The Michael Decon Program

[Nyewalker]

Call into the Michael Decon Program and tell him how you really feel...(424) 666-2425


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKo0LFeIfpo

[K_Dubb]

The only one following you around is K. Dubb, for the sole purpose of wanting to cornhole you.

I don't want to cornhole him bunny I just want to be his friend because he his hot.  When you have hot friends, it makes you hotter by reflection as you try to fit into their group and be like them.  I already ordered some 45-lb. dumbbells so I can be like Michael Decon!

When you have fat, angry, bearded friends, it just makes you fat, angry and bearded.

[ItsOver]

I don't want to cornhole him bunny I just want to be his friend because he his hot.  When you have hot friends, it makes you hotter by reflection as you try to fit into their group and be like them.  I already ordered some 45-lb. dumbbells so I can be like Michael Decon!

When you have fat, angry, bearded friends, it just makes you fat, angry and bearded.

[Dr. MD MD]

How Herpes Became a Sexual Boogeyman
It’s not a serious health threat. The CDC doesn’t even recommend regular testing. So how did herpes get so aggressively feared?

By L.V. ANDERSON
DEC 02, 20195:45 AM
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If you are an American between the ages of 14 and 49 reading this, there is a decent chance you have genital herpes and don’t know it. About 11.9 percent of Americans in that range have herpes simplex virus 2, or HSV-2, the kind most commonly associated with genital outbreaks, and most of themâ€"more than 4 in 5, by some estimatesâ€"have no idea.

That’s partly because government health officials think we’re better off that way. In 2019, a herpes diagnosis still carries an intense stigma. There are more than 1,000 posts on Reddit, the online discussion forum, containing the words herpes and devastated. Perennial articles chronicle the months, or even years, it takes for people who test positive to regain their self-worth and begin dating or having sex again. That’s why the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention actually recommends against widespread screening for genital herpes. In addition to the risk of false positives, “the risk of shaming and stigmatizing people outweighs the potential benefits” of testing everyone, the agency says. Many doctors don’t include the test in a standard STI panel unless a patient shows symptoms. Since many people with HSV-2 have either no symptoms or very mild symptoms, the majority never seek treatment and are never diagnosed.

This points to the medical reality of genital herpes: It is, for the vast majority of people, no big deal. Along with the 11.9 percent with HSV-2, 47.8 percent of Americans in the 14-to-49 age range carry HSV-1, or “oral herpes,” which generally causes cold sores around the mouth but can also cause genital herpes. If you’ve had chickenpox, shingles, or mononucleosis, you’ve also been infected by another virus in the herpes family. For the people who do have symptoms from genital herpes, they’re generally no worse than, well, cold sores, only they’re not on your face. Genital herpes only causes complications in people with compromised immune systems, and when it does, they’re usually treatable. In short, herpes simplex is a common, generally harmless skin condition that happens to sometimes be spread sexually. Barry Margulies, an associate professor of biological sciences at Towson University, said he tells students that herpes viruses are “extremely common pathogens that have actually sort of evolved a fabulous coexistence with us”â€"because “in most cases, nobody ever knows they have them.”

If herpes is such a minor deal, why does it come with such a pervasive stigma? In the first half of the 20th century, genital herpes was not on the public radar, and it wasn’t even recognized as a discrete type of herpes infection until the 1960s. But by the 1980s, it was slapped on the cover of Time with headlines like “Herpes: The New Sexual Leprosy.” What happened in the intervening years shows how a public sex panic is made. What’s still happeningâ€"herpes shame, fear, and confusion even nowâ€"shows how that panic can morph and persist. One of the oddest subplots of the stigma’s endurance has to do with who’s been falsely blamed for making herpes a boogeyman in the first place: drug companies.

Herpes simplex has been infecting hominids for millions of years, but it wasn’t until 1967 that scientists first distinguished between the HSV-1 and HSV-2 types, effectively creating the concept of “genital herpes.” The following year, a team of epidemiologists at Baylor University announced that it had found a correlation between herpes 2 and cervical cancer. (That link ultimately turned out to be a red herring; human papillomavirus, or HPVâ€"not HSV-2â€"actually causes cervical cancer.) But even at the height of the sexual revolution, and with the specter of cancer attached to it, herpes 2 didn’t immediately infiltrate the public imagination. A 1973 article in the feminist magazine Off Our Backs quoted a doctor saying, “Such is herpes simplex, a common infection, barely a diseaseâ€"so why talk about it?” In 1974, Abigail Van Buren, known as Dear Abby, reassured a reader, “My medical experts inform me that Herpes 2 should not (repeat not) be classified as a venereal disease,” since it can be spread nonsexually. “No need for you to be embarrassed,” she added. A 1976 New York Times Magazine story had an eminently reasonable conclusion: “For now, herpes viruses are part of our individual and collective ecosystemsâ€"like bacteria and pollution. We cannot get rid of them without getting rid of ourselves.”

Time Magazine; cover story on Herpes.
But around the same time, many newspapers and magazines took a different approach. They called genital herpes an “epidemic” and emphasized that it was incurable and could result in dangerous neonatal infections when passed from mother to infant during childbirth. (Both are true, though the latter is exceedingly rare.) In 1973, Time gave readers this explanation of the difference between herpes 1 and 2 in an unbylined article: “Unlike the basic herpes simplex, which strikes indiscriminately, type II appears to exercise moral judgmentâ€"tending to afflict primarily the sexually promiscuous.” A 1978 Los Angeles Times article with the headline “Venereal Disease of New Morality: Sexual Sore Spot That’s Spreading” opened by describing two people with genital herpes so severe they required hospitalization and said that herpes was “roaring through parts of Orange County like an unwanted dinner guest.” In July 1980, Time again covered herpes under the headline “Herpes: The New Sexual Leprosy” and the subheadline “ ‘Viruses of love’ infect millions with disease and despair.” Later that year, Newsweek called herpes “an insidious venereal disease” and quoted someone with herpes saying, “It’s like someone putting a soldering iron against your skin.”

Herpes hysteria reached its pinnacle in 1982. The New York Times Magazine ran a story presenting the “evidence that the disease deals a terrible blow to the victim’s self-image.” Rolling Stone’s contribution to the genre that year was titled “Lovesick: The Terrible Curse of Herpes.” In August, Time ran a now-infamous cover story, “The New Scarlet Letter,” in which author John Leo dubbed herpes “the VD of the Ivy League and Jerry Falwell’s revenge.” The article claimed it was “altering sexual rites in America, changing courtship patterns, sending thousands of sufferers spinning into months of depression and self-exile and delivering a numbing blow to the one-night stand.” Abigail Van Buren changed her tune, encouraging readers to sanitize linens and tableware used by people with herpes and contradicting a reader who asserted that having genital herpes was “just like having a cold or the flu.”

Daniel Laskin, the journalist who wrote the New York Times Magazine’s 1982 story about the “evidence that [herpes] deals a terrible blow to the victim’s self-image,” wrote to me that his story was borne out of a hysteria that was in the air. “My feeling is that this atmosphere of panic (exaggerated, I guess, in retrospect) was a function of how media and culture worked,” he said.

Television also played an important role in terrifying Americans about herpes. In March 1981, 60 Minutes ran an episode on herpes. A CDC scientist named Mary Guinan, who appeared reluctantly in the episode, said it opened with the question “Dr. Guinan, which venereal disease would you least like to have?”â€"a question no one had ever actually asked her during the interview process. “The response that was aired was a contrived one, a sliced-together collage of clips discussing syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes, and orogenital sex,” Guinan wrote in her 2016 memoir. “I cringed.” According to Guinan, she was also roped into appearing on an episode of The Phil Donahue Show in which Donahue accused Guinan of “covering up” the herpes epidemic as the live studio audience heckled her. In 1983, ABC aired a made-for-TV movie called Intimate Agony in which practically everyone living in a fictional community called Paradise Island contracts herpes.

Why did herpes hysteria explode at this time? Modern researchers have estimated that the overall prevalence of herpes 2 rose from 13.6 percent to 15.7 percent between 1970 and 1985â€"just a modest increase. Around the same time, doctor visits for genital herpes increased tenfold, a fact that researchers at the time saw as evidence of an epidemic. But with the benefit of hindsight, the increase in doctor visits seems like evidence of something else.

“If herpes did not exist, the Moral Majority would have had to invent it.”
â€" New Republic commentator, 1982
“In the ’70s, there were many cultural concerns about sex and the fear of herpes,” said Allan M. Brandt, a professor of the history of medicine at Harvard University. “It was widely seen as untreatable, a persistent risk of infection, with long-term consequences.” It is likely that fear, not a rise of infections, drove the surge to doctors’ offices.

In the period in between the discovery of penicillin (which cured chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis) and the first reported cases of HIV/AIDS in 1981, Americans had no reason to think they were at much risk from casual sexâ€"but they were deeply ambivalent about the idea of having multiple sex partners for fun. An incurable, easy-to-spread sexually transmitted infection that (sometimes) produced visible marks on the body and (very rarely) killed babies really did feel to some people like divine punishment for having sex. Indeed, a national survey commissioned in 1983 by Glamour found that 25 percent of women thought that “higher incidence of diseases transmitted through sexual intercourse … is God’s punishment for sexual promiscuity.” Billy Graham practically gloated about herpes as a sign of God’s displeasure with casual sex, saying, “We have the Pill. We have conquered VD with penicillin. But then along comes Herpes Simplex II. Nature itself lashes back when we go against God.” As one commentator for the New Republic wrote in 1982, “If herpes did not exist, the Moral Majority would have had to invent it.” Herpes was the perfect MacGuffin for a society ambivalent about the sexual revolution.

Ironically, one major contributor to the growing stigmatization of people with herpes may have been testimonials from people with herpes themselves, who skewed America’s sense of what a typical herpes diagnosis meant.

Oscar Gillespie, who co-founded a support group called HELP (Herpetics Engaged in Living Productively) in 1979, saw brief fame in the early 1980s when journalists started banging down his door asking for quotes about what it’s like to live with herpes. Gillespie appeared on The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, The Phil Donahue Show, Oprah, and 60 Minutes, and spoke to reporters from the New York Times Magazine and Time. “The mission was to get some clarity for what’s going on, for diagnosis and for treatment,” Gillespie told me over the phone. Nonetheless, some of the things he told the media sound pretty dramatic to modern ears. “People become murderous” upon being diagnosed with herpes, Gillespie said on PBS in 1982. “They want to take out contracts on the people that gave them herpes. And it often develops into a rather deep depression: ‘What will I do with my life? Now I am a leper; now I am left out of the normal swing of things.’ ”

From Gillespie’s perspective, he was simply relaying the feelings he’d heard from other people with herpes at support group meetingsâ€"and if reporters projected those feelings to a national audience, well, that was their job. “I didn’t create the language that was being used,” he told me. “I saw that language that was being used.” The word leper, Gillespie told me, “came from the people who had herpes. … If the media picked up on that, they’re just reporting.”

A major part of the herpes scaremongering of the late ’70s and early ’80s was that the infection was not merely incurable but also untreatable. When people went to their doctors with an outbreak, “They were told to go home and have a sitz bath and pretty much keep it clean and dry. That was pretty much it: keep it clean and dry,” Gillespie remembered. The lack of approved treatments for herpes didn’t stop some desperate patientsâ€"and some doctorsâ€"from experimenting. In 1981, the CDC issued a pamphlet warning people about the ineffectiveness of supposed treatments such as ether, dye-light therapy, and steroid creams.

Then, in March 1982, the Food and Drug Administration approved the very first treatment for genital herpes: an antiviral compound called acyclovir (brand name Zovirax), which was patented by Burroughs Wellcome, a private pharmaceutical company. Acyclovir had already been proven extremely effective as an intravenous treatment for immunosuppressed patients at high risk of developing complications from herpes simplex. Now it could treat genital HSV-2.

Zovirax was a medical breakthrough. It was also the source of the internet’s favorite conspiracy about herpes stigma.
But as a treatment for genital herpes, the drug’s sales initial potential proved limited. It was FDA-approved only as a topical ointment, and only for an initial outbreakâ€"there was insufficient evidence that it was effective for controlling recurrent outbreaks. By June 1983, the New York Times deemed Zovirax’s sales “disappointing.”

The tide turned for Burroughs Wellcome in January 1985, when the FDA approved an oral form of acyclovir to prevent or reduce the severity of recurrent herpes outbreaks. Burroughs Wellcomeâ€"unusually, at that timeâ€"launched an ad campaign in major magazines a few months later. These were what are known in the pharmaceutical industry as “help-seeking ads”â€"they didn’t mention Zovirax by name, but they informed readers that treatment was available for herpes and encouraged them to talk to their doctors about it. The ads ran in such publications as Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, People, and Playboy.

Zovirax was a medical breakthrough for the treatment of herpes simplex, chickenpox, and shingles, and one of its inventors was awarded a Nobel Prize in part for the drug. But it was also the source of the internet’s favorite conspiracy about how the herpes stigma was born. To hear some advocates for HSV-positive people tell it today, herpes didn’t carry any stigma until pharmaceutical companies, hellbent on selling their antiviral drugs, engineered a fearmongering campaign around it. “Herpes Genitalis, it seems, was not always stigmatized; it was merely a cold sore in an unusual place until the 1970s,” wrote an administrator for Project Accept, a nonprofit promoting herpes awareness and acceptance, in a frequently cited post. “The stigma is a comparatively recent phenomenon and appears to be the direct result of a Burroughs Wellcome’s Zovirax pharmaceutical marketing campaign in the late 1970’s through mid 1980’s.” The Herpes Viruses Association, a support group based in the U.K., has also promoted this hypothesis about the origins of herpes stigma.

