01 May 23
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The first rich boy’s name was James. He was raped by his grandfather. He was raped by his uncles. He was beaten by his father. My mother told me the stories much later. When James was 6, he was taken away from his father and given to a rich couple, Arthur and Evelyn. Arthur and Evelyn were best friends with my parents, Tom and Betty. One day my parents gave a party. Everyone brought their kids. Arthur and Evelyn drove up from Indianapolis with James to the redbrick schoolhouse where we lived, deep in the hills north of Fort Wayne. As the parents drank cocktails in our big yard with the scent of the blooming wads of cash infusing every inch of Indiana just after WWII, the kids played up on the hill beside the schoolhouse.
James was 7 and a half or 8, a bloodthirsty, beautiful, relentless boy. He ordered everyone around, even the older kids. To me he said, “I’m going to shove this up you again.”
We’d played this game before. Our families had gone on a camping trip to Pokagon State Park, and I learned that an object could be shoved up the place where I tinkled. I don’t remember now what it was, probably a stick, or maybe a rock. It felt like being cut with a knife. I remember I bled.
“I don’t want to,” I said.
We were standing on the hill. James looked at me with his feral gray eyes.
He wadded up a piece of fabric — it was a light blue-violet shade and looked fluffy, like a bunched-up hairnet.
“Put this in your underpants,” he said.
He pulled up my dress and crammed the balled-up material down my pants. Late at night, when the guests had gone home, I took off my dress, pulled down my pants. And there it still was, the wadded-up thing.
James and I played so many ferocious games while camping that summer: hooking each other with fishhooks, holding each other underwater, tying each other up, shooting each other with cap guns, chasing each other with garter snakes, dumping hot embers on each other’s heads. I am not putting him on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List — whether he belongs there is for him to decide. It is his uncles, his father, his grandfather who belong on such a list.
Now, about this Most Hideous Men of My Life List: It is a list of the 21 most revolting scoundrels I have ever met. I started it in October 2017, the day Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Harvey Weinstein bombshells in the New York Times. As the riotous, sickening stories of #MeToo surged across the country, I, like many women, could not help but be reminded of certain men in my own life. When I began, I was not sure which among all the foul harassers, molesters, traducers, swindlers, stranglers, and no-goods I’ve known were going to make the final accounting. I considered Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, and the giant dingleberry Charlie Rose, all guys whose TV shows I was on many times and who made headlines during the rise of #MeToo. But in the end, they do not make my Hideous List.
Hunter S. Thompson … now, there’s a good candidate. I know. I wrote his biography. Does Hunter, the greatest degenerate of his generation, who kept yelling, “Off with your pants!” as he sliced the leggings from my body with a long knife in his hot tub, make the list? Naw.
And if having my pants hacked off by a man lit to the eyebrows with acid, Chivas Regal, Champagne, grass, Chartreuse, Dunhills, cocaine, and Dove Bars does not make the list — because to me there is a big difference between an “adventure” and an “attack” — who, in God’s name, does make my Hideous List?
After almost two years of drawing and redrawing my list, I’ve come to realize that, though my hideosity bar is high, my criteria are a little cockeyed. It is a gut call. I am like Justice Potter Stewart. I just know a hideous man when I see one. And I have seen plenty. For 26 years, I have been writing the “Ask E. Jean” column in Elle, and for 26 years, no matter what problems are driving women crazy — their careers, wardrobes, love affairs, children, orgasms, finances — there comes a line in almost every letter when the cause of the correspondent’s quagmire is revealed. And that cause is men.
Viz.: the man who thinks 30 seconds of foreplay is “enough,” the man who cheats on his wife, the man who passes women over for promotion, the man who steals his girlfriend’s credit cards, the man who keeps 19 guns in the basement, the man who tells his co-worker she “talks too much in meetings,” the man who won’t bathe, the man who beats his girlfriend’s dog, the man who takes his female colleagues’ ideas, the man who tries to kill his rich wife by putting poison in her shampoo. Every woman, whether consciously or not, has a catalogue of the hideous men she’s known.
As it turns out, a Hideous Man marks practically every stage of my life. And so, Reader, from this cavalcade of 21 assholes, I am selecting a few choice specimens. One or two may not be pleasant for you to read about, I apologize. But if we all just lean over and put our heads between our knees, the fainting feeling will pass. No one need be carried from the room.
When I entered Indiana University, I was the most boy-crazy 17-year-old in the nation.
If you’d met me my freshman year, you would never have imagined I was born to be an advice columnist. But imagine it now. Thirteen miles from the Bloomington campus, there I am: young Jeanie Carroll, driving with a boy down a hilly back road in Brown County State Park, where IU students go on October Sundays to supposedly look at the famous leaves.
My situation in life — my father being a Beta Theta Pi from Wabash College, my mother being a Kappa Delta from UCLA, my wild wish to pledge either Pi Beta Phi or Kappa Kappa Gamma, my rah-rah disposition, my total ignorance of what is going on in the world, the fact that I never crack a book — all are equally against my becoming a columnist, the first requirement of which is acknowledging that there are other beings on the planet besides boys.
How I end up in that car, who the boy is … well, I don’t remember. I’ve been looking through my 1961 datebook, and each day is so chock-full of the names of boys who called me, the names of boys whom I expected to call me and didn’t, the names of boys who did call me but I didn’t care if they called me, the names of boys who if they didn’t call me I was never going to speak to again, the names of boys who if they called me I would not pick up the phone, and the names of boys I would have my roommate, Connie, call and ask if they called me while she was on the line with a boy who was begging me to call him back, I can’t figure out who this boy is. But meet No. 1 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List.
He belongs to that class of boys who are not athletes and so must make their mark on campus with their devastating looks or gobs of money. I don’t remember this boy having either. I remember this boy’s thing is his car. It is a stick shift. Nobody knows how to “drive a stick,” he says, except him and A. J. Foyt, the Indianapolis 500 winner, and so I am amazed when he releases the clutch like he’s stepping on a yellow-jacket nest and grinds the gears when he pulls over in the dirt and stops.
I look around. “I gotta get back to the dorm,” I say.
He turns off the engine.
“Youuuuuuuu liiiitttttttttllllllllllll prrrrrrrrrrrrik teeeeeeeeeeez,” he says. This opening compliment, “You little prick tease,” is paid to every girl at some point or other in 1961, and I don’t wait to be paid another. I open the car door and slide out.
