Amid everything else going on with Diddy right now, earlier this month, he was ordered to pay $100 million to Derrick Lee Cardello-Smith over an alleged 1997 sexual assault, per USA Today. Cardello-Smith filed a civil lawsuit against Diddy in June and was granted the award in a default judgement, as Diddy didn’t make any filings in the suit.
At the time, though, Diddy’s attorney Marc Agnifilo wrote in a statement, “This man is a convicted felon and sexual predator, who has been sentenced on 14 counts of sexual assault and kidnapping over the last 26 years. His resume now includes committing a fraud on the court from prison, as Mr. Combs has never heard of him let alone been served with any lawsuit. Mr. Combs looks forward to having this judgment swiftly dismissed.”
Now, the case has swung in Diddy’s favor.
TMZ reports the default judgement has been set aside, on the grounds that Cardello-Smith apparently didn’t sufficiently proved he effectively served the lawsuit to Diddy per Michigan law.
Judge Anna Marie Anzalone also removed the temporary restraining order the prevented Diddy from selling assets to cover damages, and noting there’s a likelihood Diddy wins the case due to the statute of limitations, given that Cardello’s Smiths claims date back to 1997.
Apparently, Bryan did not have many allies. Not only did he go against Swift, but he probably additionally angered Swifties by choosing the Philadelphia Eagles over Travis Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs. The country star deactivated his X account shortly after receiving an influx of backlash for this post, and people on X are relentlessly going after Bryan — probably more so for being pro-Ye than pro-Eagles.
Either way, it must be noted that cyberbullying is never acceptable, so hopefully, Bryan didn’t deactivate his X account due to harassment.
Swift addressed her tumultuous history with West within her Time “Person Of The Year” profile last December. She specifically cited their 2016 phone call that his then-wife Kim Kardashian leaked.
“You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” Swift told Time. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
On Wednesday, September 18, 11-time Grammy winner and Swift’s favorite producerJack Antonoff posted an Instagram carousel of photos from past Electric Lady Studios sessions. One black-and-white photo timestamped December 21, 2023 captures Swift and Sounwave laughing in the studio, which, of course, sounded the alarms among Swifties.
“Jack Antonoff just posted this picture of him, Taylor Swift and Sounwave in the studio on December 2023,” the Taylor Swift Charts fan account posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Sounwave did not work on The Tortured Poets Department [eyeball emoji].”
Sounwave was one of six credited producers on Midnights, Swift’s 10th studio album released on October 21, 2022.
So, it’s highly probable that they were working on new music in the studio in December 2023, but there is absolutely zero way of knowing whether it was material for Reputation (Taylor’s Version), Swift’s 12th LP, or none of the above.
Regardless, can Reputation (Taylor’s Version) just drop already? Haven’t we suffered enough?
Such a sense of security makes it easier to look back upon tumultuous past experiences and speak out against cruel rumors, which Gaga has done of late.
Last week, Gaga revisited the infamous cyberbully-led Facebook group and commented, “Some people I went to college [with] made this way back when. This is why you can’t give up when people doubt you or put you down — gotta keep going.”
On Tuesday, September 18, What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates premiered on Netflix, and the second episode features Gaga explaining why she chose not to acknowledge one particularly baseless rumor earlier in her career.
“When I was in my early 20s, there was a rumor that I was a man,” Gaga told Gates roughly halfway into the episode. “I went all over the world. I traveled for tours, for promoting my records, and almost every interview I sat in they said — there was this imagery on the internet that had been doctored. They were like, ‘There’s rumors that you’re a man. What do you have to say about that?’”
After a montage of clips from those cited interviews played, Gaga continued:
“The reason why I didn’t answer the question is because I didn’t feel like a victim with that lie, but I thought about, What about a kid that’s being accused of that that would think that a public figure like me would feel shame? I guess what I’m saying is I’ve been in situations where fixing a rumor was not in the best interest of the well-being of other people. In that case, I tried to be thought-provoking and disruptive in another way. I tried to use the misinformation to create another disruptive point. People, I think, assume that someone like me that performs that my performance is what’s not real, but to me, that’s the most real thing that you’ll see about me. That is so much more real than all of the rumors that are designed to orbit me to gain more clicks.”
Earlier in the episode, Gaga explained the danger of “entertainment and information being a lot closer together than they ever have been before” and explained how “entertainment as a form of manipulation is a big part of my career,” especially in terms of leveraging her platform as an entertainer to advocate for oppressed groups.
Beyond Gaga, Gates used the entire episode to investigate the era of misinformation and conspiracy theories and whether there is any hope of preserving the truth. Other episodes explore artificial intelligence, global warming, income inequality, and infectious diseases.
What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates is streaming now on Netflix.
