Relativity has picked up Burden, a racial drama from newcomer Andrew Heckler, and will use it to launch Relativity Squared, aka R2, its new specialty division.
Run by Robbie Brenner, Relativity president of production and producer of the award-winning Matthew McConaughey drama Dallas Buyers Club, the division’s mandate is to acquire and produce lower-budget, story-driven films with a unique point of view.
Two other projects already in development at Relativity — The Secret Scripture, being directed by Jim Sheridan, and The Tribes of Palos Verdes, being directed by D.J. Caruso — are being transferred to the new division as well.
Relativity executive vp acquisitions Matt Brodlie, a specialty-acquisitions vet, will run the division and report to Brenner. Executive Kevin McKeon will also work in the division. The trio will also continue on in their current roles at Relativity proper.
Relativity has picked up Burden, a racial drama from newcomer Andrew Heckler, and will use it to launch Relativity Squared, aka R2, its new specialty division.
Run by Robbie Brenner, Relativity president of production and producer of the award-winning Matthew McConaughey drama Dallas Buyers Club, the division’s mandate is to acquire and produce lower-budget, story-driven films with a unique point of view.
Two other projects already in development at Relativity — The Secret Scripture, being directed by Jim Sheridan, and The Tribes of Palos Verdes, being directed by D.J. Caruso — are being transferred to the new division as well.
Relativity executive vp acquisitions Matt Brodlie, a specialty-acquisitions vet, will run the division and report to Brenner. Executive Kevin McKeon will also work in the division. The trio will also continue on in their current roles at Relativity proper.
ABC’s ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ hasn’t premiered yet but the show’s Twitter account is in some hot water.
Someone tweeting for ABC’s forthcoming comedy series Fresh Off the Boat is in hot water.
The official account for the show, about an Asian-American family that relocates from their home in the Chinatown section of Washington D.C. to a suburban Florida neighborhood, tweeted a promo on Thursday that immediately drew criticism from followers, including series creator Eddie Huang.
The tweet said, “The world is full of different hats,” and featured a poster with illustrated figures wearing various culturally reductive hats, including a sombrero, a turban, a cowboy hat, a bamboo hat and a kufi.
Huang, whose memoir is the basis for Fresh Off the Boat, premiering Feb. 4, also appealed to fellow executive producer Melvin Mar to help get the promo removed.
.@chineseguy88 people at studio actually listen to you cause you’re a “good chinaman” lol could u please have them take the turban ad down?
Huang has not been shy about his various struggles getting the show on air, and documented them in an essay for Vulture. “The network’s approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane,” he wrote.
Huang ultimately won a few battles, though, and gave credit to ABC for its willingness to take some bold steps. “I care the most about the conversation that’s going to happen because of this show. This show to me is historic,” he said. “To deal with the word ‘chink’ in the pilot episode of a comedy on network television is borderline genius and insane at the same time.”
The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington signed on to a letter to members of the U.S. Senate on March 20 calling for Congress to block a D.C. bill that would protect LGBT students from discrimination at religious schools operating in the city. The letter, which was signed, among others, by Cardinal Donald Wuerl calls the Human Rights Amendment Act approved by the D.C. Council last year an attack on religious freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association in the nation’s capital.
The letter also calls on Congress to kill another bill approved by the Council and signed by Mayor Muriel Bowser, the Reproductive Health Non-Discrimination Act. That measure would prohibit D.C. employers from discriminating against employees based on their personal reproductive health choices, including a decision to have an abortion. D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton joined city officials in strongly disputing claims that the two bills would infringe on religious freedoms or freedom of speech. The Archdiocese of Washington oversees 139 Catholic parishes and 95 Catholic schools in D.C. and five counties in Maryland.
The campaign is being led by Ted Cruz. His “disapproval resolution” would require passage from both chambers of Congress and the signature of President Obama. Ain’t gonna happen.
Monica Lewinsky was sitting in a Manhattan auditorium last month, watching teenage girls perform a play called “Slut.” Ms. Lewinsky was in blue jeans and a blazer, her hair pulled out of her face with a small clip. She was wiping away tears.
In the scene, a young woman was seated in an interrogation room. She had been asked to describe, repeatedly, what had happened on the night in question — when, she said, on their way to a party, a group of guy friends had pinned her down in a taxi and sexually assaulted her. She had reported them. Now everyone at school knew, everyone had chosen a side.
“My life has just completely fallen apart,” the girl said, her voice shaking. Her parents were in the next room. “Now I’m that girl.”
The play concluded, and Ms. Lewinsky fumbled through her purse for a tissue. A woman came and whisked her to the stage.