This belief has gone mainstream: If you visited the Wikipedia page for herpes simplex any time between 2011 and earlier this year, you probably read a version of this theory. In recent years, it has been picked up by Vice (“Did Big Pharma Create the Herpes Stigma for Profit?”), Teen Vogue (“How Our Fear of Herpes Was Invented by a Drug Company”), and Salon (“How Big Pharma Helped Create the Herpes Stigma to Sell Drugs”). Or you might have heard it on the popular medical podcast Sawbones. It has comforted people newly diagnosed with herpes and has repeatedly fascinated the “Today I Learned” crowd on Reddit. It is also almost certainly not true.

Burroughs Wellcome ad for Zovirax reading "When they met last year, she was the only one with herpes. With the help of her doctor; she's still the only one."
If Burroughs Wellcome did play a role in stoking herpes stigma in the 1980s, one would expect its consumer-facing ads to play up the fears swirling around herpes. But the company’s campaign seemed designed to counter those fears. The ads showed attractive straight white couples embracing on the beach and lounging in natural settings. “The hardest thing he ever had to do was tell Sally he had herpes. But thanks to his doctor, he could also tell her it’s controllable,” read one tagline over a picture of one of these couples. “When they met last year, she was the only one with herpes,” read another. “With the help of her doctor, she’s still the only one.” The implication of these adsâ€"on top of the crucial, sales-bolstering point that “herpes is controllable”â€"is that herpes is not a social death sentence, and people with herpes aren’t doomed to be eternally rejected by potential romantic partners. It’s a far cry from “the new sexual leprosy.”

“The intent is to encourage people with herpes to visit their physician,” said a Burroughs Wellcome spokeswoman at the time, because herpes “had a reputation for being an untreatable, incurable disease.” Indeed, it’s hard to read the Burroughs Wellcome ads from this era as creating herpes stigmaâ€"they were clearly in conversation with a stigma that was already there.

And in fact by the time its ads appeared, America’s hysteria about herpes had already begun to die down. Gillespie, the onetime favored herpes spokesman, thinks journalists changed their approach to talking about herpes after acyclovir arrived. “The hyperness of the media changed,” he said. “The media were not pushing the issue or talking to people about their fears anymore. … Once there was treatment, they didn’t need to do a 60 Minutes.” The New York Times agreed, running an article under the headline “ ‘Paranoia’ Over Herpes Seems to Subside” in September 1985. In the article, Dena Kleiman interviewed an unnamed biology professor who was diagnosed with herpes in 1983 and initially thought of himself as a “leper” and an “unclean person.” Upon successful treatment with oral acyclovir, the biology professor “said he felt better about himself.”

The other reason paranoia over herpes subsided in the mid-1980s was rising awareness about AIDS, a sexually transmitted infection that, unlike herpes, actually threatened people’s lives. “AIDS seems to have put herpes in perspective,” a gynecologist told Kleiman. “Herpes is an annoying illness, but it is hardly a catastrophe.”

Still, if herpes stigma is much different today than it was in 1980, it clearly endures, as all those anonymous testimonials show. So does an inability to accept the facts about the infection. And with that has come the desire for someone to blame.

That seems to be where the often-repeated theory that herpes stigma was mass-produced by a profit-hungry pharma company come from. Today the conspiracy greets anxious people with new diagnoses when they search for herpes on Google, and it speaks to an appetite to expose dark corporate skullduggery.

The main evidenceâ€"the smoking gun cited over and over againâ€"seems to be a few sentences in a 2006 article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation by former Burroughs Wellcome research and development director Pedro Cuatrecasas. He writes:

During the D&D of acyclovir (Zovirax), marketing insisted that there were ‘no markets’ for this compound. Most had hardly heard of genital herpes, to say nothing about the common and devastating systemic herpetic infections in immunocompromised patients. But those with knowledge of clinical medicine knew that these were very serious and prevalent conditions for which there were no other therapies. Fortunately, at the time, research management had the authority and knowledge to render decisions.

Based on this passage, Project Accept concluded that “any public perception of need for antivirals” “would have to be manufactured.” Cuatrecasas’ article was also cited on the Wikipedia page for herpes simplex as evidence of a pharmaceutical conspiracy for several years. In February 2011, a Wikipedia editor named Marian Nicholsonâ€"also the director of the U.K.’s Herpes Viruses Associationâ€"added a section that read, “Genital herpes simplex was not always stigmatised. It was merely a cold sore in an unusual place until the 1970s.” Nicholson included a few snippets from Cuatrecasas’ article followed by the hypothesis, “Thus marketing the medical conditionâ€"separating the ‘normal cold sore’ from the ‘stigmatized genital infection’ was to become the key to marketing the drug.”

The conspiracy greets anxious people when they search for herpes on Google.
What exactly did Cuatrecasas mean when he wrote that Burroughs Wellcome’s marketing department “insisted that there were ‘no markets’ ” for acyclovir?

“During that time, certainly the condition was well-known,” he told me over the phone. “But there were no data provided in terms of incidence or prevalence or contagiousness.” Unlike with chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, health care providers have never been required by law to report herpes diagnoses to their state and local health departments, and so accurate data on its prevalence was hard to come by in the ’70s and ’80s. (Today, the CDC’s data on the prevalence of herpes comes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.) Burroughs Wellcome’s marketing team, Cuatrecasas recalled, “couldn’t get a hold of data. There were no data banks they could access. This is not atypical. … Most marketing people then, and it’s maybe even worse now, are not very imaginative.”

I asked Cuatrecasas whether there was anything to the belief that Burroughs Wellcome helped create herpes stigma. “No, no, not at all,” he replied. “No, that is really a conspiracy theory.” During clinical trials for acyclovir, Cuatrecasas added, Burroughs Wellcome was the one hearing from genital herpes patients desperate to try the drug. “There were people with severe, really severe fever blisters we don’t see much anymore.”

If you buy the conspiracy, you might be thinking that this is exactly what a pharmaceutical researcher would say to cover his tracks. But Cuatrecasas certainly didn’t sound like someone who’s a diehard supporter of his former employer. He said that after he left the company in 1985, he watched Burroughs Wellcome “jack up the price” of treatments for conditions in a way he found “unconscionable.”

I learned more about the company’s drug-promotion strategy from a former staffer named John Grubbs. Grubbs pitched doctors on Zovirax and other Burroughs Wellcome drugs for several years starting in 1987 and worked in the pharmaceutical industry for 23 years total. Grubbs said that Burroughs Wellcome sometimes sent out promoters to start talking up certain conditions to doctors before it released drugs to treat themâ€"but never more than six months in advance. “They wouldn’t want to spend the money to have a sales force promoting something that may or may not come out,” Grubbs said. “You know, some drugs get to the very end and never end up getting approved.”

Like all pharmaceutical companies, Burroughs Wellcome was motivated by profit. There is evidence that it funded research to discredit other potentially viable herpes treatments in the ’80s, presumably to protect Zovirax’s market share. Over the years, the pharmaceutical beneficiary of these drugs also shifted: Burroughs Wellcome merged with Glaxo Laboratories in 1995, and Glaxo Wellcome then merged with SmithKline Beecham to become GlaxoSmithKline in 2000. In 2006, GlaxoSmithKline paid a doctor to promote the universal screening of pregnant women for herpes, a practice that’s not recommended by the CDC but would presumably increase demand for valacyclovirâ€"brand name Valtrexâ€"the second-generation herpes treatment that GlaxoSmithKline then had the patent for. Glaxo Wellcome’s patent on acyclovir had expired in 1997. (Valacyclovir remains popular as both a treatment for herpes outbreaks and as a viral suppressant for people who have herpes and partners who don’t.)

Burroughs Wellcome ad for Zovirax reading "The hardest thing she ever had to do was tell Roger she had herpes. But thanks to her doctor, she could also tell him it's controllable."
Project Accept’s 2012 article about the origins of herpes stigma is unbylined, and the organization’s current director didn’t respond to an email asking who wrote it. I did, however, exchange emails with Marian Nicholson. When I asked her why she thought that herpes stigma was invented by pharmaceutical companies, she claimed that “the newspaper and magazine articles (Time ‘Scarlet Letter’ etc.) came about because of PR briefings from companies working for Glaxo-Wellcome and so the sudden interest in herpes just before the drug hit the market was not a coincidence.”

I asked Nicholson if she had any specific evidence that Burroughs Wellcome contributed to the media’s herpes hysteria in the ’70s and ’80s. “No, I know of no one who has published any private BW instructions to their PR company to ‘big up’ genital herpes so as to promote sales of” acyclovir, she replied, adding that she assumed “this was understood by the PR company to be ‘what we do’ and it did not need spelling out.”

I asked Laskin, the journalist who wrote the New York Times Magazine’s 1982 story about herpes, whether Burroughs Wellcome had anything to do with his story. “I had no contact at all with Burroughs Wellcome,” he replied.

I don’t begrudge Nicholson, or anyone else, their belief that Burroughs Wellcome invented herpes stigma in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s undeniably compelling. It’s compelling because it offers people with herpes an alternative way of thinking about the virus they’ve contracted. It’s compelling because it illuminates an indisputable truth: that beyond the basic biological facts, everything we think about any health condition is socially constructed.

And there are seeds of truth in this conspiracy theory. It’s true that researchers didn’t even distinguish between herpes type 1 and herpes type 2 until the late 1960s and that genital herpes wasn’t even considered a “venereal disease” until the 1970s. It’s true that herpes stigma had to be “manufactured.” But it wasn’t manufactured by a nefarious pharmaceutical company. It was manufactured by the interplay of media and consumers, a vicious cycle in which the media covered herpes sensationally, generating fear and interest from consumers, and that in turn generated more sensationalistic articles and TV news segments, and then more fear, the press and the public mirroring and stoking each other’s hysteria. People who were most affected by herpes became both a pawn in and further fuel for the panic. It’s impossible to point to a single moment in this cycle and say, “That’s when genital herpes became stigmatized.” But we can point to the phenomenon and see how misguided it was and how misguided its aftermath remains today. We can begin to free ourselves from the stories people told about herpes in the ’70s and ’80s, and start telling one another new stories about herpes insteadâ€"stories about how common it is, how trivial it usually is, and how it should be least among your fears when you have sex.

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[K_Dubb]

☝️ It's true!  I am convinced that 45-lb. dumbbells will make me a better bellgab poster, as well.  Look at how handily Michael Decon defeats all the yapping poodles who come after him on here who show up every day ginned up with fresh fury thinking today they might get to him.  He just squashes them with one line.  You can tell he has already crushed it on the weights, is already dripping in testosterone, and doesn't need to work himself up over some anklebiter flailing away.

Now my prose has been occasionally overwrought (I know!) and I think some of that calm and secure, gently mocking demeanor he exudes might serve as a powerful corrective to sharpen my attacks with concentrated force, like Michael Decon, sweaty and shirtless, doing a perfect curl oh lord help me

[K_Dubb]

Morning, doc.

[Dr. MD MD]

The 'Mess of Complexity' in Directing Your Porn Star Partner
Kayden Kross on set
Image: Darren Cornell
tracyclarkflory
Tracy Clark-Flory
10/22/19 12:00PM
•
Filed to:
MONOGAMY ON A PORN SET
10
4
LOS ANGELESâ€"Kayden Kross is crouched on a stool, legs tightly crossed, leaning toward a pair of monitors reflecting the feeds from two cameras capturing a profusion of acts and parts, a simulacrum of sexual abandon. An industrial warehouse space in downtown Los Angeles has been transformed into a fictional sexual underground with spotlit drifts of ethereal smoke. On the screens: hands, breasts, butts, vaginas, penis, tongues collide in a blur of seemingly endless permutations and possibility. Meanwhile, Kross is the portrait of a laser-focused director, looking like she might try to crawl, Poltergeist-style, right into the monitors.

She’s attempting to hide from the sight of her romantic partner of seven years, Manuel Ferrara, who is the star of this five-person bacchanal. Although the couple has agreed to monogamy off-camera, and Kross is comfortable watching him perform, her presence during sex scenes makes him uncomfortable. When directing Ferrara, which she does regularly, Kross usually leaves the room once the hardcore sex starts. This time, though, she decides to stay in the room and hopes, that by ducking behind the monitors, Ferrara won’t notice.

Ferrara, a 22-year veteran of the adult industry, stands feet away from her in front of the cameras. He’s shirtless with black dress pants slung around his ankles. In front of him: a black leather platform that’s part bed, part kinky coffee table. Four womenâ€"Alina Lopez, Angela White, Autumn Falls, and Lena Paulâ€"writhe in pleasure on the table-bed as Ferrara moves along its edges. White, a popular, multi-award-winning performer, is playing the role of his wife, who according to the script, has just had an erotic awakening after a lifetime of sexual repression. Ferrara tells his make-believe wife, “Oh yeah, you like it nasty.”

