Oprah Winfrey is defending best friend Gayle King in the wake of her controversial interview about the late Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in January.
On February 5, King received backlash from viewers for asking WNBA star Lisa Leslie about a sexual assault accusation made against Bryant in 2003. For the CBS This Morning segment on Bryant’s legacy, King asked Leslie if she felt, as a woman and a basketball player, that the case complicated his contributions. “It’s not complicated for me at all,” Leslie responded. “I have [never] seen him being the kind of person that would do something to violate a woman or be aggressive in that way. That’s just not the person that I know.
“I think the media should be more respectful at this time,” Leslie continued. “It’s like, if you had questions about it, you’ve had many years to ask him that. I don’t think it’s something that we should keep hanging out his legacy.”
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After an onslaught of furious reactions from fans and celebrities like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent, King took to Instagram to explain that CBS had edited the interview in a way she did not approve of. “I know that if I had only seen the clip that you saw, I’d be extremely angry with me too,” King said on IGTV. “I am mortified, I am embarrassed, and I am very angry.
“For the network to take the most salacious part, when taken out of context, and put it online for people who didn’t see the whole interview is very upsetting to me. That’s something that I’ll have to deal with with them,” she said. “There will be a very intense discussion about that.”
“She is not doing well,” a tearful Winfrey revealed. “She has now death threats, has to now travel with security, and she’s feeling very much attacked. You know, Bill Cosby is tweeting from jail.
“In the context of the interview, everyone seemed fine, including Lisa Leslie,” Winfrey continued, defending King’s line of questioning. “And it was only because somebody at the network put up that clip. And I can see how people would obviously be very upset if you thought that Gayle was just trying to press to get an answer from Lisa Leslie.” Winfrey also warned against “misogynist vitriol” and online attacks.
“Obviously all things pass, she will be okay,” Winfrey said. “But she hasn’t slept in two days.”
Over the weekend, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan of an apparent suicide. The moment it happened I could almost hear the sound of a million conspiracies blooming on the internet, each more insane than the next. It hadn’t been unthinkable, though—it was after all his second attempt.
But within minutes, there was talk of a swap, a body double, a plan hatched to get Epstein to Guantanamo Bay. Rapid-fire connections were drawn to the convoluted (and not real) QAnon conspiracy theory, which alleges a vast (and not real) “deep-state” effort to undermine Donald Trump. I saw supposed pictures of the corpse, and comments that it obviously didn’t match Epstein. I saw threats leveled against the Clintons and deceptive hashtags spring up like daisies. But what I didn’t see—at least not at first—was a great effort to think about what Epstein’s death would mean for his alleged victims. The focus had been switched, veering from the real plight of his victims to the fantasy of his death. We can leave investigations into Epstein’s death to the professionals, but the Twitterverse could stand to turn its attention to a conspiracy that we already know is legitimate: how badly run America’s jails are, how badly treated America’s victims of sexual assault and rape are, how the criminal justice system makes allowances for the powerful and the well-connected, while millions of people convicted of lesser crimes are made to suffer more. There is an actual miscarriage of justice here, and you don’t need to turn to Reddit to find it. Epstein’s alleged victims deserved better.
In the time since his suicide, a number of his accusers have spoken out to express their frustration.
“I am extremely mad and hurt thinking he once again thought he was above us and took the easy way out,” Jena-Lisa Jones, 30, who claims that Epstein abused her when she was 14, told ABC News.
In a statement, Jennifer Araoz, 32, who has accused Epstein of rape, expressed her own disappointment: “We have to live with the scars of his actions for the rest of our lives, while he will never face the consequences of the crimes he committed, the pain and trauma he caused so many people.”
These women haven’t accused the government of a wild master plot or drummed up support for internet theories. They’ve just asked to be heard, listened to, and respected. But of course, in Trump’s America, the prospect of a vast web of lies appeals more than the simple fact of a group of women’s truth. campaign. Trump got into politics on the back of birtherism, a conspiracy theory that suggested Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. (Spoiler: He was.) Since he was elected president, he’s continued to make references to various supposed schemes, egging on his base. So it should come as no surprise that, as Mother Jones put it, within minutes of the news that Epstein had died, “Trump appointees, Fox Business hosts and Twitter pundits revived a decades old conspiracy theory, linking the Clinton family to supposedly suspicious deaths. #ClintonBodyCount and #ClintonCrimeFamily trended on Twitter.”