“Hi, I’m Monica Lewinsky,” she said, visibly nervous. “Some of you younger people might only know me from some rap lyrics.”
The crowd, made up largely of high school and college women, laughed. “Monica Lewinsky” is the title of a song by the rapper G-Eazy; her name is a reference in dozens of others: by Kanye, Beyoncé, Eminem, Jeezy. The list goes on.
The title of Ms. Lewinsky’s 18-minute TED talk (and, perhaps, the line that best sums up her experience), which received a raucous standing ovation: “The Price of Shame.”
“Thank you for coming,” Ms. Lewinsky continued, “and in doing so, standing up against the sexual scapegoating of women and girls.”
She walked back to her seat after speaking, and a woman behind her leaned forward. “I saw you, but I didn’t realize I was sitting next to Monica Lewinsky,” she said.
A line of girls soon approached. “Thank you for being here,” said a teenager in a striped shirt and gold hoop earrings. She asked if she could take a photo, and Ms. Lewinsky winced a little, then politely told her no. “I totally understand,” the girl said.
When she was asked later about her reaction to the play, Ms. Lewinsky said: “It’s really inspiring to hear people bring awareness to this issue. That scene in the interrogation room was hard to watch. One of the things I’ve learned about trauma is that when you find yourself retriggered, it’s helpful to recognize when things are different.”
A LOT IS DIFFERENT for Monica Lewinsky these days, starting with the fact that, until last year, she had hardly appeared publicly for a decade. Now 41, the former White House intern once famously dismissed by the president as “that woman” holds a master’s degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics.
She splits time between New York and Los Angeles, where she grew up, and London, and said it’s been hard to find work.
Mostly she has embraced a quiet existence: doing meditation and therapy, volunteering, spending time with friends.
But the quiet ended last May, when she wrote an essay for Vanity Fair about the aftermath of her affair with Bill Clinton — the story a result of a years-long relationship with the magazine and its editor, Graydon Carter. (She was first photographed in its pages by Herb Ritts in 1998.)
In the essay, which was a finalist for a 2015 National Magazine Award, she declared that the time had come to “burn the beret and bury the blue dress” and “give a purpose to my past.”
That new purpose, she wrote, was twofold: it was about reclaiming her own story — one that had seemed to metastasize — but also to help others who had been similarly humiliated. “What this will cost me,” she wrote, “I will soon find out.”
It hasn’t appeared to cost her, at least not yet. In fact, the opposite has occurred.
Over the last six months, she has made appearances at a benefit hosted by the Norman Mailer Center (she and Mr. Mailer had been friends), at a New York Fashion Week dinner presentation for the designer Rachel Comey, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party and as her friend Alan Cumming’s date at an after-party for the Golden Globes. (Mr. Cumming has known her since the 1990s.)
Recently, she took part in an anti-bullying workshop at the Horace Mann School, and joined a feminist networking group. (“I consider myself a feminist with a lowercase ‘f,’ ” she told me. “I believe in equality. But I think I’m drawn to the issues more than the movement.”)
Perhaps most interestingly, in October, onstage at a Forbes conference, she spoke out for the first time about the digital harassment (or cyberbullying) that has affected everyone from female bloggers to Jennifer Lawrence to … her: “I lost my reputation. I was publicly identified as someone I didn’t recognize. And I lost my sense of self,” she told the crowd.
She just took that declaration one step further on the main stage at TED in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Thursday, where she issued a biting cultural critique about humiliation as commodity. The title of her 18-minute talk (and, perhaps, the line that best sums up her experience), which received a raucous standing ovation: “The Price of Shame.”
THIS IS NOT Monica Lewinsky’s first attempt at reinvention. But it’s also not the Monica of more than a decade ago: the one who created a handbag line and tried her hand at reality TV.
This iteration is a bundle of contradictions: warm yet cautious. Open yet guarded. Strong but fragile.
She is likable, funny and self-deprecating. She is also acutely intelligent, something for which she doesn’t get much credit. But she is also stuck in a kind of time warp over which she has little control.
At 41, she doesn’t have many of the things that a person her age may want: a permanent residence, an obvious source of income (she won’t comment on her finances), a clear career path.
She is also very, very nervous. She is worried about being taken advantage of, worried her words will be misconstrued, worried reporters will rehash the past.
She is prepared, almost always, for doomsday: the snippet of a quote that might be taken out of context; questions about the Clintons, whom she declines to discuss. “She was burned … in myriad ways,” said her editor at Vanity Fair, David Friend.
Ms. Lewinsky wouldn’t call this a reinvention, though. This, she says, is simply the Monica who in spite of the headlines, in spite of the incessant paparazzi-style coverage, “was seen by many, but truly known by few,” as she put it on the TED stage.
