#nonconsensual third party releases

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kitchensink callithump linkdump

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

With just days to go before my summer vacation, I find myself once again with a backlog of links that I didn't squeeze into the blog, and no hope of clearing them before I disappear into a hammock for two weeks, so it's time for my 21st linkdump – here's the other 20:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I'm going to start off this week's 'dump with a little bragging, because it's my newsletter, after all. First up: a book! Yes, I write a lot of books, but what I'm talking about here is a physical book, a limited edition of ten, that I commissioned from three brilliant craftspeople.

Back in March 2023, I launched a Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook of Red Team Blues, the first novel in my new Martin Hench series, about a forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding tech bros' finance frauds:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

One of the rewards for that campaign was a very special hardcover: a handmade, leather-bound edition of Red Team Blues, typeset by the typography legend John D. Berry:

https://johndberry.com/

Bound by the legendary book-artist John DeMerritt:

https://www.demerrittstudios.com/

And printed by the master printer JaVae Berry:

https://www.jgraphicssf.com/

But this wasn't a merely beautiful, well made book – it had a gimmick. You see, I had already completed the first draft of The Bezzle, the second Hench novel, by the time I launched the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues. I had John Berry lay out a tiny edition of that early draft as a quarter-sized book, and then John DeMerritt hand-bound it in card.

The reason that edition of The Bezzle had to be so small was that it was designed to slip into a hollow cavity in the hardcover, a cavity that John Berry had designed the type around, so that both books could be read and enjoyed.

I offered three of these for sale through the Kickstarter, and the three backers were very patient as the team went back and forth on the book, getting everything perfect. Last month, I took delivery of the books: three for my backers, one each for John DeMerritt and John Berry's personal archives, one for me, and a few more that I'm going to surprise some very special people with this Christmas.

Look, I had high hopes for this book. I dote on beautiful books, my house is busting with them, and I used to work at a new/used science fiction store where we had a small but heartstoppingly great rare book selection. But these books are fucking astounding. Every time I handle mine, my heart races. These are beautiful things, and I just want to show them to everyone:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720318331731/

As it happens, the next thing I'm going to do (after I finish this newsletter) is turn in the copyedited manuscript for the third Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, which comes out in Feb 2025 (luckily, I had enough time to review the edits myself, then turn it over to my mom, who has proofed every book I've written and always catches typos that everyone else misses, including some real howlers – thanks Mom!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Of course, the majority of people who enjoy my books do not end up with one of these beautiful hardcovers – indeed, many of you consume my work exclusively as electronic media: ebooks and (of course) audiobooks. I love audiobooks and the audio editions of my books are very good, with narrators like Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman.

But here's the thing: Audible refuses to carry my books, because they are DRM-free (which means that they aren't locked to Audible's approved players – you can play my audiobooks with any audiobook player). Audible has a no-exceptions, iron-clad rule that every book they sell must be permanently locked into their platform, which means that Audible customers can't ditch their Audible software without losing their libraries – all the books they purchased:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Being excluded from Audible takes a huge bite out of my income – after all, they're a monopolist with a 90% market share. That's why I'm so grateful for indie audiobook stores that carry my books on equitable terms that Audible denies – stores like Libro.fm, Downpour and even Google Books.

This week, I discovered a new, amazing indie audiobook store called Storyfair, where the books are DRM-free and the authors get a 75% royalty on every sale:

https://storyfair.net/helpstoryfairgrow/

Storyfair is a labor of love created by a married couple who were sickened and furious by the way that Audible screws authors and listeners and decided to do something about it. Naturally, I uploaded my whole catalog to the site so they could sell it:

https://storyfair.net/search-for-audiobooks/?keyword=cory+doctorow&filter=any

These books are DRM-free, which means that no matter who you buy them from, you can play them in the same player as your other DRM-free audiobooks. You know how you can read all your books under the same lamp, sitting in the same chair, and then put them in the same bookcase when you're done with them? It's weird – outrageous even! – that tech companies think that buying a book from them means that they should have the legal right to force you to read or listen to it using their technology exclusively.

If you let your Storyfair audiobooks touch your Libro.fm audiobooks, they won't get cooties! Audible is like a toddler that won't let their broccoli touch their peas – only that toddler is also a rapacious monopolist that keeps 75% of every sale.

The fight for fair audiobooks is one of those places where the different parts of my professional life cross over: activism, digital media, art, writing the web, and breaking down complex technical subjects for a mass audience. I've just signed up to a six-year project to combine all those facets in a structured way, in collaboration with Cornell University.

Cornell just named me as their latest AD White Professor-at-Large. This is a six-year appointment that involves a series of week-long visits to Ithaca to lecture, run seminars, meet with colleagues, collaborate on research, and do community performances:

https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/

We've tentatively scheduled my first visit for early September 2025, to coincide with the Ithaca Book Festival, and we've got big plans, roping in multiple departments at Cornell, the local alternative school and local colleges, doing talks at the fair as well as at the university, and (we hope!) squeezing in a stop in NYC on the way home for a day at Cornell Tech. I'm so excited (and honored) to be working with Cornell (and getting a chance to visit Moosewood Restaurant, whose cookbooks taught me how to cook!). Watch this space.

Authorship has always been a political act, but never moreso than today, with waves of book-bans sweeping the country. One of the heroes of those bans is Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who made headlines when she publicly excoriated Scholastic for demanding that she remove references to racism from her kids' books in order to make them more palatable to reactionaries:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1169848627/scholastic-childrens-book-racism

Tokuda-Hall has stepped up the fight, co-founding Authors Against Book Bans, an org that provides training and support for author/activists so they can fight back against book bans at library board and city council meetings:

https://www.authorsagainstbookbans.com/

Authors Against Book bans is looking for members! I signed up last week, within seconds of having Tokuda-Hall give me the pitch when we ran into each other in Oakland at the Locus Awards. Are you an author? Sign up too! They're especially interested in branching out beyond YA and kids' authors (though they want those kinds of writers, too!).

Book bans affect us all. Even if you personally are never stymied when you visit your library and discover the book that you want to read has been removed by a swivel-eyed loon with terminal groomer-panic. The bans sweeping our country mean that our neighbors and loved ones are being denied literature by these cranks. There are people in your life who are losing out on the possibility of a life-changing literary adventure (which is why the far right hates these books – they want to be sure no one encounters the ideas between their covers).

The realization that you have to live in a society with people who are harmed by injustice, even if you personally escape that justice? It's the whole basis for solidarity.

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.

The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.

A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:

https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template

The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.

It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths

Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then returns from adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.

They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil

One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.

In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

But amidst all those gimmes to the rich and powerful, there was one notable exception: the SCOTUS ruling on the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy. Purdue was the family business of the Sacklers, a multigenerational dope-peddling dynasty that went from super-rich to stratospherically rich by kickstarting the opioid epidemic with their blockbuster drug Oxycontin.

The Sacklers sold mountains of Oxy the old fashioned way: by lying. The lied about its efficacy and they lied about its safety, and they helped kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. Eventually, this caught up with them, and Purdue lost a bunch of court cases and was forced into bankruptcy.

That's where things get gnarly: the Sacklers took the already-sleazy world of elite bankruptcy to a whole new level, with a set of breathtakingly sleazy maneuvers that ensured that their case would be heard by the one judge in America who would let them off the hook:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

That judge was Robert Drain and the Sacklers were the blow-off to a long and shameful career in public "service." The Sacklers incorporated a subsidiary in White Plains, NY (in Drain's turf) precisely 181 days before filing for bankruptcy, then claimed that this empty small-town office had been the company HQ for more than six months. Then they hid machine-readable metadata in their filing that tricked the court's database into assigning the case to Drain:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

The reason the Sacklers were so horny for Drain? He was a notoriously generous source of "nonconsensual third-party releases." These would allow the Sacklers to permanently end every lawsuit against them without having to declare bankruptcy. Instead, they could take their (ruined, hollow) company through bankruptcy, throw a small fraction of their personal fortunes into the pot, representing fractional pennies on the dollar of what they owed to their victims, and walk away with tens of billions and eternal protection from any future suits.

In other words, they could stiff their creditors and keep the loot. Which is exactly what Robert Drain gave them – before retiring from the bench to get a two-orders-of-magnitude pay raise at a white-shoe firm that specializes in representing corporate mass-murderers like the Sacklers.

That's where it would have ended, but for a surprising ruling from the Supreme Court, which threw out the nonconsensual third-party release deal and put the Sacklers back on the hook to pay the victims of their many, many crimes.

As ever, the best source of analysis and explanation for elite bankruptcy shenanigans is Adam Levitin of the Credit Slips blog:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2024/06/purdue-pharma-decision-a-big-win-for-mass-tort-victims.html

Levitin has a prediction for what's going to happen next. He rejects the predictions of Sackler apologists, who say that this is going to add years or decades to the already too-long wait for compensation that the Sacklers' victims have endured. Instead, Levitin says that the Sacklers will almost certainly transfer billions more from their personal fortunes to the settlement pot and beg for consensual releases from their victims. In other words, they'll go from dictating terms to asking for them.

So the settlement will stand, but it will be larger, and victims who don't want to take it won't have to – they'll be able to sue. In other words, this ruling "does not prevent deals in bankruptcy. It just changes the terms of what those deals."

This has implications for other mass-murderers and corporate criminals, like Johnson and Johnson (who tricked women into dusting their vulvas with asbestos):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

And the Boy Scouts of America, who let pedophiles abuse children for decades:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue

Both J&J and BSA carved out nonconsensual third-party releases in the mold of the Sacklers' deal, and both briefed the Supreme Court, warning that if the Sacklers were forced to pay what they owed, J&J and BSA's victims would also be entitled to far larger sums. Go ahead and threaten us with a good time, why doncha?

The Sackler decision is a real bright spot at a dark time for corporate impunity. It's always nice to see big corporate bullies getting a bit of a comeuppance. Another one of those comeuppances was just delivered thanks to a classic fatfinger error.

A Microsoft engineer accidentally released the sourcecode to Playready, the company's flagship DRM product:

https://borncity.com/win/2024/06/26/microsoft-employee-accidentally-publishes-playready-code/

Microsoft's DRM doesn't do anything to protect the interests of creative workers or even the companies that employ them. As a Microsoft rep admitted on stage at a presentation in 2006, the purpose of Microsoft DRM is to prevent small startups from entering the market, ensuring that Microsoft and its "rivals" can safely divide up the world without worrying about disruptive competitors:

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/30/msft-our-drm-licensing-is-there-to-eliminate-hobbyists-and-little-guys/

I was there that day and reported on the remarks, prompting both Microsoft and its rep to furiously deny that they'd ever said this, despite multiple witnesses who heard it. This was just a couple years after I gave a viral talk at Microsoft about why the company shouldn't use DRM:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

By 2006, it was clear that the company was all in on DRM, and today, DRM is the centerpiece of Microsoft's anticompetitive strategy, and Playready is the centerpiece of Microsoft's DRM. The source-code leak is doubtless going to give rise to lots of grey-market tools for stripping DRM from all kinds of media:

https://security-explorations.com/microsoft-playready.html

You love to see it! Now I'm doubly looking forward to this summer's security conferences, including Defcon, where, for the first time, I'll be emceeing the charity poker tournament to benefit EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32

This should be very fun – and funny – especially given how little I know about poker (I have been specifically selected on that basis, for the comedy value). Every player gets a custom EFF poker-deck, and the winner gets a treasure chest filled by EFF board member Tarah Wheeler, including "emeralds, black pearls, amethysts, diamonds, and more."

I like to close these linkdumps with something fun and uplifting, and I'd planned to end things with the poker-tournament, but then my pal Raph Koster announced that his game studio Playable Worlds had dropped its first announcement of Stars Reach, an open-world MMO like no other:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/06/28/announcing-stars-reach/

Raph is a legend in MMO design circles, whose credits include Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote the definitive text on how games work, A Theory of Fun, that's does for games what Understanding Comics did for comics:

https://www.theoryoffun.com/

Stars Reach is stupidly ambitious. It consists of truly open worlds, modeled to an absurd degree of fidelity:

We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.

The game is fundamentally a climate story, whose lore has humanity seeded around the galaxy by a powerful alien race called the Old Ones, only to have humans bust through the planetary limits of every world they were given. Now the Old Ones are giving humans another chance to try smarter ways of sustaining ourselves on new worlds, with the aid of powerful robots call "Servitors."

