“It’s harder than ever to hear music in a vacuum,” write Hannah Giorgis and Spencer Kornhaber. “In this info-swamped era, the sound coming out of the speakers will be processed in the context of broad stories (uh oh, is this song about Robert Mueller?) and personal ones (uh oh, is this song about my ex?).” The most indelible television shows, films, podcasts, and books of 2018 are colored with that same bleed of political and cultural significance.
What We Listened To
(Illustration by Katie Martin)The 23 best albums of 2018
“Though Drake kept watch over the Hot 100 from the No. 1 spot for much of 2018, this year in music was not one of consensus.” → See the full list.
50 best podcasts
From a series about the history of conversion therapy in the United States to the jaw-dropping story of the neurosurgeon nicknamed Dr. Death, to a return to the events that led to then–U.S. President Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998, these most well-crafted shows of 2018 will keep your road-trip playlists spinning for a long time. → See the full list.
27 most memorable moments in music
The cultural effects of Nicki Minaj’s “Chun-Li,” Ariana Grande’s “No Tears Left to Cry,” Mitski’s “Nobody,” and more. → See the full list.
Illustration by Katie MartinThe 22 best television shows of 2018
Both new and returning series, from an adaptation of a fiction podcast thriller to a light but philosophical comedy. → See the full list.
25 best individual television episodes
Standouts from Atlanta, One Day at a Time, The Terror, Homecoming, The Great British Baking Show, and more. → See the full list.
17 best films
“While 2018 was not a big year for big films, it was a big year for smaller ones. Yes, A Star Is Born was a major hit, and deservedly so. But the bulk of the movies on our two critics’ lists were not Hollywood Oscar bait but intimate fables meticulously told.” → See the full list.
Illustration by Katie MartinThe 19 best books of 2018
“Highlights from a year of reading, including Ada Limón’s The Carrying, Tommy Orange’s There There, Madeline Miller’s Circe, and more.” → See the full list.
Our 7 favorite cookbooks
Pan-seared steak with za’atar chimichurri, curried lamb ribs, and a host of other inventive dishes from this year’s top food bibles. → See the full list.
This special edition of the Daily was compiled by Haley Weiss and Shan Wang. Concerns, comments, questions? Email swang@theatlantic.com
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As winter approaches in Finnish Lapland, daylight rapidly retreats. The Sami—the estimated 80,000 people who are indigenous to the region and live in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia—prepare for winter by bringing their reindeer down from the mountains. More than 7,000 reindeer herders, known as boazovazzi, or “reindeer walkers,” work together to herd 500,000 reindeer from their grazing pastures. Once the animals are down from the mountain, they are separated by their owners in large herding pens. Some reindeer go to the slaughterhouse, while others are kept for breeding. A select few males are neutered and trained to work, either pulling sleds or racing.
“I wanted to capture the eerie isolation of the Arctic landscape and the sheer adrenaline rush and excitement of the herding,” Eva Weber told The Atlantic. Weber’s short documentary depicts a three-minute slice of life as a Sami reindeer herder. The filmmaker fought the limitations of the project—only a few hours of light to film each day, a remote destination, cameras that constantly fogged due to the sub-zero temperatures, and sound equipment that failed in the cold—in order to capture the ancient tradition of reindeer herding in the North Pole. “It really was a very tough shoot.”
Encountering reindeer up close was a transformative experience for Weber. “The reindeer make the most incredible noises,” she said. “You can hear them from a long distance, and it is beautiful.” Once in the herding pen, Weber was struck by the energy of the animals. “I will never forget standing in the middle of the animals running around us in circles as they were being separated. We were standing in the path of the running reindeer and barely being brushed by them. Moving at that speed and with those antlers, it’s amazing how they manage to avoid obstacles in their path.”
According to Weber, Scandinavian folklore relishes in the mystery associated with Lapland. “It’s a land of magic and myths, ruled by the ancient animistic beliefs of the Sami,” she said. “According to Sami mythology, spirits are present in everything, from rocks and trees, foxes and reindeer, and the northern lights in the sky.”
“There is a dreamlike quality to the land, and for half a year, the landscape is transformed magically to resemble a wintry fairytale,” she continued. “During this time, you can’t tell whether you stand on land or lake, beneath the sky, or in it; you can see the color of the air and hear the hum of silence. There is something about isolation in an expansive space that blurs one’s boundaries.”
But if you are ever lucky enough to visit Lapland, remember to refrain from asking how many reindeer a Sami herder has. “It’s rude,” Weber said. “It is like asking a Westerner how much money he has in his bank account. The Sami say their money ‘roams around.’”
Yasuyoshi Chiba, a staff photographer with AFP, spent nearly the entire year of 2018 in Kenya, documenting an incredibly wide range of subjects, landscapes, and issues. Chiba has been on staff with AFP since 2011, winning multiple awards for his photojournalism, which is based mostly in Brazil and Kenya. This year, he captured the faces and stories of some of the 50 million people who live in Kenya, an East African nation of incredible diversity in culture, landscape, and wildlife. His photos cover subjects from a China-backed railway cutting across Nairobi National Park to the hundreds of thousands of refugees in the Dadaab refugee complex, from fashion shows and premieres in Nairobi to lions in open grassland and tribal festivals, and much much more. Below, in roughly chronological order, is a look at some of the stories brought to us through Yasuyoshi Chiba’s lens in the past year.
The surprise visit by President Donald Trump to military personnel in Iraq and Germany the day after Christmas was a particularly welcome development, given his previous departure from this time-honored tradition of his predecessors around the holiday season. The visits were marred, however, by the president’s overtly political rhetoric and by his encouragement of the small number of uniformed personnel who offered him their “Make America Great Again” hats to sign, or who displayed campaign banners. It’s the latest instance of the erosion of long-standing commitments to apolitical institutions—and the comparative indifference with which these acts were greeted ought to worry all of us.
Employees of the U.S. government, in general, face restrictions on the “political activity” in which they can engage in the workplace. Uniformed members of the U.S. military are arguably held to a high standard of nonpolitical behavior, even outside the workplace and particularly while in uniform. The presence of campaign paraphernalia at a presidential visit—and the president’s blithe disregard for protocol in choosing to sign some of that paraphernalia, to say nothing of his politically tinged speech to military personnel in a war zone—runs afoul of at least the spirit, if not the letter, of written rules such as Department of Defense Directive 1344.10 (Political Activities) and Uniform Code of Military Justice Article 88 (Contempt Toward Officials) and Article 134 (General Article).
These displays should never have been allowed, and the president certainly should not have encouraged them. But the real problem was not the boneheaded actions of a few men and women in uniform. They made a mistake in a moment of exuberance, excited to see their commander in chief. They may face a tongue lashing, or perhaps some minor discipline, but that is the most that should, and likely will, happen to them.
[Read: The president is visiting troops in Iraq. To what end?]
Nor is the real problem Trump himself. The president has made it clear that he has little interest in abiding by institutional customs and norms. Where the law does not explicitly and unequivocally prohibit behavior on his part, he construes that as an opportunity to engage in the behavior. He pays little regard to whether he should do so, or whether it would reflect poorly on the institution of the presidency itself. That is who the president has always been, and it is who he will remain.
No, the real problem is the political tribalism that continues to erode our apolitical institutions. Rules are rules, even when politically inconvenient. The military in particular is one of our most cherished apolitical institutions. We rely on the military to protect the country as a whole, regardless of which party controls the executive branch. The public needs to retain the assurance that military personnel are fighting for the United States of America, not merely for the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Maintaining that public confidence requires equal and just application of the rules, even on minor issues, such as what transpired in Iraq and Germany.
Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies with indifference. It was indifference that led some to excuse the president’s breaking decades of institutional custom in order to conceal his tax returns, or his refusal to divest from his businesses. It was indifference that led to the acceptance of the politically expedient erosion of anti-nepotism laws so that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner could serve in the White House. And it was indifference that allowed the politicized micromanagement of the civil servants at the Justice Department conducting the Russia investigation.
[Eliot A. Cohen: Presidents need to visit the troops]
Now some of the president’s defenders are trying to persuade us to ignore erosion of the apolitical bubble we have so carefully constructed over the years around the civil service and the U.S. military. They suggest that only some rules really need to be worried about, and the rest are just for show—especially if we happen to like the political views being advanced by those who ignore them.
There is danger in indifference. Those who opposed the president’s agenda—and, even more so, those who support it—should see that danger clearly, and decline to take the bait.
The year was not a month old when a 16-year-old allegedly opened fire in a cafeteria in Italy, Texas, injuring one of his classmates on January 22nd. It was the first shooting on a K–12 campus this year. One day later, in Benton, Kentucky, a 15-year-old student allegedly killed two of his classmates and injured 17 others. Over the next three weeks, there were shootings at or near Lincoln High School in Philadelphia, Salvador Castro Middle School in Los Angeles, and Oxon Hill High School in Maryland. And on February 14, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, allegedly killed 17 people and wounded more than a dozen others.
2018 has been indelibly marked by school shootings, and there was concern—at least at the outset—that it would be a year defined by a failure to address the problem, which several political figures, mostly Democrats, identified as access to guns. There had been hundreds of gun laws passed since a gunman killed 26 people, including elementary-school students, in Newtown, Connecticut, and most of them had expanded access to guns. But according to the Giffords Law Center, a gun-violence-prevention advocacy group, “the gun-safety movement experienced a tectonic shift in 2018.”
The law center tracked 1,628 firearm bills in 2018 and compiled a year-end review, which was released earlier this month. In total, 26 states and the District of Columbia enacted 67 new “gun safety” laws. “The growing number of mass shootings and domestic violence homicides, as well as the devastation wrought by guns in urban communities, has culminated in a surging pressure to address this epidemic,” the report reads.
The raft of legislation is significant not least because after so many years of school shootings, it had started to feel like every mass school shooting would be met with a familiar round of “thoughts and prayers” and calls for action, and then another school shooting would come, with little having changed. To be clear, school shootings remain rare, despite the devastating consistency with which they seem to occur. As of EdWeek’s latest tally, there were 24 school shootings with injuries or deaths this year—an average of two each month. But the very act of keeping count has its own complexities, and as my colleague Isabel Fattal wrote in February, “the messiness of counting school shootings often contributes to sensationalizing or oversimplifying a modern trend of mass violence in America.”
Parkland helped cut through the debate about numbers, putting a face and a voice to the violence. The students affected by the shooting took control of the conversation. “They have been through a trauma that would leave most adults curled in a prenatal pretzel under the bed,” Michelle Cottle wrote in The Atlantic. “But these teens have elbowed their way into one of this nation’s most vicious policy debates, demanding to have their say.” The students energized the efforts that had been laying the foundation to challenge gun laws since the Newtown shooting, and they helped plan a nationwide March for Our Lives, which included a massive rally in Washington, D.C. State legislators set to work rewriting laws. The Trump administration banned bump-stocks, an attachment that makes semi-automatic weapons fire faster. And according to an NPR analysis, gun-control groups outspent gun-rights advocacy groups during the 2018 campaign cycle; in previous cycles, spending by gun-rights groups far outpaced that of gun-control groups.
For activists, 2018 has offered reason for hope. “We are going to be the kids that you read about in textbooks,” Emma González, a Parkland student, said in a viral speech. “Just like Tinker v. Des Moines, we are going to change the law. That’s going to be Marjory Stoneman Douglas in that textbook, and it’s all going to be because of the tireless effort of the school board, the faculty members, and most importantly, the students.”
But as much as some things were changing, there were reminders of how firmly entrenched the shape of the gun debate is. For instance, Trump’s school-safety commission, formed in response to Parkland, said that it wouldn’t focus on guns. Earlier this month, it released its recommendations to “make schools safer.” The report downplayed the role of guns, emphasized mental-health services, focused on Obama-era school-discipline rules, and advocated “no notoriety” for school shooters. All told, the report signaled that even though the conversation has shifted somewhat, the changes are marginal, and for the most part the gun debate in America looks more or less the same.
The critical last layer of Donald Trump’s support in 2016 came from voters uncertain that he belonged in the White House. Now he appears determined to test how much chaos they will absorb before concluding they made the wrong decision.
For all the talk about the solidity of Trump’s base, it’s easy to forget how many voters expressed ambivalence even as they selected him over Hillary Clinton. Fully one-fourth of voters who backed Trump said they did not believe he had the temperament to succeed as president, according to an Election Day exit poll conducted by Edison Research. That number rose to about three in 10 among both the independents and the college-educated whites who backed Trump, according to previously unpublished data provided to me by Edison.
Yet even as they expressed hesitation about the future president, those voters were still willing to take a risk on him, either because they disliked Clinton or wanted change or preferred to disrupt the political system. Some may have thought Trump would moderate his behavior in office.
[Read: Republicans didn’t learn anything from the midterms]
It’s an understatement to say Trump has dashed those hopes. Instead, he has continued to shatter norms of presidential behavior in every possible direction. Allies and opponents alike usually attribute Trump’s volatility to personal factors: an impulsive and mercurial personality that lashes back at any perceived affront, seemingly without much thought about the long-term implications and with a reluctance to take advice or consider evidence.
But after two years, it’s also clear that Trump sees strategic value in violating presidential norms. He’s shown that he believes he benefits from immersing all of those around him in constant unpredictability. Probably even more important, he sees barreling through the informal guardrails that have constrained previous presidents as a way of signaling to his core supporters that he will go to any length to defend their interests. From that perspective, the more establishment voices condemn his behavior, the more he signals to his base that he’s fighting for them by any means necessary.
Until the midterm elections, it was common for Trump critics to lament that he paid little price for these excesses. But the November results showed, in a quantifiable way, that Trump’s belligerent and erratic behavior does carry a cost. Democrats won 40 seats in the House—and carried the national House popular vote by a larger margin than the GOP did in its 1994 or 2010 landslides—even though unemployment was below 4 percent and two-thirds of voters described the economy as either excellent or good. A performance that weak for the president’s party should not be possible with an economy that strong. But both independents and college-educated white voters, two groups that expressed widespread doubt about Trump’s temperament from the outset, broke solidly for Democrats last month after narrowly tilting toward him in 2016.
Rather than taking that shift as a sign to reconsider his course, Trump has doubled down on disorder since Election Day. He approaches the New Year engulfed in three distinct crises, all of which he ignited with his own actions.
Trump has precipitated a diplomatic crisis by abruptly announcing his intention to withdraw American forces from Syria. That triggered the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, which reinforced the initial tremor over the sudden reversal with a powerful aftershock.
Trump has precipitated a governing crisis by forcing a partial federal shutdown through his demand for $5 billion in funding for his border wall—an ultimatum that the administration itself only a few days earlier acknowledged could not win 60 votes in the Senate.
And he’s instigated a financial-market crisis through the shutdown, his saber-rattling on trade with China, and his repeated Twitter attacks on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell—with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin providing the aftershocks in this case through his amateurish efforts to calm the markets last weekend.
Trump defenders argue that, on the merits, he can win each of these fights politically (though that case seems very tenuous for the border wall, which has faced majority opposition in virtually every public poll conducted during his presidency). But the larger risk to Trump is that the virtues of each of his positions become indistinguishable amid such swelling levels of confrontation and instability; arguing for any individual policy in this environment may be like trying to identify a single wave in a flood tide.
[Read: The Trump administration’s lowest point yet]
Each of the current crises may recede in 2019, but the overall trajectory of Trump’s presidency points toward more, not less, disorder. Trump has systematically dismissed advisers such as Mattis who were considered, however imperfectly, the most powerful constraints on his behavior. And Trump will face new provocations that are likely to trigger his most belligerent impulses—especially from an incoming Democratic House majority that’s poised to investigate every aspect of his presidency (including his personal finances). Looming close behind are more potential indictments from Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the release of his final report on Trump, Russia, and the 2016 campaign. In 2019, combustion may be as great a risk to Trump as collusion.
As the stock market has nosedived in December, it’s become common for financial traders to tell business reporters that they now see concrete danger in Trump’s Twitter and press-conference tirades, which they once treated as only “background noise” behind policies that they generally supported.
But since their November losses, strikingly few congressional Republicans have echoed that verdict. Even amid the current maelstrom, very few have publicly broken with Trump over the shutdown or his attacks on the Fed. And while some have criticized his Syria decision and lamented Mattis’s departure, hardly any have acknowledged the broader concerns about Trump’s decision making and stability that both developments provoke.
The market meltdown in particular may be creating the most pressure Trump has yet felt to temper his behavior. But so long as congressional Republicans refuse to publicly demand change, the waves of chaos emanating from the Oval Office are likely to only grow higher. Through their deferential silence, Republicans are betting they can withstand those waves better in 2020 than they did in 2018.
The video Kevin Spacey posted on Christmas Eve has been repeatedly described as “bizarre,” with good reason: No one knows what it means. Wearing a Santa apron and occasionally sipping from a mug, Spacey seems to inhabit his House of Cards character, Frank Underwood, drawling things such as, “We’re not done, no matter what anyone says.” The monologue hints at a desire to return to Cards, despite his character having been killed off (“You never actually saw me die, did you?” he asks). It plays as commentary on the more than 30 allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey: “You wouldn’t rush to judgment without facts, would you?” The confusion the video has sown may have distracted from the news that the actor was just charged with the sexual assault of an 18-year-old in 2016.
What’s clear, at the least, is that Spacey chose for his first significant reemergence to be a showcase—or “showcase,” heavy on the air quotes—of his acting. And for it to spotlight one of the roles that the public once feted him for. And for it to dispense thoughts about morality and truth. All of which makes a statement: Don’t separate this artist from his art.
As year two of the post–Harvey Weinstein reckoning unfolds, that old ethical question—can art be evaluated apart from its artist?—feels more and more academic. Whether or not they should, many people clearly are fine with being entertained by alleged abusers. The cheers outnumbered the walkouts at surprise comedy sets by the confessed creep Louis C.K. The rapper XXXtentacion faced well-publicized allegations of hateful violence, and yet since his death, his music has risen to mega-popularity. Art, it seems, can survive allegations. What’s more unnerving is the suspicion, now, that artists can weather them, too—by relying on the goodwill engendered by their work.
Spacey’s career long blended highbrow acclaim and mainstream appeal. A stage thespian before he was a film lead, he amassed glittering awards and a prestigious post as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. These are not merely the spoils of a movie star; they are the signifiers of one who approaches his trade as capital-a Art. This particular artist’s muse? Evil. Spacey’s signature turns in The Usual Suspects, Seven, and House of Cards were all charismatic bad guys, and for 1999’s American Beauty, his suburban-dad character, Lester, lusted after a teenage girl. Accepting the Oscar for Best Actor, Spacey said he loved playing Lester “because we got to see all of his worst qualities and we still grew to love him. This movie to me is all about how any single act from any single person put out of context is damnable.”