It’s crucial to call out Trump’s insane and dangerous social media activities, but not at the expense of Epstein’s accusers who are begging us to remember who the real victims in this case are. It was exquisitely Trumpian: Another potential moment of restorative justice stolen from women who just wanted a powerful man to be held accountable.
Some of the most heartbreaking moments in the interview come as she discusses the aftermath of her ex-boyfriend Mac Miller’s death. (He passed away in September 2018 due to an accidental overdose.) At one point the writer, Rob Haskell, asks Grande “whether it is fair to call [her album] Thank U, Next a response to Miller’s death.” She gets teary and replies, “It’s just hard to hear it so plainly put.”
She says that after Miller’s death, her friends in New York City rallied around her and suggested maybe recording some music. “My friends know how much solace music brings me, so I think it was an all-around, let’s-get-her-there type situation,” she said. “But if I’m completely honest, I don’t remember those months of my life because I was (a) so drunk and (b) so sad. I don’t really remember how it started or how it finished, or how all of a sudden there were 10 songs on the board.”
“I think that this is the first album and also the first year of my life where I’m realizing that I can no longer put off spending time with myself, just as me,” she continued. “I’ve been boo’d up my entire adult life. I’ve always had someone to say goodnight to. So Thank U, Next was this moment of self-realization. It was this scary moment of ‘Wow, you have to face all this stuff now. No more distractions. You have to heal all this shit.’ ”
Grande says her Coachella performance was also emotionally-charged because of the memories of Miller that came with it. “I never thought I’d even go to Coachella,” she said. “I was always a person who never went to festivals and never went out and had fun like that. But the first time I went was to see Malcolm perform, and it was such an incredible experience. I went the second year as well, and I associate…heavily…it was just kind of a mindfuck, processing how much has happened in such a brief period.”
The next morning she strapped on three watches—one set to local time, one to New York City, and one to L.A., where Spencer lives—and boarded the plane.
McFadden visits a makeshift school inside Kaga-Bandoro.
Courtesy of NBC News
While some journalists say their job is only to inform, McFadden believes her responsibility goes beyond that. “The goal of the work is to ultimately make a difference. I don’t want anyone to be able to say they don’t know,” she says. “If we turn our backs on these people, we do it knowingly now. We know what’s happening.” She makes sure we don’t look away from women coping with trauma, children listless and starving, men taunting with guns. “You’re seeing humanity at its worst in many ways,” she says.
Still, there are moments that disarm McFadden while she’s in the field. She finds girls playing a trust game in the street, dancing in a circle and falling back into each other’s arms confident that someone will catch them. There’s the group of boy scouts, who, unlike their own government, bravely go into some of the most dangerous areas and spread everything from optimism to hand-washing techniques. “You can prepare yourself for the suffering,” she says. “But preparing yourself for the joy is another thing entirely.”
Even without the riches of diamonds, there is promise here, she shows us. When Noah Oppenheim, the head of NBC News, watched the scene of the children playing, he teared up. Viewers who saw it were moved to open their wallets—more than $1.5 million has poured into UNICEF since the first report aired.
Some of the boy scouts who’ve made it their mission to save CAR, with McFadden and Caryl Stern, president and CEO of UNICEF.
Courtesy NBC News
McFadden grew up in Auburn, Maine, in the house her mother was born in and that her grandfather built. She credits her parents, who adopted her as a baby, with teaching her that she could have anything she wanted—as long as she was willing to work for it. What she wanted, she realized at 17 as she watched the Watergate hearings from the living room floor, was to report the news. “I thought, I want to cover this. I didn’t know a journalist, to say nothing of how to become a journalist,” she says. “But I knew I wanted to tell stories.”
Not sure how best to achieve that dream, she applied to Columbia Law School. The director of admissions saw her application and called her at home in Maine. “We’re inclined to admit you,” she recalls him saying, “But you say you want to be a journalist, and I just want to tell you there are many easier ways to become a journalist.” She was frank: She didn’t know those ways. “I told him, ‘And if I want to cover the law, then I think I should know something about it.’” He essentially admitted her on the spot.
McFadden enrolled in Columbia’s journalism school at the same time, but never got her journalism degree because she landed a job first. (She graduated law school in 1984.) It wasn’t your typical interview: She had been in a class with the legendary newsman Fred Friendly, and one of her assignments was to argue the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan case, which in a 9-0 decision ruled in favor of the free press. Her task—to argue for the government and against the Times—was difficult enough; then just before class she learned Floyd Abrams, the lawyer for the Times, would be observing.
McFadden nailed it. Afterward Abrams issued Friendly a challenge: “Either you hire her as a journalist, or I’m hiring her as a lawyer,” McFadden recalls. “I always say I was won in a bet.” She did go to work with Friendly, though not before trying to negotiate her pay. “I said, ‘You know, Fred, I think you’re paying me half of what you paid the guy who had the job before me.’ And he said, ‘You don’t have the experience the guy had; you don’t have a family like the guy has. I’m taking a chance on you. Take the job or not.’” She tells the story with a cranky newsman’s voice, and the wisdom of a woman who has learned to pick her battles. “He had a point, and I had a point,” she says. “I took the job.” She has zero regrets, and calls working for him one of the great experiences of her career. “I’ve been so, so lucky,” she says about many of the opportunities she’s had. “But the harder you work, the luckier you become.”
Charm also helps, and friends call McFadden “magnetic” and “wickedly smart.” And even celebrities were not immune. While still an undergrad at Bowdoin College, McFadden became close with Katharine Hepburn “through a whole series of misadventures” (Hepburn was in her late sixties at the time). She can do a fantastic impersonation of the late actor, reciting some of Hepburn’s lessons that were wise—and unwise. (There’s this one: “‘Sometimes you just have to be too dumb to get it.’ Man, that helps. Because sometimes somebody says something that hurts your feelings, or we don’t get the assignment,” McFadden explains. “Instead of responding to every situation, sometime you have to be ‘too dumb to get it’ and just keep smiling.” But also: “Never buy firewood; steal it or chop it yourself.”) McFadden was also a bridesmaid for Liza Minnelli (for her wedding to David Gest), and longtime friends with the gossip columnist Liz Smith.
America’s always had a fascination with true crime stories, but there’s been a resurgence in recent years with Netflix documentaries like Making a Murderer. Lifetime is no stranger to the genre, either, and it continues its winter slate of female-led true crime movies with a remake of the cult classic Death of a Cheerleader.
The original movie, called A Friend to Die For, aired in 1994 and starred nineties icons Kellie Martin and Tori Spelling. This time around, Aubrey Peeples (Nashville) steps into the Kellie Martin role as Bridget Moretti, a high-schooler desperate to fit in and bond with popular cheerleader Kelly Locke (played by Sarah Dugdale). And thanks to some brilliant stunt casting, Martin also stars in the remake—time as the FBI agent who cracks the case.
Peeples and Dugdale didn’t have much knowledge of the previous film prior to their casting, but Peeples admits they eventually watched most of the original. “We didn’t want to get too much into our heads, but we definitely did our research,” she says. One thing they were extra conscious of was steering clear of eighties stereotypes. “It was all sort of ‘wannabe cheerleader murders popular girl’, and that really struck me immediately,” Peeples says. “I wanted to figure out as much as I could so I could play this role respectfully and with justice.”
Here, Peeples and Dugdale explain why they hope the movie will not just entertain, but also inspire a bigger conversation about fitting in and impossible expectations. “We live in a competitive world that pits people against each other,” Peeples says. Read on.
Lifetime
Glamour: The film is set in the eighties, but there’s plenty to relate to in terms of confidence, bullying, and where you belong. How did you relate to the material?
Sarah Dugdale: There’s a lot of pressure on young women and young people, especially in high school. You feel like everything is the biggest deal and the end of the world. I really related to my character in that she was such a perfectionist and felt a lot of pressure. I’m a perfectionist and I put that pressure on myself, so I related in that way.