Kross cuts through the moans and shouts from off-camera: “Someone go wide!” She’s telling the cameramen to make sure they are adequately capturing the reverse gang bang of Ferraraâ€"the love of her life.

This film, titled Drive, is the first feature for Deeper.com, a high-end, fetish-themed site that Kross launched earlier this year. Marketing materials have portrayed the site as “leading a sexual revolution that’s taking politically incorrect fantasies into the mainstream.” It is, perhaps, a bold proposition in the age of MeToo, which made high-profile headlines of real-life stories of abuse. Only four years ago, two years before the MeToo movement went mainstream, the adult industry began reckoning with its own abuse allegations. Since then, several men in the industry have been accused of boundary violations during shootsâ€"and, last year, Ferrara was one of them. This complicates what is otherwise a story of a couple’s collaborative rise within the porn industry, and the depiction of forbidden fantasies, with real-world concerns around consent.

Ferrara is considered an industry legendâ€"he’s won the Male Performer of the Year award a record six times and has been inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame, but it’s Kross’s star that this year has risen most dramatically. She started in the industry as a performer in 2006 with a coveted Vivid contract and has since made the transition into directing. In January, she won the AVN Award for Director of the Yearâ€"the adult industry equivalent of a Best Director Academy Awardâ€"and she’s only the second woman to do so in the show’s 25-year history. That same month, the well-heeled Vixen Media Group bought a majority stake in the award-winning TrenchcoatX, an indie porn site that Kross co-created. A few months later, she launched Deeper under Vixen’s umbrella of popular sites. Ferrara has become one of her most-booked male performers.

THIS COMPLICATES WHAT IS OTHERWISE A STORY OF A COUPLE’S COLLABORATIVE RISE WITHIN THE PORN INDUSTRY, AND THE DEPICTION OF FORBIDDEN FANTASIES, WITH REAL-WORLD CONCERNS AROUND CONSENT
The two have proven formidable on their own, but increasingly so in collaboration. Kross and Ferraraâ€"who have a child together and live next-door to Ferrara’s ex-wife, with whom he has three childrenâ€"have been called porn’s “golden couple.” They even have a Fleshlight “Couple Goals” package, which includes a dildo molded off of Ferrara’s penis and a flashlight-like tube featuring silicone labia modeled after Kross. Now, though, they frequently come as a different kind of package deal: director and performer. Kross directs Ferrara in the scenarios that she dreams up for Deeper, which have recently included a husband pressuring his wife into a threesome with an escort and a woman coercing her sister’s husband into sex.

These are delicate fantasies to navigate alongside industry abuse allegations, which have included Ferrara. Last year, the New York Post reported that performer Jenny Blighe alleged that Ferrara had choked her excessively and left bite marks on her body during a shoot for a scene the director had told her would be “pretty vanilla.” At the time, Blighe noted on Twitter that she wasn’t “sure who is to blame for the things that occurred because I don’t know what Manuel was told prior to shooting,” but has since referred to the experience as abuse. “I was very surprised,” said Kross, noting that she felt unclear on the exact nature of the allegations. “If something happened, it was not intentional.” Ferrara, via Kross, declined Jezebel’s request for comment on this matter.

Kross also frequently directs Markus Dupree, who has been accused by multiple performers of boundary violations and excessive roughness during porn shoots. Most visibly, the podcast Last Days of August, an investigation into performer August Ames’s death by suicide, unearthed text messages in which she reportedly made allegations against Dupree to a friend. (Dupree did not respond to Jezebel’s request for comment.) Kross says that she continues to work with Dupree because she personally trusts his ability to safely perform rough scenes, and because, in the case of Ames, she never went public with the allegations. “I don’t think you can throw a whole person away based on an accusation that’s removed like that,” she said. “It starts becoming reckless.”

Not unlike in the mainstream, the prevailing reality of MeToo within the adult industryâ€"despite the requisite cries about overreach and the abandonment of due processâ€"is not one of the accused men being driven out of the industry, losing their livelihoods. Like Ferrara, many are still working, and some quite successfully. There is no real sense of resolution or conclusion: Performers and directors are left with their own opinions about the legitimacy of individual claims, the degree of culpability, and the grounds for forgiveness. These perspectives don’t always fall tidily along expected political lines: Recently, Barcelona-based porn director Erika Lust, whose work is marketed as feminist and ethical, published a blog post denying a performer’s claims of on-set sexual assault.

Similarly, Kross questions the allegations against Ferrara and Dupree, but has also been vocal about the issue of consent on set. “I’m getting better and better at finding all the little places where there could be violations and controlling for that,” she said, explaining that she’ll often interrupt scenes, even at the slightest sign of unease, to ensure that a performer is comfortable.

Years ago, following those early industry abuse allegations, I visited one of her sets to report on the complexities of ensuring consent during a shoot that she felt required extra care. Interestingly, it was a scene featuring a woman performer having sex with two men in front of her real-life husband, roughly a gendered inverse of the scenario under which Kross and Ferrara routinely work. Kross explained that such a setup could “reverberate” through the performers’ off-camera lives, given the real feelings involved. But this potential liability was also crucial to the heat of the film, which went on to win three AVN awards. As she told me at the time, “In my mind, to get something really good you’re going to get something that hits the emotional aspect of an interaction, otherwise it’s just mechanical.”

To hear Kross and Ferrara tell it, at least on the surface, there isn’t much of an emotional aspect for them when they work together. “It’s all for the scene,” said Ferrara during a filming break. “Once the scene is done, ‘Thank you for the scene, it was great, now I’m back to normal and being Kayden’s husband,” he says while sitting on a fraying antique prop couch placed next to a plywood false building front. Similarly, Kross tells me of Ferrara’s work, “It’s very easy to show up, shake someone’s hand, have the common goal of making really great content, and go home and wash yourself of it.”

It wasn’t easy, though, back when Kross was performing with other men. Kross describes her decision to stop performing in 2013 as a response to both Ferrara’s jealousy, as well as her own waning interest in performing. In 2014 she wrote a Modern Love column about their relationship in which she said, “Navigating love when both of our jobs involve having sex with other people can be stressful, and this especially began to bother Manuel; he would get jealous and moody in the days before my shoots.” She continued, “He knew it wasn’t fair to ask me to stop, but he couldn’t hide the way he felt.”

As Ferrara puts it now, “I was happy she decided to stop,” although he acknowledges that some might see this arrangement as “hypocritical.” Kross, however, sees it as a quirk of their personalities. “He’s an extremely possessive person,” she says. Meanwhile, Kross jokes that she could be happily “sitting on the bed with a monitor” during one of his scenes. “It would be a little more difficult for me,” Ferrara says with a slight smile. “I wouldn’t be able to handle it the way she handles it.”

Married couples and longterm committed partners working together, or parallel to each other, within the mainstream adult industry are not at all unusual. Neither is off-camera monogamy. Kross says it is “super common,” even a “norm,” within the industry. What makes Kross and Ferrara unique is a combination of the frequency of their work together, their roles on either side of the camera, and the power dynamics in those positions, as well as the degree of their professional success. In many ways, their arrangement reflects the labor of sex work: In the context of porn, Kross doesn’t perceive Ferrara having sex with other women as a threat, because it is contained within a professionally negotiated scene.

Maitland Ward, a performer featured in the film Kross was shooting, is married and often has her husband shoot independent adult content that she stars in with other menâ€"and this works for them, although they are monogamous outside of work. “You have this passion in this moment and you’re creating this thing together in that moment,” she says. “It doesn’t have to spill outward.” She compares it to dance partners, ice skating pairs, and mainstream actors. Ward has experience with the latter, having performed in the daytime soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, the sitcom Boy Meets World, and comedies like White Chicks before getting into porn. “You watch [mainstream] movies and you think, ‘Oh my god, they’re so connected, the chemistry is amazing,’” she says. “And it is in that setting, but it doesn’t mean they’re going to be hooking up after work.”

Then again, Kross and Ferrara met on a porn set; it was her first time performing on-camera. That first shoot didn’t go wellâ€"the chemistry was so lacking that it had to be renamed from the intended Kayden Loves Manuel to Kayden’s First Timeâ€"but years later they performed together again and, as she puts it, “sparks flew.”

As Angela White, one of the industry’s top women performers, points out, some of the strongest adult films tap into real feelings, passion, and connection. “The best porn is when it’s most likely to feel threatening because there are emotions and feelings and there’s passion and real chemistry,” she said during a filming break. “It doesn’t mean that it goes beyond those walls. But the best porn as a performer to experience is the porn that doesn’t feel like porn.”

A few years ago, White performed with Ferrara in the award-winning Angela: Volume 3 which captured sex between the two in a cinéma vérité style and, toward the end of the scene, she melted into tears from the intensity; meanwhile, he held her at length and told her, “You are so fucking special.” (A clip of the film now lives on Pornhub with the title, “ANGELA WHITE GETS EMOTIONAL AND CRIES AFTER CREAMPIE.”) “It was incredible,” she tells me during a break from filming.

Of course, passion, intensity, and emotion can go in other directions. When Last Days of August producer Lina Misitzis reviewed footage of the shoot in which Ames alleged excessive roughness, she observed Dupree pushing Ames onto a table and pulling her hair. “I’ve seen dozens of other male performers pull similar moves,” she said, “but they all seem to have a sense of affection and intuition that Markus lacked that day.” Misitzis went on to watch footage of Ames’s exit interview, a common industry practice in which a performer attests that a shoot was consensual. “She’s staring straight into the camera, holding up her check for the day’s work,” narrated Misitzis. “She looks resigned and emotional and hollow, all at once.” She added that Ames “seems like she’s verging on tears.”

In part, it’s the potential for authentic feelingsâ€"the intersection of work and intimacyâ€"that drives Ferrara to ask Kross to leave once the sex starts. He prefers her in another room, even if rationally he knows that she will not only bring her monitors with her, but also later edit the scene. “He doesn’t want to do something that he’s doing to make the performance look better and then have me interpret it as this spontaneous reaction to the person, but obviously I know that,” she says. As Ferrara tells it, his discomfort is a result of concern for how she will react. “I never want to think, ‘If I do this, is she going to get upset? If I say that, is she going to get upset?’”

There is also the issue of co-stars, who can be intimidated by Kross’s presence. “I’ve had performers who don’t know how to handle the fact that we’re in a relationship and they’re having sex with him,” she says, explaining that it can result in a lackluster scene with a co-star performing disinterest for Kross’s benefit. “I don’t blame them, but it definitely hurts my product.”

Ferrara says part of his request for satellite directing is to avoid this kind of interference. “We’ve seen girls that are great performers and then because Kayden was here they kind of ... ,” he trails off as he tightens his shoulders and freezes up his body. “They don’t want to offend her. They don’t understand that she’s down with it, she’s cool with it, she wants the best scene, no matter what it takes.” As Kross puts it, “It works with the performers that are most clear about the fact that it’s a job.”

That’s the case with White: “The way I feel is if Kayden has booked me for a scene and she’s paying my rate, then I better give her the best scene that I possibly can,” she says. “If that means getting really intensely intimate with her husbandâ€"I know that the whole reason that she’s booking me is to make sure there’s incredible passionate chemistry. She’s going to be disappointed if I give her anything less.”

None of this is to suggest that Kross and Ferrara’s arrangement is simple or one-dimensional. “There is definitely a mess of complexity surrounding a relationship like this and while I’d argue it’s working, I would never argue it’s been easy,” Kross says. “I don’t think relationships are easy once you get past the infatuation phase. There have been jealousies, pettinesses, betrayals, fights, distrustâ€"all of it.” Sex on a porn set is work, it’s more often than not a fully contained, six-sided box of passion, and yet she says “there are more reasons to transgress and more opportunities to do so” in their line of work. These transgressions, though, don’t necessarily spell disaster in the same way they might for “that more normal monogamous relationship we’re comparing against,” she adds.

“THERE IS DEFINITELY A MESS OF COMPLEXITY SURROUNDING A RELATIONSHIP LIKE THIS AND WHILE I’D ARGUE IT’S WORKING I WOULD NEVER ARGUE IT’S BEEN EASY”
Even short of the potential for transgression, there is the reality of seeing once-private gestures of connection portrayed with someone else. “I’ve had to learn that the small intimacies and affections that he displays for me will be repackaged and repurposed as performance material and even if they began for me or were inspired by me they will stop being mine,” Kross says. As she tells it, negotiated non-monogamy has forced them to develop intimacy, and a sense of emotional exclusivity, in other areas of the relationship. “This not only allows us to relax enough to allow for the sort of relationship we have, but has saved us when the pitfalls of the relationship have done their worstâ€"and they’ve been bad, but they have yet to deliver that death blow,” she explains. “If anything they’ve lost their strength against us over time.”

Monogamy, and marriage itself, is often deployed as protection against fears of losing a partner, but as such both institutions are obviously fallible, which is something Kross addressed directly in that years-ago Modern Love piece: “If we lose our lover’s attention to someone else, it doesn’t matter if that erosion happens on a porn shoot, with a secretary at the office or between two academics attending a conference,” she wrote. “The only safeguard, for any of us, is how we maintain our love along the way and the care we take in choosing a partner in the first place.” And, maybe, in negotiating the terms of the relationship.