Because this is a Raph Koster game, it's got a bunch of extremely satisfying play dynamics:

A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat

An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune

An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting

In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house

A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want

The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all

Stars Reach is not playable yet, but the company's looking for gamers to give them feedback and steer the development:

https://starsreach.com/

OK, that wraps up the week's links. I'm gonna get one more edition out on Monday, god willin' and the crick don't rise, and then I'll be off for a couple weeks. Enjoy your summer!

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/29/pasticcio/#professor-at-large

Image: James St John https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/40894047123

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[milliesfishes]

౨ৎ꣑ৎSerendipitous౨ৎ꣑ৎ

[fem reader] contains: arranged marriage, nonconsensual touch, reader has a southern accent, implied sexual content. pairing: billy the kid x fem reader summary: stuck in an arranged betrothal, you think you'll forever be trapped until you meet billy and your world is flipped upside down author’s note: welcome to part one of Serendipitous! there will be three chapters if I'm planning correctly. I will be adding to the playlist and Pinterest boards as I release chapters! Please enjoy! Series Pinterest Board Series Spotify Playlist

'Old habits die hard' is what you always said when it came to tradition. It was easier said when it wasn't being forced on you.

Being the oldest daughter of a very well-to-do family, you had always known in the back of your mind that you would have to marry, but you hadn't let that thought go any further than just that-a thought.

Your childhood was free and long and lovely, spent running wild in the countryside with all the wonderful things in the world. There were expectations of course; mandatory lessons were attended by you for the benefit of your future. But you never let it sway you, so childishly single minded, focused on the present.

Truthfully you dreamt of romance, of a love so powerful it would sweep you off your feet. In your storybooks love always seemed to be the goal, woman's purpose. You were privy to it, welcoming even, when you entered Atlanta society at the age of sixteen. Maybe here you would start living. Here you could find what you had daydreamed about for most of your life.

Unfortunately, the only thing you were met with was ambiguity. The men at the parties you attended were hardly what you'd imagined. Most were several years older than you, and all of them were disappointing, talking with cigars half in their mouths and presuming you didn't know anything about anything.

Thinking maybe your expectations had been too high, you gathered yourself together for the next season, hoping this crop would be more promising than the last. Entering the first event of the month with an open mind, you tried again.

Nothing.

Soon you had realized the banality of it all. Every party was the last one's twin, with the same greetings, the same conversation, the same dances and the same men, just with different names and faces.

By your third season you were exhausted. Through the mirror you watched the sparkle in your eyes dim, noticed how every soulless event sucked the life out of that sweet girl from the country. You hardly recognized her anymore.

No longer did you expect anything out of the things you were now practically dragged to by your mother. You were still approached by so called gentlemen, yes, but while they prattled on about whatever it is they felt you needed to hear from their mouths you slipped into daydreams. Except this time, they were not about romance. They were about running away.

You'd resigned yourself to the fact that nothing was going to happen. Even though you quite literally had no interest in any of the men you'd come across, you couldn't help but feel guilty. Was there something wrong with you? Every other girl seemed to find their match just fine. Indeed, even your younger sister was practically engaged to a gentleman from the East.

Of course, your parents had grown rather frustrated with your lack of action, and you shared their emotions. Why couldn't you just settle? Every time you tried, indulged someone with a dance and tried to imagine marrying them, you could feel a headache pounding at your skull. No, it was impossible.

Remaining in this mindset, you'd been rather surprised to find yourself pulled out for half a second when one Mr. Henry Merritt approached you at one of the last parties of the season, asking for a dance.

Out of politeness (and your mother poking her fan into your back) you obliged, letting him lead you to the floor. You were expecting, well, what you'd been forced to endure throughout the last three years when it came to conversation.

It surprised you when it wasn't.

Mr. Merritt was the first man you'd ever met who didn't talk to you like a child, who actually allowed you to share your thoughts as well instead of merely agreeing with his own. He even laughed when you made a shy comment about one of the other partygoers who was far too drunk not to notice anymore.

"You're far more vivacious than anyone gives you credit for," Mr. Merritt said as he spun you one more time, signaling the end of the dance. He held your hand to his lips once before asking, "May I call on you tomorrow?"

Feeling a little twinge of excitement at the prospect, you nodded eagerly, almost rooted to your spot after he departed.

Hope lit your mind again. All the way home and all through preparing for the next day, you rekindled your fire of romance. Maybe all you'd needed was the right person, and it was all possible.

Mr. Merritt had entered your home and greeted you politely. He sat in the drawing room next to you, and you just talked for a while, about anything. The longer you spent with him, the more you could see yourself making a life with him. There wasn't that mind-numbing, heart fluttering, weak at the knees feeling when you looked at him, but you were long past that, forced to admit that was a fantasy. Butterflies were a made-up thing.

As you were talking about a book you'd just finished, you noticed him looking at your lips. You felt a jolt of anxiety. This was what you'd heard girls your age talk about in the ladies' room, something that happened on maybe the second or third meeting. You almost felt proud of yourself that you'd charmed it into occurring on your first.

Mr. Merritt moved closer, and you did too, and before you knew it your lips were touching, moving hesitantly.

Was this what kissing was? It almost felt like an obligation. There wasn't anything exciting about it, just skin on skin. You decided maybe the other girls had overexaggerated.

He put his hand on your waist, and you hardly noticed, just waiting for him to stop. There wasn't anything to it, and you didn't feel the need to continue, but you didn't know how to break away. You moved your hands to his shoulders stiffly, but he didn't seem to mind. Would this have to happen every time you saw him now? Maybe it's not so bad-

Then you felt his hand on your breast.

Alarm bells rang in your head, and you pulled back, pushing him away. Mr. Merritt frowned, reaching for you again, his hand brushing the underside of it. "Come now, dearest, won't you-"

"No," you whispered, moving away from him. You didn't want him touching you ever again. It didn't feel good at all.

When you stood up, he snatched your arm, pulling you back down. His eyes were no longer kind, and you recoiled as if he'd hit you. "Do you know what people are saying about you?" he hissed, his fingers digging into your skin. "A girl who's been out for three years and never married? It's unthinkable. I'm your only option if you don't want to be ruined, so you'd best let me-"

You yanked your arm away from him and fled, running up the stairs to your room and shutting the door firmly behind you. Your breathing was fast, your heart pounding. Was that supposed to happen? Was that some awful secret you should have been warned about before? It was horrible. If that was what marriage was you certainly didn't want any part of it.

Keeping to your room for the rest of the day, you hugged your knees to your chest and tried to imagine your future. Everyone made being an old maid out to be an awful fate but now in comparison to marriage it sounded delightful.

That was what you'd do, you decided. You'd live the rest of your days out as a single lady or marry someone too old to last very long. Then you'd be free. No longer was love your driving force, but liberty. Liberty from the suffocating wiles of high society.

Mercifully, nobody disturbed your peace until the next day, when your father summoned you to his study. Assuming it was so you could tell him about your caller, you went with plans to tell him that Mr. Henry Merritt was not the one for you, and you'd try again next season (even though you wouldn't).

"...just don't think he's who I'd like to marry," you concluded, your hands clasped behind your back.

Your father looked at you coldly, which surprised you. You didn't think you'd said anything wrong. He stood, stacking a pile of papers in front of him neatly. "I called you in today to tell you you're to marry Mr. Merritt."

Instantly your mouth went dry and your eyes widened. "What?"

"As soon as possible," your father said, one of his hands resting on the ornate desk as he looked at you.

"But...but..." you scrambled to think of something, nearly tearing up at the idea.

"Mr. Merritt has informed me that he and you took certain..." your father shifted on his feet. "Liberties."

The word that had once been your dream was now your cage. How ironic. You shook your head, trying to protest. "Daddy...please, I-"

"If he hadn't asked for your hand, I would have been forced to find someone anyways," your father interrupted sternly, his eyes harsh. "Foolishly I let you have a part in the decision of marriage but clearly that was not the best course of action. I should have known someone as flighty as you wouldn't be able to act logically."

His words stung, and you felt tears welling up, too upset to care if one slipped out. You thought of Mr. Merritt's hand on your breast in the drawing room, how his touch had made your skin crawl and your body tense, how you'd wanted to tear off the clothes you'd been wearing and burn them. "Please don't make me do this."

"You will," your father sat down as if he hadn't just shattered everything you'd ever wanted. "And we'll be relocating in three days."

"Relocating?" you asked quietly, your brow furrowing delicately.

"Mr. Merritt has invested in several properties in New Mexico," your father began writing something, the dark of the ink flourishing across his page. "He would like to leave for there as soon as possible."

"You're sending me there with him? Alone?" you couldn't hold back the desperation in your voice.

He looked up at you, and you thought you saw a slight tinge of sympathy. "No. I've been speaking with him about his investments, and they sound very lucrative. With your sister married and your brother off in New York, your mother and I decided we'd like to go out west too. A nice change from Atlanta." He gave you a pointed look. "A nice change for you."

The way it sounded, they were making sure you weren't going to run away from Mr. Merritt, supervising you right down the aisle. But at least you wouldn't be alone with him. Not yet. "Yes, Daddy."

Your father nodded. "Good. You'd best start packing."

That was your signal to leave and you did, feeling nearly lightheaded. A betrothal and change of house. It was maddening.

Packing messily in a feverish daze, you tried to give yourself hope. Maybe it would be okay. Maybe in this change of scenery things would look better. You'd grown up in the country after all and going back to your roots sounded perfect. Perfect for a fresh start.

Still, the image of you in a white dress standing next to Mr. Henry Merritt haunted your dreams that night and burnt into your eyes for all of the next day.

You liked New Mexico, you decided.

The open air space of it was a stark contrast to the crowded city of Atlanta, and you reveled in it. This was where you truly belonged.

Here, you were free to explore and enjoy nature as it was. Off came your large petticoats and hats. You were more than content to wear your simpler (prettier in your opinion) dresses and wander with your hair loose and your eyes bright.

Your fiancé objected to your activities, but he wasn't married to you yet, so you ignored him for the most part. It was easy to do so since he was busy with his new properties.

One thing you rediscovered was horseback riding, and it quickly became a passion. You'd been fond of it as a child and now you were so happy to have it back in your life. Hours now were spent exploring the open plains of your new home. You found little spots that became more than special to you, refuges from home.

Your mother was pressuring you about the wedding, even though it wasn't for another year. She had a boatload of advice for you that had you practicing endurance.

Mr. Merritt, or Henry as he insisted you call him, called on you rather often much to your discomfort. It was especially hard when he kissed you, which hadn't gotten any better since the first time. The memory of his hand where you didn't want it haunted you, though he didn't try it again. You were always scared he would.

As long as you had your rides, you were content. Because you weren't with him more than you weren't.

He requested your presence for a party one of his colleagues was throwing. You'd balked a little at that, but you knew you didn't have a choice. So, to prepare, you took a day for yourself, spending it on your horse. It was scary- the thought of going to another high society event that was sure to be just like the ones back in Atlanta.

But you did your best to doll yourself up, putting on a pretty blue corseted dress. It wasn't too fancy, but it'd definitely pass. Henry told you how pretty you looked, and you gave him a tight smile.

The second you got to the party you wanted to leave. You clung to Henry's arm as he talked to his acquaintances. Even though you were afraid of him, he was your safest option.

As he drank more alcohol, Henry became looser, touchier. You hated it, how now that you were attached to him, he felt like he had free will to touch you where he wanted.

When you tried to grab a drink to take the edge off, he took it from you, lifting it to his own lips. "She's trying something new," he laughed to his friends, and you felt your cheeks flush.

Henry pinched your cheek, kissing it once, leaving the stench of a drink behind. "She's pretty. Real pretty, huh?"

You felt your breaths grow quicker as his friends agreed. "Lookit that body," one of the other men slurred. "'S tight ain't it?"

Your mouth nearly fell open at how vulgar they were being in public. The awful feeling in you grew when your fiancé didn't defend you, merely laughing and moving his hand down to your bottom.

That was the last straw. You stepped away gracefully, chest heaving as you pushed through the crowd, your vision blurring. This new town was supposed to be something new, different from Atlanta. But no, here you were back in the same old habits, the monotonous, mundane place you'd dreamt of leaving. Only it was worse this time because of the man you were forced to stand beside.