“This is me,” she told me. “This is a kind of evolution of me.”
I had approached her after the Vanity Fair essay in part because I was intrigued, but also because I had a tinge of guilt. I had come of age in the Lewinsky era; my first job out of college was at Newsweek, where the story of the reporter who had uncovered the affair — then saw his story leaked to the Drudge Report — was legend.
I distinctly remember my high school self, wide-eyed, poring over the soft-core Starr report with friends.
None of us had the maturity to understand the complexities, or power dynamics, of the president’s affair with a young intern. When I was 16, one dominating image of Monica Lewinsky seemed to overshadow all others: slut. Of course, that 22-year-old intern was only a few years older than me.
And so I emailed her. I told her I was interested in her effort to re-emerge, and had been particularly fascinated by the reaction to it, as if there were a kind of public reckoning underway. Feminists who had stayed silent on the first go-round were suddenly defending her, using terms like “slut-shaming” and “media gender bias” to do it.
The late-night host David Letterman was on air expressing remorse over how he had mocked her, asking, in a recent interview with Barbara Walters, “With some perspective, do you realize this is a sad human situation?” Bill Maher said of reading Ms. Lewinsky’s piece in Vanity Fair, “I gotta tell you, I literally felt guilty.”
Saffron Domini Burrows, Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming and Ms. Lewinsky at Mr. Cumming’s book launch in October.
And young women were embracing her: rushing up to her after public events, messaging her on social media, asking if they could take selfies. (“Meeting her felt like meeting a pop culture icon,” said Amari Leigh, 17, a cast member in the “Slut” play. “It’s crazy to think that one thing she did, when she was not that much older than I am now, impacted her whole life.”)
“However you felt about the actual event, the way it played out was pretty grotesque,” said Rebecca Traister, a senior editor at The New Republic who was just out of college when the Clinton scandal broke and wrote about it later.
Ms. Traister said she was taken aback when she reread her own article: “Whether it’s guilt, or sophistication, or thinking a little harder about sexual power dynamics, I think people have started to think: ‘Oh right, she probably does have a right to tell her story. And that’s a good thing.’ ”
This time, Ms. Lewinsky appears determined to tell it on her terms. She has a P.R. agent screening requests and approaches media as one may expect: with the caution of a woman who has been raked over the coals.
She has reason to. Just weeks ago, a short interview with the artist Nelson Shanks was published online. In a question about which portrait subject he had found most difficult to capture, Mr. Shanks noted that his painting of Bill Clinton, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, had a shadow as a metaphor for Ms. Lewinsky — created from the shadow of an actual blue dress he had placed on a mannequin. The piece posted on a Sunday. By the next morning, it was everywhere.
Ms. Lewinsky woke up to a flooded inbox and panicked.
She was really, really sorry, she told me, but she simply couldn’t move forward with an article.
We exchanged emails and calls. The article was back on, no it wasn’t, yes it was.
You want to know what it’s like to live in Monica Lewinsky’s world? This is it.
I MET MS. LEWINSKY the following Tuesday at her apartment.
She was rehearsing in front of a small metal music stand. Her speech coach, Pippa Bateman, was on Skype from Britain.
I quietly sat on the couch and noted the details in the room: a bookshelf blocked off the bedroom area; on it, photos of friends and family, Monica as a child. On an end table were roses, crystals and a lit candle.
She handed me a script. “It’s changed a bit, so you can follow along,” she said. (By the time she appeared onstage at TED, in front of a packed room, she was on Version 24 of her speech.) On the back, she had scribbled a reminder: “Push in arm muscles, engage back and neck.”
She was working through the middle of the speech, where she would describe her questioning by investigators in a room not unlike the one we saw portrayed in “Slut.” It was 1998, and she had been required to authenticate the phone calls recorded by her former friend Linda Tripp. They would later be released to Congress.
She glanced at the script, then looked forward.
“Scared and mortified, I listen,” she said.
“Listen as I prattle on …
“Listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self, being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth …
“Listen, deeply, deeply ashamed to the worst version of myself.” She paused. “A self I don’t even recognize.”
“How did that feel?” Ms. Bateman asked. “You’ve got to own it.”
Ms. Lewinsky doesn’t have a speechwriter; she wrote the speech herself. But she has plenty of advisers: journalists, editors, new friends, old friends, her lawyer, her publicist, her family. Which is great, if everyone is in agreement. Except that no one is ever in agreement.
The major disagreement was over the opening: a joke about a man 14 years her junior, who hit on Ms. Lewinsky after she spoke at Forbes.
“What was his unsuccessful pickup line?” she would ask rhetorically. “He could make me feel 22 again. Later that night, I realized: I’m probably the only person over 40 who would not like to be 22 again.”
