FCC comment bots, a "bulletproof" hosting takedown, and more of the week's top security news.
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Intro Video
Saturday, October 5, 2019
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Friday, October 4, 2019
Tiffany Haddish drops receipts after Chingy denies hookup
Tiffany Haddish is pulling out receipts to prove that she once hooked up with rapper Chingy.
—The Forgiveness Trap – Botham Jean’s family’s response to Amber Guyger triggers debate—
While promoting her latest television show, Kids Say the Darndest Things, on The Ellen Show, Haddish told the host that she slept with rapper Chingy, best known for his chart-topping 2003 hit, “Right Thurr.”
Chingy, however, took to social media to deny the claim.
“Now @tiffanyhaddish knows damn well that’s a lie,” he wrote on Instagram in response to the claims. But he didn’t stop there. “An[d] since she lied I’m a tell the truth, she use to hook up with my brother not me but she liked me.”
Then he ended with, “Hey if we gone be honest let’s be honest. #chingy #facts #juslikethat.”
However, Haddish hit back and decided to clear the air and air out details about the one-night stand, even calling Chingy out for being bad in bed.
#TiffanyHaddish commented under #Chingy's post after the rapper denied they hooked up. Chingy has since deleted the entire post. https://t.co/RWNq3IFYhL pic.twitter.com/hfyFPTxqQ3
— Celeb Scoop Plus (@celebscoopplus) October 4, 2019
“Really Chingy stop I hooked up with you once like two months after we met,” Haddish recalled. “Granted the sex was not good cuz you was ‘sleepy.’ I was definitely in your bed at that hotel on San Vicente and Sunset. S**t, you pulled down my Sergio Valentes.”
Shots fired!
“Haddish never lies on her pussy,” she continued. “Boy I been talking about hooking up with you for years, why are you just now denying it? We had a lot of fun back in the day and only had sex once, don’t make me start calling out all the skeletons.”
Sounds like Haddish has taken a page from 50 Cent’s brand of petty hit back!
—Rapper Chingy denies Tiffany Haddish’s claim that they had sex—
The post Tiffany Haddish drops receipts after Chingy denies hookup appeared first on theGrio.
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Kamala Harris and Cory Booker side with Byron Allen in civil rights suit against Comcast and Charter
The Congressional Black Caucus has weighed in on the $20B lawsuit between Byron Allen‘s Entertainment Studios and the media companies, Comcast and Charter. Just in the nick of time, hours before the deadline for amicus briefs were to be filed in the highest court of the land, CBC members added their political voices to the powerful choir against Comcast, Charter and the President Donald Trump‘s Department of Justice regarding what Erwin Chemerinsky believes is the most important civil rights case of our time.
The DOJ filed an amicus brief earlier this summer which stated that Allen and his team (and if they win… all Black owned businesses) will have to prove that race is the only factor in refusal to work with a business. The CBC understands that this re-imagining of the Civil Rights Act of 1886 is problematic, particularly since systemic racism is not necessarily overt.
According to Deadline, among those who have lent their voice in protest are presidential candidates, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA). However, they are not alone. Earlier this week, a tsunami of the nation’s most respected civil rights organizations have let off sirens of opposition against what would be a dynamic change to a civil rights statute enacted to protect Black people from discrimination in business. The case, which will have the Civil Rights Act of 1866 smack dab in the middle of it, has reached the political mountain of The Supreme Court and is to be heard on November 13.
READ MORE: Color of Change demands Comcast withdraw its Supreme Court challenge to the Civil Rights Act of 1866
“As members of Congress, amici have a strong interest in ensuring that the laws Congress has passed are interpreted in a manner that is consistent with their text, history, and Congress’s plan in passing them,” says the brief filed by The CBC this Monday. “…The statute at issue in this case—42 U.S.C. § 1981—was passed immediately after the Civil War as part of a broader effort to ensure that the newly freed slaves enjoyed the same rights as other citizens.”
The brief continued, “This Court should not rewrite Section 1981 and disturb the vital protections that Congress passed that statute to provide.”
Booker and Harris are not the only voices from the race to the White House chiming in on this important issue. Mayor Pete Buttigieg was equally disturbed about the partnership formed between Comcast, Charter and the DOJ.
On October 1, he said, “It’s very clear that the civil rights division of the DOJ is not very energetic when it comes to civil rights, right?” The next day he took it even further, “This is critical because we need that economic empowerment to happen. I think this conversation needs to happen alongside the reparations conversation.”
