Gerry Turner will not be a Golden Bachelor for much longer, as he is set to get married in a wedding ceremony televised live on ABC.
During Thursday’s live finale of The Golden Bachelor, which featured series lead Turner getting engaged to Theresa Nist in Costa Rica, the couple announced that they will tie the knot Jan. 4, 2024. The Golden Wedding special will air at 8 p.m. and mark the first televised nuptials for the franchise since The Bachelor favorites Sean Lowe and Catherine Giudici exchanged vows in 2014.
After host Jesse Palmer told Turner, 72, and Nist, 70, that the show will be sending the couple on a trip to Italy, the Golden Bachelor replied, “We can use that as our honeymoon trip because we are going to get married. We’re going to do it as quickly as we can because, at our age, we don’t have a lot of time to waste. As quickly as we can put together a wedding plan, we’re getting married.”
Related Stories
Runner-up Leslie Fhima tearfully parted ways with Turner in Costa Rica after she sensed his lack of investment in their relationship, which led him to share that his feelings were stronger for Nist. “I was devastated,” Fhima told Palmer during the “After the Final Rose” portion of the finale. “I broke down my walls, and I fell in love with him so much. I haven’t fallen in love with someone in a really long time, so it was hard.”
Gerry Turner and Theresa Nist after getting engaged on The Golden Bachelor Disney/John Fleenor
When reunited during the live footage in the finale, Fhima told Turner that she felt “blindsided” by their breakup and asked him where things went wrong. He replied, “It didn’t really go wrong, Leslie. It was better with someone else. It was the right person in the wrong direction.”
Turner startled Nist in Costa Rica when she arrived for a potential proposal, and he told her, “I came to the realization that you’re not the right person for me to live with.” He took a pause before adding, “You’re the person that I can’t live without.” Nist then laughed and assured him, “That was so good,” before he got down on one knee to propose.
Palmer asked Turner during the “After the Final Rose” if his feelings for Nist evolved in the overnight date. “There were moments in conversation that were subtle realizations,” Turner said of his connection with Nist, a financial services professional from New Jersey. “More and more with every passing moment, she showed her enthusiasm, her adventurous side, all of that. Each one was a plus.”
Although Turner demurred when asked about their physical connection in the fantasy suite, Nist blurted out, “I knocked his boots off,” invoking a phrase that was used memorably during the season. After the crowd laughed, she quipped, “No, with my kisses.”
Fhima was left devastated during the finale when Turner ended their relationship shortly after introducing her to his two daughters and two granddaughters. Fhima made it clear she was particularly hurt that Turner professed his love to her in the fantasy-suite date and made comments that led her to start planning their future together.
“I’m heartbroken once again,” Fhima told Turner in Costa Rica. “But now I have to do it in front of the whole world to see once again how broken I am, how no one chooses me. You didn’t choose me — once again. And the other night, you made it sound like you chose me. You said things to me that made me think that this was going to be it. You led me down a path, and then you took a turn and left me there, and that’s how I feel.”
Nist and Turner bonded over their shared grief of losing their spouses. Turner, described by ABC as a retired restaurateur from Indiana, lost Toni, his high school sweetheart and wife of 43 years, when she passed away in 2017 following a bacterial infection. Meanwhile, Billy, Nist’s husband of 42 years, died from kidney failure.
In a piece published by The Hollywood Reporter that questioned the show’s narrative of Turner not having dated since before he was married, a woman identified herself as Turner’s ex-girlfriend and said they started dating a month after his wife passed away, leading to a relationship lasting more than two years. The woman, who requested anonymity, said that she moved from Iowa to live with Turner in his Indiana home before he ended the relationship in early 2020.
Article From & Read More ( ‘Golden Bachelor’: Gerry Turner and Fiancée to Marry in Wedding Ceremony Airing Live on ABC - Hollywood Reporter )
https://ift.tt/4HwVEOx
Entertainment
As frontman for the Pogues, he romanticized whiskey-soaked rambles and hard-luck stories of emigration, while providing a musical touchstone for members of the Irish diaspora.
Shane MacGowan, the brilliant but chaotic songwriter who as frontman for the Pogues reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock, died on Thursday. He was 65.
Mr. MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, said the cause was pneumonia but did not say where he died.
Mr. MacGowan emerged from London’s punk scene in the late 1970s and spent nine tumultuous years with the initial incarnation of the Pogues. Rising from North London pubs, the band was performing in stadiums by the late 1980s, before Mr. MacGowan’s drug and alcohol problems and his mental and physical deterioration forced the band to fire him. He later founded Shane MacGowan & the Popes, with whom he recorded and toured in the 1990s.
Along the way, Mr. MacGowan earned twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish immigrant life. His best-known are the opening lines of his biggest hit, an alcoholics’ lament turned unlikely Christmas classic entitled “Fairytale of New York”:
“It was Christmas Eve babe/In the drunk tank/An old man said to me, won’t see another one.”
“I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography, “A Furious Devotion” (2021). “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow, and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”
Bruce Springsteen, Bono and others agreed with his self-assessment. But his boozy sketches of rakish immigrant life — delivered with a London punk sneer — initially provoked disgust from the public and the musical establishment in Ireland.
Mr. MacGowan in London in 1977, when he was the editor of a punk-rock magazine.Sydney O'Meara/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, 1957, in a hospital near the English town of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to parents who had left Ireland just a few months earlier.
His father, Maurice, a Dubliner, worked for a chain of clothing retailers. His mother, Therese, a former secretary and model, was from rural Tipperary. Mr. MacGowan spent his early years in the middle-class suburb of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of London, though the family regularly returned to Ireland for visits.