It was funny, yes (even hysterical, judging by the reaction at TED). But did the joke sexualize her off the bat? For a woman ingrained in the public psyche as a “tart, slut, whore, bimbo,” as Ms. Lewinsky put it onstage, should she try to avoid the innuendo?
Maybe she should cut that part and go straight to the next line, somebody suggested: a question for the audience.
“Can I see a show of hands,” she would ask, “of anyone who didn’t make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22?”
Ultimately, she stuck with the joke. (The question would stay, too.)
She performed that opening later that day in a practice session downtown, then again a few days later in front of a large gathering of friends, over wine and cheese. She would practice the speech walking down the street, running errands, on a flight from Amsterdam to Oslo. As she joked on Twitter: “If you see me walking down the streets of nyc muttering to myself, don’t worry … just practicing my TED Talk.”
TED approached Ms. Lewinsky about speaking at the conference, whose theme this year is “Truth and Dare,” after watching her Forbes speech. Kelly Stoetzel, TED’s content director, said, “Part of what I think makes this story interesting is that people will get to see all the dimensions of Monica, not just the person who was reported on 17 years ago.”
Ms. Lewinsky at the Vanity Fair Oscar party.
The idea had been marinating for years. Ms. Lewinsky often thought about the toll that shame had taken on her own life; in graduate school, she studied the impact of trauma on identity.
Then Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman, killed himself after being recorded by his college roommate being intimate with a man. It was 2010, and Ms. Lewinsky’s mother was beside herself, “gutted with pain,” as Ms. Lewinsky said onstage, “in a way I couldn’t quite understand.”
Eventually, she said she realized: To her mother, Mr. Clementi represented her. “She was reliving 1998,” she said, looking out over the crowd. “Reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night. Reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open.”
She paused, becoming emotional. “And reliving a time both my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death.”
“It was easy to forget,” she said, “that ‘That Woman’ was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken.”
She doesn’t like to talk much about the past, but she will talk about residuals of her trauma: having to leave the movie theater every time a cop on a screen flashed a badge (a flashback to being ambushed by federal agents in the food court of the Pentagon shopping mall); the studying and reading about it, as a way to ease it.
“I had to do a lot of healing work and rehabilitation to get to what transpired over the course of the past year,” she said. “Anybody who has gone through any kind of trauma knows it doesn’t just go away with a snap of the fingers. It lives as an echo in your life. But over time the echo becomes softer and softer.”
And yet this isn’t simply about her story, she said. This was about using it to help others. As she put it, shame and humiliation have become a kind of “commodity” in our culture — with websites that thrive on it, industries created out of it, and people who get paid to clean up the mess.
What happened to compassion? she asked up on stage. “What we need,” she said, “is a cultural revolution.”
THE WAY MS. LEWINSKY tells it, she was “Patient Zero” for the type of Internet shaming we now see regularly. Hers wasn’t the first case ever, but it was the first of its magnitude. Which meant that, virtually overnight, she went from being a private citizen to, as she put it, “a publicly humiliated one.”
“She couldn’t go to a restaurant and order a bowl of soup — literally — without it being reported the next day,” said Barbara Walters, who said her interview with Ms. Lewinsky was one of the most watched segments in television history.
The story was the perfect combination of politics and sex. “It was like reading a really wonderful dirty book,” Ms. Walters said, “except it was her story and her mother’s story and her aunt’s story.”
It was before the days of the Internet sex tape, but barely: Princess Diana had been photographed with a hidden camera while working out at the gym; Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon sex tape was stolen from their home and bootlegged out of car trunks.
“It was at the tip of the spear of this invasive culture,” said Mr. Friend, who is working on a book about the 1990s.
And so it went from there. Ms. Lewinsky was quickly cast by the media as a “little tart,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The New York Post nicknamed her the “Portly Pepperpot.” She was described by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times as “ditsy” and “predatory.”
And other women — self-proclaimed feminists — piled on. “My dental hygienist pointed out she had third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong. Betty Friedan dismissed her as “some little twerp.”
“It’s a sexual shaming that is far more directed at women than at men,” Gloria Steinem wrote me in an email, noting that in Ms. Lewinsky’s case, she was also targeted by the “ultraright wing.” “I’m grateful to [her],” Ms. Steinem said, “for having the courage to return to the public eye.”
Had the Lewinsky story unfolded today, certainly the digital reality of it would have been worse (or at least more pungent). “They would have dug up her private photos,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and the author of “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace.” But there would have also been avenues to push back: more outlets, more varied voices, probably even a #IStandWithMonica hashtag.