As part of their agreement, Kross can veto his working with any performer who makes her uncomfortable or feels like a threat, even if that means giving up lucrative projects. As she puts it, “I’ll just say, ‘You’re not working with this person anymore,’ and he says, ‘Okay.’” Similarly, she’s asked him to restrict sex to when the camera is rolling. “I don’t want to hear that you’re fucking the person in the makeup chair, that kind of stuff,” she explains. Kross provides the additional example of him having sex for photo stills but “holding” (i.e. stopping) when the cameraperson isn’t actively shooting. It seems a fine line to walk in practice: On Kross’s set, Ferrara continued having sex with his co-stars when the photographer stopped shooting to review the images.

Their current power dynamic has “shifted drastically” from the beginning of the relationship, as Kross puts it. “When we came together, he had a stronger edge,” she says, noting how “googley-eyed” she was over him. There were, perhaps, hints of this in her Modern Love column: Kross wrote that when Ferrara asked her, at the age of 27, to quit her Vivid contract and move in with him, “with the logical next steps being marriage and children,” she experienced a panic attack that landed her in the hospital, in part because she worried about “becoming a single mother, financially insolvent... and left to raise my future children alone,” just like her own mom had been. When the couple did have a baby, Kross cut back on paid work to provide childcare, while Ferrara worked full-time.

The Modern Love column caught the attention of 20/20, which shortly after profiled the couple, probing the personal politics of their sexual arrangement by depicting Kross firmly within the wife-standing-by-her-man trope. Anchor Elizabeth Vargas narrated in absurd, reductive caricature, playing heavily on the wife/whore dichotomy: “Today, Kayden’s taken on a new role: more domestic goddess than sex goddess,” she said. “These days, the woman who starred in more than 70 adult films is more likely to be found at the park than on a porn set.” Cue: footage of Kross with her baby at the playground.

Since then, Kross has complicated the narrative of sexual inequity, launching two porn sites and becoming the adult industry’s “it” director. But there remains an essential incongruity, and as a couple, Kross and Ferrara seem in a constant flux of balancing power, especially at work. As she put it in her Modern Love piece, “Manuel gets to perform with other women while I don’t with other men.” And yet Ferrara says, “If she would tell me, ‘Listen, I don’t like you performing anymore,’ I would stop in a heartbeat. I’ve told her so many times. She knows.” Kross describes their power dynamic like so: “We go head to head, it’s intense,” she says with a laugh. “We’ve got hooks in each other, we never flatline, we never find the status quo.”

“SHE PORTRAYS NOT JUST THE FACT OF SEXUAL POWER DYNAMICS, BUT THE SHIFTING STRUGGLES WITHIN THEM.”
It’s tempting to draw connections to a recurrent theme throughout Kross’s work. In recent Deeper films, a woman aggressively pursues her boss, despite his repeated denials, until he relents. A detective uses sex to get information out of a suspect. A jealous guy seeks revenge by guiding his blindfolded girlfriend into an orgy. Many scenarios deploy kinky symbols of dominance and submission: riding crops, chains, and rope. But Kross’s focus is equally aesthetic as it is psychological: She portrays not just the fact of sexual power dynamics, but the shifting struggles within them. It’s a realm in which confrontation, trespass, manipulation, retribution, and blackmail lead to ecstasy. “It’s about power. It’s always about power,” she says of the undercurrent of her films.

A similar thing could be said of the MeToo movement: It’s about power and its abuses. Within the adult industry, specifically, the movement has focused on alleged failures to successfully navigate power during sex, and within the context of work. In some cases, it’s alleged that the portrayal of a fantasy of a power differential became on-set reality. In the wake of the spate of abuse allegations, there has been the introduction of optional consent checklists, the sharing of best shooting practice guidelines, and the greater visibility of conversations about consent. Which is to say: The industry itself is in the midst of trying to navigate power.

Back in the industrial Los Angeles warehouse space, amid a well-lit, fog-machine haze, Ferrara and Paul start having sex as their co-stars rearrange themselves gymnastically. Kross once again breaks her cover from behind the monitors and yells to Ferrara: “Give me the insert again.” Without moving his eyes from Paul, Ferrara mutters, “Okay,” and pulls back to reenact the moment of his penis entering his co-star’s vagina. This time, a camera captures the penetration in close-up.

The scene progresses with Kross peppering in directives to the performers and cameramen: “Find Lena’s boobs shaking. It’s really pretty.” “Autumn’s boobs, lemme see them bounce.” “Ladies, scoot down.” “Go crazy, I want to feel like he’s getting smothered by boobs.” And then finally: “Go to the jerk-off shot.”

After the “jerk-off shot,” the four women performers head to the shower, with Paul giving a tongue-in-cheek shout of “good game, guys,” as though they had just finished a sweaty pickup game of basketball. Kross walks up to Ferrara to check-in and he immediately holds up a middle finger right between their faces. It’s the kind of move you might expect between warring siblings, except that he’s slightly smirking and Kross laughs it off while gently grabbing at his waist.

Later, Kross will tell me, “Did you see him give me the middle finger? He was mad at me for staying.”

Tracy Clark-Flory
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Senior Staff Writer, Jezebel

[Dr. MD MD]

Matt Drudge Logs Off
The Drudge Report has become a conformist shadow of its formerly bratty, oppositional self. Why?
BY
ARMIN ROSEN
NOVEMBER 24, 2020
Stephen Jaffe/AFP via Getty Images
Matt Drudge, right, on Capitol Hill, October 1998, after the House of Representatives voted to proceed with the impeachment of President Bill ClintonSTEPHEN JAFFE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
It was the kind of story that would once have had Matt Drudge deploying font sizes that newspapers used to reserve for declarations of war. On Oct. 14, Twitter and Facebook blocked users from spreading a New York Post article alleging that Hunter Biden had brokered meetings between his father, then the vice president of the United States, and executives at a Ukrainian energy firm where the younger Biden held an $80,000-a-month sinecure. The Post’s article included photos of what appeared to be an exhausted and intoxicated-looking Biden in various states of undress.

Yet the controversy over tech companies restricting the spread of a story unflattering to the Democratic presidential contender was nowhere to be seen in the upper half of The Drudge Reportâ€"once the most coveted and agenda-setting real estate in right-of-center media. “RECORD TURNOUT ALARMS REPUBLICANS... BIDEN +7 GA,” screamed the top headlines on Oct. 15.

“People have noticed that Drudge has basically become a liberal site over the past two years,” a senior figure in conservative media told me that week.

“Liberal” might be a stretch, but it’s hard to argue with the claim that The Drudge Report has changed over the past few years. At the very least, it became an anti-Trump site. “YOU’RE FIRED!,” the top story on Drudge read on Nov. 7 when Joe Biden’s Electoral College win was first projected, appearing above a full page of links celebrating the former vice president’s victoryâ€"Drudge screenshotted the headline in a rare tweet that same day. During the campaign, the site had touted any and all bad news for Drudge’s once-preferred candidate and sometimes-host at the White Houseâ€"a fact that didn’t go unnoticed by the Media Critic-in-Chief.

“Our people have all left Drudge,” the president tweeted on Sept. 14. “He is a confused mess.”

Drudge has always been an enigma, but aspects of Trump’s critique appear to be accurate. The Drudge Report once cycled through 40-50 links in a single five-hour period. The page is now updated only once or twice a day and almost never reacts to breaking news, as if it’s being run by someone who simply doesn’t care anymore. Traffic has reportedly lagged, with Comscore data suggesting a 45% plunge in the year before this past September. In the glory days even a midpage Drudge link could pull a million views; the number is now down to the high tens of thousands. Drudge pulled the report’s app from Apple’s and Google’s app stores, only to later link to it in the Drudge sidebar after switching ad brokers without explanation in mid-2019. And unlike in past years, when the page had multiple staffers working morning and afternoon shifts, Drudge watchers have no idea who, if anyone else, works for the site. The last reported employee was Daniel Halper, a former Weekly Standard editor hired on in 2017, though it is unclear whether he still works there. When reached by Tablet, Halper would not comment on any past or current involvement with The Drudge Report.

In interviews with over a half-dozen various former Drudge associates, about half suggested that the site may no longer be under his control. For these people, politics alone couldn’t explain all the changes at the site. The humor, the oddball stories about sex robots and exorcisms, and the obsession with weather events are all almost entirely gone, along with any pretense to original reporting.

One former confidante cited a story in apparently wide circulation among the small number of people who know or knew Drudge: In the early 2010s, this person said, Drudge fantasized that he would keep the DrudgeReport.com domain forever, and that the site would simply go black one day without explanation. Others asserted that Drudge, reportedly a globetrotting lover of expensive cars, hotels, and real estate, actually would sell for the right amount. Two floated the theory to Tablet that the site had been bought by a liberal billionaire.

One of the few ex-Drudge associates who would discuss him on-record in any depth is the New York literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, a figure of some notoriety for her role in revealing then-president Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Goldberg is a former close confidante who said she had not spoken with Drudge in over five years. She believes he no longer runs the site. “It’s a totally different publication,” she told me. What was the biggest sign? I asked. “Oh, every line of the page,” she replied. “It’s just so obvious that he’s not interested, that somebody else is doing it.” This was just one of several theories volunteered by people who had been close to Drudge, though none was forthcoming with proof. Drudge himself did not respond to multiple requests for comment through both the email address listed on The Drudge Report and an intermediary.

“We don’t think Matt is there anymore,” tweeted the polling company Rasmussen last December. “Word is he sold, just waiting for confirmation. Now that will be a story.” (When reached for comment, Scott Rasmussen said he left the company in 2013 and was not aware of the tweet. Email requests for comment from Rasmussen the company went unreturned.) In mid-October the New York Post reported on “rumors that Drudge is looking for an investor” that were then “sweeping the publishing and financial world,” though without offering any further detail.

Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic Party strategist and the point of contact between Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and Drudge, also doubts he’s still in charge. “The writing’s on the wall that it’s not quote ‘him,’” she said. In December of 2017, a nine-song public Apple Music playlist attributed to a Matt Drudge was uploaded and linked to on the semi-official Drudge Report Archives websiteâ€"with songs including “Let Go” by Connie Constance, “Life Goes On” by E^ST, “Say Goodbye” by Tom Chaplin, and “Easy Way Out” by Other Lives. It concludes with Seal’s “Still Love Remains.”

No one who spoke with Tablet really knows why the once-mighty Drudge Report has changed so much. The truth behind the site that adapted the fast pace and ethical flexibility of tabloid news to the web may be too tangled for a catchy 30-point font headline to capture, as it lies beneath a tangle of obscure family connections, complicated business arrangements, and the personal saga of a shadowy man who made himself an enigma at the height of his fame. But while there is no smoking gun or definitive final answer, there are still scattered clues as to what could be going on behind The Drudge Report’s curtain.

For instance, a 2007 New York magazine article probed the tortured relationship between Matt and his father, Bob Drudge, a Maryland social worker who started an AOL-era website called Refdesk. Robert had sometimes seemed to resent his depressive and occasionally delinquent son, whose life he turned around by buying him a Packard Bell computer in 1994. Refdesk is now owned by a California-based woman named Margaret Otto, who also owns the obscure web marketing company that became The Drudge Report’s sole ad broker in mid-2019â€"the contact number in the Refdesk “contact” page now redirects to her cellphone.

Perhaps in founding and then selling Refdesk, Bob Drudge created a means by which his son could finally leave behind the online economy of rumor and sensationalism that the younger Drudge had helped bring to life. Maybe Matt Drudge achieved something that’s proven all but impossible for polarizing media and political figures in the internet era: an exit that manages to be mysterious, lucrative, and, by his standards, strangely dignified.

The Drudge Report is one of the most influential websites in history. In 1998, Drudge, who ran a popular newsletter buoyed in part by information he’d dig out of trash cans near his job at the gift shop at CBS studios in Los Angeles, reported that Newsweek had spiked an article about an extramarital affair between Bill Clinton and a White House intern. Being first to a story that resulted in the impeachment of a president was a mere entree: In the 2000s, The Drudge Report became the only news aggregator that absolutely everyone read. A Drudge link had the power to kick off entire news cycles. Editors and reporters across the media often assigned stories and composed headlines as if they were writing for an audience of one.

Drudge’s political beliefs have always been a subject of speculation. But editors often had an idea of the types of stories that would catch Drudge’s attention. Freak weather events, signs of war between the United States and either China or North Korea, and the alleged invasion of undocumented immigrants were Drudge mainstays. Few would dispute the gossip-mongering media curator’s fascination with the salacious side of American politicsâ€"images of the future first son smoking a crack pipe in bed are newsworthy in part because of Drudge. Insomuch as Drudge has any clear convictions, they involve an intense suspicion of concentrated power and the glorification of his own free will. “You’re playing in Google’s hell pit,” Drudgeâ€"or at least a shadowy outline of Drudgeâ€"fumed to Alex Jones, America’s leading conspiracy-theory-based entertainer, during an October 2015 appearance on Infowars, Drudge’s last extended interview. “Make your own place. The internet allows you to make your own dynamic, your own universe. Why are you gravitating towards somebody else’s universe?” In the closest Drudge has come to a mission statement since the early 2000s, he described his website as “a correction to this groupthink.”

Drudge remained an opaque figure since ending his weekly radio show in the late 2000s, giving almost no interviews and making no public appearances. Early in the Trump presidency, he popped up for a 12-minute segment on the heterodox far-right-winger Michael Savage’s radio show to warn that Trump’s passivity in the face of both the Democratic and Republican parties’ various alleged conspiracies against him was endangering his young presidency. Drudge had been an early backer of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and had reportedly been shepherded through the White House by Jared Kushner. Drudge, like Trump, embodied the increasingly blurry barrier between serious politics and playacting, with the public square offering a venue for a lucrative brand of cynical yet spellbinding performance art. But the differences soon outweighed the similarities: As one Drudge confidante noted, the tone on The Drudge Report was hardly funereal when the Republicans were wiped out in the 2018 midterms. The pivot away from Trump began not long after that.

In early 2017, when Drudge and Trump were still on good terms, the news maven’s father, Bob Drudge, sold his website, Refdesk.com, to a California couple. A dry-as-dust compendium of web-based research tools, Refdesk had its moment of fame during the early Bush years when The New York Times reported that it was then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s favorite website. According to filings on the Maryland secretary of state’s website, Refdesk was transferred to Margaret and Adrian Otto, both identified as “director and manager of Refdesk Holdings, LLC,” that January. The California corporation that would assume ownership, the aforementioned Refdesk Holdings, Inc., had been registered in California in December of 2016.

According to her LinkedIn page, Margaret Otto resides in Mountain View, California, the Silicon Valley gold coast town that is home to Google, LinkedIn, and other tech giants. Mountain View is hardly a right-wing bastionâ€"Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, is a Democratic Party megadonor. It turns out that Drudge’s connections to the big tech “hell pit” are personal. Margaret’s husband, Adrian Otto, is currently the technical director of the office of the chief technical officer at Google, where he helps design and maintain the web giant’s cloud computing systems. Adrian’s Drudge association goes back to the very beginning, according to Margaret: “That was 25 years ago, probably,” she said when asked about her husband’s involvement with The Drudge Report.

As Buzzfeed reported last year, an archived version of the website for HA Hosting, a company Adrian Otto founded and that both Ottos managed, boasted in 2005 that it maintained the servers for the Drudge Report, helping the site to withstand a surge of 36 million unique visitors on election day in 2004. Otto was also responsible for hosting Andrew Breitbart’s website and was thanked in one of the late Drudge assistant’s books. According to a source with first-hand familiarity with The Drudge Report’s operations, Adrian Otto continued to serve as the site’s de facto webmaster as late as 2019, overseeing its connection to the internet, communicating with its Japan-based developer, and addressing various back-end issues. A reference to an “Adrian” still shows up in the Drudge Report’s source code, at the very bottom of the page: “<!-- END -- DO NOT REMOVE THIS LINE --Adrian --!>” (based on a search of the Wayback Machine, this line first appeared in 2009).

In the summer of 2019, Drudge abruptly ended his relationship with Intermarkets, a Virginia-based web marketing firm and the only ad broker his site had ever used. He replaced it with a company called Granite Cubed whose California corporate filings listed Margaret Otto, the owner of Refdesk, as the entity’s CEO, secretary, chief financial officer, and director. Drudge provided his former ad broker with no explanation for the move and was similarly tight-lipped with Otto. “I have no idea, actually,” she said when asked why Drudge hired her company. “It was very sudden and yeah, I was never informed as to any details.”

I had reached Otto by accident, fairly early in the reporting process. The Refdesk contact page lists a Maryland telephone number, to be used for “reporting emergencies.” Instead of reaching Bob Drudge, whom directory listings place in or near Ocean City, Maryland, the number redirected to the cellphone of Otto, some 3,000 miles to the west. Otto was tight-lipped over the course of our unexpected 20-minute conversationâ€"she was vague in addressing the question of whether it was at least notable that she’d ended up deeply enmeshed in both of the Drudges’ websites. Subsequent attempts to reach her again by phone and email were unsuccessful.

Advertising on one of the world’s most-trafficked news websites was suddenly the responsibility of a one-person shop run by a person who had no apparent experience in the complex world of online advertising but who served as the owner and operator of Bob Drudge’s website and whose husband had long-standing ties to The Drudge Report. Otto’s advertising company eventually changed its name to Voranda, and has only one other listed employee on LinkedIn, aside from Otto. That person worked in digital marketing at the conservative website World Net Daily for eight years, according to LinkedIn.

Otto claimed Voranda currently has six clients, including Refdesk and Drudge. She would not give an exact number of employees at Voranda, saying only that it had “a few.” She did not know who, if anyone, still works at The Drudge Report. “He’s doing a great job, however he manages it,” she said of Matt Drudge. Otto is one person close to Drudgeâ€"and the only person I spoke to with a current known business relationship with Drudgeâ€"who vouches on-record for Drudge still having an active role in the site.

Otto says that Refdesk Holdings, Inc. owns only its namesake website. Still, Refdesk Holdings, LLC and Refdesk.com, Inc. are two different entities in California. In November of 2019, Refdesk Holdings changed its description in required California state corporate filings from an “online reference site” to a “holding company.” Voranda and Refdesk.com, Inc. also share the same corporate address, a street and suite number that correspond to the location of a UPS store in Mountain View.

There is notable overlap between Refdesk and Drudge that goes beyond the connection to the Otto family. The sites’ ads.txt pages, which list information identifying the online sales channels through which ads are served on a given website, list over 20 direct ad IDs that appear on no other websites. “DIRECT only account IDs shared across on Refdesk/Drudge proves it’s a tight network, with the two orgs pooling data and money within these accounts,” explained Zach Edwards, a California-based data expert, founder of the boutique analytics firm Victory Medium, and longtime Drudge Report watcher. Edwards also observed similarities in the two sites’ application programming interface (API), the software by which the sites interact with other users and pagesâ€"they run a similar script to check if visitors are from California, which has more stringent privacy standards than the other 49 states. As Edwards puts it, the sites “have an overlapping data layer, generated from ads.txt, javascript, and the requests that are sent out to third-party companies and the responses those companies send back.”

This is to be expected: Both Drudge and Refdesk share an exclusive ad broker, Voranda. A mid-October search of scores of direct ad ID numbers in the Drudge and Voranda ads.txt page turned up no sites other than The Drudge Report and Refdesk that identified themselves as Voranda clients. Otto claimed that the marketer worked with a handful of other websites, although it is unclear who the company’s other clients might be.

Reclusion gives Drudge something his firebrand media peers never had: an escape hatch.


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The Ottos’ Drudge connection is both personal and mysterious: Margaret Otto was active in the Junior League of Los Angeles, and was on the board of the FBI Los Angeles Citizens Academy Alumni Association. In addition to being one of the most prominent tech-side employees at Google, Adrian Otto is a founder of Open Stack, a freely available cloud computing program. There is no hint of a political agenda or of any malfeasance or graft in either person’s backgroundâ€"although there isn’t much of a hint of an interest in web advertising, either.

The online advertising business is both highly technical and nearly unregulated. A broker like Voranda is selling real estate on a given site through a constellation of online middlemen who buy space on behalf of their clientsâ€"the companies that actually serve web ads often operate under multiple names and have only a vague existence in the physical world. Sales shops like Voranda are selling more than just real estate, though. Advertisers sometimes also buy the privilege to cookie a site’s visitors and can gain a fairly granular understanding of who its users are.

Above all, online ad brokers are faced with the still-unsolved riddle of how to monetize people’s attention on the internet. If you’re The New York Times, your answer to the defining problem of 21st-century media is to produce quality content and hope that deep-pocketed brands will want to hand over money to access your discerning upper-middle-class customer base. If you’re servicing ads on the trashier end of the web spectrumâ€"on say, an illegal streaming siteâ€"the answer is to pack in as many ads as possible, no matter how annoying they are and no matter what they’re for. If you’re selling ads for a site where the audience is reportedly falling and the former readership is puzzled or even openly hostile, one possible answer to your monetization problem is to skirt the boundaries of the existing industry standardsâ€"knowing, perhaps, that these standards are extremely vague and can be manipulated without taking on any legal risk, and also that the site’s namesake is too checked out to really care and had loose standards to begin with.

On Oct. 19 of this year, the top line of Drudge included a link to a plagiarized New York Times story hosted on an obscure website called Dnyuz.com. A Dnyuz link led the entire site on Oct. 21. There were multiple Dnyuz stories somewhere on the page for much of October, which is the kind of prime election-season Drudge placement editors might once have traded their expense accounts forâ€"at least back in the days when editors had expense accounts and Drudge was seen as the kingmaker behind the entire American political information ecosystem.

According to a May article in Buzzfeed, Dnyuz is an Armenia-based website that rips off articles from American news outlets without permission. Buzzfeed reported that Google kicked Dnyuz off of its advertising network but did not suspect any business relationship between Drudge and Dnyuz.

Still, websites can profit off of one another without any kind of formal business ties. Some 89% of Dnyuz’s 2 million monthly total visits are from referrals, over 96% of which come from Drudge, according to the analytics website SimilarWeb. In other words, without Drudge, Dnyuz would barely have an audience to sell ads against.

The websites’ businesses turn out to be oddly similar, too. Advertising on the internet works through third-party networks communicating with websites where they serve ads, often through rapid-fire auctions. Each individual ad has its own bidding identification number, which is publicly viewable for any website by opening its domain followed by /ads.txt. These distributions, the vast majority of which are automated, happen through so-called direct ads, which advertisers prefer because they can know with certainty exactly where and when their ads will appear. Less desirable are reseller IDs, which might wind up just about anywhere. Direct ads are meant to be unique to a single corporate owner; reseller IDs can show up on tens of thousands of domains, and are more common on sites that lack the capacity, or the credibility, to fill out their page with direct ads. Thus there is a built-in incentive to disguise reseller ads as direct ads, slapping an expensive label on what is inevitably a much cheaper product. Per an analysis by Rocky Moss, a co-founder and CEO of DeepSee, a company whose programs help web advertisers detect and avoid fraudulent practices among online publishers, Drudge IDs show up across 40,000 different sites, while Dnyuz IDs appear on some 13,000. This is a sign that both organizations at least tolerate and perhaps even profit from this kind of rampant ad mislabeling, according to Moss.

The sites also seem to belong to the same corner of the same ecosystem. While Drudge and Dnyuz don’t share any direct IDs, they do share 13 reseller IDs. Moss found that these IDs are collectively shared by another 15,000 sites. But only 185 of these sites, some 1.2% of them, also share all 13 of the IDs common to Dnyuz and Drudge. Among them are several dozen U.S.-based local news websites, like FremontTribune.com and BillingsGazette.com, along with a smattering of red-meat conservative infotainment-type pages, like CarlHigbie.com, DrewBerquist.com, StacyOnTheRight, and Lifezette.

Edwards noted that several of the ad servicing companies that show up in Dnyuz’s ads.txt also lack much in the way of a clear grounding in physical space, with their sites offering little in the way of contact informationâ€"Surgeprice.com “doesn’t even seem to exist.”

Meanwhile, Edwards and Moss found a number of oddities in The Drudge Report’s advertising practices. In mid-October, Moss discovered that The Drudge Report was running a script that would load advertisements that do not render on the site’s publicly visible page. The existence of the hidden ads was further concealed through “detection evasions”â€"Moss found that the ads disappeared when they were examined with standard web developer tools. Advertisers paid for ads that were supposed to be featured on the site but which remained hidden, with steps taken to conceal the very fact of their being hidden. The advertisers, who are almost always represented by computer programs that make lightning-fast automated bids on available web real estate, are paying to place ads that a user simply never sees. Moss explained the discovery in a YouTube video, which was made after Tablet brought various other irregularities to Moss’ attention:


Drudge seems to have had a habit of gaming the web advertising economy, as Buzzfeed reported last year, citing online advertising industry concerns over the site’s suspiciously fast auto-refresh rate. Online ads are often priced based on the number of users expected to see a given ad. According to a source with first-hand familiarity of The Drudge Report, in early 2018, Google determined that Drudge’s suspiciously fast auto-reload rate artificially inflated the impressions for ads that the web giant was serving to the site. Drudge has manually tinkered with the automatic page refresh rate over the years, according to Edwards, a longtime watcher of the site’s HTML. Frequent automatic reloads were ostensibly meant to make users aware of content updates on the page, but they had the effect of also refreshing the ads, thus driving up the number of eyeballs recorded as seeing those ads. Google declared that it would halve its advertising payout to Drudge, though it’s unclear how badly this cut into the site’s bottom line, or how angry Google was at a website that had generated significant revenue for them over the years. Industry experts estimated The Drudge Report’s revenue at somewhere between $9 million and $30 million over the previous year, Buzzfeed reported in August of 2019.

The Dnyuz links, mislabeled ad inventory, hidden ads, and recent history of inflating ad impression numbersâ€"even if not illegalâ€"point to a once highly influential news operation whose highest concern is now the extraction of monetary value from its audience. Still more proof of The Drudge Report’s mercenary outlook comes from a review of which websites share a Google ads publisher identification number with The Drudge Report. Google ads IDs and account numbers are typically linked to bank accounts through which websites are paid for advertising space. Buzzfeed identified the alleged owner of Dnyuz partly by looking at common ID numbers shared on Adsense, one of Google’s advertising platformsâ€"the numbers are sometimes shared by sites that have a direct business relationship.