His parents had high expectations for their literary-minded son, who as a boy had read Joyce and Dostoyevsky. They sent him to prestigious fee-paying institutions rather than state schools. When the family moved to London, he earned a scholarship to the Westminster School, situated on the grounds of Westminster Abbey, which had educated several British prime ministers.
But Mr. MacGowan spent his summers far from this seat of the English establishment, staying for weeks at a time with relatives at the Commons, his mother’s family’s rustic homestead near Nenagh, in County Tipperary.
The house was a well-known local destination for marathon bouts of music, dancing and drinking. “On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the door was open all night, and it would be a place to go for a session,” Mr. MacGowan told Mr. Balls, his biographer. “I would be put upon the table from the earliest days I can remember and told to sing what songs I knew.”
Mr. MacGowan would also claim it was in Tipperary where he first acquired his lifelong drinking habit. In “A Drink With Shane MacGowan,” the 2001 memoir he wrote with Ms. Clarke, he recalled that his uncle would bring him home two bottles of Guinness from a pub to drink each night starting when he was 5.
Mr. MacGowan in 2021. He fractured his pelvis in a fall in 2015 and never fully recovered.Ellius Grace for The New York Times
Back in London, Mr. MacGowan also began taking and selling drugs, resulting in his expulsion from the Westminster School and the first of what would be a series of addiction-driven personal crises.
At 17, he was institutionalized for months; he spent his 18th birthday in London’s famous Bethlem psychiatric hospital, sometimes known as Bedlam.
After he was discharged, he was drawn into the emerging London punk scene. In 1976, the New Music Express, a music newspaper, featured his picture, ear trailing blood, under the blaring headline “Cannibalism at Clash Gig.” While he and a girl had been biting each other, Mr. MacGowan said, his ear had actually been cut by a bottle.
The notoriety of that image helped establish his identity in punk circles, where he was known by the alias Shane O’Hooligan. The next year, he was fronting the Nipple Erectors (later shortened to the Nips).
But by the early 1980s the energy had largely drained from the punk movement, giving way to the synthesizers, eyeliner and bouffants of so-called New Romantic bands like Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants.
Punk refugees found themselves migrating into a growing world music scene in London, where British bands would try their hand at African, Latin American or Greek music. Tapping into Irish music seemed an obvious choice.
Along with the tin whistle player Spider Stacy and the banjoist Jem Finer, both British, Mr. MacGowan formed a band called the New Republicans, the name an Irish political joke aimed at the dandified New Romantic scene. In 1982, the band re-emerged under the name Pogue Mahone, an Irish-language phrase meaning “kiss my ass” that was later shortened to the Pogues.
By 1984, their raucous live shows had earned the Pogues a loyal following. The band signed to the independent label Stiff Records, home of Elvis Costello, Madness and the Damned.
Mr. MacGowan, second from left, joined with Van Morrison (third from left), Elvis Costello (second from right), Bob Geldof (third from right) and other musicians in 1986 to announce plans for a benefit concert to focus attention on unemployment in Ireland.Associated Press
The two albums the band recorded for Stiff showcased Mr. MacGowan’s gift for storytelling. His subject matter — from picaresque rambles to confessions of regret written from the perspective of someone far from home — marked him as an inheritor of a boisterous Irish tradition of irreverent poetry and song that developed in the 19th century — “songs of hard labor and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss,” Joseph Cleary, a professor of Irish literature at Yale, wrote in The Irish Times in 2018.
Mr. MacGowan’s song “Dark Streets of London” follows an immigrant’s life in London, from the initial exhilaration of freedom to poverty and homelessness:
“And I’m buggered to damnation/And I haven’t got a penny/To wander the dark streets of London.”
By the late 1980s, the band was touring extensively, first in continental Europe and then worldwide, including along the heavily Irish American communities of the eastern United States, where it developed a following. In 1987, the Pogues were the opening act for U2 concerts, performing in massive venues like Wembley Stadium in London and Croke Park in Dublin.
That November, the band reached the pinnacle of its commercial success with the release of “Fairytale of New York.”
That song — co-written with Mr. Finer and featuring vocals by the English songwriter Kirsty MacColl — reached No. 2 on the British charts that year; it reliably appears on the charts every holiday season.
The Pogues would keep up their energetic recording and touring pace for several more years, even though Mr. MacGowan had become addicted to heroin in addition to his longstanding alcohol problems. Shows were missed. He was repeatedly injured in falls and struck by moving vehicles. His bandmates ultimately decided to dismiss him before a concert in Yokohama, Japan, in August 1991.
But Mr. MacGowan, continued to write and record, issuing two albums with his group Shane MacGowan & the Popes that enjoyed modest critical and commercial success. He left the group in the late 1990s and performed sporadically with the reformed Pogues from 2001 to 2014, when the band again dissolved.
The Pogues in concert in Boston in 2007. Mr. MacGowan was fired from the band in 1991 but performed sporadically with a reformed version from 2001 to 2014.Erik Jacobs for The New York Times
Mr. MacGowan remained an object of public interest in Britain and Ireland. In 2015, a documentary about the surgical replacement of his famously rotten teeth was shown on British television. That same year, however, he fractured his pelvis in a fall and never fully recovered.
Mr. MacGowan never gave up alcohol, but his drinking and behavior mellowed. In 2018, he married Ms. Clarke, his longtime girlfriend. In addition to her, he is survived by his sister, Siobhan, and his father. His mother died in 2017.
In January 2018, Mr. MacGowan was feted for his 60th birthday with a tribute concert in Dublin that included Bono and Sinead O’Connor. During the event, President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland presented him with a lifetime achievement award.