“If it happened today, I think the consensus that she deserved to be thrown under the bus would be considerably weaker,” said Clay Shirky, a journalism professor at N.Y.U. who studies Internet culture. “And the key thing that’s changed is not information — there were credible press reports about Cosby for years, just as Clinton’s denial was ridiculous on its face — but the ability to coordinate reaction.”
In that respect, Ms. Lewinsky may finally be in a unique position to tell her story. “I don’t know … exactly how you combat cyberbullying,” Ms. Walters said. “But at least she’s fighting back. … I do think it’s about time we gave her a chance.”
THE NIGHT BEFORE TED, Ms. Lewinsky began a ritual. She lit candles. She set up a table of crystals. She debated which necklace to wear, then ordered dinner and tea.
She would be in bed by 9:30 and up at 5 a.m.; Amy Cuddy, the Harvard researcher whose TED talk on body language clocked nearly 25 million views, was meeting her in the morning. They would power-pose together.
Ms. Lewinsky had a friend from Los Angeles there with her, and Ms. Cuddy stopped by to wish her luck. The two had never met in person.
“If you had told me a year ago I was going to be delivering a TED talk, I would have laughed in your face,” Ms. Lewinsky said, seated on the carpet.
She looked at her friend.
“A year ago. …” she choked up. “Well, you were there. It was so, so hard. There were times I thought I wouldn’t make it.”
“I’m just so grateful,” she said. “I’m at once grateful and surprised.”
Earlier, I had asked Ms. Lewinsky what she hoped to accomplish with a platform like TED. She asked if I had read the David Foster Wallace book “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men.” In it, there is a chapter about suffering, and the story of a girl who has survived abuse.
What the young woman endures is horrific, said Ms. Lewinsky, but by going through it, she learns something about herself: that she can survive.
“That’s part of what I thought I could contribute,” she said. “That in someone else’s darkest moment, lodged in their subconscious might be the knowledge that there was someone else who was, at one point in time, the most humiliated person in the world. And that she survived it.”
Correction: March 19, 2015
An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misspelled the surname of the article’s subject. As the article correctly notes, she is Monica Lewinsky, not Lewinski.
Correction: March 19, 2015
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Rebecca Traister. She was not yet a writer at Salon when the Clinton scandal first became public. It is also misstated the date of an article Ms. Traister wrote about the subject. It was from 2003, not 1998.
Correction: March 20, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of this year’s TED conference. It was “Truth and Dare,” not “Truth or Dare.”
The show, Aslan told Science of Us, will orient itself mostly toward rituals that might be less familiar to an American audience — for example, he cited plans to shoot scenes taking viewers inside Muharram, a Shiite period of mourning involving rituals of self-flagellation, and Na Nachs, a sect that combines orthodox Judaism with a love of rave culture.
In an interview, Aslan expanded on his goals for the show and explained how he both is and isn’t hoping to be a religion-themed version of Anthony Bourdain.
So it sounds like one of your goals here is to draw out certain commonalities between religious rituals from very different places and cultures.
By the time the show is done, I think people will think to themselves, Okay, so, you know, the actions are a little bit different, the metaphors are different, the context is different, but the sentiments behind these rituals are familiar. They’re sentiments that I have. And I think that’s what is really going to be eye-opening, is people are going to realize that there’s not that much that separates us — that we may use different myths and metaphors, we may use different languages, but when expressing the issues of ultimate concern, oftentimes we all come up with the same answers, the same ideas, the same hopes and aspirations, the same struggles.
It’s actually not that hard to imagine very religious people realizing they have something with common with very religious people from other faiths. But what about nonbelievers? How do you expect them — or hope for them — to respond to this show?
That’s a very good question, and this is not a show that’s geared toward believers. First of all, it’s going to be wildly entertaining and we’re going to these exotic locales and it’s going to be beautifully shot, and you’re going to get to watch someone that you trust take you on a journey into another world, into another culture. And that’s really what this is about, it’s about getting a window into another culture through the lens of their religious experience.
I often say Anthony Bourdain’s show is not about food. It’s about cultures, it’s about other worlds — it’s just that he uses food as a vehicle to open up these other worlds. You don’t have to be a foodie to watch the show, to like the show. And it’s the same thing here. It’s that we’re using religion, and particularly rituals and lives and practices, as a way of peeling back the curtains behind these other communities, these other societies, these other cultures. And that’s something that I think anyone who’s interested in the world would be interested in, regardless of what their view is about religion.
Specifically with regard to people who are atheists or who have no religious beliefs, I think over and beyond all the other things that I’ve said, that the show will be very useful in that for a lot of people — religious and nonreligious — when they think about religion, they have this notion of it as something codified and monolithic. They think about religion, and they think about religious institutions, they think about scripture. And that’s how they understand and that’s how they experience religion.
