Archives for October 2017

In the interview, Mr. Heilemann said he was still coming to terms with the accusations that have been lodged against his longtime collaborator. Mr. Halperin — who has denied allegations of groping and assault, but acknowledged pursuing relationships with ABC colleagues — worked at ABC until 2007, roughly a year before he teamed up with Mr. Heilemann for “Game Change” during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“The bare nature of the accusations are horrific and shocking and terrible,” Mr. Heilemann said. “These behaviors are not the behaviors that I witnessed, and they’re not consistent with the person that I thought I knew. That’s not an excuse. That’s just the truth.”

Mr. Halperin declined to comment for this article. The allegations against him, which have expanded in recent days as more women have come forward, place him in a group of media figures felled by claims of sexual misconduct in the wake of numerous allegations against the film mogul Harvey Weinstein.

They include the literary editor Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic publisher Hamilton Fish, the Vox editorial director Lockhart Steele and the head of Amazon Studios, Roy Price. Mr. Halperin’s alleged misconduct with younger subordinates has been described as predatory and a sign of endemic sexism in television news.

It remains unclear what will become of Mr. Halperin’s contributions to the scuttled third installment in the “Game Change” series. The pair had conducted roughly 300 interviews for the book in recent months, Mr. Heilemann said.

“We’ve done reporting that touches on important things both for history and for the current national dialogue,” he said.

For years, Mr. Halperin played the Washington insider to Mr. Heilemann’s freewheeling descendant of Hunter S. Thompson, whose likeness he uses for his Twitter profile.

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The two achieved riches and prominence that most reporters only dream about. They moved through the crowds at rallies lit up by their own dedicated Showtime camera crew. Their employer, Bloomberg News, installed a huge promotional poster for their show featuring their images on the side of the Marriott in Des Moines, a popular hangout for campaign reporters.

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Their style was derided in some quarters as superficial, and some pundits criticized Mr. Halperin’s interviews with President Trump during his candidacy as too cozy.

“Game Change,” a No. 1 best-seller, sold nearly half a million copies; its HBO film adaptation won Emmys and Golden Globes. They wrote a sequel, “Double Down: Game Change 2012,” and appeared frequently on cable news; Bloomberg was said to be paying Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann salaries in the range of $1 million.

Mr. Heilemann, who made his reputation at Wired, The New Yorker and New York magazine, dreamed up the idea for “Game Change” — a Hollywood-style account of a presidential election — while vacationing in Aspen, Colo. He pitched the idea to Mr. Halperin, an acquaintance from the campaign trail, during a ride to a John McCain rally in 2008.

“Mark was my friend,” Mr. Heilemann said. “I cared about him then, and I care about him now. It’s also the case that Mark wasn’t in the circle of my closest friends.”

Many of their interviews were conducted jointly. Asked if he could use that material for a prospective solo project, Mr. Heilemann replied: “T.B.D. It’s complicated.”

Showtime said that the network remained on good terms with Mr. Heilemann and that it was examining whether “The Circus” will go on without Mr. Halperin. NBC News, where Mr. Heilemann is a contributor, has severed ties with Mr. Halperin.

The men worked closely for nearly a decade, including a two-year stretch of near-daily contact for their Bloomberg TV show. What would Mr. Heilemann say to a skeptic who found it difficult to believe that he had been unaware of Mr. Halperin’s alleged misbehavior?

“I would never try to argue anybody out of their skepticism about anything,” Mr. Heilemann said. “All I can say is, I barely knew Mark in the period of time when he stands accused of doing these things. People are entitled to their opinions about what I should have known, or must have known, or whatever. But the timeline is what the timeline is.”

He added: “I hope that my reputation has not been damaged by this. I don’t feel like I’m crumpled in the corner in some way.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/business/media/mark-halperin-game-change.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Two of the tiny cabins feature a porch with Adirondack chairs, floor-to-ceiling windows, a leather couch, a kitchen, a bathroom and a king-size bed. The third building is set up more as a living room and meeting hub. To encourage people to disconnect from digital distractions, the units are not equipped with televisions or Wi-Fi, Mr. Barnes said.

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Mountainside promotes the Rendezvous Cabins in its marketing strategy; prospective buyers of homes in the development can spend a night in a tiny house or model home to experience the neighborhood. The plan seems to be working: About 90 percent of the visitors become buyers after experiencing a weekend there.

“Everyone is having a great time staying in them,” Mr. Barnes said.

Tiny houses are also used to help companies bolster their presence on social media sites like Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook.

