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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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      in Theater

      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

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      The Jussie Smollett Case Is Probably Far From Over, Analysts Say

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      The Illinois appellate court that ordered Mr. Smollett’s release from jail often takes months, even years, to rule on cases, according to experts.After serving six days of a five-month sentence, Jussie Smollett walked out of Cook County Jail on Wednesday night, flanked by supporters who shepherded him into the back seat of an SUV.Whether or not Mr. Smollett is forced to return to the jail in Chicago to complete his sentence is a question that is not likely to be answered for months — and possibly years.The appellate court in Illinois, which ordered Mr. Smollett’s release, is not built for speed, and it was the anticipated delay in hearing his appeal that led the court order that Mr. Smollett should be free while it deliberates whether he was wrongly convicted of staging a fake hate crime. Several experts said proceedings of all sorts at the court typically take about a year or two years.“This court will be unable to dispose of the instant appeal before the defendant would have served his entire sentence of incarceration,” according to the court’s order, which was signed by two of three justices on the panel.Legal experts in Illinois differed on how common it is for defendants to be released on appeal when they had been ordered to serve relatively short jail sentences and their offenses were nonviolent, such as Mr. Smollett’s.“Let’s say they reverse his conviction — he just did the 150 days for nothing,” said Gal Pissetzky, a criminal defense lawyer with experience on appellate cases.The appeals process tends to drag on because of the time it takes the court to prepare voluminous transcripts from the trial and from pretrial proceedings and requests to delay proceedings.There is also typically a backlog of cases waiting to be heard. In 2020, more than 3,300 cases were pending with the First District appellate court in Illinois, where Mr. Smollett’s case was assigned.“There are a lot of cases — it’s always been that way,” said Joseph Lopez, a criminal defense attorney who has represented high-profile defendants like Drew Peterson, who was convicted of murdering his third wife. “And because he’s not in custody, they’re not going to be in a hurry to get to it.”But experts said Mr. Smollett’s case could proceed faster than normal because it is so high profile and the special prosecutor handling the case, Dan K. Webb, is from a private law firm that is better equipped than a state prosecutor’s office to focus on a specific case and make the sort of timely filings that would accelerate a decision.Dan K. Webb, the special prosecutor in the Smollett case, after the sentencing last week.Anthony Vazquez/Chicago Sun-Times, via Associated PressThe defense’s efforts to secure Mr. Smollett’s release began immediately after Judge James Linn handed down the sentence last week in a blistering takedown of the actor that accused him of potentially undermining the credibility of true hate crime victims.Though the defense asked for an immediate suspension of the sentence pending appeal, Judge Linn swiftly denied their request, citing what he characterized as the seriousness of Mr. Smollett’s offense — staging a hoax in which two men lightly assaulted him while yelling racist and homophobic slurs.“The wheels of justice turn slowly, and sometimes the hammer of justice has to fall,” Judge Linn said in the courtroom. “And it’s falling right here, right now.”Nenye Uche, Mr. Smollett’s lead lawyer, then quickly brought the matter to the higher court, the First District Appellate Court in Illinois, and Mr. Webb’s legal team argued against Mr. Smollett’s release, writing in court papers that according to the defense’s logic, every defendant who received a relatively short sentence would be released pending appeal and that the defense was taking “advantage” of Judge Linn’s lenient jail sentence.Ultimately, judges have the discretion to decide these matters on a case-by-case basis. Experts say it is common for defendants to serve their entire sentence of incarceration before their appeal is resolved, something that critics often condemn as particularly unfair if the appellate court ends up overturning the trial court’s decision.The Smollett case has already stretched on for more than three years, starting in January 2019, when Mr. Smollett reported to the police that two men had attacked him, hurled the slurs at him and placed a rope around his neck like a noose.Two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, testified during the trial last year that Mr. Smollett had asked them to carry out the attack and instructed them in detail on how to do it. The defense argued that the brothers were lying and seeking to protect themselves from prosecution.Judge Linn said at the sentencing hearing that Mr. Smollett’s decision to maintain his innocence on the stand was an aggravating factor that led him to hand down a sentence that included jail