READ MORE: Buttigieg on Byron Allen’s Comcast case — ‘It matters who’s running the DOJ’
The post Kamala Harris and Cory Booker side with Byron Allen in civil rights suit against Comcast and Charter appeared first on theGrio.
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Amber Guyger: Protests erupt over light sentence
Protests erupted Wednesday outside of a Dallas courtroom after Amber Guyger was sentenced to 10 years for the shooting death of Botham Jean after she entered the wrong home.
—The Forgiveness Trap: Botham Jean’s family’s response to Amber Guyger triggers debate—
Prosecutors urged the court to hand down a 28-year sentence to Guyger, the age Jeanwould have been today had he lived. Instead, Guyger was sentenced to a mere 10 years, a decision that angered protesters who believed the punishment was too light given the circumstances.
Tensions ran high between demonstrators and police after the sentencing, as activists chanted, “No justice, no peace,” outside the courthouse, The Star-Telegram reports.
Officers ordered them to “Please exit the roadway” but things soon took a turn and a video captured one woman getting arrested.
A woman in a red shirt could be seen walking with her fist up as officers swarm and pull her down when she tried to run. The woman was handcuffed.
WARNING GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: There’s been an arrest in the protest in downtown #Dallas . The protest is taking place after #AmberGuyger received a 10 year sentence for the murder of #BothamJean pic.twitter.com/Ci8Sa8M87u
— Alex Rozier (@RozierReports) October 3, 2019
Another person could be heard on the video screaming, “This is why we hate you!”
“Let her go!” another shouted.
Dallas police on Thursday said the woman in the video, Safiya Paul, 31 was arrested and charged with obstruction, a misdemeanor, police said. She was released from jail on a $500 bond.
The protests followed a tense week of testimony in the Guyger case. On Tuesday, a jury decided in less than 24 hours to convict the 31-year-old after prosecutors convinced them that the Sept. 6, 2018 shooting was not accidental, but instead an avoidable tragedy sparked by Guyger’s poor judgment. By Wednesday, it was announced that she had only been sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Before anyone could celebrate the “guilty” verdict, a disturbing video started making the rounds of a Black deputy stroking Amber Guyger’s hair after the verdict. Viewers said it was jarring to see Guyger being handled so adoringly by a person of color immediately after she was convicted of killing an unarmed Black man.
What the hell man? She’s stroking Amber’s hair after she was found guilty of murder. Some of us are still slaves. That’s why WS don’t want us speaking about black empowerment. They don’t want their slaves to finally be set free. #AmberGuyger pic.twitter.com/y1sLGwjUgB
— African Diaspora News Channel (@AfrDiasporaNews) October 1, 2019
That same day, Botham Jean’s younger brother, Brandt Jean, took the stand for his victim statement, and tearfully said to her brother’s killer, “I don’t want to say twice or for the 100th time how much you have taken from us. I think you know that, but I just.. I hope you go to God with all the guilt and all the bad things you have done in the past. Each and every one of us may have done something that we have not supposed to do. If you are truly are sorry, I know I can speak for myself, I forgive you.”
Botham Jean's brother to Amber Guyger: "I forgive you."
In a stunning moment, Brandt Jean asked the judge to allow him to hug the former Dallas police officer after she was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing his sibling. https://t.co/Pw4gBchCC1 pic.twitter.com/OPNbZrlmxi
— ABC News (@ABC) October 3, 2019
He then hugged his brother’s killer. And to add insult to injury, the State District Judge Tammy Kemp hugged Guyger too.
The protests are a culmination of the community’s anger over the sentence and what seems likes privileged treatment of Guyger.
“Why give a murder conviction and then 10 years?” said Dominique Alexander, the leader of the Next Generation Action Network, explaining why the Black community is outraged.
The post Amber Guyger: Protests erupt over light sentence appeared first on theGrio.
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Diversity of jury seen as key factor in officer’s conviction
By TAMMY WEBBER Associated Press
The questioning dragged on all day and into the evening as lawyers queried hundreds of prospective jurors for potential bias in the trial of Amber Guyger, the white Dallas police officer who fatally shot a black neighbor in his own living room.
Finally, the judge sent everyone home except the attorneys, who made their final selections in private.
It wasn’t until jurors filed into the courtroom for opening statements that the public got its first look at something many had hoped for: a panel that was as racially diverse as Dallas County.