This summer, Hormel, the maker of Spam, sponsored a Tiny House of Sizzle Tour with an ornate unit painted in blue and yellow. The home on wheels made stops at festivals, malls and ballparks, where company representatives handed out samples as people took pictures inside and marveled at the Spam souvenirs.

“The tiny house idea is definitely on trend right now,” said Brian Lillis, the Spam brand manager. “We are in the process of getting our social media numbers, but I am sure we tracked well.”

Untuckit, a New York apparel retailer that specializes in untucked shirts, hauled a tiny house that resembled one of its stores throughout the East Coast in 2016, stopping at universities and in small towns. The aim was to expose Untuckit to more consumers and determine where to open locations, said the company’s chief executive and co-founder, Chris Riccobono.

“If we sold shirts, that was a bonus,” he said.

Driving the mini-boutique around was like having a moving billboard, Mr. Riccobono said, and the payoff in social media presence justified the $40,000 investment. The campaign was so successful that the company is planning a second one for 2018.

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TheSize Surfaces, a composite-stone manufacturer in Castellón, Spain, also ran a tiny-house tour to showcase a 400-square-foot dwelling clad with Neolith, the company’s stain-proof synthetic surface. The promotional journey started in January in Orlando, Fla., and will continue across the United States throughout the year. The company’s aim is to prove that Neolith can be applied on floors, walls, countertops, even exterior siding.

“We believe that anywhere where there’s a surface, you can cover with Neolith,” said Saudia Utter, marketing manager at FM Distributing, a Neolith provider in San Francisco.

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In this tiny house with mansion features, a ladder leads up to an outdoor deck outfitted with a gas barbecue. Inside, the house features a loft bed, two bathrooms with Toto toilets, a kitchen with a tall wine refrigerator, recycling bins, a built-in espresso machine, Miele appliances and a living room with a flat-screen TV and an electric fireplace. A marblelike dining table cut of Neolith stands as the focal point of the kitchen.

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“Everyone who has seen it has been impressed, and it is bigger than everyone imagined it to be,” said Ms. Utter, whose company hosted the model house for two months. “We were surprised by the fact it has been on the road all year and nothing has been cracked or broken. It has stayed in immaculate condition.”

Tiny homes are gaining traction as rental lodging, too. Across the United States, mini-hotels are springing up in R.V. parks and resorts and on private lots. Over the next five years, “we are going to see whole communities and tiny house hotels all over the place,” said Jamie Mackay, the founder and chief executive of Wheelhaus, a maker of modular homes in Jackson, Wyo.

Mr. Mackay also runs the nearby Fireside Resort, which features 25 tiny homes that he designed. After guests asked repeatedly where they could buy one of the units, he started Wheelhaus to sell his houses.

The rental units offer a taste of what it’s like to live in one without a full-time commitment. The website for the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in Colorado Springs tells buyers how they can make a profit on their investment and turn the houses into a hotel or bed-and-breakfast.

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The Snake River Sporting Club, a 1,000-acre private club in Jackson, ordered a neighborhood of four one-bedroom tiny houses it calls Discovery Village. Lavished with Restoration Hardware furniture and accessories, the units can be booked for $225 to $525 nightly.

And tiny houses offer a humanitarian benefit. In the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, urban planning coordinators are looking to them as transitional housing that neighborhoods will see as an asset rather than a blight.

Mr. Dobrowolski of Escape Traveler said his company was in Houston helping hurricane-displaced residents with specially designed units. He has developed a lower-cost version of his Escape tiny homes that can be deployed quickly in a disaster.

Mr. Mackay of Wheelhaus recently announced Omni-Haus, a transportable structure that, when installed, can withstand winds of 190 miles per hour, he said. Working with local developers in hurricane-ravaged cities, his company is planning to deploy 100 to 200 units to Florida for hurricane survivors.

“Cheap emergency housing is a Band-Aid,” he said. “I want to deliver units that are built to last, not thrown in the landfill later on. Tiny houses are the next big disruption.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/realestate/tiny-house-marketing.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

And because the labor market has created more and more superstars in recent decades, as economists have repeatedly found, the number of harassers in that category is probably growing.

“The superstar harassers do cast a long shadow,” Ms. Feldblum said. “If it is well known in a workplace that someone at that level is getting away with bad behavior, that then sends a message down the ranks.”

Partly as a result, the costs of retaining a superstar harasser outweigh the benefits, even in narrow economic terms, according to research cited by the commission.