Figuring some fresh air would do you good, you stepped outside, shutting the door behind you and leaning against it, letting the cool breeze of the night wash over you. You closed your eyes, tilting your head back against the wooden surface.

Why did this have to happen? When did your life turn into someone else's, a different person's dream? You had tried to be positive, tried to be accommodating to what everyone else wanted, but now you couldn't stand it. It was exhausting, terrifying to know that you were going to be bound to an awful man for the rest of your life just because you hadn't wanted to settle.

Bringing a hand to your face, you took in a deep breath, trying to calm down. It's okay. It's okay. You can be okay-

"You alright?"

Your eyes flew open, and you looked around for the source of the voice. A tall man with dark hair stood in front of you, a few feet away. He looked concerned. "Noticed ya come out here in a rush."

For a moment you were speechless. You'd seen men before, but one look at him suggested you'd never seen men.

He towered over you, and the hat on his head shaded his eyes but you could still see the bright blue of them, and it made you weak at the knees. His shirt was blue, and he wore suspenders over them. There was a gun belt slung around his waist, and something about the look of it had your heart fluttering.

Butterflies.

You cleared your throat, smoothing your hair and managing to meet his eyes. "Yes. Yes, I'm okay."

"Ya sure? Ya look a little..." his eyes slowly wandered over you, and it made you shiver. "...a little spooked."

You felt yourself soften. Even him simply seeing you had you melting. "It's nothing. I just needed a moment."

"Ah, I get that," the man said, folding his arms and leaning against the wall. "These..." he gestured toward inside. "...can be kinda suffocating."

"Yeah," you breathed, grateful someone else could see it. "It's...I've never been entirely comfortable with them."

He gave you a jaunty half smile that warmed you from the inside out. "You'n me got that in common." He tilted his hat up, presumably so he could see you better in the dark. "Ain't never seen ya before, pretty. Ya new 'round here?"

Your heart stuttered again when he called you pretty, and you nodded, feeling like you were in a daze. "I am. I've been here for about a month."

"Where from?" he folded his arms, tilting his head interestedly.

"Atlanta," you smiled a little bit.

"Ah, I can hear the accent now," he smiled, which in turn made your own grow larger. "Why'd ya move all the way to this little corner?"

"I'm..." you didn't want to tell him that you were engaged for some reason. "My fi- father moved his business out here."

"And how're ya findin' it so far?" he questioned, lowering his chin to better look you in the eye.

That was the first time since you'd come out here that anyone had asked you how you felt. It surprised you so much that you paused before you answered. "I like it. A lot."

You hesitated before you continued, unsure if he cared, but something about the look in his eyes made you sure he'd listen to anything you had to say. So, you did something you wouldn't have done with anyone else. You said more. "I grew up in the country in Georgia, and it's been lovely to go back to my roots, so to speak."

This seemed to please him for some reason. He moved a little closer, and you found you didn't mind at all. "The country, huh?"

"Barefoot on horseback," your accent poked through there and it caused his grin to stretch.

"Well ain't you just a southern sweetheart?" he shifted on his feet. "Sweeter 'n sugar."

"How do you know I'm sweet? You just met me," you couldn't help but tease. "I don't even know your name."

The man held out his hand for a shake. "I'm Billy. Nice to meetcha." He gave you a nod, accompanied by a smile that did more for you than another man's touches ever had.

You told him your name, giving him a mock curtsy that made him chuckle, taking his hand to shake. It was big and warm, and it nearly enveloped yours.

He repeated your name as you shook his hand, and the way it sounded in his mouth...you'd never loved your name so much before. "Welcome to Lincoln County."

"Thank you kindly," you giggled, feeling so lighthearted, more so than you remembered recently. "It's been a pleasure."

Billy lifted your hand to his lips and kissed it gallantly, like a knight. "The pleasure's entirely ours to have a beautiful gal settle 'round these parts."

When he called you beautiful, you felt the butterflies again. How you felt around him...it was like a thunderbolt. But you liked it. You realized right then that you hadn't thought of Henry once the entire time you'd been talking to Billy. Now that your fiancé was on the brain, though, you looked back at the house, brow furrowing as you became paranoid he'd come after you.

Billy noticed this and squeezed your hand. "Hey. Whatever's in there that bothered ya...it ain't worth it."

He was very close now. So close that you could see the details of him. His dark eyelashes. The way his hair curled around his ears. Billy lifted a hand, searching your eyes for permission. You gave a slight nod, and he settled it on your cheek, sliding back slightly in your hair. Oh, it was so warm. His thumb stroked your face slightly.

"Don't let 'em getcha down, sunshine," he whispered.

Your heart leapt into your throat. His lips were so close to yours. He was so handsome and caring and-

In a moment of impulse, you bridged the gap and pressed your lips to his, kissing him softly. Billy returned the gesture immediately, his lips rough and hungry. His hand found your waist, and you gasped, a little sound, into his mouth.

Billy dragged his hand through your hair, his movements becoming slower in a way that drove you crazy. His hand gripped your waist, kneading slightly. His lips covered your briefly before puckering slightly again, and he nudged his nose against your skin, biting your lower lip gently.

This was kissing? Your mind hardly had time to wander with what he was doing to you, but you had a brief thought. This is what you'd imagined.

He pressed you against the wall, the brim of his hat slipping up your forehead, the gesture lifting it slightly off his head. Both his hands were at your waist now, thumbs sliding up and down as his lips slotted against yours. One of his knees bent forward, wedging between yours. The action emitted a breathy sigh from you and he grinned against you.

"Like that?" he muttered, his lips still smushed against yours. You nodded, your hands sliding up to grasp his suspenders, pulling him forward so your chests were touching. It felt so good, he felt so good. Oh, you'd never wanted someone like this. And the way he was touching you...you were so starved for affection.

Billy parted his lips from yours and you chased them, not wanting to stop. He squeezed your waist with both hands, his forehead pressed to yours. You reached up and knocked his hat up so it wasn't poking you anymore. He grinned, his nose touching yours again. "Ya doin' okay?"

Nodding, you touched your lips to his briefly, looking up at him through your lashes. "Billy...I..." There was an ocean of feeling crashing inside you, and now you were purely acting on desire. "I need you."

He nodded, pressing his firm thigh up in between your legs and you whimpered, just enough to let him know. "I can feel it, sweetheart."

"Do you live far from here?" you asked softly.

Billy shook his head, holding your waist just by the fingertips and rubbing up and down. "No. Not far."

You reached up and tugged on his shirt collar, lips slightly parted as you looked into his eyes. "Would you...?

A little grin turned the corners of his lips upwards. "You gotta use your words, sweet. Tell me whatcha want."

Leaning your head back, you breathed in once, eyes falling to his lips. "Billy..." you kissed him once, then pressed your lips to his cheek for a long moment. "Make me feel good. Please."

Now he was really grinning. Billy's hand dropped to yours and he clasped your fingers, lifting it to his lips again, not breaking eye contact. Only this time, you saw something different. That pure, primal desire reflected in his irises.

You had one thought of Henry, but it was fleeting. How could you think of him when you had Billy holding your hand and looking at you the way he was?

As Billy led you through the streets, you felt giddy. He wanted this just as much as you did, you could tell. All the way there he talked to you, asking you about what you liked, and your family and your life in Atlanta. He was thrilled to discover you liked riding too, and he said he'd love it if you showed him the spots you'd discovered.

Once you got to where he was staying and through the door, you felt the tendrils of want gripping your chest again. He unlocked the door and held it open for you, letting you enter first.

You entered, looking around at the little space. It was neat, well kept, but it was clear he lived there. There was a belt on the bed, and what looked like letters on the bedside table. Once the door was shut you turned around to face Billy again. He pocketed the key and took his hat off. "It's-"

He was cut off by you pushing him against the door, standing on tiptoes to move your lips against his. He let out a surprised "Mmph," but responded in kind, lifting his hand to your chin and tilting it up. Billy trailed his fingers down your jaw and then his other hand found your cheekbone.

The feeling of his nose squishing against your cheek was somehow erotic to you. His lips didn't stop at your mouth this time; they found your jaw, your chin, your neck. His lips trailed down your neck, and your fingers tangled in his hair, something you hadn't been able to do earlier since his hat had been on.

Billy's hands found your thighs, then your bottom, squeezing it gently with both hands. It was odd how Henry had done nearly the same thing earlier and it'd nearly broken you. But now Billy was doing it and it spurred you on, making you tug at his hair, in turn making him let out a strangled groan.

He grabbed your waist, lifting you like you weighed nothing and setting you on the dresser. Billy pushed your skirt up so it was bunched around your thighs and then gripped your hips, tugging you forward so you were pressed right against him, your legs wrapped around you. You kicked your shoes off and hooked your knees over his hips, ankles crossing over his backside. His lips claimed yours again, but he was slightly off, a messy top lip kiss the result of it.

You squeezed your legs around him. It was evident how badly he wanted you; you could feel it through his pants. His gun belt was pressing against you, and it made you whimper, your hand coming to the handkerchief around his neck and pulling.

"Billy..." you mumbled through his kisses. "I need you...need you bad..."

He pulled back, finding your neck and nipping at it, sucking a bold kiss into your skin. Then he looked up, his hands coming to your hair and smoothing it, tucking it behind your ears. "As fun as it'd be to do it right here-" he paused, looking down at the state of you and smiling. "-I think my bed might be more comfortable, sunshine."

That name. You would've done anything he wanted if he called you that after asking. So, you nodded and he kissed you again before sweeping you off the dresser and laying you on his bed.

You sat up, tugging on his handkerchief and undoing it, tossing it to the side. Sliding his suspenders off, you leaned in and kissed him again, fingers nimbly pulling at his buttons and effectively opening his shirt. He removed it immediately and threw it to the side.

Realizing it was your turn, you reached behind you and tried to undo the laces of your corset. Seeing you wouldn't get very far, Billy chuckled and turned you around, his long fingers starting to make work of unknotting it. Not to keep you waiting, he kissed the back of your neck as he did, then your shoulder when you managed to work your sleeve down.

Together, you were able to slide it off your body, leaving you bare chested, with only a pair of bloomers and stockings covering you now. Billy turned you so he could see, and you thought you heard his breath catch.

"Beautiful," he mumbled, getting to his knees in front of you. "Look atcha. Ya'd think an angel fell into my arms."

As he spoke, his fingers hooked on the edge of your left stocking, peeling it down your leg and doing the same with the other. The sight of him, shirtless and undressing you may have been the most erotic thing you'd ever seen.

Billy reached up and kissed your collarbone, the motion feather light. His lips messily made their way down your chest, nosing against the spot between your breasts. He kissed your tummy gently, then your belly button, resting his chin there and looking up at you. His fingers dipped under the edge of your bloomers, and you saw the question in his eyes.

You nodded, and he kissed your tummy again, sliding your last garment down your legs and off your body.

Once you were completely bare, you scooted back on the bed, your knees bending to cover yourself. He smiled, but didn't question it, instead crawling over you to kiss you soothingly. "Ain't never seen a gal so pretty," he said against your lips. "Look atcha...all stretched out 'n bare for me..."

You reached for the button of his pants, tugging on it. He chuckled lightly, thumbing at your cheek. "Words, honey, 'member?"

"Won't you take them off?" you pleaded, looking up at him needily.

He smiled, standing up and uncovering your body. You reached for the blanket covering the bed, pulling half of it over your torso. Billy undid his belt and tossed it on the floor. You heard his gun clatter, but he didn't stop to do anything about it. In practically no time, he was as bare as you were, and you couldn't stop staring at him.

Billy smirked sweetly when he realized your eyes had caught between his legs. You'd never seen a man fully nude before, not a real one anyways. The statues in the pictures you'd seen in books about Europe hadn't been exactly educating.

You knew what sex was. Young ladies of society weren't supposed to know exactly, but awhile back, when you were in the ladies' room with a group of friends, you'd been passed a book that had been going around secretly. When you opened it, there'd been pictures. And detailed explanations.

But nothing could have prepared you for the real thing. For really seeing a man's body, and one that clearly wanted you, nonetheless. You looked away shyly, clutching the blanket around your chest.

Billy climbed on top of you, nudging your legs apart and settling between them. You were determinedly not looking there, and he noticed, kissing your nose.

"You can look," he smiled, nudging your nose. "Look all ya want. 'S all yours tonight."

Shyly, you did, your cheeks turning rosy as you did. He pressed his cheek against yours, kissing you there. "Ya ever done this before?"