It was perhaps the culmination of Mr. MacGowan’s complex relationship with his ancestral home. The Pogues’ emergence had generated a backlash from musical traditionalists in Ireland. The great Irish singer Tommy Makem called the band “the greatest disaster ever to hit Irish music.”
But Mr. MacGowan’s lyrical talent ultimately won him admirers throughout Ireland, where he relocated with his wife after his time with the Pogues, and well beyond.
Bruce Springsteen, in an appearance on Ireland’s “Late Late Show” in October 2020, called Mr. MacGowan “a master.”
“I truly believe that a hundred years from now most of us will be forgotten,” Mr. Springsteen said. “But I do believe that Shane’s music is going to be remembered and sung.”
Article From & Read More ( Shane MacGowan, Songwriter Who Fused Punk and Irish Rebellion, Is Dead at 65 - The New York Times )
https://ift.tt/6tnhGSi
Entertainment
As frontman for the Pogues, he romanticized whiskey-soaked rambles and hard-luck stories of emigration, while providing a musical touchstone for members of the Irish diaspora.
Shane MacGowan, the brilliant but chaotic songwriter who as frontman for the Pogues reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock, died on Thursday. He was 65.
Mr. MacGowan emerged from London’s punk scene in the late 1970s and spent nine tumultuous years with the initial incarnation of the Pogues. Rising from North London pubs, the band was performing in stadiums by the late 1980s, before Mr. MacGowan’s drug and alcohol problems and his mental and physical deterioration forced the band to fire him. He later founded Shane MacGowan & the Popes, with whom he recorded and toured in the 1990s.
Along the way, Mr. MacGowan earned twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish immigrant life. His best-known are the opening lines of his biggest hit, an alcoholics’ lament turned unlikely Christmas classic entitled “Fairytale of New York”:
“It was Christmas Eve babe/In the drunk tank/An old man said to me, won’t see another one.”
“I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography, “A Furious Devotion” (2021). “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow, and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”
Bruce Springsteen, Bono and others agreed with his self-assessment. But his boozy sketches of rakish immigrant life — delivered with a London punk sneer — initially provoked disgust from the public and the musical establishment in Ireland.
Mr. MacGowan in London in 1977, when he was the editor of a punk-rock magazine.Sydney O'Meara/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, 1957, in a hospital near the English town of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, to parents who had left Ireland just a few months earlier.
His father, Maurice, a Dubliner, worked for a chain of clothing retailers. His mother, Therese, a former secretary and model, was from rural Tipperary. Mr. MacGowan spent his early years in the middle-class suburb of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of London, though the family regularly returned to Ireland for visits.
His parents had high expectations for their literary-minded son, who as a boy had read Joyce and Dostoyevsky. They sent him to prestigious fee-paying institutions rather than state schools. When the family moved to London, he earned a scholarship to the Westminster School, situated on the grounds of Westminster Abbey, which had educated several British prime ministers.
But Mr. MacGowan spent his summers far from this seat of the English establishment, staying for weeks at a time with relatives at the Commons, his mother’s family’s rustic homestead near Nenagh, in County Tipperary.
The house was a well-known local destination for marathon bouts of music, dancing and drinking. “On Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the door was open all night, and it would be a place to go for a session,” Mr. MacGowan told Mr. Balls, his biographer. “I would be put upon the table from the earliest days I can remember and told to sing what songs I knew.”
Mr. MacGowan would also claim it was in Tipperary where he first acquired his lifelong drinking habit. In “A Drink With Shane MacGowan,” the 2001 memoir he wrote with Ms. Clarke, he recalled that his uncle would bring him home two bottles of Guinness from a pub to drink each night starting when he was 5.
Mr. MacGowan in 2021. He fractured his pelvis in a fall in 2015 and never fully recovered.Ellius Grace for The New York Times
Back in London, Mr. MacGowan also began taking and selling drugs, resulting in his expulsion from the Westminster School and the first of what would be a series of addiction-driven personal crises.
At 17, he was institutionalized for months; he spent his 18th birthday in London’s famous Bethlem psychiatric hospital, sometimes known as Bedlam.
After he was discharged, he was drawn into the emerging London punk scene. In 1976, the New Music Express, a music newspaper, featured his picture, ear trailing blood, under the blaring headline “Cannibalism at Clash Gig.” While he and a girl had been biting each other, Mr. MacGowan said, his ear had actually been cut by a bottle.
The notoriety of that image helped establish his identity in punk circles, where he was known by the alias Shane O’Hooligan. The next year, he was fronting the Nipple Erectors (later shortened to the Nips).
But by the early 1980s the energy had largely drained from the punk movement, giving way to the synthesizers, eyeliner and bouffants of so-called New Romantic bands like Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants.
Punk refugees found themselves migrating into a growing world music scene in London, where British bands would try their hand at African, Latin American or Greek music. Tapping into Irish music seemed an obvious choice.
Along with the tin whistle player Spider Stacy and the banjoist Jem Finder, both British, Mr. MacGowan formed a band called the New Republicans, the name an Irish political joke aimed at the dandified New Romantic scene. In 1982, the band re-emerged under the name Pogue Mahone, an Irish-language phrase meaning “kiss my ass” that was later shortened to the Pogues.
By 1984, their raucous live shows had earned the Pogues a loyal following. The band signed to the independent label Stiff Records, home of Elvis Costello, Madness and the Damned.