Social scientists have long documented the ways that power changes people’s psychology. It increases their sense of entitlement — when inequality is high, the affluent have a strong belief that they deserve their money, one recent study suggested — and diminishes their inhibitions.

An experiment published in a psychology journal in 2008 found that men who were given power over women tended to flirt more overtly than men who lacked such power. Another experiment found that those who thought of themselves as powerful underestimated both personal risks, like the chances of developing gum disease, and a more general level of risk, like the number of people who die in plane crashes each year.

“They don’t see threats even if they’re right in front of their face,” Cameron Anderson, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the second study, said in an interview. Alluding to superstar harassers, Professor Anderson added, “They’re so focused on sexual gratification, they don’t see the moral, ethical and legal problems.”

Many people in an organization, from the most junior scheduler to the chief executive, have some form of power. The distinctive feature of superstars is that they are more likely to use their power with impunity.

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Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard University, said in an interview that although he had seen no reliable data on superstars and sexual harassment per se, evidence showed that organizations tended to tolerate a wide range of misbehavior from people they perceived as stars. “They seem to also get away with things,” he said, “in a way they would never be able to do if they were not viewed as superstars.”

Professor Katz cited a study by two economists in which corporate chief executives who won high-profile awards, typically those conferred by major business publications, subsequently spent more time away from the job on outside pursuits like writing books. They were also more likely to manipulate the earnings that their companies reported.

Such license to misbehave appears to have been common for stars in some of the recent high-profile harassment cases. A former Fox News producer who quit several years ago said that Mr. O’Reilly’s contention that no one had complained about him to the network’s human resources department was basically meaningless because bringing a complaint meant having to be ready to quit.

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(Fox News brought in a new head of human resources this year who was given responsibility for overhauling and expanding the department and who reports directly to the network’s corporate parent.)

In a CNN report, women who worked at ABC News made allegations of inappropriate advances and sexual contact by Mark Halperin, a prominent journalist who was once the division’s political director, but said they feared reporting him to network executives because Mr. Halperin had been a powerful figure there.

Mr. Halperin has denied nonconsensual contact with the women; an ABC News representative said the network considered harassment and retaliation unacceptable and encouraged employees to come forward if they encountered such behavior.

And Susan Fowler, an engineer who quit her job at Uber after contending with what she said were sexism and sexual harassment, wrote a widely read blog post in which she described complaints she filed against two fellow employees that were never acted on. The reason she said she was given for the inaction was that each of the men was a “high performer.”

The irony is that the calculation that persuades employers to ignore bad behavior by stars is frequently wrong, and not just because of the potential damage to an organization’s image if the bad behavior comes to light.

A study by two researchers in 2015 found that the benefit to an employer of retaining a “toxic” employee, such as a sexual harasser, who was in the top 1 percent of productivity was outweighed by the cost of keeping that employee — by a ratio of more than two to one, and probably by far more than that.

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A crucial reason, the study concluded, was that toxic workers tended to drive out other employees, a phenomenon that appeared to have occurred in some recent high-profile cases. Ms. Fowler wrote that when she started working at Uber in November 2015, women made up more than one-quarter of her department. Within 13 months, according to her blog post, the share had fallen below 6 percent, with sexism being a major factor.

At Fox News, a prime-time star, Megyn Kelly, left in what was reported to be disillusionment over an atmosphere in which the mistreatment of women — including the behavior of Mr. O’Reilly — was tolerated.

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(The study on the costs of retaining toxic employees relied on data encompassing thousands of customer-support and other front-line service workers, but the evidence suggested that a similar result would apply in many higher-stakes industries, one of the authors, Dylan Minor of Northwestern University, said in an interview.)

The growth of a superstar economy is reflected in a greater concentration of money and power among those at the top. A generation or two ago, a top worker who was slightly better than his or her peers tended to receive a moderate premium in earnings. Today, with companies operating on a more sweeping scale, that premium is much higher. Top performers only slightly better than their peers tend to make vastly more money.

“It’s really taken off in the last two decades,” Professor Katz of Harvard said. “You see it in broad measures of income, and even in the raw data — the hedge fund manager, finance people, C.E.O. data, top academics, top lawyers.”

In effect, the rest of the economy is becoming more like Hollywood, where a small group of stars have long reaped a huge portion of the rewards. That means more bosses and boards may soon face decisions about whether to stand up to harassers or to overlook their behavior.

