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      Jennifer Bonjean, the Lawyer Who Defended R. Kelly and Bill Cosby

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      Jennifer Bonjean has become known for her aggressive approach as she has defended men accused of sexual misconduct in several of the highest profile cases of the #MeToo era.Jennifer Bonjean, a defense lawyer who has the words “not guilty” tattooed on her right arm, called one woman who accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse a “pathological liar.” She accused another of extortion. She tried to pick their accounts apart, and attacked prosecutors for stripping her client, the former R&B star, of “every single bit of humanity that he has.”Ms. Bonjean, who was Mr. Kelly’s lead lawyer during the criminal trial in Chicago that ended with his conviction last week, has become known for her aggressive tactics in representing men accused of sexual misconduct in several of the highest profile cases of the #MeToo era.She helped Bill Cosby get his sexual assault conviction overturned last year, which led to his being freed from prison. She has also represented Keith Raniere, once the leader of the Nxivm sex cult, as he appealed his conviction on sex trafficking and other charges, for which he was sentenced to 120 years in prison.“Everyone’s entitled to a vigorous defense,” Ms. Bonjean, 52, said in an interview last week shortly before Mr. Kelly’s conviction on sex crimes involving minors was announced.Her theatrical, knock-down-drag-out style is hardly atypical in the world of criminal defense, but it has attracted attention at a time when #MeToo-era cases are reaching trial, as she has urged jurors to be skeptical of women who have testified, often through tears, about being sexually abused.“We are in an era of ‘believe women’ and I agree, but not in the courtroom,” Ms. Bonjean said during closing arguments in the Kelly case. “We don’t just believe women or believe anything. We scrutinize. There’s no place for mob-like thinking in a courtroom.”That perspective and her relentless cross-examination of accusers, which typically involves drilling them on any inconsistencies in their accounts and questioning their motives, has drawn criticism from those who say it could scare abused women from coming forward.Ms. Bonjean accompanied Bill Cosby when he returned to his home in Pennsylvania last year after she worked to overturn his conviction, and he was freed from prison.Mark Makela/ReutersLili Bernard, who has sued Mr. Cosby and accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1990, said she was upset by Ms. Bonjean’s behavior earlier this year where she defended Mr. Cosby in a civil case brought by a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager. Ms. Bernard, who attended the trial in California, called the lawyer’s cross-examination of that woman, Judy Huth, and other accusers “victim blaming and victim shaming.”Originally from Valparaiso, Ind., Ms. Bonjean (pronounced bon-JEEN) is a classically trained opera singer who earned a master’s degree in music and once worked at a rape crisis center in Chicago, advocating for victims of sexual violence — a stint, she said, that some might now see “as ironic.”That job led her to study at Loyola University Chicago’s law school with the intention of becoming a prosecutor, but she ended up going into defense work after gravitating toward “underdog” clients. As a lawyer who views prosecutorial overstep as her driving force, she gained prominence by focusing on so-called wrongful conviction cases.Russell Ainsworth, a staff attorney at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, has worked with Ms. Bonjean on civil rights cases for a decade and said that typically, he plays the “straight guy,” while she “comes out swinging.”“If I needed a lawyer to go to the mat for me, that’s the lawyer I would choose,” he said.Her approach was on display earlier this year in the civil suit brought by Ms. Huth, who accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975, when she was 16.During Ms. Bonjean’s cross-examination of Ms. Huth, she challenged her on why it had taken her decades to come forward with her accusation. At one point she suggested that Ms. Huth had kept quiet about the trip to the mansion, not because she had buried painful memories, but because she was uncomfortable telling people that she had gone there with Mr. Cosby because he is Black. Ms. Huth strongly denied that.During the trial, Ms. Bonjean turned her attention to Ms. Bernard, and accused her in court of speaking with a juror during a break. She argued for a mistrial. (The judge denied Ms. Bonjean’s request.)“In that little moment that she tried to falsely accuse me, I felt the wrath of her, the depths she would go to,” Ms. Bernard said in an interview.Ms. Bonjean, whose firm is based in New York, said that she considers herself a feminist, insisting that the label is not inconsistent with her work as a defense lawyer for accused men. Her responsibility, she explained, is to exercise every legal lever at her disposal for her client, noting, “that will not always be consistent with sensitivity to a victim’s feelings.”And she contends that if she were a male lawyer, people wouldn’t think twice about her approach, simply chalking it up to a lawyer doing his job.“I’m supposed to be some type of ambassador — a vagina ambassador,” she said, “Seriously, I get a lot of those questions, like somehow I am traitorous to women by taking on these cases.”During Mr. Kelly’s Chicago case, Ms. Bonjean was boldly combative at every turn. She fought to keep as much of the video footage away from the jury as possible, maintained a steady stream of objections and sometimes kept the fight for her client going on Twitter.At one point, prosecutors complained to the judge about a tweet she posted in which she accused them of playing dirty tricks. Ms. Bonjean offered to refrain from tweeting about the court proceedings, she said, and the judge agreed. A few days later, Ms. Bonjean posted: “I’m not allowed to tweet but I think I can retweet,” sharing someone else’s tweet that quoted her from the trial, calling one of the government’s key witnesses “a liar, a thief and an extortionist.”“I had to find what worked for me,” Ms. Bonjean said of her approach. “My aggressive style — some people call it fiery, some people call it, whatever words you want to use to describe it, that was the way that I could be effective.”Debra S. Katz, a lawyer who has represented high-profile sexual misconduct accusers, said that defense tactics seeking to shred a woman’s credibility or impugn her character run the risk of failing with a jury, citing Harvey Weinstein’s conviction in New York, during which she represented one of the women accusing the producer of sexual assault.“Everybody deserves a defense, but to attack women in this way is, in my view, absolutely unconscionable,” Ms. Katz said.Ms. Bonjean’s highest profile success has been her role in appealing Mr. Cosby’s sexual assault conviction. She and her co-counsels persuaded the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on an apparent promise not to charge him on allegations that he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand in 2004.Mr. Cosby’s more recent civil trial ended with a jury finding against him that awarded Ms. Huth $500,000 in damages.In Mr. Kelly’s recent case, he was found guilty of some of the most serious charges, including of coercing minors into sexual activity and producing child sexual abuse videos. He was acquitted on several other charges, including that he had sought to obstruct an earlier investigation.In both cases, Ms. Bonjean has pledged to mount a vigorous appeal.Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Chicago. More

