Showing posts with label scandals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scandals. Show all posts

Thursday, March 5, 2026

"The Water Polo Scandal That Rocked LA’s Most Elite Private School"

Repugnant facts about Harvard-Westlake, but Vanity Fair starts the article by describing the villain as having "big alpha energy." The Post has already written about it twice.
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Monday, November 17, 2025

I wasn't going to read it, because haven't we heard more than enough about these people, but then I saw it described as having an M. Night Shyamalan-style twist at the end, and...

It certainly does. When you're done reading.


Some related thoughts:

the item here on "f.o.b. voice" sort of gets at the same dynamic. the big LLMs are very good at producing glib, knowing, smooth prose in the same way that "the magazine industry" was very good at producing glib, knowing, smooth prose. but if there was demand for such prose we'd still have magazines

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— Max Read (@maxread.info) November 17, 2025 at 9:28 AM




(She's a former CNN White House correspondent)





Jewish space lasers are a deal-killer for me. Hard pass.

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— Noah Shachtman (@noahshachtman.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 7:32 AM
Rep from Maryland



Vanity Fair going for the daily double, I see.

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— Joe Adalian (@tvmojoe.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 2:58 PM
The author's other articles





SCOOP: CDC officials on Monday linked for the first time the measles outbreak that began in Texas with another in Utah and Arizona, a finding that could end America’s status as a nation that has eliminated measles. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/h...

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— Apoorva Mandavilli (@apoorvanyt.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 4:28 PM






I just realized the thing that set back social democracy in America a hundred years was Hunter Biden not inviting media elites on his cocaine benders and sharing his hookers and I will spend the next 48 hours staring at the wall.

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— Starfish Who Can’t Think Something Witty (@irhottakes.bsky.social) November 17, 2025 at 6:04 PM






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Saturday, September 7, 2024

There's a delicious scandal rocking the Miss Fiji pageant

I don't want to ruin any of the twists and turns, but the purpose of a system is what it does:

Miss Universe is a multi-million-dollar business which operates like a franchise - you need to buy a licence which enables you to use the brand and sell tickets for the event.

Those licences are expensive and in small countries it’s hard to find anyone willing to fund a national pageant - which is why Fiji hasn’t entered a contestant since 1981.

But this year, one organisation was willing to buy the licence: [a] property development firm

....

Apart from a voting scandal at the Miss America contest in 2022, recent controversies have tended to be in less developed parts of the world.

This is probably because they tend to be non-profit affairs in many Western countries . . . while pageants elsewhere have become more popular and more lucrative than ever.

“Historically, beauty pageants have been an amazing tool for social mobility for women,” . . . .

“Apart from the prestige and the glory, it gives you a platform to attract followers and sponsorships. When there’s money involved, the stakes are higher.”

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Saturday, August 17, 2024

Scandalous story about the chairman of the 2028 Summer Olympics

Three headlines:

[T]he married LA 2028 Olympics chief and music mogul behind Billie Eilish and Coldplay - is a 'serial cheater' who slept with a string of female staff

LA28 Olympics Silent on $350,000 Salary for [Chairman]’s Former Secretary and Alleged Mistress

[Chairman's] Tabloid Scandal Brings Professional Fallout for Agency Owner and L.A. Olympics Chief

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Wednesday, December 13, 2023

The author behind the Goodreads review-bombing scandal says she'll seek psychiatric help

Her (former) agent said of her apology:

“mental illness neither explains nor excuses racism.”

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Tuesday, November 7, 2023

Absolutely wild story about a powerful Wikipedia editor

A story told well starting here. (And the report on Wikipedia's site.) (And to read after.)

