After the January 6 House committee voted unanimously to subpoena Donald Trump, the former president has reportedly calculated a plan to turn the whole thing into a circus. (He also freaked out about it first on Truth Social, as Trump does.) Of course, Trump testifying in front of the committee would be a disaster. His attorneys have historically tried to keep him off the witness stand because there’s always a constant fear that Trump will perjure himself thanks to his tendency to basically say whatever pops into his head. It’s why his lawyers fought tooth and nail to keep him from testifying for Robert Mueller.
However, what Trump wants and his lawyers want are not always the same thing. According to Maggie Haberman, the former president reportedly wants to testify in front of the January 6 committee “live” with cameras. Haberman made the revelation during a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, who couldn’t believe that Trump’s legal team would let him go through with the plan. However, both he and Haberman acknowledged that he’s not exactly working with the best representation these days, which is why at least one of his lawyers is trying to make the live testimony happen. Via Mediaite:
HABERMAN: At least one of his lawyers was sounding people out about the idea today of him — of him testifying and agreeing to it as long as the committee would let him do it live. And so I certainly don’t think they’re all shutting him down. I do think that there are people who would be concerned about it, for the same reason that his lawyers, when he was being investigated by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, were concerned about him meeting with Mueller and testifying, which Trump wanted to and they did not want him to, for the reasons you just said.
Considering the January 6 hearings brought in huge ratings, it completely tracks that Trump wants in on the action with his own live special. That’s peak Trump. Even if the questioning goes horribly wrong for him in front of the entire nation, we’ll never hear the end of it if Trump’s testimony kills in the ratings department. He won’t shut up about it.
Lil Baby’s new album, It’s Only Me, is out now on Quality Control Music and while it’s already looking like a triumph on the order of his last two albums, Harder Than Ever and My Turn, some fans are paying closer attention to one song in particular, since Baby appears to take a swipe at QC labelmate Quavo.
Fans are rightfully beside themselves over the possible tension between the labelmates, as it could represent the end of an era. While they never really collaborated much over the years, only really appearing as guest artists on other rappers’ songs, they did work together on Quavo’s 2018 album Quavo Huncho on the song “Lose It.” Now, if they really do have beef, it could be fun to see a pair of rappers actually… y’know… rap about it rather than passive-aggressively tweet at each other for a change.
Of course, it’s also been said that “rap is wrestling” so if this all does turn out to be a case of extreme kayfabe, let’s just hope it offers up as much entertainment value as it promises.
The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – Enough
It is my opinion that dolls should not come to life. This kind of thing happens a lot in movies and I hate it every time. It is very creepy. If I am ever in a room with a doll and the doll looks at me and blinks, I can assure you at least one of us will not be in that room about five seconds after that happens, either because I have fled in terror or because I have heaved it out of a window or both. I do not even super enjoy dolls that are not alive but look lifelike. I do not like their faces and eyes. Why are their eyelashes so long? It’s not right.
Perhaps this “no living dolls” stance might seem at odds with my noted pro-Muppet position. I can see you sitting there right now cranking away on this one. “But Brian, aren’t the Muppets kind of like dolls that can walk and talk? How is that different?” Well, first of all, how dare you? The Muppets are not weird humanoid dolls with porcelain skin that gain sentience and a sudden thirst for blood. They are plushy goofballs who, as far as I am concerned, have always been alive. And they do not commit murders. I’m mad you even brought this up. Come on.
But yes, creepy dolls are back in the news, as they often are in spooky season, thanks to the trailer for the upcoming movie M3GAN, which took the whole damn internet by storm this week.
Some thoughts:
No
I hate it
I hope someone smashes it with a hammer
Maybe I’ll feel better about it after I read the description, though. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.
Gemma (Allison Williams), a brilliant roboticist at a toy company, uses artificial intelligence to develop M3GAN: Model 3 Generative Android a life-like doll programmed to be a child’s greatest companion and a parent’s greatest ally. After unexpectedly gaining custody of her orphaned niece Katie, Gemma enlists the help of the M3GAN prototype – a decision that has horrific consequences.