“It takes a team” isn’t just a saying to ODESZA. As one of the biggest electronic acts in the world, Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight have built up their global following by surrounding themselves with people who not only believe in their vision but help bring it to life. In fact, the band’s creative leads are very much considered members of ODESZA themselves.
Particularly, SOUND+VISION Award honoree Sean Kusanagi. As a longtime friend of Mills and Knight dating back to their college years at Western Washington University, Kusanagi has played a pivotal role in the creation and evolution of ODESZA.
“I actually ended up introducing Harrison and Clay because I knew both of them and that they were doing separate projects,” Kusanagi says. “Clay was doing Beaches, and Harrison doing Catacomb Kid. I was living with Clay at the time, kind of near our senior year, and I told the guys they should really just get together and play some music.”
ODESZA
When he encouraged Mills and Knight to meet, Kusanagi didn’t envision that the pair would end up forming one of the most renowned touring acts in the country or that it would forever change the course of his own career. Early gigs in ODESZA’s career saw Kusanagi wearing all sorts of different hats, from touring with the band, to playing guitar on the duo’s 2012 album Summer’s Gone, to mapping lasers on the band’s Last Goodbye tour, Kusanagi evolved as a powerhouse creative force in his own right as the band ascended to stardom.
“My role is to make sure that all of the creative elements are working together,” Kusanagi says of his current role in ODESZA. “We’ve always been obsessed with cinema and movies and building cinematic-type experiences. And the show’s no different. It is like we’re telling a narrative, we’re really building a movie on stage for people to see.”
ODESZA
“Music drives everything and being able to work so closely with my friends Harrison and Clay and Luke [Tanaka] thinking as a whole cohesive entity is where just a lot of the magic happens,” Kusanagi continues. “Sometimes it’s a visual that sparks the audio and sometimes the audio sparks a visual or a laser moment or a pyro moment or a costuming moment or a choreography moment. My goal is to just build a world on the stage so that when people show up, they feel immersed for those 90 minutes to two hours and feel like they live inside of this ‘ODESZA world’ that can only exist right then and there.”
We asked Kusanagi what he believes to be the main innovative components that have changed ODESZA’s live shows over the past two decades.
So this was one of the first elements that we really brought to life, dating back to around 2015 or 2016. ODESZA being an electronic group, they wanted to bring live orchestral and musicality to a show that is consistently made of computers and electronic elements. I think a lot of people can agree that it’s not very interesting to just watch someone behind a computer. So it probed the question of how do you bring to life all the elements of their music, which is so layered and so textural and has so many different types of worldly samples? That was really the first thing that excited us.
The first thing that we tried was adding some drumming. Harrison and Clay initially just started drumming on stage, actually bringing a drum kit up there. They brought a SPD, toms, and crash to just add some of those initial energies since that’s all they could afford at the time.
We kept wanting to make it bigger though as the shows got bigger. It’s not enough just for the two of them to drum. So we brought on a drumline to represent so many of these rhythms and styles. It was almost 10 years ago now when we partnered with the Colorado University drumline, and what’s fun is some of those members are still with us now.
We wanted to then keep building on ODESZA’s cinematic musicality. That’s where we thought to add string components as well, and we brought strings to one of ODESZA’s first Red Rocks headlining shows. That was the moment where we started realizing there are all these opportunities to build not just around these electronic moments, but around these musical and orchestral moments and make it come to life. ODESZA built on this “cinematic-ness,” which was and continues to be very future-thinking.
Creative Innovation 2: Pyrotechnics
ODESZA
It’s really easy to just put an explosion within a show because we have money and it’ll just make the crowd hyped. But for us, it comes back to the question, “What’s motivating it? Why are we doing it?” We want to think about why we’re doing this and why it makes sense to add any sort of creative element into the live show.
So for us, yes, pyro is a huge part of our show, but we also want to make sure that it feels motivated for how everything is working together. I’ll use “Loyal” as an example here, where we have this army of drummers on the stage and we have this king that is rising from the dead. They’re bringing this loyal king to life. And in that moment we’re like, oh, fire makes so much sense here to add on the stage just because we have this very almost war battle scene happening, both with the drum line and the visuals. The fire is helping accent that.
We use pyro to help tell the story of this ODESZA world that we’re in.
One of the challenges that comes with pyro is the many different stage formats we find ourselves in. With the drumline out, we have a lot of people onstage, sometimes 16 people, while also trying to set off pyrotechnics. We had to work a lot on the choreography or reworked stage positionings to make it work on certain stages for sure. The whole thing gets underestimated, which is why you also don’t see it that often.
We’ve incorporated pyrotechnics for the past five or so years, but it was The Last Goodbye tour where we really dove in and built time code around our pyrotechnics and our special effects like confetti. We had every second planned. Every moment is planned down to the millisecond when it’s happening and how it’s firing and how it’s being shot off in the show.