Moss discovered that some 960 websites share one of three Google publisher ID numbers with The Drudge Report. These IDs are associated with three online marketing companies that sell reseller inventory on Drudge: Saamba, PixFuture Media, and Project Agora, Ltd. Drudge is in a continent-spanning, if totally automated, revenue-sharing relationship with these 960 pages, a number of which also share direct IDs with Drudge. Interestingly, scores of the sites that share direct IDs, which typically only recur among sites that have the same publisher, are English-language media outlets based in foreign countriesâ€"the Deccan Herald, the daily newspaper of Karnataka, a state in southwestern India, shares some 40 direct advertising ID numbers with Drudge, to take just one of numerous examples. It’s at least theoretically possible the two websites have a common owner. For Moss, it’s likelier that these direct labeled ad IDs are falsified reseller ads, and that the shared Adsense ID indicates that the Deccan Herald and Drudge are cashing in on the same opaque ad market. However this arrangement came to be, it provides yet another monetization shortcut for a site that still claims 20 million page views a day.

Some of The Drudge Report’s unusual activity appears to have begun within the past four monthsâ€"the hidden ads first showed up in early August. Moss noted “a significant change in the script profile” beginning around the same time late this summer, along with “a stark increase of the average number of ad frames loaded per-session” and an almost total reorganization of the site’s ad stack, which is the range of programs and companies serving ads to Drudge (see below). “The shared IDs have changed a ton over the past year,” Edwards also observed.


Drudge’s disenchantment with Trump predates these changes. Perhaps The Drudge Report’s new ad broker wanted to cash in on higher traffic during the stretch run of the presidential election. Orâ€"if there’s any truth to the rumorsâ€" maybe its new owners did.

Perhaps the unusual practices reflect decisions made by Drudge himself rather than any change in ownership. But Drudge would be under no obligation to disclose a new ownerâ€"a former confidante speculated that if The Drudge Report ever sold, the only two people who would know about it would be Drudge and his buyer. One possibility is that Drudge has remained the site’s owner on paper while the meaningful decisions are made elsewhereâ€"perhaps in Mountain View, where his ad broker and long-serving webmaster and the owner of his father’s website are located. The Ottos might not own both The Drudge Report and Refdesk, but they have a great deal of potential control over how both sites operate, along with valuable information about their audiences.

An exclusive web broker can act as a kind of gatekeeper for a website: Visitor data is part of the reason advertisers pay for space on other people’s pages in the first place. Drudge currently runs between 200 and 300 “cookies” through which advertisers can track users’ web activity; as Moss notes, the default version of the site at the time he examined it in mid-October, and then again in mid-November, was the “unsecured” page, leaving users unusually exposed to bad actors (unsecure pages are identifiable by the prefix “http” in their web address). In both cases the default soon changed back to the secure “https” version but for some span of time the election-season Drudge Report was a potential free-for-all for anyone looking to gather valuable and potentially identifying data on visitors to the site.

Even now, The Drudge Report is an information bonanza. Traffic may be down, but the site still claims tens of millions of daily visitors, on par with major news networks and newspapers. The question is: Whose bonanza is it?

I asked Lucianne Goldberg if Drudge’s old friends ever speculate about where he might be. “Gone,” she said. Not gone in the sense of dead, she quickly clarified. “Gone” in the sense of finished with his old life: “I think he was a little surprised he made it as far as he did, and that he was as quote ‘important’ to the general press scene as he was ... He had a cool operation. He didn't have to work very hard, went swimming once a day in the ocean, and he liked going to parties. And he liked his hat.”

Multiple former acquaintances of Drudge’s theorize that his disappointment with Trump is sincere, and similar to that of his friend Ann Coulter’s: Both turned on the president because of his unseriousness in pursuing their agenda, particularly the construction of a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Drudge is famous for discarding friends over forgotten or half-invented slights, according to both news accounts like the New York magazine profile and to several former acquaintances who still aren’t quite sure why the web publisher cut them out of his life. In the greatest possible demonstration of his jealously guarded independence, Drudge may have done the same thing to a president of the United States whose White House he could freely crash.

Maybe Drudge decided he was sick of it allâ€"and perhaps this was a wise move. Right-of-center media can be a bestiary of lightning rods and public villains. Former Breitbart chief Steve Bannon is under indictment on allegations of tax fraud; Tucker Carlson is subject to a nearly full-on advertiser boycott despite having the highest-rated show on cable. Twenty-five years into his career, Drudge, by having effectively disappeared, has become an object of fascination rather than scorn.

Reclusion gives Drudge something his firebrand media peers never had: an escape hatch. Tracy Sefl is one of the most unexpected of the former Drudge acquaintances, and thus someone with a unique vantage into his psychology. She is a professional Democrat who spent years working to advance the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton, perhaps the public figure that looms largest in Drudge’s tangled psyche. Sefl proved successful in placing stories during the 2008 campaign, during which Drudge emerged as somewhere between an affable adversary and an unlikely friend. “What I have to imagine is that there's no joy in it anymore for Matt,” she said. “And that may be what it comes down to. What fun is it anymore to follow all of this for someone who's been doing it as long as he has, someone who’s ridden the roller coasters that he helped build? What fun is it in 2020 to be mucking around in these news cycles?”

Sefl believed that Drudge was never all that political. He cared about “personalitiesâ€"personalities of the principals, the candidates, the elected officials, personalities in media. He was attuned to those. He had opinions about them. I imagine he still does.” He had few rooting interests outside of himself. “I’ve never believed that he has a side that is a partisan side. His side is capitalism.”

Lucianne Goldberg had a similar read. “I don’t think he had any politics at all,” she said.

Drudge grasped the potential of the internet before almost anyone else in publishing. “We are entering an era vibrating with the din of small voices,” a smirking Drudge told the National Press Club during an infamous 1998 appearance. “Any citizen can be a reporter.” Maybe Drudge is undertaking one of his boldest moves of all, one that will hopefully prove as pioneering as his belief in the flattening effects of web media: Whether through a payday, political apathy, or a newfound slackerdom, Drudge might have actually pulled off everyone’s dream: making bank and then logging off.

[Dr. MD MD]

The IRS Tried to Take on the Ultrawealthy. It Didn’t Go Well.
Ten years ago, the tax agency formed a special team to unravel the complex tax-lowering strategies of the nation’s wealthiest people. But with big money â€" and Congress â€" arrayed against the team, it never had a chance.

by Jesse Eisinger and Paul Kiel April 5, 2019, 5 a.m. EDT

SERIES: GUTTING THE IRS
Who Wins When a Crucial Agency Is Defunded

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom based in New York. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.

On June 30, 2016, an auto-parts magnate received the kind of news anyone would dread: The Internal Revenue Service had determined he had engaged in abusive tax maneuvers. He stood accused of masking about $5 billion in income. The IRS wanted over $1.2 billion in back taxes and penalties.

The magnate, Georg Schaeffler, was the billionaire scion of a family-owned German manufacturer and was quietly working as a corporate lawyer in Dallas. Schaeffler had extra reason to fear the IRS, it seemed. He wasn’t in the sights of just any division of the agency but the equivalent of its SEAL Team 6.

In 2009, the IRS had formed a crack team of specialists to unravel the tax dodges of the ultrawealthy. In an age of widening inequality, with a concentration of wealth not seen since the Gilded Age, the rich were evading taxes through ever more sophisticated maneuvers. The IRS commissioner aimed to stanch the country’s losses with what he proclaimed would be “a game-changing strategy.” In short order, Charles Rettig, then a high-powered tax lawyer and today President Donald Trump’s IRS commissioner, warned that the squad was conducting “the audits from hell.” If Trump were being audited, Rettig wrote during the presidential campaign, this is the elite team that would do it.


Georg Schaeffler faced a $1.2 billion tax bill after his company restructured a huge debt. (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
The wealth team embarked on a contentious audit of Schaeffler in 2012, eventually determining that he owed about $1.2 billion in unpaid taxes and penalties. But after seven years of grinding bureaucratic combat, the IRS abandoned its campaign. The agency informed Schaeffler’s lawyers it was willing to accept just tens of millions, according to a person familiar with the audit.

How did a case that consumed so many years of effort, with a team of its finest experts working on a signature mission, produce such a piddling result for the IRS? The Schaeffler case offers a rare window into just how challenging it is to take on the ultrawealthy. For starters, they can devote seemingly limitless resources to hiring the best legal and accounting talent. Such taxpayers tend not to steamroll tax laws; they employ complex, highly refined strategies that seek to stretch the tax code to their advantage. It can take years for IRS investigators just to understand a transaction and deem it to be a violation.

Once that happens, the IRS team has to contend with battalions of high-priced lawyers and accountants that often outnumber and outgun even the agency’s elite SWAT team. “We are nowhere near a circumstance where the IRS could launch the types of audits we need to tackle sophisticated taxpayers in a complicated world,” said Steven Rosenthal, who used to represent wealthy taxpayers and is now a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

Because the audits are private â€" IRS officials can go to prison if they divulge taxpayer information â€" details of the often epic paper battles between the rich and the tax collectors are sparse, with little in the public record. Attorneys are also loath to talk about their clients’ taxes, and most wealthy people strive to keep their financial affairs under wraps. Such disputes almost always settle out of court.

Have you been involved in a Global High Wealth audit?
If so, we’d like to hear about your experiences! Email jesse.eisinger@propublica.org or on Signal at 718-496-5233.
But ProPublica was able to reconstruct the key points in the Schaeffler case. The billionaire’s lawyers and accountants first crafted a transaction of unusual complexity, one so novel that they acknowledged, even as they planned it, that it was likely to be challenged by the IRS. Then Schaeffler deployed teams of professionals to battle the IRS on multiple fronts. They denied that he owed any money, arguing the agency fundamentally misunderstood the tax issues. Schaeffler’s representatives complained to top officials at the agency; they challenged document requests in court. At various times, IRS auditors felt Schaeffler’s side was purposely stalling. But in the end, Schaeffler’s team emerged almost completely victorious.

His experience was telling. The IRS’ new approach to taking on the superwealthy has been stymied. The wealthy’s lobbyists immediately pushed to defang the new team. And soon after the group was formed, Republicans in Congress began slashing the agency’s budget. As a result, the team didn’t receive the resources it was promised. Thousands of IRS employees left from every corner of the agency, especially ones with expertise in complex audits, the kinds of specialists the agency hoped would staff the new elite unit. The agency had planned to assign 242 examiners to the group by 2012, according to a report by the IRS’ inspector general. But by 2014, it had only 96 auditors. By last year, the number had fallen to 58.

The wealth squad never came close to having the impact its proponents envisaged. As Robert Gardner, a 39-year veteran of the IRS who often interacted with the team as a top official at the agency’s tax whistleblower office, put it, “From the minute it went live, it was dead on arrival.”

Most people picture IRS officials as all-knowing and fearsome. But when it comes to understanding how the superwealthy move their money around, IRS auditors historically have been more like high school physics teachers trying to operate the Large Hadron Collider.


Charles Rettig, commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, said if any group were auditing Donald Trump, it would be the Global High Wealth team. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images)
That began to change in the early 2000s, after Congress and the agency uncovered widespread use of abusive tax shelters by the rich. The discovery led to criminal charges, and settlements by major accounting firms. By the end of the decade, the IRS had determined that millions of Americans had secret bank accounts abroad. The agency managed to crack open Switzerland’s banking secrecy, and it recouped billions in lost tax revenue.

The IRS came to realize it was not properly auditing the ultrawealthy. Multimillionaires frequently don’t have easily visible income. They often have trusts, foundations, limited liability companies, complex partnerships and overseas operations, all woven together to lower their tax bills. When IRS auditors examined their finances, they typically looked narrowly. They might scrutinize just one return for one entity and examine, say, a year’s gifts or income.

Belatedly attempting to confront improper tax avoidance, the IRS formed what was officially called the Global High Wealth Industry Group in 2009. “The genesis was: If you think of an incredibly wealthy family, their web of entities somehow gives them a remarkably low effective tax rate,” said former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, who was one of those responsible for creating the wealth squad. “We hadn’t really been looking at it all together, and shame on us.”

The IRS located the group within the division that audits the biggest companies in recognition of the fact that the finances of the 1 percent resemble those of multinational corporations more than those of the average rich person.


Former IRS Commissioner Steven Miller tried to fix the agency’s approach to auditing the ultrawealthy. (Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)
The vision was clear, as Doug Shulman, a George W. Bush appointee who remained to helm the agency under the Obama administration, explained in a 2009 speech: “We want to better understand the entire economic picture of the enterprise controlled by the wealthy individual.”

It’s particularly important to audit the wealthy well, and not simply because that’s where the money is. That’s where the cheating is, too. Studies show that the wealthiest are more likely to avoid paying taxes. The top 0.5 percent in income account for fully a fifth of all the underreported income, according to a 2010 study by the IRS’ Andrew Johns and the University of Michigan’s Joel Slemrod. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than $50 billion each year in unpaid taxes.

The plans for the wealth squad seemed like a step forward. In a few years, the group would be staffed with several hundred auditors. A team of examiners would tackle each audit, not just one or two agents, as was more typical in the past. The new group would draw from the IRS’ best of the best.