Jesus Christ, Gemma. Get it together. Watch one movie. This was all easily avoidable. Have you not seen Chucky? Have you not seen any other movie where some android gets half its face blown off and then turns its mangled undead head towards its assailant and stares sometimes literal lasers out of its exposed glowing red eye? It’s madness. Any good neighbor would have seen you unloading this doll out of your car and hopped in your driver’s seat and backed over it for your own good. Lots of people are at fault here.
I mentioned all of this earlier this week and a buddy of mine, Matt, made an excellent point: You rarely see movies like this set in Philadelphia. And there’s a good reason for that, which I say mostly as an excuse to remind everyone about the HitchBOT thing, which was written up by the New York Times under one of my favorite headlines ever: “Hitchhiking Robot, Safe in Several Countries, Meets Its End in Philadelphia.”
Good. Yes, sure, it was a friendly little thing at the time. A sweet little way to bring people together. But that’s how it starts. One day someone was going to look in the rearview mirror and that thing was going to sneer at them and try to strangle them with the seatbelt. You can’t be too careful with these things.
In conclusion, M3GAN should have been a very short movie that ended like this.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – Few developments in history have been less surprising than “Tom Cruise is going to outer space”
Paramount Pictures
Tom Cruise is a maniac who will go to incredible lengths and risk catastrophic bodily injury if it means you will drive to a theater and buy a ticket to one of his movies. Or any movie, really. I kind of do not think he cares. If you saw Tom Cruise on the street and told him you’re excited to go see the new Mario movie in a theater I bet he would do that really intense clap and smile thing he does when he’s happy. You know the one. The Tom Cruise thing. You’re probably picturing it right now. That one.
Anyway, he’s going to space soon. Like, real space. Astronaut space. From an interview with the BBC with a movie executive named Donna Langley, who seems pretty excited about it all.
Langley tells BBC News that Cruise plans to take a rocket up to the International Space Station. The movie plot, which Cruise and director Doug Liman pitched to her on Zoom during the pandemic, “actually takes place on earth, and then the character needs to go up to space to save the day”.
The hope, she adds, is that Cruise will be “the first civilian to do a spacewalk outside of the space station”.
What I like about this is… well, two things. The first is that I saw this story earlier in the week and read the last sentence of that blockquote and my first thought was “yeah, that makes enough sense, I suppose.” Like, if I came up to you on the street and said “Hey guess who is gonna be the first civilian to do an astronaut-ass spacewalk,” I feel like you would get to Tom Cruise in three guesses. Probably less. It’s a very Tom Cruise piece of business.
The second thing I like about this is that it was announced the same week noted astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson had kind of a meltdown on Twitter about the science of Top Gun: Maverick.
“Late to the party here, but In this year’s @TopGunMovie, @TomCruise’s character Maverick ejects from a hypersonic plane at Mach 10.5, before it crashed. He survived with no injuries. At that air speed, his body would splatter like a chainmail glove swatting a worm. Just sayin’,” deGrasse Tyson tweeted. He added, “When Maverick ejected at Mach 10.5, he was going 7,000 mph, giving him 400 million joules of kinetic energy — the explosive power of 100 kg of TNT. A situation that human physiology is not designed to survive. So, no. Maverick does not walk away from this. He be dead. Very dead.”
I choose to believe Tom Cruise is going to space just to make Neil’s head explode a little bit. It’s more fun that way. It’s fun the other way, too. It’s really just fun. I guess that’s my point. And that I’m kind of nervous to see where Tom goes after this. It’s hard to get bigger than space. He might just start running around with sticks of little dynamite while shouting “GO SEE A MOVIE.” It’s gonna get weird. I’m a little excited.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – I must have more popes
HBO
I think sometimes people think I’m joking when I tell them that the two seasons of Paolo Sorrentino’s extended papal universe — The Young Pope and The New Pope — were some of the most legitimately moving and beautiful television I’ve ever seen. I can understand that. I’m always posting screencaps of the weird stuff the show did. Like, the thing where the Australian government gave Jude Law — the Young Pope — a kangaroo as a gift and someone murdered it a few episodes later. Diane Keaton played a nun who was obsessed with basketball. The pope kind of prayed someone to death. It was wild.