Creative Innovation 3: Visuals
ODESZA
The mastermind behind the visuals is my partner Luke Tanaka. He’s the lead on a lot of it, but he works with 30-40 artists from all over the world to create the visuals at ODESZA’s shows.
We get to map out the show plan, and what type of visuals for each song, and then work with these really talented artists across the globe to craft the narrative behind every show. This is really Harrison, Clay, Luke, and myself figuring out what type of style we want the visuals to be. Is it animation? Is it Cinema 4D, is it unreal? Is it after-effects?
What type of program do we want to use? What type of visual artists do we want to collaborate with?
An example is our work with Euphoria, this amazing artist up from Canada who did a lot of the album design and album cover design. He built these characters and then we started using these characters as the main representation of the Last Goodbye souls that you actually saw as inflatables up at the Gorge and are also just kind the narrative tie between everything in the show.
We really try to stay away from building your classic three-part loop for each song, which you can see the format of a lot of times, and instead get into what the actual narrative of this show is, how do all these visuals play and intersect together? And then most importantly, what type of visual wants to represent the music in a whole entirely new way so when someone shows up to the show they experience a song and it evokes something different for them and allows them to hear it in a whole new light.
Creative Innovation 4: Lasers
ODESZA
We’ve used lasers for a long time, but we specifically leveled them up for The Last Goodbye tour.
Specifically, the lasers that we brought into the Gorge were a very unique new thing. I think one thing that we’ve always tried to do is if we’re at a special venue [like The Gorge] we want it to feel extra special. So we wanted to see how we could use lasers in a new way.
We actually put lasers behind the crowd and shot them all the way across the Gorge, with more wattage and lasers than what has ever been at that venue before. Projecting them across the crowd and into the background created this expansive place for people. The amount we used was the first time that that’s ever been done in that capacity at that venue.
I think that’s also the main ethos for every single one of these things. How has it been done in the past and how can we break that mold and how can we recontextualize it or rebuild it in a way that feels like it has always belonged in this set? And even if it is pushing the boundaries of the visuals or the world-building or the lasers or the pyro, the number one thing for all of it is that it works together.
If it doesn’t work together, then it all falls apart. I actually think one of the most innovative things is just building this from friends and building this as a friend group, who have been together since the very beginning and knowing that these are some of the biggest shows. I never thought that I would be in this position of creative directing before Beyonce at Coachella, but to be able to look over and see myself doing this with my friends while sharing a stage with Beyonce or Eminem, and do three nights sold out at the Gorge, that’s everyone’s dream.
Sean “Diddy” Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy, aka Puffy, aka Love, has again been denied bail, this time by a different judge, over concerns of potential witness tampering. According to multiple sources, including the Twitter accounts of TMZ and Huffington Post editor Phil Lewis, Diddy’s second request for bail was shot down by a second judge, Andrew L. Carter, despite a bid by his attorney Marc Agnifilo to appeal yesterday’s decision by Judge Tarnofsky to deny bail based on flight risk.
According to @innercitypress, the Twitter account of independent reporter Matthew Lee, who previously covered the trial of Tekashi 69, Agnifilo offered the services of a private security firm to monitor Combs’ whereabouts, bar Combs from access to the internet or a mobile device, and control visitor logs, but Carter was unconvinced — especially as the state presented evidence he had contacted witnesses even while under investigation by federal authorities. Agnifilo also tried to explain away the 2016 video of Diddy beating Cassie in a hotel hallway as the result of anger from supposed infidelity on her part rather than part of a pattern of behavior. Needless to say, it didn’t help his case.
The kickoff show on September 28 will be hosted 2024 Emmy Award winner Jean Smart with musical guest Jelly Roll, promoting the upcoming release of his ninth studio album, Beautifully Broken.
October 5 will be hosted by stand-up comic Nate Bargatze, who is undoubtedly less surprised to be invited this time around, while Coldplay will handle the music duties.
Stevie Nicks will be the musical guest on October 12, but you can probably expect a little harmonizing from guest host Ariana Grande, who’ll be promoting her film adaptation of Wicked.
On October 19, Michael Keaton has hosting duties, fresh off the box office success of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (and the Hollywood Star ceremony for Batman, which you just KNOW he’ll attend, probably in character). Billie Eilish will continue the promotion of her new album, Hit Me Hard And Soft.
And finally, as mismatched and beloved a pair as you can imagine will guest on November 2, with Chappell Roan making another concession in her fight against fame, and John Mulaney allegedly edging further into his return to the spotlight — although he seems mystified by the news.
Meanwhile, SNL will have a slightly updated cast, including the dismissal of breakout star Chloe Troast, which Uproxx’s own Josh Kurp called a “big mistake” for the show’s 50th season.