READ MORE: The Forgiveness Trap – Botham Jean’s family’s response to Amber Guyger triggers debate
On Wednesday, the jury composed largely of people of color and women sentenced Guyger to 10 years in prison, a day after convicting her of murder in the September 2018 killing of her upstairs neighbor, Botham Jean, after she said she mistook his apartment for her own.
“This trial had a magnifying glass on it,” and jury selection was a fairer process because of that, said Alex Piquero, a criminologist at the University of Texas at Dallas. He said prosecutors and defense attorneys likely realized there would be a huge public outcry if the jury turned out mostly white.
“There were so many different eyes looking at this case, it was hard not to play by the rules,” he said.
Guyger, 31, was still in her police uniform after a long shift when she shot Jean, a 26-year-old accountant from the Caribbean island nation of St. Lucia, after pushing open the unlocked door to his apartment. She was soon fired from the force and charged with murder.
She testified at her trial that she mistook Jean’s home for her own, which was one floor below, and thought he was a burglar.
READ MORE: Tracee Ellis Ross dishes about Hollywood snubs during ‘Girlfriends’ days
From the beginning, the jury’s demographics were bound to be closely watched in a case that ignited debate over race and policing. Critics, including Jean’s family, questioned why Guyger was not taken into custody immediately after the shooting and whether race played a factor in her decision to use deadly force.
Research suggests that more diverse juries make decisions differently than all-white juries, said Samuel R. Sommers, a Tufts University professor who has studied jury diversity. For example, an all-white jury is more likely to convict a black defendant.
“Race and ethnicity influence our perceptions and judgment all the time in our daily lives,” he said. “Nothing makes those biases disappear when we enter a jury room.”
Guyger’s attorneys tried unsuccessfully to get the trial moved to another county, arguing that pretrial publicity made a fair trial in Dallas County impossible. Moving the trial to a suburban county also would have all but guaranteed a whiter, more conservative jury, which could have led to a different outcome, experts said.
Dallas County is about 29% non-Hispanic white.
While awaiting the jury’s sentence, an attorney for Jean’s family, Ben Crump, said the panel’s diversity would help them “see past all the technical, intellectual justifications for an unjustifiable killing.”
But another Jean family attorney, Daryl Washington, said Thursday that the jury also represented Guyger because it included eight women.
“It was very important to have jurors representative of the county they served in … but this wasn’t just about black and white,” Washington said.
One of Guyger’s lawyers and the president of the Dallas Police Association, which paid for her legal defense, did not respond to calls and text messages seeking comment Wednesday and Thursday.
Prosecutors historically have tried to get all-white juries because they were more likely to support law enforcement, said Kerri Anderson Donica, president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
“I think it’s so ingrained in prosecutors’ minds that it’s probably a bias they don’t even realize exists,” said Donica, who is white.
Former Dallas County prosecutor Heath Harris, who is black, said all attorneys seek jurors who will “rule how you want.” Harris, now a defense attorney, said it’s just as common for attorneys of minority clients to try to limit conservative white jurors. And though he believes Guyger would probably have been acquitted if the trial were held elsewhere, he thought there was enough evidence to justify either an acquittal or conviction.
The case also illustrates how much Dallas County has changed.
A 1986 Dallas Morning News investigation found that prosecutors routinely manipulated the racial makeup of juries through legal challenges, excluding up to 90% of qualified black candidates from felony juries. The U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that jurors could not be excluded solely based on race.
The newspaper also cited a treatise on jury selection written in the 1960s and credited to a Dallas County assistant district attorney. It advised prosecutors to not allow any minorities on a jury “no matter how rich or how well-educated.”
Community activist Changa Higgins, who leads the Dallas Community Police Oversight Coalition, said he was still shocked when the Guyger jury returned a conviction.
“This is one of the very few times I’ve seen the justice system work the way it’s supposed to work for us, or the way it works for white people,” he said.
___
Webber reported from Chicago. Associated Press writer Jake Bleiberg in Dallas contributed.
The post Diversity of jury seen as key factor in officer’s conviction appeared first on theGrio.
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Tracee Ellis Ross dishes about Hollywood snubs during ‘Girlfriends’ days
Although Tracee Ellis Ross is enjoying the fruit of a very successful turn on black-ish, she was virtually invisible at the beginning of her career, which is the case for most Blacks in Hollywood.