Mr. MacGowan, second from left, joined with Van Morrison (third from left), Elvis Costello (second from right), Bob Geldof (third from right) and other musicians in 1986 to announce plans for a benefit concert to focus attention on unemployment in Ireland.Associated Press
The two albums the band recorded for Stiff showcased Mr. MacGowan’s gift for storytelling. His subject matter — from picaresque rambles to confessions of regret written from the perspective of someone far from home — marked him as an inheritor of a boisterous Irish tradition of irreverent poetry and song that developed in the 19th century — “songs of hard labor and hard living, of wandering and exile, resentment and loss,” Joseph Cleary, a professor of Irish literature at Yale, wrote in The Irish Times in 2018.
Mr. MacGowan’s song “Dark Streets of London” follows an immigrant’s life in London, from the initial exhilaration of freedom to poverty and homelessness:
“And I’m buggered to damnation/And I haven’t got a penny/To wander the dark streets of London.”
By the late 1980s, the band was touring extensively, first in continental Europe and then worldwide, including along the heavily Irish American communities of the eastern United States, where it developed a following. In 1987, the Pogues were the opening act for U2 concerts, performing in massive venues like Wembley Stadium in London and Croke Park in Dublin.
That November, the band reached the pinnacle of its commercial success with the release of “Fairytale of New York.”
That song — co-written with Mr. Finer and featuring vocals by the English songwriter Kirsty MacColl — reached No. 2 on the British charts that year; it reliably appears on the charts every holiday season.
The Pogues would keep up their energetic recording and touring pace for several more years, even though Mr. MacGowan had become addicted to heroin in addition to his longstanding alcohol problems. Shows were missed. He was repeatedly injured in falls and struck by moving vehicles. His bandmates ultimately decided to dismiss him before a concert in Yokohama, Japan, in August 1991.
But Mr. MacGowan, continued to write and record, issuing two albums with his group Shane MacGowan & the Popes that enjoyed modest critical and commercial success. He left the group in the late 1990s and performed sporadically with the reformed Pogues from 2001 to 2014, when the band again dissolved.
The Pogues in concert in Boston in 2007. Mr. MacGowan was fired from the band in 1991 but performed sporadically with a reformed version from 2001 to 2014.Erik Jacobs for The New York Times
Mr. MacGowan remained an object of public interest in Britain and Ireland. In 2015, a documentary about the surgical replacement of his famously rotten teeth was shown on British television. That same year, however, he fractured his pelvis in a fall and never fully recovered.
Mr. MacGowan never gave up alcohol, but his drinking and behavior mellowed. In 2018, he married Ms. Clarke, his longtime girlfriend. In addition to her, he is survived by his sister, Siobhan, and his father. His mother died in 2017.
In January 2018, Mr. MacGowan was feted for his 60th birthday with a tribute concert in Dublin that included Bono and Sinead O’Connor. During the event, President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland presented him with a lifetime achievement award.
It was perhaps the culmination of Mr. MacGowan’s complex relationship with his ancestral home. The Pogues’ emergence had generated a backlash from musical traditionalists in Ireland. The great Irish singer Tommy Makem called the band “the greatest disaster ever to hit Irish music.”
But Mr. MacGowan’s lyrical talent ultimately won him admirers throughout Ireland, where he relocated with his wife after his time with the Pogues, and well beyond.
Bruce Springsteen, in an appearance on Ireland’s “Late Late Show” in October 2020, called Mr. MacGowan “a master.”
“I truly believe that a hundred years from now most of us will be forgotten,” Mr. Springsteen said. “But I do believe that Shane’s music is going to be remembered and sung.”
Article From & Read More ( Shane MacGowan, Songwriter Who Fused Punk and Irish Rebellion, Is Dead at 65 - The New York Times )
https://ift.tt/6tnhGSi
Entertainment
Jonathan Majors returned to New York City Criminal Court for the start of his assault trial, which began Wednesday after numerous delays. Jury selection is expected to start in the late afternoon.
Majors arrived in a lower Manhattan courtroom, wearing a grey suit and carrying a bible, notebook and mug, around 9:52 a.m. He was holding hands with girlfriend Meagan Good, who has attended several court appearances with Majors.
The Marvel actor was arrested in Manhattan on March 25 after an alleged domestic dispute with his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari. Majors has pleaded not guilty to the four charges of assault and aggravated harassment that have been leveled against him; a fifth charge of strangulation has been dropped. He faces up to a year in jail if he’s convicted.
Much of the morning was spent debating the defense’s motion to request that “contested evidence” remain under seal and barred from public view due to the ”high profile” nature of the case and allegations against Majors. Members of the media filed a motion to oppose this ruling, which applies to a single pre-trial issue and not the entire trial.
Defense attorney Seth Zuckerman told Judge Michael Gaffey that he believes the disclosure of sensitive information will “deprive” his client of the right to a fair trial. “There are no alternatives,” he asserted. He believes the sealed information would “have a highly prejudicial impact on the jury no matter what.”
Attorney Katherine M. Bolger, who represented the news entities who filed the motion, said she wasn’t privy to the sealed information but argued that press should have access on behalf of the public. “We urge you to reject this,” she said to the judge. “For any closure, there needs to be on-the-record filings.”
The judge moved to seal the hearing as well as the documents on this issue because it’s “the only way to prevent tainting the jury pool.” The information will become public if the evidence is found to be admissible for trial.
Later, Gaffey informed Majors that the trial will proceed regardless of whether he appears in person. The judge added that Majors is under no obligation to testify during the trial.
At the time of Majors’ arrest in March, Jabbari told officers that she was assaulted and taken to the hospital with “minor injuries to her head and neck” after an alleged altercation in a taxi. Defense attorneys for Majors alleged it was Jabbari who assaulted Majors, and “not the other way around.”
In April, Jabbari was granted a temporary order of protection, which means the two parties cannot have any direct or third-party contact. The order remains in place.
Jabbari was arrested on Oct. 26 and charged with assault and criminal mischief in connection to the March incident, according to the New York Police Department. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office said it “declined to prosecute the case against Grace Jabbari because it lacks prosecutorial merit.” The matter is now closed and sealed.
In the wake of the allegations, Majors has been cut from feature film projects and dropped by his PR team at the Lede Company, as well as his management, Entertainment 360. WME still represents the actor. He has a major role, as the villainous Kang the Conqueror, in Disney’s sprawling Marvel Cinematic Universe.
It's been presented as a mistake, a very embarrassing one, and the book has been hastily taken off the shelves. But how could it have happened?
The Dutch language edition, Eindstrijd, has a very plain reference to a senior royal and there have been claims of another much vaguer reference to a second name.
The publisher's managing director, Anke Roelen, said on Tuesday night: "An error occurred in the Dutch translation and is currently being rectified."
As a result, the publishing house, Xander Uitgevers, is "temporarily withdrawing the book", with its release day descending into chaos.
It's now going to be re-released on Friday, in a "rectified" version.
Publishers Xander Uitgevers say it is "temporarily withdrawing" Endgame in the Netherlands
Although the blame was initially placed on the translation process, a comparison of the English and Dutch text doesn't suggest it's about getting some of the phrases or vocabulary mixed up.
The line identifying the member of the Royal Family isn't in the English text, so it hasn't been mistranslated. It seems to have been added.
And an updated message from the publisher now talks of an "error", without mentioning translations, if that has any significance.
The next thought might be that this was part of a draft or a previous edit that had been taken out of other language versions, but had mistakenly not been updated in the Dutch version.
But the author Omid Scobie, speaking on Dutch television on Tuesday, made it clear that any version he had produced had never named names. So that would rule out this having been a draft or remnant of some previous editing that had not been removed.
"There's never been a version that I've produced that has names in it," the author told the RTL Boulevard show.
"The book's available in a number of languages and unfortunately I can't speak Dutch, so I haven't seen the copy for myself, so if there have been any translation errors I'm sure the publisher's got it under control," said Mr Scobie.
Joe Pugliese / Harpo Productions / CBS
The race row emerged from Oprah Winfrey's interview with Prince Harry and Meghan
In pre-publicity, he had made a specific point of saying that for legal reasons, he wouldn't identify the names involved in the race row that emerged from Prince Harry and Meghan's interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Prince Harry and Meghan themselves have never given the name of the person or persons, who were alleged to have asked questions about the skin colour of their as yet unborn baby.
As Meghan herself has observed about the potential consequences of revealing the name: "I think that would be very damaging to them."
After this was first revealed in the Oprah Winfrey interview in 2021 it sparked a royal race row, and questions about the identity of those involved have become a lingering cloud.
This latest book makes the claim that there were two people involved in asking these questions rather than one.
Apart from an update on Wednesday announcing a new release date, the publisher has still to say what went wrong - but that won't stop those trying to work out what happened.
Could it have been some kind of publishing version of a hack or a hoax? Was it a sales stunt? A prank? Stray text put in for a joke and then not removed? Or someone changing text after the proofreading was finished?
What's surprising is that any other news lines in the book were heavily trailed, including excerpts in the US press and in interviews.
So it might seem odd to bury the biggest bombshell in the middle of the book, without any subsequent explanation of this revelation, and without any kind of highlighting of the claim.
After this short line revealing the name, the Dutch text goes back to the same as the English, while you might expect it to reference back or expand on such a major revelation, which would be the biggest moment in the book.
If a publisher had decided to take such a big decision to reveal this information, it would be its biggest selling point as well as its biggest risk.
Either way, if it was going to be deliberately revealed it's hard to see why it would be tucked away as a single line, mid-text, rather than milked in every way to boost sales.
Buckingham Palace hasn't been commenting on what has appeared in the Dutch edition of Endgame, in a book that already had been taking aim at the senior members of the Royal Family.
The English-language publishers, Harper Collins, have also not responded.
In the wake of the Oprah interview, with its toxic questions about racism and the royals, the late Queen's response had included: "Recollections may vary."
In this latest Dutch whodunnit, it seems translations may vary too.
Sean “Diddy” Combs has resigned as chairman of hip-hop TV network Revolt, the company said Tuesday, as he faces multiple sexual assault and battery accusations dating back to the early 1990s.
Revolt said that Combs has stepped down to ensure that the network “remains steadfastly focused on our mission to create meaningful content for the culture and amplify the voices of all Black people,” according to a company statement posted on Instagram.
“Our focus has always been one that reflects our commitment to the collective journey of Revolt — one that is not driven by an individual, but by the shared efforts and values of our entire team on behalf of advancing, elevating and championing our culture — and that continues,” said the statement, which noted that Combs didn’t have an operational or day-to-day role in the business.
Related Stories
On Thursday, two women sued Combs for sexual assault under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which revived the window to bring sexual misconduct claims for one year. Joi Dickerson-Neal, who briefly appeared in one of his music videos, claimed that he drugged and raped her when she was a college student at Syracuse University in 1991. According to the complaint, he allegedly recorded the encounter and shared it with several people.
In another suit, the plaintiff, suing as a Jane Doe, accused Combs and R&B singer Aaron Hall of sexually assaulting her and a friend, as well as choking her until she passed out several days later as he urged her not to report the incident.