Your cheeks flushed even more as you shook your head. Billy nodded, pulling back and kissing you softly, a gentle soothing motion. "'S okay. 'nd ya want to?"

When he got another nod, he kissed your brow, then your nose again. "Mkay. We can take it slow. Wanna make it good for ya."

He was being sweet, and you appreciated it. But that didn't mean you weren't still nervous. You looked back down between you again, taking in a deep breath.

Billy saw how flustered you were, and he ran his hand up and down the curve of your hip. "You want to touch?"

You looked up at him with wide eyes, looking at your hand, then back at it.

He smiled. "You can touch. It's okay." Billy took your hand in his and guided it south, your heart fluttering when you reached it.

The next little bit was euphoria. It was unlike anything you'd done before; unlike any feeling you'd had before. The way he kissed and caressed, reached and reassured...after it was done the only thing you knew was that you wanted it again. And again.

Billy sat up and moved you to sit on his lap once it was over, skin against skin. You buried your face in his neck, closing your eyes. He rubbed your back, his fingers smoothing over your spine.

"How was it?" he mumbled, kissing your shoulder.

"Felt good," you whispered, sleepily lifting your head to look at him. You were telling the truth. It'd been wonderful. Never in your wildest dreams had you imagined you could feel that way. And as of late, you'd never imagined someone like him being the cause of it.

But he was here, and you were in his lap, exhausted and blissful from it.

Billy gently rolled you over to lie flat on the bed, and he settled in a similar position, holding his arm out so you could rest against his chest. He was so warm, his body acting as a pillow for you. And he didn't seem to mind at all.

Stroking your hair, he whispered how well you'd done for him, how pretty you'd looked. The praise made you smile, and you drifted off to sleep like that; with your bare breasts pressed against his equally naked side, cozy as could be.

It wasn't until the next morning that you remembered your fiance.

Waking up next to Billy had you smiling sleepily, leaning over to kiss his cheek. He leaned on his side, rubbing your arm absentmindedly. "Mornin' sunshine."

You lazily pressed a kiss to his mouth, letting his stubble scratch your chin. Oh well, you figured you had all sorts of marks from that and his kisses all over your body after last night. Hopefully you'd be able to cover them up before Henry saw.

Henry.

For the first time in hours, you remembered him and the thought made you bolt up, eyes wide as you struggled to collect your clothes. Billy sat up, looking both amused and confused at your hurry. "What's the rush, sweetheart? Got somewhere to be?"

"I shoulda gone home last night," you managed, yanking your stockings and bloomers on, then stepping into your dress and trying to retie the back.

Billy chuckled and stood, nudging your hands away and lacing your dress himself. The action made your heart flutter. That was all it seemed to do around him. Butterflies.

He reached around and kissed your cheek when he was done, smoothing your hair. "I'm glad ya did though. Ain't often I get a pretty girl in my bed all night."

You turned around to look at him. He was still completely nude. "It's not?"

Billy looked down at you with a sort of intensity in his eyes that parted your lips slightly. He brushed a strand of hair behind your ear. "It's not."

You let yourself look at him for a few more seconds before tearing your eyes away, looking down and smoothing your dress, feeling flustered. Reaching down, you grabbed your shoes and slipped them on hurriedly. "I'd better get back...but..." you stumbled as you tried to get your second heel on. "Thank you for...for the night and-" you weren't sure what to say next.

Luckily, Billy paid that no mind and he sat back down on the bed, pulling the blanket over his lap and leaning back on his hands. "Gonna give me a kiss before ya go?"

Smiling exasperatedly, you gave in and went to him, pressing your lips to his once before rushing out the door. "Goodbye Billy!"

"I'll be in touch sunshine," he called as you left.

You shut the door and leaned against it, sighing as the memories of last night played in your head. You'd slept with him.

A good girl from Atlanta wouldn't do that. Hell, you from a year ago wouldn't do that.

This wasn't Atlanta though. And you were a different person than you were a year ago. One look at a handsome cowboy from Lincoln County and you'd fallen between his sheets. But it'd felt good. And even though you'd technically cheated on your fiancé...you felt no remorse.

And besides, this was different than a one-night stand. Billy had asked you questions, seemed genuinely interested in you and your life. He'd cared about you. That was a rarity in your life: being truly cared for.

Billy made you feel something you'd never felt for a man before. In the merry-go-round of suitors you'd entertained, not one had caused those...those...those butterflies.

As you made the journey back home, it was all you could think about. The cowboy with the blue eyes who'd lit the sparkle back in yours.

Next part

[inevitablysomber-dark]

Shackled (Chapter 2)

Dark! Rafe Cameron x Pogue! Reader

Warning: There are some intense, dubiously consenting and nonconsensual sexual themes in this series. MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY. MINORS DNI.

Summary: You hate Outer Banks with a passion and are working hard to get out despite all the obstacle in your way. Rafe himself eventually becomes one of those obstacles after a night of low impulse control. Will you be able to overcome him or will you have no choice but to submit.

Slow Burn

Series Masterlist

It was supposed to be a typical day, but it wasn't.

You didn't get a whole night's rest because your father stumbled into the house all loud and obnoxious, though that wasn't the problem. You would have ignored him and rolled over if that had been it. 

No, it was the vomit.

The first time he threw up, you ignored him.

The second time, your conscious wouldn't allow you to stay in bed, so you had to get up and see if he was ok.

The third time, there was no vomit, just dry heaving, and at that moment, you decided to drag him into his truck and find a free clinic nearby. 

They put him on an IV, filled him with liquids, and kept him overnight to watch him. 

By 8am, he was out and asking to stop by a convenience store to get some beer. While he got to rest on a comfortable hospital bed and snore his little heart out, you were present and awake the entire time.

When you finally got home that morning, just as you were about to place your head on your pillow, Mary called.

"Rafe's dad is going on vacation with Rose for the next few days."

"So?" you asked, though you had an idea of where the conversation was headed.

"So! he's having a party tonight. Can you please come with Ether and me"

You rolled your eyes. Of course, Rafe would have a party on a Monday of all days.

"I can't, my dad was just released from the clinic this morning, and I have to keep watch over him."

It wasn't a lie, but you needed to avoid all kooks for the day. You were not mentally prepared to deal with anyone without conflict arising. 

"Boo, just put him to bed for the day. He's an adult. He can take care of himself."

She wasn't wrong 

"Look, Mary, I'm really worried about my dad. I can't just dump him to spend the day with you."

"Whatever," she responds, hanging up without any kind of goodbye.

Since you all were older, you didn't need to chaperone Mary and Ether when they went out to parties. Now they only brought you to make them look good because a gold nugget looks better when there's a turd to compare it to. And in Outerbanks, you were the most giant and rancid turd. At least, according to the townsfolk.

You close your eyes, hoping to get some rest when your father suddenly calls out to you. 

With a frustrated groan, you drag your body out of bed and head downstairs. 

"I need more beer, and I'm hungry."

You squint your eyes at him in annoyance. 

"Then go get it," you respond.

"Are you back talkin' me, little girl?" he asks, turning his head to peek at you through his peripherals. "You better go get me somethin' to eat. I can't move with my stomach feelin' like this."

Anger starts to bubble, but you push it back down with a deep breath. 

"Is there anything specific you wanna eat?"

"I wanna double cheeseburger, large fries, and a diet coke."

You sigh and roll your eyes before grabbing your sandals at the door and the keys for the truck.

"And don't forget my Heinekens!" he yelled as the door shut.

—

When you got back, it was already afternoon. You had to go to a convenience store a little further away, on the other side of the island, because it was the only one that sold liquor to anyone under 21 without asking questions.

When you returned, your father was grumpy and suffering from mild withdrawals.

Due to your exhaustion from lack of sleep, you were cranky and irritated, and you wanted to make him suffer a bit since he was the reason why you were in such a terrible mood. 

So, you take your time going back, using the kitchen door to get in, carefully placing his food on a plate, and walking it out into the living room. 

"Where's my beer?" he asked. 

"Oh, I forgot it, let me go and get it for you," you reply 

When you return to the kitchen, you grab a fresh warm Heineken from the new package and walk it out to him.

"Where's the bottle opener, and why the hell is this beer warm?" he asked. 

"O, I'm sorry, pa, they didn't have any packages in the freezers," you lied. 

You go back into the kitchen and grab a bottle opener for him. 

"You know I don't like warm beer," he complains.

Still, he finds himself opening the bottle and starts chugging.

"You need anything else, pa?" you asked. 

He grumbled and waved you away. 

You practically flew to your room and jumped into bed. Closing your eyes as you hit the sack. 

You absolutely hated your father. You'd wish that he'd just disappear forever. Ever since your mother left when you were 16, he made it his mission to achieve the 'worst father of a lifetime' award. Unfortunately, if he left, you'd have nothing left. The house and bills were in his name. You needed him around until you could finally move on from Outerbanks.

—

Your mind was cloudy, and your insides felt mushy as you were yanked out of your rest by your father's disparaging shouts. 

You could hear the croak in his lungs, and he struggled to say your name. You groaned as you dragged your body out of bed and into the living room. When you looked over at your alarm clock, you realized you'd only managed to get about 2 hrs of rest. 

Mary and Ether were at the door. Ether waves at you with an excited smile on her face. 

"I hear your lovely friends here wanted to take you out tonight, but you refused?" he asks. 

"You're sick, dad," you respond. 

"Oh nonsense, I'm a grown man, I can take care of myself, you just go on upstairs and get ready to go out." there was an apparent slur in his speech and a slight wobble to his step.

They were taking advantage of his inebriation, and you knew if you didn't go out with them now, your father would talk your ear off for the rest of the night. 

You sigh in defeat 

"Don't worry about clothes," Ether said. "We bought you some"

"Now, isn't that nice" your father pipes. He pulls you outside and puts your keys in your hand "go out, have a good time, and enjoy your youth."

God, this man was full of shit. For some reason, your father somehow got it into his head that if you were friends with well-off people, you would get a piece of the pie, and by association, so would he. So, of course, he loved Mary and Ether. They represented wealth that he could have in his grasp. How delusional. 

He didn't realize that if there ever came a moment when you'd never have to worry about money, he would no longer be in your life. 

All 3 of you hopped into Mary's car with you in the back seat.

"I told you guys  I had to take care of my dad. Why did you come?" you asked. Trying to stretch the exhaustion out of your back and rub the sleep from your eyes. 

"We just wanted to party, and we need our best girl," Ether said 

You couldn't help but roll your eyes at her bogus statement. 

"Here," she says, handing you a plastic bag with the name of a boutique you'd seen on the mainland. "We brought you a bathing suit."

You raised your brow at her. 

"It's a pool party," Mary states "put it on before we get there."

Upon closer inspection, you realized this was a bathing suit  Ether wore to a kegger about 2 years prior. When you pulled out the two-piece, you couldn't help but think how ugly and gaudy it looked, tinted with the most hideous shade of orange you'd ever seen. You remembered how the floral patterns reminded you of the grannies who walked to the church on Sundays. 

But you held your tongue, were still in the car, and would need a ride home later in the night, so you put it on. The top was an easy fit, but the bottoms were tight around your ass, so you decided to keep the baggy shorts on. 

"Good luck with Rafe tonight," you said 

"Yea, we're gonna try to see if he's up for a threesome, you know," Ether says. "I just wanna see his dick once, then I could die in peace."

"Shut Up, E-" Mary gripes. 

Mary didn't like to share, but Ether didn't mind sharing. If their little plan to coax Rafe into a threesome worked, you wondered if their friendship would survive.

—

The party was loud and rambunctious, and you were tired and ready to go home. As soon as you all stepped up to the front door, they abandoned you, trying to find the mansion's host. You wandered around aimlessly for a bit, looking for someplace to sit, but almost every space was occupied. So you did the next best thing, you went upstairs. 

You needed a bed and a space away from all the noise terraforming a migraine behind your right eye. You could nap for about an hour and a half, which should get you through the rest of this party before heading home. 

You step into the first room you find unlocked and close the door, the bass from the music downstairs still vibrating in the walls. When you turn towards the room, envy floods your soul. It was huge, more significant than your living room back home. It had more of a masculine touch to it, so you assumed it was Rafe's room. The last time you saw him, he was downstairs snorting coke with some friends. You were sure he wouldn't mind you unknowingly borrowing his bed for an hour. Unfortunately, just as you took your sandals off and set your knee into the mattress, one of the doors in his room opened. 