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      Jaimie Branch, Trumpeter Who Crossed Genre Lines, Dies at 39

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      One of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, she forged a direct emotional, and even spiritual, connection with her listeners.Jaimie Branch, an innovative avant-garde trumpet player and composer whose punk-rock intensity and commitment to experimentation and to dissolving the distinctions between genres invigorated the music scenes of New York and Chicago, died on Aug. 22 at her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn. She was 39.Her death was announced by International Anthem, the Chicago-based label that released albums by her groups Fly or Die and Anteloper. No cause was given.Over the last decade, Ms. Branch emerged as one of the most dynamic trumpet players in contemporary music, coaxing a remarkable range of sounds from her horn. She used electronic effects and toy noisemakers (including a Fisher Price Happy Apple from the 1970s) to further extend her sonic spectrum. She would often play a complicated passage, step back and scream, and then plunge back into playing without missing a beat.“I mean every note that I play,” she told the online music journal Aquarium Drunkard in 2019. “When I’m up there, I’m putting it all out on the table. It’s like high risk, high reward.”Ms. Branch forged an emotional, even spiritual, connection with listeners. Her energy could barely be constrained by the stage, filling a room not just with the sound of her trumpet but also with the force of her presence.Offstage, she was just as magnetic. Known to friends as Breezy, she was a gregarious figure, as averse to formality and affectation as she was to capital letters (she preferred her name and song titles lowercase).Ms. Branch was conservatory-trained, but her stage attire was unconventional for jazz circles: an Adidas track suit, a kimono draped over a “Young Latin & Proud” T-shirt, a baggy Outkast “ATLiens” baseball jersey. Her head was always covered, whether by a hoodie, a jauntily askew baseball cap or a knit toque, and her forearms were festooned with colorful tattoos.“She was the quintessential example of ‘honest music,’” Scott McNiece, International Anthem’s co-founder and director of artists and repertoire, said in an interview. “Music that has the capacity to change people’s lives and change the world, which everyone needs now more than ever.”Ms. Branch composed most of the music with Fly or Die, a quartet whose other members were Chad Taylor on drums, Jason Ajemian on bass and Lester St. Louis on cello (who replaced Tomeka Reid after the group’s first album, called simply “Fly or Die”). She favored improvisation for Anteloper, a dub-influenced duo with the drummer Jason Nazary, both of whom also doubled on synthesizers and other electronic gear.While she regularly performed concerts for cultural programmers like Roulette (where she was a 2020 resident artist) and Arts for Art, Ms. Branch was equally at home creating dissonant synthesizer squiggles on a noise-rock bill at Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens, or playing an impromptu jam session at the San Pedro Inn in Red Hook with her most recent trio, c’est trois, with the bassist Luke Stewart and the drummer Tcheser Holmes.In a 2017 article on women in jazz, the New York Times critic Giovanni Russonello described “Fly or Die” as one of “the most startling debut albums in jazz this year,” adding that “Ms. Branch uses extended technique and blustery abstraction to a dizzying effect.” In DownBeat magazine’s 2020 critics poll, Ms. Branch was voted “rising star” on trumpet.Ms. Branch in action with her group Fly or Die at the Winter Jazzfest in New York in 2018.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesOn the 2019 album “Fly or Die II: Bird Dogs of Paradise,” she revealed her impressive singing voice on two songs, one of which, “prayer for amerikkka pt. 1 & 2,” recounts the story of a young Central American woman detained after crossing the Southern border. (The song was based on the actual case of an El Salvadoran teenager whom Ms. Branch’s mother had assisted.)Despite the power of her trumpet playing, Jaimie felt very vulnerable, her sister, Kate Branch said in an interview, and she felt even more so when singing, adding, “She really cared about the message.”Jaimie Rebecca Branch was born on June 17, 1983, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. Her father, Kenneth, was a mechanical engineer; her mother, Soledad (Barbour) Branch, known as Sally, is a psychotherapist and social worker. “Jaimie” is spelled the way it is, her sister said, because the girls’ Colombian maternal grandmother couldn’t understand why their mother would call her daughter Jaime, a boy’s name, “so my mom added another ‘i’ so my grandmother could properly pronounce it.”Jaimie started playing piano at age 3 and wrote her first song, “My Dreams End in the Sky,” at 6. A small orchestra at the family’s church in Long Island performed it, and Jaimie sang it and dedicated it to a retiring minister.When she was 9, the family moved to Kenilworth, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, where she began playing trumpet in the school band. After playing extensively at New Trier High School in Winnetka (including a stint in a ska-punk group, the Indecisives), she moved to Boston to attend the New England Conservatory of Music, where she studied jazz performance.After graduation Ms. Branch moved to Chicago, where she became a fixture of the jazz scene. “You could hear her all-encompassing sound just by looking her straight in the eyes,” the trumpeter Rob Mazurek, a frequent Chicago collaborator, said in an email.She left Chicago in 2012 to attend graduate school at Towson University in Baltimore, but departed a few credits short of a master’s degree in jazz performance. She told The Chicago Reader in 2017 that she had begun using heroin in 2008, and she struggled with opioids for years, enrolling in multiple inpatient treatment programs, most recently on Long Island in 2015.Following her time in that program, Ms. Branch moved to Red Hook. She gigged constantly, whether as the leader of her own groups or as a guest in the ensembles of the saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and the vocalist Fay Victor.“She was a true collaborator, and that’s why she was so damn good at playing this music,” said the Brooklyn composer and vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who began improvising with Ms. Branch soon after she arrived in Brooklyn. “She could listen, give and receive in equal measure with an unparalleled generosity. She had so many extremely close friends who also were collaborators, and because of that she wanted each individual to be really strong and strengthen the community as a whole.”In addition to her sister, Ms. Branch is survived by her mother and two half brothers, Clark and Russell. Her father died in 2017; the first Fly or Die album was dedicated to him.Ms. Branch had recently finished mixing Fly or Die’s third studio album. Ever seeking new sounds, she was also discussing potential projects like dub remixes of Anteloper and exploring her interest in the Chicago electronic dance music genre known as footwork.“A lot of her collaborators were jazz musicians,” said Piotr Orlov, a friend and supporter who wrote the liner notes for the 2021 album “Fly or Die Live,” “but ‘the music’ for her was much broader, always filled with rhythm for moving, improvisation for keeping it interesting or unexpected, and camaraderie. Which is why the connections she made between so-called jazz and contemporary classical, beats and electronic music, rappers and dancers, standards and the hard-core songbook, were completely organic, and always fascinating.”On Wednesday night, as news of Ms. Branch’s death spread, about 75 of her friends and fellow musicians gathered on Valentino Pier in Red Hook, a few blocks from her apartment. As “Fly or Die Live” played through a phone propped up against a small, tinny-sounding megaphone, some in the crowd tapped out beats on drums or on the concrete, others banged tambourines and sleigh bells, and the young saxophonist Zoh Amba played melancholic funereal blasts.From across the Red Hook Channel the distant sound of another trumpet could be heard, most likely from a mariachi band in a waterfront bar, joining the music in a phantom collaboration. More

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      Woman Testifies R. Kelly Sexually Abused Her on Video When She Was 14

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      The woman testified at the singer’s federal trial in Chicago that she had been persuaded not to testify against him at his 2008 state trial, which ended in his acquittal.CHICAGO — In 2008, a jury in Chicago declared the singer R. Kelly not guilty of producing child sexual abuse imagery after seeing a videotape that prosecutors said showed the R&B singer engaging in sex acts with an underage girl. The defense team had argued that the identities of the people in the tape were in question, and several jurors said the lack of testimony from the victim was a significant barrier to convicting Mr. Kelly.But on Thursday, the woman at the center of the 2008 trial took the stand, identifying herself and Mr. Kelly as the people in the infamous video, saying that they had sex “hundreds” of times when she was underage, and explaining how two decades ago he had persuaded her to deny their relationship to law enforcement officials.“I was extremely scared that my parents would find out,” she said, adding that she was afraid of what would happen to Mr. Kelly.Mr. Kelly has been trailed by accusations of abusing young women and underage girls for more than two decades but had long avoided criminal punishment — until last year, when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison after he was convicted in federal court in Brooklyn of racketeering and sex trafficking charges.Before that, the 2008 trial was the closest Mr. Kelly had gotten to being held accountable.The woman at the center of that trial, now 37, took the stand at the Everett M. Dirksen U.S. Courthouse in downtown Chicago, where she said that she had been repeatedly sexually abused as a teenager by Mr. Kelly and testified that it was in fact her at age 14 appearing in the videotape, which at one point shows Mr. Kelly urinating on her.Testifying under a pseudonym for more than four hours on Thursday, the woman told the court that in 2002, after law enforcement officials had obtained the tape, Mr. Kelly sent her and her parents out of the country to make them inaccessible to investigators. He then urged her to deny to a grand jury that it was her on the tape and paid for a lawyer to accompany her, she said. She testified that she had falsely told the grand jury that it was not her on the videotape and that she was not sexually involved with Mr. Kelly. She said that she gave Mr. Kelly’s lawyers a necklace of hers that could be seen on the videotape.As the woman spoke, Mr. Kelly — who is facing charges of coercing minors into sex, receiving child sexual abuse videos and conspiring to obstruct justice — remained impassive.The woman told the jury that she was 13 years old when she was first introduced to Mr. Kelly by her aunt, a protégée of Mr. Kelly’s who goes by the stage name Sparkle. Mr. Kelly, who became the woman’s godfather, started speaking sexually with her over the phone, she said, then started abusing her physically. She testified that Mr. Kelly would sexually assault her at various locations, including his home, the recording studio and his tour bus.The tape surfaced after a journalist for The Chicago Sun-Times who had reported on the accusations against Mr. Kelly, Jim DeRogatis, received it in the mail from an anonymous sender, and turned it over to law enforcement. Mr. Kelly was charged in 2002 with producing child pornography, and he stood trial in 2008 but was acquitted.The woman testified that around the time of the trial, she was living with Mr. Kelly in his mansion, and that after he was acquitted, he began physically abusing her and controlling her ability to leave. He later helped her move into her own place and get a car, she said.A lawyer for Mr. Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, who is expected to cross-examine the woman on Friday, sought to undermine her testimony in opening arguments, telling the jury that she has an immunity deal with prosecutors. The woman affirmed that in exchange for her testimony, prosecutors had granted her immunity from prosecution for perjury related to the false grand jury testimony in 2002.Prosecutors say that they now have more evidence of the woman’s abuse than the state prosecutors had 14 years ago. The 2008 trial focused on one video, but the current trial centers on four videos that prosecutors say show Mr. Kelly sexually abusing the woman. Those videos are the basis for charges against Mr. Kelly related to producing child pornography, as well as the ones related to receiving child pornography.According to the federal indictment, Mr. Kelly and his associates realized in 2001 that videotapes of him sexually abusing the woman were missing, and as a result, they began a multiyear effort to recover the tapes, paying one person hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to regain possession of them.Charges against two of Mr. Kelly’s associates, Derrel McDavid and Milton Brown, who are standing trial at the same time as Mr. Kelly, relate to accusations that they had tried to find the missing tapes. Both men pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers have argued that they were carrying out their jobs, unaware that Mr. Kelly was abusing children.Later on in the trial, four other women are also expected to testify that Mr. Kelly sexually abused them when they were girls. More