So when they think about Christianity, they may think about the church or the Pope or the New Testament. But rarely do they have any knowledge of the lived experience of people around the world who call themselves Christian, and whose experience of scripture, whose acknowledgement of institutions and authorities, is quite radically different than what outsiders think it is. That variety is exciting, it’s interesting, but I do think it’s also important. Because our conversations about religion are so simplistic – they’re so black and white. They’re absolutely devoid of nuance, and they seem to be completely devoid of any knowledge of the actual lived experience of people of faith. What do people of faith actually do? How do they think? How do they feel these emotions? All we ever talk about is what a text says or what an authority figure says, and those things don’t play the kind of central role in the lives of people and communities of faith that ritual does, that experience does.
It sounds like the main distinction you’re hoping to draw out is between the monolithic outsider’s view and lived religious life?
Absolutely. And we are not going to go to the Vatican, you know what I mean? Like, who cares? If we do a show on Catholicism, we would probably do these minority Catholic groups who have married a traditional Catholic theology with, let’s say, Caribbean spirituality, and have created something new and unique that an American middle-class Roman Catholic might look at and think, Wait a minute — that’s weird! That doesn’t look like the Catholicism that I know! And then, by the end of the hour, he thinks to himself, Okay, I get it. That’s as legitimate as my expression of Catholicism.
Anything else you’d like to add?
Just that the best way to put this is that it’s going to be experiential. You’re going to experience the journey with me. As much as I love Anthony Bourdain’s show, in the end, I can’t taste what he tastes, so when he eats a sheep testicle and tells me it tastes like chicken, I’m just going to take his word for it, whereas you can actually experience these rituals — you’ll see me undergo these rituals, and I think that will allow for a more intimate connection.
Anthony Johnson has the story of a Catholic high school teacher whose rant sparked outrage among alumni, including actress Susan Sarandon.
SOMERVILLE (WABC) —
A Catholic school teacher in New Jersey who went on an anti-gay rant on Facebook has sparked national outrage among alumni, which includes a former “Real Housewives of New Jersey” cast member and Garden State-raised Susan Sarandon.
Now, Imacculata High School in Somerville is distancing itself from theology teacher Patricia Jannuzzi.
It all started with the comments, which said gays “want to re-engineer western civilization into a slow extinction”
Jannuzzi went on to post, “We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity.” She also states the idea that gays are protected under the 14th Amendment is “bologna.”
Students had these opinions about her Facebook rant.
“I had Ms. Jannuzzi this semester, and the way that she is being perceived here as somebody that’s a hateful person, it’s just not fair,” one said.
“I’ve talked to her a few times, all good things,” another added. “I’ve never heard anything bad from her, so I was surprised hearing this.”
Former student Scott Lyon was shocked to hear his former teacher’s comments. He posted a photo of the child he is raising with his husband in Los Angeles and wrote, “I found your classes and teaching during my time at IHS to be focused on love and acceptance. I can’t help but be offended and disappointed by the position.”
Lyon’s aunt, actress Susan Sarandon, supports her nephew’s comments.
“So proud of my nephew Scott and the dialogue he started,” she wrote. “High school is a tough time anyway. Students don’t need teachers making it even more difficult.”
The administration made Jannuzzi take down her controversial post and issued its own statement, saying, “Through our investigation, we have determined that the information posted on this social media page has not been reflected in the curriculum content of the classes she teaches.”
Celebs slam Catholic school teacher’s anti-gay post
3/12/2015 USA Today by Sergio Bichao, (Bridgewater, N.J.) Courier-News
SOMERVILLE, N.J. — An anti-gay rant by a religion teacher at a Catholic high school in New Jersey is drawing the ire of alumni across the country, including a former Real Housewives of New Jersey cast member and New-Jersey-raised Susan Sarandon.
On her now-deleted Facebook profile earlier this week, the veteran private Catholic school teacher said gays or gay activists “want to reengineer western civ (sic) into a slow extinction” as part of their “agenda.”
“We need healthy families with a mother and a father for the sake of the children and humanity!!!!!” wrote Immaculata High School teacher Patricia Jannuzzi, adding that the argument that gays are protected under the 14th Amendment is “bologna.”
The school has since forced Jannuzzi to take down her Facebook page, which was no longer visible Wednesday evening, but not before others took screenshots of the rant and shared it on social media.
Immaculata principal Jean Kline on Wednesday distanced her school from Jannuzzi’s comments and said that “through an investigation, we have determined that the information posted on this social media page has not been reflected in the curriculum content of the classes she teaches.”
In her statement, Kline said the school “takes this situation very seriously.”