“To the extent that technology gives you the power to serve a broader swath of the market, and you’ve got more leverage as a result,” said Robert H. Frank, a Cornell University economist who has written extensively about superstars, “that’s not slowed down one iota.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/business/superstars-sexual-harassment.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Production on the final season of “House of Cards” was suspended Tuesday, two days after its star, Kevin Spacey, was accused of having made an unwanted sexual advance toward a 14-year-old boy in the 1980s.

In a statement, Netflix and Media Rights Capital, the studio behind the show, said production was being halted “to give us time to review the current situation and to address any concerns of our cast and crew.”

On Monday, executives from both companies spoke to the cast and crew of “House of Cards” in Baltimore, where production of its sixth season had recently gotten underway. The streaming service announced on Monday that the season would be the show’s last. A spokeswoman for Netflix said that decision had been reached months ago, long before the allegation against Mr. Spacey.

On Sunday, BuzzFeed reported an allegation by the actor Anthony Rapp that Mr. Spacey had made an unwanted sexual advance toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 and Mr. Spacey was in his mid-20s. Mr. Spacey released a statement shortly after the article was published in which he said that he did not recall the episode but attributed it to “deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.”

The decision to stop production raises questions about whether it will resume, and, if it does, whether Mr. Spacey will return to the series. Also on Tuesday, Variety reported that the start-up MasterClass had pulled Mr. Spacey’s $90 online acting lesson videos from its site.

Over the summer, production for the ABC reality show “Bachelor in Paradise” was shut down after an allegation of sexual misconduct on the show’s set. Production resumed after an investigation turned up no wrongdoing.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/business/media/house-of-cards-netflix-kevin-spacey.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

But first it may be helpful to offer a framework for how articles like these come together. At The New York Times, articles are rigorously reported then dissected by desk editors before publication. And major investigative stories are scrutinized to an even greater degree. For those stories, not only do the desk’s editors probe the work, but masthead editors — the most senior journalists at The Times — also weigh in, as do members of our legal team. And especially careful consideration is given to the language used to describe potentially criminal allegations.

As always, we’re interested in hearing from you on this topic. After you’ve read the article, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section.

Just boys being boys?

Wow! Haven’t we just gone through weeks, articles and campaigns trying to determine all the facets of why women hadn’t previously stepped more forcefully forward to take down Harvey Weinstein? So now we see the use of terms like “non consensual sex” instead of “rape” to soften the violent acts perpetrated against women as just boys being boys and doing nothing more than getting “20 minutes of action” (see Stanford rape case last year). I guess it’s no surprise in the Trump era to see no steps forward, two steps back.

— D.A.Oh, in a comment on our recent story about the mothers of male college students accused of sexual assault

Ian Trontz, the editor of the story, explains our approach to discussing such issues.

It is certainly understandable that some readers would want The Times to use the strongest wording possible. Whenever we write on this topic, we find ourselves searching for the right term. As a rule, we should be striving for wording that is descriptive and not euphemistic, while above all being accurate and fair.

There are several terms often used to describe the accusations in these cases, and at one point or another we’ve used each of them. The strongest term is “rape.” As a criminal matter, the definition varies by state, though in general (and at the risk here of being euphemistic) it involves physical sexual contact without consent. Indeed, that type of contact is what some of the men in the story we published last week were accused of.

When we’re choosing our wording, we also consider connotations. “Rape” has a strong association with the criminal justice system, and it is one of the most serious criminal acts. We do, at times, use the term “rape” or “campus rape,” but since the cases we are writing about are often not being handled in criminal court, we prefer to be judicious in using a term that is so closely identified with a heinous crime, especially if the student has not been formally charged.

In this article, we used a couple of terms when describing the charges faced by the students. One was “sexual assault.” This, too, has a criminal connotation; in many states, the term is in the penal code. Despite this, we believe that “sexual assault” is an appropriate term to use because it is a term often used by colleges when investigating complaints and meting out discipline. (For example, here’s Yale’s periodic report on its sexual misconduct investigations.) Indeed, the university documents we examined for one of the men in the article said he was accused of sexual assault. It is an accurate and fair way to describe the campus accusations. To not use the term would be to deprive readers of the specificity the issue demands.

We also used the term “nonconsensual sex.” There is no doubt that this is generic and clinical sounding. But it also adds a layer of understanding to this complex issue. The key question in campus investigations is whether consent was freely given by both parties. Some colleges adhere to a “yes means yes” standard that requires an affirmative response by both people for each sexual act. Other colleges are not that explicit but still require willing engagement in the act by both parties. In many cases, alcohol is involved, and the question becomes whether either person was too incapacitated to be considered capable of giving consent. In all these circumstances, the question comes down to whether consent was given. The term “nonconsensual sex” helps the reader understand the issue a little better.