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      R. Kelly Stands Trial in Chicago: What to Know

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      The musician faces charges of sex crimes and of working to obstruct an earlier investigation that resulted in his acquittal in a 2008 criminal trial.R. Kelly, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison for racketeering and sex trafficking earlier this year, will stand trial again starting this week, beginning the next chapter of prosecutors’ efforts to hold him criminally responsible for allegations of sexual abuse dating back more than three decades.The trial is in Chicago, the city Mr. Kelly long called home, and where he faced his first criminal trial in 2008.This time, federal prosecutors are seeking to hold Mr. Kelly and his associates accountable for working to stymie the earlier trial, in which a jury acquitted Mr. Kelly of producing child sexual abuse imagery. They are accusing Mr. Kelly and a former employee who is also on trial, Derrel McDavid, of arranging hush money payments and seeking to conceal evidence that would have aided prosecutors when they were investigating the singer in the early 2000s.Mr. Kelly, 55, will face charges that he coerced five minors into sex acts, and several charges related to producing child sexual abuse imagery. He and Mr. McDavid also face charges of receiving child sexual abuse imagery, during what prosecutors have described as a scheme to recover missing tapes of Mr. Kelly having sex with minors.A third man — another former employee of Mr. Kelly’s, Milton Brown — is facing a related charge. All three men have pleaded not guilty.The trial will be an emotional moment for many in Chicago who have witnessed Mr. Kelly’s rise from a child of the city to a pop and R&B star, then his fall after he was accused of luring underage girls into his orbit.“Chicago has always struggled with this because he is local and we tend to go up for our locals,” said Mikki Kendall, a writer who grew up in the city and recalled, in the Lifetime documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly,” seeing the adult singer approaching teenage girls at a local McDonald’s. “There are people who are going to be very upset and will again try to insist that the girls are at fault, and there are going to be people — and I am one of them — who are going to say 59,000 times: He is a grown man preying on very young women and children.”The first public disclosure of abuse allegations came in a 1996 lawsuit, and a steady drip of legal claims and articles followed over the next two decades. The renewed effort to prosecute Mr. Kelly came in 2019, after the Lifetime documentary broadcast accounts of women who described being abused and controlled by him, oftentimes when they were teenagers.One year ago, Mr. Kelly stood trial in New York, where a jury found him guilty of leading a decades-long scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex. He started serving his 30-year prison term in Brooklyn before he was transferred to a federal prison in Chicago for the current trial.What happened in the 2008 trial?The 2008 trial was a result of a 2002 grand jury indictment of Mr. Kelly on 21 counts of child pornography, which were later reduced to 14. The case took years to go to a jury. During that time, the singer debuted some of the biggest hits of his career, including “Ignition” and “Step in the Name of Love.”The trial revolved around a 27-minute tape that prosecutors said showed Mr. Kelly having a sex with a teenage girl and urinating on her. The case hinged on whether the jury was convinced that the people in the tape were who the prosecutors said they were. Mr. Kelly and the young woman denied they were the ones on the tape, and neither testified in the trial.A jury found Mr. Kelly not guilty on all charges, and after the verdict was released, jurors said the young woman’s refusal to testify was a significant barrier to convicting him.How is that relevant to the current trial?A portion of the trial will focus on charges that Mr. Kelly and his associate, Mr. McDavid, conspired to obstruct the previous federal investigation by paying off people with knowledge of Mr. Kelly’s abuse and seeking to suppress evidence.Prosecutors accuse Mr. Kelly of persuading the minor in the tape to deny to a grand jury in the early 2000s that she had a sexual relationship with Mr. Kelly and that it was her in the 27-minute video. According to the federal indictment, Mr. Kelly and Mr. McDavid arranged payments and bought gifts for the minor and her parents over a roughly 15-year period to prevent them from speaking to law enforcement about the abuse.These hush money payments were part of a broader effort, prosecutors say, to hide evidence of Mr. Kelly’s sexual abuse from investigators.In 2001, after state officials started investigating whether Mr. Kelly had been abusing the child at the center of the 2008 trial, Mr. Kelly and his associates realized that several videotapes of the singer sexually abusing minors had gone missing, according to the indictment in the case. After that realization, Mr. Kelly and Mr. McDavid started a multiyear effort to have those videos returned, paying an unnamed person hundreds of thousands of dollars to recover them, the indictment said.Around the time of the first trial in Chicago, prosecutors say, the person that Mr. Kelly and Mr. McDavid hired to find the missing videos planned a news conference about the existence of footage of Mr. Kelly having sex with minors. According to the indictment, Mr. Kelly, Mr. McDavid and others paid the person $170,000 to cancel it.The charges of receiving child sexual abuse imagery relate to the effort to recover several missing videos of Mr. Kelly engaging in sex acts with the person at the center of the 2008 trial.Who is expected to testify?Prosecutors have not revealed exactly who they will call to testify, but court papers suggest that they now have the cooperation of the woman whose testimony in 2008 was a missing piece of evidence in their case, as well as her mother.The indictment also suggests that prosecutors have the cooperation of four other people who say that Mr. Kelly coerced them into sex when they were underage, between 1996 and 2001.​​Judge Harry D. Leinenweber, who will preside over the case, recently ruled that any accusers called to testify will be able to do so using pseudonyms.A lawyer representing Mr. Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, did not respond to requests for comment on the case. Mr. Kelly did not testify in the trial in Brooklyn.In a tweet last week, Ms. Bonjean wrote that it would be difficult to find 12 jurors who would be fair “given the media war on my client.”“The government starts with an incredible advantage but we are going to fight like hell to get a jury that will follow the law,” she wrote.How does the trial in Chicago differ from the one in Brooklyn?The trials are likely to be similar in that the centerpiece of the prosecutors’ case is testimony from people who say Mr. Kelly recruited them for sex, but the legal approaches are different.In Brooklyn, Mr. Kelly was convicted of one count of racketeering based on allegations that he was the ringleader of a criminal enterprise that had carried out acts of bribery, kidnapping and forced labor. He was also convicted of eight counts of violating the Mann Act, a sex trafficking statute.In the trial starting this week, which is in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the charges are just as complex. Mr. Kelly faces five counts of coercing a minor into criminal sexual activity; four counts of doing so for the purpose of producing a video of the conduct; two counts of receiving child pornography; one count of conspiring to receive child pornography; and one count of conspiring to obstruct a federal investigation.One part of Mr. Kelly’s history that is not likely to be addressed is his illegal marriage to the singer Aaliyah when she was 15 and Mr. Kelly was 27. The marriage was central to the case against Mr. Kelly in Brooklyn, where a witness testified that Mr. Kelly sexually abused Aaliyah when she was only 13 or 14 years old. (Aaliyah died in a 2001 plane crash.)Mr. Kelly’s legal team asked the judge in the Chicago trial to exclude evidence related to the marriage, and prosecutors responded that they did not intend to introduce evidence on the subject.Is R. Kelly facing any other criminal charges?Yes. Mr. Kelly still faces sex crime charges in Illinois and Minnesota. After the federal trial in Chicago, those charges will be dealt with next. More