The suits were filed less than a week after Combs settled a suit brought by Cassie, an R&B singer once signed to his label, accusing him of raping and physically abusing her for nearly a decade. The case was among a series of suits under the Adult Survivors Act against powerful men in the music industry, including music executive L.A. Reid; Neil Portnow, the former head of the organization behind the Grammy Awards; and Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Combs denied the allegations and called them a “money grab.”
“Because of Mr. Combs’ fame and success, he is an easy target for accusers who will falsify the truth, without conscience or consequence, for financial benefit,” the statement said. “The New York Legislature surely did not intend or expect the Adult Survivors Act to be exploited for improper purposes. The public should be skeptical and not rush to accept these unsubstantiated allegations.”
Combs founded Revolt in 2013 as a music channel on Comcast after its merger with NBCUniversal. In 2021, Detavio Samuels, hired as chief operating officer, was elevated to chief executive of the Black-owned media company after the departure of Roma Khanna.
Article From & Read More ( Sean “Diddy” Combs Steps Down as Chairman of Revolt Amid Multiple Sexual Assault Lawsuits - Hollywood Reporter )
https://ift.tt/X6eVGxL
Entertainment
Despite Omid Scobie’s intention to produce a no-holds-barred, game-changing, unsparing analysis of the royals, their uncertain future and unclear purpose, their otherworldly extravagances, and how ruthlessly and ineptly they operate, his new royal tome, published today, is not as explosive as it imagines itself to be. Neither is it as full of scandal and revelation as the dish-filled biography of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Scobie wrote with Carolyn Durand. Indeed, at times it reads rather like an overlong opinion piece on the subject of why the author believes the royal family should be abolished (spoiler: it won’t), and a collection of various score-settling media-world and palace beefs. The reviews are coming in—and are mostly thumbs-down and sneering.
However, there are some genuine insights. The best of these seem (unsurprisingly) to come from the Sussex camp and include details on how Harry felt at being side-lined from the family during the queen’s death, Harry’s view of his relationship with his brother and father, and an account of an exchange of letters between Meghan and King Charles that name the royal racists (there are two not one) who questioned the skin color of Harry and Meghan’s then unborn first child, Archie. Scobie says he knows who the two are—it is unknown if they are both royals, or one a royal, and one a member of the royal household. In the book, Scobie says Kate Middleton and Prince William knew about the royal racists and resisted King Charles’ request they reach out and talk to Harry and Meghan about it.
Charles was “horrified” by how Meghan felt about what was said. Scobie is also highly critical of Prince Edward and his wife Sophie, in two race-related passages. The royal racism scandal—the names still unknown, whatever was actually said still unknown, no apologies made, the inevitable public debate and outrage as yet unplayed out—remains a highly charged, potentially extremely damaging issue for the royals.
Whatever else, Endgame is a useful compendium of just how insanely feud- and machination-filled, and weird and arcane, royal life remains in 2023—which is why it caused plenty of pre-publication palace palpitations. Scobie sketches how spokespeople and aides operate for their masters with a single-minded intensity, which often includes the wanton denigration of others. For all its outward finery, Scobie shows over and over again how ugly the inner workings of Buckingham Palace are.
So, what could this book—about where the royal family finds itself after the death of Queen Elizabeth, about Harry’s fractured relationship with his family, and William and Charles’ growing rivalry—possibly contain that we did not already know? Well, quite a bit, even if the palace can rest easy. We read it as a form of pure public service, and below is a round-up of all its hottest, and even silliest, revelations, incisive analyses, rumors, and sources being their absolute bitchiest. Royal fans, take a seat, and get the butler to bring you some popcorn!
First, a catch-up over all the stories so far, and extracts and leaks over the last few days.
The really fascinating overarching theme of the book is Scobie’s rigorously illustrated account of the rivalry between William and Charles. He says William doesn’t think his father is “competent” enough to handle the job and that Charles has seethed at what he perceives as William’s attempts to upstage him and depict him as a “transitional” king.
One Charles aide is quoted as saying of reports that it was William who pushed Prince Andrew out of the family: “William, or his staff, I should say, will always be quick to play up his efforts…There is an almost frenzied push for William to be seen as ready for the throne, despite an entire generation coming beforehand.”
“Though they share similar passions and interests, their style of leadership is completely different,” Scobie writes of Charles and William, highlighting William’s decisive response to the scandal of Lady Susan Hussey, the late queen’s lady-in-waiting, who was forced to apologize and resign after she repeatedly asked Ngozi Fulani, a Black charity boss, where she was “really” from at a palace event.
Britain's Prince William and King Charles III during the National Service of Thanksgiving and Dedication for King Charles and Queen Camilla, and the presentation of the Honours of Scotland, at St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh.
Jane Barlow/Pool via Reuters
Charles reportedly resents William—and his Earthshot Awards—for moving in on the environmental issues that were once his domain. Charles leads with his head and heart, Scobie writes—William is “colder,” and “has no problem taking prisoners along the way.”
Kensington Palace sources are cited as saying that William just wants to be sure his image is no longer affected by “poor decisions” made by other members of the family including Charles, while Scobie describes the two courts as “hives of competing agendas.”
Scobie says the king’s team were “furious over William’s effrontery” when, on the way home from a “tone deaf” Caribbean tour, William’s aides told journalists the experience would inform his “blueprint” for his own kingship in the future.
The Fulani scandal, said Scobie, shows the royal family “lacks the agility and improvisational thinking to change with a rapidly transforming world.” Scobie goes on to criticize the royals’ inability to deal with race- and diversity-related issues at the palace and within the Commonwealth.
Prince William, Duke of Cambridge and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge along with Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex arrive at St Mary Magdalene's church for the Royal Family's Christmas Day service on the Sandringham estate in eastern England, Britain, December 25, 2018.
