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NFL's Washington Football Team reach a settlement with former cheerleaders in 'lewd video' scandal
11 Feb, 2021 13:14
© Getty Images via AFP
The Washington Football Team have reached a financial settlement with several of their former cheerleaders who were recorded in 'lewd videos' without their knowledge during swimsuit calendar photoshoots in more than ten years ago.
The settlement - which reports indicate came in 2020 - comes after videos were allegedly produced in 2008 and 2010 from outtakes of a calendar shoot showing the team's cheerleaders in various states of undress, with the Washington Post reporting last year that the videos were produced at the request of team owner Dan Snyder and former vice president and commentator Larry Michael. Both strenuously deny the allegations.
News of the settlement comes amid relentless investigations into the culture of the team formerly known as the Washington Redskins which also includes probes into allegations of sexual harassment made by 15 women against former employees of the NFL team. Per NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, that particular investigation, which is headed by lawyer Beth Wilkinson, is said to be "nearing completion".
"To me, the important thing in the context of this is that the Washington football club has made a lot of changes already," said Goodell.
"Dan and Tanya [Snyder] are going to be done making those changes for the football club. It's good to see that. But I expect that Beth's recommendations will be something that will be added to that."
The franchise has since "paused" its cheerleader program as they continue with their rebranding after ditching their "Redskins" moniker due to perceived racial insensitivity. However, ESPN reports that the temporary closure of the team's cheerleading ranks is unrelated to the lewd video investigation and that it is expected to resume in the future.
The team has yet to make any substantive announcement as to what the team's name may be in future. The "Football Team" nickname was initially implemented as a placeholder to allow time for branding analysts to put forth a suggestion for a further identity change, but reports indicate that team officials are considering it as a candidate to be implemented permanently.
"The time is right to reimagine our entire game day experience, to reinvent it in a way that reflects our modern identity and aligns with what today's fan seeks," team president Jason Wright said.
However, critics of the move say that the term "Redskins" has long bypassed any accusations of racism and that the large-scale opposition to it is just another example of the "woke" PC brigade shouting into a self-created abyss.
Paris Hilton Says She Was Abused as Teen at Utah School
Testimony helps get new law passed
The Associated Press
Feb 8, 2021
SALT LAKE CITY—Paris Hilton testified about abuse she says she suffered years ago at a boarding school in Utah, as she lobbied Monday for a bill seeking to regulate the state’s troubled teen industry.
Hilton was sent to Provo Canyon School for 11 months at age 17 where she says she was abused mentally and physically, recalling that staff members would beat her, force her to take unknown pills, watch her shower and send her to solitary confinement without clothes as punishment. The socialite and reality TV star also spoke about the abuse in a documentary titled “This is Paris” that was released this fall.
Hilton testified at a state Senate committee hearing at the Utah Capitol in favor of the bill that would require more government oversight of youth residential treatment centers and require them to document when they use restraints. The measure passed unanimously following emotional testimony from Hilton and several other survivors.
Paris Hilton speaks to the Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and Criminal Justice Standing Committee at the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake City on Feb. 8, 2021. (Rick Bowmer/AP Photo)
“Talking about something so personal was and is still terrifying,” Hilton told the committee. “But I can not go to sleep at night knowing that there are children that are experiencing the same abuse that I and so many others went through, and neither should you.”
The 39-year-old Hilton said the treatment was so “traumatizing” that she has suffered nightmares and insomnia for years.
The Provo institution is now under new ownership and the administration has said it can’t comment on anything that came before the change, including Hilton’s time there. A statement on the school website says the previous owners sold the school in 2000.
Since the documentary was released, other celebrities have spoken out about their experiences at the school or others like it, including Michael Jackson’s daughter Paris Jackson and tattoo artist Kat Von D.
During her testimony, Hilton called on President Joe Biden and leaders in Congress to take action and said she intends to pursue federal legislation.
“This is just the first step,” Hilton told reporters. “This bill is going to definitely help a lot of children but there’s obviously more work to do, and I’m not going to stop until change happens.”
In ‘Allen v. Farrow,’ looking for the last word
on a notoriously unresolved story
A new documentary series on HBO dives deep into decades-old allegations of sexual assault against director Woody Allen, shown in New York in March 1993, by daughter Dylan Farrow. (Arnaldo Magnani/Liaison/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
By Ann Hornaday
Feb. 16, 2021 at 8:30 a.m. PST
The subject was “Manhattan.”
The documentary filmmakers Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, whose four-part series “Allen v. Farrow” begins airing Feb. 21 on HBO, were discussing the films of Woody Allen. Their new production revisits the events of 1992, when Allen was discovered to be in a relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, the college-age daughter of his romantic partner Mia Farrow; in the midst of that revelation and a bitter custody battle, Allen was accused of sexually assaulting the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow.
