Liam Broady was beaten by Milos Raonic in the first round of Wimbledon this year
Liam Broady beat fellow Briton Jay Clarke in straight sets to reach the second round of US Open qualifying.
British number five Broady, 24, eased to a 6-3 6-1 victory against Clarke, who is two places higher than him in the national rankings.
Broady will next face Belarus’ Uladzimir Ignatik, needing two more wins to reach the main draw, which starts on Monday in New York.
Heather Watson also won in the first round of qualifying on Wednesday.
The 26-year-old British number three beat 14-year-old American Cori Gauff 6-4 6-1 in one hour 11 minutes to set up a tie against Japan’s Ayano Shimizu and join Naomi Broady, who upset Katie Boulter on Tuesday, in the second round.
Katie Swan fought back from a set down to beat Italy’s Deborah Chiesa 3-6 6-4 6-4 in two hours 24 minutes and will face Japan’s Nao Hibino next.
Britons Harriet Dart and Gabriella Taylor are also in first-round action in New York on Wednesday.
Kyle Edmund, Andy Murray and Cameron Norrie are the British men already in the main draw, while Johanna Konta is the only Briton to have gained direct entry to the women’s singles.
While the rest of us have been scrambling to keep up with whatever just went down between Grimes, Elon Musk, and Azealia Banks, Russian Twitter has been roasting the Tesla CEO with these truly incredible memes.
According to Twitter user @andromedamn, the meme shows off “super bootleggy lifehacky” inventions, often captioned with “and how do you like this, Elon Musk?”
The lifehacks include a lightbulb secured by a bike lock and a pipe, a guy wearing a toilet seat around his neck to carry his beer, and a washing machine modified to be a stove.
apparently russia has this meme where they @ elon musk in pictures of super stupid bootleggy lifehacky “inventions” captioned “and how do you like this, elon musk?” so as it turns out, no one is better at memes than the russians pic.twitter.com/Uoz6yfqZAC
They aren’t exactly the safest inventions, but you have to admit they’re pretty damn clever.
As state news agency Russia Beyond notes, lightbulbs in Russian apartment hallways are often stolen, so someone brilliantly secured it with a bike lock.
Memepedia.ru — the Russian equivalent to Know Your Meme — says @StalinGulag started the meme last year when they tweeted a fake news screenshot that said scientists at the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics started using the particle accelerator to smoke herring.
According to Memepedia, the meme “implies that Musk is one of the recognized geniuses and leaders of technological progress,” but contrasts his reputation with “domestic lifehacks.”
Motherboard translates the Russian to “Hey Elon, envy the scientific achievements of our country!”
Ну и как ты на это ответишь, Илон Маск?! Опять захлебнешься завистью к научным достижениям нашей страны! pic.twitter.com/2LVEIMdFHI
The online translation on this one is rough, but basically @SkiperKakao said they dreamed about attaching a navigation system to a horse “to make Uber,” so they could have a “horse without a driver.”
“How do you find this invention, Elon Musk?”
Приснилось, что приделал систему автоматической навигации на коня, чтобы получился Убер.Конь без водителя. Как тебе такое изобретение, Илон Маск?
Andre Holland, Melanie Lynskey, Bill Skarsgard, Sissy Spacek
broadcaster
Hulu
seasons
1
Genre
Drama, Thriller
We gain a new perspective on the events of the present by weaving through the mind of someone lost in the past.
For episode 7 of Castle Rock, titled “The Queen,” we see things through the fractured perspective of Sissy Spacek’s Ruth Deaver, a woman ostensibly struggling with dementia, who in the previous installment revealed she is pinballing around between traumatic events of the past.
In an astoundingly powerful performance, Spacek as Ruth is both the hero and the victim in this story. She uses a relatively recent gift of a chess set to help ground herself in the present. As she tells Wendell, her grandson, she scatters the pieces around her home to remind herself that if she sees one, “I know it’s now, not then. And I can find my way out of the woods.”
This presses pause on the other storylines playing out in the show. We left things with the ominous mystery man sitting wounded outside Ruth’s house. Meanwhile, Henry Deaver was locked inside a soundproof room by a demented scientist who insisted the “voice of God” that Henry’s father (and Ruth’s late husband) had pursued in the woods was actually physical evidence of multiple universes.
Other years, other nows. All possible pasts, all possible presents. Schisma is the sound of the universe trying to reconcile that.