He had a personal bathroom as well, a way to rub it in. 

Who else steps out but the devil incarnate himself?

Fuck 

“Sorry, I was just about to leave," you said, putting your knees down and trying to put your sandals back on. 

He's quiet for a moment as he takes you in. 

"You're the pogue that buys from Barry," he states 

You look up nodding your head in confirmation.

"You don't have to leave" he pulls out a blunt and a lighter from his pocket and proceeds to smoke it.

"No, I don't want to intrude, plus it feels a little awkward now," you say 

"It doesn't have to be" he holds the blunt out towards you "want a hit," he asks. 

You look at the blunt, thinking that maybe you shouldn't. However, it's not your product, and you're off the clock trying to justify your actions before you reach out for it. A hit wouldn't hurt; you were tired and needed something to induce sleep. Moving closer, Rafe hands it to you, and as you put it to your lips and take a drag, he walks around to sit on his bed, leaning against the headboard.

You hand it back, following suit, sitting on the bed, waiting for it to take effect. 

"You know, you're kinda hot for a pogue," he says 

You glance in his direction as he stares at you. 

"Sure," you say

People would flirt when you used to sell on the island, and being the drug addict he was, you wouldn't put it past it to try his hand.

"I'm serious," he says 

When you look back, he's still staring. A dark cloud shades his eyes.

"Ok," you nod 

Your head fell back, and you pulled it back up, afraid to lay on a huge bed that wasn't yours with the owner sitting next to you. You thought to get up and leave because the atmosphere was getting uncomfortable. Still, a familiar dizziness began to take solace in your head. Clouding your vision and muddling your thoughts. 

"You ok?" he asks, moving in a bit closer. 

"Yea, I just-" you tried to get up, but you felt your body drop.

Before you can fall to the ground, Rafe grabs you and pulls you back into the bed. 

It had been a while since you actually inhaled weed, you felt your tolerance must have lowered. 

"Hey, be careful," his breath tickles your cheek as he holds you close.

When you turn to look at him again, you get a good look at his face. He had such beautiful blue eyes and a handsome face, adorning such a dopey smile. 

"You know you're not so bad yourself," you say, unaware that your social filter has become more casual "Too bad you're an asshole."

A chuckle escapes his chest as he looks into your eyes, and before you can move away, he leans in,  pecking your lips. You were so shocked that you weren't sure what to do with yourself. 

Though it didn't matter because the next time he leaned in, he didn't retract, his lips firmly planted against yours, stimulating and encouraging you to follow the movement. He tightens his arms around you, pulling you closer to the middle of the bed before laying you down and planting himself between your legs.

He deepens the kiss driving his tongue between your lips and coaxing your own out to play. He grinds his hips into your body, building a bit of friction from the sexual tension that fills the air. You could feel his hardness against your midriff as he tried to pull you in closer to him. 

Something was telling you this was wrong, but you couldn't understand why? You were too distracted by his fingers as they pushed up your top and began playing with your nipples. Pulling at them and twisting them between his thumb and index.

A moment passes before he drags his other hand into your shorts and presses his fingers into your cherry. A jolt travels through your pelvic area at the sudden contact. 

You put your hand against his chest and push against his chest. 

"I don't think this is a good idea." At that moment, images of Mary and Ether flash through your mind. That's right! Your friends had a thing for Rafe. "I know there are 2 girls downstairs that wouldn't mind wetting your dick simultaneously."

Rafe pauses and looks down at you. "I don't want two girls right now. I want you" he continues his ministrations, ignoring the resistance you tried to enforce.

"But-" you tried 

"Look!" he says. "I'm Rafe Cameron, if I wanted two girls, I would have two girls, but right now, I want you."

He tries to push your top off, but in the process of getting it over your head, the strap binding it in the middle popped, so he just let it go. 

Your nipples perked in the cool air-conditioned room, and he dipped his head down, popping one into his mouth as he played with the other. 

He kisses you up and down your neck and chest as he pulls off your shorts. Flipping you over and taking a good look at the view before getting his hands on it. 

"Your ass looks amazing" he kneads your ass cheeks for a moment before pulling your lower body closer to his crotch. 

He tears your bottoms off before pushing his fingers between your lower lips. 

"God, you're so wet," he comments. 

He pulls out his hard length, poking it against your flesh and rubbing it against your pussy. He grabs your hips and slowly pushes when he lines himself up, breaking through your entrance. 

Your body goes rigid with the intrusion. 

"Relax, don't tense up" his fingertips graze your spine as if to comfort you at that moment.

When you felt his pelvis against your bottom,  you knew he was all the way in. 

He leans over you, grabbing your upper body and pulling you back up.

He hustles his hand between your legs and begins playing with your bud. He's slow with it at first, carefully pushing and pulling, letting your channel get used to his girth. When you felt your slick leaking onto the bed, he began to pick up speed, slowly accelerating, starting to chase that high. 

You lurch from the sudden pleasure as his thrusts become relentless. You tighten around him, a climax shaking throughout your body, inducing his own, forcing him to still as an orgasm runs through him. 

You both fall to the bed, his body on top of yours, as he remains inside you.

You lay there for a moment, then you feel his fingertips dance against your sides before squeezing and pulling up against your breast. 

"No, you're definitely hot for a pogue," he says as he slowly grinds his cock in and out of you with agonizing pleasure

[edisonashley]

Section 230 Doesn’t Support Habeus Petition by ‘Revenge’ Pornographer–Bollaert v. Gore

As you may recall, Kevin Bollaert ran UGotPosted, which published third-party submitted nonconsensual pornography, and ChangeMyReputation.com, which offered depicted individuals a “pay-to-remove” option. Bollaert appeared multiple times in my inventory of nonconsensual pornography enforcement actions. Bollaert’s conduct was disgusting, and I have zero sympathy for him. Nevertheless, I also didn’t love the path prosecutors took to bust him. The lower court convicted him of 24 counts of identity theft and 7 counts of extortion and sentenced him to 8 years in jail and 10 years of supervised release. Pay-to-remove sites are not inherently extortive, and identity theft crimes often overreach to cover distantly related activities.

Worse, the appeals court affirmed the convictions despite a significant Section 230 defense. The opinion contorted Section 230 law, relying on outmoded legal theories from Roommates.com. Fortunately, I haven’t seen many citations to the appellate court’s misinterpretation of Section 230, so the doctrinal damage to Section 230 hasn’t spread too much (yet). However, that still leaves open whether Bollaert’s conviction was correct.

Bollaert raised that issue by filing a habeus corpus petition in federal court. Such petitions are commonly filed and almost never granted, so Bollaert’s petition had minimal odds of success as a matter of math. Not surprisingly, his petition fails.

The district court says that Section 230’s application to Bollaert’s circumstance does not meet the rigorous standard of “clearly established federal law”:

In this case, the Supreme Court has never recognized that the CDA applies in state criminal actions. The Supreme Court has never indicated circumstances that would qualify a state criminal defendant for CDA immunity. Absence of applicable Supreme Court precedent defeats the contention that Petitioner is entitled to CDA immunity under clearly established federal law….

federal circuits have not applied CDA immunity in state criminal actions or indicated circumstances that would qualify a state criminal defendant for CDA immunity. Petitioner cannot satisfy § 2254(d)(1) with district court opinions applying CDA immunity in state criminal actions.

I’ve routinely blogged about the application of Section 230 to state criminal prosecutions, and I even wrote a lengthy discourse on why that was a good thing. Still, I can’t think of any federal appellate courts that have reached this conclusion, so perhaps the court’s factual claim about the jurisprudential absence is correct.

The court adds that even if Section 230 qualified as “clearly established federal law,” the appellate court ruling didn’t necessarily contravene that law:

the California Court of Appeal performed an exhaustive and comprehensive analysis of the applicable circuit court decisions before concluding Petitioner is an information content provider under Roommates. The state court reasonably interpreted Roommates and Jones, and reasonably concluded that Petitioner “developed, at least in part, the offensive content on his Web site by requiring users to input private and personal information as a condition of posting the victims’ pictures, making him an information content provider within the meaning of the CDA.”

This passage reinforces the deficiencies of the appellate court’s Section 230 discussion. “[R]equiring users to input private and personal information as a condition of posting the victims’ pictures” is not the encouragement of illegal content, as referenced by Roommates.com, as that information isn’t actually illegal; and the Jones case rejected an “encouragement” exclusion to Section 230 while ruling for the defense. Do those deficiencies support the extraordinary relief of habeus corpus? Apparently not.

Case citation: Kevin Bollaert v. Gore, 2018 WL 5785275 (S.D. Cal. Nov. 5, 2018)

Section 230 Doesn’t Support Habeus Petition by ‘Revenge’ Pornographer–Bollaert v. Gore published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.weebly.com/

[dirtymisfit61]

In Brief: Delaware and New York District Courts Affirm Constitutional Authority to Grant Nonconsensual Releases in Chapter 11 Plan

On September 21, 2018, the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware affirmed a bankruptcy court's ruling that it had the constitutional authority to grant nonconsensual third-party releases in an order confirming the chapter 11 plan of...By: Jones Day from Bankruptcy Law RSS Feed | JD Supra Law News http://bit.ly/2Adwr75

[theconservativebrief]

When a third woman accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct this week, Kavanaugh supporters immediately stepped forward with a familiar defense: It couldn’t have happened, because surely if it had, someone would have said something at the time.

In a sworn declaration delivered through her lawyer Michael Avenatti, Julie Swetnick avowed that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drug girls at high school house parties where the girls were later “gang raped.” Swetnick further says that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she herself was drugged and raped, although she does not directly say that he participated in her rape.

In a statement released by the White House, Kavanaugh (who has denied all three allegations against him) called Swetnick’s statement “ridiculous” and “from the Twilight Zone.” His denial was widely echoed by supporters to whom the idea that such terrible things could happen on a routine basis, and that no one would do anything to stop them or even avoid the parties, seems absurd.

If a crime happened, this argument presumes, surely everyone involved would have recognized that it was terribly wrong and someone would have spoken up at the time.

But if there’s one thing we can take away from the popular culture of the 1980s, when the alleged events took place, it’s that a sexual assault at that time might not have been immediately clear as what it was, for participants and observers alike. Some of the most popular comedies of the ’80s are filled with allegedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.

As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks. They don’t really count. They’re funny — even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.

“I have a difficult time believing any person would continue to go to – according to the affidavit – ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) after Swetnick came forward with her story.

“One obvious question about this account: Why would she constantly attend parties where she believed girls were being gang-raped?” asked National Review editor Rich Lowry.

“Please someone help me with this,” wrote conservative writer David French. “Georgetown Prep boys frequently committed gang rape. Lots of people knew they were committing gang rape. And despite this common knowledge no one has talked publicly for three decades, until the day before a crucial Senate hearing. What?”

This argument has been a common response to accusations of sexual misconduct over the past year of #MeToo discourse: It couldn’t have happened, because if it had, someone would have said so at the time. But as German Lopez has written for Vox, there are plenty of issues in our criminal justice system that prevent survivors of sexual violence from reporting.

Survivors who come forward are likely to be harassed and blamed for not keeping their mouths shut, they are likely to face a hostile response from police officers, the process of investigating the crime can be so traumatic for the survivor that it’s sometimes called “the second rape” — and after all that, odds are low that the attacker is ever likely to face legal consequences for their actions.

It’s worth noting another reason that Kavanaugh’s accusers in particular wouldn’t have been comfortable coming forward about what happened to them in the early 1980s. The way our culture thought about rape at the time was fundamentally different than it is now.

In the 1980s, “rape” meant an attack from a stranger in a dark alley, not something that acquaintances did to each other at house parties where everyone knows each other. In 1982, it would have been difficult for women like Swetnick and Christine Blasey Ford to find the language to describe what had happened to them.

“I completely reject that notion,” said French on Twitter, when presented with the argument that the way our culture talked about rape in the 1980s was different than it is today. “I was in high school in the 1980s. Gang rape was viewed as a horrible crime then, too.”

It’s true that gang rape was considered a horrible crime in the 1980s — but in the abstract, when thought of as a crime perpetrated by a group of strangers on an innocent, sober, virginal good girl victim in a dark alley. But it’s simply not the case that the mainstream culture at large in the ’80s had the same ideas we do today about sexual assault — especially when it’s perpetrated by people who know each other, at parties, around alcohol.