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That said, we do not liberally sprinkle a term like “nonconsensual sex” throughout an article about serious, sometimes violent acts. It adds context, but it should not be used so often as to become the default terminology for the act. The term we use most often is “sexual assault,” the one that best defines the nature of the accusations.

The Power Relationship

Our newsroom lawyer, David McCraw, further clarifies the use of the phrase “nonconsensual sexual relationship.”

In the case law, “nonconsensual sexual relationship” is often used in cases where the victim is intoxicated or drugged, and in cases where someone has sex with a policeman or prison guard and feels there is no choice but to submit because of the power relationship.

It would also include rape by force or threat.

Call it rape. That’s what it is.

Dear NYT, please do not call it “forced vaginal sex.” Call it rape. That’s what it is.

— Michelle Grua, in a comment on the Times story in which women, including the actresses Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie, came forward to say Harvey Weinstein harassed them.

Rebecca Corbett, a senior enterprise editor on our Investigations team and one of the editors on the story, responds.

We were trying to be very precise in describing other allegations against Mr. Weinstein reported by The New Yorker, to give readers as much information as possible. We were not trying to minimize the gravity of the allegations. But in retrospect, it would have been better to use the term “rape” at least once, since it certainly applies to that particular set of allegations.

Language that doesn’t imply more than our reporter has learned

The Times’s First Amendment fellow, Christina Koningisor, weighs in with more legal considerations.

The New York Times legal team and newsroom share a similar goal: ensuring accurate and fair reporting. Truth is a defense to libel, so safeguarding the accuracy of our stories protects the newspaper against legal liability.

But we also understand that stories must be readable. When discussing claims of sexual harassment or assault, readers (and other lawyers) may want us to use technical legal terms — for example, “aggravated sexual assault.” But a news story is not a legal treatise. And the definition of a crime often varies from state to state.

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The easiest way to report claims of sexual harassment or assault without incurring legal liability is to cite the language contained in legal documents, such as complaints or police reports. The media may republish statements made in official public documents regardless of whether the statements ultimately prove false.

When we don’t have legal records to rely on, we try to ensure that events are described as accurately as possible. This often requires relying on information provided to us by those involved in the incident or those who have some knowledge of it.

Using an evocative phrase or term to describe certain behavior may make for more interesting reading, but it may also suggest more than we know. When deciding how to describe these claims, we try to use language that reflects what our reporter has learned but does not imply more. In this effort, reporters and lawyers are generally united — both are working to produce a story that is at once truthful and clear.

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/31/reader-center/sexual-assault-terminology.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

He initially told reporters that he had returned Ms. Wall to shore the night before. After her torso was found on Aug. 23, however, Mr. Madsen said that she had died aboard his submarine in the hatch accident and that he had buried her at sea.

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A forensics report showed that her limbs had been removed by force and that she had been stabbed many times. Her head and missing clothes were found on Oct. 6, but the head showed no sign of trauma like those Mr. Madsen had reported.

Investigator Jensen told reporters on Monday that the forensic evidence did not initially support Mr. Madsen’s claim of carbon monoxide poisoning, but that the police had now asked experts for an additional evaluation.

The police were still searching for Ms. Wall’s arms and the cellphones of Ms. Wall and Mr. Madsen, both believed to have been thrown overboard.

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The trial of Mr. Madsen is expected to begin in March. He has also been preliminarily charged with abuse of a corpse and “sexual relations under aggravating circumstances.”

During a court hearing in September, the prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen said the police had found a hard drive belonging to Mr. Madsen with videos showing the torture and killing of women. The videos did not appear to have been made by the inventor, Mr. Buch-Jepsen said.

“The videos indicate that one may have an interest in fetish, torture and murder,” he said in court. “These are some very grave videos with women recorded abroad.”

Ms. Wall, 30, was a freelance journalist from Trelleborg, a port town in southern Sweden. She studied at the London School of Economics and at Columbia University in New York, and her articles had appeared in several publications, including The New York Times.

After her death, friends and family started raising money to establish a grant in her name for “a young female reporter to cover subculture, broadly defined, and what Kim liked to call ‘the undercurrents of rebellion.’ ”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/world/europe/kim-wall-peter-madsen-journalist-submarine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss