2025-12-11 02:47:30
Season 3 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives debuted on November 13, and among the routine infighting, there’s a heavier topic that has consumed the season’s conversations: the incremental revelations that most of the women in the cast have been sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. (Hulu didn’t include any trigger warnings in front of these episodes.) This isn’t surprising, given the self-reported rates of sexual violence. Similarly disturbing and unsurprising, though, is the fact that for one of those women, the cast and the audience have decided that she’s lying.
Demi Engemann shared this season that Marciano Brunette groped her without her consent while she visited the Vanderpump Villa, a different Hulu original reality show. Brunette, the lead server at the Villa, claims they shared a consensual kiss and denies assaulting Engemann. Vanderpump Villa producers released a statement that they had reviewed their footage and found her claims to be “unsubstantiated.” In early December, Brunette filed a lawsuit against Engemann, claiming she defamed him by lying that she had been assaulted.
For those who haven’t watched SLOMW, it follows a group of young women who grew up in the Mormon church, have large social media followings, and started their own “MomTok” group, infamous for a swinging scandal years ago. The group often discusses how they want to modernize the Mormon church and change its stance on traditional gender roles and LGBTQ+ acceptance.
I found that many of the police investigations hinged on the victim’s behavior instead of hard evidence: were they sad enough, did they try to fight back, were they flirting beforehand, and had their story been consistent through and through?
However, their treatment of Engemann’s allegation looks all too familiar to me, as a reporter who has read through dozens of police reports that labeled sexual assault claims as false. My reporting was featured in the Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, which shows police interrogation videos and first-hand interviews with alleged victims who were accused of lying and charged with crimes.
I found that many of the police investigations hinged on the victim’s behavior instead of hard evidence: were they sad enough, did they try to fight back, were they flirting beforehand, and had their story been consistent through and through?
Now, for Engemann’s part, and separate from her allegation of sexual assault, she has been incredibly insensitive to others’ pain and discomfort. She chastised and mocked another wife, Jessi Draper, for having a consensual affair with Brunette (yes, the same Brunette). She orchestrated a very awkward and public Chippendales-like dance with a different cast member, Jen Affleck, who said she was uncomfortable and didn’t give consent.
As happens with a reality TV scandal, Engemann’s accusations turned the audience into pseudo-detectives. On camera at least, she is friendly with Brunette, hugs him, and doesn’t say outright that she’s uncomfortable with anything. Perhaps most suspicious to the online detectives and cast is that she kept in touch with her alleged assailant, sending him messages that included some sexual innuendos. But to be clear, none of these publicized messages mentions anything physical happening between the two of them, consensually otherwise.
This vigorous analysis of Engemann’s behavior hasn’t been applied to Brunette, whose character isn’t spotless. In a previous season of Vanderpump Villa, Brunette bragged that he had slept with an “extraordinary” number of his coworkers at an old job. In the Vanderpump Villa episode when Brunette meets the wives, he comments on their looks soon after meeting them, calling them “so f*cking hot”. And after he asks Engemann for a“therapy session”, she is the one who ends the conversation, and Brunette pulls her in for a hug, kissing the side of her head.
Instead, all the shame bore down on the two women involved with Brunette. Draper was excoriated by her husband, who said his own bad behavior toward her was excused because she cheated on him. And Engemann has been called a liar and a master manipulator who made up sexual assault allegations to cover up a consensual affair.
Reporting a sexual assault has always been fraught because these crimes usually have no witnesses, leave no physical injuries, and worst of all, credibility can be made or broken by a victim’s behavior before and after the alleged assault.
I want to be very clear that I don’t know if Engemann was actually assaulted — and neither do you.
Claire Fallon and her co-host summed up my feelings pretty perfectly on a podcast episode of Rich Text: “We both feel very uncomfortable about the fact that this is a half-season of a reality show about whether a group of women believe another woman’s claim that she was sexually assaulted.”
The way that the group of wives has characterized their doubt has been in service of other “real” victims. In a hotel room, Draper, Mickaela Matthews, and Miranda Hope discuss their feelings about the accusation. Miranda says while pinching her fingers together:
“You’re taking a situation that’s this big, and using your position as a woman to make it this big, which is actually so much worse for actual assault victims.”
Draper: “Yes, and it makes women not be believed when other women do shit like this.”
Reporting a sexual assault has always been fraught because these crimes usually have no witnesses, leave no physical injuries, and worst of all, credibility can be made or broken by a victim’s behavior before and after the alleged assault.
My reporting found that family, friends, and police all come up with remarkable excuses for why they think someone made up an allegation of assault. For a 12-year-old, police said she lied about her adoptive dad abusing her to get back at him for taking her phone away. For a college student, it was so she could get help with her grades. For a restaurant server, it was so she could extort money from her boss. All three of these people – even the child – were charged with crimes for lying. And all three saw their charges later dropped or were fully exonerated.
The season’s reunion aired last week, and during it, Engemann again said and did things to others which have no excuse — while pointing to her head, she asked Affleck what was wrong with her brain (after Affleck came out publicly that she recovered from prenatal depression and suicidal ideations). She assumed Affleck wasn’t a victim of sexual assault, which was quickly corrected, and to which Engemann responded, “OK, that’s great.”
But something else struck me while watching the reunion that was true for so many of the young women I’ve interviewed. While crying during a break, Engemann said, “It’s more painful to not be believed […] or to have to go over it over and over and over and feel the pain of past things than to just say ‘F*ck yeah, we kissed.’”
For so many victims, it is easier to dismiss the truth, push down their memories, and say that they weren’t assaulted – especially when there is a culture so ready to accept their admission of fault.
I have no idea where Brunette was that night during the reunion, but for certain, he wasn’t on national TV in front of narrowing and skeptical eyes, facing intense and repetitive questions.
2025-12-11 02:33:23
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has identified a new enemy: Calibri. According to multiple reports, Rubio has ordered diplomats to stop using the font—a “wasteful DEIA program” from the Biden era, he called it— and return to Times New Roman in official communications.
The change follows a memo seen by Reuters and the New York Times entitled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” which called Calibri “informal.” Returning to Times New Roman, the memo wrote, would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” The State Department had been using Times New Roman since 2004.
In January 2023, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken adopted Calibri after the typeface was recommended by his diversity and inclusion office to improve accessibility for staff, including those with disabilities like dyslexia or low vision, or people who use assistive technology like screen readers.
When asked about why the State Department was spending time changing fonts amid languishing peace talks in Ukraine and Israel’s continue ceasefire violations in Gaza, a spokesperson told Mother Jones that the switch was necessary to align with “the same dignity, consistency, and formality” of the standard fonts used “in courts, legislatures, and across federal agencies where the permanence and authority of the written record are paramount.” The spokesperson also noted that, starting Wednesday, all papers submitted to the Executive Secretariat, which is responsible for coordinating internal communications in the Department of State, must use Times New Roman, 14-point font.
Rubio has since removed the department’s diversity and inclusion office as part of a broader move by the Trump administration to eliminate diversity policies in the federal government and universities.
2025-12-11 01:22:26
The Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection is planning to require visitors from countries on the Visa Waiver Program to provide up to five years of their social media history, along with other personal data, according to a CBP proposal posted to the Federal Register. The move could significantly increase the barrier to entry into the country and risks stifling potential tourism.
Countries a part of the waiver program include Australia, Chile, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, and the United Kingdom, amongst many others. The program allows visitors to travel to the United States for tourism or business stays of 90 days or less without obtaining a visa, if they meet certain requirements.
Sophia Cope, a senior staff attorney for the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation told the New York Times that, should this proposal be enacted, it would “exacerbate civil liberties harms.”
“It has not proven effective at finding terrorists and other bad guys,” Cope said, adding that these kinds of policies have “chilled the free speech and invaded the privacy of innocent travelers, along with that of their American family, friends and colleagues.”
The CBP stated that it is introducing these changes to comply with President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order, entitled “Protecting the United States From Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats.”
This new proposal from CBP suggests adding social media as a “mandatory data element” for an Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application, which all visitors to this program must submit. Also, “when feasible,” it hopes to require other sensitive data from travelers, like personal and business phone numbers used in the last five years, personal and business email addresses from the last ten years, IP addresses and metadata from electronically submitted photos, biometrics data like face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris scans, and the names, phone numbers, dates of birth, places of birth, and residencies of parents, spouse, siblings, and children.
These “High Value Data Elements” would be required in addition to what is already expected under the current system. Right now, applicants from visa waiver countries must enroll in the ESTA program, pay $40, and submit an email address, home address, phone number and emergency contact information. Then, the authorization is good for two years.
Just last week, the State Department instructed its staff “to reject visa applications from people who worked on fact-checking, content moderation or other activities” the administration considers “censorship” of Americans’ speech, per reporting from NPR. The department also announced that H-1B visa applicants and their dependents would be required to set their social media profiles to “public” so they can be reviewed by US officials.
That move, Trump’s January order, and the CBP’s latest ask allow the US government to have an immense amount of power in deciding what online speech supports, as the president puts it in his order, “the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” They also grant leeway to deny entrance to those who support groups the administration has deemed dangerous—like pro-Palestinian student activists, who Trump and his administration have repeatedly sought to deport.
According to CBP, the proposal is open for a 60-day public comment period.
2025-12-11 00:06:03
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s affinity for public exercise was once again on display this week, with the 71-year-old health secretary and his transportation counterpart, the former reality star Sean Duffy, staging a pull-up contest inside Ronald Reagan National Airport to promote Make Travel Family Friendly Again, an offshoot of the department’s larger push to bring “civility” back to American travel.
“Yes, sir!” spectators cheered on, impressed by the performance of brawn before them.
“He’s coming for you!”
“Woot!”
Yet amid the delight of Kennedy’s onlookers, I registered a rising discomfort. This felt especially strange considering that I should have been relieved to see Kennedy with a shirt on. That, for once, we did not have to bear witness to the sight of this man’s pectoral muscles. But no, instead, a creeping instinct that what I had witnessed was not in fact real began to overwhelm me. Something about the jerking motions and the form with which Kennedy managed to “beat” Duffy in this contest struck me as profoundly wrong.
Were these actual pull-ups? Was the government lying to me?
I was in no position to sound the alarm. So I reached out to Casey Johnston of the newsletter She’s a Beast.
“The correct way to do a pull-up is from a dead hang at the bottom (arms fully extended), then pulling oneself all the way up to the point that the chin passes the upper side of the pull-up bar, all the way back down, repeat,” Johnston wrote in an email. “We can see that all of RFK’s pull-ups are about 1/4 of this range in the middle, neither fully extending all the way down, nor pulling himself up above the bar.”
My heart stopped. My theory that something was off was starting to prove correct. That’s when Johnston reflected my horror back to me:
Crucially, this also must be done without any thrashing of the body or kicking of the legs, as this extra momentum takes a lot of the work out of actually pulling oneself up with one’s upper body. Around count 15, Kennedy starts to kick his legs. At no point does RFK do an actual pull-up. They count 20, but the number of actual pull-ups done here is zero.
There we have it: another conspiracy unraveled; the government appears to have falsified information in its efforts to promote a $1 billion program that does not address far more systemic issues facing American travel. But through investigation, I have uncovered a small truth: RFK Jr. did not perform a single pull-up at Reagan National Airport.
2025-12-10 23:03:18
The image was grotesque.
In March, a camera-ready Kristi Noem posed in front of a group of shirtless, shaved, tattooed men crammed inside a metal holding cell in a foreign prison. The photo-op (and video message) was taken during the Homeland Security secretary’s tour of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, where the Trump administration had sent more than 230 Venezuelan migrants on flimsy evidence. Noem’s performance at CECOT was a triumphant show of ruthlessness as well as a warning: If you’re an immigrant unlawfully present in the United States, you too could end up shipped off to another country and held in one of the world’s worst prisons—perhaps indefinitely.
The message is clear: No immigrant living in the United States is to feel safe or welcome. No one will be spared.