The “Let Me Be Frank” video may be an attempt to reassert this professional history. Spacey the great actor is implied in his complaint that his scandals led to an “unsatisfying ending” that could have been “memorable”—a likely dig at the poorly reviewed final season of Cards that didn’t feature Frank Underwood. Spacey the philosopher of misdeeds is here, too: “I told you my deepest, darkest secrets,” he says, seeming to speak both as Frank and also as himself, the public figure. “I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty, but mostly I challenged you and made you think. And you trusted me, even though you knew you shouldn’t.”
[Read: The Kevin Spacey allegations, through the lens of power]
Left unstated is the way that Spacey’s acting career was accompanied by allegations of misbehavior, sexual and otherwise. (He’s apologized to his first public accuser, Anthony Rapp, and denied or remained silent on other allegations.) The Usual Suspects shut down production for two days after Spacey made an advance on a younger actor on set, the actor Gabriel Byrne told The Sunday Times. Producers on House of Cards conducted an investigation and sent Spacey to retraining in 2012 after an inappropriate “remark and gesture.”
Also left unreckoned with in Spacey’s video is the difference between the thrill of fictional villainy and the effects of the real-life kind. One of Spacey’s accusers, the filmmaker Tony Montana, has talked about the PTSD and shame he suffered after Spacey allegedly grabbed him. Another, who says he was 15 when a 24-year-old Spacey tried to rape him, told Vulture, “What he left me with, more than what he took from me, was a sense that I deserved this. And that’s the knot I’m still untangling.”
All of this queasy context is surely part of why Spacey’s video accrued more than 7 million views in just a few days. People are rubbernecking at the disgraced star opting to play the villain. “Kevin Spacey is sending a very disturbing message as he chastises his audience,” the actress Ellen Barkin tweeted. “If you hypocrites loved me as a murderer, why won’t you love me as a sex offender? Maybe because Frank Underwood’s crimes are fiction and Kevin Spacey’s are not.” Wrote Patricia Arquette, “I’m sure none of the men who were kids at the time of their sexual assaults appreciate @KevinSpacey’s weird video.”
But another unsettling fact is that some portion of the video’s viewers really do miss Spacey on-screen—and would cheer his return to public life, regardless of whether he’s an abuser. The YouTube clip has more than 51,000 “dislikes” and 170,000 “likes”: an imprecise and manipulable metric of public sentiment, yes, but one that’s reflected in some of the comments. One example: “Kevin Spacey is brilliant at what he does and what he does makes millions of people happy. The truth is we all never heard his side of the story.” The Daily Mail’s Tom Leonard reports on rumors of a comeback plan for Spacey and points out that there’s a website of unknown provenance, supportkevinspacey.com, where fans can leave encouragement. It appears that some have written in to applaud “Let Me Be Frank.”
Netflix has not commented on the video, but it seems unfathomable that Spacey’s stunt actually teases a return on House of Cards, whose recent season was advertised as its last. (The company reportedly lost $39 million after ending its relationship with the actor.) With authorities in New England filing charges and other investigations of Spacey reportedly under way in Los Angeles and London, the likelihood of a career reboot seems even more ludicrous. The quality of this video itself—the home-software title font, the bad imitation-Cards dialogue, Spacey’s conspicuous failure to act as though there’s any coffee in his mug—adds to the sense of him as delusional. But at the core of this gambit may be the belief that a man like him can act his way out of anything. Given how many guys accused of #MeToo–related offenses seem to be doing okay, is that so farfetched?
Early every Sunday growing up in Australia, Anne Gu attended Chinese school, the weekend classes where many children of Chinese immigrants learn Mandarin. There, she bonded with her classmates over their shared sense of obligation. “We understood we had to be there because of our culture, our parents,” Gu told us, “while our other friends were sleeping in.”
They kept in touch via group chat, exchanging jokes about life as first-generation Asian Australians. “Someone was like, it would be fun if we made a Facebook group, and we all agreed,” Gu said. In September, she and her friends created a group and added “all the Asian friends” on their Facebook friend lists. They called it Subtle Asian Traits, after a then-popular Facebook group among Aussie teens called Subtle Private School Traits.
The high-school seniors had intended it to be a small community of friends from the Melbourne area, so when its member list ballooned to 1,000 people, “I was like, no way,” Gu said. Three months later, the group is among the most popular on Facebook, with more than a million members from around the world at the time of reporting, and more every day. “This group is the reason I go on Facebook like 10 times a day now,” one member wrote in it. The group skews young, and popular posts invoke the quotidian relatability of grabbing bubble tea with friends and enduring strict parents—or dealing with ignorance.
One popular meme in the group riffs on something dreaded by many diasporic Asians—the “Where are you really from?” line of questioning:
(The primary language in Hong Kong is Cantonese, not Mandarin.) For many in the group, it’s an all-too-familiar microaggression.
The group has become a place for diasporic Asians to talk about encounters like this, despite being scattered across the globe, many in neighborhoods without a lot of people who look like them. “Subtle Asian Traits demonstrates another example of the importance of specificity and universality. To reach the most people, you have to be incredibly specific,” says Takeo Rivera, a professor at Boston University who researches Asian American cultural production.
Subtle Asian Traits has now inspired at least 40 other groups, according to Subtle Asian Yellow Pages (itself another Facebook group): Subtle Asian Dating (for more than 275,000 Asian singles), Subtle Asian Dating: Wholesome Edition (newly created, for more than 100 Asian “wholesome” singles), Subtle Asian Christian Traits (for more than 63,000 Asian Christians), Subtle Asian Pets (for more than 22,000 fans of corgis and more), Decolonized Subtle Asian Traits (“for the AAPI who want less boba and more SJW with their memes”), and more.
The past year has shown a visible hunger among the Asian diaspora for cultural purchase: Look at the success of Crazy Rich Asians, the hype over the international rise of K-pop, and the clamor for literature by Asian authors. But media visibility for Asians remains lacking in many respects. In the United States, according to statistics compiled by scholars at six different California universities, only 4 percent of series regulars on TV last year were Asian American and Pacific Islanders—and more than half of those shows were canceled that year. “Asians haven’t had the opportunity to have their voice heard in media. We’re underrepresented,” Gu said to us. “Our Facebook group is giving so many Asians an opportunity to voice their thoughts.”
The Facebook group is a digital manifestation of a “third space,” or the in-between space in which “cultural hybrids,” such as the children of immigrants, adrift between two national communities, shape their unique identities. It’s fitting that the group’s founders met at Chinese school, another third space.
“We have to sort of bounce between both cultures in our lives,” Gu said. “I feel like the group has helped people come to terms with it, and know they’re not alone, and that there are so many people around the world who have the same struggles and same experiences.” Subtle Asian Traits has revealed the breadth of the diaspora. While most of the members in the group are Asian Australians and Asian Americans, reflecting the large proportions of Asians in both countries, other members hail from countries such as Sweden and Switzerland—“which I hadn’t even known had that many Asians,” Gu marveled. “And we can still laugh and agree on the same memes.”
One prolific poster in the group, Laura Ngo, grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, and didn’t have many Asian friends at school, with the exception of those she met at the Vietnamese church. So she found them online. “I feel like it’s reconnecting a lot of Asian Americans with people from their communities, and it’s like one big group of understanding—all these jokes that you don’t have to explain,” Ngo says.
The surge of these groups speak to a “need and yearning for a safe space—where Asian Americans can express our authentic selves,” explains Jenn Fang, the founder of reappropriate.co, a blog on Asian American feminism and race. Subtle Asian Traits is the latest iteration in a long line of online Asian communities, like Yellow Board and Rice Bowl, popular message boards from the early 2000s, or Asian Avenue, an early social-networking site for Asian Americans. Fang, a message-board alum, joined Subtle Asian Traits after hearing about it from us.
The group, like many other Facebook groups centered on shared experiences, has a therapeutic function. Some of its content references cultural pressures that many immigrant children face. “Any other not-skinny/not-small Asian folks out there who struggle with body image shit? Especially as a Korean ... every time I go back to Seoul, I feel this crippling insecurity, like by not being thin I’m a disgrace to my culture,” one discussion post reads, with thousands of sympathetic responses. “My father almost flipped a shit and started yelling at my brother when he didn’t get into Columbia,” another popular post reads. “I know that immigrant parents go through so much to set themselves up in a new country. I really know that my parents struggled. But what do you guys think is fair for the kids or not?”
[ Read: Facebook groups as therapy ]
Other posts retain the cavalier tone of memes, but hint at trauma. A poll asking, “What did your parents beat you with? Lol” received thousands of responses as well. The choices: belt, back scratcher, sandals, fly swatter, and shoehorn. (Belt won.)
There is a tension inherent in Subtle Asian Traits’ attempt to place diverse experiences under one “Asian” umbrella. Some worry that its posts can perpetuate stereotypes about tiger parents and model minorities. Others have accused it of excluding content about South Asians, despite billing itself as a space for everyone. There are the usual problems with trolls that surface in any corner of the internet, too.
Alisha Vavilakolanu, a 21-year-old psychology student, notes that “people were using slurs against South Asian people [in the group],” but the moderators didn’t intervene until, she feels, it was too late. She looked up the group’s moderators and found no South Asian representation. “It’s important to have people on the other end who can recognize [abusive behavior] and immediately be like, ‘That’s not okay, we don’t accept that.’” The concern about its lack of representation of South Asians helped in part to spur the creation of yet another meme group: Subtle Curry Traits, which features more South Asian–focused content, though it has fewer members (about 223,000 at the time of reporting).
When we shared criticism of the group’s low South Asian visibility with Gu, she said, “It’s a very big group, so it’s very hard to control what gets posted and what’s not. We try to be as inclusive as possible. At the end of the day, there are more East Asians in the group than Indians.” Gu and the 14 other administrators and moderators spend hours reviewing the more than 4,000 daily submitted posts as if working “a full-time job,” as Gu put it. When they come across offensive posts, they screenshot them and discuss what to do over a group chat. The teenagers have become gatekeepers of cultural production, holding the power to shape norms—including the sticky question of what is “Asian” enough to be posted in the group.
They’re also getting many requests about monetizing the group. Indeed, the administrators have started posting sponsored content for an Australian mattress company promising a bed so firm “your bubble tea won’t spill no matter how many you’re drinking.” According to Gu, the money will go toward covering expenses to “protect our online [identities].”
But the teens, who are currently on break for the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, are still trying to focus on their original goals for Subtle Asian Traits. “We labeled the group [Facebook category] as ‘family,’ so that’s what the group’s purpose is, to allow people to feel like they all belong to something,” she said, alluding, like nearly everyone we spoke with, to the loneliness of being a diasporic Asian, fitting in neither here nor there. Perhaps the explosion of this Facebook community was inevitable: People want to find their people.
Some enterprising group members have taken it upon themselves to move its conversations offline. Hella Chen, the co-founder of Subtle Asian Dating, told us, “There was a need for this in the community that would allow for a better way for people to connect with others. Dating was the thing in the sense that people wanted to get to know someone personally.” And at least based on some posts in the group, members have been able to find love with fellow Asians.
[ Read: When internet memes infiltrate the physical world ]
Matt Law, a 27-year-old entrepreneur, organized a Subtle Asian Traits meet-up in New York City that attracted more than 400 people—and he plans to host more. “In the beginning it was like a joke, to see if people were interested or not, and in the end, people ended up being very receptive,” he says. “It’s a great way to bridge community and have people meet up in person and not just talk through the Facebook group.” Group members are organizing meet-ups in Vancouver; Toronto; Boston; Washington, D.C.; and other cities.
And Gu, for her part, bonded with her own family over the group. When she saw a post about a traditional Chinese dish made of scrambled eggs and tomatoes—a simple comfort food she’d forgotten about—she asked her parents to make it for dinner. “I was like, I haven’t had this in ages, and my parents were like, ‘Okay, we’ll make it for you.’” Her parents had forgotten about the dish, too. It was a moment of connection between generations, one made especially potent by the prevalence of the group’s themes of intergenerational alienation. “And then my dad made it again like the week after.”
Children should have equal access to a high-quality education. It’s a popular talking point among both the left and the right because it’s non-objectionable—yet it’s far from the reality of American primary and secondary education. As the landmark Reagan-administration report, A Nation at Risk, put it 35 years ago, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
Advocates for so-called school choice, however, argue that they have a solution: If you provide students and families with a broad range of options—including charter schools, private schools, and traditional public schools—they can choose the one that best suits them. In theory, the schools would compete with one another, vying for students, and the competition itself would spur them all to improve, as Peter Bergman, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University, told me. Ideally, that competition is open to all students equally, as it is that sort of open free-for-all that ought to produce the best results.
[Read: Public opinion shifts in favor of school choice]
Of course, for this to work, parents need to know about the options available to them. Research has shown that there are significant barriers to choice, among them access to transportation, enrollment issues, and a lack of information about the schools. A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research adds another dimension to this problem: Schools themselves may play a role in encouraging more “desirable” students to enroll, meaning that often it’s more the schools choosing the students than the reverse.
The study, authored by Bergman and Isaac McFarlin, a professor of education at the University of Florida, examines the beginning of the school-choice process: inquiries about how to apply. In a randomized test, the researchers sent emails from fictitious parents to more than 6,000 charters and traditional public schools in areas with school choice. “Each email,” Bergman and McFarlin wrote, “signaled one of the following randomly-assigned attributes about the student: their disability status, poor behavior, high or low prior academic achievement, or no indication of these characteristics.” The pair wanted to see whether schools provided the same information to all parents, regardless of any difficulties alluded to in the emails.
Ultimately, Bergman told me, they found that the schools they emailed are less likely to respond to students who are perceived as “harder to educate.” The charter schools, he added, were “particularly less likely to respond to students with a particular [individualized educational plan]”—meaning students who have a special need that would require them to be taught in a separate classroom. This “cream-skimming,” or providing information only to high-value students, is a “key source of potential inequality,” Bergman said.
[Read: How to rile up education debates with one word]
An easy takeaway from the report, McFarlin told me, would be that “charter schools discriminate against special-needs kids,” but that would be an incomplete assessment, since the schools they emailed replied to the parents of any student with any disadvantage—behavioral issues, low grades, or special needs—at similar rates. Now that researchers know whether schools responded to the emails, the next step is digging into the responses to see if they are actively discouraging certain students from applying.
In the meantime, Bergman and McFarlin hope that this sparks a conversation about how the subtle discrimination of not responding to an email can create an information gap for families in the application process. School choice, with a goal of equitable access, could work, they say, but only if it truly allows the students to choose schools, rather than allowing the schools to choose students.
Over the next month, The Atlantic’s “And, Scene” series will delve into some of the most interesting films of the year by examining a single, noteworthy moment. Next up is Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace. (Read our previous entries here.)
The most impressive thing about Leave No Trace is that the enemy of the film is not the government. Yes, Debra Granik’s story is about a father, Will (Ben Foster), and his daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), trying to live away from society, and the way that their dreams are shattered when they’re arrested for trespassing on public land. Will, a traumatized Iraq War veteran, craves isolation and peace above all else, and he chafes at almost any kind of institutional structure. So when he’s taken away from the forest, separated from his daughter, and hauled in front of social services, the whole process should feel monstrous. Somehow, it doesn’t.
Granik is a filmmaker with an incredible gift for conveying characterization cleanly and simply; her camera doesn’t judge, but rather empathizes. It’s likely obvious to the viewer, early on, that Will’s hope for a quiet life off the grid is bound to fail, especially as his daughter grows older and begins seeking a life of her own. It’s equally obvious that Will is going to ignore the orders of the state of Oregon the first chance he gets, even if he’s threatened with imprisonment. Still, soon after he and Tom are taken out of the forest, Granik digs into the specifics of the government’s intervention and the ways in which officials are trying to help. In fully considering the situation from multiple angles, she gives a careful portrait of its intractability.
[Read: ‘Leave No Trace’ is a shattering, essential drama]
Once Will is processed, he’s assessed by a social worker named James (Michael J. Prosser), who sits him in front of a computer and has Will take a personality test of sorts. “Respond true/false to each question … There’s 435 questions. If you can’t answer something, you’ve got three seconds, it’ll beep and move on to the next statement,” he explains soothingly, before turning the computer on and departing the room. The test is somewhat less soothing, featuring a halting, robotic voice that utters true-or-false statements like “I enjoy reading articles on crime” and “I have nightmares or troubling dreams.”
Will keeps up at first, but the statements grow more probing and accusatory, even as they’re delivered with the same flatness. “I think about things that are too bad to talk about.” “Things aren’t turning out like the prophets said they would.” “It seems like no one understands me.” Will’s grumpy demeanor quickly crumbles into anguished confusion; Foster, doing career-best work, expresses all of Will’s horror and despair at what he’s being asked with a single mournful stare. He’s someone trying to live a meaningfully detached life; the test’s assumption is, of course, that he’s crazy, angry, or both.
As Will ignores the questions, James comes back in to console him. “You wouldn’t be the first one to have a problem with this test,” the social worker confesses. James is as warm and sympathetic as he can be, but he’s still there to do a job, and the test is what it is—a fruitless, reductive attempt to glean why someone might not want to be part of society. The sequence plays out in an office decorated with forest wallpaper, a facsimile of the environment Will and Tom were just plucked from; it reads like yet another effort to offer comfort while reasserting control.
James and the other social-service workers do their best to find Will and Tom a placement with a rural family that might approximate their old life off the radar, while also keeping them on Oregon’s books. If this entire early section of the film played out malevolently, the rest of Leave No Trace (which sees an increasingly frayed Will taking Tom back into the woods to try and reclaim their former life) wouldn’t work; it’d feel too righteous and pure. Instead, all the tricky ideas Granik wants to explore are laid out from the start, so that the later acts can wrestle with them. The world that Will is trying to escape isn’t evil, but even at its most benevolent, it has no real understanding of how to handle people like him, and vice versa. Thanks to Granik’s sensitivity, Leave No Trace is a humane attempt to grapple with that alienation.
Previously: Hereditary
Next Up: Mission: Impossible – Fallout
What are the aliens thinking? That’s always been a problem for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). Until recently, SETI’s focus has been on alien “beacons,” signals that somebody somewhere intentionally beamed into space. But this traditional method involves making informed guesses about what the aliens were thinking when they built their beacons, and those guesses may turn out to be laughably wrong.
There’s an entirely new way to do SETI now, and understanding its promise begins with considering the properties of solar panels. Rather than just looking for beacons, SETI researchers now want to also search for unintentional “technosignatures” from alien industrial civilizations. An example of an unintentional technosignature could be pollutants in a distant planet’s atmosphere, or the shadow of a large artificial structure orbiting a planet.
[Read: Searching the skies for alien laser beams]
The best way to find a technosignature is to search for the observable byproducts of activities that are necessary for all civilizations. For instance, industrial civilizations, by their very nature, must extract energy from their surroundings to do work and keep themselves running. In a creative paper published last year, the astronomers Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb wondered what technosignatures would radiate out from a civilization that powered its world by harvesting solar energy on a planetary scale.