And it might be coming back for a third installment, at least according to producer and Sorrentino collaborator Lorenzo Mielo, who said, and I quote, “There is an idea that Paolo has that maybe is going to happen. The third and last.” Yup, good enough for me. I hope Danny DeVito plays the pope this time.
That’s not all Mieli said, either. He also elaborated on the process of creating the show. It turns out he had been trying to work with Sorrentino for a while before they settled on this idea. And the way they settled on it was… I mean, pretty much perfect.
After two further failed pitches, Mieli eventually set a project with Sorrentino. The resulting project would be the director’s popular HBO TV series, The Young Pope. Sorrentino brought the idea for the show to Mieli.
“He brought me an idea about a pope, an American pope, that smokes cigarettes. That was the pitch, and I said fantastic. That seemed to me a very good pitch.”
Hmm. Yes, I love it. Imagine you’re a big-time Hollywood executive and some guy struts into your office and goes “okay, so there’s this pope, and he’s an American and he smokes cigarettes” and then he just stops talking. Silence and anticipation fill the air as you wait to see what he says next. And… nothing. Seconds pass. A full minute. He’s just looking at you, waiting. At some point, you realize he’s done and that was the entire pitch. You stroke your chin and ponder what has taken place. You ponder and ponder. Hmmmm.
I would greenlight it, too. Just out of curiosity.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – My favorite trope is thriving on the dragon show
HBO
Regular readers of this column know about my deep and incredibly pure love of the thing where one character in a movie or television show looks another character in the eye and explains that the two of them are not so different, really. It makes me so happy, every time, and it’s one of those things that you can’t stop noticing once you have started noticing. It happens all the time. It happened just this week on House of the Dragon, during the series of toasts at the dinner where my sweet and miserable pile of loose skin King Viserys pleaded with everyone to get along for 30 seconds before he died. That’s the line up there in the screencap. It’s a modified “not so different,” sure, but has the same energy, which is enough for me to count it.
The best part is that it’s not even the first time the show has done this, in slightly modified fashion. There was this, too, from earlier in the season.
HBOHBO
It’s delightful. It brings me so much joy. It’s probably one of the reasons I’m enjoying the show so much more than I expected. It might be the main reason. Well, Matt Smith and his smirking are up there, too. I need him to say it next. Straight into the camera. I do not ask for much but I am asking — begging, pleading — for this. I’ve been very good and think I deserve it.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – This is probably too many episodes
In a data point sure to fuel more quantity-versus-quality debate, Netflix broke its own record for number of original episodes released in a single quarter — with 1,026 in the third quarter of 2022, according to a tally by Wall Street firm MoffettNathanson.
This seems like too many episodes to me. It definitely seems like a lot of episodes. Like maybe they should be making fewer of them. But maybe this is just normal for a big fancy streaming serv-
That’s more than five times any other streaming rival: Amazon Prime Video and Hulu released 223 and 194 episodes, respectively, and Disney+ debuted 140 original episodes, per the report. HBO Max, now owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, released 114 episodes in the third quarter — significantly fewer episodes than usual and comprising the lightest slate for the service since Q2 2020, the second quarter after launch.
Okay, yeah, this is too many episodes. Maybe they should try t-
Netflix has taken a “something for everyone” strategy, as Netflix co-CEO and chief content officer Ted Sarandos has said — although that doesn’t mean everyone will be a fan of everything on the service. (Indeed, watching more than 1,000 episodes in a 90-day span would be virtually impossible.) According to the streamer, customers on average watch six different genres every month, ranging from drama to horror and from comedy to kids.