“Allen v. Farrow” is the result of co-creator and producer Amy Herdy’s 3½ -year deep dive into the case, including an exhaustive reexamination of documents, tapes and interviews with corroborating witnesses. In addition to taking viewers inside the family’s story, the filmmakers pull back the lens to critique how incest and trauma are treated within a patriarchal criminal justice and family court system, and how power plays out in private and public spheres.
They also revisit parts of Allen’s oeuvre, using the director’s work as proof of the frequent charge that he has long harbored a disturbing fetish for portraying sexual relationships between teenage girls and older men.
Viewers can decide whether that’s entirely fair play. But Dick and Ziering clearly see disturbing links between Allen’s alleged behavior and his views of women, whether it’s the lovably ditsy title character of the rom-com “Annie Hall” or Allen’s portrayal of a 42-year-old man in love with a 17-year-old high school student in “Manhattan.”
“Obviously he’s a very skilled filmmaker, there’s no question about that,” Dick said regarding Allen. “But one of the things that struck me, especially to some degree about ‘Annie Hall,’ which made me slightly uncomfortable the way the characters are presented, but especially [about] ‘Manhattan’ [was] that celebration of an older man’s relationship with a teenager, without any kind of analysis of the power structure. I was very suspicious of that.” So suspicious, he added, that when it was first released, “I didn’t watch the film.”
Over the years, those who had an interest in the story in the 1990s have dug into their respective worldviews: Allen is a pervert and a narcissist, who at worst assaulted his young daughter and at the very least committed breathtakingly callous boundary violations within the Farrow family. Or, Allen is the victim of a scurrilous false accusation that was originally hurled within the context of a bitter breakup and is now being resurfaced by vindictive adult children. (Allen’s son Ronan Farrow, a journalist who helped break the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations story that launched the #MeToo movement in 2017, has been particularly avid in his support of Dylan and vitriol toward Allen.) Those who avoided the story have been content to relegate it either to unsavory tabloid fodder, the bizarre psychodrama of a dysfunctional family or the realm of “We’ll never know for sure.”
Regardless of where they fall along that continuum, “Allen v. Farrow” invites audiences to reexamine their most closely held assumptions. Like Dick and Ziering’s previous films — “The Invisible War,” “The Hunting Ground” and “On the Record” — “Allen v. Farrow” addresses the issue of alleged sexual assault, in this case incest, a subject they had long wanted to tackle. Like those previous films, it is both methodically reported and deeply emotional, presenting an absorbing and often discomfiting alternate history to the one many people reflexively accepted in the 1990s — a version of reality that Dick and Ziering maintain was the result of a shrewdly effective campaign on the part of Allen’s lawyers and PR team.
Herdy has done a particularly granular job of illuminating the institutional lapses that prevented Dylan from getting her day in court: “Allen v. Farrow” finds serious flaws in the Yale-New Haven Hospital report used by Allen as proof of his exoneration, and it makes a persuasive case that another report, from New York child-welfare investigators, was covered up. The series also reminds viewers that the Connecticut state prosecutor in the case has always maintained that he had probable cause to charge Allen, although he declined to do so.
Beyond the specifics of the case, “Allen v. Farrow” offers a pointed challenge to film critics and entertainment reporters as it casts a skeptical eye on auteur worship, celebrity culture, separating the art from the artist, and the complicity of compartmentalization. And it serves as yet one more skirmish in a conflict that has been waged primarily through the media for almost 30 years.
Search this blog for 'Woody Allen' for a number of articles on this story.
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Jimmy Savile: Police launch investigation after Midlothian woman alleges TV presenter subjected her to vile sex attack as a child
By Gary Flockhart, Edinburgh News
Tuesday, 16th February 2021, 9:10 am
The woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, said the TV personality and predatory paedophile subjected her to a sickening sex attack while she visited family in England as a child in the 1980s.
She told the Daily Record how she was taken to Leeds to visit family members, and while there her mother introduced her to Savile via a third party.
The woman has been interviewed by Police Scotland and West Yorkshire Police over the allegations.
“I had always loved Jim’ll Fix It and wanted to be on it. My mum was away by this time. I was in awe. I was just sitting with him and he gave me a drink of lemonade but after a while I felt funny.
“He took me off to one of the many rooms at the side of the main living room. We sat down and then he sexually abused me.
Disgraced TV presenter Jimmy Savile, who died in 2011. Picture: PA
“I always felt ashamed about it.
“I tried to shut it out for years and thought I was being stupid dwelling on things that happened so long ago. It happened more than once with Savile. In total, I would say he abused me half a dozen times.”
A Police Scotland spokesman said: “We are investigating reports of historical sexual abuse. Inquiries are ongoing.”
Savile, who died in 2011 aged 84 having never been brought to justice for his crimes, is believed to have abused up to 1,000 children, with some being as young as two years old.
A 2016 report into his child sex crimes found staff at the BBC, who employed Savile for many years, missed numerous opportunities to stop him.
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