Hannah McKay/Reuters
“I would be lying if I said it’s not a difficult environment to be a person of color,” a non-white member of the royal household staff told Scobie. “I have not witnessed outright, explicit racism, but I have certainly experienced, and seen others experience, microaggressions and prejudice at work. This place still has a long way to go when it comes to everyone working here being able to feel completely comfortable.”
Kate and William’s coronation video focused on them and their kids very deliberately, a source close to William said. “The prince is aware of the huge amount of popularity and good favor that he and the princess receive… For them to take advantage of that only benefits the entire institution.”
There is no more persuading the public that William and Charles are always in agreement, Scobie says. Charles is seen as a “transitional” monarch, and William is waiting, knowing the public much prefer him to his dad. Kensington Palace now regularly shares that William is doing things his own way, a former senior courtier said. “There has been a sense that William is slowly trying to separate himself from his father. His popularity is high, and he doesn’t want his father’s lack of it to affect that.”
William and Harry: forget it
We learn that William “considers his brother an outsider,” and Scobie adds, “No longer useful as a helpful distraction or collateral damage, William had been wanting to distance himself from his brother ever since Harry’s marriage to Meghan—whom [William] took a disliking to from the start.” A source close to the Sussexes told Scobie, “William shifted away from acting like a brother and became more like someone only focused [on the crown].”
A source close to Prince William, speaking on how he feels about Prince Harry, said, “There’s a huge amount of anger there. He feels betrayed and sad about the situation. But he also doesn’t agree with the things his brother feels he has done. He feels he has lost Harry and doesn’t want to know this version of him.”
Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex (L), and Britain's Prince William, Duke of Cambridge attend the unveiling of a statue of their mother, Princess Diana at The Sunken Garden in Kensington Palace, London on July 1, 2021, which would have been her 60th birthday.
Dominic Lipinski /Pool/AFP via Getty Images
That version, countered a Spencer family source, is simply, “Harry being a man who has stepped outside of the institution and sees things in a different light. They will never see eye to eye at this point. They’re on completely different sides… that won’t change.”
In February and March of this year, Harry asked a friend to arrange a conversation with William—his overtures were ignored. The damage to their relationship is “irreparable.”
A friend of Harry’s said, “Though he hasn’t found closure with his family he accepted that things are unlikely to change, particularly with his brother—who refuses to even properly talk with him.”
While Charles has tried to keep the door open to Harry, he is also described as being “cold and brief” in an awkward call with Harry after the Netflix documentary Harry and Meghan came out, evicting him from Frogmore Cottage as “punishment” for his memoir, and only invited Harry to the coronation at the last minute. His wife Camilla has “no relationship” with Prince Harry, Scobie says.
Harry told a friend,” I’m ready to move past it. Whether I get an apology or accountability, who knows? Who really cares at this point?”
Kate and Meghan: ice, ice, baby
Scobie says Meghan had originally hoped she and Kate could bond, but Kate “can be cold if she doesn’t like someone,” said a source. “She wasn’t a fan” of Meghan’s from the start, said another. “She spent more time talking about Meghan than to her.” Kate has “jokingly shivered” when Meghan’s name has come up. The two women have had “almost zero direct communication, bar a few short pleasantries, since late 2019.”
Meghan was aggrieved the palace didn’t correct the record over rumors she had made Kate cry in a row over bridesmaid dresses for her wedding (Meghan says it was the other way round, and Kate sent her flowers as an apology).
For Kate, relations are so bad, “there’s no going back,” even in regards to Harry. “She was close to Harry, and she will always look back fondly on those moments, and the relationship he had with their children,” a source who knows the Waleses told Scobie. “But to her, there is no way she could ever trust them after all their interviews.”
Some reports say Scobie is critical of Kate, but the criticism is part of a wider, and astute analysis, of her royal ascent, and the changing phases of her royal life and significance.
Britain's Prince William and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, arrive at the world premiere of the new James Bond film "No Time To Die" at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Britain, September 28, 2021.
Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Charles ‘cold’ towards Harry
The much-publicized recent birthday call between Harry and Charles signals a détente, after long periods of silence. After his highly critical memoir, Spare, was published, Scobie writes that Harry reached out to Charles to discuss unresolved issues. “It was an awkward conversation, but he knew if he didn’t make those first steps, there would never be any progress, a friend of Harry said. “There were no raised voices, no arguments… but the King was cold and brief rather than open to any proper dialogue.”
During a conversation just hours after Prince Philip’s funeral on Sept 19, 2022. Harry confronted Charles and William about why nothing was done on Meghan’s behalf to rebut the palace staff's bullying allegations made against her. “You must understand, darling boy, the institution can’t just tell the media what to do.”
Harry, a source said, “was gutted that his family would watch this kind of dirty game play out.” Scobie writes that the palace’s report on the allegations “remain unknown to the public, unseen by the Sussexes or their lawyers… somewhere in a vault in Buckingham Palace.”
Harry and Meghan: doing it their way
Unsurprisingly, the fullest and most intimate material in the book comes care of Scobie’s special, best-sourced subjects, and the section about Harry and Meghan includes the best writing in the book—a gripping account of Harry being frozen out on the day of the queen’s death by the rest of the royals.
What else? Harry and Meghan don’t have staff in the early mornings, taking care of their kids, and taking them to and picking them up from their schooling.
Harry has gone very California, working out, employing a personal trainer, going on hikes and bike rides, having acupuncture, and taking ice baths.
The palace took six months to confirm Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet’s title change. “They see the way their children are treated differently, and that’s hard to feel comfortable with,” a friend of the Sussexes told Scobie.
