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Adam Levine's ex-Maroon 5 bandmate accused of sexting teens - and attacking wife when she confronted him on it

Adam Levine's ex-Maroon 5 bandmate accused of sexting teens - and attacking wife when she confronted him on it

Daily Mail​2 days ago
Musician Mickey Madden, a one-time bassist for the Adam Levine-fronted band Maroon 5, is accused of physically attacking his wife after she confronted him about sending inappropriate text messages to teenagers.
'He physically abused me,' Madden's spouse Kate Bowman said in court documents filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, in regard to a series of events which unfolded on July 21. 'I'm now terrified of him.'
Bowman said the bass player went 'insane' after she asked him about the alleged messages with the teenage girls - which allegedly centered around a rape fantasy.
Madden went 'insane' when Bowman asked him about the situation, Bowman told the court, grabbing her arms and slamming her body against a kitchen counter.
'He pulled me to the ground and was out of his mind,' Bowman told the court in her filing.
Daily Mail has reached out to reps for Madden, and an Instagram account the musician appears to run, for further comment on the story.
Bowman described her efforts to flee the dangerous situation in her court filing.
'I managed to move around and escape him, got up, and ran out of the house to escape him,' she said.
She continued: 'He ran after me in his underwear and barefoot, caught up to me, shoved me against the gate, and then tried to grab me back to the house.'
Bowman said that she 'managed to escape and ran to the street' but Madden 'found [her] twice in different locations, physically abusing me each time.'
Bowman included screengrabs in her filing from ring camera footage to support her claims.
Bowman tried to retrieve Madden's phone, and says she wound up leaving the home afraid for her life.
Bowman was able to rummage through the contents of the phone after she ran down the street and hid between cars after escaping the enraged musician's clutches, she said in court documents.
Bowman told the court that Madden had never shown that level of outrage prior to their marriage.
Bowman was pointed out to the text-related allegations against Madden by a stranger, she said in the court filing.
Bowman told the court that she subsequently moved out of the home and has been residing with a friend in the wake of the conflict, she said in the court filing.
Bowman told the court that Madden told her he was sorry via text message, and that he was planning on seeking help for sex addiction.
She said she was concerned about Madden's potential mercurial reaction when he sees that she used a credit card of theirs to hire a lawyer in the wake of the July 21 incident.
Bowman has asked for a restraining order preventing Madden from approaching within 100 yards of her person, place of business, residence or vehicle.
Bowman said that Madden has exerted monetary control over her for the duration of their four-year-plus marriage.
Bowman said said she has since started working a job, and is concerned that Madden will try to track her down at her work. She added that she's put a deposit down for an apartment where she will reside.
Bowman is asking for expenses, in addition to custody of a pair of Siberian Husky dogs they own named Jam and Toast.
A Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted Bowman a temporary restraining order in connection with the domestic violence allegations, but a request for Madden to vacate their home was not granted, pending a future hearing on the matter.
Madden was the bass player for Maroon 5 - whose hits include moves like Makes Me Wonder, Moves Like Jagger and She Will Be Loved - for nearly 26 years, but departed the band in 2020.
He stepped away from Maroon 5 in July of 2020 after he was arrested in connection with domestic violence
'I have some things that I need to deal with and address right now and so I have decided to take a leave of absence,' Madden said in a statement at the time. 'During this time, I do not want to be a distraction to my bandmates. I wish them the absolute best.'
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Victory for attorneys who waved guns at BLM protesters as they are rewarded after five-year battle
Victory for attorneys who waved guns at BLM protesters as they are rewarded after five-year battle

Daily Mail​

timean hour ago

  • Daily Mail​

Victory for attorneys who waved guns at BLM protesters as they are rewarded after five-year battle