Ruth is trying to reconcile the same. Recapping this episode is difficult because it amounts to scattered puzzle pieces. Before this, some of the pieces were missing. Now they’re all face-up, but we have to assemble them to understand the picture they create.
So much of Ruth’s existence is disorientation. Where is she? When is she? But in the midst of it all, we find the answers to some of the other bizarre events of the present.
For one, the thing with the dead dog is explained. In an early episode, Henry finds Alan Pangborn in the woods, digging up a suitcase used as a makeshift coffin for a stray dog who had been struck and killed by a truck several weeks ago. Ruth kept thinking the dog was back, and she wanted evidence that it was truly dead.
Alan excavated it, opened it up, snapped a cell phone picture of the deceased animal, and that was that. Weird, right? But it turns out to have more significance than we knew.
For one, we see the death of this particular animal happen. A clear accident with a tragic outcome, but it loosens a memory in Ruth’s junk-drawer mind that haunts her.
“Did I ever tell you what happened to Puck?” she tells Alan. Puck was the similar-looking dog that the family had when Henry was a boy. The pet just disappeared one day, with no explanation.
Leapfrogging to the end of the episode, we see her discovering an empty package of rat poison tucked deep into her trash. The dog was reacting badly to her husband, who showed extreme domineering if not outright abuse in this episode.
It’s clear the Reverend Deaver murdered the family pet. But apart from showing his cruelty, why does this matter? Ruth has a conflict with the specter of her late husband near the end of the episode, and he taunts her about her failure to muster the courage to leave him and run away with their son to a new life.
But there is something else calling to her from beneath these memories. She’s trying to hear it, just as her husband and Henry strained to hear the Schisma — the “voice of God” — in the woods.
President Donald Trump is defending the hush money payments made by his former attorney Michael Cohen to a pair of women, insisting, contrary to Cohen’s guilty plea, that the effort wasn’t “even a campaign violation.” (Aug. 22) AP
For Richard Nixon, it was not the Watergate break-in, it was covering it up. For Bill Clinton, it was not the sex with a White House intern, it was lying about it.
And now, for Donald Trump, it is not — for the moment, at least — about colluding with Russia to influence the 2016 election, but with possibly breaking campaign finance law to influence it.
For all the talk of attacks on American democracy by a pro-Trump Russian government, the president’s most pressing trouble stems from pre-election hush payments to women with whomthey say he once had adulterous sexual trysts.
It’s a political lesson that seems to go unlearned: A president is often tripped up not by the big things but the little ones, and not so much by high crimes as common failings — especially mendacity.
Nixon was never conclusively linked to the attempt by his re-election campaign to break into the Democratic National Party headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington — a “third rate burglary,’’ as his press secretary put it.
But he participated in the attempt to cover it up, and was en route to impeachment in 1974 when he resigned.
Clinton may have survived the fact that he had sex in the White House with Monica Lewinsky. He lied about it, however, and was impeached by the House of Representatives in 1998 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.
He was found not guilty by the Senate. But he will never live down his denials, especially the one on Jan. 26, 1998, with his wife Hillary at his side, when he told the nation “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’’
And before a grand jury, when asked about the veracity of his previous claim that “there is not a sexual relationship…’’ he famously said, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.’’
Trump’s mantra for the past year has been “no collusion’’ between his presidential campaign and Russia. But that was before his former fixer and lawyer Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty this week and implicated his former boss in the payoffs.
Now, Trump seems to have had his eye on the wrong threat to his presidency.
What’s the motive?
The question, in each case, is why.
Why did Nixon, facing a badly divided Democratic Party, not go ahead and admit what had happened at the Watergate and throw those who actually planned and executed the burglary under the bus?
Why did Clinton, whose sexual relationship with the 22-year-old Lewinsky was consensual (however unseemly and inappropriate), not just confess his sin and throw himself on the mercy of an electorate that probably would have forgiven him?
Why did Trump, who once said he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters’’ not simply admit the liaisons months ago and move on? Especially since nothing in his personal biography suggested he was a paragon of virtue in the first place.
There are no certainties, just possibilities.
Nixon and his paranoia
Robert North Roberts, a political scientist and author of Ethics in U.S. Government, thinks Nixon’s infamous paranoia led him to order the Watergate cover up. He lacked confidence in his standing with voters, believed everyone was out to get him and so didn’t consider honesty a viable policy.
But Boston College historian Patrick Maney thinks Nixon actually had good reason to orchestrate the cover up. The president had approved the creation of the secret Plumbers unit (originally designed to stop leaks such as those of the Pentagon Papers) that attempted the break in.