—Tracee Ellis Ross on how Pattern Beauty fills in the gaps in the natural hair community—
Ellis Ross opened up on Essence’s The Color Files podcast about the lack of support that accompanied being a lead star on a show starring an all-Black female cast on Girlfriends.
In fact, she said she was never invited on talk shows by David Letterman, or Jay Leno, a perk she now has due to her popularity on the award-winning black-ish.
“My career was not handed to me,” she explained. “When I was on Girlfriends, I couldn’t even get on a late-night show. No joke. I was never on Jay Leno, David Letterman, any of those shows. I was the lead. It was a huge hit in our community and we had a lot of eyeballs.”
“I had never gone to the Golden Globes. I’d never gone to the Emmys. I’d never gone to any of those award shows,” the actress added. “All of that has happened since I got on ‘black-ish’ in my mid-40s. None of that was a part of my experience in the early part of my career.”
Girlfriends ran from 2000-2008, which is TV gold, given that it survived so long. Yet after it ended, Ellis Ross said scripts weren’t flying at her feet and it was a struggle to get cast or any work in the Hollywood real.
The actress saw brief success on BET’s “Reed Between The Lines” with Malcolm-Jamal Warner in 2011, but that show as soon canceled after just one season.
But things turned rosy in 2014, when she was offered a role as Rainbow on black-ish.
—Tracee Ellis Ross announces lush new hair care line for curly hair—
She’s also been able to spread her wings too and produce episodes on black-ish something she recently dished about in an interview last month on the “Tamron Hall Show”.
“They [the titles] don’t matter to me, but they matter in the context of our history and our world and our life and as women and as black women they do,” she explained.
“And I think it’s really important for us to have equity in the things that we create. And I think culturally and historically that hasn’t been the case. Personally, the title is not the thing, it’s being involved in creating content,” Ellis Ross added.
The post Tracee Ellis Ross dishes about Hollywood snubs during ‘Girlfriends’ days appeared first on theGrio.
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Jordan Peele Signs 5-year Deal with Universal Pictures
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Jordan Peele has inked a five-year deal with Universal Pictures.
Through a statement published on Forbes, Donna Langley, chairman of Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, states: “Jordan has established himself as a premier voice and original storyteller with global appeal. He is leading a new generation of filmmakers that have found a way to tap into the cultural zeitgeist with groundbreaking content that resonates with audiences of all backgrounds. We also share an important goal with Monkeypaw when it comes to increasing representation onscreen in the characters that are portrayed, the stories that are told and the people who tell them.”
Jordan also expresses excitement about the deal, “It would not have been possible to make Get Out and Us without the endless trust and support we received from Donna Langley and the team at Universal. Their willingness to take risks and their commitment to original content makes them the perfect collaborative partner for Monkeypaw. I couldn’t be more excited for what lies ahead.”
Monkeypaw (Peele’s production company) is currently in production on a reimagining of the horror film Candyman, written by Peele and Rosenfeld and directed by Nia DaCosta (“Little Woods”). Peele also expressed his thankfulness through his Twitter account, “Thank you for all the support and love! More content coming at ya!”
Peele got his career started in 2003, as a cast member on the Fox sketch comedy series Mad TV. After starring on the series for five seasons, he left the show in 2008. He and his Mad TV collaborator, Keegan-Michael Key, created and starred in their own Comedy Central sketch comedy series Key & Peele (2012–2015). Peele also co-created the TBS comedy series The Last O.G., which stars comedians Tracey Morgan and Tiffany Haddish (2018–present) and also serves as the host and producer of the CBS All Access revival of The Twilight Zone (2019–present).
His movie credits include Peele co-writing, producing and starring in Keanu (2016) and has voice acted in Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (2017) and Toy Story 4 (2019). The 2017 horror film Get Out was his directorial debut, for which he received numerous accolades, including the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, as well as nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. He received another Academy Award nomination for Best Picture for producing Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman (2018). His most recent film horror film, Us, which he directed, wrote, and produced, was another critically acclaimed hit that was released earlier this year.
Get Out holds the record as the highest-grossing movie ever for a feature debut from a writer/director with an original screenplay. It grossed $176 million at the North American box office on a $5 million budget. While his second movie, Us, took in $255 million at the global box office. According to The Wrap, Us had the highest-grossing opening ever for an original horror film, the highest-grossing opening ever for an R-rated film, and the highest-grossing opening for a live-action original since 2009’s Avatar.
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