time, more than two years of probation, a $25,000 fine and more than $120,000 of restitution for the Chicago Police Department’s investigatory efforts. The defense argued that Mr. Smollett should not be incarcerated because his offense was the kind of low-level, nonviolent felony that often results in sentences of probation or community service.The defense’s appeal will draw from many stages of the case’s long life, from its objection to the second indictment of Mr. Smollett after the state’s attorney’s office dropped the charges against him in 2019 to the way Judge Linn handled jury selection.Two key arguments the defense is expected to make are that the appointment of a special prosecutor to reassess the case was never valid and that Mr. Smollett was subjected to double jeopardy because he surrendered his $10,000 bond and performed some community service in 2019.Mr. Webb’s office has argued in the past that it was well within the court’s authority to appoint a special prosecutor and that Mr. Smollett was not subjected to double jeopardy because the original case had been dismissed.“We’re very much looking forward to having a nonpolitical discourse with them that is intellectual, that’s understanding of the laws,” Heather Widell, one of Mr. Smollett’s lawyers, said of the appellate court at a news conference on Wednesday night.Mr. Uche said at the news conference that when he told Mr. Smollett about the court’s decision to free him for now, the actor pressed his hands up against the glass separating him and his lawyer in jail, and said, “I nearly lost hope in our constitutional system.”Mr. Uche has said that decision“says a lot about what the appellate court thinks of this case,” but, in the court’s brief order, the justices made no mention of whether they had considered the merits of the appeal in making their ruling. 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      Jussie Smollett, Once an ‘Empire’ Star, Is Now in the Cook County Jail

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      On Thursday evening, Mr. Smollett began serving a five-month sentence for falsely reporting a hate crime, a conviction he plans to appeal.It was an extraordinary ending to an unusual hearing.Jussie Smollett, sentenced to five months in a Chicago jail, stood up, defiantly declared his innocence and repeatedly warned the room that he was not suicidal and, if anything should befall him while incarcerated, it would not be his own doing.Then, with his right fist raised, Mr. Smollett was led off to become likely the most famous of the 6,000 inmates at the Cook County Jail.The jail primarily houses defendants awaiting trial, but also convicts serving shorter sentences, like Mr. Smollett, 39, who was booked into Division 8, a facility that is used to administer medical and mental health treatment, as well as house inmates who require protective custody.Mr. Smollett has a private cell, which is monitored by security cameras and an officer stationed at the entrance, according to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. He will be allowed “substantial time” outside of his cell to talk on the phone, watch television and interact with staff members in common areas, but only when other detainees are not present, the office said.Judge James B. Linn, who presided over the trial at which the actor was convicted of falsely reporting a hate crime, had ordered that Mr. Smollett serve his jail term under protective custody.Mr. Smollett’s lawyer Nenye Uche had said after Thursday’s hearing that his client was vulnerable and deserved special protective measures. “All you need to do is log onto various media, social media, to see some of the nasty things said about him,” Mr. Uche said. “Of course someone like that should be in protective custody.”Supporters have said the actor is particularly vulnerable to being targeted because he is a gay man and a recognizable celebrity.Understand the Jussie Smollett CaseThe actor Jussie Smollett was found guilty in December of falsely reporting that he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic assault in 2019.Timeline: The case began with the actor’s police report and led to a trial in which he was accused of staging the attack himself.Smollett’s Testimony: Mr. Smollett was self-deprecating and animated as he sought to convince a Chicago jury he was the victim of a real attack.What the Evidence Shows: Explore some of the documents and security camera footage related to the case.His Sentence: The actor was sentenced to five months in jail on March 10. His supporters had made impassioned pleas for leniency ahead of the sentencing hearing.In arguing for leniency at the hearing, Mr. Smollett’s lawyers had emphasized evidence of Mr. Smollett’s good character and said they supported his contention of innocence, urging he be given a new trial or, at the least, probation. They did not mention in their arguments a concern about the specific realities of incarceration at the Chicago jail, which some social justice advocates have described as having a “culture of brutality and violence” in the highest security units.Mr. Smollett’s unit is not among those cited.Criminal defense experts said they thought the jail would likely do everything it could to isolate Mr. Smollett from other prisoners, considering his fame and potential to disrupt day-to-day activities there, which for many inmates include communal meals in the commissary.