The administration’s apparent satisfaction in arranging the CECOT ordeal has been emblematic of the second Trump term’s ever-increasing callousness toward immigrants and willingness to treat the constraints of the law as mere suggestions. Last month, Human Rights Watch and the watchdog organization Cristosal documented evidence that the Venezuelans removed to El Salvador endured “torture” and “enforced disappearance.” (As we reported after their release, and confirmed by the report, men said that following Noem’s visit, they received more beatings and had their food taken away by the prison guards.)
That image of Noem and the saga of the Venezuelans the US government exiled to a notorious gulag—without a semblance of due process—should be seared into America’s collective memory. But in the months since it happened, and as those men are made to live with the trauma inflicted on them, I’ve wondered whether it will.
Displays of inhumanity were a normalized phenomenon in 2025. A peril of having punitive theater as a central tenet of governance is that, eventually, the shock factor and public outrage risk wearing out. The horror may never fully register. When there’s a barrage of previously-unbelievably-unconscionably-legally dubious acts and brutal policies, how does one begin to wrap their head around each uniquely reprehensible episode, let alone a year’s worth of anti-immigration cruelty?
Think of all you’ve seen this year. The same month as Noem’s video, a Tufts University student was descended on by masked men and sent to detention for the grand offense of co-writing an op-ed critical of Israel. An unknown number of people have been dragged out of cars, chased down streets, and forced to the ground during immigration raids. We’ve all watched the videos. But there are simply too many examples to keep track of; the recordings start blending into each other. The impact of individual stories starts to dilute in an overwhelming news cycle where everything is “unprecedented” and too horrific to contend with. We look away.
But the sheer volume does not stop Trump’s war on immigrants from raging on in full force. And it is vital to look at just how wide and encompassing this assault has been: This year, the White House routinely made the lives of immigrants—all immigrants—and their families in the United States hell.
This is an imperfect attempt to take stock of it.
As previously mentioned, the Trump administration disappeared hundreds of Venezuelan men to CECOT—a gulag that has elicited comparisons to a concentration camp—in brazen defiance of court orders. Noem admitted in a declaration filed last week in response to an ongoing inquiry by a federal judge in Washington, D.C. into possible criminal contempt that she made the decision to continue to fly the men to El Salvador despite a ruling blocking their transfer. (The Justice Department all but dared the judge to pursue a referral for prosecution.)
Then there is US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration enabled ICE—now the most well-funded police force in the country—to snatch people up with little accountability and authorized the agency to make arrests at and near hospitals, churches, and courthouses. Masked agents began to show up at hearings and routine check-ins. The agency started recruiting so-called “Homeland Defenders” to go after immigrants for a $50,000 signing bonus. (The FBI recently issued a warning about instances of criminals impersonating ICE agents.) “Collateral arrests” of people who have lived in the United States for decades became common occurrences.
At the same time, Trump stripped immigrants of legal protections, making them newly deportable. The administration has taken away protected status from hundreds of thousands of people in what amounts to the largest de-legalization push in recent US history. They arrested, detained, and deported Dreamers—immigrants brought to the United States as children—despite valid protection from said deportation.
It goes on: Trump further gutted refugee resettlement, with the notable exception of South Africa’s white Afrikaners; banished immigrants to third countries and nations where they face potential harm (in flagrant violation of the international law principle of non-refoulement); purged the immigration courts and weaponized them as a deportation-first tool; tried to take away the citizenship of American-born children; dispatched a militarized border patrol and other federal agencies with camera crews to terrorize Democrat-led cities; and instituted a policy of mandatory detention designed to break people’s will to fight their cases. (One lawyer I talked to recently recounted a client telling him he would rather spend 10 years in prison in Venezuela than another 10 days in US immigration detention.)
Many of those measures made headlines and elicited outcry. (I’ve failed to list other events of note, I am sure.) But there are countless other ways immigrants across the United States are quietly bearing the brunt of an administration that—fighting a self-perceived battle for the survival and presevation of a blood-and-soil idea of America as a nation—demonizes entire communities and casts foreign-born people as an existential threat. (An exception? If you have $1 million lying around to purchase a “Gold Card” fast-track visa and path to residency to “unlock life in America.”)
