Aurelia Butler

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    Woman Accuses Sean Combs of Raping Her in Filmed Attack

    In a new lawsuit, the woman said Mr. Combs and his bodyguard drugged and assaulted her in his recording studio in 2001.A woman accused the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs of drugging and raping her at his recording studio in Manhattan in 2001 in a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, saying that she learned last year that the assault had been recorded and shown to others.The lawsuit was filed about a week after Mr. Combs, 54, was arrested on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Six other women have accused Mr. Combs of sexual assault in lawsuits in the past year, while three additional lawsuits have accused him of sexual misconduct.The plaintiff in the suit filed on Tuesday, Thalia Graves, said in her complaint that she was 25 at the time of the assault and knew Mr. Combs through her boyfriend at the time, who was working for Bad Boy, Mr. Combs’s record label. The lawsuit said that in or around the summer of 2001, Mr. Combs called her and asked to meet in person. After arriving in an S.U.V. to pick her up, the lawsuit said, he offered her a glass of wine that made her feel “lightheaded, dizzy and physically weak.”When they arrived at the recording studio, the suit said, Ms. Graves lost consciousness and later woke up to find herself naked and her hands tied behind her back with “what felt like a plastic grocery bag.” She said in the court filing that a bodyguard of Mr. Combs’s had lifted her up and slammed her down onto a table, after which she recalled Mr. Combs raping her.“Plaintiff was unable to move, totally overpowered physically, in addition to being drugged and bound,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Manhattan.Representatives for Mr. Combs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Ms. Graves’s suit also names the bodyguard, Joseph Sherman, as a defendant, saying that he assaulted her and forced her to give him oral sex. Mr. Sherman said in an interview that he stopped working with Bad Boy in 1999 and had “nothing to do” with Mr. Combs by 2001.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Willie, Waylon and the Boys: the Ultimate Outlaw Country Primer

    Hear songs from Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash and more, inspired by a new book.In 1985, four icons of outlaw country — from left, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash — formed the supergroup the Highwaymen.Mark Humphrey/Associated PressDear listeners,I’m a sucker for anything remotely related to country music’s outlaw movement, and I recently tore through the audiobook of Brian Fairbanks’s tome “Willie, Waylon, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever,” an informative page-turner that inspired today’s playlist.Coined in the 1970s to classify a certain kind of country music rebel, the term “outlaw” can be a little nebulous, and there’s endless debate about which artists were (and weren’t) a part of that club.* I appreciated Fairbanks’s decision, though, to focus primarily on the four artists who would form the country supergroup The Highwaymen: Texas’s braided sage Willie Nelson; the deep-voiced, country-rocking maverick Waylon Jennings; the legendary father figure Johnny Cash; and the Rhodes Scholar-turned-Nashville janitor-turned-songwriting superstar Kris Kristofferson.In telling the stories of these four artists and the ways their careers intersected, Fairbanks also traces the larger arc of outlaw country — from its beginnings as a genuinely countercultural movement that flew in the face of the Nashville establishment, to its transformation into an empty marketing term, and its eventual rebirth in subsequent generations of freethinking country artists.It’s difficult to distill the first wave of outlaw country down to just 10 tracks, but for this playlist, I gave it my best shot. You’ll hear songs from the aforementioned four, as well as tunes from Jessi Colter, Billy Joe Shaver and David Allan Coe. And as for those waves of outlaws who have recently revived the spirit of the Highwaymen? Stay tuned for a playlist dedicated to them in the coming weeks.Almost busted in Laredo, but for reasons that I’d rather not disclose,Lindsay*Merle Haggard, for example, is sometimes grouped in with the outlaw movement. While the self-proclaimed Okie from Muskogee was the only one of the above mentioned artists to do significant jail time, there were other aspects of his career and philosophy that put him at odds with artists like Nelson, Cash and Kristofferson. Regardless of how you label him, Haggard is one of the greats — and worthy of a playlist all his own.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: A Devastated Drone Pilot Opens the Met Opera’s Season

    Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s bloodless “Grounded,” about a fighter pilot turned dissociating drone operator, stars the mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo.On a fall evening in 1883, the Metropolitan Opera opened its doors for the first time with a performance of “Faust,” the classic tale of a man who sells his soul to Mephistopheles to gain power and pleasure.On Monday, 141 years later, another Met season began with Jeanine Tesori and George Brant’s “Grounded,” a bloodless new opera on that same old theme of making an ill-advised deal with the devil.The same old theme, but with 21st-century trappings — a plot about advanced weapons technology; a libretto loaded with words unprintable in this newspaper — that are still unusual in the tradition-bound opera world, particularly on the Met’s most important night of the year. There is an assumption that operas on charged contemporary themes must be risky and important. “Grounded,” which doesn’t risk much, politically or musically, shows this isn’t so.Its protagonist, Jess, is a hotshot fighter pilot who falls in love with a rancher she meets while on leave in Wyoming. When she gets pregnant, she is pulled out of her beloved F-16 cockpit, and out of combat in the Middle East. With a loyal husband and daughter, she is without the sense of freedom and mastery she had soaring through — and dropping bombs from — what she calls “the blue.”A few years later, her old boss, the U.S. military, has a proposal: Would she apply her gifts to operating a missile-bearing Reaper drone, thousands of miles away from her targets? It’s much less glamorous than her former “Top Gun” life, but she’ll be able to go home and hug her child at the end of the day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘We Will Dance Again’ Review: Remembering Oct. 7

    In this documentary by Yariv Mozer, Israelis who attended the Nova music festival near the Gaza border describe how they survived the attack last year.“We Will Dance Again” reconstructs the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival. At least 360 people were killed at the event that was near the border with Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. Directed by Yariv Mozer, this documentary opens with an acknowledgment of the fraught subject matter. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the text says. Citing death tolls from both sides of the conflict, it adds, “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”That caveat also hints at why assessing “We Will Dance Again” as a movie is so difficult. Impassioned viewers will undoubtedly have their own opinions, and it would be disingenuous to say that a film released in advance of the attack’s anniversary — and in the middle of an active war — could somehow be seen apart from the divisive politics surrounding the region.Through phone videos, interviews with festivalgoers and, eventually, footage attributed to Hamas fighters, “We Will Dance Again” assembles a timeline of how the attack was experienced at the festival, where people had gathered to attend a multiday rave. Some remember spotting rocket fire as the sun rose on the morning of Oct. 7. “Wow, Lali, there’s fireworks!” one interviewee, Liel Shitrit, known as Lali, quotes a friend as saying. “They really went all out this year!” Soon after, over images of streaks in the sky, we hear an off-camera voice speculate that “the drugs are kicking in.”But the interviewees explain how the reality of the situation became clear. As the film’s narrative unfolds, we hear from witnesses like Noa Beer, who recounts a harrowing escape by car and a call to the police, who she says didn’t yet understand the situation. Elinor Gambarian, a single mother, hid inside a refrigerator.Two of the interviewees, Eitan Halley and Ziv Abud, recall a grenade attack on a roadside shelter where they had taken refuge; both commend efforts by Aner Shapira, who was killed, to toss back grenades before they exploded. Halley says he saw Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas and whose body was later recovered, in the immediate aftermath of the blast.While the fluid editing of such disparate source material is impressive, some of Mozer’s aesthetic choices tend to cheapen the testimonies. (The rave-like electronic scoring as Shitrit describes looking for circling birds to see where gunfire was coming from seems particularly unnecessary.) But if the shock of that day’s violence has faded after a year, “We Will Dance Again” aims to keep it visible, and to memorialize it viscerally.We Will Dance AgainNot rated. In Hebrew, English and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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    Strange Cellmates in a Brooklyn Jail: Sean Combs and Sam Bankman-Fried

    Mr. Combs is sleeping in the same dormitory-style room as Mr. Bankman-Fried, the crypto mogul who was convicted of fraud.Sean Combs is living in the same unit of a Brooklyn jail as Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto mogul convicted of fraud, sleeping in a dormitory-style room with a group of other defendants assigned to the same section, according to a person familiar with the living arrangements.Mr. Combs has been held in the jail, the Metropolitan Detention Center, for nearly a week, since federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment charging him with racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking in what the government has called a “decades-long pattern of physical and sexual violence.”He has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyers argued strenuously for him to be released on bail, proposing to a judge that he put up a $50 million bond and hire a security team to monitor him at all hours. The judge rejected the proposal, saying that he had concerns about Mr. Combs attempting to witness tamper, landing him in a special housing unit that often holds high-profile inmates.A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons said the agency “does not provide information about conditions of confinement, including housing assignments or internal security practices for any particular incarcerated individual.”Mr. Bankman-Fried has been housed in the jail, known as M.D.C., since last year, when his bail was revoked after a judge ruled that he had violated conditions of his release. In the lead-up to his trial, his lawyers complained that he had only intermittent internet access and could not adequately prepare for his case. They said that Mr. Bankman-Fried, a vegan, was subsisting on a diet of water, bread and peanut butter.Mr. Bankman-Fried, who founded the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was convicted of masterminding a sweeping fraud in which he siphoned billions of dollars of his customers’ money into venture capital investments, political contributions and other lavish spending. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What Belongs to Opera? Garth Greenwell’s Novel of Desire