We can tell that it’s not the case, because there are many beloved, iconic movies made in the 1980s that built entire comedic subplots over what we can better recognize today as rape scenes. And in those movies, rape wasn’t a horrible crime. It was supposed to be funny.

The ’80s were a decade of film comedy hugely informed by the recent success of 1978’s Animal House, which features a rape fantasy scene filmed in what critic Emily Nussbaum describes as “the perviest possible way.”

It was the decade that gave us Revenge of the Nerds, which, as Noah Brand put it at the Good Men Project, “has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt”; it gave us Police Academy and its “nonconsensual blowjobs are a fun and light-hearted prank” ethos. And perhaps most disturbingly, it gave us the comedic rape subplot in Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’s much beloved and iconic 1984 teen romance.

Sixteen Candles isn’t a college sex romp like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House. It’s a high school love story. It’s been celebrated for 34 years for its sweet, romantic heart. Yet it is entirely willing to feature a lengthy, allegedly hilarious subplot in which a drunk and unconscious girl is passed from one boy to another and then raped.

The drunk girl in question is Caroline (Haviland Morris), the girlfriend to romantic hero Jake Ryan, and if you know one thing about Sixteen Candles, it’s that Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) is perfect. He is the impossibly cool, impossibly beautiful senior guy who is dating the impossibly beautiful senior girl — and yet, as soon as Jake Ryan hears that gawky, awkward sophomore Samantha (Molly Ringwald) has a crush on him, he immediately begins to like her back, defying all the laws of god, man, and high school popularity.

Jake Ryan is the embodiment of a fantasy so compelling it instantly made Sixteen Candles iconic: What if the object of all your romantic high school dreams decided to pursue you without you having to expend any effort whatsoever, just because they could see that you were, like, deeper and more special than the rest of the school? What if they somehow saw that without you ever having to have a conversation or interact with them in any way?

“Jake stands the test of time,” wrote Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2004. He quotes a 34-year-old woman who grew up on Jake Ryan: “Oh, gosh, Jake Ryan. Just thinking about it now, I get … kind of … It’s all just too good to be true.”

Jake Ryan’s reputation as the ideal dream boy of every teenage girl’s deepest fantasies has lasted for decades. Jake, writes Stuever, “is Christ, redeeming the evil sins of high school. Jake as the ideal. Jake as the eternal belief in something better.”

Yet Jake Ryan cold-bloodedly hands a drunk and unconscious Caroline over to another guy and says, “Have fun.”

In 1984, you could be a perfect dream boy and also be an accessory to date rape. They were not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, they reinforced each other.

In the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, Jake is allowed to be callous to Caroline without losing his dream boy status because, Sixteen Candles briskly assures us, Caroline is not the right kind of girl. She has breasts, and she drinks. She’s potentially a little bit slutty. “She doesn’t know shit about love,” Jake explains. “The only thing she cares about is partying.”

The fact that Jake casually despises his longtime girlfriend doesn’t reflect poorly on him, because it doesn’t affect the fantasy at the heart of Sixteen Candles. What Sixteen Candles is selling is the dream of the unattainable guy falling in love with the everygirl. So for the fantasy to work, Jake must prove his deep and abiding love for Sam. Ignoring and degrading Caroline is an easy shortcut to that goal, because in the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, the more you degrade one girl — the whore — the more you can exalt the virgin.

So Caroline gets drunk at a party and passes out in her boyfriend’s room, where presumably she believes she will be safe. Jake, disgusted, comments that “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to,” but now that the pure and virginal charms of Sam are in his sights, “I’m just not interested anymore.”

Instead, he passes her over to Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) — who is listed in the credits only as “the Geek” — reasoning, “She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference.” The poor Geek has had no luck with girls, so Jake illustrates his generous magnanimity by installing the Geek in his own fancy car, with his own fancy unconscious girlfriend next to him, and says, “Have fun.”

In the car, Caroline regains consciousness long enough to ask who the Geek is, and Jake assures her that the Geek is, in fact, him, a casual manipulation that Caroline is too drunk to register as false. The pair drives off into the night, and Caroline climbs into the Geek’s lap and purrs, “I love you,” disoriented and out of it. The Geek looks straight into the camera lens and grins, “This is getting good.”

The next time we see Caroline, she’s unconscious again, and the Geek is having his friends photograph him next to her unresponsive body. “Ted, you’re a legend,” they gush.

The next morning, a newly sober Caroline and Geek conclude that they had sex the night before. The Geek asks Caroline if she enjoyed herself. “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” Caroline says.

“She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought,” wrote Molly Ringwald in the New Yorker last year, in a long, empathetic reexamination of her work with John Hughes, “because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.”

The camera lingers on the mismatched pair — the beautiful cheerleader and the Geek, who we all know never, ever would have had sex if the cheerleader had anything to say about it in her right mind — and waits for us to laugh. The joke is that they had sex despite the fact that the cheerleader didn’t want to. It’s funny.

The Geek’s culpability here is muddy. He is ostensibly relieved of responsibility for the encounter because Caroline is the one who came onto him — although he was sober enough to recognize that she wouldn’t do so if she weren’t drunk. And like Caroline, he was drunk enough to black out the next morning, throwing his own ability to consent into question — although he was sober enough to drive, and unlike Caroline, he wasn’t fading in and out of consciousness all night.

Whether or not the Geek is directly responsible for committing date rape, the fact remains that Caroline had sex she didn’t consent to, and the movie expects its audience to respond to that development with righteous glee. Jake — perfect, dreamy, too-good-to-be-true Jake Ryan — orchestrated the situation while in perfect control of his faculties. The movie expects that fact to make him only dreamier, because every time Jake degrades Caroline it proves more firmly that he considers Sam to be special and above degradation.

Here are the basic ideas embedded in this plot:

• Girls who drink are asking for it. Girls who have sex are asking for it. Girls who go to parties are asking for it. They are asking for it even if they only drink and have sex and party with their monogamous boyfriends. Whatever happens to that kind of girl as a result is funny.

• Boys are owed girls. A good guy will help his nerdy bro to get a girl. Her consent is not necessary or desired.

• To avoid being the kind of girl who gets raped, you need to earn male approval. If you earn male approval, other girls might be raped, but you won’t be, and that will prove that you are special.

• Once you earn male approval, it can be taken away — as Caroline’s goes away once Jake tires of her — and then you’ll go from being the kind of girl who doesn’t get raped to the kind of girl who does.

• A good guy can participate in this whole system and remain an unsullied dream guy.

• The kind of girl who gets raped has no right to complain about what happens to her. Also it isn’t rape.

That’s how mainstream culture presented rape, and thus affirmed rape culture, in 1984.

On many levels, it’s not far off from how larges parts of our culture think about rape today — but we bury those values now. In 2018, we no longer enshrine these values in stories of unambiguous rape that are embedded into beloved romantic classics. We offer alternative narratives and are capable of having conversations about date rape.

In the 1980s, though, alternative narratives were few and far between. They were mostly offered only by feminism, and in the 1980s, mainstream culture considered feminism shrill and unfashionable.

That doesn’t mean that people went to see movies like Sixteen Candles and immediately thought, “Wow, that looks like fun, I’d better go get a bunch of girls drunk and have sex with them without their consent.” Sixteen Candles is not singlehandedly responsible for the rape culture of the 1980s. But like all popular culture, it does both reflect and help to shape the social context in which it exists.

The dominant cultural narrative at the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s high school experience was the one offered by Sixteen Candles. And it taught any girl who went to a party and got assaulted by an acquaintance that whatever happened to her was surely her fault, that it proved that she was the wrong kind of girl, that it was funny, that she had nothing whatsoever to complain about, and that it absolutely wasn’t rape.

Under those circumstances, the mystery is not why “any person would continue to go to … ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” as Sen. Graham argued. The mystery is why anyone ever came forward with their story at all.

Original Source -> The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles

via The Conservative Brief

[leeannclymer]

Blog Post: Libel Shield Debate Stalls Boston Herald Ch. 11 Plan In Del.

A Delaware bankruptcy judge delayed a Chapter 11 plan confirmation decision for remnants of the Boston Herald's estate Thursday, after balking at a proposal for sweeping, nonconsensual third party releases shielding former reporters and other content creators from defamation claims. Blog Post: Libel Shield Debate Stalls Boston Herald Ch. 11 Plan In Del. published first on http://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/workers-compensation/rss.aspx

[investmart007]

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  | Missouri governor who vowed to fight scandal instead quits

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/vYZbi3

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  | Missouri governor who vowed to fight scandal instead quits

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  — On a dreary overcast day, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens stood in a light rain near the Governor’s Mansion and recounted his grueling training as a Navy SEAL officer to suggest he would never quit fighting allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations.

Less than two weeks later, Greitens announced Tuesday that he is quitting with his mission incomplete.

“The time has come, though, to tend to those who have been wounded and to care for those who need us most,” said the Republican governor, his voice cracking while his team members struggled to hold back tears. “So for the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high.”

Greitens’ departure will become official at 5 p.m. Friday — marking a stunning political defeat for the 44-year-old, self-made warrior-philosopher who had aspirations of someday becoming president.

For those fellow Republicans who had strenuously urged his resignation, Greitens’ exit provides the divided party a chance to reunify at the start of a summer campaign season in which it’s seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Greitens’ resignation also allows him to avoid the potentially dubious distinction of becoming the first Missouri governor ever impeached. A House investigatory committee had subpoenaed Greitens to testify next Monday during a special monthlong session focused solely on his potential discipline.

Fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson — a former state lawmaker and sheriff — is to serve the remainder of Greitens’ term, which runs until January 2021.

In addition to the legislative investigation , Greitens faced a felony charge in St. Louis of tampering with computer data for disclosing a donor list of The Mission Continues to his political fundraiser in 2015 without the permission of the St. Louis-based veterans’ charity he founded.

A special prosecutor from Kansas City also is weighing whether to refile a recently dismissed invasion-of-privacy charge in St. Louis alleging that Greitens took and transmitted a nonconsensual photo of a partially nude woman with whom he acknowledged having an affair in 2015.

The St. Louis prosecutor’s office said it had reached a “fair and just resolution” on criminal charges against Greitens now that he’s leaving office, and that more details would be made public Wednesday.  But the special prosecutor from Kansas City said Tuesday that her investigation is ongoing.

Greitens could face other investigations. The chairman of the House investigatory committee and an attorney representing the woman’s ex-husband both have said they have shared information with FBI agents looking into the governor.

A complaint also remains pending at the Missouri Ethics Commission alleging Greitens filed a false campaign report last year about the source of the charity donor list.

On May 17, Greitens suggested to a crowd of supporters gathered for an agricultural event that wouldn’t give up.

“No matter what they throw at me, no matter how painful they try to make it, no matter how much suffering they want to put me and my family through and my team through … we are going to step forward day after day after day, and we are going to continue in our mission to fight for the people of Missouri,” Greitens said then.

On Tuesday, Greitens remained defiant even while resigning.

“I am not perfect. But I have not broken any laws or committed any offense worthy of this treatment,” he said. “I will let the fairness of this process be judged by history.”

Greitens is a married father of two young sons. He is a Rhodes scholar with a doctoral degree in politics who traveled the world on humanitarian missions before joining the Navy. After being wounded in Iraq, he founded a veterans’ charity and became a best-selling author and motivational speaker.

He campaigned as a political outsider in 2016, winning an expensive Republican gubernatorial primary and then defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the general election to give Missouri Republicans control of the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years.

Greitens had a sometimes rocky relationship with the GOP-controlled Legislature as he pushed his agenda, once comparing them to third-graders and frequently denouncing them as “career politicians.”

His support in the Capitol unraveled further after the night of Jan. 10, when a St. Louis TV station aired a report featuring an audio recording secretly made by a woman’s ex-husband. In that, the woman describes how Greitens allegedly bound her hands, blindfolded her and took a compromising photo while threatening that he would distribute it if she ever spoke of their encounter. Greitens denied threatening blackmail, but hasn’t directly answered questions about whether he took the photo.

A St. Louis grand jury indicted Greitens on Feb. 22 on one felony count of invasion of privacy related to the alleged photo. That prompted the Missouri House to form a special investigatory committee.

In April, the legislative panel released a report containing graphic testimony in which the woman said Greitens had restrained, slapped, shoved and belittled her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid. Greitens denied any violence and said the allegations amounted to a “political witch hunt.” He vowed to stay in office.