What am I wearing? Tennis shoes, jeans, big sweatshirt, and — blam, he lunges from the car and bolts his arms around me. We crash, like felled trees, to the ground.
We land in grass covered in yellow leaves. Thanks to Mr. Weber, my high-school biology teacher, I can, with 100 percent confidence, say those yellow leaves are poplar leaves. They crackle as I struggle to get up.
Straddling me, the boy looks zonked out of his mind with the possibilities. He pushes my sweatshirt up to my neck.
I remember the thought flashes through my mind that could I have foreseen the circumstance of a boy throwing me down and pushing my sweatshirt up to my chin, I would not have worn a padded bra. A padded bra makes a girl look like she lacks something.
“I don’t want to wrestle,” I say. “Get off!”
He pins my arms over my head by my wrists.
“Get off!” I say again.
He is holding my wrists with both his hands, and, before I can react, he changes his hold to one hand and, with his free hand, pulls a knife out of his back pocket.
“See this?” he whispers.
I look at it. At the time, I own two Girl Scout knives, a Girl Scout knife-safety certificate, and my own personal hatchet, and the neighbor kids believe I have reached a height of felicity rarely attained on Illsley Place, our street, because of my winning 30 rounds of mumblety-peg, a game where we throw pocketknives at each other’s bare feet. So, yes, I can “see” his knife. It’s a jackknife, a knife with a folding blade, dark brownish-gray, made out of some kind of horn, about five or six inches. If he opens it, it will measure, end to end, 10 or 11 inches. It’s not the knife. Well, it is the knife, but it’s the look on his face that scares me.
“Get off,” I say.
He pushes my bra up over my breasts. I can smell his excitement; it’s like electrified butter, and I zero in on the fact that he must use two hands to open the knife.
“Get off!” I say.
“I am gonna get off,” he whispers.
He lets go of both of my wrists for two seconds to open the knife, and I roll out from under him and run.
I was voted Best Girl Athlete in high school, but I was a high jumper, not a runner. I outrun this boy nonetheless. And on a twisty back road through tangled orange-and-scarlet thickets, a young couple in a car pick me up about a quarter-hour after I escape. The girl says, “I’ll bet a boy tried something with you,” and I say, “Yeah,” and that is the last word I utter about the attack until now.
Had I been an artist, I could have carried the front seat of the car the boy was driving wherever I went on Indiana University’s campus to protest his assault like Emma Sulkowicz carrying her mattress around Columbia University in the greatest art show of 2014, but I didn’t think of it. Perhaps hauling around just the gearshift would have sufficed. But, like many women who are attacked, when I had the most to say, I said the least.
Let’s just double-check my diary: Do I write that I went to the campus police and reported the boy? Do I say I went to the university health clinic and talked with a therapist? No. I say:
BE IT KNOWN—
That from this day forth I will not except [sic] or go on any dates that are not of my choice — they must be boys who are to my liking [I can’t read what I crossed out here]. I have to [sic] many things to do — rather than waste my time with CREEPY BOYS.
(signed) Jeanie Carroll
After college and bumming around Africa, I arrive in Chicago, ready to start my so-called career. I meet one of those semi-good-looking, brown-haired, unimpeachably but forgettably dressed young men who are vice-presidents because their fathers own the company, in this case an employment agency–and–accounting firm–type thing, which, despite the gloss of its golden promise, no longer exists.
He hires me to help “land new accounts.”
“You start tonight,” he says.
“Great!” I say.
“We’re meeting the people from Marshall Field’s. Be at the Pump Room at eight o’clock.”
“Wow!” I say. “The Pump Room!”
Congo-green paisley taffeta dinner suit, whisk-broom eyelashes, Rorschach-inkblot eye shadow, stacked heels, Marquis de Sade hair bow, and skirt up to here, I arrive in the Pump Room. I remember lots of white linen. Sparkling silver. The maître d’ escorts me to a booth, where No. 13 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List rises to greet me and says, “They canceled.”
“Oh dear,” I reply.
“Never mind,” he says. “Sit down.”
He orders drinks, an extra glass of ice, tells me in detail about the new suit he is wearing, and then says, surprised, “Oh damn! My ex-wife just walked in.”
My false eyelashes spring open like parasols.
A smashingly put-together woman with a flamboyant mane of rich red hair is being escorted with an older chap (he is probably all of 35) to a table across the room. When they are seated, my boss raises his glass to her. She nods and raises one eyebrow at him.
“She’s a cunt,” he says.
Ten minutes later, an odd thing happens. My boss’s ex-wife takes her chap’s hand and raises it to her lips. A moment later, my boss takes my hand and raises it to his lips.
I jerk my hand away.
“Just a welcome smooch,” he says. “Don’t be bourgeois.”
He orders another drink. Across the room, my boss’s ex-wife glances at us and puts her two very, very red open lips on her chap’s cheek and — well, there is no verb available — squishes her lips up and down and sorta rolls them around his face like she is the press-and-steam girl at a dry cleaner.
After she concludes, my boss picks up the glass filled with ice, globs in a mouthful, crunches it for a few seconds, and then plants his freezing lips and tongue on my face.
I nearly fly out of the booth.
“GET OFF!” I cry. “Ewwwwwww!”
“You’re soooo booooooozzzzshwaaaaahh,” says my boss.
“Keep it in your mouth, mister!” I say. “Where’s the waiter? I need more bread and butter!”
I am not a foodie. Give me a three-cheese foot-long with a mound of red onions on it or a couple of Amy’s organic black-bean burritos and I’m happy. But wild, half-witted, greener-than-green Jeanie Carroll, 50 years before #MeToo, 40 years before women even begin expecting things could be different Jeanie Carroll, who takes her licks and doesn’t look back, is not about to pass up a dinner in the goddamn Pump Room!
I have the filet mignon. (One of the last times I ever eat meat, so disgusting is this night.)
My boss? He orders another drink and becomes more and more excited, slobbering on my hand like a Doberman playing with his squeaky toy, and meanwhile my boss’s ex-wife — who I now, half a century later, suspect was actually his wife and this was a little game they played to spice things up — starts rubbing her chap’s leg.
My boss and I can’t really see her doing it, as the table linen hangs nearly to the floor, but it is clear from the feverish action of her upper body that she is rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, and when her chap’s eyes close, she goes on rubbing until, with his face still smeared with lipstick and looking like a sophomore standing on the free-throw line in a tied game, the chap stands up, heaves a wad of cash on the table, grabs the wife, and they scamper toward the exit. My boss asks for the check.
My Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight room in the old Hotel Eastgate on Ontario Street no longer exists. But at the time, it is only a dozen or so blocks away, and my boss insists on driving me home. It is my first ride in a Mercedes. I am surprised at how uncomfortable the stiff leather seats are. Two or three blocks from my place, my boss runs a red light, stomps the brakes, skids to a halt, and, jabbering about “that cunt” or “a cunt” or “all cunts,” jams his hand between my legs so hard I bang my head into the dashboard trying to protect myself. I open the car door and bound into the traffic.
My boss must be doing the following things: pulling over, getting out, etc., because as I am about to turn in to the Hotel Eastgate, I look back and see him weaving toward me in a drunken trot. I remember that his legs look menacingly short. I run into the empty hotel lobby. Spurt past the desk. No manager in sight. Check the elevators. Decide to take the stairs two at a time. Hit the second floor. Feeling for the room key in my jacket pocket, I run down the hall, and as I try to put the key in the door, my boss catches me from behind and clamps his teeth on the nape of my neck. I kick backward at his shins, manage to get the key to work, jab a backward elbow into his ribs, squeeze into my room, and push, push, push the door closed.
Have you ever shut a dog outside who wants to come in? My boss scratches and whimpers at that door for the next quarter of an hour. The next day, I get a new job — and never has my lack of all talent been put to better advantage — as a greeter-and-seater at Gino’s East, the Chicago pizza joint beloved by mob guys, journos, and TV glamorosi, and do not so much as call No. 13 to tell him I quit.
Do I attract hideous men? Possibly. But I’ve also encountered many creeps, villains, dickwads,and chumps simply because I’ve been around a long time. I was mostly single, free of encumbrances, and working in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when a woman could scarcely walk down the street without getting hit on or take a job without being underpaid.
So … we may proceed to No. 15 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: Les Moonves, chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of the CBS Corporation.
This happens in the time — one of the happiest of my happy life — when I am booming around the country writing for Esquire. I have been interviewing Moonves in the lounge of the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills for a story (presciently titled by my editor “Dangerous Minds,” February 1997), and the short, gravel-voiced Moonves apparently takes one look at me — a 50-something journalist in a pair of old brown-and-beige oxfords — and his life is no longer his own.
After the interview is finished (and for a man like Moonves, talking about himself for an hour and a half is as good as downing two gallons of Spanish fly), he follows me to the elevator. When I turn to say good-bye, he says: “You’re smart.”
I say: “Thank you!”
He says: “Smart enough to choose an out-of-the-way hotel,” and he steps into the elevator behind me and, his pants bursting with demands, goes at me like an octopus. I don’t know how many apertures and openings you possess, Reader, but Moonves, with his arms squirming and poking and goosing and scooping and pricking and prodding and jabbing, is looking for fissures I don’t even know I own, and — by God! — I am not certain that even if I pull off one of his arms it won’t crawl after me and attack me in my hotel bed. Hell, I am thrilled I escape before he expels his ink.
Naturally, I do not mention this in the article. I am a member of the Silent Generation. We do not flap our gums. We laugh it off and get on with life. (Moonves, for his part, told New York he “emphatically denies” the incident occurred.)
By now, Silent Generation aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed by all this horrible crap? Well, I am shallower than most people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for myself. I do not try to control everything. But mainly, I think it is because I have done the thing no Indiana University football team has ever done in history — I have won a national championship: Miss Cheerleader USA. And they fly me to Washington, D.C., to meet President Lyndon Johnson in the Rose Garden. My photo (in a swimsuit!) plays on front pages across the nation. I get a big scholarship and appear on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth.
This championship is, in fact, so important to the Indiana athletic department that they put me on billboards all over the state of Indiana — giant images of an ecstatic Jeanie escaped from her bottle, soaring above the stunned crowd in the Indiana University football stadium, a big i on my crimson sweater, cheerleading skirt aswirl, legs split like the atom.
And, well, I’ve never really come down … have I?
I’m up there, perpetually, eternally, forever in mid-leap, urging the crowd to never lose hope. I was a cheerleader in grade school. I was a cheerleader in high school. My sisters, Cande and Barbie, were cheerleaders; my brother, Tom, was a pole vaulter, so he jumped too. Today I open a letter for my column, I read the question, and what do I do? I start shouting and yelling and cheering at the correspondent to pick herself up and go on. And, by God! The correspondent does pick herself up and does go on! Because if she doesn’t, I keep yelling at her. And every now and then I shout at myself, “Get the hell up, E. Jean! You half-wit! My God! Get on with it!”
And many women my age just “get on with it” too. It is how we handle things: Chin up! Stop griping! We do not cast ourselves as victims because we do not see ourselves as victims. While the strategy has worked for me, I wish I hadn’t waited so long to say something about two of my Hideous Men.
Beauty contests are such a rage when I am growing up that my camp — a Girl Scout camp! — holds yearly pageants. So it happens that the first beauty contest I am nominated for is Miss Camp Ella J. Logan. (Later I’ll win Miss Indiana University, no doubt due to my “talent”: I take to the stage dressed as Edith Sitwell and perform a dramatic reading of Dick and Jane.)
There is no talent portion at camp, alas. We contestants walk up and down the dock; the judges, who’ve roared across the lake in a magnificent Chris-Craft and who are now seated in deck chairs, call my name.
I walk over and whisper: “What?”
They whisper: “You are Miss Camp Ella J. Logan.”
After they put the papier-mâché crown on my head, the cape on my shoulders, and give me the baton covered in Reynolds Wrap, Old Cam, No. 6 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List, the waterfront director, takes me out in a boat and runs his hands under my shirt and up my shorts. He is breathing and moving his hand slowly and hotly, and I fight no battles in my head. My mind goes white. This is Cam. This is the man who has watched me grow from an 8-year-old Brownie Scout, and his notice is an honor. This is Cam, who teaches me to swim and dive and awards me the coveted White Cap! This is Cam, who continues to run his hand inside my shorts and under my blouse — even in the dining room during dinner, under the table, squeezing my thighs, shoving his fingers — saying, “You’re my girl. You’re my girl. You’re my girl,” and making me Girl Scout–promise “not to tell anyone.”
He does this until I go home. I am 12.
My friends will be stunned to read this. My sisters and brother will be speechless. But Aly Raisman, the great Olympian gymnast, and the more than 150 young women who spoke out in court about Lawrence Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor, will not be shocked. Nassar abused some of the young women in front of their own mothers. Nobody saw it.
And old Cam? He writes a book called The Girl Scout Man. It is listed in “rather remarkable” condition, though there is some “light foxing and some very modest yellowing of the pages,” on Abe Books, the rare-books dealer. Here is a shortened version of its description:
“This loving homage to Girl Scouting is a record of many of the experiences and incidents and occurrences spanning the over twenty-five years of dedicated service of Cam Parks, done mostly at Camp Ella J. Logan, near Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the shore of Dewart Lake. If you, Reader, are an alumnus of Logan … memories of time spent at this camp may well be sweeping over you right now.”
No thank you.
As a Scout, I returned to Camp Ella J. Logan year after year, becoming tall and womanly, receiving letters from boys with swak written on the backs of the envelopes, going on weeklong canoe trips, and completing my counselor-in-training program.
Cam I avoided. Never once did I speak to him or look at him again, but my brain does not avoid him. He and his maroon swim trunks may have been dead these last 40 years, but old Cam and the boat are the events — of all the events in my life — that somehow swim constantly back into my head. And it’s Cam who, when he dies at the age of 72 and the story starts going around that he was “suddenly dismissed” from coaching, causes me the most pain.
I could have spoken up! Maybe not when I was 12. But when I was 25. He died when I was 34. I might have stopped him.
Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said: “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.
His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.
This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).
Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”
And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”
I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.
“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”
“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”
“A girl,” he says.
“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.
“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.
As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”
“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.
“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”
I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.
“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”
What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.
“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.
“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.
“I’m 52,” I tell him.
“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.
I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.
There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”
“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”
“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.
“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.
“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”
“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.
“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”
This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!
There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:
Did I report it to the police?
No.
Did I tell anyone about it?
Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.
“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”
My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)
Do I have photos or any visual evidence?
Bergdorf’s security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th Street entrance of the store. We would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags-and-hats sections. Cameras also must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department. New York law at the time did not explicitly prohibit security cameras in dressing rooms to “prevent theft.” But even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be very difficult to see the man unzipping his pants, because he was wearing a topcoat. The struggle might simply have read as “sexy.” The speculation is moot, anyway: The department store has confirmed that it no longer has tapes from that time.
Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?
Bergdorf Goodman’s perfections are so well known — it is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh — that it is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that, for a very brief period, there was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. Inconceivable is the word. Sometimes a person won’t find a sales attendant in Saks, it’s true; sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or even Tiffany’s; but 99 percent of the time, you will have an attendant in Bergdorf’s. All I can say is I did not, in this fleeting episode, see an attendant. And the other odd thing is that a dressing-room door was open. In Bergdorf’s dressing rooms, doors are usually locked until a client wants to try something on.
Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?
Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.
So now I will tell you what happened:
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.
And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.
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Rasheem Carter. (photo: Laurel Police Department)
National civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing the family, announced that the demonstration would take place in Taylorsville, Mississippi.
Carter's mother — who is from nearby Fayette — reported her son missing in October 2022 shortly after he called and said a group of white men in trucks had been harassing him, Insider previously reported.
A month later, police found his remains in a wooded area near Taylorsville.
Officials at the time said they believed that no "foul play was involved" but that the incident was still under investigation. Crump previously said that Carter's head was "severed" from his body and some of his body parts were missing. The attorney told ABC News that his spinal cord was found in another location from his head.
Carter's family believes his death was a "modern-day lynching" and has demanded more answers from law enforcement. Police told Insider in March that there's no evidence to suggest that Carter was killed and that animals could have torn his body apart.
Carter was captured on deer camera footage in the Mississippi woods the day he was reported missing and his mother told Insider that she knew he "was somewhere struggling, somewhere running for his life."
According to a statement released Thursday, Crump said that Mississippi Crime Lab informed the family that another set of remains, which were discovered in February, is linked to Carter.
"The family of Rasheem Carter, while still deep in grief, is being denied adequate information and closure from the Mississippi officials overseeing this case. From the beginning of this case, the family has been misled," Crump said.
"Now, it's unacceptable that the family had to find out through an email that more of Rasheem's remains were found, and still, they haven't been told any other information, been offered a meeting with officials, or received his remains," the statement said. "They continue to be stonewalled at every turn. This family just wants to find out what happened to Rasheem and say their goodbyes – they ask that the additional remains be returned to them so that they can lay him to rest."
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Lisa Sales, president of the Virginia NOW chapter, calls for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment outside the district courthouse in Washington, U.S., September 28, 2022 (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)
With a 51-47 vote in favor, Senate Democrats and supporters were nine votes shy of the 60 needed for a resolution to clear the 100-member chamber's filibuster hurdle.
The resolution would have removed a 1982 deadline for state ratification that prevented the Equal Rights Amendment from going into effect. Three states -- Nevada, Illinois and Virginia -- approved it after 1982.
Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer said the ERA was more important since the Supreme Court last year overturned the national right to abortion.
"To the horror of hundreds of millions of American people, women in America have far fewer rights today than they did even a year ago," Schumer said prior to Thursday's vote.
Groups opposed to abortion have argued the ERA could provide an avenue to making abortion a constitutional right, and the amendment's failure is likely to increase attention on women's rights in the 2024 White House campaign.
Passage of Thursday's resolution would have required the support of nine Republicans in the Senate, where Democrats hold a narrow 51-49 majority. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, joined Democrats in voting for the measure.
The ERA was proposed in 1923 but did not pass Congress until 1972. Under U.S. law, amendments to the Constitution must be ratified by three-fourths, or 38 of the 50, state legislatures and do not require presidential approval.
A U.S. District Court ruled in 2021 that ratifications after the deadline "came too late to count." And a federal appeals court in February rejected calls from Illinois and Nevada for the ERA to be adopted.
The Trump administration argued that ERA ratification needed to start over. The Biden administration has not formally changed that position but voiced support for the resolution on Thursday.
"It is long past time to definitively enshrine the principle of gender equality in the Constitution," the White House said.
Proponents of the amendment say it would ensure women get equal pay and secure their rights in legal matters, while opponents argue it could subject women to a military draft if it were reinstated.
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Stephen Stills, Lukas Nelson, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young onstage at the Hollywood Bowl for opening night of Willie's 90th birthday party. (photo: Jay Blakesberg/Blackbird Production)
On the opening night of Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90, Neil Young, Snoop, Margo Price, and a stacked guest list helped celebrate the Red Headed Stranger at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A.
