Jacobs is still an asshole, but I think Bruenig is making substantially more than $70K. She’s an opinion columnist at the Times, not a reporter, and they get paid a lot more than reporters do—this article, from 20 years ago, cites them at $150K-350K/year. I have no idea if salaries have gone up or down since then, but…

Pretty sure he’s getting that from a lie pushed by Kobe’s lawyers. When the victim went to have the rape kit done, she wore an old pair of underwear that had a different man’s DNA on them, from earlier in the week. That DNA showed up in the DNA test in addition to Kobe’s, and his team tried to spin it as her having…

He never said that he believed he raped her. He said he understood how she could interpret it that way.

What do you think she should have done, given the restrictions that the Post had saddled her with? She’s a politics reporter; WaPo wasn’t going to let her cover this in an article. (As stated, they argued she shouldn’t even be tweeting about it because “it didn’t pertain to her coverage area.”) She had been…

So, in the hours after his death, when the story of his death was still developing and we hadn’t even had any proper long form hagiographies that needed to be taken down a notch published, does a retweet of a single article meet the standard that Sonmez herself is attempting to defend her tweet by?

Here’s an example. They’re usually vague enough that they’re effectively useless, and of course newspapers want their reporters to be stirring things up and drawing attention on Twitter, within reason—that’s what draws clicks.

Matthew Keys has been blatantly making stuff up throughout this because he wanted her suspended/fired. WaPo never commented on why she had been suspended in the first place, and Sonmez made it clear that she had been instructed to take down all her tweets, not just the ones with the screenshot of her mailbox.

Kobe’s story changed many times over the course of the investigation; I think searching for any consistency in it is a lost cause.

Yes—and that’s why now is a very good time to revisit the details of the case. What most people remember of it is wrong. (And a lot of that was dependent on the smears Kobe’s lawyers made against her character—that he was later obligated to apologize for in his statement—and a sports press that was happy to be…

You should revisit the facts of Bryant’s case; they were fairly atypical for a celebrity rape case. Bryant attempted something of a fucked-up magic trick in that he admitted to doing things which fit the definition of rape, and that made the victim feel like she was raped, while simultaneously denying that he raped…

I think Kobe’s closest comparison is OJ—another man who was accused of violent crime against a white woman. In both cases they weren’t held legally liable but didn’t get off so cleanly in civil cases. (Kobe settled, OJ lost.) And both came about as close to confessing as it’s possible to do without actually…

Yes! If someone is empathetic enough to understand that it would be hard for Vanessa Bryant or her kids to have Kobe’s rape trial rehashed right now ... surely they’re also empathetic enough to understand that it would be hard for any sexual assault victims (but especially Kobe’s!) to read these fawning posts that…

To hold her solely responsible for his death erases his agency. (I say this as someone who has struggled with similar mental health problems.) People can say and do terrible things to you that increase the likelihood of attempting suicide, but at the end of the day, they cannot actually make you do it. The choices you…

Yeah, the problem was that what she did should be a crime, but a different, lesser crime. And it’s not. So the lawyers went with the closest thing, and her actions were so egregious that people didn’t want her to go free, so they were willing to convict her of a crime that she didn’t quite commit.

For what it’s worth, in context it’s clear that Clinton says that the Republicans are grooming Gabbard to be a third-party candidate. Not the Russians. I don’t know if that makes a difference to Tulsi’s lawsuit, but it makes a difference to the accuracy of this article.

What I want to know is how you read the endnotes of Infinite Jest if you cut it in half.

Dogpound is a specialty gym that focuses on boxing and heavier lifting equipment--not the kind of stuff that’s usually in home gyms. Swift could probably put a boxing ring in her house, but why would she want to?

Have Scottish/black/Jewish/gay people asked for Groundskeeper Willie/Hibbert/Krusty/Smithers to be recast because they promote stereotypes? If so, yes, we should probably recast them. If Scottish/black/Jewish/gay people don’t have issues with the portrayals and aren’t asking for them to be recast, then why would there…

And the mandatory weigh-ins, and recruiting underqualified students based on “the look,” etc. (I did a similarly body-conscious sport when I was in high school, and trust me when I say that you don’t ever need to weigh girls in sports like this; they’ll put enough pressure on themselves on that account as it is.)

Beyond that—there’s no reason he even has to lie, straight out, that yes, he said it. “I don’t recall saying that, but I would never want to leave Elizabeth with the impression that that’s what I believed. Of course I think a woman can be president, and I’m sorry if that didn’t come across in our earlier conversation”…