It’s easy to imagine a civilization covering a fraction of its world with solar panels. This is something we might try in, say, the Sahara desert. What Lingam and Loeb did was calculate how the large-scale deployment of solar technology would leave a mark in light that bounces off a planet’s surface.
Technosignatures are similar to biosignatures, which are the means for finding life of any kind on a planet. The chemical makeup of an exoplanet’s atmosphere can, for example, be extracted by catching light passing through the planet’s veil of gas. On Earth, atmospheric oxygen or methane would quickly react away without our planet’s abundant life. That means seeing oxygen and methane in an exoplanet atmosphere might serve as a good signature for a biosphere thriving on that distant world.
But the vegetation covering our planet creates many kinds of signatures that could be seen from a distance. In particular, Earth’s vast array of leaves alters the spectrum of sunlight that we reflect back into space. Chlorophyll, the chemical responsible for photosynthesis, strongly absorbs light in the green part of the sun’s spectrum while strongly reflecting its red light. That means that sunlight bouncing off Earth has a noticeable “red edge” from all the biosphere’s leaves, grass, etc. If you plotted how much sunlight gets reflected from Earth versus that light’s wavelength, you’d see the planet’s “reflectance” rise sharply as you cross from the green parts to the red parts of the spectrum. The rise is so sharp that astrobiologists have long floated proposals aimed at searching for a photosynthetic red edge from exoplanets. They’ve even calculated the reflecting properties of novel forms of photosynthesis that might evolve on worlds with stars very different from our sun.
[Read: Congress is quietly nudging NASA to look for aliens]
Lingam and Loeb saw that large-scale deployments of solar-energy collectors would also change the way sunlight reflects from an exoplanet. Focusing on the properties of silicon, they calculated the wavelengths of light that solar panels would absorb and the wavelengths that they’d bounce back into space. Instead of a red edge, their calculations showed that silicon-based solar panels would produce a sharp change in reflectance at the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum. They called this the silicon edge.
A skeptic might argue that silicon is too human-centric a solar-panel construction material to produce a universal technosignature. Lingam and Loeb, however, gave convincing arguments that it’s the element of choice for solar-powered exocivilizations. There are only a few kinds of light-energy harvesting materials you’d find on any planet. Using the cosmic abundances of the elements, Lingam and Loeb showed that most planets are likely to have a lot of silicon lying around, making it an obvious component for building solar collectors.
For good measure, the two scientists also calculated the reflectance properties of gallium arsenide and the mineral perovskite, both of which might be used in solar panels. Each produced its own distinctive edge in the planet’s spectrum. Now, all astronomers have to do is go looking for these signatures. Fortunately, the telescopes they need to do so are starting to come online.
Gabe Kenworthy, a 22-year-old freelance content manager for some of Instagram’s most notorious meme pages, was up at 2 o’clock on Christmas morning. He was sitting on his parents’ couch searching for heartwarming holiday content to post when he realized something was wrong.
Just after he sent his partner some memes for approval, Kenworthy’s phone exploded with texts. Jonathan Foley, the owner of a network of meme pages with millions of followers, including @SocietyFeelings, @Deep, and @Positivity, told him that Instagram had shut down his accounts without warning, along with a slew of others.
Instagram regularly purges batches of accounts that the platform says violate its terms. And this is not the first time Instagram has cracked down on spam during the holidays. In December 2014, the company deleted hundreds of thousands of accounts in what became known as the “Instagram rapture.” But rarely does a strike affect so many notable pages at once. Some memers have estimated that more than 500 accounts were shut down over the past few days, including pages with millions of followers, such as @ComedySlam and @Pubity. Even @God was suspended on Christmas. “Instagram is the Grinch this year,” said Ryan, a 20-year-old who lost a network of pages with more than 1 million followers and asked to be referred to by his first name only because of concerns about hacking.
“We’ve seen behavior on Instagram whereby some usernames … are stolen or traded,” an Instagram spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday. “We do not allow people to buy, sell, or trade aspects of their account, including usernames. We are consistently taking steps to disincentivize and stop this behavior, including removing accounts that violate our policies.”
[Read: How hackers are stealing high-profile Instagram accounts]
What frustrated many memers most about the mass ban was that they had no recourse and no way to learn more about their situation. Dylan White, a 21-year-old who ran @Jaw, a popular account that posted memes and pop-culture news along with photos of men who had strong jawlines, said he had been running his account for three years and had never had a problem with it previously. “This is my full-time income, so it’s very detrimental to my livelihood,” he said. Ryan was also worried about the money he lost in the crackdown. “I was trying to eat dinner and socialize with my family,” he said, “but knowing behind the scenes everything I’ve built, my entire net worth, was just gone before my eyes.”
Several memers who were also affected said that they hadn’t obtained their accounts improperly, though they could be taking the fall for bad action by previous owners. Some users, including Ryan, also had personal pages and accounts banned, ones that they knew they had founded from the get-go.
Theories circulated throughout the day on Kik, where owners of the largest meme pages on Instagram communicate. Some suspected that Instagram was cracking down on a rogue employee who had illegitimately claimed these usernames using an internal dashboard years ago and then sold them. In screenshots of Kik chats reviewed by The Atlantic, some people also wondered whether the purge was somehow tied to people’s devices, since Instagram has been known to punish spammers by deleting all the accounts associated with a specific device or IP address. Another theory was that Instagram accounts that switched too frequently between public and private were targeted, a tactic that large pages had been exploiting as a growth hack in recent months.
Second ban wave lads and that’s how you lose $300K worth of IG’s 😘🤦🏻♂️
— Ry (@Verdict) December 25, 2018Most meme account holders will likely never receive a detailed answer on what, exactly, they did wrong, but bans such as this serve as a powerful reminder of just how volatile and unregulated the Instagram meme industry is, and how little it’s tended to by the platform itself. Ben Cohen, the entrepreneur behind @BasicBitch, who has since sold off his large Instagram accounts, said that despite the vast amounts of money some meme accounts generate, they’re subject to almost no oversight.
Some popular memers, such as @TheFatJewish’s Josh Ostrowsky and @FuckJerry’s Elliot Tebele, have successfully tied their real-life personas to their Instagram handles, but most large meme accounts operate anonymously. In fact, it’s that very anonymity that allows these pages to transform themselves into a brand. Barak Shragai, the co-owner of @Daquan, told The Atlantic earlier this year that he considers Daquan’s anonymity a key advantage to the growth of his page, which has more than 11 million followers. Shragai says it allows followers to project their own personality onto the page and prevents followers from reading a meme through a particular lens based on who posted it.
[Read: Reddit’s case for anonymity on the internet]
But the disorganized, sometimes scammy way some meme pages do business, coupled with the fact that the main account holder is often obscured, makes dealing with them a unique challenge for Instagram. On the one hand, the platform relies on large pages and meme accounts for growth. On the other, it has a responsibility to protect its users from spam. Networks such as Twitter and Tumblr have previously taken an approach similar to Instagram’s Christmas campaign: mass-banning anyone remotely affiliated with terms-of-service violations.
Waking up on Christmas to half your instagram banned. Thanks Facebook Merry Christmas!!
—Mitchell Conran (@Narnoc) December 25, 2018The unfortunate consequence of this type of approach is not just that some innocent account holders unjustly lose their primary source of income, but also that an entire class of accounts that generate massive engagement are ignored and deprioritized. Since Vine’s public fall, platforms have begun to recognize how critical influencers are to their networks. YouTube has had a robust creator-relations team. Snapchat was forced to recognize the power of influencers after initially dismissing them. And Instagram has made a heavy push in the influencer space, courting big social-media stars at events such as VidCon and BeautyCon. Yet meme accounts, some of which have larger and more engaged followings than certain traditional social-media stars, remain largely ignored.
The Christmas meme purge has only exacerbated the relationship between Instagram and these types of accounts. One group of memers who are adamant that they never engaged in any type of banned behavior plans to press the company to establish a representative to field requests from the most successful creators. The move wouldn’t be unprecedented. Instagram and Facebook have a large internal team that deals with requests from publishers; if anything, pages such as @SocietyFeelings or @Jaw have more in common with some modern media companies and influencers than with average users. BuzzFeed, for instance, has scaled its main Instagram account to more than 4.4 million followers by posting memes and screenshots of tweets.
“We are our own BuzzFeed,” said Declan Mortimer, a 16-year-old who ran the @ComedySlam account, with more than 11 million followers. Kaamil Lakhani and Jonathan Foley, who work together on @SocietyFeelings, said they were even in the process of building a dedicated website, as accounts such as @Daquan have already done.
“It seems like Insta values celebrities more than anyone else,” said Mitchell Burke, a 17-year-old who lost several pages in the purge. “If you’re a content account, you’re treated as an average user. You could have 10 times the following as these celebs and still get treated like an average person.”
Damn IG really banned kiddo … the audacity
—Luca (@Lucainho) December 25, 2018Swish Goswami, a 21-year-old entrepreneur, lost @Swish, a basketball-themed news and meme account, and @JumpMan, a sneaker-themed account. He said that at the very least, Instagram should offer support for pages with more than 1 million followers and offer a dedicated person to “look at captions, tell us how to license content properly, how to credit it, how to manage copyright. Questions like these are not ones people should have with bigger pages.”
Despite the Christmas setback, most meme account holders mentioned in this article said that they weren’t planning to abandon the platform anytime soon. But the incident served as an acute reminder of how quickly they can lose it all and be forced to start from scratch. “We’re playing on rented property,” said Goswami, “and that’s just so apparent now more than ever before.”
When fans of My Brilliant Friend have finished the first season of HBO’s acclaimed television adaptation, they may find themselves looking to fill a void. The eight-episode series, which aired its finale earlier this month, followed the lives of Lenù and Lila, two girls growing up in a poor neighborhood in Naples in the mid-20th century. Their thorny, intense friendship—which Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan novels chronicle in intricate detail over the duo’s lifetime—has been fascinating to witness on the small screen. But until Season 2 arrives, viewers might consider passing the time with another acclaimed epic offering a simultaneously intimate and sweeping view of postwar Italy: the 2003 film The Best of Youth (or, La Meglio Gioventù).
When a recent Guardian article about HBO’s My Brilliant Friend noted that “this is a prestige Italian production, assembling the great and the good of the country’s cinema and TV,” the author could have easily been talking about The Best of Youth. Originally envisioned as a TV miniseries, the two-part, six-hour film directed by Marco Tullio Giordana follows two Italian brothers over the course of decades as they find their place within their country’s charged political landscape after World War II. Written by Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli, the movie won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival and was even given a limited U.S. theater run. While some American viewers may have been put off by its length and subtitles, critics were nearly unanimous in their praise for The Best of Youth. A review in Slate said that the film, despite its length, “doesn’t have a boring millisecond.” Roger Ebert described the movie glowingly as a “novel” that made him feel as though he had “dropped outside of time.”
Both My Brilliant Friend and The Best of Youth succeed partly because they give viewers ample time to get to know and care for the characters, especially the central duos. My Brilliant Friend, with its stark, stage-set–like backdrops, drab colors, and characters who speak in dialect, feels like a window into an entirely different era and world. Meanwhile, the brightness of The Best of Youth, and the ease with which the actors—some already well known in Italy—inhabit their roles, holds the audience especially close over the considerable run time, making viewers feel as though they could be watching a home movie of their own family. Though the two works touch on similar political tensions and take expansive views of their protagonists’ lives during a certain period in Italian history, they diverge in tone and examine different slices of society. In many ways, The Best of Youth can be seen as both a cinematic complement and an antidote to the grimness and claustrophobia of My Brilliant Friend.
[Read: The gorgeous savagery of ‘My Brilliant Friend’]
That’s not to say the film shies away from tragedy: The Best of Youth introduces Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni), two college-age brothers with very different personalities. The sociable Nicola boasts a lighthearted demeanor that masks a profound empathy, while the sullen, withdrawn Matteo struggles with anger issues—today, he might be diagnosed with clinical depression. In the mid-1960s, the movie makes clear, Italians with any kind of mental illness were often relegated to asylums or treated with electroshock therapy. Within the first 15 minutes of The Best of Youth, the brothers meet one such patient: a young woman named Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), whom they decide to help. Their plan to smuggle her out of an institution and back to her family fails because, in their naïveté, they don’t stop to think that her family may have put her there in the first place.
This incident, which inspires Nicola to become a psychiatrist, is but one allusion to the larger societal changes that took place in postwar Italy. In addition to a reform of the psychiatric system, the film also tracks a rise in left-wing terrorism, and the Mafia killings and subsequent trials that would shake the southern part of the country in the 1980s. Both brothers become tangled up in these historical events, but their participation seems optional in a way that Lenù and Lila’s involvement in the ugliness of the era does not. In HBO’s My Brilliant Friend, which is also set in the latter half of the 20th century, the heroines are regularly threatened with violence, starting when they’re children, in their own neighborhood in southern Italy. Later, a teenage Lila realizes with horror just how much of their life is controlled by the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia.
Lenù and Lila can hardly be faulted for responding with a passive rage when faced with the limitations of their era, a time when women like them were expected to do little more than bear children to often abusive husbands. In its own way, this rage informs the girls’ fascinating, volatile relationship with each other. Their friendship is one that seems to fuel every manner of emotion—jealousy, fear, desperation, desire, and affection—as the girls work to envision a better future for themselves. The onscreen version of Lenù and Lila’s Naples feels closed off and Fellini-esque, with surreal backdrops and grotesque characters such as the lovelorn Melina and the predatory Donato. Just like the tunnel that separates the girls from the rest of the city, their poverty cuts them off from the outside world, also keeping their parents from imagining a different life for themselves or their children.
In contrast, Matteo and Nicola are both well educated and championed by their family from the start; the young men are aware of their relative privilege and of how society will define them by it. Their disappointment over the failed kidnapping of Giorgia sends them careening in different directions after they abandon plans to take a post-graduation trip together through Europe. Nicola gets as far as Norway’s Arctic Circle, while Matteo, praised as a brilliant literature student, leaves academics to enlist in the army. A few months later, the brothers reunite in Florence in November of 1966, during the flooding of the Arno River. They join the legions of volunteers who had come to rescue Florence’s priceless works of art, and who would come to be known as angeli del fango or “angels of the mud.” For many young people, this event would be their first taste of a lifetime of activism, and The Best of Youth is at its most relevant when it traces the brothers’ path toward that future.
As Matteo and Nicola grow older, the film depicts how the hopes of their generation—literally “the best of youth,” as in the title, taken from a Pier Paolo Pasolini poem—played out on both political and personal levels. The movie’s explicit examination of class privilege and responsibility will be familiar to many Italians who came of age in the postwar decades. Marco Cupolo, an associate professor at the University of Hartford, discusses this debate in his essay on The Best of Youth: “Would authenticity and unselfishness of emerging, well-educated classes lead the reforms of Italian institutions and society? What kind of moral values were young Italians looking for during the 1960s and 1970s?”
These questions call to mind a discussion that Lenù and Lila have with their peers in My Brilliant Friend’s fourth episode (“Dissolving Margins”) about whether to abandon their parents’ old rivalries in favor of neighborhood unity. “Our fathers did bad things,” says Lenù, as they discuss whether to accept a party invitation from the son of Don Achille, the feared neighborhood loan shark, “but we, their children, should be different.” Though the teenagers couldn’t have known it, their debate mirrored the social pressures that young people were confronting all across Italy.
Some young Italians concluded that their best chance at success was to leave the country altogether, an approach addressed in The Best of Youth as well as by Ferrante, who titled the third book in her Neapolitan series Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, as if to underscore how much geography defines her characters’ identities. But The Best of Youth shows how saving a generation can mean pointing it toward an exit: Early in the movie, a professor advises Nicola, “Do you have any ambition? Then leave Italy while you can. Italy is a country destroyed, a beautiful but useless place … with dinosaurs in charge.” Giancarlo Lombardi, a professor at the College of Staten Island CUNY Graduate Center, spoke about this powerful conflict—whether to leave or stay—among the youth of that period. “Some parties and leaders see us as not having had the guts to fight for our country,” Lombardi told me of his generation. “But this whole idea of the best of youth—what does it mean? At the heart of the show is the question of courage and the importance of rolling up your sleeves and making things better.”
In the end, this is really what draws the two brothers together, and what sustains their story— and viewers—over The Best of Youth’s six hours. As a soldier who will become a police detective and a left-wing student who will become a doctor, respectively, Matteo and Nicola continue to find themselves on different sides of an ideological divide. The two meet up again during a 1968 student riot in Turin, for example, where Nicola attends medical school. In a heated exchange about the violence taking place on their streets, Nicola’s radical girlfriend, Giulia, claims that they fight for the poor, while Matteo says, of a police colleague who was attacked by protesters and left disabled, “he is poor in a way you will never understand.” Yet somehow, in spite of arguments like this one, the brothers’ deep affection for each other and sincere desire to make their country better—even if they disagree about how—are the keys to their appeal. The audience comes to see each brother through the other’s eyes, to understand how great political disagreements can be reduced to mere squabbles in the face of filial love.
This kind of deep bond—one that manifests either as antagonism or affection—also anchors the Neapolitan novels, keeping readers engaged over four books and continuing to stoke “Ferrante fever” for long after the first installment was published in 2012. The girls’ connection is what made HBO’s My Brilliant Friend such a critical success, and it’s what will draw fans back when the show returns for its second season. Over decades of their life and amid the turmoil of their country, Lenù and Lila—much like Matteo and Nicola—are alternately family, friends, strangers, and enemies, each of their paths painfully incomplete without the other.
I was a 16-year-old student at the Bronx High School of Science, scribbling Concrete Blonde lyrics at my desk, when my English teacher abruptly called on me, without a heads-up or any preparation, to explain my thoughts on the word nigger in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Truth be told, I didn’t have an opinion, at least not a sophisticated, nuanced one, because I was a teenager reading Twain for the first time. I was there to learn like everyone else. But suddenly, as one of two black students in the class, I was expected to enhance the learning experiences of my mostly white counterparts. I’ll never forget the terrifying and confusing feeling of going from a part of the classroom to a classroom accessory.
Bronx Science is one of the three original specialized high schools run by the New York City Department of Education. These schools are required by state law to admit students based solely on the uniform Specialized High Schools Admissions Test. As I grew up and succeeded in this cut-throat, supposedly merit-based space, part of me feared any association with affirmative-action programs. I’d earned my way into Bronx Science, and I worried that anyone who didn’t understand how the system worked would assume I’d been given a leg up.
As an adult, I don’t oppose affirmative action—quite the contrary—but I support only certain justifications for it. Affirmative action should be implemented as part of a broader reparations program; the point should be justice, not “diversity.”
[Caitlin Flanagan: The dueling deities of Harvard]
I remember hearing a lot about the evils of affirmative action as a high-school student in the 1990s, and more than a few of my classmates figured I would all but automatically gain admission to every college I applied to. They were presumably reading stories about how the University of Michigan, in 1998, began using a 150-point scale to rank applicants, with 100 points needed to guarantee admission. The university gave underrepresented ethnic groups an automatic 20 points on this scale. Jennifer Gratz and Patrick Hamacher, both white residents of Michigan, claimed to have been harmed by this system in their applications to the university.
Their complaint eventually reached the Supreme Court in Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003. The majority opinion held that the University of Michigan’s use of racial preferences in undergraduate admissions violated both the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (President Lyndon Johnson’s legislation that originally advanced affirmative action). The Court did, however, rely on precedent to accept the argument that diversity can constitute a compelling state interest.
That precedent was the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Allan Bakke, a white male, had been rejected two years in a row by the University of California at Davis medical school, which had reserved 16 out of 100 places for qualified minorities.
Four justices defended the use of racial quotas to remedy the burdens placed on minorities by past racial injustice. As Justice Harry Blackmun wrote, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.”
But in his majority opinion, Justice Lewis Powell ruled that while UC could use race as a factor in admissions, quotas were impermissible. He argued, moreover, that attaining a diverse student body was the only real interest asserted by the university that survived legal scrutiny. Powell, quoting an unrelated case, emphasized that the “‘nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure’ to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this nation of many peoples.”
In its reasoning, the Court suggested that the point of affirmative action was to foster a more varied classroom environment for “leaders,” thus shifting the intended beneficiary of the program from the historically discriminated against to the nation that had discriminated against them. And who are these “leaders”? The future, Powell implied, perhaps without realizing it, depends on white students’ exposure to the supposedly unique ideas and mores that qualified minorities should offer.
While the push for diverse representation in society is important, it has no place in the legislation of affirmative action. Besides not addressing the actual issues—discrimination and inequality—this ideology creates “otherness.” It breeds the singling out of people who haven’t traditionally held positions of power, people who are often seen as either inferior or astonishingly exceptional, and therefore spectacle. This ideology demands wisdom from an ignorant 16-year-old that, rightly, the state should offer.
Affirmative action should be about reparations and leveling a playing field that was legally imbalanced for hundreds of years and not about the re-centering of whiteness while, yet again, demanding free (intellectual) labor from the historically disenfranchised.
[Read: The problem with how higher education treats diversity]
Affirmative action, whatever the rationale, has also never been the only, or even the most important, advantage in college admissions. Luke Harris, a Vassar professor, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor at Columbia University and UCLA—both critical-race-theory pioneers—have noted that what got lost in the University of Michigan fight was that students were also awarded 10 points for attending elite high schools, eight points for taking a certain number of AP courses, and four points for being legacies. That’s 22 points that certain affluent and middle-class students had built in that poor, first-generation college students had little or no access to. This structure rewarded students who already benefited from living in upscale neighborhoods, who had successful parents or parents who, at the very least, knew how to succeed in “the system,” and who continued to benefit from the affirmative action of not descending from people who for generations were banned from reading, buying property, and living in safe neighborhoods with decent schools.
Somehow, advantages of this sort are often invisible to the general public. And if they’re made visible, the most coddled people in American society tend to get their feelings hurt—and insist on their self-worth. This dynamic explains the theater of defensiveness that played before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2018, as then–Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who attended one of the most expensive prep schools in the nation and who is the son of a lobbyist and judge, sneered, “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the No. 1 law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.” Kavanaugh’s grandfather Everett Edward Kavanaugh went to Yale as an undergraduate. If Kavanaugh truly does believe that he is an island of his own merits, his lack of historical knowledge and his lack of awareness of his own privilege are terrifying for any judge, let alone a Supreme Court justice who could soon preside over affirmative-action cases.
[Read: The weakening definition of “diversity”]
I’m not the only person who’s skeptical of the diversity rationale. Lee Bollinger, current president of Columbia University—and whose name was attached to Gratz v. Bollinger as then president of the University of Michigan—sees both its advantages and pitfalls. When I interviewed him for my graduate thesis just weeks before he presided over my 2013 Columbia commencement ceremony, he said his legal team presented the more society-appeasing argument somewhat instrumentally. “We needed to win a major legal battle in the context of trying to win the hearts and minds of people about the issue,” he recalled.
Although he believes diversity is an important part of education, he doesn’t think it should be the sole permissible legal basis for an affirmative-action program. Referring to the 1978 Bakke case that struck down racial quotas, Bollinger said, “On the legal side, Bakke made it clear that you couldn’t use past discrimination as a rationale. I felt that was wrong and still feel that’s wrong.” When making the case for affirmative action, he prefers to start the conversation by talking about Brown v. Board of Education as opposed to Bakke. “I’m increasingly worried that there is a historical amnesia under way,” he said.
Amnesia, defensiveness, and a lack of focus on any one issue as many of us scramble to address the current, nonstop assault on progressive values. What’s the practical solution? I’d rather publicly dissect Twain than pretend I can solve an almost insurmountable problem I didn’t create; I just know that not having a proper conversation about the purpose of affirmative action is dangerous. And there have been ideas percolating around restorative justice and reparations for a long time.
In 2013, Britain, France, and the Netherlands were sued by 14 Caribbean countries demanding what could be hundreds of billions of pounds in reparations for slavery. I read the documentation and thought, Yes, let’s at least talk about how those European countries flourished, in part, because of brutality and slavery. Let’s start there instead of a lopsided debate about how EU countries should or shouldn’t be benevolent enough to give the refugee descendants of the countries they pillaged legal status and a chance to succeed. That sort of acknowledgment, on both sides of the Atlantic, would be a start.
Vamos falar a verdade. Marília Mendonça é a rainha do Brasil.
Quem não entende o que é sofrer por amor? Ser traído? Ver o carinha que você gosta ficando com sua amiga? O apelo de suas músicas é universal.
Ela é a principal representante do “feminejo”, tipo de música sertaneja feita por mulheres e voltada para mulheres. A diferença para o sertanejo tradicional é que, pela primeira vez, elas estão no papel principal. Também não querem mais saber de homem machista e são companheiras umas das outras.
Repare nessa letra:
“O cara que eu tava deu em cima de você, foi?
E aí você ficou com ele, mas foi uma vez, ok
Do que cê tá com medo? De estragar a amizade?
Nem fica preocupada, a gente resolve mais tarde
Se quem tava comigo era ele, a culpa é dele
Quem fez essa bagunça na nossa amizade é ele
Eu não vou deixar de ser sua amiga por causa de um qualquer
Que não respeita uma mulher”
“A culpa é dele”, Marília Mendonça
Como os colegas sertanejos, Marília, Simone e Simaria, Naiara Azevedo e Maiara e Maraísa cantam sobre amor, traição, festa e bebedeira. Elas conseguem falar sobre empoderamento de mulheres – jargão esquerdista detectado – sem nunca dizer que estão falando disso.
Quer uma prova?
“Tá pra nascer alguém que manda em mim
Que possa me impedir de ser feliz
Tá pra nascer e não vai ser você
Sou vacinada e mando em meu nariz”
“Chora Boy”, Simone e Simaria
Quando completou 22 anos, em 2017, Marília se tornou a artista mais ouvida do país. É uma das mais vistas no YouTube. Fatura mais de R$ 10 milhões por mês com shows e direitos autorais. Sua música chega a lugares que, aceitemos, esse texto dificilmente vai conseguir chegar.
As mulheres do feminejo não costumam se considerar abertamente feministas. Pelo contrário, rejeitam esse título que tão bem lhes cabe, mas que, para elas e para muitas brasileiras, soa mal. Algumas das maiores representantes do gênero – Maiara e Maraísa, Naiara Azevedo e Simone e Simaria – só admitem ter “dez centavos de feminismo”.
E daí que elas não levantam a bandeira? Marília e suas amigas do feminejo são feministas sem dizer que são. A maneira simples e despretensiosa que elas têm de se expressar é uma lição valiosa para os movimentos de esquerda. Talvez seja a hora de repensarmos o vocabulário e seus símbolos – e é aí que o feminejo pode trazer lições importantes.
Fora jargãoA direita foi eficiente em emplacar uma conotação negativa para chavões repetidos pelos movimentos progressistas. O feminismo virou “abortismo” e sinônimo de mulheres feias e mal amadas. A defesa dos direitos humanos se tornou a defesa de bandidos.
Com isso, esquerda, feminismo, patriarcado, empoderamento e machismo, por exemplo, são termos que repelem boa parte do público e podem impedir o avanço do diálogo.
Na maior parte dos casos, insistir em explicações não resolve a questão. A vitória de Bolsonaro para a presidência da República nos mostra isso. Venceram aqueles que conseguiram emplacar a versão de que a esquerda e o feminismo são abortistas, bandidos ou sinônimo de mulheres feias e mal amadas.
Marília Mendonça deu várias entrevistas negando que é feminista. “Se minhas letras se encaixam, não é proposital. Apenas sou uma mulher que defende a igualdade por merecimento”, disse ela ao jornal O Dia. E complementa: “Não somos melhores e nem piores que os homens. Somos capazes”.
À Folha de S.Paulo, ela falou que seu feminismo não é feito de teoria, textos ou protestos. “Protesto com minha vida, ao bancar tudo isso e falar que ia ser do jeito que sou e que ia conseguir o que consegui”.
Em entrevista no Domingão do Faustão ela falou sobre sororidade (o companheirismo e a união entre as mulheres), mas sem usar o jargão: “O que eu sonho de verdade é que as mulheres se unam, que elas jamais abaixem a cabeça. Porque a gente vem conquistando as coisas na raça”.
Marília Mendonça canta seu feminismo sem jargão no dia 21 de dezembro de 2018, no Espaço das Américas em São Paulo.
Foto: Agatha Gameiro/FramePhoto/Folhapress
Marília não está nem aí de ser chamada de “gordinha”, de ser julgada por fumar um maço de cigarro em quatro horas e por encher a cara de vodka. Não tenta se enquadrar em padrões. É como várias mulheres que lutam para ter controle sobre a própria vida, se sentem representadas por outras mulheres e questionam injustiças ainda muito comuns, como continuarem a receber salários menores que os de homens na mesma função. Buscam, à sua maneira, a igualdade entre homens e mulheres. Elas não se consideram, mas são feministas, embora ajam diferente da esquerda, que se apega a expressões que pouco ou nada dizem para a maioria das pessoas fora da bolha. O feminejo agrega, enquanto a esquerda perde aliados importantes.
Capitalizando com a rejeiçãoDurante as eleições, a campanha de Jair Bolsonaro tinha o desafio de reverter a enorme rejeição que ele tinha entre o público feminino. Foi bem sucedida com uma estratégia de dividir as mulheres em dois tipos: as que o apoiam e rejeitam o feminismo; e as femininas.
O discurso foi repetido de diferentes formas entre seus apoiadores. Joice Hasselmann, a mulher com maior votação para a Câmara, diz que “feministas são vexaminosas e deselegantes”. O deputado eleito Eduardo Bolsonaro costuma dizer que “mulher que se dá ao respeito” não entra em movimento feminista.
As manifestações do #elenão, como a de 29 de setembro, que levou milhares de pessoas às ruas de 26 estados, foram desqualificadas pelo grupo bolsonarista justamente por serem ligadas ao feminismo. Circularam notícias falsas de que os atos tiveram orgias e até satanismo.
Depois do protesto, pesquisas indicaram que Bolsonaro cresceu em intenções de voto. Em parte, segundo analistas, porque o movimento foi classificado como de esquerda, elitizado e que não conseguiu furar a bolha do público que já não votava no militar. E aí começaram comparações entre o que seriam “mulheres de direita e de esquerda”.
Logo depois do protesto, Eduardo Bolsonaro resumiu a lógica que a direita tentava colar às feministas. Disse, sem nenhum pudor, que “mulheres de direita são mais bonitas e higiênicas”. Nos grupos de WhatsApp, a máquina de memes da campanha bolsonarista não economizou criatividade para divulgar montagens comparando os dois tipos de mulheres. Funcionou.
Quando um tipo de discurso não funciona mais, a direita é eficiente ao praticar o desapego. Ela está constantemente se reinventando para continuar existindo.
Vejamos o exemplo do Democratas, o DEM. Hoje ele se vende como “o partido das novas ideias”. Mas o DEM existe desde 1965 e foi criado para dar apoio à ditadura. Chamava-se Arena até 1980, quando foi rebatizado de PDS. Cinco anos depois, mudou para PFL e, em 2007 – quando estava desgastado demais para eleger algum dos seus membros – passou a se chamar DEM. Atualmente, o partido das novas ideias já tem três ministros indicados para o governo de Jair Bolsonaro, um grande defensor da ditadura militar. As ideias são as mesmas do passado – só o marketing que mudou.
Não queremos dizer que os defensores de causas progressistas devem abandonar seus ideais. Só precisamos encontrar o melhor tom para comunicá-las, especialmente em um contexto de guinada à direita na política e nos costumes.
Derrube os muros ao redorA quarta onda feminista, pautada em grande medida pela internet, não chega para uma boa parcela da população. Por isso é preciso repensar estratégias. Não faz sentido falar sobre #8M (o movimento que começou na Argentina e ficou famoso nas redes sociais) com mulheres que não entram em greve em 8 de março sob o risco de perderem o emprego.
Alguns coletivos de mulheres já adaptam o discurso quando abordam temas feministas em eventos nas periferias ou nas escolas. Elas falam em movimento de mulheres em vez de dizer feminismo, por exemplo. Isso ajuda a romper a resistência das ouvintes e facilita a transmissão da mensagem. O que nós precisamos é aprender com esses coletivos e com a Marília Mendonça.
A artista consegue envolver uma parcela imensa da população com a sua música. Mesmo homens. Isso quer dizer que essas pessoas se sentem representadas, de algum jeito, com o que está sendo dito. E o que ela diz é, na base, feminismo – mesmo rejeitando o rótulo.
Quando Marília Mendonça se preocupa com a esposa do homem com quem ela fica, a mensagem é clara: esta outra mulher não é necessariamente sua inimiga. Pode parecer óbvio, mas é o oposto do que costuma ser dito em músicas populares. Ela resolveu, de uma forma popular e acessível, a questão da rivalidade entre mulheres, muito discutida em movimentos feministas.
E a música faz isso sem palavras difíceis, textões, lacração ou jargões esquerdistas. A mensagem foi passada adiante de um jeito que faz sentido para a vida real das pessoas. Quem se identifica com os valores propagados pelo feminejo também provavelmente se identifica com os valores do movimento feminista – só não sabe disso ainda.
A esquerda precisa escutar as necessidades do público que ela quer alcançar. Caso contrário, continuará cercada pelos seus próprios muros.
The post Você tem um minuto para ouvir a palavra do feminejo? appeared first on The Intercept.
In January 2018, we began the year with the first deep look at the insurgency bubbling up across the country, and the steps — both overt and covert — Democrats back in Washington, D.C., were taking to tamp it down. As good journalism often does, the story begat tip after tip, and we learned that what was happening was far broader than even we understood. In the spring and summer, we turned our attention to an obscure race playing out in the Bronx and Queens, where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a bartender and former Bernie Sanders organizer, was challenging the man expected to be next in line for the House speakership. The shocking result has reoriented our national politics.
Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP
By Ryan Grim, Lee Fang
Art: Matt Lubchansky
By Lee Fang
Photo: Andres Kudacki
By Aída Chávez, Ryan Grim
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Ryan Grim
Photo: CBS via Getty Images
By Naomi Klein
Photo: Kyndell Harkness/Star Tribune/AP
By Rachel M. Cohen
Illustration: Nicolás Ortega
By Briahna Gray
Photo: Andrea Morales/Getty Images
By Mehdi Hasan
Photo: Kevin Hagen/Getty Images
By Peter Maass
The post Democratic Insurgency and Establishment Backlash: The Intercept’s 2018 Politics Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.
Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez is setting a kind of cover charge to get onstage for the Democratic presidential primary debates, but not just any money will do. In addition to the usual polling metrics required to join the debate, candidates will also have to meet a to-be-determined criteria for “grassroots fundraising.”
Including small-dollar fundraising as a necessary element for debate participation would have two effects. First, it incentivizes candidates to invest — strategically, financially, and emotionally — in growing a small-donor base. Second, it will force potential billionaire self-funders like Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Howard Schultz to demonstrate some level of popular enthusiasm for their campaigns, meaning they can’t just flash their own cash and buy their way onstage.
This is a remarkable decision for any political party, and it reflects a growing shift in how campaigns are run and won. It also previews what will be an important way to measure the success of candidates in the Democratic primary: not just looking at how much money candidates raise, but how much of their money comes from small-dollar donors.
The rise of small-dollar contributions in the 2018 election cycle shows a growing appetite for the Democratic base to fund campaigns on its own — and a potential distaste for traditional Democratic power brokers (and their money) determining the winners of primaries. That spells trouble for candidates who might rely on big money or self-funding for their campaigns, and especially for those who will tolerate outside Super PACs supporting their candidacy.
The DNC Needs to Define “Grassroots Fundraising”A word of caution before getting too excited about the idea of “grassroots fundraising” being a new standard for whether Democratic Party sanctions candidates: The only way it will be a meaningful metric is if the party defines it as how much of a candidate’s money comes from people donating $200 or less, which is the federal definition of an “unitemized,” or small-dollar, contribution. This dividing line is a useful way to understand the amount of money a candidate can raise from people who don’t necessarily have $200 of disposable income for political contributions, but who still feel compelled to donate.
Of course, candidates try to use a looser definition to make their grassroots support seem more impressive than it actually is, most commonly by touting how many of their contributions came from $200 or less. A candidate can say that 90 percent of their contributions came from small-dollar donors, but that means 90 people contributed $1 each and 10 people contributed $2,700 each, then 99.6 percent of the candidate’s money came from big-dollar donors.
That may seem like an extreme example, but take New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2018 campaign. In his July campaign finance report, eager to blunt the grassroots credentials of challenger Cynthia Nixon, Cuomo touted that 57 percent of his campaign’s contributions came from people giving $250 or less. Seems pretty good, until you look at the money coming from those contributions, which amounts to only 1 percent of Cuomo’s $6 million haul from that reporting period. Sixty-nine of Cuomo’s contributions came from a single individual, almost all in $1 increments — and the donor just happened to be the roommate of a campaign staffer.
In order for the “grassroots fundraising” metric to be meaningful, the DNC must focus on the amount of small-donor money rather than the number of small-donor contributions raised, and even setting the bar as low as 15 or 20 percent of their total cash raised could force candidates to focus on small dollars.
Where the Potential Candidates Stand in Small DollarsIt’s not easy raising money from small-dollar donors. Only two of the 435 members of the House of Representatives elected in 2018 raised the majority of their money from small dollars: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and John Lewis. Just eight more representatives pulled in 31 percent or more of their money from the grassroots.
