem in his Eastern Kentucky district." Try life in New York City, motherfucker! Considering that a law like this would bankrupt hundreds of world's largest blogs overnight, as well as flagrantly violate the First Amendment, we'll probably not lend our support. Want to weigh in? Why not send Rep. Couch a letter, or just give him a call at his home number? It's listed on his website, consistent man that he is:
Vitally important issue alert: The Supreme Court may finally take up the case of when the words "fuck" and "shit" are allowed to be broadcast on network television. The justices could decide as early as today [LAT] to hear a case on whether it's okay for the occasional drunk celebrity to say "Fuckin A-right!" at an awards show, or if that should land the network a hefty fine. The FCC is like, fine the fuckers! But the networks are like, fuck that! It's a true shit storm.
"On Sept. 1, New York's Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP will raise its top rate to more than $1,000 from $950. Firm partner Barry Ostrager, a litigator, says he will be one of the firm's thousand-dollar billers, along with private-equity specialist Richard Beattie and antitrust lawyer Kevin Arquit. The top biller at New York's Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP hit $1,000 per hour earlier this year. At Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, also of New York, bankruptcy attorney Brad Scheler,"—pictured!—"now at $995 per hour, will likely soon charge $1,000." [WSJ]
Yesterday, a Massachusetts court upheld a $2-million defamation award against the Boston Herald and some of its reporters, including David Wedge. Because we don't know anything about anything, we called in David Lat, the fine (yet deliciously shallow!) legal mind behind Above the Law, to tell us what this means for newspapers and bloggers who don't like getting sued—and what it means for those who do so enjoy suing.
Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection.