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      in Television

      Hulu’s ‘The Bear’ Fuels Demand for Chicago’s Italian Beef Sandwich

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      The FX series has fueled a spike in sales of the sandwich at Chicago-specialty restaurants across the country.Last month, Dan Michaels, an owner of Gino’s East of Chicago in Los Angeles, watched as orders for Italian beef — the classic Chicago sandwich of thinly sliced roast beef and tangy giardiniera piled on a roll — suddenly soared to 300 a day, from 150 a day in June.“The Bear” had struck again.The cross-talking, anxiety-inducing series from FX about a struggling Chicago beef sandwich shop and its harried kitchen brigade has drawn acclaim from food media and restaurant veterans, propelled a slew of “Yes, Chef!” memes gushing over the lead actor, Jeremy Allen White, and energized a collective lust for sweaty line cooks.The show has also spurred instant demand for the delectably sloppy Italian beef sandwiches at the center of the plot’s chaos. Search interest on Google, according to Google Trends, nearly doubled after the show was released on Hulu on June 23, and Chicago-style restaurants across the country are feeling the effects in person.From left, Jeremy Allen White, Lionel Boyce and Ebon Moss-Bachrach convening in a walk-in refrigerator on “The Bear.”FX, via Associated PressMike Klaersch, the owner of the Pizza Man, a mom-and-pop Chicago joint outside Kansas City, Kan., noticed customers piling in for the sandwiches. The restaurant, he said, sold five to six times as many as it did in June.Jarret Kerr, an owner of Dog Day Afternoon, a Chicago Italian beef and hot dog restaurant in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, said he had seen at least a 50 percent increase in orders of hot Italian beef sandwiches — at $15, the most expensive item on the menu — since the show debuted. The cramped shop used to sell up to a dozen a day; the staff is now slinging 30 or more a day and selling out daily.“It’s been a godsend,” Mr. Kerr said. “Now every day we say, well, thank you to ‘The Bear,’ thank you to ‘The Bear.’”The shop was name-checked last month on “Late Night With Seth Meyers” when Mr. Meyers and the actor Mr. White, who stars as Carmy in the series, took bites of its Italian beef sandwich. (A “Late Night” intern snagged the last two sandwiches before the shop sold out for the day, Mr. Kerr said.)Goldbelly, an e-commerce company that delivers specialties like lobster rolls and gumbo from restaurants around the country, has seen a 30 percent increase in sales of Italian beef sandwiches since “The Bear” premiered, a spokeswoman for the company said. (That number could soon rise with the recent addition of the Chicago staple Al’s Beef to the site.)According to Chicagoans, a true Italian beef relies on a consistent, harmonious formula of roast beef and hot giardiniera, all atop — this is important — a Turano Baking Company French roll. Roasted peppers, for a touch of sweetness, are optional. The sandwich is then “dipped, dunked or baptized” in beef juices according to jus preference, said Henry Tibensky, a native Chicagoan and the founder and chef of Hank’s Juicy Beef, a roving Chicago hot dog and sandwich pop-up in New York City.The gloriously messy sandwich as served at Al’s Beef in Chicago.Anjali Pinto for The New York TimesAmjad Haj, an owner of two Al’s Beef locations in Chicago, hasn’t seen an increase in business, but his customers are talking about the show. “One thing I’ve heard a couple of times though is they don’t think the accent is right,” Mr. Haj said. (Staff members at three other Chicago-area restaurants we contacted hadn’t heard of “The Bear” at all.)Not even the recent heat wave that hit much of the country could slow demand. Italian beef sandwich orders have doubled over the last two weeks at Emmett’s, a Chicago-cuisine restaurant in Manhattan, said the owner, Emmett Burke.At Mr. Beef On Orleans in Chicago, where exterior scenes for “The Bear” were shot, business is booming. Joseph Zucchero, an owner who opened the shop in 1979, said he went from selling 250 to 300 Italian beefs per day pre-“Bear” to 800 daily in early July.“The week after it aired, all of a sudden, we were out of bread,” Mr. Zucchero said. Some days he keeps the shop open three to four hours past closing time to accommodate the line of customers.As for the show? “I haven’t seen it yet,” he said as a phone started to ring in the background. “I’m too busy. I’m waiting for all of the hullabaloo to calm down.”Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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      in Theater