The Red Headed Stranger might’ve been over a thousand miles away from Spicewood, Texas, but for four hours on a Saturday night, a birthday celebration at the Bowl felt just like partying at home with close friends and family gathered around, crooning new tunes and familiar classics all night long. (If your friends are some of the most badass, talented artists in the world, that is).
For the country icon’s first of two back-to-back birthday concerts, officially dubbed Long Story Short: Willie 90, Willie called up some of his closest crew to ring in another year around the sun, with longtime collaborators, rock legends, and members of his Family Band alike on the bill.
On the lineup: Beck, Allison Russell, producer Buddy Cannon, Ziggy Marley, Stagecoach headliner Chris Stapleton, Dwight Yoakam, Dave Matthews, Margo Price, Miranda Lambert, Edie Brickell, Bob Weir, Sturgill Simpson, the Lumineers, Emmylou Harris, Jack Johnson, Gary Clark Jr., Jamey Johnson, Leon Bridges, Kris Kristofferson, Tom Jones, Lyle Lovett, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Snoop Dogg, Rosanne Cash, the Chicks, Tyler Childers, Stephen Stills, Willie’s sons Lukas and Micah (Particle Kid), and George Strait, who’d perform two songs with Willie on day one, including “Pancho and Lefty” near the end of the celebration.
The night played out like a country music marathon and a TV special-in-the-making — presenters including Ethan Hawke, Jennifer Garner, Oscar winner Helen Mirren, and Willie’s pal Owen Wilson graced the stage to introduce the different acts — as the lineup ran through Willie’s extensive catalogue of tunes at a fast pace, trying to fit a head-spinning amount of hits and deep cuts into the first night.
To kick off the show, Strings took the stage for a rendition of Willie’s trademark opening number, followed by “Stay All Night.” After the “California Sober” singer-guitarist’s set, Hawke, walked out to introduce “a brilliant member of another generation carrying on that Willie tradition, another straight-shootin’ Texan, one of my personal favorites, the soon-to-be-legend,” Charley Crockett.
“I’d like to dedicate my version of this Willie Nelson song to the Virginia State policeman that pulled me out of my car, busted me, gave me a couple of felonies, and he asked me to play a country song for him on my Telecaster, and I swear, as I’m standing here by God’s grace, the only song I could remember was this one right here. It goes something like this,” Crockett said, before playing “The Party’s Over.”
“He’s the reason I record records at such a frequent pace,” Crockett told Rolling Stone on the red carpet before the concert. “He’s the reason I tell record executives so often, don’t let the door hit ‘em on the way out. It’s because of Willie. He is the blueprint.”
Particle Kid would follow Crockett’s performance with a cut from the same 1967 album alongside producer Daniel Lanois for “Ghost.” Next, Charlie Sexton joined Edie Brickell for “Remember Me,” with Lyle Lovett taking the stage shortly after for what he called “the perfect” song, “Hello Walls.”
“Willie’s music is like the bible,” Lovett told RS earlier in the night. “To listen to a Willie Nelson song gives you one kind of education, to learn a Willie Nelson song expands it exponentially… The economy of words, his imagery, the simplicity of language and complexity of thought — it’s all in his songs.”
Minutes later the crowd was transported to 1978 thanks to Margo Price and Nathaniel Rateliff’s grooving ode to Waylon Jennings’ and Willie’s “I Can Get Off on You.”
Nearly an hour after the show began, Mirren appeared onstage to announce Norah Jones.
“I’m so happy to be here,” Jones told the crowd. “I love Willie so much, so so very much, and everyone in his world so very much. And that includes Bobbie Nelson — one of my favorite piano players. Here we go, this one’s for Bobbie.” Sitting at the piano, the Grammy winner and longtime Willie collaborator breezed through “Down Yonder,” a rollicking piano tribute to Willie’s older sister and Family Band member, who died last year at 91.
The night featured no shortage of nods to the Highwaymen — the supergroup of Willie, Waylon, Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson: Jamey Johnson performed Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever,” which the Highwaymen cut for their 1995 album The Road Goes on Forever, and Rosanne Cash sang “Lovin’ Her Was Easier” with the guy who wrote it, Kristofferson himself.
“They loved each other like brothers — Willie, Waylon, Kris, and my dad,” Cash told Rolling Stone earlier that afternoon before the show started. “And Willie and Kris are the last guys standing … I keep getting overwhelmed by that.”
After Kristofferson and Cash walked offstage together, Lukas Nelson stood in the center, guitar in hand, for one of the night’s best and most intimate moments, a stirring solo performance of “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” off the 1980 soundtrack to Honeysuckle Rose.
Leon Bridges followed with the Seventies standard “Night Life” with Gary Clark Jr., who stayed for another song, asking the crowd, “Can I turn up a little bit?” The Bowl cheered. “I don’t want to be disrespectful,” he said, plucking away at the first notes of “Texas Flood.” Then Jack Johnson took L.A. on a comedy tour and got laughs after every verse with “Willie Got Me Stoned (and He Took All My Money),” an original about losing your mind and your cash while playing poker with Willie.
The Chicks, introduced by Garner, commanded one of the loudest cheers from the crowd all night before they tore through “Bloody Mary Morning,” adding some punk energy to the already rollicking Willie staple.
“There’s only one reason why I’m not on a beach in South Asia right now, and that’s ‘cause it’s Willie Nelson’s birthday,” Simpson joked. “I’m going to take a minute to say something that I’ve never had the courage to say to his face. And that is there’s only one reason I ever went to Nashville to make country records, and that’s ‘cause I grew up listening to country records made by Willie Nelson.
“I wanted to make country records that were outside the box from what most people think a country record can be,” he continued. “I only signed a record deal with Atlantic Records because Willie Nelson made those records on Atlantic. That didn’t work out too good for me, but everything else did thanks to you guys.”
The lights dimmed while Simpson strummed his acoustic guitar alone on the stage for “I’d Have to Be Crazy,” a track written by Steven Fromholz and recorded by Willie. Simpson cut it for his own 2013 album High Top Mountain.
The hits kept rolling with Miranda Lambert, who got the crowd singing with “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” the opening track to 1978’s Waylon & Willie. “The first songs I ever heard were Willie songs,” Lambert told Rolling Stone ahead of the show. “I feel like I’ve known Willie since I was born. But also seeing George Strait celebrate Willie along with the rest of us, just the impact he’s had on all of our heroes … He kept generations of us singers-songwriters going and inspired for all these years.”
Three hours into the show, Neil Young and Stephen Stills — “two titans of American music,” as Hawke described the duo — brought the house down with a medley of “Long May You Run” and “For What It’s Worth.” (Coincidentally, Young sang “Long May You Run” 10 years ago for Willie’s 80th birthday, a taping of CMT Crossroads at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville.)
And then there was Willie, arriving at one hell of a party in the middle of Young’s harmonica solo to join in on “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?” off Young’s 1985 LP Old Ways.
Willie’s fellow toker Snoop Dogg arrived next for “Roll Me Up,” the pot anthem that imagines a baked final send-off: “Roll me up and smoke me when I die,” goes the chorus. Willie asked what key they were going to do the song in this time. “The key of smoke,” Snoop replied, as images of smoke creeped over the stage — and the crowd. “Anybody out there smoking tonight?” Snoop asked. “Roll one for Mr. Nelson.”
Before the party could end, there was one more Willie tradition to go: The evening’s performers — from Lambert to Price, Crockett to Rateliff — joined Willie, Lukas, and Micah onstage for a transcendent gospel medley of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “I’ll Fly Away,” as the Bowl danced and sang the chorus together.
“Thank y’all” Willie said, his guitar Trigger in hand. “Happy birthday to me!” Not missing a beat, all of Hollywood seemed to break out into “Happy Birthday” in his honor.
But that wasn’t the end of the show — there was still just enough time for another tune before the Bowl’s strict 11 p.m. curfew. “Y’all gotta help us sing this,” Willie said of the final song, “It’s Hard to Be Humble,” written by “an old friend Mac Davis.”
“Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble / When you’re perfect in every way / I can’t wait to look in the mirror / ‘Cause I get better-looking each day / To know me is to love me / I must be a hell of a man / Oh, Lord, it’s hard to be humble, but we’re doing the best that we can.”
“Thank y’all for comin’ out to help us,” Willie said, with the American flag projected on the stage above him. “We’ll see you tomorrow night. We love you.”
Long Story Short: Willie 90 Night One Set List:
Billy Strings – “Whiskey River,” “Stay All Night”
Charley Crockett – “The Party’s Over”
Particle Kid & Daniel Lanois – “The Ghost”
Edie Brickell and Charlie Sexton – “Remember Me”
Lyle Lovett – “Hello Walls”
Margo Price and Nathaniel Rateliff – “I Can Get Off On You”
Beck – “Hands on the Wheel”
Norah Jones – “Down Yonder,” “Funny How Time Slips Away”
Warren Haynes – “Midnight Rider”
Rosanne Cash and Kris Kristofferson – “Lovin’ Her Was Easier”
Lukas Nelson – “Angles Flying Too Close to the Ground”
Leon Bridges and Gary Clark Jr. – “Night Life”
Gary Clark Jr. – “Texas Flood”
Jack Johnson – “Willie Got Me Stoned”
Tyler Childers and the Food Stamps – “Healing Hands of Time,” “Time of the Preacher”
Ziggy Marley – “Still Is Still Moving to Me”
Tom Jones – “Opportunity to Cry”
Jamey Johnson – “Live Forever”
Bob Weir – “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”
The Chicks with Keith Sewell – “Bloody Mary Morning”
The Lumineers – “A Song for You”
Nathaniel Rateliff – “City of New Orleans”
Sturgill Simpson – “I’d Have to Be Crazy”
Miranda Lambert – “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”
Chris Stapleton – “The Last Thing I Needed,” “Always on My Mind”
Neil Young, Stephen Stills with Promise of the Real – “Long May You Run,” “For What It’s Worth”
Willie Nelson, Lukas Nelson, Micah Nelson, Neil Young with POTR – “Are There Any More Real Cowboys”
George Strait and Willie Nelson – “Sing One With Willie,” “Pancho and Lefty”
Snoop Dogg and Willie Nelson – “Roll Me Up”
Willie Nelson – “On the Road Again”
Group – “Circle Be Unbroken,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Happy Birthday,” “It’s Hard to Be Humble”
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People walk past a First Republic Bank branch in San Francisco, California, U.S. April 28, 2023. (photo: Loren Elliott/Reuters)
In a statement issued early Monday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said that all depositors of First Republic Bank will become depositors of JPMorgan and will have full access to their deposits.
The deal involved a “highly competitive bidding process,” the FDIC said in its statement, but it did not say what JPMorgan is paying to purchase First Republic.
Under the deal, JPMorgan acquires “substantially all” First Republic assets and agrees to assume responsibility for all of its deposits, including those above the federal insurance limit of $250,000 per account. First Republic had about $229.1 billion in assets and $103.9 billion in deposits.
JPMorgan personnel are now reaching out to First Republic customers, CEO Jamie Dimon said.
Federal regulators approached JPMorgan about bidding on First Republic’s assets, said Jeremy Barnum, JPMorgan’s chief financial officer. The bank “did not seek out this deal,” Barnum told reporters Monday.
Dimon reiterated that the broader banking system was sound and said the deal would stabilize the system after the country’s third bank failure in two months. Still, Dimon acknowledged that as interest rates continue to rise, the economy is not immune to consequences or stress.
“Hopefully people will be properly prepared for it,” Dimon said.
In March, JP Morgan was one of the banks that put billions of dollars into beleaguered First Republic, as regulators and the industry scrambled to contain a crisis that had led to the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. Barnum said the ultimate demise of First Republic wasn’t a sign that that effort failed. Rather, it helped buy time “when time was needed.”
JP Morgan is not assuming First Republic’s corporate debt or preferred stock, it said in a statement.
First Republic’s failure is expected to cost the FDIC about $13 billion, the agency said. The money will come from the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund, which insured banks pay into every quarter.
First Republic’s 84 offices in eight states will reopen as branches of JPMorgan, and depositors will be able to access all of their money when they open Monday.
The closure and sale of First Republic comes seven weeks after the abrupt failure of Silicon Valley Bank in California prompted an extraordinary federal rescue effort aimed at averting a wider financial crisis.
Unlike SVB, which failed in a matter of days, First Republic has been wobbling for weeks. The delay gave regulators and industry executives time to evaluate the bank and prepare for its demise.
In recent weeks, the bank hemorrhaged more than $100 billion in deposits. As investors became more sensitive to banking risks, shares of First Republic lost 97 percent of their value.