And even if Nixon didn’t know about the Watergate job – the historical verdict is still out on that one – he did know about other, equally nefarious operations that might have come to light if the break-in did.
Clinton and his image
Roberts and Maney (a Clinton biographer) suspect Clinton was so personally embarrassed by the Lewinsky affair that, no matter how limited its political damage, he felt he had to cover it up. Also, he’d been able to skate through a similar scandal involving a woman named Jennifer Flowers during the 1992 presidential campaign.
But the lie cost him. Some Americans would have forgiven Clinton the horn dog; but they would never forgive the dissembling “Slick Willie,’’ who said he smoked pot but didn’t inhale. A man derided by his critics as politically calculating had instead reinforced a most negative political image.
Roberts thinks Trump may have done so because he was worried about alienating his evangelical Christian supporters.
Many evangelicals supported Trump, a profane, twice-divorced former casino operator, only because they so hated the liberalism that Hillary Clinton personified, and because they believed Trump would nominate conservative Supreme Court justices. Trump might not have wanted to push his luck with such voters on the personal morality front.
Trump might also have been worried about the reaction of his wife, Melania, who’d stood by him during the campaign after the release of a videotape on which he admitted to sexually harassing women.
Maney suspects Trump simply thought he could get away with paying the hush money. Given his background as a real estate developer and reality TV star, and the boisterous 2016 campaign, buying the silence of a few women — even if it involved breaking election finance law — might have seemed no big deal.
And, compared to a potential charge of conspiring with a hostile foreign oligopoly to undermine U.S. democracy, it probably isn’t.
USA TODAY Sports
Published 5:37 p.m. ET Aug. 22, 2018 | Updated 6:56 p.m. ET Aug. 22, 2018
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USA TODAY Sports’ Steve DiMeglio previews the upcoming tournament at the Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, New Jersey. USA TODAY
“It’s on.”
That’s what Tiger Woods tweeted Wednesday to confirm the highly anticiipated one-on-one matchup against Phil Mickelson, “The Match,” will be Thanksgiving weekend.
The showdown will be Friday, Nov. 23, and it will be match play.
As various details start trickling in, here is one thing we know for sure: It’s winner-take-all for $9 million.
The Match will be played at Shadow Creek Golf Course in Las Vegas.
Woods and Mickelson staged a promotional back-and-forth on Twitter on Wednesday.
Mickelson was quick with his reply.
I bet you think this is the easiest $9M you will ever make
Woods: “Think you will earn some bragging rights?”
Mickelson (who joined Twitter on Wednesday, just in time): “Let’s do this.”
The match will be shown on pay-per-view.
“We think there will be some pretty good interest, but we’re also trying to present it in a way that you don’t get to see on normal TV,” Mickelson told reporters at Ridgewood Country Club in Paramus, N.J., site of the Northern Trust, the first event of the FedExCup playoffs. “We’ll have (microphones) on both of us and our caddies, and you’ll be able to hear all the banter as well as all the commentating that will be more interactive.”
“The idea is not just to have this great match but to have this interactive experience so fans can see something they have never seen in televised golf before.”
Other details — What time it begins? Who will be in the gallery? Will there be an undercard? How much for the pay-per-view? — are still to be worked out.
WarnerMedia issued a release following Woods’ tweet with some details:
Live pay-per-view coverage of the event will be distributed through Turner’s B/R Live, the company’s new premium live sports streaming service, AT&T’s DIRECTV, AT&T U-verse, and will be offered to other on-demand platforms.
HBO Sports will capture all the excitement leading up to the match.
Bleacher Report and its House of Highlights, which recently surpassed 10 million followers on Instagram, will offer comprehensive highlights and behind-the-scenes content.
Turner’s TNT will also televise programming with select content from the event in the weeks following the live competition.
Turner International will facilitate distribution of live PPV access to the event outside the U.S.
Also in the release:
“Woods and Mickelson will selectively make side-challenges against one another during the match. For instance, Woods or Mickelson could raise the stakes by challenging the other to a long-drive, closest-to-the-pin or similar competition during a hole as they play their match, with money being donated to the winning golfer’s charity of choice.”
Woods has been installed as a prohibitive favorite at -180 by Golfodds.com and Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook manager Jeff Sherman.
Mickelson, meanwhile, is +150. A $100 bet would fetch $150 in net winnings if Lefty pulls off the upset.
One interesting mystery: Will Woods have to use a left-handed driver (like the one he is holding in the poster he tweeted)?
The former Wasps and Sale back pleaded guilty to common assault and resisting arrest following the incident outside a nightclub during a pre-season tour in Jersey.
“By his guilty plea before the criminal court, Mr Cipriani accepts that he behaved in a way that, in the panel’s view, fell below the standard of behaviour expected of a rugby player,” Graham added.
“The panel were supported in reaching that decision by Gloucester Rugby’s own internal disciplinary hearing finding that his behaviour fell below the standard that the club expects.
“Mr Cipriani is a role model and by committing an act of common assault and by resisting arrest, the panel find his actions are prejudicial to the interests of the game.
“The panel do not agree that this is a ‘minor’ incident or ‘trivial’.”
The Rugby Players’ Association said earlier this week it was “surprised” to learn the RFU had charged Cipriani, as they considered it an internal club matter.
Cipriani, who moved to Kingsholm in the summer, was fined £2,000 after pleading guilty to the charges and has also been fined the same amount by his club and ordered to do 10 hours community service.
Gloucester CEO Stephen Vaughan said: “Whilst disappointed at the verdict, we accept the decision of the panel, particularly concerning the way Gloucester Rugby have handled the matter. We believe that the panel’s decision not to impose any additional penalty endorses our approach.
“We now look forward to the start of the season and putting this incident behind us.”
People in India’s flood-ravaged state of Kerala are facing a “great struggle to rebuild their lives”, local officials have warned, as high waters that have killed hundreds of people and displaced more than a million others start to recede.
Rescue teams searched throughout the southern state on Wednesday for survivors stranded during the area’s worst flooding for a century.
Torrential monsoon rains from the end of May onwards have forced an estimated 1.2 million people to shelter inside makeshift relief camps, according to government figures.
Rains subsided on Sunday after dramatically intensifying in the preceding two weeks, killing at least 238 people since August 8.
The death toll since the end of May has topped 380, while authorities say that dozens of people are still missing.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, State Relief Commissioner PH Kurian said that more than a million people remain in the camps.
“The exact number is not known, this is a dynamic figure,” he said on Wednesday.
An estimated 1.2 million people are sheltered inside makeshift relief camps [Aijaz Rahi/AP]
As waters started receding over the past few days, authorities began taking stock of what is projected to be a months-long, if not longer, effort to rebuild the state’s devastated infrastructure and services.
Local officials estimate the floods caused $3bn of damage, with about 10,000km of Kerala’s roads and more than 100,000 houses needing to be reconstructed.
Several of Kerala’s predominant industries – including tourism as well as tea, rubber and spice plantations – have been hit particularly hard, with estimated losses totalling tens of millions of dollars.
Hotels and tour operators in several locations throughout the state have also witnessed cancellations approaching 80 percent of all bookings ahead of peak tourist season, which runs from September to March, according to Indian Association of Tour Operators figures reported by the Times of India.
On Tuesday, state Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan told reporters he had requested a $1.4bn loan from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to finance reconstruction efforts.
“Our aim is not merely a restoration of the state to pre-flood times, but the creation of a new Kerala,” Vijayan said.
Modi has pledged $71m of assistance to date, with more funding expected to be released by the central government in coming weeks, and deployed military units to help with recovery efforts.
“This is not going to be a 100-metre sprint, it is going to be a long marathon,” Unni Krishnan, a member of Save the Children’s emergency health unit, told Al Jazeera in reference to rebuilding efforts in the state, home to more than 33 million people.
Risk of disease
Medical officials and NGOs, meanwhile, warned of a heightened risk of waterborne disease outbreaks due to the flooding.
“Water sanitation and hygiene are very crucial at this time,” Ray Kancharla, Save the Children India’s humanitarian manager, told Al Jazeera.
Save the Children has warned about an increased risk of waterborne disease outbreaks following the flooding [Aijaz Rahi/AP]
Local health officials said earlier this week they were prepared to deal with any such emergence of disease and had distributed preventive medicines in a bid to avert an outbreak.
According to India‘s central government health index, Kerala has the best performing public health system of any state in the country.
Save the Children officials told Al Jazeera that Kerala, one of India’s wealthiest states, was well positioned to avoid any major emergence of disease because of its strong public health system and a literacy rate approaching 100 percent.
“Health and education together is the definite antidote to stop disease outbreaks,” Krishnan said.
Schools throughout Kerala remained closed on Wednesday but are set to reopen next week, Krishnan added, following the conclusion of the state’s annual Hindu harvest festival.
“There are broken houses and damaged schools but along with that some of the invisible needs such as mental health and emotional care should also be a priority … [because] children will have questions like ‘why did this happen to me?’” he said.
“There is a lot of capacity in this state but what it lacks is the contextual experience because it has never dealt with a disaster of this magnitude before.”
Schools throughout Kerala are set to reopen next week [Aijaz Rahi/AP]
Puppets, murder, Sesame Street lawsuits—that’s what summer blockbusters are made of… right? Well, according to critics, not so much.
Reviews for The Happytime Murders aren’t looking so happy. Despite its star-studded cast — led by Melissa McCarthy — the puppet-heavy film noir/comedy isn’t doing so well in the court of public opinion.
Directed by Brian Henson (son of the late Muppets creator Jim Henson), The Happytime Murders parodies traditional puppet storytelling in a human- and puppet-inhabited Los Angeles. From drug abuse to graphic sex scenes, the Happytime trailer makes it clear that this isn’t your average visit with Kermit the Frog. And yet, while the naughty puppet trope has certainly worked in the past, it doesn’t seem to be singing (or miming) quite like it used to.
Check out some critics’ takes on The Happytime Murders below.
The Happytime Murders tries so desperately hard to push the envelope of indecency that it crosses into the realm of being astonishingly unfunny. I honestly can’t name another time I’ve sat in a theater and witnessed such deafening silence fall across an audience during a comedy than in my press screening for this. It isn’t the mere notion of watching puppets act naughty that is offensive or shocking; what’s shocking is how Henson’s film, written by Todd Berger with a story by Dee Austin Robertson, thinks it’s hilarious and edgy as it continues to make a fool of itself throughout the (thankfully brief) 91-minute runtime. The Happytime Murders is like that guy who gets too wasted too early at the party, taking things to an 11 when everyone else is comfortably tipsy at a seven. It’s as if a group of puppeteers who’ve been forced to stymie their horn-dog sense of humor for years are finally free to shout every crude joke at the top of their lungs all at once.
It should come as no surprise that “Happytime” comes up farcically short as a metaphor for racism. But its most fatal miscalculation is the decision to frontload so many of its crassest setpieces into the first 15 or 20 minutes, depriving the rest of the film of the shock value that is its entire raison d’etre. By the midway point, the movie is so strapped for ideas that it resorts to turning dud one-off jokes (characters mistaking McCarthy for a man, “an asshole says what?”) into painfully extended running gags.
The Happytime Murders also clumsily tries to use its puppet-filled world as a metaphor for classism, racism and sexism in modern America, as puppets are persecuted and made to be the butt of offensive jokes. However, those themes aren’t really developed and are largely forgotten once the murder mystery storyline kicks into gear. Instead, positioning the puppets as a race that has been historically persecuted is more offensive and ridiculous than the smart social commentary The Happytime Murders clearly wants its audience to believe it is.
As always, McCarthy is a delight, elevating the uneven material with consistent comic brilliance marked by broad physicality; the scene in which her character snorts “grade A sucrose,” enough to kill an ordinary human, is a hoot. She also displays striking chemistry with her puppet co-star, expertly voiced and manipulated by Barretta. The more than 125 puppet characters, all created especially for the film, feature many striking creations, albeit not ones likely to show up on toy-store shelves. But the movie is practically stolen by a human performer, Rudolph, who infuses Bubbles with as much sweetness as hilarity.
It’s an incredible testament to the great Maya Rudolph that she almost rises above it, playing Phil’s lovelorn secretary with enough doe-eyed sass to save a few of her scenes. After all those years at “SNL,” she’s an absolute master at rescuing laughs from overlong sketches that run themselves into the ground — she does more with a lock-pick and a banana in this movie than Henson accomplishes with 50 hypersexual puppets and all the hand-sewn vulvas an R-rating can buy.
“Happytime Murders” can’t tickle the funny bone enough to get more than a few laughs even from Elmo. It’s hard to overemphasize the extent to which the puerile humor yields diminishing returns, as the filmmakers (Henson and writer Todd Berger) hammer away at dirty-puppet jokes to the point of wearing holes in them.
Ms. McCarthy has proved her comic mettle in all kinds of company, so why not alongside a chain-smoking blue guy in a rumpled suit? She and the other non-inanimate actors — Mainly Ms. Banks, Maya Rudolph and Leslie David Baker — get to do a bit of silly riffing, but it’s mostly tired, bloodless stuff. The plot should be an excuse for comic invention, but it mostly just gets in the way, which makes me think that a feature film isn’t really what Phil and his ilk need or deserve. Like their mainstream Muppet brethren, they might be more at home on smaller screeners, in shorter bits. No disrespect.
MacGyver stunt man Justin Sundquist has been put in a medically induced coma after suffering a serious injury on set, PEOPLE confirms.
“We have learned about an injury to stunt coordinator Justin Sundquist that occurred late Monday on the set of MacGyver in Atlanta,” CBS TV Studio said in a statement to PEOPLE and EW. “The production team is cooperating with the authorities investigating the accident, and our primary concern at this time is Justin’s health and well-being.”
A source close to production says Sundquist sustained an injury after falling off a moving vehicle on set. However, according to the source, production has not been halted.
According to court documents, obtained by Deadline, the stunt man sued CBS Studios in May 2017 after he was allegedly hit by a car while shooting Hawaii Five-O.
Sundquist’s attorney claimed that “a key personnel who had safety responsibilities was under the influence of narcotic controlled substances, which caused and/or contributed to Mr. Sundquist’s injuries and damages.”
In the suit, Sundquist claimed that Hawaii Five-O executives were notified 18 months prior of the “safety concerns” and the “continued use and abuse of controlled substances by this key personnel.”
Jimmy Bennett, the ex-child actor who says #MeToo hero Asia Argento had sex with him when he was 17, spoke out for the first time Wednesday, saying he was traumatized by the encounter and never reported it because he was “ashamed and afraid.”
“I did not initially speak out about my story because I chose to handle it in private with the person who wronged me,” said Bennett in a statement, according to an email to USA TODAY from Bennett’s lawyer, Gordon Sattro. “My trauma resurfaced as she came out as a victim herself. I have not made a public statement in the past days and hours because I was ashamed and afraid to be part of the public narrative.”
But contrary to what Argento has said denying a sexual encounter, Bennett confirmed a sexual encounter did take place, he was underage at the time, and he was unprepared to deal with the “ramifications” at the time.
“I tried to seek justice in a way that made sense to me at the time because I was not ready to deal with the ramifications of my story becoming public,” his statement said. “At the time I believed there was still a stigma to being in the situation as a male in our society. I didn’t think that people would understand the event that took place from the eyes of a teenage boy.”
Now that he’s 22, he said he’s no longer afraid to speak.
“I have had to overcome many adversities in my life, and this is another that I will deal with, in time. I would like to move past this event in my life, and today I choose to move forward, no longer in silence.”
According to documents sent under mysterious circumstances to The New York Times last week, Argento, then 37, had sex with Bennett, then two months after his 17th birthday, in a Marina del Rey hotel room in 2013, and then quietly agreed to pay him nearly $400,000 as hush money.
The Times said it received documents in an encrypted email that included a selfie of Argento and Bennett in bed together, dated the same day as another selfie of the two she posted on her Instagram about her “reunion” with Bennett.
The age of consent is 18 in California, so such an encounter would have been a crime in 2013 and would theoretically still be possible to prosecute. Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department detectives have said they are looking into the matter.
The private settlement between Argento and Bennett was reached a month after Bennett notified Argento in November 2017 that he intended to sue her over their encounter.
Bennett approached Argento shortly after she went public with her accusation that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein raped her in a hotel room in France in 1997. She then became one of the leading voices of the #MeToo movement to call out sexual abuse, even as she was quietly paying out hush money to someone who accused her of statutory rape.
The Times attempted for days to get a comment from both Argento and Bennett before it posted its story on Sunday. USA TODAY and other media outlets attempted the same in the days since.
She acknowledged paying Bennett hush money but said that decision and the subsequent arrangements for payment were made by her late boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, who considered Bennett “dangerous” but still deserving of “compassion” given his money woes.
Bourdain committed suicide in June. It is not clear if there is a link between his death and Argento’s conflict with Bennett.
On Wednesday, it was Bennett’s turn to speak out for the first time since the scandal broke.
Bennett is a former child actor, with a list of credits dating to 2002, who’s now a rock musician. He met Argento when he was cast at age 7 in a 2004 movie she co-wrote, directed and starred in, “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things.” (She played a prostitute; he played her son, whom she dresses as a girl to lure men. His character is raped in the film.)
Skiper Kakao
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trustedenews 