BRITAIN-ROYALS/HARRY-MEGHAN
Britain's Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, attend the 2022 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Ripple of Hope Award Gala in New York City, U.S., December 6, 2022.
Andrew Kelly/Reuters
A friend of the couple told Scobie: “Not one step” of the last few years “could be predicted… they were flying by the seat of their pants at times. Those first two years outside of the U.K. were scary, stressful, and while full of hope, incredibly draining. It took a long time to be able to just sit back and think, ‘Phew, we’re going to be OK.’’”
Meghan felt especially rejected when Charles let it be known she wouldn’t be welcome at Balmoral on the day of Queen Elizabeth’s death. It wasn’t protocol, as Charles claimed (giving as the reason that Kate wasn’t going either; in fact, she was staying at home because of her children’s first day at their new school the same day).
Of his various media-related lawsuits, a source close to Harry said that he plans “on making sure this does not take over my life… I want to see it through to its conclusion.” He wants the cases resolved by 2025. A source close to Harry said, “This is a tough commitment, but he has the balls to take them on… He’s never going to back down. He spent ten years in the military and finds it very hard to turn a blind eye to injustice. He is determined to see this through.” He wants an “ethical and reliable press”—perhaps meaning one that just writes nice things about him and his wife.
William: his marriage and alleged affair
A friend of Prince William’s said of the rumors that he’d had an affair with Rose Hanbury, the Marchioness of Cholmondeley: “Dealing with nasty, untrue rumors… wouldn’t you be filled with rage? It’s been very difficult for him. And for Kate. But I truly believe these things make you stronger.”
William and Kate’s marriage, a source said, “is a partnership, an alliance, and a lifetime commitment. They work as a team.” William is “incredibly proud” of Kate’s growth as a senior member of the family. “It’s all about support, and both feel supported by one another.”
In private, William’s temper “flares” closely resembling his dad. A former aide told Scobie, “William is a man that likes to get things done, done quickly, done efficiently… In the process of making that happen, he can definitely be sharp….” There is a colder side to him, “as he gets closer to the top job.”
Britain's Prince Charles and his wife Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, leave Crathie Church at Balmoral in Scotland, after attending a service on their first wedding anniversary, April 9, 2006.
Gordon Jack/Reuters
Charles: the diva
Scobie recalls Charles famously losing it over a leaky pen last year, and said his demanding, petulant behavior is well known. He likes soft-boiled eggs (“four minutes—no more, no less, or they’ll be sent back to the kitchen in infantile fury”), thousand thread count bed linen when he travels (it must be perfectly steamed). There are “temper tantrums” if his pajamas aren’t pressed; when his shoelaces are threadbare they are replaced with freshly ironed pairs. You may have heard his toothpaste is squeezed onto his toothbrush for him (a one-inch strip!), but Charles also insists it comes from a “crested silver dispenser.”
Queen Camilla says it all with her friends
Queen Camilla is reportedly friends with Jeremy Clarkson, and stayed silent after he wrote an infamous column saying he had dreamed of Meghan Markle being “paraded naked through the streets of every town in Britain while the crowds…throw lumps of excrement at her.”
Camilla and Piers Morgan are also close friends, contends Scobie, sharing a mutual disdain for all things “woke.” Behind closed doors Camilla “rolls her eyes… when topics such as gender identity, unconscious racial bias, and even veganism are raised.”
“It’s all lefty nonsense to her,” a former aide revealed. “Even gluten-free or dairy-free options on a restaurant menu irk her.”
Camilla “quietly thanked” Morgan for defending the royals after Harry and Meghan’s Oprah interview. “Camilla will never publicly comment on anything, or speak ill of others, but she will always know someone who can do that for her,” a former aide told Scobie.
TV personality Piers Morgan arrives at BBC Broadcasting House, ahead of his appearance on 'Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg', in London, Britain, September 3, 2023.
Hollie Adams/Reuters
Morgan vigorously denied Scobie’s claims Monday. “For the record, I have never had a single phone conversation with Queen Camilla,” Morgan said. “Now he says as a fact in his book that we have regular phone conversations—that I personally know is an absolute lie. I did however, as I said publicly at the time, have conversations with several other members of the royal family, but it wasn’t Queen Camilla.”
Meanwhile, a friend of Prince Harry—after he trashed Camilla in Spare, and in interviews about the book—says he doesn’t see her as the “evil stepmother,” adding their relationship is “respectful… and kept at a safe distance.”
Camilla, another source said, isn’t so forgiving in the other direction. ”To say she wasn’t hurt by what he wrote (in Spare) would not be the truth. But she won’t retaliate.”
Omid Scobie on the Fourth Estate stage during day one of Web Summit 2022 at the Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.
Sam Barnes/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images
When Meghan called Omid
After Scobie was subjected to racist abuse, Meghan called him in late summer 2018, he writes. “I just wanted to say hi, see how you’re doing,” she told him. Their then-press officer had told Meghan and Harry about the harassment and threats he had received. Scobie writes, “Here was someone checking in in a journalist she still only really knew through a byline,” when the royals weren’t doing the same for her as she suffered abuse online and in the press.
“They didn’t see Meghan as important enough to care for—simple as that,” said a friend of Meghan’s. “No matter who asked, no matter what was pointed out, no matter how loudly she told them, or we told them, that she was struggling…. she was expected to shut up and deal with it quietly.”
Article From & Read More ( Omid Scobie's 'Endgame': Every Royal Scandal and Feud Revealed in New Book - The Daily Beast )
https://ift.tt/gjmNauS
Entertainment