      Chicago’s Victory Gardens Is Again Mired in Turmoil

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      The esteemed Chicago theater’s artistic director is out, and artists and his supporters are upset with the company’s board of directors.CHICAGO — Victory Gardens Theater, a vibrant fixture here since 1974, had long prided itself on being a champion of diversity while also bringing new works to its audiences. In 2001, it received the Tony Award for outstanding regional theater for its role in “contributing to the growth of theater nationally.” The theater was jolted in the wake of the social-justice movement of 2020, when its board triggered protests and the mass resignation of its affiliated playwrights by appointing its white executive director to become the artistic director as well — a decision that was not communicated with the theater’s artists. After an upheaval, the executive director resigned, along with the board president, and by the spring of 2021, Black leaders had been appointed to three key positions: Ken-Matt Martin was named artistic director, Roxanna Conner acting managing director and Charles E. Harris II president of the board.But now, a little more than two years after that rebellion, Victory Gardens Theater is in turmoil again. Last month the Victory Gardens board told the staff that Martin had been placed “on leave” — he said in a recent interview that he had been dismissed — and Conner said she would depart at the end of July.That has led to a new uproar. The playwright Erika Dickerson-Despenza denounced what she described as the board’s “white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values” in a statement announcing that she had rescinded the rights to her play “Cullud Wattah,” about the Flint, Mich., water crisis, with nine days left in its run. Actors’ Equity intervened to ensure that the performers were paid for the canceled shows, saying in a statement: “It is deeply disheartening to see an organization that has very publicly wrestled with institutional racism in recent memory again be perceived as unable to support workers of color without whom Victory Gardens Theater could neither exist nor thrive.”Three resident theater companies that present work at Victory Gardens have pledged not to work there until the artists’ complaints are addressed. And the company’s resident directors and playwrights — a new ensemble brought in by Martin — have signed a petition announcing their departures from the organization and calling for “the immediate resignation of the Victory Gardens’ board of directors.”The theater’s remaining staff members took control of the theater’s Facebook and Twitter accounts in early July to post a statement: “We, the nine remaining full-time staffers of Victory Gardens, in solidarity with the resident artists, demand the immediate resignation of the board of directors and the reinstatement of Ken-Matt Martin as artistic director.”Harris, the board president, has declined to comment on any of these matters, referring to Martin’s situation as a personnel issue and releasing a statement on the board’s behalf.Ireon Roach, left, and Renée Lockett in the Victory Gardens Theater production of “Cullud Wattah,” which the playwright pulled from the theater.Liz Lauren“The Victory Gardens Theater board is grappling with the theater’s future, as are many other nonprofit theaters,” said the statement, which expressed regret over the resignation of the playwrights and the withdrawal of “Cullud Wattah,” and pledged that the perspectives of staff members had been heard. “We are committed to acting in the theater’s best interests in all matters.”During a recent video interview, Martin said he did not know why he was dismissed. “The board informed me that I was being released from my artistic director contract at Victory Gardens with cause,” he said, reading from a statement he later posted on his personal website. “I asked twice in the meeting what was the cause and was not given any.”He said he was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement and give up all claims on future lawsuits. “I am declining the offer,” he said. “It is vitally important that I be able to speak truthfully about the needs of the artists and staff.”His removal was seen by his supporters as a betrayal, following what some saw as a lack of support for Martin and Conner. Victory Gardens has been without an executive director, the top job at the theater, since 2020, and though a search committee eventually interviewed candidates, the post remains vacant.“As somebody who has worked in the nonprofit sector for a long time and had a pretty close-up view of the relationships between boards and leadership and staffing structures, it seemed like operationally there were a lot of holes, and Ken-Matt and Roxanna were being relied on to plug all of them,” said Marisa Carr, whom Martin invited to join the playwrights’ ensemble in June 2021 and who resigned a year later. She cited creating the operating budget (a task an executive director would likely be involved in) and even cleaning the theater as duties that fell on their shoulders.Martin took the reins at Victory Gardens during the pandemic, and at a time when newly formed groups like “We See You, White American Theater,” a national coalition of theater artists, were demanding that antiracism and significant hiring of people of color become the industry standard. Martin supported such efforts, pushing for a pay equity plan at Victory Gardens.Just over a year later he has now joined a group of Black artistic leaders recently separated from the institutions they had been hired to lead. Elsewhere in Chicago, the House Theater closed its doors this summer after its new artistic director, Lanise Antoine Shelley, had presented just two shows; Jon Carr, the Second City executive producer, left his position in February after 14 months; and Regina Victor, artistic director of Sideshow Theater, resigned on July 20.Circumstances differ from case to case, and it remains unclear why Martin was let go, but some see a pattern, including Lili-Anne Brown, who directed the Victory Gardens production of “Cullud Wattah.” “Put a woman or person of color in charge but don’t support them at all and thereby push them off the glass cliff,” she said.Finances appear to be a flash point in this conflict, especially a proposed real estate deal. Victory Gardens occupies the historic Biograph Theater in Lincoln Park and also owns office space in an adjacent building. The board has been considering selling its office space so it can buy a former restaurant space located within the Biograph building with the aim of consolidating the theater’s real estate and possibly saving money over the long term. But Martin and others objected, saying that the purchase wasn’t supported by a broader plan or capital campaign, and that the money would be better used to repair the theater’s long-faulty heating and air conditioning system, among other needs.These disputes have alarmed theater professionals beyond the immediate Victory Gardens family. David Cromer, a theater director and Chicago native who is now based in New York, said he sent a concerned email to the board expressing his confusion and urging its members to resign “if you no longer wish to facilitate the creation of theater.”“Does a board owe legally an explanation for any of this?” Cromer said in a phone interview. “Probably not. But they have the stewardship of one of the foundational documents of Chicago theater, so what the hell? What answers have they presented?”The playwright Isaac Gomez, who posted the “We Resign” letter from the Victory Gardens playwrights’ ensemble and resident directors on his Medium page, said he has recruited 11 potential new board members while sending emails urging those currently serving to step down. One current member responded that the board intends to “stay the course,” Gomez said. Board members approached for this article referred all questions to Harris and the board’s statement.The board has maintained it is making decisions for the good of the theater, explaining in the statement that its members have “more than 100 years of experience with Victory Gardens, and we know well the delicate balance of managing the artistic well-being of the theater with our fiduciary responsibility.” It added: “We believe wholeheartedly in the powerful work of Victory Gardens Theater and are committed to finding a way to enable it to continue.”Could Victory Gardens survive if the board stays and Martin does not? “No,” Brown said. “I believe almost 2,000 people have signed that petition saying they won’t work there unless the board steps down and Ken-Matt is reinstated. So continue with what? Where are they even going to get the plays?”Dennis Zacek, who served as Victory Gardens’ first artistic director for 34 years, said he also is unsure about the theater’s future. “As far as I can tell, either the theater is going to be dissolved, or they’re going to have someone come to the negotiation table and find a way for these people to communicate with each other,” he said, endorsing the idea of Harris stepping down as board chairman. “It may not be enough, but come on, there must be some good people on that board. He may be a good person, too, but it’s on his watch.”David Kolen, an Actors’ Equity senior business representative who oversees contracts with Chicago theaters, said the union would support its members working in a reopened Victory Gardens Theater as long as it is “a safe and functional workplace.”As for Martin, he said that although he appreciates the unsolicited calls for him to be reinstated, he has decided “that I need to take a break from nonprofit theater administration and would not immediately return if asked.”The issue, he stressed, isn’t about him but the treatment of those who do creative work. “I am not a martyr,” Martin said. “I am not a victim. I am an artist and deserve to treated with respect.” More