I don’t know. It feels to me like maybe Netflix should chill out a little and make a smaller amount of shows that are cool and good. Shows like, to cite an example completely at random and also because I put it right at the top of this section under the bold letters, American Vandal. That was a good show. I know I make this point a lot but I only do that because it’s true and I want everyone to know. I feel great about it. The end.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Chris:
My college buddy is getting married in a couple of weeks in one of those weird fall weddings. Me and the other groomsmen want to get name tags and put dumb fake names on them and force everyone at the reception to refer to us by those names only. This whole thing was at least partially inspired by your affinity for a good fake name, so I figured I’d come to you for some suggestions. I know you won’t let us down.
Chris, I am honored. In a few different ways. Here are 10 decent ones to get the ball rolling:
Percy Valentine
Burt Razor
Pog Sheraton
Terry Lasagna
Wally Colorado
Hank Rockledge
Tito October
Chase Montecarlo
Bosco Radison
Dash Silverado
Tell the bride and groom I say congratulations and that I am sorry.
Several explosions inside of Italy’s Stromboli volcano sent enormous plumes of smoke into the sky and major streams of lava into the Tyrrhenian Sea over the weekend.
Excuse me.
Lava oozed from the northern crater of the volcano after a partial collapse of the crater terrace, Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology said. Authorities issued a middle-level warning to about 400 residents who live on the island – which is part of the Aeolian archipelago off the northeast coast of Sicily – after the eruption was confirmed on Sunday morning, the agency said.
I need to be clear about two very important things here:
I hope everyone is safe and healthy and not substantially impacted by the gushing lava and plumes of ash spitting out of this thing
If I went to an Italian restaurant and saw something on the menu called “The Stromboli Volcano,” I would order it sight unseen
I bet it would be delicious.
The Stromboli volcano, active almost continuously for at least 2,000 years, has erupted several times this year alone, according to records from the Smithsonian Institution.
Two more things:
This is kind of terrifying
This paragraph would also be a fun description of the Stromboli Volcano on the menu or that Italian restaurant
You’ll probably never hear the Hermanos Gutiérrez sing. But if you ever have the opportunity to hear the instrumentalist duo speak as they share stories of each of their songs during tour sets, you’ll find that the vividness in their words aligns with the transcendence of their music. Their upcoming album, El Bueno Y El Malo, contains sounds inspired by their Swiss and Ecuadorian upbringing, channeling the rhythms and melodies found in the ‘50s and ‘60s Latin tunes they grew up on.
Upon hearing Hermanos Gutiérrez’s music, particularly their latest effort El Bueno Y El Malo, the listener can paint a picture of Sergio Leone films, scored with dreamy, heady guitars, matching each other’s familial energy throughout. It’s an album that finds the brother duo, Estevan and Alejandro Gutiérrez, taking risks, most notably working with a new producer after years of solely working with each other.
The record was co-produced with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, with much of the recordings taking place at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville. With this particular album, the hermanos wanted to create a musical landscape in the desert and pay homage to Spaghetti Western films.
“[My brother and I] came prepared with 10 songs that we wrote together,” Estevan says. “We arrived in Nashville, we got to know Dan and the whole crew for about 20 minutes. And then we were already recording. It was amazing, because we felt like we knew each maybe in another life. It felt just so natural to be there to record. And we recorded 10 songs in two and a half days.”
They particularly enjoyed working with Auerbach as he didn’t impose ideas upon them, but rather, helped them expand upon their musical universe.
As one can imagine, the songwriting process is a bit different when their music doesn’t utilize any sung or spoken lyrics. Even during the early phases of the pandemic, working separately wasn’t an option for the hermanos. The two are bound by music and work together in a synergetic fashion.
“Once we have a clearer idea of something that we want to share with each other, then we show it to each other, and then it’s always like one part is missing,” Alejandro says. “And then we try to add stuff, and let it grow and be rich. But before we even go to the studio, I think we really want to have a clear structure of each song in the album. We want to want to be sure of the story we want to tell in the studio. And the more you’re prepared and have the structure you’re even more free to improvise stuff.”
