Dennis Hastert, the former Speaker of the House who has been accused of molesting five minors while coaching high school sports, is reportedly “sorry,” according to his lawyer.
In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on Wednesday, an off-duty NYPD officer, Jacob Sabbagh, was arrested on child molestation charges.
After feds announced indictments against ex-House speaker Dennis Hastert yesterday for illegally funneling $3.5 million to an unnamed person from his past as a high-school wrestling coach, an obvious question lingered: What was the cash for? For covering up male-on-male sexual abuse, naturellement.
"If two people come together," my mother began, "who've never had any power except by the way of abuse, it's going to be bad. Both of us had power exerted over us as children. I eventually learned that as an adult, I was still doing the dance, seeking out abusive relationships. That doesn't mean it was my fault. But I played a role. And your father was abused by his father and, as an adult, he became a rage-aholic, exerting power over others."
Jonathan Koppenhaver, the mixed martial arts fighter known as "War Machine," was admonished in a Las Vegas courtroom yesterday for laughing during the testimony of alleged victim Christy Mack. Koppenhaver's lawyer denied his client had laughed at all, causing judge Melanie Andress-Tobiasson to respond, "I watched him laugh."
If Amy Berg's documentary An Open Secret eventually finds the distribution that is currently eluding it, it's going to mean more problems for director Bryan Singer, who earlier this year was accused of repeatedly drugging, threatening and forcibly sodomizing a minor in a lawsuit. It could mean problems, in fact, for a whole lot of people in Hollywood. Our awareness of the exploitation of minors by powerful men is just the tip of an iceberg, according to Anne Henry of the non-profit BizParentz.
In a series of tweets posted earlier this morning, Amanda Bynes accused her dad of child abuse, saying he was "verbally and physically" abusive when she was a kid and that living with him "was a total nightmare." Now she says the microchip in her brain made her say those things.
Alt lit is caving in on itself. After a week of multiple rape and abuse allegations against prominent authors and editors, the earnest, internet-obsessed literary scene is in full crisis: Today, the alt lit criticism site and scene blog of record Htmlgiant announced that it's shutting down. Meanwhile, in a private Facebook group associated with the blog Alt Lit Gossip, women writers have suggested forming an entirely new scene, "no boys allowed."
My abuser was quiet, soft-spoken and charming. He was the kind of man who would knock you down a flight of stairs then run down to kiss every wound. Despite the signs, he didn't fit the description of a violent person in my mind. I ignored the storm that was brewing and convinced myself that since he hadn't hit me, I in fact was not in an abusive relationship.
Police have arrested a man for allegedly beating an autistic teen at a house party in Okeechobee, Florida, a brutal incident caught on tape and shared widely on social media.
Last week, an impassioned letter from a sexual abuse survivor surfaced online. Its author had been at the center a scandal that attracted national media attention. The letter's vulnerability, and its bravery, gave me chills.
When the statute of limitations for sexual abuse came up before one California woman could work up the courage to report her abuser, she took the matter into her own hands. A California woman identifying herself as Jamie, claiming that a teacher had molested her, said she recently found the teacher's phone number and confronted her. Jamie taped the whole conversation.
After keeping relatively quiet for the past two weeks, TechCrunch founder and Silicon Valley kingmaker Mike Arrington issued an exhaustive rebuttal on his blog yesterday to his ex-girlfriend Jenn Allen's public claims that he raped and physically abused her. Arrington's pushback against Allen comes as Gawker has uncovered more detail on allegations that he assaulted another ex-girlfriend, Meghan Asha—including corroboration from Asha's friend and former partner, Julia Allison.
Alec Baldwin: regular asshole, or racist asshole? This is the question raised this morning by the New York Post, and a photographer in its employ who claims that Baldwin called him a "coon," a "crackhead," a "drug dealer" and "Ralston":
"I set out to write a memoir that was a love letter to a man I was deeply in love with, a man who challenged me in myriad ways, a man who changed my life profoundly, a man I respected and honored greatly at the time," Alisa Valdes wrote on her blog on Wednesday. She was talking about her book The Feminist and the Cowboy: An Unlikely Love Story. "[W]hat I actually wrote was a handbook for women on how to fall in love with a manipulative, controlling, abusive narcissist. [...] I feel I owe it to my loyal readers and fans to be truthful now. It is the decent thing to do."