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      Goodman Theater Names Susan V. Booth as Artistic Director

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      Booth, who currently leads the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, will succeed Robert Falls, who is retiring after 35 years leading the Chicago mainstay.Susan V. Booth, the artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta, has been named the next artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, a dominant force in that city’s vibrant theater scene and one of the most influential regional nonprofits in the country.Booth, 59, who will assume the position in October, will be the first woman to lead the Goodman, which was founded in 1922. She succeeds Robert Falls, who announced last September that he would be stepping down after 35 years at the helm.The Goodman, which has an annual budget of $22 million and a staff of roughly 200, won the 1992 Tony Award for excellence in regional theater. Under Falls, it staged more than 150 world or American premieres, while also helping to transform Chicago from a theater scene known primarily for actors to one recognized as a seedbed for directors with artistic visions “too massive to be contained in a storefront theater,” as Chris Jones, the theater critic for The Chicago Tribune, wrote last year.The move will be something of a homecoming for Booth, who went to graduate school at Northwestern University, directed at theaters across the city and served as the Goodman’s director of new play development from 1993 to 2001. Her husband even proposed to her on the catwalk over the Goodman’s main stage on her last day on the job.In a telephone interview, Booth said she looked forward to diving back into Chicago’s rich theater scene, which she described as marked by a muscular, democratic and “radically diverse aesthetic.”“It was always a really fluid ecosystem, where artists would bounce between punky first-year start-ups in the backs of bars to the Goodman stage,” she said. “That fluidity meant that if there was a hierarchy, it had to do with your chops. It was glorious.”Her arrival at the Goodman comes at a time of widespread turnover in leadership in Chicago theater, because of retirement and upheavals around diversity and inclusion. She said one of her first tasks would be to figure out “where Chicago is now,” both artistically and civically, to determine how best to reach the widest audiences possible.She said she also wanted to work with the theater’s artistic collective to continue the Goodman’s tradition of “treating classics as if they were new plays” and giving prominent placement to challenging new works.“I love me a classic, and I have no interest in relegating that work to other theaters,” she said. “But I love the level playing field that’s created when you produce new work.”Booth led the Alliance in Atlanta for 21 years, where she doubled the operating budget (currently $20 million) and endowment, and led it to a 2007 Tony Award for regional excellence. The theater presented more than 85 world premieres, including six musicals that later went to Broadway, including “The Prom” and “The Color Purple.”It also worked to develop relationships with young playwrights, while cultivating new voices through programs like the Spelman Leadership Fellowship, a partnership with Spelman College in Atlanta aimed at addressing the lack of diversity in theater leadership.Asked about a signature project, she cited a staging of “Native Guard,” the former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey’s poem cycle exploring both her family history and the history of Black Civil War troops, which was staged originally at the Alliance and then later at the Atlanta History Center, amid its Civil War collections.“The theatricalization of it was as much about how the audience engaged with the work as about the source narrative,” she said. “It was a community event.”It was “theater designed to catalyze dialogue, to evoke action,” she added. “That mattered to me a lot.”The Goodman’s 2022-23 season, programmed by Falls, includes the world premieres of Rebecca Gilman’s play “Swing State,” about a Wisconsin community split by political polarization (one of two productions to be directed by Falls), and Christina Anderson’s “the ripple, the wave that carried me home,” about a family fighting for the integration of a swimming pool in Kansas in the 1960s. There will also be a 30th-anniversary production of “The Who’s Tommy,” directed by Des McAnuff.As for her own programming, Booth said she wanted the Goodman to be part of the ripe political and social debates of the moment, without losing sight of the pure pleasure of theater.“I don’t know a theater community in the country that isn’t creating the odd joy-bomb,” she said. More