But Greitens’ troubles deepened in the ensuing weeks when Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley — who is running for McCaskill’s seat — referred evidence to the St. Louis prosecutor leading to the felony charge alleging misuse of the charity donor list.

A May 2 House committee report indicated that Greitens himself received the donor list while CEO of the charity and later directed political aides to work off it. Shortly before Greitens resigned Tuesday, the House panel heard a second round of testimony from former aide Michael Hafner about the charity donor list and other efforts by Greitens’ campaign to conceal the original source of some political donations.

Earlier Tuesday, a judge also ruled that a secretive pro-Greitens group called A New Missouri must comply with a legislative subpoena for documents. The legislative panel also had subpoenaed other Greitens’ campaign aides.

___

Associated Press writers Summer Ballentine and Blake Nelson in Jefferson City, Jim Salter in St. Louis, John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Steve Peoples in New York City contributed to this report.

__

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

[dailydoss]

New Post has been published on Dailydoss

New Post has been published on http://www.dailydoss.com/amazon-studios-chief-suspended-sexual-harassment-claim/

Amazon Studios Chief Suspended After Sexual Harassment Claim

Roy Price, the executive in charge of Amazon’s growing investment in movies and television shows, was suspended by the company on Thursday after a Hollywood producer publicly accused him of making unwanted sexual advances toward her.

Mr. Price, the head of Amazon Studios, was accused of lewdly propositioning Isa Dick Hackett, a producer of one of its most popular shows, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published earlier in the day.

In the interview, Ms. Hackett, an executive producer of the Amazon series “The Man in the High Castle,” said that Mr. Price had repeatedly made unwanted sexual advances toward her two years ago after a dinner at Comic-Con in San Diego.

When reached by The New York Times on Thursday, Ms. Hackett said she was “talked out” but said that the details in the article, written by Kim Masters, were accurate.

“I just wanted to get that out,” Ms. Hackett said in the brief phone interview.

According to the Hollywood Reporter article, Ms. Hackett entered a cab on July 10, 2015, with Mr. Price and Michael Paull, then an executive at Amazon and now the chief executive of BamTech, as they were making their way to an after party. Ms. Hackett said that Mr. Price repeatedly propositioned her in the cab, once making use of a vulgar term for male genitalia. At the party, Ms. Hackett said, Mr. Price approached her while she was speaking to other executives and shouted “Anal sex!” directly in her ear.

In a statement, an Amazon spokesman said, “Roy Price is on a leave of absence effective immediately.” Albert Cheng, currently the chief operating officer of Amazon Studios, will assume Mr. Price’s duties on an interim basis, an Amazon spokesman said.

Ms. Hackett is a daughter of the late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. “The Man in the High Castle” series, which was renewed for a third season in May, is based on one of his 44 published novels. Although Amazon does not release viewership numbers, the company said in 2015 that “The Man in the High Castle” was its most-streamed show.

Ms. Hackett is also a producer of “Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams,” an anthology series that premiered in Britain last month and will be streamed by Amazon Video next year.

Allegations that Mr. Price had made unwanted sexual remarks to Ms. Hackett surfaced in August in an article by Ms. Masters that was published on the tech news website The Information.

That article included few specifics about Ms. Hackett’s claims, with Ms. Hackett providing a statement that she did not “wish to discuss the details of this troubling incident with Roy except to say Amazon investigated immediately and with an outside investigator.”

In The Hollywood Reporter article, Ms. Hackett said she had been inspired to come forward after the publication of articles in The Times and The New Yorker that detailed accusations of abuse from numerous women against the film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

“I think women inspire each other,” Ms. Hackett said. “I feel inspired by the other women who have been far braver than I am, who have come forward. I hope we all continue to inspire each other and ultimately create change.”

Mr. Price has been with Amazon since 2004, and became the head of Amazon Studios three years ago. When The Information story was published, he was represented by Lisa Bloom, the lawyer who recently resigned as an adviser to Mr. Weinstein. Ms. Bloom has also represented women who brought sexual harassment claims against the actor Bill Cosby and the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.

Ms. Bloom said in an email that her “representation of Roy Price has concluded.”

Earlier Thursday, Rose McGowan, an actress who reached a settlement with Mr. Weinstein in 1997 after an episode at a film festival, posted a series of tweets directed at Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, saying she had told the head of Amazon Studios that Mr. Weinstein had raped her. Ms. McGowan did not mention Mr. Price by name and did not respond to a message on Twitter asking for clarification.

Mr. Weinstein’s spokeswoman has said he denies all allegations of nonconsensual sex “unequivocally.”

Last Friday, the day after The Times story on Mr. Weinstein was published, Ms. McGowan directed a Twitter message at Mr. Price saying, “remember when I told you not to do a deal with him and why?”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Monopolists are winning the repair wars

In 2018, dozens of states introduced Right to Repair bills. These bills are wildly popular among voters, but wildly unpopular among monopolists ranging from Apple to Microsoft to Google to GM to John Deere to Wahl. Every one of these bills was defeated.

Repair advocates regrouped for 2021. 27 R2R bills have been introduced at the state level. Every single one that came up for a vote was defeated, thanks to aggressive lobbying by an unholy alliance of the country’s largest, most profitable, least taxpaying corporations.

In 2014, a pair of American political scientists published a groundbreaking peer-reviewed paper analyzing 30 years’ worth of US policy-making that compared policy outcomes to public polling results.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#authors-details

They concluded that general public sentiment had almost no impact on US policy making — but the political preferences of wealthy people and large corporations were hugely predictive of what laws and regulations we’d get.

Or, in poli-sci jargon, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The Right to Repair fight is a hell of a proof of this principle. It’s really hard to overstate the popularity of the idea that you should be able to fix your own stuff, or choose where you get your stuff fixed.

Take auto-repair. As auto-manufacturing has grown more concentrated, car makers have squeezed independent mechanics — as close to a folk-hero as the American imagination can produce! — to the margins.

After all, forcing car owners to use official service depots has huge advantages: manufacturers can gouge on service prices, they can force drivers to buy expensive original parts, and they get to unilaterally decide when a car is beyond repair and force you to buy a new one.

Drivers have a good intuitive sense that this is going on. That’s why, when Bay Staters voted on Massachusetts Question 1 (an automotive R2R ballot initiative) in 2012, it passed with an 86% majority!

Mass Question 1 is a really good example of how monopolists can arm-twist politicians into frustrating the will of the people. Immediately after the 2012 initiative, auto-makers set about retooling their cars to escape the new right to repair rule.

The 2012 rule forced automakers to give mechanics access to diagnostic info from cars’ wired internal networks, so Big Car moved all the useful diagnostic data to their cars’ wireless networks. Hence the 2020 Massachusetts R2R ballot initiative, which closed this loophole.

The 2020 fight over the Mass. R2R ballot initiative was fuckin’ wild. The car-makers ran some seriously freaky scare-ads, in which the ability of auto mechanics to read wireless diagnostic data led directly to women being stalked and murdered.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

I’m not making this up. The underlying premise was, “We turned your car into a hyper-aggressive mobile surveillance platform that incidentally gets you places. If we let other people see the data we’re nonconsensually extracting from you, it will put you in terrible danger.”

Thankfully, Bay Staters saw through this bullshit and passed 2020’s Question 1 with a 75% majority.

The thing is, people completely understand that they should be in charge of deciding who fixes their stuff.

They understand that the risk of poor repairs should be addressed through consumer protection laws (which also bind monopolists’ own authorized repair depots), not by having the repair market privately regulated by monopolists who have vast conflicts of interest.

This understanding has only deepened through the pandemic year, as authorized repair depots shuttered and vital equipment languished thanks to anti-repair laws and technological countermeasures.

For example, Medtronic’s workhorse PB840 ventilators couldn’t be refurbed without using a grey-market activation dongle that a single Polish med-tech homebrewed, encasing them in cases harvested from busted clock-radios and guitar pedals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Medtronic — a med-tech monopolist that effected the largest corporate inversion in history to escape US taxes — argues that letting independent med-techs fix its products puts patients at risk, but this argument is every bit as flimsy as the auto-makers’ Mass. scare-ads.

It ignores three important facts:

I. Med-techs have always done this kind of repair. The change isn’t that med-techs are demanding the right to do something new — it’s that Medtronic leveraged its monopoly to foreclose on the industry-standard practice

II. Medtronic’s own security track-record is comically terrible. This is the company that makes pacemakers that can be wirelessly hacked from across a room to kill its user, whose software update system doesn’t even use cryptographic signatures.

If Medtronic is an expert on any aspect of patient safety, that expertise is certainly hard-won, derived from its long history of lethal patient endangerment.

III. If there is a problem with indie technicians struggling to fix Medtronic products, the obvious answer is to provide service manuals, parts and diagnostic codes.

The case for Right to Repair is incredibly strong. Not only does R2R protect consumers from ripoffs, it also provides local jobs — 1–4% of US GDP comes from the independent repair sector, almost entirely in independent small/medium businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

Repair is an important environmental, labor and human rights story. As leaked internal memos demonstrate, Apple’s aggressively landfilling of devices (so customers buy more) is environmentally devastating and creates demand for conflict minerals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#e-waste-apple

The average American family loses $330/year because of the lack of access to independent repair, a $40b annual drag on the economy thanks to monopoly rents collected by monopoly firms.

To say nothing of the impact on jobs: landfilling a kiloton of ewaste creates <1 job; recycling that waste creates 15 jobs, while repairing it creates 200 good, local jobs that can’t be offshored (you don’t send a phone overseas for repair).

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Jobs-Revolution

Then there’s the food security story: John Deere is an agribusiness monopolist that outraged farmers by claiming that they didn’t own the tractors they paid six figures for, merely “licensed” them on terms that forbade them from fixing their own machines.

Deere leads Big Ag’s anti-repair, forcing farmers to use official parts, preventing modifications that would allow third-party attachments, and collecting outrageous service call fees for a technician whose job is to unlock the tractor after the farmer replaces a part.

This policy means that farmers who fix  their own tractors still can’t use them even if there’s a hail-storm coming and they need to bring in the crop. Farmers — who’ve been fixing their own gear since the first farmer built a forge next to their farmhouse — are desperate.

Some farmers download anonymously maintained Ukrainian firmware and overwrite the Deere software, creating unknowable risk of remote attack. Others have to maintain “backup tractors” they use for weeks while waiting for Deere to fix their equipment.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000400896/standoff-between-farmers-and-tractor-makers-intensifies-over-repair-issues

Just like Medtronic and GM, Deere claims that allowing independent service creates infosec risk — but just like its anti-repair comrades, Deere’s own infosec is a dumpster-fire, with tractors across America at risk of mass-scale cyber-attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

The common thread joining these firms is monopoly: a lack of competition that allows them to extract billions from the public, and a cozy cohort of business leaders who can mobilize that loot to ensure that politicians and regulators don’t give the public what it demands.

American industry is experiencing a wave of monopolism not seen since the Gilded Age, and it affects every sector. Take hair-clippers — a category that exploded during the lockdown thanks to the newly created need for home haircuts.

The clipper market is monopolized by a single firm, Wahl. As I discovered — the hard way — Wahl has designed its newest clippers so they disintegrate if you try to take them apart to sharpen them.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1380554358824136706

Instead of sharpening these devices, you’re expected to buy a new $40 blade (for a shaver that costs $60 all in!), and throw out the old one — or, less realistically, you can mail them your razor for factory sharpening.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Wahl is part of the war on repair, sending letters to state legislators warning that letting people sharpen their own clipper blades could lead to fatal housefires.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4446374-Wahl-Opposition-Illinois.html

Two years ago, the FTC convened an inquiry on independent repair called “Nixing the Fix.” The Nixing the Fix report was released earlier this month, and it affirms everything that repair advocates have said all along.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#we-fixit

The FTC calls bullshit on manufacturers’ claims about cyber-risk, housefires, and whether getting your car fixed by your family’s beloved mechanic will lead to your murder. It broadly and firmly endorses Right to Repair.

Which brings me back to 2021, were every one of the 27 R2R bills that has been brought before a state legislature for a vote has been defeated, thanks to heavy corporate lobbying by monopolists.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-20/microsoft-and-apple-wage-war-on-gadget-right-to-repair-laws

These bills were voted down after heartbreaking testimony from ed-tech repair specialists who described the devastating impact that a broken laptop has on poor families whose kids are doing remote learning.