*Previously:


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Saturday, October 28, 2023

The deeply strange reason Berkeley students disrupted the game against USC today

I assumed it had to do with the middle east, but not at all--this article goes into salacious detail:
A growing group of UC Berkeley students has been staging a months-long protest campaign demanding that the university bring a suspended Spanish and Portuguese professor back to campus. They’ve shared testimonies highlighting how influential [she] has been both as a mentor and as a leading scholar at a school with few Latinx faculty.
...
But records obtained by KQED paint a troubling picture of what led to [her] suspension. Over three investigations, which looked into behavior that began in 2018 and continued through 2022, the university found [she] had repeatedly harassed, stalked and retaliated against ... an English and Comparative Literature professor at UC Davis, and then violated orders not to contact him.
......
[The Davis professor] has stirred his own share of controversy.
The Chronicle also has a write-up.
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Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Organization benefiting people with intellectual disabilities was created as a "cover" for a group practicing "spiritual direction with nudity and sexual touch"

Background from the founder's Wikipedia page:
In 1964, through [the founder's] friendship with a priest ..., he became aware of the plight of thousands of people institutionalized with developmental disabilities. [He] invited two men . . . to leave the institutions where they resided and live with him in Trosly-Breuil, France. Their time together led to the establishment of L'Arche at Trosly-Breuil, a community where people with disabilities live with those who care for them. Since that time a network of 150 L'Arche communities have been established in 38 countries
Christianity Today (the article goes into detail):
From the famous Christian community he developed in Trosly-Breuil, France, the Catholic theologian and leader perpetuated a hidden “mystical-sexual” sect. Over a nearly 70-year period, [he] violated at least 25 women—all of them adults without disabilities—during prayer and spiritual devotion.

...

While the ministry brought dignity and fellowship to the vulnerable over the decades, the report suggests that [he] founded L’Arche as a cover to reunite a group who practiced contemplation and spiritual direction with nudity and sexual touch.

...

Despite the founders using L’Arche as a cover for their mystical and sexual practices, the researchers concluded that “L’Arche as a project and as an organization has nothing to do with a sect” and that the beliefs of L’Eau vive hadn’t spread to L’Arche leaders elsewhere.

...

They called it “astonishing” that the sectarian practices hadn’t proliferated more widely

Catholic News Agency:

Contacted by CNA, [the] chaplain of L’Arche in France for 16 years until 2020, expressed his deep pain and dismay at reading the new report and the details of the abuses committed [by the founder].

...

“This warns us against the all-too-common temptation to canonize people during their lifetime by putting them on a pedestal” 

...

“It would be a great shame if people who need to be welcomed by L’Arche were to suffer the double punishment of being rejected by society in principle, and now rejected a second time because of this case which concerns its founder only

*Previously: Lawsuit alleges that Panda Express workers were "forced to strip in 'cult-like' team-building seminar"

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Sunday, September 11, 2022

Scandal in the chess world after legend loses to 19-year-old grandmaster

Guardian:

Magnus Carlsen’s shock withdrawal from the $350,000 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis following his third-round defeat to the newcomer ... has triggered a variety of “cheating” claims.

...

it was the first withdrawal of the Norwegian’s entire career. His only explanation was a cryptic video clip of the football manager José Morinho saying “If I speak I am in big trouble,” during a press conference about referees.

This was widely interpreted as raising suspicions of cheating.

...

[The 19-year-old] has been banned from the largest chess site and uninvited from the Chess.com Global Championship, a $1m event with online qualifiers and an eight-player final in Toronto.

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Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Eastern Kentucky high school under investigation after images of students giving lap dances to staff go viral

The Courier Journal tries to figure out what a "man pageant" is, and whether it's an annual tradition for the school:

A thread about the Hazard High School events on the social media site Reddit titled "This is the mayor of my town being grinded on by a high school student dressed as a woman" has more than 450 comments and 7,600 upvotes on the website.

...

Photos that were subsequently taken down from the athletics department's Facebook page showed students in underclothing giving lap dances to faculty and staff, including Hazard High School Principal [known as "Happy"], who is also mayor of the Perry County city.

...

"Normally, the principal . . . is pretty dad-gum strict, so that surprises me, unless someone pulled something out of a hat,” [a board member] told The Courier Journal.