    Greenwell’s “What Belongs to You” reaches the opera stage with a team that includes the composer David T. Little and the director Mark Morris.The composer David T. Little isn’t sure whether it was really his idea to write the opera “What Belongs to You.”Nine years ago, he was given an advance copy of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel of the same name by his friend and fellow musician Alan Pierson, from the group Alarm Will Sound. As Little read the book, a finely hewed account of desire and shame, and their resonances in an American’s dangerous love for a Bulgarian hustler, he thought: This is a song cycle waiting to happen, if not a full-length opera.He said as much in an email to Pierson, taking the first step that led to the premiere of “What Belongs to You” on Thursday at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va. Now, Little said, “I suspect Alan masterminded this thing from the beginning.”In the years since Little was sent the book, Greenwell has become a critical darling, the author of “Cleanness” and “Small Rain,” which was released this month. Little and Pierson brought on more artists: the Grammy Award-winning vocalist Karim Sulayman, for whom the opera was written, and Mark Morris, the choreographer and director, who is staging the work’s premiere.Pierson conducting during a rehearsal of “What Belongs to You” at the Modlin Center for the Arts in Richmond, Va.Maansi Srivastava for The New York TimesAnd, yes, this is exactly what Pierson was hoping would happen.“This is a book that I’ve been deeply connected to from the beginning,” he said. He and Greenwell, a former singer, were students and collaborators at the Eastman School of Music, and remained close friends as Greenwell became a poet, a teacher and then a prose writer, whose style seemed to reflect the different phases of his life. Pierson read early versions of “What Belongs to You,” which Greenwell dedicated to him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ukrainian Poet and Rock Star Fights Near Front and Performs Behind It

    Serhiy Zhadan, 50, is a beloved Ukrainian poet as well as a novelist, lyricist and rock star. Furious over the invasion, he enlisted to fight even as his band still plays and his readings fill halls.When the Ukrainian army hit a crisis of recruitment earlier this year amid rising losses on the battlefield, one of the most popular cultural personalities in the country stepped up and enlisted.“At some point it became uncomfortable not to join up,” said Serhiy Zhadan, in an interview at a military base in July.A beloved poet, novelist, lyricist and rock star in Ukraine, Mr. Zhadan, 50, joined a local National Guard brigade in his home city of Kharkiv in May and started a two-month stint in boot camp. By summer he was serving in an engineering unit on the second line of defense.Many of his friends were already fighting, he said of his decision to enlist. “This feeling that someone is fighting for you, instead of you, while you are also able to join, was also important.”Although he said he did not intend to set an example, Mr. Zhadan’s decision to join the army resonated with many, across generations and with lovers of both his words and music.He can fill a sports hall or a Kyiv theater for poetry readings, as he did on occasions this summer, and his rock band was acclaimed for delivering the best set at the Atlas music festival, Ukraine’s largest, in July. Proceeds of his performances go toward buying medical supplies and other equipment for the soldiers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Caterina Valente, Singer Who Was a Star on Two Continents, Dies at 93

    Born in Paris to Italian parents and raised in Germany, she had her own show on television in the 1950s and was later a small-screen mainstay in the U.S.Caterina Valente, a polyglot performer who sang in more than a dozen languages and was a television mainstay on two continents in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lugano, Switzerland. She was 93.Her death was announced on her website.Ms. Valente achieved stardom in mid-1950s Germany in a popular music genre known as schlager: novelty songs, with titles like “Ganz Paris Träumt von der Liebe” (“All Paris Dreams of Love”) and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Honolulu Strandbikini.” By 1955, her hits had put her on the cover of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.“Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Honolulu Strandbikini” was one of the first of Ms. Valente’s many hit records.DeccaShe had her own television show in Germany in 1957, and she appeared regularly at the Olympia in Paris throughout her career. Her fluid, confident delivery and sure pitch, as well as her skill as both a guitar player and a tap dancer, also carried her across the Atlantic, and by the early 1960s she was a regular on American television.Ms. Valente capitalized on her cosmopolitan origins. She was born in Paris to Italian parents who themselves were entertainers; was brought up in wartime Germany; and was fluent in a half-dozen languages. She would regularly make records for the French, Italian and German markets, which led to hits all across the continent. She won France’s Grand Prix du Disque for her 1959 recording of the song “Bim-Bom-Bey.”Ms. Valente on a 1966 episode of “The Dean Martin Show.” She was a regular on this and other American variety shows for many years.NBC, via Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More