In the final days of 2020, very few people can look back and say they’ve had a good time. (Dua Lipa, maybe… or soap wholesalers). One member of that fairly selective club is Nathan Apodaca, the TikToker known as @420doggface208 or just doggface208, who shot to viral fame over a video of him skateboarding, drinking cranberry juice, and listening to to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Through TikTok’s […]
Tarpley Hitt
28 posts
Forty women identified only as “Jane Doe” have sued MindGeek, alleging the Montreal-based internet porn company knowingly profited from the sex-trafficking operation GirlsDoPorn. The suit, which was filed Tuesday afternoon in the Southern District of California, seeks punitive and compensatory damages of more than $80 million. “Plaintiffs have suffered damages including, but not limited to, severe emotional distress, significant trauma, attempted suicide, and social and familial […]
The avant-pop artist FKA Twigs has sued actor Shia LaBeouf for what she described as “relentless” abuse during their nearly one-year relationship in 2018. The lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and first reported by The New York Times, accuses the Transformers actor of sexual battery, assault, infliction of emotional distress, and knowingly infecting the singer with a sexually transmitted disease. At the center of […]
Four days before Thanksgiving, as the U.S. braced for a second wave of the illness that has killed over 270,000 people and forced most of the world into isolation, CEO Nicholas Duro launched his app for upscale live events and group travel. He called it “Private Island.” To celebrate the debut, Duro flew 19 people—including 12 TikTok influencers and a Nickelodeon star—to Hawaii for a nine-day […]
The guy on the phone is trying to buy a piano. He’s a 55-year-old Staten Island man calling about an ad for a vintage grand. On the call, he’s energetic, gregarious, and prone to laughter–which is good, because the salesman, prank-caller Johnny Brennan of the Jerky Boys, has veered off-topic, away from thousand-dollar instruments and onto what he calls his “Terminal Groove” class: a hybrid of […]
On Nov. 2, police received a call from a local jewelry salesman, Jay Brett Rind, reporting an accidental shooting at his apartment in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. According to an affidavit filed in court on Nov. 5, Rind told dispatchers that he’d met an old friend, 21-year fire department veteran James Gilliard, for dinner to offer him the “deal of a lifetime.” Rind planned to move […]
A Los Angeles judge granted a restraining order against Diplo Wednesday afternoon, filed by a woman who alleged the EDM DJ had leaked “revenge porn” of her on Twitter. “We are pleased to announce that by an order dated November 16, 2020, the Court ordered our requests ‘all granted’ and the restraining order issued,” attorney Lisa Bloom who represents the petitioner, wrote in a statement about […]
A Los Angeles woman has filed a restraining order against Diplo, or Thomas Wesley Pentz, county court records show. Attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents the plaintiff, said she sought “to block Diplo from distributing revenge porn” allegedly “designed to humiliate her and to scare other women out of coming forward.” “I am representing [redacted] regarding her claims against Diplo,” Bloom said. (The Daily Beast is withholding […]
Two years ago, filmmaker Raquel Cepeda started looking for tapes. Specifically, she was searching for leftover footage from 80 Blocks from Tiffany’s, a 1979 documentary about two gangs in the South Bronx: the Savage Nomads and the Savage Skulls. Cepeda was researching the life of the Skulls’ former “First Lady” Lorine Padilla. But the movie had long been MIA—never released commercially, it wasn’t available on DVD […]
Carl Lentz, the pastor credited with bringing the Instagram-friendly Australian megachurch Hillsong to the U.S. and baptizing Justin Bieber, was fired this week from the New York franchise he helped found. Hillsong founder Brian Houston announced the news in an email to Hillsong East Coast members on Nov. 5. “God will use Carl in another way outside of Hillsong Church,” Houston wrote. “This action has been […]
At first glance, the small group assembled outside Pornhub’s L.A. office might have looked like employees. They surrounded the building in black T-shirts with white script, framed by the adult site’s signature orange box. Instead of the standard logo, however, the tees read “Traffickinghub.” The sparse and socially distant protest, which happens every week, had been organized by the West Coast arm of Knock Out Abuse, […]
President Trump was being treated in the hospital for COVID-19 on Saturday, and at least nine of his party’s top officials had contracted the virus—but it made no difference to many GOP officials and campaign aides who continued to flout social distancing guidelines and host maskless, indoor events. On Saturday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who tested positive for COVID-19 late Friday night, doubled down on his […]
For 32 years, Glynndana Shevlin worked at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California, and through 29 of them, her spot was a concierge club called the E-Ticket Lounge. From 2 p.m. to 10:30 at night, Shevlin hosted guests on the 11th floor of a wing known as the Adventure Tower, serving continental breakfasts, chips and salsa, appetizers, and drinks. As a sommelier, she specialized in wine. […]
Aracely Diaz was at home with her husband and kids when the email arrived, announcing that Disney would lay off 28,000 workers. Diaz has worked as a housekeeper at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, California for 19 years. So had her husband, Micael Diaz. The next morning, the couple woke up at 6:30 in the morning, got in their car, and sped north on the I-5 […]
In early July, the Walt Disney Company reopened parts of two amusement parks: Disney World near Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The former reopened to house the tightly controlled 13-week experiment known as the NBA Bubble, in which staff, players, coaches, and personnel adhered to strict social distancing guidelines and isolation requirements, paired with regular on-site testing. The latter welcomed back its workers with […]
On Saturday morning, protesters showed up to the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles, carrying signs. To passing drivers, the scene looked pretty typical. There have been protests in Los Angeles nearly every day since the civil uprising in June over police brutality, and the signs’ language resembled slogans popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement. One woman scrawled “CARE NOW” on […]
Thursday afternoon, Marla Maples, the television personality best known as Donald Trump’s second wife, shared an Instagram photo from notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates cracking up like a cartoon villain. “We get rid of cash and coins,” the overlaid text reads. “We give you a chip. We put all your money in your chip. If you refuse a vaccine, we […]
For more than nine months, five of them during a global pandemic, a 26-year-old woman named Chelsea Becker has been sitting in Kings County Jail, under a $2 million bail, for giving birth to a stillborn baby. Becker has been there since November, when police arrested her and prosecutors charged her with murder. The District Attorney argued that Becker’s methamphetamine addiction had caused the stillbirth, citing […]
The Chainsmokers’ drive-in concert in tony Southampton, New York, an allegedly distant charity festival held on Saturday night, violated the terms of their permit and will likely face citations and fines from multiple city departments, according to Southampton Town Supervisor Jay Schneiderman. Over 3,000 residents paid up to $25,000 to hear the EDM duo, featuring the subprime sounds of Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon’s DJ alter […]
On Saturday, two days into the MLB’s skeletal 2020 season, Fox Sports debuted a feature few asked for: virtual fans. Facing a schedule that dropped from 162 games to just 60, held in stadiums without crowds to boo, applaud, or smooch on the jumbotron, Fox announced via tweet that they had just the fix: a partnership with SportsMEDIA Technology and Silver Spoon Animation to insert the […]
“I’m in Eastern Ontario. Thousand Islands. Great Lakes. Doing what everyone else is doing in North America—trying to stay inside as much as possible,” Dan Aykroyd said on a phone call in April. Technically, he was outside at that moment. Aykroyd was walking around his family’s farm in Canada, which has the luxury of space and the drawbacks of weak cell service and several unfortunate incidents […]
Early Saturday morning, two people were shot—one fatally—inside the section of Seattle known as the Capitol Hill Organized Protest Area (CHOP), a police-free zone that sprung up in the wake of anti-racism protests following the death of George Floyd in Minnesota. The gunshots that rang out between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m., killing a 19-year-old man and leaving another in critical condition, marked the first report […]
For the past decade, Chris D’Elia, one of the country’s top club comedians who packs theatres hundreds of times a year, has enjoyed the special status afforded to a few middle-aged comics who grasp and expertly deploy devices of the Gen-Z internet. The 40-year-old stand-up, who has three Netflix specials and a Comedy Central special called White Male. Black Comic, has maintained massive followings across social […]
Wednesday morning, a Change.org petition circled the internet calling to “Have TikTok remove any content involving the ‘George Floyd challenge!!’” The page featured a disturbing layout collage, cropped to reveal only the bottom two photos. In each, two white guys mugged for the camera, as one knelt on the other’s neck—both mocking the murder of George Floyd, who died after a Minneapolis cop knelt on his […]
Monday afternoon, America’s most manic snitch sat down in a stairwell at his new undisclosed address to upload an Instagram video about the music industry’s supposed latest mega-scam. “So listen, I want the world to know that Billboard is a lie,” said Tekashi 6ix9ine, or Daniel Hernandez, who was recently released from federal custody, where he was serving out a sentence for nine charges including conspiracy […]
One of the peculiarities of online dream analysis, at least for those of us without advanced psychiatry degrees, is its tendency to get specific. On a dream interpreter like Dream-Meaning.net, where users can search imagery for its precise meaning, ambiguity is an afterthought. The image of a diaper, for example, broadly symbolizes “childish or dependent attitudes.” But the entry also breaks down into 14 subgenres, such […]
On Thursday, the Professional Beauty Federation of California published a press release to the “Hot Topics” section of their website. It was titled: “Time to Sue Governor Newsom.” The release came in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement that the following morning, California would officially enter “Phase Two” of the “Safer at Home” order. Select businesses, from florists to clothing retailers to toy stores, would be […]
On October 10, 2019, federal investigators [******]unsealed an indictment charging the owners and two employees of the websites Girls Do Porn and Girls Do Toys with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion. They arrested three of the four defendants. They named the fourth, a New Zealander named Michael Pratt who had already fled the country, a fugitive. The indictment […]