They were voted down despite the record, the public support, the climate questions, the food security issue, the human rights issues — voted down to preserve the monopoly profits of a tiny number of firms whose claim to being “American” is tenuous at best.

These tax-dodging, offshoring companies view the American public as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and disclaim any responsibility to the country — while still expecting its lawmakers to defend their interests, at the expense of the voters.

Image: Jcaravanos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E-waste_workers.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[dirtymisfit61]

We, the Releasees (Redux): Delaware District Court Holds That Bankruptcy Court Had Constitutional Authority to Approve Nonconsensual Third-Party Releases

On September 21, 2018, the United States District Court for the District of Delaware issued a decision holding that the Bankruptcy Court had constitutional authority to approve the nonconsensual third-party releases contained in the debtor’s plan of...By: Shearman & Sterling LLP from Bankruptcy Law RSS Feed | JD Supra Law News https://ift.tt/2QTdcFK

[dirtymisfit61]

Bankruptcy Court Enforces Nonconsensual Third-Party Releases in Chapter 15 Case

In In re Avanti Commc'ns Grp. PLC, 582 B.R. 603 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. 2018), Judge Martin Glenn of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York entered an order under chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code enforcing a scheme of arrangement...By: Jones Day from Bankruptcy Law RSS Feed | JD Supra Law News https://ift.tt/2w7F6Ff

[investmart007]

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  | Missouri governor who vowed to fight scandal instead quits

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/vYZbi3

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  | Missouri governor who vowed to fight scandal instead quits

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  — On a dreary overcast day, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens stood in a light rain near the Governor’s Mansion and recounted his grueling training as a Navy SEAL officer to suggest he would never quit fighting allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations.

Less than two weeks later, Greitens announced Tuesday that he is quitting with his mission incomplete.

“The time has come, though, to tend to those who have been wounded and to care for those who need us most,” said the Republican governor, his voice cracking while his team members struggled to hold back tears. “So for the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high.”

Greitens’ departure will become official at 5 p.m. Friday — marking a stunning political defeat for the 44-year-old, self-made warrior-philosopher who had aspirations of someday becoming president.

For those fellow Republicans who had strenuously urged his resignation, Greitens’ exit provides the divided party a chance to reunify at the start of a summer campaign season in which it’s seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Greitens’ resignation also allows him to avoid the potentially dubious distinction of becoming the first Missouri governor ever impeached. A House investigatory committee had subpoenaed Greitens to testify next Monday during a special monthlong session focused solely on his potential discipline.

Fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson — a former state lawmaker and sheriff — is to serve the remainder of Greitens’ term, which runs until January 2021.

In addition to the legislative investigation , Greitens faced a felony charge in St. Louis of tampering with computer data for disclosing a donor list of The Mission Continues to his political fundraiser in 2015 without the permission of the St. Louis-based veterans’ charity he founded.

A special prosecutor from Kansas City also is weighing whether to refile a recently dismissed invasion-of-privacy charge in St. Louis alleging that Greitens took and transmitted a nonconsensual photo of a partially nude woman with whom he acknowledged having an affair in 2015.

The St. Louis prosecutor’s office said it had reached a “fair and just resolution” on criminal charges against Greitens now that he’s leaving office, and that more details would be made public Wednesday.  But the special prosecutor from Kansas City said Tuesday that her investigation is ongoing.

Greitens could face other investigations. The chairman of the House investigatory committee and an attorney representing the woman’s ex-husband both have said they have shared information with FBI agents looking into the governor.

A complaint also remains pending at the Missouri Ethics Commission alleging Greitens filed a false campaign report last year about the source of the charity donor list.

On May 17, Greitens suggested to a crowd of supporters gathered for an agricultural event that wouldn’t give up.

“No matter what they throw at me, no matter how painful they try to make it, no matter how much suffering they want to put me and my family through and my team through … we are going to step forward day after day after day, and we are going to continue in our mission to fight for the people of Missouri,” Greitens said then.

On Tuesday, Greitens remained defiant even while resigning.

“I am not perfect. But I have not broken any laws or committed any offense worthy of this treatment,” he said. “I will let the fairness of this process be judged by history.”

Greitens is a married father of two young sons. He is a Rhodes scholar with a doctoral degree in politics who traveled the world on humanitarian missions before joining the Navy. After being wounded in Iraq, he founded a veterans’ charity and became a best-selling author and motivational speaker.

He campaigned as a political outsider in 2016, winning an expensive Republican gubernatorial primary and then defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the general election to give Missouri Republicans control of the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years.

Greitens had a sometimes rocky relationship with the GOP-controlled Legislature as he pushed his agenda, once comparing them to third-graders and frequently denouncing them as “career politicians.”

His support in the Capitol unraveled further after the night of Jan. 10, when a St. Louis TV station aired a report featuring an audio recording secretly made by a woman’s ex-husband. In that, the woman describes how Greitens allegedly bound her hands, blindfolded her and took a compromising photo while threatening that he would distribute it if she ever spoke of their encounter. Greitens denied threatening blackmail, but hasn’t directly answered questions about whether he took the photo.

A St. Louis grand jury indicted Greitens on Feb. 22 on one felony count of invasion of privacy related to the alleged photo. That prompted the Missouri House to form a special investigatory committee.

In April, the legislative panel released a report containing graphic testimony in which the woman said Greitens had restrained, slapped, shoved and belittled her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid. Greitens denied any violence and said the allegations amounted to a “political witch hunt.” He vowed to stay in office.

But Greitens’ troubles deepened in the ensuing weeks when Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley — who is running for McCaskill’s seat — referred evidence to the St. Louis prosecutor leading to the felony charge alleging misuse of the charity donor list.

A May 2 House committee report indicated that Greitens himself received the donor list while CEO of the charity and later directed political aides to work off it. Shortly before Greitens resigned Tuesday, the House panel heard a second round of testimony from former aide Michael Hafner about the charity donor list and other efforts by Greitens’ campaign to conceal the original source of some political donations.

Earlier Tuesday, a judge also ruled that a secretive pro-Greitens group called A New Missouri must comply with a legislative subpoena for documents. The legislative panel also had subpoenaed other Greitens’ campaign aides.

___

Associated Press writers Summer Ballentine and Blake Nelson in Jefferson City, Jim Salter in St. Louis, John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Steve Peoples in New York City contributed to this report.

__

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

[investmart007]

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  | Missouri governor who vowed to fight scandal instead quits

New Post has been published on https://is.gd/vYZbi3

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  | Missouri governor who vowed to fight scandal instead quits

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo.  — On a dreary overcast day, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens stood in a light rain near the Governor’s Mansion and recounted his grueling training as a Navy SEAL officer to suggest he would never quit fighting allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations.

Less than two weeks later, Greitens announced Tuesday that he is quitting with his mission incomplete.

“The time has come, though, to tend to those who have been wounded and to care for those who need us most,” said the Republican governor, his voice cracking while his team members struggled to hold back tears. “So for the moment, let us walk off the battlefield with our heads held high.”

Greitens’ departure will become official at 5 p.m. Friday — marking a stunning political defeat for the 44-year-old, self-made warrior-philosopher who had aspirations of someday becoming president.

For those fellow Republicans who had strenuously urged his resignation, Greitens’ exit provides the divided party a chance to reunify at the start of a summer campaign season in which it’s seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill.

Greitens’ resignation also allows him to avoid the potentially dubious distinction of becoming the first Missouri governor ever impeached. A House investigatory committee had subpoenaed Greitens to testify next Monday during a special monthlong session focused solely on his potential discipline.

Fellow Republican Lt. Gov. Mike Parson — a former state lawmaker and sheriff — is to serve the remainder of Greitens’ term, which runs until January 2021.

In addition to the legislative investigation , Greitens faced a felony charge in St. Louis of tampering with computer data for disclosing a donor list of The Mission Continues to his political fundraiser in 2015 without the permission of the St. Louis-based veterans’ charity he founded.

A special prosecutor from Kansas City also is weighing whether to refile a recently dismissed invasion-of-privacy charge in St. Louis alleging that Greitens took and transmitted a nonconsensual photo of a partially nude woman with whom he acknowledged having an affair in 2015.

The St. Louis prosecutor’s office said it had reached a “fair and just resolution” on criminal charges against Greitens now that he’s leaving office, and that more details would be made public Wednesday.  But the special prosecutor from Kansas City said Tuesday that her investigation is ongoing.

Greitens could face other investigations. The chairman of the House investigatory committee and an attorney representing the woman’s ex-husband both have said they have shared information with FBI agents looking into the governor.

A complaint also remains pending at the Missouri Ethics Commission alleging Greitens filed a false campaign report last year about the source of the charity donor list.

On May 17, Greitens suggested to a crowd of supporters gathered for an agricultural event that wouldn’t give up.

“No matter what they throw at me, no matter how painful they try to make it, no matter how much suffering they want to put me and my family through and my team through … we are going to step forward day after day after day, and we are going to continue in our mission to fight for the people of Missouri,” Greitens said then.

On Tuesday, Greitens remained defiant even while resigning.

“I am not perfect. But I have not broken any laws or committed any offense worthy of this treatment,” he said. “I will let the fairness of this process be judged by history.”

Greitens is a married father of two young sons. He is a Rhodes scholar with a doctoral degree in politics who traveled the world on humanitarian missions before joining the Navy. After being wounded in Iraq, he founded a veterans’ charity and became a best-selling author and motivational speaker.

He campaigned as a political outsider in 2016, winning an expensive Republican gubernatorial primary and then defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the general election to give Missouri Republicans control of the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years.

Greitens had a sometimes rocky relationship with the GOP-controlled Legislature as he pushed his agenda, once comparing them to third-graders and frequently denouncing them as “career politicians.”

His support in the Capitol unraveled further after the night of Jan. 10, when a St. Louis TV station aired a report featuring an audio recording secretly made by a woman’s ex-husband. In that, the woman describes how Greitens allegedly bound her hands, blindfolded her and took a compromising photo while threatening that he would distribute it if she ever spoke of their encounter. Greitens denied threatening blackmail, but hasn’t directly answered questions about whether he took the photo.

A St. Louis grand jury indicted Greitens on Feb. 22 on one felony count of invasion of privacy related to the alleged photo. That prompted the Missouri House to form a special investigatory committee.

In April, the legislative panel released a report containing graphic testimony in which the woman said Greitens had restrained, slapped, shoved and belittled her during a series of sexual encounters that at times left her crying and afraid. Greitens denied any violence and said the allegations amounted to a “political witch hunt.” He vowed to stay in office.

But Greitens’ troubles deepened in the ensuing weeks when Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley — who is running for McCaskill’s seat — referred evidence to the St. Louis prosecutor leading to the felony charge alleging misuse of the charity donor list.

A May 2 House committee report indicated that Greitens himself received the donor list while CEO of the charity and later directed political aides to work off it. Shortly before Greitens resigned Tuesday, the House panel heard a second round of testimony from former aide Michael Hafner about the charity donor list and other efforts by Greitens’ campaign to conceal the original source of some political donations.

Earlier Tuesday, a judge also ruled that a secretive pro-Greitens group called A New Missouri must comply with a legislative subpoena for documents. The legislative panel also had subpoenaed other Greitens’ campaign aides.

___

Associated Press writers Summer Ballentine and Blake Nelson in Jefferson City, Jim Salter in St. Louis, John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Steve Peoples in New York City contributed to this report.

__

By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (A.S)

___

[dirtymisfit61]

In Brief: Bankruptcy Court Rules That It Has Constitutional Authority to Grant Nonconsensual Releases in Chapter 11 Plan

In In re Millennium Lab Holdings II, LLC, 2017 BL 354864 (Bankr. D. Del. Oct. 3, 2017), the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware ruled that it had the constitutional authority to grant nonconsensual third-party releases in an order...By: Jones Day from Bankruptcy Law RSS Feed | JD Supra Law News http://ift.tt/2A4kRde

[dirtymisfit61]

Non-Consensual Third-Party Releases in Chapter 11 Plans: a Recent Decision

A recent decision of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York provides important guidance on the limits of nonconsensual third-party releases in the Second Circuit. SunEdison, Inc. sought confirmation of a plan for...By: Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP from Bankruptcy Law RSS Feed | JD Supra Law News http://ift.tt/2hlsEe6