...

[The principal] was previously the subject of an investigation in 2008 . . . .  The principal also came under scrutiny earlier in 2008 . . . .

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Tuesday, October 26, 2021

There's a big scandal surrounding the election of the University of Alabama's homecoming queen


Aside from the fact that the election rules seem to have been violated in various significant ways, she's alleged to have accumulated a massive amount of infraction points that should have resulted in her disqualification.
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Thursday, September 9, 2021

New wild updates about that series of shootings involving a powerful family in South Carolina

NBC:

The Murdaugh brothers' father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather all held the top prosecutor's position in South Carolina's 14th Circuit, which covers a swampy coastal region of the state known as the Lowcountry, and wielded power in the same role for more than eight decades.

...

South Carolina's highest court agreed Wednesday to indefinitely suspend the law license of Alex Murdaugh

...

his law firm — Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth & Detrick, which was founded by his great-grandfather — had opened an investigation into "misappropriated funds."

Check out the acronym the firm uses to refer to itself:

The firm of Peters, Murdaugh, Parker, Eltzroth & Detrick (PMPED) said Murdaugh resigned Friday.

"His resignation came after the discovery by PMPED that Alex misappropriated funds in violation of PMPED standards and policies," the firm's statement read. "A forensic accounting firm will be retained to conduct a thorough investigation. Law enforcement and the (South Carolina) Bar have been notified."

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Monday, July 5, 2021

Kendrick Perkins explains his position; Jalen Rose's daughter goes after Rachel Nichols; Was the apology longer than a Giannis free throw?









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Sunday, June 6, 2021

Demented story about the founder of the Financial Times, who was also Churchill's private secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty

 Wikipedia:

In 2021, it was alleged that [he] had engaged in an elaborate deception late in his life for the purpose of receiving corporal punishment from teenage boys. He had set up a 'summer school' in Scottish country house locations, in the style of British public schools. He pretended to be a 16-year-old boy named 'Mike', explaining his appearance by claiming to have an unusual aging disorder. 'Mike' would be caught smoking or drinking and be punished with a cane by other pupils. The ruse lasted until a hired tutor recognised Bracken, but did not come to public attention until one of the other participants published a memoir at the age of 85.

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Wednesday, November 4, 2020

The Court of Master Sommeliers has suspended seven men over reports of sexual harassment

Forbes:

The organization survived a massive cheating scandal two years ago, was criticized for its insincere handling of the Black Lives Matter crisis as relative to the wine business and now close to two dozen women have come forward accusing a hand full of male Master Sommeliers of sexual harassment.

...

[One of the men] was long considered one of the most egregious offenders, but as the country’s first American to have served as president of the Court of Master Sommeliers Worldwide and a historically well respected Master Sommelier, he was long considered untouchable.

...

Some attribute the last years of bad male behavior to the stream of Somm movies, three of which were released between 2012 and 2018, which glorified male sommeliers as rock stars. “The rise of ‘Somm’ culture after the documentaries made it worse because [male sommeliers] were given a cultural of permission to behave like rock stars”

Eater:

The seven men will be barred from participating in any court activities, but the organization stopped short of revoking their membership altogether, pending a California hearing process.

You can read the announcement from the Court of Master Sommeliers here.

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Saturday, October 31, 2020

From 1999, David Carr writes about Ruth Shalit (author of that now infamous feature in the Atlantic)

David Carr's extremely lengthy article for the Washington City Paper:

It’s hard to remember that at a time when being a hot young writer in Washington was a big deal, Shalit was the biggest deal of all. As a featured writer in the opinion journal the New Republic beginning in 1993, she was a gorgeous stylist, with a gift for rendering the distant cousins of literary detail and policy nuance, often separated by nothing more than a comma. By the time she was 24, contracts, assignments, and bouquets were arriving steadily from some of the most reliable brand names in the business: the New York Times Magazine, GQ, and the New York Observer, among others. Her first real job out of college made her famous and well-compensated in a business not known for either.