That was crucial because IRS auditors have a long-standing reputation, at least among the practitioners who represent deep-pocketed taxpayers, as hapless and overmatched. The agents can fritter away years, tax lawyers say, auditing transactions they don’t grasp. “In private practice, we played whack-a-mole,” said Rosenthal, of the Tax Policy Center. “The IRS felt a transaction was suspect but couldn’t figure out why, so it would raise an issue and we’d whack it and they would raise another and we’d whack it. The IRS was ill-equipped.”

The Global High Wealth Group was supposed to change that. Indeed, with all the fanfare at the outset, tax practitioners began to worry on behalf of their clientele. “The impression was it was all going to be specialists in fields, highly trained. The IRS would assemble teams with the exact right expertise to target these issues,” Chicago-based tax attorney Jenny Johnson said.

The new group’s first moves spurred resistance. The team sent wide-ranging requests for information seeking details about their targets’ entire empires. Taxpayers with more than $10 million in income or assets received a dozen pages of initial requests, with the promise of many more to follow. The agency sought years of details on every entity it could tie to the subject of the audits.

In past audits, that initial overture had been limited to one or two pages, with narrowly tailored requests. Here, a typical request sought information on a vast array of issues. One example: a list of any U.S. or foreign entity in which the taxpayer held an “at least a 20 percent” interest, including any “hybrid instruments” that could be turned into a 20 percent or more ownership share. The taxpayer would then have to identify “each and every current and former officer, trustee, and manager” from the entity’s inception.

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Taxpayers who received such requests recoiled. Attacking the core idea that Shulman had said would animate the audits, their attorneys and accountants argued the examinations sought too much information, creating an onerous burden. The audits “proceeded into a proctology exam, unearthing every aspect of their lives,” said Mark Allison, a prominent tax attorney for Caplin & Drysdale who has represented taxpayers undergoing Global High Wealth audits. “It was extraordinarily intrusive. Not surprisingly, these people tend to be private and are not used to sharing.”

Tax practitioners took their concerns directly to the agency, at American Bar Association conferences and during the ABA’s regular private meetings with top IRS officials. “Part of our approach was to have private sit-downs to raise issues and concerns,” said Allison, who has served in top roles in the ABA’s tax division for years. We were “telling them this was too much, unwieldy and therefore unfair.” Allison said he told high-ranking IRS officials, “You need to rein in these audit teams.”

For years, politicians have hammered the IRS for its supposed abuse of taxpayers. Congress created a “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” in the mid-1990s. Today, the IRS often refers to its work as “customer service.” One result of constant congressional scrutiny is that senior IRS officials are willing to meet with top tax lawyers and address their concerns. “There was help there. They stuck their necks out for me,” Allison said.

The IRS publicly retreated. Speaking at a Washington, D.C., Bar Association event in February 2013, a top IRS official, James Fee, conceded the demands were too detailed and long, telling the gathering that the agency has “taken strides to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” The Global High Wealth group began to limit its initial document requests.

The lobbying campaign, combined with the lack of funding for the group, took its toll. One report estimated that the wealth team had audited only around a dozen wealthy taxpayers in its first two and a half years. In a September 2015 report, the IRS’ inspector general said the agency had failed to establish the team as a “standalone” group “capable of conducting all of its own examinations.” The group didn’t have steady leadership, with three directors in its first five years. When it did audit the ultrawealthy, more than 40 percent of the reviews resulted in no additional taxes.



The inspector general also criticized the IRS broadly â€" not just its high-wealth team â€" for not focusing enough on the richest taxpayers. In 2010, the IRS as a whole audited over 32,000 millionaires. By 2018, that number had fallen to just over 16,000, according to data compiled by Syracuse University. Audits of the wealthiest Americans have collapsed 52 percent since 2011, falling more substantially than audits of the middle class and the poor. Almost half of audits of the wealthy were of taxpayers making $200,000 to $399,000. Those audits brought in $605 per audit hour worked. Exams of those making over $5 million, by contrast, brought in more than $4,500 an hour.

The IRS didn’t even have the resources to pursue millionaires who had been hit with a hefty tax bill and simply stiffed Uncle Sam. It “appeared to no longer emphasize the collection of delinquent accounts of global high wealth taxpayers,” a 2017 inspector general report said.

In recent years, the number of Global High Wealth audits has been higher â€" it closed 149 audits in the last year â€" but tax lawyers and former IRS officials say even that improvement is deceptive. A major reason is that the audits are much less ambitious. “They were longer at the beginning and shorter as the process moved on,” Johnson, the tax attorney, said.

Inside the IRS, agents seethed. “The whole organization was very frustrated,” Gardner said. “They were just really not sure what the hell their mission was, what they were supposed to be accomplishing.”

Georg Schaeffler, 54, has flowing salt-and-pepper hair that makes him look like he could’ve been an actor on the 1980s TV show “Dynasty.” The impression is offset by the wire rim glasses he wears and by the bookish disposition of a person who, as a teenager, once asked for a copy of the German Constitution as a present.

As a younger man, Schaeffler tried to escape his legacy. He left Germany and the family company at a young age and lit out for the American West. He was trying to make it on his own “where people don’t know who you are,” as he would tell a reporter for a magazine profile years later. Some might escape to Texas to live a bit wild. Schaeffler became a corporate lawyer.

Schaeffler’s law firm colleagues didn’t know much more than that he spoke with an accent, and certainly not that he was vastly wealthy. That is, until he landed on the Forbes list of global billionaires. Rueful at the loss of his privacy, Schaeffler once declared: “I hate Forbes.”

The family’s riches stemmed from ball bearings and other automobile parts manufactured by the Schaeffler Group, which was founded by Schaeffler’s father and then passed to his mother after his father died. By 2006, Georg (pronounced GAY-org) owned 80 percent of the enterprise and his mother the remaining 20 percent. (As a Texas resident at that time, Schaeffler was required to pay U.S. income taxes.)

He very nearly lost it all. In 2008, Schaeffler Group made a big mistake. It offered to buy Continental AG, a tiremaker, just days before the stock and credit markets experienced their worst crisis since the Great Depression. Even as Continental’s stock price crashed, Schaeffler was legally obligated to go through with its purchase at the much higher pre-crash price.


Schaeffler and his mother, Maria-Elisabeth, ran into trouble after their family auto-parts company acquired tiremaker Continental AG in the middle of the financial crisis. (Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Schaeffler Group flirted with bankruptcy and pleaded for aid from the German government. The media began to pay closer attention to the private company and the low-profile family that ran it. German press accounts dismissed Schaeffler’s mother as the “billionaire beggar” for seeking a bailout and pilloried her for wearing a fur coat at a ski race while seeking government help.

No German government aid came. The Schaeffler Group teetered, and the family’s fortune plummeted from $9 billion to almost zero. Amid the crisis over Continental, Georg accepted his fate and took up a more prominent role at the company; he’s now the chairman of its supervisory board.

To pay for Continental, Schaeffler Group borrowed about 11 billion euros from a consortium of banks. At the time, Schaeffler’s lenders, including Royal Bank of Scotland, were desperate, too, having suffered enormous losses on home mortgages. They wanted to avoid any more write-downs that might result if the company defaulted on the loans. So in 2009 and 2010, Schaeffler’s lenders restructured the debt in a devilishly complex series of transactions.

By 2012, these maneuvers had caught the eye of the Global High Wealth group. Paul Doerr, an experienced revenue agent, would head the audit. Eventually, the IRS discerned what it came to believe was the transaction’s essence: The banks had effectively forgiven nearly half of Schaeffler’s debt.

To the IRS, that had significant tax implications. In the wealth team’s view, Georg Schaeffler had received billions of dollars of income â€" on which he owed taxes.

The auditors’ view reflects a core aspect of the U.S. tax system. Under American law, companies and individuals are liable for taxes on the forgiven portion of any loan.

This frequently comes up in the housing market. A homeowner borrows $100,000 from a bank to buy a house. Prices fall and the homeowner, under financial duress, unloads it for $80,000. If the bank forgives the $20,000 still owed on the original mortgage, the owner pays taxes on that amount as if it were ordinary income.

This levy can seem unfair since it often hits borrowers who have run into trouble paying back their debts. The problem was particularly acute during the housing crisis, so in late 2007, Congress passed a bill that protected most homeowners from being hit with a tax bill after foreclosure or otherwise getting a principal reduction from their lender.

Tax experts say the principle of taxing forgiven loans is crucial to preventing chicanery. Without it, people could arrange with their employers to borrow their salaries through the entire year interest-free and then have the employer forgive the loan at the very end. Voila, no taxable income.

The notion that forgiven debt is taxable applies to corporate transactions, too. That means concern about such a tax bill is rarely far from a distressed corporate debtor’s mind. “Any time you have a troubled situation, it’s a typical tax issue you have to address and the banks certainly understand it, too,” said Les Samuels, an attorney who spent decades advising corporations and wealthy individuals on tax matters.

But the efforts to avoid tax, in the case of Schaeffler and his lenders, took a particularly convoluted form. It involved several different instruments, each with multiple moving parts. The refinancing was “complicated and unusual,” said Samuels, who was not involved in the transaction. “If you were sitting in the government’s chair and reading press reports on the situation, your reaction might be that the company was on the verge of being insolvent. And when the refinancing was completed, the government might think that banks didn’t know whether they would be repaid.”

This account of the audit was drawn from conversations with people familiar with it, who were not authorized to speak on the record, as well as court and German securities filings. The IRS declined to comment for this story. Doerr did not respond to repeated calls and emails.

A spokesman for Schaeffler declined to make him available for an interview. “Mr. Schaeffler always strives to comply with the complex U.S. tax code,” the spokesman wrote in a statement, saying “the fact that the refinancing was with six independent, international banks in itself demonstrates that these were arm’s length, commercially driven transactions. The IRS professionally concluded the audit in 2018 without making adjustments to those transactions, and there is no continuing dispute â€" either administratively or in litigation â€" related to these matters.”

Schaeffler’s lenders never explicitly canceled the loan. The banks and Schaeffler maintained to the IRS that the loan was real and no debt had been forgiven.

The IRS came not to buy that. After years of trying to unravel the refinancing, the IRS homed in on what the agency contended was a disguise. The banks and Schaeffler “had a mutual interest in maintaining the appearance that the debt hadn’t gone away,” a person familiar with the transaction said. But the IRS believed the debt had, in fact, been canceled.

In the refinancing, the banks and Schaeffler had agreed to split the company’s debt, which had grown to 12 billion euros at that point, into two pieces: A senior loan, to be paid back first, worth about 7 billion euros and a junior piece worth about 5 billion euros.

Schaeffler’s income-producing assets were placed into the entity that held the senior debt. Schaeffler was required to repay the debt according to a schedule and to pay a meaningful interest rate: 4.25 percentage points above the rate his lenders charge each other to borrow money. In short, it appeared to be a relatively straightforward debt transaction.

The junior debt was another matter â€" and its provisions would raise the hackles of the IRS. To begin with, the entity that held the junior debt did not directly hold income-producing assets. There was no schedule of payments that Schaeffler had to make on the junior debt. He wasn’t obligated to make principal payments until the end of the loan’s term. And it carried a nearly nonexistent annual interest rate of 0.1 percentage points above prevailing interbank lending rates, plus an additional 7 percent per year, which Schaeffler could choose to defer and pay at the end of the term.

The banks attached two other provisions to the refinancing: A “Contingent Remuneration Payment” and a “Contingent Upside Instrument,” according to German securities filings. The two additions called for Schaeffler to make payments to the future performance of the company.

The IRS and Schaeffler’s team fought especially over the Contingent Upside Instrument. Its value was tied to the Schaeffler Group’s future profitability, just like a share of stock would be. The IRS argued that not only was this an equitylike sweetener to the banks, but that it tainted the entire junior portion of the debt. To the IRS, it looked like the banks had a claim on future payments from Schaeffler, but they didn’t know when they’d receive it â€" or even if they would ever get anything.

To the IRS, these steps all added up to the effective cancellation of about $5 billion worth of debt, for which the banks had received something in return. That something looked and acted very much like equity.

The Schaeffler audit was one of the biggest for the Global High Wealth group. The IRS assigned a larger than normal team to the exam. The agency would send 86 separate document requests to Schaeffler through July 2013.

But there were problems almost from the beginning, according to people familiar with the audit, who provided this account and chronology. The IRS examiners disagreed with one another over strategy. The debates sometimes spilled into the view of Schaeffler’s team. “I remember a tremendous amount of turnover from the exam team and infighting. They were not presenting a coherent message,” a person in the Schaeffler camp said.

By contrast, Schaeffler’s team of lawyers and accountants was large and unified. “These taxpayers aren’t exactly represented by H&R Block,” Gardner, the retired IRS official, said.

Schaeffler’s advisers threw as much as they could back at the agency. Document requests are typically voluntary at the outset. But at one point, an IRS auditor was frustrated at what the team saw as the Schaeffler team’s resistance and delays and demanded, “Would a summons help?” according to a person familiar with the exam. Schaeffler’s team complained about the perceived threat. The IRS scolded its employee, and Doerr, the lead auditor, apologized to the Schaeffler side, according to the person.