Earlier this week, Shakira was filmed abruptly leaving the stage during a performance at Miami’s LIV Nightclub after she appeared to notice someone in the crowd filming up her dress. There’s more to the story than that, however.
A source told Spanish language news agency EFE that “although there has been a rumor about a fan filming under her skirt, the truth is that the person filming was a member of her team taking footage of her performance at the renowned nightclub.” LIV claimed the same thing, telling Page Six that “it was actually [Shakira’s] photo and video team that she was trying to get to stop filming her while she was enjoying the moment with the crowd and fans.”
This doesn’t really explain why Shakira looked annoyed and made the “I see you” gesture, but the “Puntería” singer has yet to comment on the matter. She’s busy with other things like getting nominated for three Latin Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year for Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, Song of the Year for “(Entre Paréntesis),” and Best Latin Electronic Music Performance for the Tiësto remix of “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53.” Shakira is also kicking off her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour in November.
Beginning in 2025, Netflix will be the new home of WWE’s flagship series Raw. But if you can’t wait that long to get your wrestling fix on the streaming service, there’s a new show about a legendary wrestler premiering soon.
The Queen of Villains covers the life and career of Kaoru “Dump” Matsumoto, an iconic (and feared) Japanese female wrestler. Her feud with The Crush Gals — Lioness Asuka and Chigusa Nagayo — as part of the heel Atrocious Alliance stable was must-watch television; one match was reportedly watched by over 10 percent of the entire Japanese population.
Here’s everything to know about The Queen of Villains, including plot details, the cast, and the premiere date.
Plot
The Queen of Villains follows Kaoru Matsumoto, who dreams of becoming a professional wrestler… a dream not by shared by those closest to her, including her own father. However, she channels her rage into becoming notorious heel, Dump Matsumoto. “This set the stage for the Hair vs. Hair Death Match between the nation’s darling Chigusa Nagayo and enemy of the people Dump Matsumoto — a legendary women’s pro wrestling match that is still talked about to this day,” according to the official Netflix description.
Dump was such a convincing villain during the peak of her professional wrestling career that according to wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer, “she often brought crowds literally to tears with her villainous tactics, and when she would merely walk down the street in any major city, people would scatter in fear.”
Yuriyan Retriever, who plays Dump in The Queen of Villains, told Tudum how she prepared for the grueling role. “I auditioned in the fall of 2020, and filming began in July 2022,” she said. “We started with bodybuilding. You can’t have the body of a pro wrestler without building up your muscles, so under the guidance of a trainer, we started by developing muscle to gain strength.” Retriever even learned how to properly swing a bamboo sword.
You can see a fun thread of Dump Matsumoto’s famous matches here.
Retriever’s performance received raves from the real life Matsumoto.“Yuriyan’s powerful performance is incredible,” she told Tudum. “Some parts will make you cry, and I hope viewers will watch The Queen of Villains and feel inspired to believe that their dreams can come true if they never quit or give up.”
The cast also includes also Erika Karata as wrestler Chigusa Nagayo; Ayame Gorika as Lioness Asuka, described as “the most athletic and technical wrestler among her peers”; Hitomi Kamoshida and Haruka Imou as tag team duo Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda; Jun Murakami, Daisuke Kuroda, and Takumi Saitoh as All Nippon Women’s Pro Wrestling founders Takashi Matsunaga, Kunimatsu Matsunaga, and Toshikuni Matsunaga; Takuma Otoo as promoter and referee Shiro Abe; and Nobuko Sendo as Dump’s mother, Satoko.
Release Date
All five episodes of The Queen of Villains will begin streaming on Netflix on Thursday, September 19.
Trailer
You can check out the trailer for The Queen of Villains below.
The recently reunited Linkin Park put their stamp on last night’s (September 17) episode of The Tonight Show. Perhaps the most fun moment came at the very start, though.
The band’s Mike Shinoda was one of Jimmy Fallon’s interview guests, and after introducing him, Shinoda walked out as The Roots performed a rendition of The Knack’s 1979 classic “My Sharona.” Naturally, instead of singing the actual words, they replaced it with Shinoda’s name and it was a delightful moment.
Shinoda clearly got a kick out of it, as he laughed and pointed at the band when he realized what was happening. Still smiling and laughing once the intro was done, Shinoda explained to Fallon how his name has faced “My Sharona” comparisons since he was in high school.
He also spoke about what it’s like to have the Linkin Park machine up and running again and said, “You know what’s really funny is I was texting with the band after the Forum show, and we were euphoric for like 48 hours. I mean, it was truly, you know… to be this many years in and to feel that genuine adrenaline and excitement and happiness was like… there’s nothing like it, man.”
The new-look band also performed their recent single “The Emptiness Machine.” The group released the single earlier this month and it’s the first one featuring new members Emily Armstrong and Colin Brittain. Check out the performance below.
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