Of the potential 2020 contenders who have filed federal fundraising reports, only four — Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; Kamala Harris, D-Calif.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. — have raised the majority of their money in the current election cycle from small-dollar donors. Beto O’Rourke is right behind, with $36.8 million, or 45 percent, of his money coming from the grassroots. (In absolute terms, his record-breaking haul puts him well in first place, whereas Merkley’s 63 percent only netted him $2.2 million.)
| Candidate | Committee | Total Raised | Unitemized Contributions (<$200) | Percentage |
| Bernie Sanders | 2018 Senate | $12,561,473.98 | $9,384,655.11 | 74.71% |
| Kamala Harris | 2022 Senate | $6,591,903.57 | $4,906,438.63 | 74.43% |
| Elizabeth Warren | 2018 Senate | $30,652,544.13 | $19,369,886.27 | 63.19% |
| Jeff Merkley | 2022 Senate | $3,443,186.53 | $2,164,287.06 | 62.86% |
| Beto O’Rourke | 2018 Senate | $80,319,754.49 | $36,861,722.22 | 45.89% |
| Tulsi Gabbard | 2018 House | $1,404,103.28 | $532,401.97 | 37.92% |
| Joe Biden | American Possibilities PAC | $2,562,524.76 | $879,845.92 | 34.34% |
| Kirsten Gillibrand | 2018 Senate | $20,800,733.76 | $6,608,743.01 | 31.77% |
| Sherrod Brown | 2018 Senate | $25,608,242.88 | $6,898,825.24 | 26.94% |
| Richard Ojeda | 2018 House | $2,850,434.08 | $758,049.94 | 26.59% |
| Cory Booker | 2020 Senate | $7,676,915.64 | $1,836,282.50 | 23.92% |
| Amy Klobuchar | 2018 Senate | $10,754,297.70 | $2,413,680.09 | 22.44% |
| Joseph Kennedy III | 2018 House | $4,449,388.80 | $812,432.40 | 18.26% |
| Tom Steyer | Need to Impeach PAC | $14,582,593.86 | $1,271,735.07 | 8.72% |
| Eric Swalwell | 2018 House | $3,026,601.31 | $212,750.36 | 7.03% |
| John Delaney | 2020 Presidential | $4,997,566.39 | $35,575.54 | 0.71% |
It may seem like this is a meaningless distinction; money is money, and money (for better or worse) helps win elections. But focusing on this aspect of 2020 Democrats’ finances is important, because they’re going against the only president of the modern era to ever win the White House by relying mostly on small-dollar donations. Donald Trump won in 2016 with 53 percent of his campaign’s money — even including his self-funding — coming from people donating $200 or less.
Trump has been even more prolific with grassroots donations as he gears up for his re-election campaign. Of the nearly $86 million Trump has raised in individual contributions to his campaign and joint fundraising account with the Republican Party since he took office, $62 million, or 72 percent, has come from small-dollar donations.
Behind this money is something that can’t be bought: supporter enthusiasm. Increasingly, money alone is not enough to win elections; it’s about how much of the money comes from small-dollar donors, and what else those donors do for the campaign.
Generally speaking, people make small contributions to candidates because they believe in their message or candidacy and want them to win. That also means it’s easy for a campaign to convert their donors into volunteers, and vice versa, as O’Rourke did in his race against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cultivating donors and activists gets people excited and invested in the race, enabling them to give repeatedly, to evangelize for the candidate, and to do anything else the campaign asks for help with in order to win.
Buying Small-Dollar DonorsGrassroots fundraising almost never appears out of thin air; even the most exciting populist candidate has to invest in a program to cultivate these donors. Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign, on which I was the digital fundraising manager, spent tens of millions of dollars on digital ads to boost his fundraising. Harris has spent more than $2 million in 2018 on digital advertising to build her own small-dollar program, even though her next Senate election isn’t until 2022.
A plurality of money for most successful grassroots fundraising campaigns usually comes from a candidate’s email list, and the most effective way of building those lists is by running ads — generally on Facebook — asking people to sign up for the campaign. Sometimes immediately, but most often over several months, the campaign will make back the money spent on building its email list by turning those supporters into donors and starting to profit from that investment.
At least, that’s the idea. If the goal isn’t to actually raise money, but rather to create the appearance of a campaign powered by a grassroots army, then it doesn’t matter if each new “donor” comes at a net loss to a candidate. If a billionaire like Bloomberg needs to get over a bar that includes having a significant portion of his campaign money coming from small-dollar donors, it’s still possible for him to do so. He would just have to run a small-dollar program at a big loss, paying far more per email address and donor than those people give back.
If his campaign does the math right, it could meet the DNC’s theoretical grassroots fundraising threshold, even if it’s coming at a huge cost. However, when Cuomo tried to build a small-donor program this way, he failed miserably at raising any money through it. One would imagine billionaires would have an even harder time doing so, though Steyer does have an advantage here over the other billionaires. Steyer’s Need to Impeach PAC built a 6 million-person email list based on a petition to impeach Trump. However, that email list has only resulted in $1.2 million in small-dollar contributions — a paltry sum for such a large list, and a sign that it would be even harder to convert that list to donors in support of Steyer being the next president.
As the party begins approaching small-donors in an even more sophisticated way, it would be reasonable for the DNC to judge grassroots success by taking into consideration the cost of raising that army. What a candidate needs are soldiers who volunteer, not mercenaries; wherever possible, the party should look out for candidates skirting the spirit of this metric.
The Danger in Big Money and Super PACsThe possibility of a billionaire or corporate candidate faking their way to small-dollar support doesn’t render the idea of a grassroots fundraising metric meaningless. It actually makes the concept more valuable: Inserting the idea of grassroots fundraising into the debates makes it a campaign issue, which then focuses attention on big money in politics as well.
As the amount of money candidates raise from small-dollar donations becomes more important to the actual mechanics of the presidential election, it will force a discussion about who is funding candidates and why. Billionaires and corporate-funded candidates will have to explain their decision to take big money — and explain why they can’t raise it from the grassroots.
Donations tied to the oil and gas industry, financial sector, pharmaceuticals, and for-profit health insurance will be scrutinized and become weaponized by and for candidates who swear off that kind of money. Candidates who say they want to fight climate change will be attacked for accepting money from fracking interests; others who say they support “Medicare for All” will have to explain why they’re taking money from people whose entire industry would go up in smoke if profit was removed from health care.
This is to say nothing of the danger inherent in Super PACs, which can accept unlimited funds from any person or corporation. Sanders swore off a Super PAC in 2016, and would almost certainly do so if he runs again. Warren made rejecting Super PACs a key part of her initial Senate race against Scott Brown. Joe Biden, writing in his book, said he wouldn’t use a Super PAC if he ran for president. But Cory Booker has a Super PAC-in-waiting, founded by a Democratic donor, with $4 million already committed — and its leader says he’ll continue to operate even if Booker says he doesn’t want the help.
What we will see in the Democratic primary is a direct relationship between taking big money and not raising small money. It also becomes a lot easier for candidates to actively say they don’t want big money and don’t have Super PACs; it creates an incentive for grassroots donors to contribute, because the candidate’s success is tied only to their supporters. As more and more candidates can say they’re raising money from small-dollar donors, why should activists looking for a candidate give to someone who can raise money from Big Pharma? Why should a teacher give a hard-earned $20 to a candidate if they know that a billionaire is funding a Super PAC anyway?
/Super PACs and big money are going to create far more problems than they’re worth for Democratic candidates. Every donation will be scrutinized and used as an attack. Candidates who reject big and outside money will be able to use that stance as a way to supercharge their own grassroots fundraising. It will become harder and harder for Super PAC candidates to justify their tolerance of outside money in a race that will be shaped by grassroots enthusiasm.
What to Expect in the Small-Dollar PrimaryPerez’s introduction of a grassroots fundraising threshold to participate in debates is born out of the DNC’s efforts to appear unbiased in the primary, correcting its mistakes from 2016. But in doing so, Perez is actually putting his thumb on the scales of the race — only for once, it’s against big money and corporate candidates.
This extra incentive to focus on grassroots fundraising will transform how the primary is run. For years, when candidates filed their campaign finance reports, reporters raced to get up stories on how much each hauled in — the bigger the better. But with the DNC spotlight on small donors, reporters will now zero in on that small-dollar number. It won’t just be Sanders touting his average contribution amount; expect any candidate with a decent grassroots program to do so as well.
In the wake of Citizens United, things are changing fast in Democratic politics. Corporate political action committee contributions, until recently an obscure part of campaigning, are now rejected by nearly every 2020 candidate, as are Super PACs. Donations over a certain threshold might be the next to become stigmatized. In the meantime, whoever makes it out of the 2020 gauntlet will be up against one of the most successful grassroots fundraisers in history — and they’re going to need all the help from Democratic small-dollar donors they can get.
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Twelve years ago, e-cigarettes couldn’t be found in America. Three years ago, Juul didn’t exist. But last Friday, Marlboro manufacturer Altria bought a 35 percent stake in the vaping juggernaut for $12.8 billion. The deal values Juul at $38 billion, a similar market capitalization to that of Target, MetLife, Delta Air Lines, and Ford. Fifteen hundred Juul employees split a $2 billion dividend as a result, becoming instant millionaires overnight.
Juul was an inviting target for Altria because it has captured close to three-quarters of the total e-cigarette market, according to Nielsen data, up from only 2 percent in 2016. Revenues for Juul increased almost 800 percent from 2017 to 2018, with its most explosive growth happening among teenagers. While e-cigarettes don’t contain cancer-causing tobacco, they do hook users to a drug that’s hard to quit. By one measure, nearly 20 years of falling cigarette use among 12th-graders has been wiped out by the rise of Juul.
The return to nicotine addiction among adolescents is happening alongside the rapid-fire monopolization of a brand-new market. While traditional tobacco companies all tried their hand at e-cigarettes, there was no legacy of dominant players in the sector and no major barrier to rivals. The fact that an industry established a decade ago so quickly whittled down to one dominant player, which an incumbent cigarette giant then bought into, suggests that our Second Gilded Age is a monopoly-creation machine.
We’re on the verge of witnessing Big Tobacco co-opt the very sector that was supposed to kill it off.This is not how markets are supposed to work. Regulators had — and still have — multiple opportunities to prevent both concentration in the e-cigarette market and profiteering off children. But competition authorities have taken such a hands-off attitude toward the economy, that we’re on the verge of witnessing Big Tobacco co-opt the very sector that was supposed to kill it off.
When launched in 2015, Juul was another of Silicon Valley’s attempts to “disrupt” an established market — in this case, cigarettes. The company, based in San Francisco, positioned itself as a savior for public health, because unlike cancer-causing tobacco sticks, vaporizer devices distribute nicotine without tar or other carcinogens. In fact, the original intention of e-cigarettes when patented by a Chinese pharmacist in 2003 was to convert tobacco users. Juul claims it “has helped more than one million Americans switch from cigarettes.”
By the time Juul came on the market, the major cigarette companies were all experimenting with their own e-cigarettes. Lorillard acquired a brand named blu, which at the time was the market leader. Altria acquired Green Smoke and launched its brand MarkTen. R.J. Reynolds created Vuse. British American Tobacco had a brand called Vype. There were also numerous other competitors, including Ruyan, E-Swisher, Logic, and NJOY. But because America has effectively abandoned competition policy, it took only two years for Juul to take over the market. Altria, in fact, discontinued its own e-cigarette brands this month, prior to taking a stake in Juul.
Juul devices look like thumb drives and can be recharged in a USB port. Users insert “pods,” which contain as much nicotine as a pack of cigarettes. Flavors include traditional tobacco styles like menthol, but also mango, fruit, cucumber, and creme. The vapor is odorless and evaporates quickly. The company maintained an active social media presence promoting vaping, with fan accounts driving the virality even further.
You could say that Juul just built a better mousetrap, but all of Juul’s elements seem designed to appeal to teenagers, who can conceal the devices easily, take quick puffs at school or at home, and enjoy the dessert-like flavors. Because the prices are fairly high — $20 a device, and $30 for a four-pack of pods — Juul’s spread has been largely limited to affluent teens. But “juuling” has become a verb, a sure sign that the brand has taken over a market.
And while juuling isn’t as dangerous as smoking tobacco, it carries its own health risks while delivering a highly addictive substance that a savvy company can translate into overwhelming profit. Instead of the original intent to convert adult smokers, Juul appears to be tapping into a generation of new nicotine users.
The Federal Trade Commission has the authority to halt marketing addictive products to children and teens. Under the Family Smoking Prevention and Control Act, the Food and Drug Administration also has authority to regulate the sale and marketing of tobacco products, which includes e-cigarettes. For example, the agency could have made e-cigarettes only available by prescription, as has been proposed in the United Kingdom. This would ensure that smokers wanting to quit would be the primary recipients of the product. But careful not to tread on markets, Juul was allowed to overrun high schools until it was far too late.
Sensing an epidemic, the FDA is belatedly scrambling to crack down on Juul’s marketing to children. But this is where Altria, an established lobbying force with connections at the highest levels, can be most helpful.
In 2016, the FDA prevented e-cigarette sales to anyone under 18; some states set the age limit to 21, and Juul has voluntarily applied that to sales on its website. In November, Juul stopped selling certain flavored pods in retail stores and closed its social media accounts, days before a scheduled FDA ban on flavored e-cigarette sales. The FDA has also seized marketing documents from Juul to determine if strategies were adopted to appeal to children, while senators have pressured the company on the same point.
None of this has really stopped determined vapers from getting their Juul fix. The company sells all flavors on its website, and while it claims a sophisticated age-matching system to prevent buyers under 21, secondary sellers on eBay or Alibaba — or the black market in school hallways — have no such restrictions.
Limited retail sales in storefronts could hold back Juul’s growth, however. Enter Altria. An amazing article in the Wall Street Journal bluntly suggests that the 35 percent stake in Juul “gives the e-cigarette maker more marketing muscle, expanded shelf space and a benefit that would have been unthinkable from a cigarette company in the past: an easier path to Washington’s approval.”
The deal stipulates specifically that Juul devices and pods will appear on shelves next to Marlboro cigarettes, and it states that Juul ads could go right on Marlboro packages. Altria’s sales force will push Juul products, potentially opening up hundreds of thousands of retail locations. And Altria CEO Howard Willard suggested in a conference call that the company would collaborate with Juul on an FDA application required of all e-cigarette makers before 2022 to remain on the market. “We have years of experience” with navigating the FDA, Willard said.
Put another way, an established merchant of death with a deep lobbying bench is framing itself as a rescuer of an upstart nicotine addiction device, protecting it from FDA attacks. This is the next level for a monopolist — converting economic power into political power.
For Altria, the play is clear: Use Juul as an escape hatch if declining cigarette sales continue, and perhaps as a gateway back into cigarettes, as addicted teens chase a nicotine fix. It wasn’t the only cigarette company with the idea; Altria beat out British American Tobacco for Juul in a bidding war, according to the Financial Times. Another escape hatch is marijuana. Earlier in December, Altria also took a $1.8 billion stake in Cronos, a Canadian cannabis grower, seeking to capitalize on legalization efforts. Similarly, AB InBev, the maker of over 500 beer brands, just reached a deal with cannabis company Tilray to create pot-infused drinks for the Canadian market.
In other words, the companies that have delighted in addicting the public to their legal drugs for decades are now busily buying up newfangled addiction sellers, keeping the business of addiction in largely the same hands. Alert competition authorities might raise an eyebrow at this, and antitrust regulators still have to approve Altria’s purchase of 35 percent of Juul. But like most mergers these days, it’s expected to sail through. In short, it’s good to be big, especially if you want to get bigger.
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Devonia Inman goes on trial for his life. But there’s really no evidence against him. Witnesses keep changing their stories. And the jury never hears about an alternate suspect — a man who was just arrested for a brazen murder of two prominent community members.
Liliana Segura: On the website of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation — the GBI — is a gruesome tab. Unsolved homicides. It’s five pages long, fifty names total. Lives cut off and reduced to a paragraph or two. More police blotter than tabloid.
Jordan Smith: Laneisha Crowder, a 21-year-old single mom, murdered at home 18 years ago. Mary Susan Humphrey, air traffic controller. She died after leaving a nightclub in Valdosta back in 1980. And then there’s a man known only as Roy. He died sometime between 1975 and 1979, maybe in Georgia. Or maybe in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi or Texas. There’s a number to call if you have more information.
Liliana Segura: Some of the entries include pictures of the victims. Old school photos, outdated haircuts. Lots of blurry snapshots, family and friends cropped out to frame the victim.
Jordan Smith: On about half of them, there’s no picture at all. Just a little white box with a gray N/A where the face should be. One of those belongs to a man named Shailesh Patel, murdered Friday, April 7, 2000, in Adel, Georgia, at a house just blocks from the small convenience store where he was working. Tim Balch is a former police officer from Adel and he remembers when Patel was killed, because it was the second gruesome murder in less than two years in this town of just 5,000 people.
Tim Balch: That store is literally like a block, and in fact, you can see the front end of it from here, where those gas pumps are down there is where that happened, yeah. He was found dead three streets behind us on Gordon Street.
Liliana Segura: What do remember about that case? What can you tell us about that?
Tim Balch: That was probably one of the most savage murders. The fight was throughout the house and I think that the coup d’etat, as you could say, the final deal was when the television went over his head. I mean, there was fighting and stabbing, and it was a very bloody crime scene.
Jordan Smith: I mean, it seems amazing to me that that didn’t get solved. It seems like there’d be a lot of good potential evidence there, it’s so violent. I just wonder if you just have ever thought about what actually might have occurred and why.
Tim Balch: It was just a very strange place for a murder to take place anyway, because it wasn’t one of those areas that you would even expect family fighting to take place. It was a pretty good area. We rarely got calls over there.
Liliana Segura: We’ve talked about how wrongful convictions leave the real killer free. Well, Shailesh Patel was murdered barely a year and a half after Donna Brown and we’re sure the GBI pegged the wrong man, Devonia Inman, for that crime. We can’t say that there is a connection between the murder of Donna Brown and the murder of Shailesh Patel. We can say that there was talk around town that there might have been. But we don’t know if the Adel police or the GBI ever considered that. What we do know is that Patel’s death was grisly. Left his family devastated and the town shocked. Again. And that nearly 20 years later, his killer has never been identified. From The Intercept, I’m Liliana Segura.
Jordan Smith: And I’m Jordan Smith. This is Murderville, Georgia. Shailesh Patel was murdered in April 2000. After Devonia Inman was jailed for Donna Brown’s murder, but well before he would go to trial. That’s a lot of time. And if the wrong man’s in jail, it’s a lot of time for the right man, the real killer, to plot his next crime. So could Patel’s killer be the real culprit behind Donna Brown’s murder? And if so, then why wasn’t that person caught? And why was Devonia Inman pegged for the crime? We’re going to try to figure that out. But first we need to understand what happened with the Donna Brown case and Devonia Inman’s conviction. And how Devonia went from a kid getting in trouble in California to an adult facing murder charges in South Georgia.
Liliana Segura: Hi.
Dinah Ray: Hi!
Liliana Segura: Dinah-
Dinah Ray: How are you?
Liliana Segura: I’m good. How are you?
Dinah Ray: I’m good. Nice to meet-
Liliana Segura: Sorry to show up with all this equipment. Nice to meet you too.
Dinah Ray: Come on in.
Liliana Segura: Sorry, my hands are full.
Liliana Segura: This is the house in California where Devonia Inman lived when he was a teenager. White, single story home, green trim. It’s in a suburb in South Sacramento, not far from the freeway. He moved there with his parents, Dinah and David Ray, when he was about 15 or 16, from a house just a few miles away. The family wanted to settle down in a better neighborhood. Outside there’s a basketball hoop over the two-car garage, inside a stone fireplace with family photos on the mantle. Dinah had collected all the photos she could find of her son over the years. Inman as a toddler, reading with his sister. Inman as a teenager, with an earring and a sideways cap. He has a dimple when he smiles. Dinah also had letters and a poem he had sent from prison earlier that year. His parents were really proud of it. He wrote it for a poetry contest and won, they said. It was called The History of Being Black. Here’s David reading from the poem.
David Ray: …a dream, then I would foresee a race of color that needs to perfect itself. For in the days lost to gangs, greed, and selfishness…
Jordan Smith: Inman grew up here in California. But his family’s roots were in Adel.
Dinah Ray: I was born and raised in Adel and my family lives in Adel. All of my family. My parents, my dad’s dad. He dead now, but at that time, my parents, all my siblings are back in Adel. I enjoyed growing up in Adel. It was the country, you know, quiet, slow. I thought Adel was a great place to grow up in as a child.
Jordan Smith: Devonia Inman was born there, too, in the same house where Dinah grew up. He was born on the couch. And he was still a baby when they moved to California.
Dinah Ray: Actually left Adel when he was about 2, 3 months old. I was married to his dad and he was military, so we went to Oklahoma and then wound up here in Sacramento where his dad and I divorced.
Jordan Smith: Dinah and David Ray have been married for three decades now. David raised Inman since he was a toddler, like he was his own son. Inman doesn’t call David his stepfather. He’s his dad – period. Inman was the oldest of four kids.
Dinah Ray: He was a good son. He’s a caring and loving person. He loved people. He liked to dress up as a kid. His dad was in the military, so he liked to dress up in military clothing and wear them around the house. He liked tearing things apart and putting them back together.
Liliana Segura: What kinds of things did he like to take apart and put back together? What was his, sort of-
Dinah Ray: He would take his toys apart. A stereo or that scooter. He loved to see how something worked, I guess.
Jordan Smith: But things started to change in high school when he started running with the wrong crowd.
Dinah Ray: The trouble here- My son, I think the only thing here that he was guilty of was really choosing wrong friends. Certainly, he can’t control what his friends do, which is one of the reasons I sent him back to my family in the country, so that he could, you know, maybe not get in trouble.
Liliana: How old was he when you were starting to be a little concerned like that?
Dinah Ray: He was a teenager. He was about 14, 15.
David Ray: About 15 or 16.
Jordan Smith: We’ve said it before and we’re gonna say it again. Just because somebody is wrongfully convicted doesn’t mean they’re an angel. Sometimes they’re even a bit of a dick. But that doesn’t mean they should spend the rest of their life in prison, especially for something they didn’t do.
Liliana Segura: Devonia Inman certainly has some good qualities. His parents clearly love him and he loves his son. And that thing where he used to like to take things apart and put them back together – maybe he could have done something with that. He had just turned 20 when he was arrested for Donna Brown’s murder. That said: He definitely has a dark side. Inman’s police records from Sacramento are hard to piece together. The GBI requested them just weeks after he was arrested in Adel for Donna Brown’s murder. Pages are scattered throughout the GBI report, which is almost 1,000 pages long. What’s clear is that he started to get in trouble early. There are disciplinary reports from two separate high schools. Then, a couple of arrests – armed robbery, attempted robbery, and car theft. But the main thing: he seems to have had a real problem with violence against women. That started early, too. Apparently, part of a cycle. His biological dad had been abusive toward his mom.
Jordan Smith: He was only 16 the first time he got in trouble for it. There was a girl he’d been dating for just two weeks who accused him of choking her and threatening to kill her. Then, a few years later, he was living with another girl. Her family filed a bunch of complaints against him. Saying he beat her up all the time and that he had been threatening the whole family. Police arrested Inman a couple times. He spent several months in jail and a few years on probation. In the summer of 1998, on the eve of his 20th birthday, he seemed bound for more trouble. So his mother decided to do what mothers have done for decades when their kids need shaping up. She sent him to stay with Grandma, far away. It was one of those times when you do what you think is the right thing and it turns out to be the wrong thing. Very wrong.
Liliana Segura: Inman was no stranger to Adel. He and his siblings had been going there from the time he was little. Dinah would take them during holidays and school vacations. They would stay for two weeks. During one of those visits, in 1995, he got a girl pregnant. She was known around town as Pebbles. Later, when Inman was back in Adel for Christmas, he went to see Pebbles. She was still pregnant and in the hospital. But she didn’t want him there. He got angry. Inman was charged with making a “terroristic threat” after insisting to see her. He was put on probation, but he quickly broke it by returning to California. That probation violation would come back to haunt him. The DA who charged him in that case — his name was Bob Ellis. He’s the same DA who would later charge Inman with murder. By the summer of 1998, Inman was 19 and his parents didn’t know what to do. They brought him to a family reunion in Mobile, Alabama and instead of bringing him back to Sacramento with them, Dinah and David put him in a car with his aunt and uncle and sent him to Adel.
Dinah Ray: I just didn’t want him to get into anything serious or in behind peer pressure. I thought I was protecting him by sending him to Adel in the country. That wasn’t the case.
Liliana Segura: Maybe you can tell me a little bit more about when you decided to send him to Adel and how he reacted.
Dinah Ray: He didn’t really want to. All of my kids are really very close and I’m really close to my kids, maybe because I’m so far away from my family. He didn’t really want to stay there, but I thought if he could stay a school year or something, then I would come back to get him after school year, or to see if he liked it. Maybe he could finish school-
David Ray: It was a very hard decision, I mean-
Dinah Ray: It was.
David Ray: He didn’t want to stay and my wife didn’t want him to leave him, and she cried the whole ride back.
Dinah Ray: I didn’t want to leave him.
David Ray: We thought we was having him in a better environment.
Dinah Ray: And that was the worst mistake.
Liliana Segura: Do you regret having sent him to Adel?
Dinah Ray: Every day. Every day of my life. It was the worst thing I could have ever done. It destroyed our lives. It destroyed his life. And I had to blame myself for that.
Liliana Segura: Inman arrived in Adel in late July, 1998. He was angry.
Devonia Inman: I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to stay with my grandma at the time, I didn’t want to stay with my aunt. I just wanted to leave that town. There wasn’t nothing there except just a whole bunch of chaos and trouble.
Liliana Segura: The hope his parents had that he might finish school — that wasn’t happening. Instead, he was getting into fights, making threats, and getting in trouble with police. In September, just a few days before the murder at Taco Bell, Inman was accused of pointing a gun at Zach Payne. That’s the same weird, rambling, drug-dealing Zach Payne who knew nothing about the death of Donna Brown, but told police anyway that Inman was capable of killing her. Two days after the murder, police arrested Inman for violating the terms of his probation from that fight at the hospital back in 1995. It was the perfect excuse to keep him locked up while they collected more evidence against him. They’d leave him in jail until they were ready to charge him with murder.
Jordan Smith: We’ve talked about Adel before. Here’s the Adel music again. The short version: small town in southern Georgia, sharply divided by race, with a long racist history. And like in so many places, that racist history finds a home in policing. Good stats are hard to come by, but there are plenty of anecdotes. Like the time in 1982 when Adel made national news. Two white cops fired their guns into a moving car with four black kids inside. They said the kids were speeding. After the officers shot at them, their car flipped over. The NAACP called for the cops to be fired. And if you ask folks like Devonia Inman’s aunt and uncle, they’ll tell you they don’t need statistics to prove that the town is racist. They’ve lived here their whole lives and they see it every day.
We went to meet the aunt and uncle, Ethel and Ben Pickett, at a buffet restaurant in Adel, the Western Sizzlin. It’s right next door to the Taco Bell where Donna Brown was murdered. It’s a popular spot. During Inman’s trial jurors ate lunch there.
Liliana Segura: Ethel told us that Adel’s always been a tough place to be a young black man.
Ethel Pickett: When a black child graduated from high school, they went to the army. They got out of Adel. They went to Atlanta, they went to Detroit, somewhere. They got out of Cook County, because if they hadn’t have got out of Cook County, they was going to jail. They was going to prison.
When you’re out there on the streets, whether you doing something or whether you’re not, you was going to jail. And if you resisted, you got the consequences. It was a privilege for a black man to graduate back in the day and get out of Adel. Parents, when their child got of age, that was their main thing, to get them gone.
Liliana Segura: She says the racism is a little more subtle today. But she’s still convinced that racism was behind her nephew’s arrest and conviction. It’s hard to prove that. And at least at the beginning, it was Inman’s behavior that got him onto the radar of the Adel PD. Part of that was due to his relationship with Christy Lima, the girlfriend he was with at the time Donna Brown was killed. He met her soon after moving to Adel. The cops had been called to her house after he and Lima got into a couple of fights. Now she says she was the abusive one, that Inman just played tough.
Christy Lima: He used to wear the bandanas, you know, because he was from California. Like, you know, gangster thugs, but Devonia is a sweetheart. You know, he wasn’t a fighter, it never was nothing, him being like- He was just crazy about me. We were young. We would fight. And more me, I’ve always been like the type of abusive person. Devonia probably hit me once. Hit me back for hitting him.
Liliana Segura: In the months before Donna Brown’s murder, Inman wasn’t really doing much. He didn’t have a job and he wasn’t going to school. He was mostly hanging out with Lima, or with his grandmother, or his aunt Ethel, or one of his many cousins. He smoked pot and drank beer. And he visited his son, who was just a toddler. The last time he saw him was the day Donna Brown was murdered.
Jordan Smith: While Inman was in jail waiting for his trial to start, he got moved around to different facilities. It’s not clear why — and neither the GBI nor the Adel PD would tell us — but his family thinks it was to keep them from seeing him. Meanwhile, the prosecutor kept plugging away, even as the case seemed to be falling apart. The murder weapon never materialized. Inman’s prints did not match those lifted from Donna Brown’s car. Witnesses were starting to recant their statements and another two were sticking to totally fishy stories about Inman’s involvement.
Liliana Segura: The fishiest? The story told by a woman named Virginia Tatem. She’s the newspaper carrier who claimed to hear a gunshot over six lanes of interstate traffic and then said she saw Inman speeding away from the Taco Bell. But remember — she didn’t come forward until weeks later, after a $5,000 reward for information about the crime had been posted. She eventually collected that cash.
Lee Grimes: We were waiting for the papers, they were late sometimes, and we were standing kind of to the side of the place where we picked up the papers.
Liliana Segura: Lee Grimes was another newspaper carrier. He was with Tatem waiting for the papers to be delivered the night that Donna Brown died. He says nothing unusual happened that night.
Lee Grimes: A dark car with some black people rode by and we were talking about the crime that had occurred that month, and she was telling me, “You know there’s a $5,000 reward for that. It sure would be nice to get that reward, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc, etc.” This car rode by, “You know those people right there, they could have committed that crime or they might have committed that crime,” and they rode on down the street. And that’s my memory of that- of the quote “the crime.” It was a month or so after the crime and there was a reward which she was, Virginia was always into whatever she could do to make some extra money and that kind of thing. That’s basically the story. Also at the time that corner was pretty dark. There wouldn’t be no way I or anybody else could pick out a black person in a dark car, could pick out the description she picked out of- that she said she saw. I mean, it’s just impossible.
Liliana Segura: Grimes says he confronted Tatem about it years later, when he saw her in a bank. He asked how she was sleeping at night. She wouldn’t answer him. We wanted to talk to Tatem, so we went to her house.
Liliana Segura: …which I understand you played a pretty central role in. I’m sorry to show up, we called you a couple times. I understand you were pretty key to cracking that case open, and-
Liliana Segura: She was not interested, she told us through a crack in the door. She told us not to come back. Inman’s aunt and uncle think the police and GBI knew he didn’t do it, but decided to pin the murder on him because he was an easy target, because he was black, and the cops thought he was a pain in the ass.
Ethel Pickett: He had smarted off at a couple of police officers. They had assaulted him and he had smarted off at them and then when he headed out with the girl and went up there, he was getting smart with them. He was telling Jimmy-
Liliana Segura: Jimmy Hill, the investigator from the Adel Police Department.
Ethel Pickett: He called him all kinds of names and stuff. And he was saying he knew his rights, they couldn’t do this, they couldn’t do that to him. And it made them mad. Jim Hill was like, “I heard him say that he was coming here using three or four different aliases thinking he all bad, and this, and that. “He ain’t getting out of here. He won’t never see the daylight of dawn around here, in this jail.”
Jordan Smith: So, wait, so-
Ethel Pickett: That was the words that the detective Jimmy Hill said.
Jordan Smith: So, Jimmy Hill, basically didn’t like that Devonia was smarting off to him and said he would never get out of jail.
Ethel Pickett: Right.
Jordan Smith: And, then he didn’t.
Ethel Pickett: No, he didn’t. They just focused on him because, basically, they was going to get somebody black for killing that lady. And I knew that. The whole town knew this. I said, well everybody better know where they was and have a witness or alibi for what happened, because they’re going to pin that murder on somebody black.
Jordan Smith: Again, that’s hard to prove. What should’ve been easier to see was that police had the wrong guy. But it seemed no one wanted to want to see that. Instead, prosecutors aggressively ignored all the red flags that were turning up before the trial. One of the craziest ones: just months before Inman’s trial began, LarRisha Chapman sent a letter to Inman’s attorneys. She’s one of the teens working with Donna Brown the night she was killed — the one who first told investigators she saw nothing weird at the Taco Bell that night, but then implicated Inman, saying she’d heard his voice coming from the weeds by the parking lot. Now, in her letter, she confessed that the GBI had pressured her to say that and that they fed her details of the crime. She was just 16 at the time. No adults were present when she was questioned. Inman’s lawyers gave prosecutors the letter. But the prosecutors kept moving towards trial anyway. The trial began in Adel in June 2001, more than two-and-a-half years after Donna Brown was killed. It’s hard to find impartial jurors in a community as small as Adel, especially when the crime was as awful as this one was. The county called hundreds of potential jurors and eventually whittled it down to 15.
Jessica Cino: Nice to meet you.
Steven King: Steven. Nice to meet you.
Jordan Smith: I’m Jordan. Nice to meet you.
Steven King: Good to meet you.
Jessica Cino: This is Jordan, this is Liliana.
Steven King: Liliana. Jessie, Jordan, Liliana.
Jordan Smith: We met one of them, Steven King, at his house near Adel. King was appealing because at the time of the murder, he had been away from town for six years, serving in the Army. Today he’s a mail carrier. The jury was sequestered. Also unusual for Cook County.
Steven King: They would take us back and forth from the motel to the courthouse to lunch, back to the motel to supper in a little yellow school bus. They did let us swim, but they would ask the other guests “can the jury have the pool for an hour or so?” and we went in the evenings. Yeah, it was a- it was an experience.
Jordan Smith: The trial was a big deal. The first capital case in a generation. Inman’s parents, Dinah and David Ray, were there from California. But they say they weren’t allowed into the courtroom for most of the trial. They were told they might have to testify. And in the end, they did, after their son was convicted. They had to beg jurors to spare his life. Family of the victim — Donna Brown — was there too. So were other curious people from around town. A reporter for the local paper took notes.
Liliana Segura: There are no recordings of the trial, only the transcripts. But when we first read through them, it became pretty clear that, like the investigation into the crime, the trial was a total shitshow. The evidence was thin, so prosecutors did everything they could to make Inman seem scary and menacing.
More than a dozen local cops were sworn in as bailiffs to act as court security. A normal case might have three. It seemed like a brazen attempt to make the jury believe that Inman was a very dangerous man before even a single witness had testified. Another thing: they kept calling Inman by like four different aliases, which certainly made him seem sketchy, but they weren’t names he actually used. Then there was the bizarre, and frankly racist, courtroom drama. Halfway through the trial, one juror — a black man — was removed after he admitted he’d had sex with one of the witnesses, a black woman. A second juror, a white man, also had sex with a witness, at least according to her. That juror denied it, so the judge let him stay. Tim Eidson, one of the prosecutors, gave the opening statement. Eidson wears glasses, he has a receding hairline and an easy smile. He has a lyrical southern accent and a resonating voice. “There really was no physical evidence,” he acknowledged to the jury. But the reason for that, he said, was that Inman had plotted out the crime so well.
Jordan Smith: Eidson later ran into trouble with the law himself. There was an indictment on federal corruption charges for a drug case involving his wife. He later became a public defender and then was sued by a civil rights group that said he provided inadequate defense to indigent clients. And then there was elected district attorney Bob Ellis. He ran into legal trouble, too. And he was also indicted in a federal case for sexual misconduct with a confidential drug informant. She accused him of rape, but he denied it. He later became a boat salesman and part-time Baptist preacher. The prosecutors brought in a parade of witnesses from California to talk about Inman’s criminal past, including crimes he committed as a juvenile. Not the domestic violence, but the other stuff. Prosecutors said these petty crimes — which they called “similar transactions” — showed that Inman was a bad egg, indications that he would ultimately become a murderer. Earline Goodman, who worked on the defense team, told us that was one of Tim Eidson’s signature moves.
Earline Goodman: Tim was the king of kings of similar transactions.
I never understood how that little penny ante stuff in California was a similar transaction to this, but like I said, Tim was king of similar transactions. I don’t know how in the world, but he was.
Jordan Smith: For what it’s worth, Eidson’s “similar transactions” didn’t exactly impress juror Steven King.
Steven King: I don’t know why they brought all the guys in from California. To me that was a total waste. They were just trying to have a base of his criminal history or something?
Liliana Segura: And in 2011, Georgia finally changed its rules of evidence. So, if the trial were to take place today, a lot of that California stuff wouldn’t be admissible anymore. Not that the rules mattered a whole lot. The judge let all sorts of stuff in. “It seemed like everybody forgot they went to law school, including me,” he joked at one point, after allowing improper questioning of a witness to go unchecked.
The witnesses were as bad on the stand as they had been in the investigation. People like Zach Payne. He was brought from drug rehab to testify. He was brief and nonsensical, contradicting himself on the stand and talking about Jesus. Then there was LarRisha Chapman. Despite the letter she wrote months earlier, prosecutors still called her to testify, apparently to humiliate her and paint her as a liar. When she swore she saw nothing that night, Eidson was ruthless. He insisted that her statement about seeing Inman in the weeds was the true story and that it was Chapman’s fault that Donna Brown was dead. “Well, Ms. Chapman,” he began. “I think the fact of the matter is, if you had told somebody that night, Ms. Brown might still be alive.” Chapman was devastated when Inman was convicted, at least according to Dinah Ray, Inman’s mother. She says after the trial, Chapman came up to her in tears and said she was sorry. Chapman wasn’t the only one to recant on the stand. Marquetta Thomas, who had recently done a stint in jail, also said she had lied. But prosecutors brought a procession of jailhouse informants to describe how she told them Inman had killed Donna Brown. Finally, the story told by Virginia Tatem, the newspaper carrier, got even more preposterous. Now she insisted that she was so close to Donna Brown’s car as it sped past that she could have reached out and touched it. And she could see the gold chain around Inman’s neck.
Jordan Smith: Inman’s lawyers tried to show the jury that Inman was not a killer. It didn’t go very well. They called Lee Grimes, the newspaper carrier who was with Tatem that night. He was a really important witness, but he wasn’t particularly forceful. He just said he didn’t see any of the things that Tatem claimed to have seen. District Attorney Bob Ellis defended Tatem’s version of the events.. He told the jury that she remembered the details because she was a woman. Women are more “nosey” than men, he said, and they notice things like the jewelry a person is wearing. “You know that book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?” he asked the jury. “Men perceive things differently than women do.” Throughout all this, King, the juror, took a lot of notes. He showed them to us when we went to visit.
Steven King: Very interesting but I’ve got… and the actual vote, for where we, where we voted, this was the vote count and apparently we took two votes if- my notes are what they are. They may not be complete, they may, you know-
Jordan Smith: Maybe you could read those notes that you have and the times and what the counts were.
Steven King: Okay, on the voting for guilt or innocence we had, it was- apparently it was nine for guilty, zero for not-guilty and three were undecided on the first vote.
Jordan Smith: Zero for not-guilty. King said he was skeptical of a lot of the witnesses, including Virginia Tatem, who he did not believe at all.
Steven King: Looking back at my notes, I believe she had said something about she could see the cars from where she was and anybody that’s from Adel knows you can’t see the Pizza Hut because the Dairy Queen is right there.
Jordan Smith: But remember the jailhouse snitch who claimed that Devonia Inman had confessed to him? And then asked to have his sentence reduced? His name is Kwame Spaulding and he clinched it for King.
Steven King: From what I remember the things that Kwame knew, he could have only known that as a fact and that really weighed- that was the most, without Kwame it wouldn’t have been a case.
Jordan Smith: Both prosecutors and investigators swore that Spaulding’s story was legit. And, they told the jury, they knew that because he offered details of the crime that only the killer would know. Like that a .44 caliber revolver was used to murder Donna Brown. But that wasn’t true. That detail, and others, had been printed in the newspaper more than once. Jurors like King never knew that. An hour later, the jury voted again and decided to convict Devonia Inman. Inman’s old girlfriend, Christy Lima, says it wasn’t a fair trial.
Christy Lima: But they wouldn’t listen to nothing that I said, but Devonia’s lawyer told me I did a good job, because my story never changed, they just kept going back and forth about me being a stripper. It was never nothing about- they kept just putting me down like, “She was a stripper, I’ve got all these kids, how can they believe anything that I say when I let men pay me for money to have sex with them.” And I was like, wait a minute, what does that have to do with Devonia being on trial for murder? You know, the trial was just a mess. To me it wasn’t even a trial. It was just whatever the prosecutor said, that’s what it was. That’s it, that’s all.
Jordan Smith: While Bob Ellis insisted that being a woman helped Tatem to remember so clearly what happened the night Donna Brown died, he did not extend the same ability to Lima and her story that provided Inman an alibi. In fact, Ellis told the jury that Lima’s recollection — which never once varied — couldn’t be trusted because, he implied, she was a whore. “Are you going to believe those folks?” he asked the jury.
But the biggest problem with Inman’s trial probably wasn’t the faulty evidence or the lying witnesses or even the prosecutors who discredited the legitimate ones. It’s what wasn’t said.
Liliana Segura: By the end of 2000 there had been three more brutal killings in Adel. Shailesh Patel — the man we talked about at the beginning of this episode — was beaten and stabbed to death after work. His killer has never been caught. And a beloved shopkeeper and his employee. They were bludgeoned to death in broad daylight. A man named Hercules Brown was quickly arrested and charged with those murders.
Word had gone around town that Hercules Brown killed Donna Brown, too. Multiple people had told the GBI investigators that and Inman’s attorneys tried to talk about that during the trial, but the prosecutors wanted none of it. District Attorney Bob Ellis told the judge that there was no indication “whatsoever” that Hercules Brown had “anything to do with this.” One of Inman’s defense lawyers told the judge there was plenty of evidence implicating Hercules. For one, he was a closer at the Taco Bell and he’d recently been arrested for two savage armed robbery-murders. If Devonia Inman’s lesser crimes in California were enough to suggest a pattern of deadly violence, certainly Hercules Brown’s “similar transactions” should have been relevant.
And if there was nothing more concrete, it’s because the GBI never bothered to compare Hercules’ fingerprints to the ones lifted from the car. In fact, they completely ignored the warnings about Hercules altogether.
Jordan Smith: All of this happened outside the presence of the jury. The judge sided with Ellis. He said none of the evidence linking Hercules to the murder at the Taco Bell passed “the smell test, much less any test for trustworthiness.” So the jurors never heard it. But the judge, he was wrong. There was good reason to believe that Hercules was connected to Donna Brown’s murder — and to the others, including the unsolved murder of Shailesh Patel. To be clear, there is nothing definitive that connects Hercules Brown to Patel’s murder. But there was talk that he might have been responsible and that should have been worth looking into.
In Murderville, it seems things are often overlooked. That has consequences, like the wrong man, Devonia Inman, being sent to prison for murder.
Liliana Segura: Next time on Murderville, we’ll meet the Patel family. It took us a long time to track them down. When we did, they said some surprising things about the GBI and told us about the unanswered questions the family is still living with.
Murderville, Georgia is a production of The Intercept and Topic Studios. Alisa Roth is our producer. Ben Adair is our editor. Sound design, editing, and mixing by Bryan Pugh. Production assistance from Isabel Robertson. Our executive producer is Leital Molad. For The Intercept, Roger Hodge is our editor and Betsy Reed is the editor-in-chief. I’m Liliana Segura. And I’m Jordan Smith. You can read our series and see photos at theintercept.com/murderville. You can also follow us on Twitter @lilianasegura and @chronic_jordan. Talk to you next week. If you can’t wait for more episodes, you can binge listen to the entire season ad-free now on Stitcher Premium. For a free month of Stitcher Premium, go to stitcherpremium.com/murderville and use promo code MURDERVILLE.
The post Episode Two: The Trial appeared first on The Intercept.
Hercules Brown has been in prison for murder for more than 16 years, but he has not confessed to the September 1998 murder of Donna Brown at the Taco Bell in Adel, Georgia — even though there is strong evidence pointing to his guilt, and Devonia Inman, a man unconnected to the crime, is serving a life sentence in prison for it.
Jessica Cino, a dean and law professor at Georgia State University, has spent countless hours over more than three years trying to find a way to help Inman prove his innocence, a monumental feat that means battling a court system rigged to keep him behind bars. He’s exhausted his normal appeals and courts are loath to accept a new filing based only on a contention that someone is actually innocent. In order to raise the issue, Cino would need to find new evidence of a constitutional violation — one that hasn’t been included in any of his other appeals, and one to which she could bootstrap the innocence claim.
The pro bono legal team that Cino helped to assemble has been on the hunt for this new evidence, well-aware that with the passage of time, the odds of finding a fresh constitutional violation are slim. And then, last year, they found Kim Brooks.
Brooks took a job at the Taco Bell not long after Donna Brown was murdered — in fact, she took over Brown’s position. Hercules was still working at the Taco Bell, and his behavior toward Brooks was disturbing, she said. He would “play” like he was going to rob her and asked her if she wanted to help him pull off an “inside job” to rob the store. He told her that he would “rough her up” to make it look realistic, and they could split the take.
It was the same scenario that Inman’s cousin Takeisha Pickett, then a shift manager at the Taco Bell, had reported to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation not long after Brown’s murder. No one had paid attention.
Brooks also told the legal team that Hercules had all but confessed to her. He said he’d done something “bad.” When she asked if someone else was paying for his mistake, he replied, “It’s better their life than mine.”
And like Pickett, Brooks tried to report her troubling interactions with Hercules. She first tried to tell a local Adel cop, a sergeant who would escort her to the bank to make night deposits. But he brushed her off, eventually telling her that she’d have to talk to Jamy Steinberg, the GBI agent leading the Brown murder investigation. She tried, but he apparently wasn’t interested. He told her that Donna Brown’s murderer had already been found and that the case was closed.
This all happened before the end of 1998, Brooks told the lawyers, meaning that Inman hadn’t even been indicted yet, let alone tried. The information should have been recorded in the GBI report and it should have been turned over to Inman’s defense team. Neither happened — and that’s a constitutional violation that could get Inman back into court. “I do think that a ‘bombshell’ is the best way to describe it,” says Cino. “It’s yet another corroborating witness in this whole cesspool of facts that never got untangled or even looked at by the GBI.”
In January 2018, the lawyers filed a special appeal in state court seeking to overturn Inman’s conviction based on the new evidence. The appeal is pending. Despite its strength, it’s still a longshot. “A judge should read this and be outraged and give [Inman] an evidentiary hearing,” Cino says. “Politics and realities being what they may, I can’t at all say that I am even more than 50 percent confident that that’s the outcome.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
It was in mid-2015 that we received the first email from Cino. She was writing to see if we might be interested in looking into Inman’s case.
Cino did not represent Inman, but she was convinced that he was innocent, and had taken on his case as an advocate, she told us. She shared some red flags pointing to a wrongful conviction. There was no hard evidence connecting Inman to the murder, which had taken place around 2 a.m. on September 19, 1998. The victim, a single mother named Donna Brown, was the manager at Taco Bell; she was leaving the restaurant carrying the day’s receipts when she was apparently ambushed, shot dead with a .44 revolver. The gun was never recovered, nor was any of the cash or the bank bag that was stolen from her. And none of the fingerprints lifted from her car — which was stolen and dumped nearby — matched Inman.
Instead, there was a rogues’ gallery of witnesses who fingered Inman, an outsider from California who had only been in town a little more than a month before being accused of the crime. By the time he was tried in 2001, two of the prosecution’s key witnesses had recanted their statements to the GBI, insisting on the stand that they had lied. Ten years later, yet another witness — a man who was locked up briefly with Inman and claimed that he’d confessed details of his crime — also recanted, saying he’d been coerced by police.
But most significantly, in 2011, DNA testing revealed the genetic profile of another man, Hercules Brown, on the key piece of physical evidence found at the scene: a makeshift mask fashioned from a length of gray sweatpants with two eyeholes cut into it. Not only had Hercules gone on to commit a brutal double murder in the fall of 2001, but his name had also come up in rumors about a previous murder that same year — the killing of an Indian immigrant named Shailesh Patel — which remains unsolved. In sum, during the 17 months since the murder at Taco Bell, three more grisly slayings had taken place in Adel, a town of just more than 5,000 people. The DNA evidence was damning proof that law enforcement got the wrong man in 1998 — and by failing to treat Hercules as a suspect, they were indirectly responsible for further carnage in Adel. “I mean, it’s convenient, right?” Cino notes. “The minute, he gets locked up, people stop dying in this little town. That says a lot.”
Yet in 2014, the same judge who presided over Inman’s trial declined to grant him a new one, claiming that the DNA evidence was not persuasive enough. The Georgia Supreme Court subsequently declined to intervene. This left Inman in an impossible legal predicament. As Cino explained, “All the stars have to align for somebody to be able to challenge their conviction … to have lawyers who are going to work for them and to have a judge who’s receptive to those claims.” Inman had been given that shot but was still denied, even with DNA evidence, which only exists in a fraction of cases. The state of Georgia was “pretty crafty,” Cino said, in that “they left open this sliver for Hercules Brown to just creep into the picture and still leave Devonia in prison because they were able to at least create some inference that, well, we found Hercules’s DNA at the scene but that doesn’t mean Devonia wasn’t there too. … And it makes it now impossible or almost impossible for him to use that DNA to successfully challenge his conviction.”
As we began to review the materials in Inman’s case, we were horrified by what we found: a panoply of bad practices known to wreak havoc in the criminal justice system, all of which are regularly implicated in wrongful convictions. It started with an incomplete police investigation. Law enforcement latched onto an early narrative about the crime and then consequently ignored all signs — even screaming ones — that conflicted with their chosen theory. Such tunnel vision and confirmation bias are common in cases of innocent people sent to prison. In Inman’s case, agents with the GBI failed to follow several substantial leads, including rumors that Hercules was the real man responsible for Brown’s murder.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
We first went down to Cook County in November 2015, meeting Cino in Atlanta and making our way south down I-75. Cotton fields were ripe for harvest along the interstate; at Exit 39, the main entrance to Adel, a sign advertised the King Frog, an old Adel institution that once billed itself as the “Flea Market of the South,” but now mainly sells discount clothing in the shadow of a newly arrived Walmart. Although Thanksgiving was more than a week away, Christmas decorations adorned the storefronts in sleepy downtown Adel, surrounded by magnolias and palm trees.
The Taco Bell where Donna Brown was shot sits just off the interstate, across from a truck stop and surrounded by a handful of fast-food joints. We retraced the steps Brown would have taken as she carried the cash to her car, examined the area where her assailant was allegedly lying in the weeds, then drove the short route taken by her killer, turning east across the overpass covering I-75 and making a right towards the still-abandoned Pizza Hut lot several blocks away.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Around the corner from the Pizza Hut was the awning where Virginia Tatem — the newspaper delivery woman who was a key eyewitness against Inman — once stood. The shelter used to house gas pumps but is now just an empty shell facing out toward the street on the corner of 4th Avenue and Adams Street. Around 2 a.m. on the night of the murder, Tatem said she was standing under the awning waiting for the nightly delivery of the Valdosta Daily Times when she heard what sounded like a gunshot coming from the other side of the highway. She then claimed to see two cars following each other, going so fast that they fishtailed when turning the corner. Despite their high speed, she said she saw clearly into each car. In the first, a black car that matched the description of Brown’s Chevrolet Monte Carlo, she saw a lone black man she would later identify as Inman. In the second, a rusty-brown-colored car, she saw four or five other black people. The cars continued down the road before coming to a stop at the boarded-up Pizza Hut and disappearing from view.
Looking out onto the street from the spot where Tatem said she stood, her claims seemed absurd. The sound she allegedly heard from the Taco Bell to the west would have had to cut through the noise from multiple lanes of traffic, both from the overpass, as well as the sound from I-75 below. The voices she supposedly heard from the Pizza Hut would have been similarly hard to hear, unless the subjects were loud, which would seem unlikely from anyone who just committed a robbery and murder. What she claimed to have seen seemed just as unlikely. She described the first driver as wearing a ribbed white tank top and dark slacks, along with a thin gold chain. But looking down toward the Pizza Hut from the awning — in broad daylight — it was hard to make out much of anything.
There was good reason to be skeptical of Tatem from the start. It had taken her more than a month after Brown’s murder to come forward with this account — and only after news of a $5,000 reward for information related to the Taco Bell murder was published in the Adel News Tribune. In two subsequent interviews and then on the witness stand at Inman’s trial, Tatem offered additional details she hadn’t previously disclosed to police — embellishments that should have been a cause for concern. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable — a leading factor in wrongful convictions — and an account that gets more detailed with the passage of time is even more suspect. Yet both police and prosecutors ignored this fact, accepting Tatem’s dramatic tale at face value.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
As we explored the area between the awning and the Pizza Hut, Cino theorized that prosecutors felt that they needed Tatem to move forward with the case. Inman did not get indicted until January 1999, she pointed out. “So that means they didn’t think they had enough until they got Virginia Tatem’s last statement.” Prior to that point, “none of the forensics matched up. They don’t get any really credible witness statements.” Then “suddenly Virginia Tatum comes in and they get more until they’ve got, basically a perfect statement from her” — a description that matched their theory of the crime.
Particularly disturbing is that GBI agent Jamy Steinberg seems to have completely missed an early sign suggesting that Tatem’s story might be fabricated. On October 26, 1998, the same afternoon he first talked to Tatem, Steinberg called a man named Lee Grimes, a fellow newspaper carrier who was reportedly waiting with Tatem on the night of the murder. According to the GBI report, Grimes said he didn’t remember anything about that night. More importantly, he told Steinberg that Tatem had actually called him to talk about what she was now claiming to have seen. If this was a hint that Tatem may have been trying to gin up her story before offering it to the police, there’s is no indication that Steinberg — or anyone else — ever considered it.
Grimes was called to testify for the defense at Inman’s trial, but the examination was lackluster. He repeatedly said he didn’t remember anything about that night, including after an odd exchange: Lead prosecutor Bob Ellis recounted how, according to Tatem, Grimes had allegedly joked with her about not walking into the street to get a good look at who was driving down by the Pizza Hut because she might get shot. Grimes said he didn’t remember that “at all.”
Could it be that something did happen, and Grimes just didn’t remember it? We went to see Grimes to find out.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
We located Grimes in a quiet town nearly two hours northeast of Adel, in a house that is a shrine to his first love: music. A former school band director, Grimes’s house is a maze of record albums — more than 20,000 of them, alphabetized on seemingly endless rows of shelving. Beatles paraphernalia is displayed throughout the house, and a collection of album covers stretches back into the laundry room.
Grimes explained that in the fall of 1998, he was on hiatus from teaching, living in Adel and delivering papers. He remembers the night of Donna Brown’s murder as well as the day he testified in Inman’s trial. And he has a singular regret: that he wasn’t more forceful when answering questions about what Tatem said she’d seen. “None of that happened, and I’ll swear on 10 stacks of Bibles … none of what she said, absolutely, positively, did not happen at all,” he said.
Grimes traced Tatem’s story to a conversation he had with her on a totally different night following the murder, after the notice of the reward had run in the paper. The two were waiting for the newspapers to be delivered when a car carrying some black people passed by. They began talking about the murder at Taco Bell. “She was telling me, ‘You know, there’s a $5,000 reward for that. It sure would be nice to get that reward.” She then made a pointed comment: “‘You know, those people right there, they could have committed that crime,’” Grimes recalls her saying. “I just thought, well, she’s looking for money.” He said he had no idea that Tatem had gotten involved in the case until sometime later, when he was contacted by Inman’s attorney. Tatem’s story, he said, was “just totally made up.”