“We are dedicated to creating a school environment that promotes mutual respect and provides a challenging academic program, rooted in the Gospel message of Jesus Christ.”
It remains to be seen whether the school’s response will allay reaction by alumni, some of whom remember losing a gay classmate to suicide.
Former Real Housewives cast member Greg Bennett, who graduated from Immaculata in 2004 and who had Jannuzzi as a teacher his senior year, shared the screenshot of Jannuzzi’s post on his Twitter account, asking his 165,000 followers to sign a petition addressed to school administrators calling “for action to be taken and hate speech to stop at Immaculata.”
“I don’t think that she should influence the minds of students on a daily basis,” Bennett said Wednesday, calling attention to other posts by Jannuzzi on her Facebook page that called for “closing the borders.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Sarandon, who graduated from Edison High School, shared a letter written by her nephew, Scott Lyons, to Jannuzzi, his former teacher at the high school.
“You have a responsibility as a teacher to lead by example and the words that you have been throwing out there are detrimental to the well being and health of the youth that you inspire,” Lyons, who has an adopted son with his husband, writes. “I am certain that the pope himself would take issue with your extreme point of view on homosexuality.”
In a Facebook post with more than 4,000 likes, Sarandon wrote, “High school is a tough time anyway … students don’t need teachers making it even more difficult.”
The online petition had nearly 550 signatures as of Thursday morning with comments from alumni such as Susan Keith of New York, who recalled one of her classmates at Immaculata committing suicide because he was teased for being gay.
“I left this school after being told in religion class I must live a celibate single life if I had gay ‘feelings,’ ” writes Doug Bednarczyk of Marlton, N.J. “Around the same time, a gay classmate committed suicide.”
Lucas Bernardo, of Philadelphia, says he was 16 when he took a class taught by Jannuzzi.
“I didn’t feel comfortable in her class with the negative messages about gay and lesbian people she was preaching to us,” he writes. “I remember arguing with her about such topics and being in total disbelief that such blatant hate could be taught in a religion class.”
Bennett, who now lives in San Francisco, said he has mostly positive memories of Immaculata. While he remembers Jannuzzi being “obsessed” with Mel Gibson in The Passion of the Christ, he doesn’t recall her ever making anti-gay remarks.
Bennett said he came out as gay in college and is no longer a practicing Catholic.
“Kids today are brought up with Glee and gay characters everywhere. I didn’t really have that,” he said. “It could be that her students would see through this and think she is just a crazy person. Either way, I wouldn’t feel comfortable going into a class taught by someone who so blatantly thinks who I am is defective in some way.”
The petition, which is addressed to Kline, Sister Anne Brigid Gallagher, the assistant principal, John Hack, director of alumni relations, and Monsignor Seamus Brennan, parish pastor of Immaculate Conception, calls the teacher’s postings “unacceptable and reprehensible.
“This kind of behavior needs to be stopped. There is a line between believing in God and professing anti-homosexual sentiment to the public. We should be preaching the good word of the Lord, not creating a hostile and combative environment.”
Kline said the school is reviewing its social media policy for employees.
“It is the policy of the school that all faculty and staff demonstrate respect and sensitivity to all people at all times and to avoid offending any individuals or groups,” Kline said.
The statement does not say whether the teacher will be reprimanded.
Cubs Co-Owner, Laura Ricketts, stops by Windy City LIVE to exclusively premiere the Cub’s “It Gets Better” Video.
Laura Ricketts, Co-Owner of the Cubs and the first openly gay owner of major league franchise, talks with Val and Ryan about the Cubs “It Gets Better” Video. The Cubs will be the second professional sports team to participate in the “It Gets Better” campaign following the San Francisco Giants who released their video earlier in June. It was filmed at Wrigley Field on Tuesday, June 14 with manager Mike Quade, first base coach Bobby Dernier, pitcher Ryan Dempster, center fielder Marlon Byrd, second baseman Darwin Barney and owner Laura Ricketts appear in the video to speak against hatred, bigotry and intolerance.
Currently, there are no openly gay athletes playing in any of the four major pro sports, as the New York Times recently highlighted in an article about New York Rangers hockey player Sean Avery announcing his support for marriage equality in New York state.
About the “It Gets Better” Project Growing up isn’t easy. Many young people face daily tormenting and bullying, leading them to feel like they have nowhere to turn. This is especially true for LGBT kids and teens, who often hide their sexuality for fear of bullying. Without other openly gay adults and mentors in their lives, they can’t imagine what their future may hold. In many instances, gay and lesbian adolescents are taunted – even
The It Gets Better Project was created to show young LGBT people the levels of happiness, potential, and positivity their lives will reach – if they can just get through their teen years. The It Gets Better Project wants to remind teenagers in the LGBT community that they are not alone – and it WILL get better.