“They’re going to put him wherever they would have the least amount of disruptions to the rest of the facility,” said Steve Greenberg, a defense attorney in Chicago who represents the singer R. Kelly against sex crime charges in Illinois. Mr. Kelly was once held in the division where Mr. Smollett resides.Mr. Smollett’s lawyers had asked the judge to defer Mr. Smollett’s sentence until after they have appealed his conviction. But Judge Linn swiftly denied their request. In addition to the jail time, Mr. Smollett was sentenced to more than two years of probation, plus a fine of $25,000 and restitution of more than $120,000 to offset the city’s cost in investigating the case.The maximum sentence allowed for the offense for which Mr. Smollett was charged, felony disorderly conduct, is three years in prison, but many of those convicted are given probation. Judge Linn cited several factors, including Mr. Smollett’s testimony on the witness stand, which the judge described as “pure perjury,” in explaining why he ordered some jail time.Sam Mendenhall, a prosecutor on the case, said on Friday that he believed Mr. Smollett would not have the option of reducing his jail time for good behavior because Judge Linn ordered it as a condition of probation.Mr. Smollett in a photo taken after he was incarcerated Thursday. He was sentenced to five months at the Cook County jail. Cook County Sheriff’s Office, via Associated PressThe Cook County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on Thursday that Mr. Smollett would receive a “comprehensive medical, mental health and security assessment.” Mr. Smollett’s sentencing hearing at Leighton Criminal Courthouse was unusual in its length — about five hours — and its intensity, with the defense, the prosecution and even the judge making impassioned speeches about the case.Mr. Smollett’s supporters, including his 92-year-old grandmother and his former boss at a nonprofit organization, made glowing remarks about his commitment to social justice as they pleaded for leniency.In his own extensive remarks, Judge Linn took another tack, sharply condemning Mr. Smollett as a narcissistic attention seeker who wasted precious police hours with his “stunt” and made it more difficult for real hate crime victims to be taken seriously.“Your very name has become an adverb for lying,” Judge Linn said. “And I cannot imagine what could be worse than that.”Mr. Uche later said he was “offended” by the remarks, and outside the courtroom, one of Mr. Smollett’s brothers, Jocqui Smollett, sharply criticized the judge.“He chastised my brother,” Mr. Smollett said. “He does not deserve this. He was attacked.”Cook County Jail has drawn criticism for conditions in some of its units, but Mr. Smollett will be held in protective custody by order of the judge who sentenced him. Kamil Krzaczynski/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe police believed initially that Mr. Smollett, best known for starring in the music-industry drama “Empire,” had been the victim of a hate crime when he reported on Jan. 29, 2019, that he had been attacked by two men who hurled racist and homophobic slurs at him, put a rope around his neck like a noose and shouted “this is MAGA country.” But prosecutors presented evidence that Mr. Smollett had orchestrated the hoax himself, including testimony from two brothers, Abimbola Osundairo and Olabinjo Osundairo, who said they had mildly assaulted Mr. Smollett according to his directions.The defense had argued that the brothers carried out the attack to scare Mr. Smollett into hiring them as his security detail. Mr. Smollett’s appeal is likely to follow the arguments raised by his lawyers Thursday, in which they cited what they described as errors by the judge and the prosecutors, and suggested Mr. Smollett’s case had already been adjudicated once and he could not be punished twice — a violation of the legal concept of double jeopardy.In 2019, when prosecutors dropped the original charges, Mr. Smollett did some community service and surrendered his $10,000 bond payment, punishment that seemed insufficient to some critics.Kim Foxx, the state’s attorney whose office negotiated that initial outcome, sharply criticized the prosecutors who handled the second indictment in an op-ed for The Chicago Sun-Times on Thursday, calling it a “kangaroo prosecution” and “mob justice.” (After an investigation of Ms. Foxx’s office, Daniel K. Webb, the special prosecutor who handled the case, found the office had abused its discretion, but did not violate the law, in deciding to drop the charges.)Lori Lightfoot, the mayor of Chicago, struck a very different tone, saying in a statement that the city had been “vindicated” by the judge’s sentence.Mr. Webb said after the sentencing that he was struck by the extent to which Mr. Smollett was unwilling to express any remorse for the damage he had done.“Again today,” he said, “after he’s been convicted by a jury of five felony counts, after he heard a judge today excoriate his conduct as being reprehensible, he still stood up in the courtroom and insisted that he’s not going to ever admit or accept any responsibility for what he did.” More