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      Susan Nussbaum, 68, Who Pressed for Disability Rights in Her Plays, Dies

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      In a wheelchair after being hit by a car in her 20s, she became an advocate for people with disabilities in her writing for the stage and as a novelist.Susan Nussbaum, a playwright and novelist whose work reflected her concern for the rights of people with disabilities, died on April 28 at her home in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago. She was 68.Her sister, Karen Nussbaum, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.Ms. Nussbaum began using a wheelchair after being hit by a car at age 24 and soon became an integral part of Chicago’s burgeoning disability-rights scene.Incensed by a lack of accessibility in the city for theater people with disabilities, she wrote her own plays, starring herself and other disabled actors.“If the dominant culture was saturated with backward concepts of who we were, I would answer back with my own collection of disabled characters,” she wrote in a 2012 essay published in The Huffington Post.Ms. Nussbaum began her playwriting career with “Staring Back,” which was performed on the Second City’s E.T.C. stage in 1983. She then collaborated with Mike Ervin, a disability activist who writes a column for Progressive.org, on a series of satirical sketches about disability. Titled “The Plucky and Spunky Show,” it was presented at the Remains Theater.The first reading of her acerbic comic play “Mishuganismo” was in 1992 in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune, in an article about that reading, called it “a mad-sad-glad whirl of politics, activism, love, need, sex and other items.”Directed by her father, Mike Nussbaum, an actor, and based on her own letters, the play took its title from a term that one of Ms. Nussbaum’s friends coined, meaning “a syndrome when a Jewish woman goes crazy for a Latin guy.” The play was later published in the 1997 anthology “Staring Back: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out.”Her last major play, “No One as Nasty,” which documented the relationship between a disabled woman and her paid caretaker, was performed in 2000 at the Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago.As a member of the Chicago-based disability rights organization Access Living, Ms. Nussbaum campaigned to make theaters more accessible to wheelchair users and participated in other protests, including efforts to make public transit in the city accessible.After decades of work in theater, she turned to fiction. Her novel “Good Kings Bad Kings,” which follows workers and residents in a Chicago care institution for people with disabilities, earned acclaim for its candor and sensitivity and won the 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.The book’s title came from reporting in The New York Times about Jonathan Carey, an autistic boy who was killed by an employee of the Oswald D. Heck Developmental Center, near Albany, where Jonathan was living. “I could be a good king or a bad king,” the man told the boy as he asphyxiated him, according to court documents.That line stuck with Ms. Nussbaum, she said in a 2013 interview with the website Bitch Media. “It became the title because it reminded me how, when it comes to kids, the adults have all the power. And when the adult in question has no emotional connection to the child, and the child’s welfare is turned over to that adult — as is the case in institutions — terrible things can happen.”She continued: “The disabled characters we’re presented with usually fit one or more of the following stereotypes: victim, villain, saint, monster. The fate of the disabled character is usually miraculous cure, death or institutionalization.”In writing the novel, as in her other work, Ms. Nussbaum said, “It was really important to me to give disabled characters — more than one — their own voices, and the agency to represent themselves and their own perspective on what happens.”Susan Ruth Nussbaum was born on Dec. 2, 1953, in Chicago to Mike and Annette (Brenner) Nussbaum. Her mother worked in public relations. She grew up in Highland Park, a suburb of Chicago, and attended Highland Park High School, graduating in 1972.Interested in theater from a young age after running lines with her father, she began writing plays in high school. After graduating, she took drama classes at the Goodman School of Drama (now The Theatre School at DePaul University) in Chicago.She was on her way to an acting class when she was struck by a car. She spent seven months in the hospital.She then navigated through life as a wheelchair user, becoming angry at the lack of accessibility. At one job, as she recounted in a 2013 Psychology Today article, the workplace did not have accessible bathrooms. Finding no ramps on public transportation, she and other wheelchair users began taking an ambulance to and from work. These experiences galvanized her to join Access Living and begin writing plays.Her activism extended outside Chicago as well. A longtime leftist, Ms. Nussbaum visited Nicaragua and Cuba as a member of coalitions on disability rights. Later in life she founded Empowered Fe Fes, a Chicago organization for disabled young women seeking to explore their sexuality.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her father; a brother, Jacob Nussbaum; and a daughter, Taina Rodriguez. More