The St. Louis couple who drew national attention in 2020 for pointing firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home has finally regained possession of one of those weapons after a years-long legal dispute. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, both attorneys, went viral during the summer of 2020 when they were seen armed on their front lawn as demonstrators passed through their private neighborhood. The couple said they felt threatened after protesters broke through a gate and ignored 'No Trespassing' signs displayed on their private street - no one was hurt in the instance. Now, five years after the viral spectacle, Mark posted a video to X showing himself collecting the AR-15 rifle from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department as he was finally rewarded with the return of the firearm after the lengthy fight. He wrote: 'It only took 3 lawsuits, 2 trips to the Court of Appeals and 1,847 days, but I got my AR15 back!' 'We defended our home, were persecuted by the left, smeared by the press, and threatened with death, but we never backed down,' he added. The McCloskeys were initially charged with unlawful use of a weapon. They later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges in 2021 - Mark to fourth-degree assault and Patricia to second-degree harassment - and agreed to forfeit the weapons. However, the couple was pardoned by Missouri Governor Mike Parson shortly thereafter. In 2024, a Missouri appeals court approved the expungement of those misdemeanor convictions, and under state law, the ruling meant the offenses were effectively erased from the couple's records - paving the way for them to reclaim the confiscated firearms. 'That gun may have only been worth $1,500 or something, and it cost me a lot of time and a lot of effort to get it back, but you have to do that,' Mark told Fox News Digital. 'You have to let them know that you will never back down.' According to Mark, the AR-15 had been in the possession of St. Louis police, while Patricia's Bryco .380-caliber pistol was held by the St. Louis Sheriff's Department. He said he expects the pistol to be returned sometime next week. The firearms were initially ordered destroyed after the couple entered their guilty pleas. However, court proceedings later revealed that both weapons still existed. Mark sued in 2021 to get the guns back, but his request was denied multiple times. He eventually prevailed following the expungement ruling last month, which came despite opposition from city attorneys, who argued the couple still posed a threat and cited McCloskey's use of the incident in political advertisements during his unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign. He also noted that the protesters' statements addressed only perceived threats on the day of the incident, not any ongoing danger. Judge Joseph P. Whyte rejected those arguments, the Daily Mail previously reported, writing in his decision that the court was bound to rule based on the expungement statute and not on political grounds. He also noted that the protesters' statements addressed only perceived threats on the day of the incident, not any ongoing danger. The case drew national attention and political reaction at the time, with President Donald Trump and several Republican leaders expressing support for the St Louis natives. The couple later appeared in a video message during the 2020 Republican National Convention.

Unmasked: the man behind one of the fastest growing far-right YouTube channels
Unmasked: the man behind one of the fastest growing far-right YouTube channels