“Normally, regulators don’t react to stock prices. But this one fell so precipitously. It raised public concern and encouraged regulators to act to preserve public confidence,” said John Popeo, a partner at the Gallatin Group, a financial consultancy, and a former FDIC attorney.
After the exodus of deposits, the bank became “a zombie institution,” he added.
Like SVB, First Republic blundered into trouble as the Fed began raising interest rates almost 14 months ago. It invested in long-term assets, such as home mortgages and government securities, when rates were low.
Those now earn the bank a return of about 3 percent, even as it is paying around 5 percent to obtain fresh funds for its operations from the Fed and the Federal Home Loan Bank.
“Both of them essentially committed financial suicide by putting all these fixed-rate assets on their books and exposing themselves to a rising interest rate environment,” said Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Va.
Like the failure of SVB and Signature Bank of New York, First Republic’s collapse is likely to raise questions about the performance of federal regulators. On Friday, reports from the Fed and the FDIC blamed bank executives in both cases for mismanaging their operations and said federal supervisors had been lax.
Among the attractions for JPMorgan in acquiring First Republic is the failed bank’s wealth management business, with $289.5 billion in assets. That unit, which provides investment services for affluent clients, produced $223 million in fee revenue during the first quarter.
Continued banking upheaval poses a dilemma for the Federal Reserve. The central bank has been raising interest rates for more than a year, aiming to slow the economy and curb inflation. The fight against rising prices is not yet won, but higher rates are causing cracks to appear in the banking system.
“A lot depends on what happens with interest rate policy,” Ely said. “The Fed is facing a real conflict in this because inflation pressures are still there. And knocking down inflation is more important to the Fed.”
Bank borrowings from the Fed’s discount window and a new loan program it established as part of the SVB shutdown rose last week to $155 billion from $144 billion the week before, an indicator that some banks remain under stress.
Investors expect the Fed to raise rates at least once more at its May meeting this week, probably by a quarter of a percentage point.
Trouble in the nation’s banks could hurt the economy. Amid a trio of recent bank failures, loan officers could grow skittish about taking risks. Fewer loans would make it harder for companies to expand and hire, slowing the economy’s momentum at a time when Fed economists anticipate a recession later this year.
Small-business owners say it is getting harder to obtain credit. The National Federation of Independent Business gauge of loan availability is at its tightest level in roughly a decade. Overall, banks reported a total of $2.8 trillion in commercial and industrial loans as of April 19, down only fractionally from the prior week, according to the Federal Reserve.
“Lending is somewhat weaker than before the banking sector turmoil in March, but we haven’t seen a pure credit crunch,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon. “Banks are still lending, but they are exercising more discretion in terms of their loans.”
All banks with more than $50 billion in assets are required to file with the FDIC a “resolution plan” designed to provide insight into how the institution could be wound down in the event it failed.
In its most recent plan, submitted at the end of last year, First Republic said that “its focused business model, uncomplicated structure and conservative market share” would make it easy to wind down in a crisis.
“First Republic believes that a resolution of the Bank by the FDIC would not require the use of any extraordinary government support and would substantially mitigate the risk that the failure of the Bank could have a serious adverse impact on the financial stability of the United States,” the bank said in the December 2022 document.
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Smoke rises in Khartoum, Sudan, on Saturday, as gunfire and heavy artillery fire continued despite the extension of a ceasefire between the country's two top generals. (photo: Marwan Ali/AP)
On Sunday, one day later, a second convoy also arrived in Port Sudan, bringing the total number of U.S. citizens the State Department and its allies have helped depart the country since the start of the violence to 1,000.
"We continue to assist U.S. citizens and others who are eligible with onward travel to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where additional U.S. personnel are positioned to assist with consular and emergency services," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a statement Sunday.
"Departure options for U.S. citizens have included seats on partner country flights, partner country and international organization convoys, U.S. government organized convoys, and departure via sea as well," Miller added.
Buses carrying 300 people reached Port Sudan on Saturday after leaving the capital of Khartoum late Friday.
That group of mostly Americans — along with some Germans, Norwegians and local staff — were driven on seven buses contracted by the U.S. and monitored by armed drones on the journey, a Pentagon official told NPR. The U.S. government contracted 16 buses total.
Conflict between rival generals from the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has killed more than 500 people and injured more than 4,000 others since fighting broke out on April 15. Bombings and gun battles have rattled Khartoum, devastating buildings in residential neighborhoods.
The RSF assisted the convoy with three vehicles to help get the buses safely through checkpoints, according to a Pentagon official.
Some 16,000 Americans had been registered in Sudan before the convoys' departures. Families of trapped Americans in Sudan have criticized the U.S. for initially ruling out a U.S.-run evacuation, The Associated Press reported.
The U.S. is among several countries to have closed their embassies and evacuated their staff and families.
On Sunday, the United Nations said it was sending Humanitarian Affairs chief Martin Griffiths to the region, where food, water, fuel and other supplies are dwindling as the fighting rages on.
"The scale and speed of what is unfolding is unprecedented in Sudan," UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said in a statement. "We are extremely concerned by the immediate as well as long-term impact on all people in Sudan, and the broader region."
From Port Sudan, the Americans can cross the Red Sea to a port in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Miller said in a statement on Saturday.
"The U.S. government has taken extensive efforts to contact U.S. citizens in Sudan and enable the departure of those who wished to leave," the statement read. "We messaged every U.S. citizen in Sudan who communicated with us during the crisis and provided specific instructions about joining this convoy to those who were interested in departing via the land route. We encourage U.S. citizens who want to leave Sudan but chose not to participate in this convoy to contact the Department of State using the crisis intake form on our website."
The Pentagon has assisted the evacuation by deploying intelligence and surveillance support, "and we are moving naval assets within the region to provide any necessary support along the coast," according to a statement on Saturday from Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh.
A U.S. official told NPR American ships are just off Port Sudan, but not in the port itself. The official said there are no State Department or U.S. military personnel at the Port.
The U.S. has repeated its warning to Americans not to travel to Sudan.
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Kim Gittleson does chores to prepare for early calving season on the ranch north of Walden, Colorado. (photo: Jimena Peck/WP)
Gittleson, friendly and polite, has gotten used to such queries over the past year and a half. That’s about how long gray wolves have been making their mark in this high valley known as North Park — nowhere more than on Gittleson’s ranch, where wolves have attacked several cows and calves. That has turned the 11,000-acre property and the region into a testing ground for the wild canines’ future in Colorado — and for the hopes and fears of both their advocates and opponents.