Somewhere amidst all the buzz and sizzle, Shalit made the quintessentially ’90s journey from media employee to media celebrity. 

...

In Shalit’s version of things, she left Washington because she finally decided to walk away from all of the hectoring windbags who would lay her low. She exited the New Republic at the end of January, but her departure actually came after months of quiet pushing from Editor Charles Lane. Either way, Shalit is no longer a Washington journalist because she could not change the single most interesting thing about herself:

“People fall prey to a reductionist fallacy that the worst truth about you is the most consequential truth. [The plagiarism] was a truth about me and is a truth about me. But there are a lot of other interesting truths as well.”

...

As the covered and the coverers reached a new level of intimacy, stars like Shalit began serving as subjects, rather than authors, of extensive profiles for the likes of George magazine. And, like those politicians who are handed gobs of power and adulation for no particular reason, Shalit became unaccountable. Her editorial enablers chose not to notice that their cherished phenom had not mastered the basics of her profession.

Another reminiscence:


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Thursday, October 15, 2020

The unfolding scandal in Alaska reads like a season of Twin Peaks

Anchorage Daily News on a scandal that so far has involved a mayor that's already resigned, a troubled reporter, and a gossiping mother that was badly mistaken:

“I said something like: ‘I’m not his biggest fan either, I believe my daughter was trafficked a few years ago and he was one of her customers.’ ”

At the time, Blakeley believed what she was saying was true, she said.

Two years ago, she learned her daughter, then 18, had been posting on websites such as “SeekingArrangement,” which primarily connects men with younger women for “sugar daddy” relationships. Worried, she asked about her daughter’s clients.

The way Blakeley says she remembers it, her daughter told her a favorite client was a “short man” in Anchorage who worked in government.

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Saturday, September 21, 2019

Ten funny tweets
















































*More funny posts.
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Wednesday, July 31, 2019

"In Australia, one cat seems to have destroyed an entire bird sanctuary"

Sarah Zhang for the Atlantic:
That’s when they decided on the stakeout. On the night of December 1, Greenwell and the five residents took shifts. The white cat came at 7 p.m.; they shooed it away. The cat returned at midnight; they shooed it away again. The cat came back a third time that night, and Greenwall saw it slinking toward the birds. They chased the cat for half a mile before it disappeared in the coastal scrub. The group returned to stake out the area the next night, and then the City of Mandurah hired an overnight security guard for a few days. When the cat was not seen again, they thought the danger had passed.

But it had not.

...

“There was absolute outrage in the community”
And speaking of wildlife sanctuaries:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is the sort of book that you’ve either never heard of or have already read for your book club. The bestselling hardcover title of 2019, Crawdads has sold more than 1 million copies—jaw-dropping for any first novel, much less one by an author who just turned 70, living on a remote homestead in northern Idaho. Publishers Weekly has called its success the “feel-good publishing story of the year.” (Spoilers for the novel follow throughout this piece.) If you’re one of the people who’ve read the book, you probably know a little of Owens’ romantic backstory, like the huge boost her debut got when Reese Witherspoon, the Oprah of our time, selected it for her book club. Or the fact that while Crawdads is Owens’ first novel, it’s not her first book. And then there’s the 22 years she spent in Africa with her husband, Mark, living close to the land and working in wildlife conservation. Delia and Mark wrote about those experiences in three memoirs. But what most of Crawdads’ fans don’t know is that Delia and Mark Owens have been advised never to return to one of the African nations where they once lived and worked, Zambia, because they are wanted for questioning in a murder that took place there decades ago.

...

To be clear, Delia Owens herself is not suspected of involvement in the murder of a poacher filmed by an ABC camera crew in 1995, while the news program Turning Point was producing a segment on the Owenses’ conservation work in Zambia. But her stepson, Christopher, and her husband have been implicated by some witnesses.
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Saturday, November 11, 2017


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