As its title suggests, one of the main themes of El Bueno Y El Malo is duality. On a particular track called “Los Chicos Tristes,” the hermanos take inspiration from their grandfather, who they say taught them to embrace the beauty and power in feeling sad and vulnerable.
“Being sad doesn’t mean like,” Estevan says, before briefly pausing, “Yeah, does it mean having weight on your shoulder? Sometimes it does, but it’s an honest perspective. And how we try to transmit it to the music, it’s a powerful skill that we can all use to make something beautiful.”
The hermanos very briefly appear in the song’s music video, which is directed by Alejandro Sugich, as the music scores the story of a street vendor in Mexico City doing strenuous labor throughout the day, to come home and enjoy a calm, simple dinner with his family.
“We didn’t want it to make it about us,” Alejandro says. “We wanted to show someone and put a light on them. We were so overwhelmed by this idea of going there and portraying millions of stories that are happening every day.”
The hermanos were raised by a Swiss father and an Ecuadorian mother. Growing up between the cultures of Ecuador and Switzerland, the two learned how to be present in the moment, and to cherish things as they are, especially during the times when they’d be traveling between both countries.
The two often say that Ecuadorian culture takes place in the streets, as the children play and gather with their neighbors and friends; while Swiss culture takes place within the four walls of one’s home, focused on the safety and comfort of the family. As they are currently on tour, the sentiment continues to ring true, with the brothers continuing to recall and tell stories inspired by their upbringing through pure instrumentation.
“I remember we went to visit our relatives or grandparents in Ecuador, it was always kind of more loose, more free,” says Alejandro. “I remember our relatives would pick us up at the airport, and we were in the back of a pick-up, no safety stuff. You don’t have those kinds of things in Switzerland, but then going back makes you appreciate your other values. Not having something in a different culture makes you appreciate it even more in another culture.”
El Bueno Y El Malo is out 10/28 via Easy Eye Sound. Pre-order it here.
Russell Westbrook’s future with the Los Angeles Lakers is unclear. There is the possibility he is traded before his contract expires at the end of this season — there seems to be a new rumor every few weeks suggesting the Lakers have discussed a move with another team, with the Indiana Pacers a popular destination for the former league MVP.
And then, there’s the potential he just stays with the team this year, plays out his deal, and walks next summer. Should that happen, the question becomes whether he’ll remain in the starting lineup or come off the bench. While that’s been floated as a solution from early on in his Laker tenure, it’s never come to fruition, as Westbrook started all 78 games in which he appeared last season.
It appears that is on the verge of changing, at least for one night. According to Dave McMenamin and Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Westbrook is going to come off the bench during the team’s preseason finale against the Sacramento Kings on Friday night.
ESPN reporting with @Mcten: The Lakers are planning to bring Russell Westbrook off the bench in the final preseason game vs. Kings tonight (ESPN, 10 ET). Darvin Ham and Westbrook have been exploring possibility of Westbrook quarterbacking second unit and they’ll try it tonight.
As Woj went on to explain, the idea is that Westbrook can more or less be given free rein to play the way he wants with the team’s second unit.
There’s a hope that Westbrook can play freer and faster with ball in his hands on second unit — and have to worry less about fitting away from ball around the starting group. It is certainly an idea they’ll continue to discuss with start of regular season next week.
Ham has mentioned he has “a clear plan” for how he wants to use Westbrook this season, although it was not clear if that meant bringing him off the bench.
In support of The 1975’s new album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, lead singer Matty Healy appeared on Apple Music’s The Zane Lowe Show for an interview out this week (as Rolling Stone notes). While discussing the band’s trajectory for crafting this record (which is out today), Healy also opened up about his experience struggling with a heroin addiction — before the fellow members intervened.
Healy described his heroin use as a solo thing, saying it was “the first time where there had been anything that one of us was doing, or was into, that the others weren’t.” he continued, “It was the first time I had to tell them something. It was the first time that the idea of a secret existing even came out. It’s almost as if, well, is there anything else that we’ve not known? Because that’s a big thing.”