What is the It Gets Better Project? In September 2010, syndicated columnist and author Dan Savage created a YouTube video with his partner Terry to inspire hope for young people facing harassment. In response to a number of students taking their own lives after being bullied in school, they wanted to create a personal way for supporters everywhere to tell LGBT youth that, yes, it does indeed get better.
Two months later, the It Gets Better Project (TM) has turned into a worldwide movement, inspiring over 10,000 user-created videos viewed over 35 million times. To date, the project has received submissions from celebrities, organizations, activists, politicians and media personalities, including President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Lambert, Anne Hathaway, Colin Farrell, Matthew Morrison of “Glee”, Joe Jonas, Joel Madden, Ke$ha, Sarah Silverman, Tim Gunn, Ellen DeGeneres, Suze Orman, the staffs of The Gap, Google, Facebook, Pixar, the Broadway community, and many more. For us, every video changes a life. It doesn’t matter who makes it.
The website www.itgetsbetter.org is a place where young people who are lesbian, gay, bi, or trans can see how love and happiness can be a reality in their future. It’s a place where our straight allies can visit and support their friends and family members. It’s a place where people can share their stories, take the It Gets Better Project pledge, watch videos of love and support, and seek help through the Trevor Project and GLSEN.
On March 22, 2011, six months following the launch of the campaign, the It Gets Better Project book was released. The book , It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living is on-sale wherever books are sold. It includes essays and new material from more than 100 contributors, including celebrities, religious leaders, politicians, parents, educators, youth just out of high school, and many more. All proceeds from the book will be donated to LGBT youth charities. For more details and to purchase the book, visit HTTP://ITGETSBETTER.ORG/BOOK.
Kevin Spacey has promised to use his “normal voice” when he narrates a six-part series for CNN about the dirty tricks, Machiavellian schemes and powerful campaign speeches people have employed over the years in the race to the White House, so as not to confuse it with the dirty tricks and Machiavellian schemes and powerful campaign speeches he will employ in his White House race on Netflix.
CNN said this morning Spacey, who plays ruthless, conniving politician Francis Underwood in House Of Cards, will narrate and produce a six-part series for the cable news network in 2016 about six of of history’s most famous White House races past.
Race For The White House will be co-produced by Raw Productions and Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions, and exec produced by Spacey and his Trigger partner Dana Brunetti, CNN said as it’s touting its upcoming primetime docus to potential advertisers. The series will use previously unseen archive footage, interviews with key players, and dramatic re-creations.
“When we created the CNN Original Series brand, this is exactly the type of programming we had in mind,” CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker said in today’s news; Race For The White House, he said, “will be the perfect complement to our coverage of the 2016 campaigns and election.”
It may also be the perfect compliment to a fourth season of Netflix’s House Of Cards; Netflix recently premiered Season 3 of the political soap and has not yet said whether Season 4 is in the cards. If that happens, it is expected to premiere in 2016 as well.
As described by CNN, each hour of its Spacey project “will tell the story of a four-year, no-holds-barred battle to become the most powerful person in the world, culminating in a single night of heart pounding tension. From powerful campaign speeches to the dirty tricks and Machiavellian schemes, Race For The White House will capture the drama of how a high-stakes presidential election can turn on a single issue and so much more.”
Raw Productions has a client list that includes the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, A&E, Film4, CBS, ITV, National Geographic, History and Syfy; its output includes Gold Rush for Discovery, The Hunt For The Boston Bombers, BAFTA-winning The Liquid Bomb Plot, and Locked Up Abroad all for National Geographic, and the BAFTA winning feature documentary The Imposter.
Trigger Street’s credits include House Of Cards, Captain Phillips and The Social Network,21, Shrink, Fanboys, Beyond The Sea, The Big Kahuna, The United States Of Leland, Mini’s First Time, Bernard And Doris, and Recount.
Lewinsky, who gained international infamy due to her affair with former President Bill Clinton, is scheduled to speak at TED 2015 Truth and Dare in Vancouver, Canada on March 19.
After a lengthy absence from the public eye, Lewinsky began remaking herself as an anti-bullying activist last year. Her biography on the TED website touts her experience surviving the scandal and becoming a “social activist.”
“Monica Lewinsky advocates for a safer and more compassionate social media environment, drawing from her unique experiences at the epicenter of a media maelstrom in 1998,” the biography says.
Lewinsky’s gave her first major public speech on anti-bullying activism last October at the Forbes Under 30 Summit. In that address, Lewinsky described herself as the first person to become the focus of a media circus in the modern, digital landscape.
“I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was patient zero,” Lewinsky said.