Looking at the immigration system as a whole, virtually every part of it has been made harder and riskier, as if repurposed only to punish people for one of the most universal experiences there is: migration.
Every day, immigrants are being penalized for interacting with the legal immigration system. The Trump administration has gotten out of its way to make the citizenship civics test harder to pass while also increasing scrutiny through the expansion of a values-based “moral character” standard. They have eliminated the automatic extension of employment authorization for people renewing their work permits. Under the guise of restoring “integrity” to the system and making the country safer, they expanded the enforcement authorities of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of visas and other immigration benefits, empowering special agents to make arrests.
The State Department has revoked thousands of student visas and is tightening vetting for fact-checkers and workers in the disinformation field. Following the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by an Afghan immigrant, the administration halted all asylum decisions, shortened the duration of work permits for various groups from five years to 18 months, ordered the review of approved green cards for immigrants from “every country of concern,” and began canceling naturalization ceremonies. Unsurprisingly, a growing share of immigrants with legal status, and even naturalized US citizens, report worries about immigration enforcement.
The message is clear: No immigrant living in the United States is to feel safe or welcome. No one will be spared. Not a college freshman visiting family on Thanksgiving. Not even the mother of the White House press secretary’s nephew. “The distinction between legal and illegal immigration becomes meaningless when both can destroy a country at its foundation,” a spokesperson for USCIS said in a press release email that landed in my inbox in November.
Much of the current immigration policymaking—if this rampant clampdown and unleashing of brutalizing force can be called that—seems to be now distilled to a simple modus operandi: we do it because we can. Little does it matter if families are separated again or if US children with cancer end up being removed from the country. Any means fit for this end: to get as many people out as possible and stop others from coming.
Every disturbing news report about a wrongful deportation or military-style raid of an apartment building should come as a reminder that the US government is using its prosecutorial discretion—it is choosing—to normalize casual cruelty and overt racism. And it’s doing so ostensibly in the name of “protecting” the American people.
2025-12-10 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Pattie Gonia, the drag queen and environmentalist, arrived in San Francisco on Friday afternoon and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge with $1 million more than when she set out on her journey last week.
The diversity and inclusion advocate completed the 100-mile trek from Point Reyes national seashore to San Francisco in full drag with her voluminous red wig and smokey eye. The effort was part of a campaign she launched to raise $1 million for eight nonprofits that aim to expand access and make the outdoors a more “equitable place.”
“Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you can’t make a difference,” she wrote on social media after completing the journey. “When I started being Pattie, everyone told me I was crazy. When I told people I wanted to do this fundraiser, [they] laughed in my face.
“Seven years later and I hope I can be a little bit of proof to you that combining who you are and what you’re good at to fight for the change you want to see in the world works.”
Pattie Gonia has become one of the most visible drag queens in the US in recent years. In 2024, Donald Trump’s campaign used footage of her with Kamala Harris as part of an attack ad against the then vice-president. Earlier this year she helped organize a demonstration at Yosemite, where LGBTQ+ climbers hung a trans pride flag on El Capitan.
“We flew the Trans pride flag in Yosemite to make a statement: Trans people are natural and Trans people are loved,” she said in a statement at the time. “We are done being polite about Trans people’s existence. Call it a protest, call it a celebration—either way, it’s giving elevation to liberation.”
Recently, she playfully challenged the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to a pull-up competition in a video that contrasted footage of her lifting herself with ease with video of Hegseth appearing to struggle through the exercise.
For the last week, she was on a solo trek on the California coast, getting in drag daily and setting up camp each night, while filming videos documenting the journey. She is set to perform her final show of the year in San Francisco on Saturday, “That is, if I can make it in time,” she said. Video posted to social media on Friday evening showed her strutting across the Golden Gate Bridge and ending her journey with cake.
By Friday, a GoFundMe for the project had raised more than $1 million from almost 35,000 individual donations.