Aubrey Peeples: I definitely experienced a lot of anxiety and insecurities and [put] pressure on myself in high school, and I think that’s relevant to a lot of people—no matter how old you are. When I was reading a lot of the case notes [about this story], a lot of people mentioned that Bernadette, the real girl, had a lot of body issues and would talk about her body in a really negative way. She was very insecure, and that was definitely something I experienced as a young actress. So that’s really relevant.
Sarah: [This industry] is a very visual medium, so you have to make sure not tie your self worth to the business. It’s a mentality that has to be practiced.
Aubrey: It’s a very competitive industry and we also live in a very competitive society, which is something I hope that the film reveals a little bit, and something I hope we can address.
What inspires you about the stories Lifetime is telling about real-life women?
Aubrey: It’s very relevant today, and I think the industry is hopefully leading towards empowering women. People also have a fascination with true crime, and I think everyone is just trying to understand our psychology a little bit more and understand why we do the things we do. We’re trying to attempt to understand our own humanity.
Lifetime has never shied away from dark, twisted, real-life stories, and this Saturday’s Love You to Death is no exception. The film—which stars Oscar winner Marcia Gay Harden and Emily Skeggs—tells the disturbing events that led to the murder of a seemingly perfect mother caring for her sick daughter. Harden plays Camile, a single mom suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, a mental illness in which a person acts as if an individual they’re taking care of has a physical or mental illness when the person is not really sick.
Harden had never heard of the syndrome but was totally captivated by the story, comparing it to a car wreck you can’t look away from. In fact, neither could Hulu, which airs a similar telling of the story later this spring with their limited series, The Act.
Whichever story you watch though, Harden and Skeggs hope the focus remains on mental health. “We can make assumptions about people with mental illness, we can make assumptions about other people’s families, but we don’t know,” Harden says. Here, she and Skeggs explain what it was like to immerse themselves into their respective roles, and the lessons they took away from it.
Glamour: How did you both get involved with this film?
Marcia Gay Harden: Emily’s friends were casting her before this even started shooting.
Emily Skeggs: Yeah, I’m a true crime junkie, so I had friends who said, ‘You need to watch this documentary, and also, you need to play this girl when it’s a movie.’ I had one friend who messaged me while I was in negotiations, and I was like, ‘Just hang tight, just wait two weeks and I’ll tell you something!’ So I was excited to dive into it.
MGH: For me it was a no brainer. I love Lifetime and the direction that Lifetime is going. I had never heard of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy or this story, but when I read it, it was like a car wrecks—you couldn’t look away. It was liberating to play this character. It’s fun to transform, but it was a lower, darker place to go, and a place that was full of so much sadness and darkness and pain. It’s the juice of being an actor, for sure.
ED ARAQUEL/Lifetime
ES: It made me think about perspective and love in a really different way and question a lot of things. You see these kinds of cases and think, I know what’s going on here, or I know exactly what I would have done if I was in their shoes. It made me really question things.
How much research did you do into what actually happened?
ES: And happens. And I really believe the only reason we really know about this case is because it ended in a murder and ended in violence. I think there are a lot of people living with this syndrome and doctors don’t know how to deal with it. There’s no protocol for it and no system in place to help people with this syndrome or to help doctors help people. It’s really fascinating.
MGH: Emily said this earlier, and it’s true: people who are sick like this don’t think they’re sick. People who are racist don’t think they’re racist. People who do crimes against humanity usually don’t think they are. So there’s not this awareness. I would love to have read a journal of Camille’s, but she wasn’t the type of person who would do that. That doesn’t exist. So she’s doing what she thinks she needs to do for her survival. And she would have taken it further. That’s what is scary. I think she would have taken it to the point of mentally incapacitating her so that all the world would know she’s mentally disabled and now I need to care for her for the rest of her life. It’s such an interesting story because in a terrible way, [Esme] breaks free. But I’m subjugating all of the person to a life to never knowing who she is as a human being. But I love that it’s a very current story.