He went on to note that it was in 2018, tied to The 1975’s album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, that the rest of the band (and his friends) stepped in. “No, you need to respect my drug addiction,” Healy claims was his response to the intervention.
“I’d not lost anything. I’d nearly lost the respect of everybody I loved, but I hadn’t,” he explained. “Hadn’t lost my career. Hadn’t lost my possessions. Hadn’t lost my money. I was just walking a very, very thin line. I think that I was lucky enough in my condition in the way that I am as a person to recognize that what needed to be done needed to be done.”
Being Funny In A Foreign Language is out now via Dirty Hit. Buy/stream it here.
Drake is used to attending big-time games and rocking the jersey du jour, but this weekend’s vaunted El Clásico clash between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid will feature Drake’s OVO owl on Barça’s kit.
“To celebrate being the first artist with 50 billion streams on @Spotify @FCBarcelona will wear the OVO owl at El Clasico on Sunday,” Drake captioned an Instagram photo of himself holding up the FCB jersey. “This doesn’t feel real but it is.”
The LaLiga giants debuted the jersey to a remix of Drake’s 2016 No. 1 hit “One Dance.”
Drake surpassed 50 billion cumulative Spotify streams in January 2021, with Varietynoting that the Toronto icon had been named the most-streamed Spotify artist of the 2010s. “One Dance” and Drake’s 2018 No. 1 single “God’s Plan” have each racked up over 2 billion streams alone.
Spotify became the official kit sponsor of Barça in July as part of an overarching long-term partnership that included the rebranding of the club’s home from Camp Nou to Spotify Camp Nou. It’s especially fitting that Barcelona is honoring a first for Drake because this year’s El Clásico will give the winner sole possession of first place early in this LaLiga season.
The match will kick off at 10:15 a.m. EST on Sunday (October 16) from Santiago Bernabeu in Madrid, Spain.
To paraphrase Tyrion Lannister, it’s not easy watching Game of Thrones all the time, but Ben Schwartz found a way. Testing positive for COVID helped, but the Parks and Recreation and The Afterparty star is “getting better, testing negative, & shaking off symptoms,” he tweeted this week, which is obviously good news. The bad news: “I cant watch 8 hours of Game of Thrones a day anymore BUT I will finish this show, just slower,” he wrote, adding, “THE GOT THREAD WILL CONTINUE! FOR THE WATCH!”
Schwartz is a man of his word. He’s up to season six, having recently watched the episode where Missandei tells the worst joke that Grey Worm has ever heard and Arya kills the Waif (who Schwartz dubbed “The Terminator”). “No One” is a triumphant episode of Game of Thrones — like an episode earlier in the season, “The Door,” which is triumphantly devastating. If you don’t remember what happens in it based on the title alone, maybe Schwartz’s live-tweets will refresh your memory.
“People had to be floored when Hodor died, right?” Schwartz wondered (they were). “Had to be a fan favorite character. He was great. I will miss you, [Wylis]. You died doing what you said you were gonna do for a bunch of seasons.” Amen.
People had to be floored when Hodor died, right? Had to be a fan favorite character. He was great. I will miss you, Willis. You died doing what you said you were gonna do for a bunch of seasons.
The thread is worth monitoring as Schwartz inches ever closer to the final season. Maybe it’s better in 2022 than it was in 2019, without the pressure? (Unlikely, but at least there’s House of the Dragon to look forward to.)
The Watcher miniseries has arrived on Netflix as another Ryan Murphy production. Granted, there are a lot of these Murphy projects, and some stand out much more than the rest. Dahmer may have stood out for some wrong reasons, but it’s still the streamer’s second most-watched series already, so Murphy knows a thing or two about making compelling shows out of horrific situations. And The Watcher does dramatize a truly upsetting real-life situation for one family who bought (what they believed was) their dream home, only for the situation to quickly devolve into a mystery person stalking the home (and the Broaddus family).