Colorado is finalizing a 300-page plan to reintroduce wolves to the state, from which they were eradicated by the 1940s. It is doing so at the behest of voters, who in 2020 narrowly approved an unprecedented ballot measure directing the state to begin releasing the endangered predators into rural western Colorado by the end of this year.
But in a twist, wolves began to set up shop on their own. In 2021, the state wildlife department announced that six pups had been born to a pair believed to have migrated from Wyoming — the first documented Colorado-born litter in decades.
The news was celebrated in Denver, where Gov. Jared Polis (D) welcomed the pups and dubbed their parents “John and Jane,” and where 66 percent of voters approved the ballot measure. Not so much here in Jackson County, where the pack made its base, and where 87 percent voted no.
The reintroduction effort is being closely watched nationwide. Will Colorado be hospitable to a contentious wild animal, serving as the missing link in a chain of wolf habitat from the Northern Rockies to the Southwest? Or will it veer toward the stance of Montana and Idaho, which conservationists say allow far too aggressive hunting?
Wolves are federally protected outside the Northern Rockies, so nearly all killing is prohibited. Colorado’s plan leaves hunting off the table, but the state is asking the federal government to deem the released wolves an “experimental population,” allowing more “flexibility” — a term that can include killing wolves that attack livestock. Ranchers, including Gittleson, want that. Wolf advocates worry it will set back a fledgling population.
Under Colorado’s plan, wolves are likely to be captured in the Northern Rockies and released in a Central Colorado area where the state says there is an overlap of suitable habitat and social tolerance. But for now, it is in this quiet landscape along the Wyoming border where early clues are emerging about Colorado’s ability to live alongside a predator the plan says “symbolizes the diversity of American thoughts, values and opinions.”
The local wolf pack has already been diminished. Three of its eight members are believed to have been killed last year across the border in Wyoming.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) says it has confirmed 14 killings of cattle or working dogs since January 2022, including a border collie killed last month that was worth $20,000, its owner told local media. Down the highway from Gittleson’s ranch, a red sign on a different property reads: “If you voted for reintroduction of wolves, do not recreate here. You are not welcome!”
The opinions aren’t so adamant on the mountain-flanked ranch where Gittleson and his wife have 190 cows and 39 heifers. That has made it a sort of Rorschach test — a place where opponents see proof of wolves’ threat and advocates spot glimmers of the potential for coexistence.
Gittleson said he ranched for four decades with just a handful of suspected losses to mountain lions. He spotted a black wolf in 2019 and tracks here and there. “They weren’t bothering our cows, so we were like, okay,” said his wife, Kim Gittleson, 60, an administrator at a local sheriff’s department. “Obviously, that changes when they start killing your cattle.”
That happened in December 2021, when the pack killed one of their heifers — the first confirmed wolf killing of Colorado livestock in more than seven decades. Eight more deaths followed over the next few months, the Gittlesons say. (CPW confirmed four as deaths and two as injuries, they said.)
Word got out, and Gittleson’s phone started blowing up with questions and advice — from reporters, wolf advocates, conservation groups, ranchers in other states and hunters. Gittleson took them all and opened his ranch to the callers.
“Here, the public is seeing that maybe they’re not quite the sweet little things they think,” Gittleson, 65, said as a winter-white hare dashed through leafless willows nearby. “And maybe the rancher’s not the biggest S.O.B. in the world.”
Besides, with killing not an option, “I’m extremely motivated to find nonlethal means,” he said. “So if you thought you had an answer, I was willing to listen.”
To frighten wolves, Gittleson has hung government- and nonprofit-provided fladry — flags that can deter predators. He has used flashing Foxlights and shell crackers. Range riders — some on horseback, some in cars; some volunteers, some from a coexistence organization — have patrolled at night. He placed horned cattle with his cows and deployed six burros — known for livestock guardian skills — donated by CPW.
Gittleson said he considered fencing but worried it would block pronghorn and elk. Feeding guard dogs would be pricey, he said. He wasn’t sure a Noodle Man — the inflatables that dance wildly at car lots — would work for long. A man who had experience protecting rhinos from poachers in Africa offered fencing and alarms but disappeared after seeing how large a 300-acre pasture is, Gittleson said.
“That was a problem we had with a lot of people,” Gittleson said. “I tell you how many acres there are, and you don’t have a concept of what I’m talking about.”
Nonlethal deterrents are often effective, researchers say. But Gittleson said he’s concluded the techniques last until wolves learn they are not deadly. Two of his cows were killed while range riders were monitoring, he said. Wolves were on his property this month, he said, “testing” the cattle.
“They’re extremely smart,” Gittleson said. “It’s just gonna be me continuing to do things, and if we get several long periods of time without attacks, maybe we’ll say we are doing something right.”
The day before, the state wildlife commission held one of its final hearings on the reintroduction plan in Steamboat Springs, an hour away. The front rows of a college auditorium overlooking snowy slopes were filled with parks and wildlife employees in brown uniforms. Behind them, some audience members wore shirts with wolves on them. Others wore cowboy hats and camo.
The public comments were cordial but reflected still-stubborn divides. Gail Bell, who helped drive the ballot measure campaign, said the proposed compensation for livestock attacked by wolves — up to $15,000 per killed animal, and up to $15,000 for veterinary fees — “seems exorbitant.”
“There has been a lot of entitlement over centuries regarding ranchers,” Bell said, adding: “Let’s focus on what unites us.”
It is true that wolves don’t kill large numbers of livestock, conceded Jo Stanko, a local rancher. But “if you are that particular individual rancher, it is a huge, huge financial, emotional and planning impact,” she said.
Gittleson spoke, too, calling for a more specific definition of “chronic depredation.”
Back at his ranch, he said he knows people wonder why losing some cattle to wolves can’t simply be a cost of doing business in an industry that raises animals for food. “The worst part of it is the stress,” he said. “Staying up all night, night after night, and then still having to do things during the day.”
After all the meetings, Gittleson said, he’s not sure anyone changed anyone else’s mind. “I know there’s people who think I’m gonna come up with the answer. That would be nice. But I don’t know if it’s realistic,” he said.
Calving was about to start, providing vulnerable prey for wolves. Even so, Gittleson gently turned down the caller’s offer to keep vigil. The snow was too deep to drive into the pasture, he told him, and it was too cold to go on foot at night.
“I told him we had people out there before, and you don’t really save me any sleep when I worry about whether you realize wolves are coming in,” Gittleson said. He would, he said, keep losing sleep alone.
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