The IRS’ efforts to police the superwealthy have been a bust. (Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
In another instance, the IRS could not get information it sought from Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, related to its advice to Schaeffler. So it sued the accounting firm in early 2014. Ernst & Young contended the material was privileged because it was prepared in anticipation of litigation. The IRS won in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, but Ernst & Young appealed.

In early November 2015, with the Ernst & Young appeal unresolved, top IRS officials gave the Schaeffler audit team the permission it was looking for. They allowed the auditors to notify Schaeffler that they believed he’d failed to disclose about $5 billion in income and that he could expect a $1.2 billion tax bill. That included some $200 million in penalties because the agency viewed the transaction as abusive.

Only days later, the IRS was dealt a defeat that would further hamstring its ability to press its case. On Nov. 10, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district judge, slapping down the IRS’ efforts to get the Ernst & Young documents, ruling they were in fact protected by privilege. The IRS had no choice. It would have to proceed without the documents.

The IRS took solace that despite the adverse ruling on the documents, the appeals court appeared to bolster the IRS’ view of the transaction. Describing it as a “complex and novel refinancing,” the court said the consortium of banks “essentially insured” Schaeffler “by extending credit and subordinating its debt.” The opinion found that Schaeffler’s team had known that litigation over the transaction was “virtually inevitable,” underscoring the sense that the billionaire’s lawyers and accountants knew they were pushing legal limits.

The two sides wrangled even over routine procedural matters. The statute of limitations was about to run out. Usually the taxpayer voluntarily agrees to extend the time limit rather than antagonize the agents doing an audit. But Schaeffler’s team raised the prospect of refusing an extension. They ultimately relented, but succeeded in amping up the pressure on the auditors.

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Even as the antagonism built between the two sides, the IRS showed deference to the Schaeffler camp. Doerr gave Schaeffler’s attorneys a heads-up that the agency was going to deliver bad news, an action that was viewed as overly solicitous, according to one person. It gave an opening for Schaeffler’s lawyers to raise their concerns with the audit team’s bosses. They expressed how wrongheaded they thought the IRS’ position was and how inappropriate its actions had been.

In June 2016, the IRS sent Schaeffler the official notice that the agency would seek unpaid tax and penalties.

Schaeffler’s attorneys continued to argue, often above the heads of the audit team, that the auditors’ interpretation was incorrect. They held conference calls with top IRS officials, saying the audit team had given the Schaeffler side mixed messages. Some on the team had assured Schaeffler’s attorneys that he would not face a large tax bill or be subject to a penalty. Top officials then met with the Global High Wealth team to discuss the issues. “The pushback is incredible,” one knowledgeable person recalled.

The pushback worked â€" and here’s where an audit is radically different from a court case. Court cases are typically accompanied by publicly available decisions and rulings that explain them in detail. By contrast, audits are shielded by the secrecy of the IRS’ process. They can end with no scrap of publicly available paper to memorialize key decisions. In August 2016, in Schaeffler’s case, officials several rungs up the IRS hierarchy told the Global High Wealth team to withdraw the penalty from its request.

Even without a penalty portion, Schaeffler would still owe the original $1 billion in taxes if the IRS maintained its contention that the banks had cancelled his debt. Schaeffler’s team then went to work on that, too. It succeeded. By 2017, the IRS had abandoned its assertion that debt had been transformed into equity. After six years on a hard-fought case, the agency had effectively given up.

The IRS had a few stray quibbles, so the agency said it required a payment in the “tens of millions,” according to two people familiar with the audit. There the trail goes dark. Tax experts say Schaeffler’s team would likely have appealed even that offer, which in many instances leads to further reductions in money owed, but ProPublica could not ascertain that that occurred.

Thanks in part to the U.S. government’s bailout of the auto industry and the global economic recovery, the Schaeffler Group’s business rebounded. Despite a recent dip in the car market, things have turned out OK for Georg Schaeffler. Today, Forbes estimates his fortune at over $13 billion.

[SredniVashtar]

I don't want to cornhole him

Picture the scene:

Myke decides to go on a bike ride, wearing only skimpy cycling shorts and a crop top. Cruising along in the California sunshine, he distractedly examines his reflection in a pocket mirror (he never leaves home without it) while a turtle crosses his path. Poor Myke's wheel encounters the hapless chelonian and our hero is propelled into the air, knocking him unconscious. That perfect profile now a mass of contusions, his prone beach body against the hot asphalt, shorts pulled away in the collision to reveal his superbly toned buttocks.

You'd sodomise him a heartbeat. You wouldn't even pull him onto the grass verge but you'd do it in the middle of the road and make the turtle watch too. Don't try and deny it, you filthy pansy. God, how you people disgust me!

[SredniVashtar]

They have a sandwich named after you in the cafeteria.

'Good afternoon. I'd like a ''Chubby Whore'' please, with curly fries and a chocolate milkshake.'

[Walks_At_Night]

Picture the scene:

Myke decides to go on a bike ride, wearing only skimpy cycling shorts and a crop top. Cruising along in the California sunshine, he distractedly examines his reflection in a pocket mirror (he never leaves home without it) while a turtle crosses his path. Poor Myke's wheel encounters the hapless chelonian and our hero is propelled into the air, knocking him unconscious. That perfect profile now a mass of contusions, his prone beach body against the hot asphalt, shorts pulled away in the collision to reveal his superbly toned buttocks.

You'd sodomise him a heartbeat. You wouldn't even pull him onto the grass verge but you'd do it in the middle of the road and make the turtle watch too. Don't try and deny it, you filthy pansy. God, how you people disgust me!

Seems like it has been awhile since you have been around. It's been like this for days. Senda did a show and tell of his brain MRI and in one of the cuts it looks like he has two cysts/masses/holes on the left side.  One would think this would kick off a crisis of epic proportions on the board, but no.....  All we get is sodomy talk with a little KJV thrown in around the edges.  I think bellgab might be doomed. 

[whoozit]

Seems like it has been awhile since you have been around. It's been like this for days. Senda did a show and tell of his brain MRI and in one of the cuts it looks like he has two cysts/masses/holes on the left side.  One would think this would kick off a crisis of epic proportions on the board, but no.....  All we get is sodomy talk with a little KJV thrown in around the edges.  I think bellgab might be doomed. 

I just assumed the holes were from Senda’s jailhouse cornholing.

[SredniVashtar]

Seems like it has been awhile since you have been around. It's been like this for days. Senda did a show and tell of his brain MRI and in one of the cuts it looks like he has two cysts/masses/holes on the left side.  One would think this would kick off a crisis of epic proportions on the board, but no.....  All we get is sodomy talk with a little KJV thrown in around the edges.  I think bellgab might be doomed. 

Does this mean the age old question 'is the fat cunt dead?' might soon be resolved permanently?

[Walks_At_Night]

Does this mean the age old question 'is the fat cunt dead?' might soon be resolved permanently?

He seemed fine in his video from last night - showing off the new pressure cooker that will allow him to eat healthy finally. He discussed his plans for after he wins the lottery this month - buying a restored Mercury Cougar, sending money to Trump and jailing MV. No cognitive decline it would seem. A brain munching amoeba isn't going to slow him down. He's got plans.

[SredniVashtar]

He seemed fine in his video from last night - showing off the new pressure cooker that will allow him to eat healthy finally. He discussed his plans for after he wins the lottery this month - buying a restored Mercury Cougar, sending money to Trump and jailing MV. No cognitive decline it would seem. A brain munching amoeba isn't going to slow him down. He's got plans.

That pressure cooker will soon be lost under the junk heap. I'm sure we can all get behind jailing MV. How that man has stayed one step ahead of the law all this time will remain a mystery.

[Walks_At_Night]

That pressure cooker will soon be lost under the junk heap. I'm sure we can all get behind jailing MV. How that man has stayed one step ahead of the law all this time will remain a mystery.

Yeah that pressure cooker is doomed. He has to unplug the popcorn popper and then move it off the cutting board to make room for the shiny new cooker. Seems like an awful lot of work. Then you have wash and peel the fresh veggies and what not to put in there. $5 will get you $10 that it never even gets plugged in. Might be for the best - high pressure, heat and Senda are not a good combination.

[K_Dubb]

You'd sodomise him a heartbeat. You wouldn't even pull him onto the grass verge but you'd do it in the middle of the road and make the turtle watch too. Don't try and deny it, you filthy pansy. God, how you people disgust me!

I would not!  Quite apart from the moral repugnance of such a deed which would, at minimum, cost me the only person who has ever been kind to me on bellgab, as well as perfectly reasonable concerns over physical safety (as a lifter of 45-lb dumbbells instead of my puny 30s he could knock me flat, and moreover would be perfectly within his rights to do so) I thrill in the danger of the chase and only creep on guys who could beat me up (admittedly, most of them).  Those who would doubt my fortitude should reflect that I am a hunter of the deadliest game on the planet, my fellow man, and that I do so absolutely starkers and from a position of significant disadvantage!

No, I would fetch him a cooling horchata, give him a meager bony shoulder to lean on home, apply gentle words and cold compresses, and bake him conchas and elotes and marranitos until he got better, all the while impressing upon him the strength of my unconditional devotion, my steadfast reliability, and my absolute trustworthiness, while hacking all potential rivals for his affection off at the knees.

[SredniVashtar]

Yeah that pressure cooker is doomed. He has to unplug the popcorn popper and then move it off the cutting board to make room for the shiny new cooker. Seems like an awful lot of work. Then you have wash and peel the fresh veggies and what not to put in there. $5 will get you $10 that it never even gets plugged in. Might be for the best - high pressure, heat and Senda are not a good combination.

He usually buys the veg ready-prepared, for the busy executive who doesn't have the time. I'm guessing one of the raccoons ends up being cooked in it. Or a cat.

[Walks_At_Night]

I just assumed the holes were from Senda’s jailhouse cornholing.

Now that's just disgusting. Everything in this thread comes back the old dusty trail in some form. My theory was that some of Kathy's roaches crawled in his ear, kept digging until they hit paydirt and made some nests.   

[Walks_At_Night]

I would not!  Quite apart from the moral repugnance of such a deed which would, at minimum, cost me the only person who has ever been kind to me on bellgab, as well as perfectly reasonable concerns over physical safety (as a lifter of 45-lb dumbbells instead of my puny 30s he could knock me flat, and moreover would be perfectly within his rights to do so) I thrill in the danger of the chase and only creep on guys who could beat me up (admittedly, most of them).  Those who would doubt my fortitude should reflect that I am a hunter of the deadliest game on the planet, my fellow man, and that I do so absolutely starkers and from a position of significant disadvantage!

No, I would fetch him a cooling horchata, give him a meager bony shoulder to lean on home, apply gentle words and cold compresses, and bake him conchas and elotes and marranitos until he got better, all the while impressing upon him the strength of my unconditional devotion, my steadfast reliability, and my absolute trustworthiness, while hacking all potential rivals for his affection off at the knees.

Still can't compete with the side boob pix that LL posted. 

[K_Dubb]

Still can't compete with the side boob pix that LL posted.

Just wait until I get my official Michael Decon 45-lb dumbbells I will show you some rock-hard sideboob!

[SredniVashtar]

Just wait until I get my official Michael Decon 45-lb dumbbells I will show you some rock-hard sideboob!

You'll end up with a hernia the size of a water melon.

[whoozit]

Just wait until I get my official Michael Decon 45-lb dumbbells I will show you some rock-hard sideboob!

IIRC yours will probably be bigger.

[Walks_At_Night]

Just wait until I get my official Michael Decon 45-lb dumbbells I will show you some rock-hard sideboob!

...and I will want to see that side boob. After being trolled by Falun Gong into pouring over those hourly Biden cock pix looking for the evidence that will change the world forever, I'm down for just about anything.

[Walks_At_Night]

You'll end up with a hernia the size of a water melon.

Just not a hernia but an Iguana.  Those are the best kind.

[K_Dubb]

I started reading the first one wondering if the conclusion reached on the cause of obesity and general health was the gut microbiome (something that I have been paying attention to in spurts for a decade as I find the subject fascinating.) Eventually, it became too long and I started wondering WTF.

I did read the whole thing because, as you know, this is an obsession of mine.  It starts out well, but the main complaint turns out to be how little attention the medical profession pays to it, relying on a stern lecture of a few minutes instead of holding the fatty's hand while he cries and cooking all his meals so he doesn't have to worry about what he eats and continually monitoring him for slip-ups.  Like most pleas for fat acceptance, it's a long, drawn-out yearning for someone to pay attention to you and take the wheel of the car you have already put into an irrecoverable skid.  Suck it up, fat boys, you did this to yourselves!

[K_Dubb]

You'll end up with a hernia the size of a water melon.

Haha I wonder if I can get the delivery man to take them up the stairs for me.

[K_Dubb]

...and I will want to see that side boob. After being trolled by Falun Gong into pouring over those hourly Biden cock pix looking for the evidence that will change the world forever, I'm down for just about anything.

Fuck yeah chest butt here I come!

[Dr. MD MD]

...and I will want to see that side boob. After being trolled by Falun Gong into pouring over those hourly Biden cock pix looking for the evidence that will change the world forever, I'm down for just about anything.

And the evidence revealed that the Biden’s are in the pocket of the CCP. Communist takeovers of our nation are hilarious, comrade!