The situation later turned into a real-estate nightmare. Derek and Maria Broaddus are portrayed by Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts in this show, and they initially purchased their cursed home from a real estate agent portrayed by Jennifer Coolidge, but that’s not the real estate who’s talking about the house these days. Rather, that would be David Barbosa, who came to the gig after a 2018 article by The Cut, which detailed how a mystery party fired off a series of disturbingly threatening letters to the Broaddus family. This person claimed to have been tasked with watching over the house for decades, and he knew far too much about the parents and their children while referring to them as “young blood.”
That was only the beginning of the letters, and the article sent the house into viral infamy with people flocking to take photos and generally gawk. Entertainment Weekly spoke with Barbosa about how his clients took a big loss on the $1.4 million house (listed for $999,000 and selling for $40,000 less), but someone eventually did buy it after a deluge of prospective buyers nope-d out:
“The deal was that, if you were going to put an offer in on the house, you had to go down to the attorney’s office and look at [all of the evidence], so you knew what really happened before we went into a hard contract,” he explains. One man, whom Barbosa remembers confidently told him that he didn’t “give a s—” about the hostile letters the Broadduses received, backed out after delving deeper into the case.
“He went down to the attorney’s office and called me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m out.’ He just said, ‘Listen, after reading everything, there’s no way I’m going in that house,’” Barbosa says with a laugh.
From there, no one knows what happened with The Watcher because the new owner didn’t experience the same harassment. Did he suddenly pass away, and no one knew it? The abuse doesn’t appear to be targeted against the Broaddus family since a former owner received a disturbing letter, too. Well, Netflix viewers are now left to evaluate the situation, and that’s precisely what they’ll do while binging.
The controversial racketeering case against Gunna, Young Thug, and their label, YSL, has received national attention and criticism for its use of lyrics as evidence for months, and now, an unexpected new voice has entered the discussion. Kim Kardashian, who has become more involved in the fight for prison reform as she has pursued a law degree, issued a statement in support of Gunna on her social media. In it, she decries his treatment by authorities and a judge’s recent refusal to grant him bond — the third such request that has been denied. His trial is set for January.
“Imagine sitting in a jail cell for 155 days with no bond when the only evidence against you is a ticket for an unrelated window tint and someone saying you were in a gang,” she wrote. “That’s where my friend Sergio finds himself today after having his bond denied for the third time despite there being zero evidence that he committed a crime.”
Gunna’s bond request has been denied three times because prosecutors feel that he might intimidate or tamper with witnesses. However, Gunna’s legal team argues that there’s no evidence to support this fear. Meanwhile, the main evidence against him according to the original indictment is his own music; while Gunna shouts out YSL, prosecutors maintain this means “Young Slime Life,” a gang, not “Young Stoner Life,” Gunna’s label.
Kardashian’s statement refutes this, declaring, “Sergio [Kitchens, Gunna’s real name] deserves better and we all should demand better.” You can read the full statement below.
Imagine sitting in a jail cell for 155 days with no bond when the only evidence against you is a ticket for an unrelated window tint and someone saying you weren’t in a gang. That’s where my friend Sergio finds himself today after having his bond denied for the third time despite there being zero evidence that he committed a crime.
Earlier this year I had the pleasure of meeting Sergio aka Gunna. He appreciated my interest in criminal justice reform and asked me to take a look at his cousin’s case. Since his incarceration, I have worked with his legal team and the facts of his case are yet another example of why the “justice system” is anything but just.
Some of these facts include:
*prosecutors alleged witness intimidation yet not a single person has said he threatened them or had anyone else threaten them.
*prosecutors alleged he’d had a nurse sneak him drugs yet the nurse says this is untrue and there is zero evidence it happened
*prosecutors alleged he was in a gang based on a witnesses testimony but when you read that testimony it says specifically that he is not in a gang and the witness doesn’t really know him and the interview is 3 years old.
Even though there is no evidence tying him to a single crime, or showing that he is a risk to the community Sergio had his bond denied once again today.
His trial is set for January but will likely be continued meaning he will sit in jail even longer.
Sergio deserves better and we all should demand better. #FreeGunna
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This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