Grimes was not sure whether Tatem ever collected the money, but he was willing to bet she had. A few years later, Tatem wrote a lengthy war novel, titled “Tripwire,” which she self-published in 2008. It centered on two women in Adel whose husbands had gone to fight in Vietnam. Grimes said there was some speculation that she had used the reward money for that — “which would be something frivolous she would do.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Grimes last saw Tatem at a bank, several years after the trial. He decided to confront her. “I walked up to her and I asked her, ‘How are you sleeping at night?’ And she just walked away.”
Several people have tried to speak to Tatem about the Donna Brown murder over the years. She has not welcomed the attention. Aimee Maxwell, the founder and former executive director of the Georgia Innocence Project, told us that the first time she showed up at Tatem’s door, her husband ran Maxwell off with a rifle. In Cino’s experience, phone calls to the house would be picked up by a woman claiming to be Tatem’s “friend,” but who Cino and her colleagues suspected was Tatem herself.
We went to see Tatem during a subsequent visit to Cook County, stopping by her home in Hahira, a rural town just south of Adel. She was not expecting the visit. Upon answering the door, she cracked it open just a sliver, allowing for the briefest of exchanges. We said we were looking for people willing to discuss the murder of Donna Brown. “Good luck with that,” she answered. She denied that she’d been an important part of the case — “I don’t think I was key,” she said. “I was a witness. That was it.” More surprising, despite her presence at the evidentiary hearing in 2014 — which had been held to consider the DNA evidence found on the ski mask matching Hercules Brown — Tatem repeatedly claimed that she had not heard anything about any DNA evidence. “I don’t even know anything about it,” she said, adding that anything more she had to say about the case she had already said in court. “That was it and basically I don’t have any other kind of comment,” she said. “And please don’t come back.”
Despite Tatem’s insistence that she had nothing more to say, she later agreed to speak to Bill Rankin of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In an interview outside her home, with her grandchildren playing nearby, she cried over the fact that people kept questioning her claims and motives when it came to what she saw. She also confirmed that she had collected the reward money, just six months after the trial ended. But as she did on the stand, she adamantly denied that she had been motivated by greed. “I’m a mother of five children,” she said. “I don’t take something like that as a joke.” She told Rankin that she felt something in common with Brown, who was a mother working a dangerous night shift. There were plenty of times she felt she was in danger herself, she said. “It could have been me.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Tatem’s wasn’t the only door that closed in our faces as we tried to look into the Donna Brown murder. Several key players refused to talk at all, chief among them the lead investigators. GBI agent Steinberg, a rookie with the department at the time, was laconic: The case has “been adjudicated,” he said over the phone. “You can ask, but I’m not going to discuss it with you.” This was far more than we got from then-Adel Police detective Jimmy Hill, leaving the extent of his involvement in the investigation uncertain.
Over repeated visits to Adel, it became clear that while Steinberg officially led the investigation into Brown’s murder, Hill played a key role in the case. Defense investigator Earline Goodman named him as one of the only people who could really explain why the investigation went as it did. And according to Christy Lima, Inman’s girlfriend at the time of the murder, it was Hill and the Adel police who were hounding her sister Marquetta Thomas, who implicated Inman in the crime in the days and weeks after Brown’s slaying. “They kept interrogating her,” Lima said. “They picked her up every day.”
Hill’s name appears all over the GBI’s official report, yet none of the documents are actually written by him. This is not entirely surprising: None of the officers who first responded to the call about a body in the Taco Bell parking lot recorded their initial contacts with witnesses or their observations of the scene. This basic information is simply absent from the GBI report. In fact, there are no reports from the Adel Police Department at all. At Inman’s trial, Adel Police Chief Kirk Gordon explained that his officers didn’t write reports because “we’re not going to interfere” with the GBI. Even when an Adel officer was the first to receive or develop some bit of information, he said. “What’s the use in writing it down when you can explain it to [the GBI] face to face?”
This lackadaisical approach raises serious questions, not only about what leads were communicated by local officers to the GBI in the Donna Brown case, but also about who might have exerted influence on various players — like Thomas — or on the direction of the investigation — like the decision to focus on Inman and not Hercules. Of particular concern is whether Hill held sway over such decisions. Goodman believes that is exactly what happened: “I think he’s the one that put the case together,” she said.
Inman’s relatives are certain that it was Hill who targeted Inman. They say he mouthed off to Hill and a couple of Adel police officers during his last arrest. According to his uncle, Ben Pickett, Hill said about Inman, “He ain’t getting out of here. He won’t never see the daylight of dawn around here, in this jail.” Dinah Ray, Inman’s mother recalls speaking to Inman in jail. “He told me that he had smart-mouthed a police officer,” she said. “I strongly believe this is the reason [he was targeted]. Him disrespecting authority. Does that equal to life in prison?”
Photo: GBI
Hill, a portly, bald sexagenarian with a smile that is half glower, is a polarizing figure in Cook County. Depending on who you ask, he’s either a crack investigator with a spotless record of arresting the right person, or an aggressive and vindictive man who used whatever means necessary to clear his caseload. There seems to be no in between when it comes to Hill; a number of people we spoke to for this story refused to say anything about him on the record, but had strong opinions to share once the interview was over.
Several of his law enforcement colleagues described Hill as exceptionally talented. “Jim Hill was always a very aggressive detective. I mean, he was like your true detective. If he had the evidence you were going to get arrested. I mean, that’s all there was to it,” Tim Eidson, the former assistant district attorney, recalled. “And I will tell you, if Jim Hill ever made an arrest, I had no doubt that he had the goods.”
To Gordon he was very smart, but “a little bit loose-tongued, rough around the edges, I should say.” And former DA Bob Ellis said the investigator had a “strong personality” that some people found intimidating — though he said he never did.
But others saw Hill as a racist bully. Ben Pickett said he was “always pinning stuff on young black men.” Takeisha Pickett, Inman’s cousin, agreed, saying that she’d always heard that he was a bad cop who liked to get black people off the street whenever possible. They’re not alone in their negative assessments. Former Cook County Sheriff John Daughtrey did not mince words: “He’s a vicious little man,” he said. “He’s threatening something all the time.” And he agrees that the city’s black residents have an especially hostile view towards the man that they believe is “out to get them specifically.”
Hill, says Daughtrey, is “the most hated guy in Cook County, there’s no doubt about it.”
We got in touch with Hill in the spring of 2017, after a number of failed attempts to reach him that included trying to track him down at home, leaving phone messages with a close friend, and camping out in the lobby of the Cook County Sheriff’s Office where he now works; we left a series of notes with the receptionist. When we finally reached him by phone, he was decidedly surly. “Isn’t it a clue when I don’t return your call I don’t intend to talk with you?” he asked. He hung up before we could ask any real questions.
As we pursued our investigation, it seemed that everyone who might actually be in a position of power to correct the mistakes made in Inman’s case — from police to prosecutors to judges — had abdicated their duty to see that justice is served. Yet, others wished desperately that they could do more to help. Where Grimes regrets that he was not more forceful in pushing back against Tatem’s apocryphal story about what she saw the night of the Taco Bell murder, Marquetta Thomas harbors deep regret about the role she played sending Inman to prison.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
We met Thomas in July 2016, in Baldwin, a small town two hours northeast of Atlanta, and roughly half the size of Adel. Her two-story, white clapboard house sits on the edge of the Chattahoochee National Forest, which spills down from Tennessee. “I never heard of this town in my life,” she said, but she had settled there after being released from Lee Arrendale State Prison, just five minutes away. Wearing glasses, a red sweater vest, a bowtie, and a short-sleeved shirt that showed off an old tattoo, she reflected on her role in the case — and how much she wishes she could take it back.
Thomas was the first to insist that Inman was responsible for Donna Brown’s murder. Her motivation was twofold: She hated the way he treated her sister, Christy Lima, she said, while she also felt hounded by investigators in the days and weeks after the murder. She still doesn’t understand why the cops came to her in the first place. “It’s just like they picked me out [at] random,” she said.
Whereas her sister told investigators from the start that Inman was with her that evening — and has never changed her tune — Thomas said she was coerced into implicating Inman. “I think they were just looking to pin the crime on somebody to make their job lighter, easier, and I was a pawn in their game that they used,” she said. “It was verbal coercion because they would say, ‘Wasn’t this this?’ and I just agreed. I guess the story started getting formulated with bits and pieces they were telling me, and I just fused the story together to get [them] out of the picture.”
Thomas arguably had a further incentive to advance a narrative in which Inman alone committed the crime. There were rumors that Thomas might have played a role to herself in the crime at Taco Bell, something the state tacitly acknowledged over the course of Inman’s trial, albeit not in front of the jury. She even fit the description of the woman in the second car that Virginia Tatem allegedly saw that night. Although Thomas denies having had any role — she told us she did not know Hercules Brown — by the time the state called Thomas to testify in June 2001, she was facing bigger problems of her own, having been arrested for acting as a getaway driver in another unrelated armed robbery. Thomas was ultimately convicted and sent to prison, spending 14 years locked up for her role in that crime.
It was a life-altering blow. Thomas had four young kids when she went to prison, whose childhoods she missed completely. She described facing beatings and rape — but she was also able to turn her life around, enrolling in vocational training and getting involved with a traveling choir, in which she was able to sing and share stories of redemption at area churches. When she was released, the church helped her get back on her feet. Today she is 41; when we met, she had a good job and dedicated much of her time to the ministry as a worship leader, youth minister, and minister of music in the congregation — and was deeply involved in church outreach.
Thomas says she thinks about Inman’s case and her role in it almost every day — “every time I open my refrigerator, because the liberties of just being free and walking in the grass barefoot or being allowed to open my own refrigerator when I want” — and particularly when her son calls home. Now in his 20s, her son is serving 80 years in prison for participating in an armed robbery that ended in murder. “I’m thinking, ‘This is my karma or my reap-what-you-sow,’ because I allowed another young man’s life to be gone for a murder and robbery that he did not commit,” she said.
But ultimately, Thomas blames the police for everything that went sideways for Inman. “I think it’s them, Adel all day long — Adel city police and the GBI.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Dinah Ray no longer feels safe in her hometown. After her son was convicted, she wrote letters to anyone she could think of who might be able to help but came to fear that the letters might make her a target. Once during a visit to Adel, the heater in the hotel room caught fire. “Me and my wife, we thought they was trying to kill us,” her husband, David, says. “I get a little paranoid when I go there,” Dinah admits. She is afraid of the police and authorities in Adel. “I don’t know what they may do.”
Growing up, she had been aware of the racial divisions in Adel — a ditch near her mother’s house separated the black side of town from the white side. “We would cross that ditch to go to the store sometimes,” she said, and an elderly white couple would let their dog loose after her and her siblings. Still, Dinah had felt it was a good place to live. But not anymore. “After that trial, it changed my whole perspective on Adel,” Dinah says. “I told my sisters, ‘Adel is no place for a black man. You need to take your boys away from here.’”
Dinah and David still live in Sacramento, in a white house with a basketball hoop over the garage. On a weeknight in September 2016, they shared old photographs of Inman growing up. There is a photograph of his sister reading to him as a toddler, a shot of teenage Devonia wearing denim from head to toe, standing next to a Christmas tree. In another, he is dressed in a white suit and sunglasses. Even when he was a little boy, he had loved to dress up, often in military garb, mimicking his biological father. “He loved to look nice,” Dinah says.
It was hard for Dinah to leave Inman in Adel. “He didn’t want to stay, and my wife didn’t want to leave him,” David says. “She cried the whole ride back.” Dinah calls it “the worst thing I could have ever done. It destroyed our lives.” The family attended the trial but was not allowed in the courtroom for most of the proceedings. “Even with the little information that we heard during the trial, I still thought my son was coming home,” David says. “To me, the evidence that they had, they didn’t have nothing.”
After the verdict came down, they remember a young woman who was a witness for the state had approached Dinah. They later identified her as LarRisha Chapman, who first claimed to see Inman in the weeds but later recanted in a letter and on the stand. “She was crying, and she said that she was sorry, that she didn’t even know my son,” Dinah says, “that they were just harassing her, and they made her say it.”
Dinah Ray, at her home in Sacramento.
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
Inman writes frequent letters to his family; Dinah was going to find some letters to share when Inman’s cousin, Takeisha Pickett, arrived at the house. Pickett, who previously lived in Adel and worked at the Taco Bell prior to the murder, could have been a crucial source of information, had investigators taken her seriously. On multiple occasions, she tried to provide a critical tip: In the months leading to the crime, Hercules Brown had asked her if she would help him rob the Taco Bell. “He said it to me maybe twice and I brushed him off on it,” she said. “Then a month or two later, this happens.”
In high school, Pickett knew Hercules as a football player from a well-to-do family. “When I started working at Taco Bell, I was introduced to a different Hercules,” she said, a guy who had gotten into drugs. Regardless, the two got along, she says. As a shift supervisor, she would sometimes close the restaurant with him. “He gave me a ride home one night and we came in for a little while,” she said. That’s when he said, “‘Man, you should let me rob you one night,’ or whatever.” Pickett scoffed — there wasn’t enough money at the Taco Bell to make it worth robbing, she said. “He just left it alone for a little while. Then maybe a couple of weeks later, he brought it up again. Then I think we might have been at work. He was like, ‘Man, you should let me do it, Keesh.’ I was like, ‘Man, you trippin.’ That was that.”
By the time she heard about the murder, Pickett had left her job to work at Lowe’s. When Steinberg came seeking information about Inman, she says, “I was like, ‘Hercules Brown wanted to rob the Taco Bell.’” In response, she remembers him saying, “That’s not relevant to what we’re talking about.” She never heard anything further until she was subpoenaed for trial.
In a two-page summary included in the GBI report, Steinberg makes no mention of this part of his interview with Pickett. Indeed, despite the constant chatter among members of the community that Hercules was involved, there are virtually no indications that Steinberg looked into the rumors. Later, Pickett says, when she went to court to testify at trial, she met in a small room with Jimmy Hill and Bob Ellis, repeating to them what she had told Steinberg. But she was dismissed.
By then, Hercules already sat in a jail cell for the brutal killing of William Bennett and Rebecca Browning months before. Bennett’s death still saddens Pickett — she knew his daughter from school, she said, and “I loved him because he made the best chili dogs ever.” Like so many others in Adel, Pickett is certain that their deaths could have been prevented if Hercules had ever been considered as a suspect for the murder at Taco Bell.
David suggested that the murder of Shailesh Patel might have been avoided too. “To this day, I think if they would have listened to us, the other three people that got killed later … they would be still alive,” he says, “and then my son would be home with us.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
For all the lingering trauma over the bloody chapter in Adel, among the members of the Patel family, the death of their loved one has gone largely unspoken for years.
Today Manishh Patel has no recollection of speaking to the Adel News Tribune about his uncle’s death in 2001. At the time he was a college student in Atlanta, majoring in business. He now manages a cheap motel in Macon, Georgia, where we met last summer, along with his uncle, Haribai. Like several members of the family’s older generation, who began arriving in the U.S. in the late 1970s, Haribai does not speak fluent English, relying on Manishh to translate. Shailesh Patel was his younger brother, Haribai explained through his nephew. After he was killed, “I couldn’t think for three months.”
Manishh explained that his uncle’s murder was only the first in a series of horrible tragedies that gripped the family in 2000. After his death, Shailesh had been cremated and the family had gone to Savannah to spread his ashes in the ocean. On the way home, the family got into a car accident, which killed Shailesh’s young daughter. Soon after that, Shailesh’s mother died. The family was in a constant state of shock and mourning. Haribai “was nervous all the time. Just scared all the time,” Manishh says. “It was just a bad time for our family.”
If the Patels were too emotionally burdened to keep tabs on the investigation into Shailesh’s death, the authorities were not providing any information. On the profile of the unsolved murder, the GBI website puts two names as the officers in charge: GBI agent Mike Clayton, who also participated in the Donna Brown investigation, and Adel Police detective Jimmy Hill. The names don’t ring a bell within the Patel family. Nobody from law enforcement ever called them, Manishh explained. Instead they got word that something bad had happened from another Indian acquaintance in Adel, who called them the day after the murder. Manishh’s father went to the scene but was turned away. The first time an agent came to talk to them it was days later, at a motel the family owned in Locust Grove.
It is hard to piece together who spoke to the GBI and when. Harabai “was there, but he didn’t talk to anybody,” Manishh explained. “It was always some relative or a cousin or somebody that did all the talking and then told him what they said.” He estimated that the GBI agent stayed for 20 to 30 minutes, asking basic questions. “And then that was the last what they heard from him.”
Photo: Ryan Christopher Jones for The Intercept
At one point during our interview, as he translated for Haribai, Manishh was told something he had never heard, a revelation that stunned and confused him. According to his uncle, “the GBI came up there and said, ‘If y’all want to proceed on this case, y’all have to help us pay for the investigation, at least 30 to 40 percent of it.’” The claim sounded bizarre: Families of victims are certainly not expected to cover the cost of a state investigation. It is unclear whether there was a miscommunication or even who had the conversation in question with the GBI. (Mark Pro, the GBI agent who insists that the investigation into the case is ongoing, called the claim “ridiculous.”) Regardless, the Patels have remained under the impression for years that the murder of their loved one had gone unsolved because they could not afford to pay for it.
“We never had any kind of crime like this in our family even before or after,” Manishh explained. The older generation in the immigrant family were outsiders to the criminal justice system in the United States. They did not feel empowered to push or question the GBI. And the language barrier made things that much harder. When a news station put together a public service announcement asking for tips to solve the murder, the job fell to Manishh’s cousin, who was similarly young at the time.
“I remember the cousins used to talk about it like, ‘What’s going on?’ Like, ‘What happened?’” Manishh recalls. But they did not want to upset their parents by bringing it up. “Even just bringing this up right now is even hard for them,” he said. “Because they kind of sealed it away a little bit, you know? … They’d rather be free, not have to think about this no more.”
Still, Manishh wishes that he could know what happened. “What kind of investigation they did. … Was it a forced entry or not? What was the story?” He wonders if the killer targeted Shailesh or meant to go after his brother-in-law, Vishnu, who was the one living at the house on Gordon Avenue, where Shailesh was killed, the one who brought Shailesh to Adel in the first place. “What happened?” Mannish asks. “Even if it was Hercules Brown, what was he thinking?”
It has been more than seven years since the DNA results from the mask came back with a match to Hercules. Inman’s parents remember exactly where they were when they got the phone call from the Georgia Innocence Project. “All we could do was cry,” says Dinah Ray. “We thought, this is it. He’s going to be coming home soon. But that didn’t happen.”
David Ray becomes emotional as he describes their attempts for help. His wife wrote to everybody she could think of — even the president, he says. “We still can’t believe this. This is supposed to be the justice system? My son been wrongly accused,” he said. “Something is wrong with this system. It needs to be checked again.”
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