The Guardian

timean hour ago

  • The Guardian

Unmasked: the man behind one of the fastest growing far-right YouTube channels

The Guardian has identified the self-described 'national socialist' behind an openly extremist YouTube channel that in just over two months has accumulated 50,000 subscribers, seen more than 2.3m views, and likely made thousands of dollars from YouTube's revenue-sharing monetization program. Johnathan Christopher 'Chris' Booth, 37, lives in the unincorporated community of Coral, a part of Maple Valley Township in Michigan's Montcalm county, and is married to a senior local Republican official. Booth has published more than 70 YouTube videos since May on his Shameless Sperg account, whose graphic design elements feature stylized SS bolts. Titles of his videos – generally a recording of him delivering his views direct to camera – include: 'Why I Dislike Jews. It's not complicated', 'Black Crimes Matter: Never Relax' and 'Jews and FBI hate you and your free speech'. Typically the videos attract hundreds of comments from like-minded YouTube users. His channel has seen such remarkable success that it has drawn apparently baseless allegations from other far-right creators that he is a 'fed'. On an X account that frequently advertises his videos, his posts include antisemitic comments and in one response to a post about actor Jim Carrey he writes: 'All of them deserve rope. I advocate for national socialism though, under which idiots like this would not fare too well.' Despite YouTube's stated policies against hate speech and content that promotes violence against individuals or groups based on race, religion or other protected characteristics, Booth's channel appears to be monetized through the YouTube Partner Program. The channel displays ads and Booth has thanked subscribers for their financial support through the platform. YouTube's community guidelines explicitly prohibit content that 'promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization'. A YouTube spokesperson said: 'Upon review, we terminated the channel for violating our community guidelines. Content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, nationality, race or religion is not allowed on YouTube.' According to YouTube, another account associated with Booth was terminated, and creators are no longer entitled to earn any revenue if their channel is terminated. The terminations happened after the Guardian reached out to YouTube with questions about Booth's activities. Also according to YouTube, content that promotes violence or hatred against individuals or groups based on their ethnicity, nationality, race or religion is not allowed on the platform. In the wake of the ban, Booth took to X to say that he would move his content to 'alt-tech' platforms such as Odysee. Booth is married to Meghyn 'Meg' Booth, the Republican treasurer of Maple Valley Township. Meg Booth has 'liked' several posts with extremist themes on Chris Booth's Facebook account with her personal account. Chris Booth's Facebook page also features extensive racist propaganda along with iconography often employed by neo-Nazis. The revelations raise questions about the extent to which YouTube, whose parent company Alphabet also owns Google, Waymo and other tech companies, has backslid on monitoring extremism on its platform. Jeff Tischauser, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), said Booth's operation across YouTube, X and merchandising platforms was a 'boilerplate Nazi grift'. 'He may be earning money from YouTube, as well as hawking these racist and antisemitic items on his website like cups and T-shirts,' Tischauser added. He said that YouTube is 'the premier site that these guys look to in order to expand their following and to make money off of that following'. The Guardian retrieved a Coral, Michigan, street address from EU-mandated General Product Safety Regulation compliance information on the Shameless Sperg merchandise page on the merchandising platform Printify. The property at that address is owned by Meg Booth, according to property records. Data brokers indicate that Chris Booth lives at the same address. Sites including show exterior views of the house at the property. The property's color and cladding match those visible in videos published to YouTube on 14 and 15 May. Chris Booth appears to have made some efforts to remove photographs of himself and other potentially identifying information from his own social media accounts and other online spaces. However, he is visible in 'shorts'-style videos posted by Meg Booth to Facebook. This video of Chris Booth depicts the same person visible in Shameless Sperg videos. The Guardian emailed both Chris and Meg Booth for comment. In an email, Meg Booth appeared to repudiate her husband's views. 'I am not involved in my husband's content or political views, and I do not share or support any form of racism, antisemitism, or hate speech,' she wrote, adding: 'My values are my own and are grounded in respect, inclusion, and service to the community.' Meg Booth concluded: 'As an elected official, I've always acted independently, with integrity, and in line with the expectations of my office. I respectfully decline further comment.' Chris Booth did not directly respond, but in the day after the email he took to X to reaffirm his views, including a post in which he wrote: 'I've come to believe fascists are born, not made. Discovering real fascism in my early thirties was like looking into a mirror and finally realizing why commies have called me a fascist for so long. They spotted it before I could, but then I wholeheartedly embraced it.' In his videos and on X, Booth explicitly embraces neo-Nazi ideology and promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories. On his Shameless Sperg X account, Booth writes: 'I am the Shameless Sperg, I am a National Socialist, and I do sperg rants here,' with a link to his YouTube channel. On the YouTube channel, he writes: 'This channel is a collection of sperg rants and commentary on the news & issues of the day, or whatever else is on my mind, from an autistically dissident and NS perspective.' 'Sperg', an abbreviation for Asperger syndrome, is used pejoratively in far-right circles for those whose obsessive and open extremism might put off normal people or draw unwanted attention. 'NS' is commonly used as an abbreviation for 'national socialist' in far-right circles. His videos almost all contain neo-Nazi perspectives, enunciating conspiratorial antisemitism, anti-Black racism and claims that white people are superior to all other races. In a June video titled 'There is no Anti-Semitism without Semitism', Booth states in relation to interwar Germany: 'Extreme sadism and humiliation towards Gentiles is a Jewish tradition … Now, you might begin to understand why, after 14 years of seeing their people tormented by the Jews, millions of Germans organized, gained political power and broke the chains of Jewish tyranny in Germany.' The video continues with Booth arguing that antisemitism is a just response to the behavior of Jews, and sarcastically dismisses the idea that it is 'just some ancient mental pathogen in the minds of the goyim, it just springs to life for no reason just to make things harder for the Jews'. In a July video, Booth defended recent attempts to create a whites-only community in Arkansas. He said: 'White people are allowed to congregate together without being accompanied by some fucking Black person or some Jew.' In another July video Booth said: 'Black people oppress themselves. I don't do it. I have no interest in it. I, you know, I just want them away from me. You know, I want them away from me, my community, my state, my country. I don't know. Just, I don't know, get the fuck away from me.' In a May video supporting Trump's program of allowing Afrikaner refugees into the country on the basis of a fictional 'white genocide' in South Africa, Booth said: 'You know, I'm hoping that they don't completely lose South Africa to the Black plague, but, um, but in any event, uh, things are going to fall apart for them and go shit sideways.' Tischauser, the SPLC analyst, said that the themes of Booth's videos mix 'crass racism, basic historic white power talking points' and 'pseudo-academic kind of takes on Black criminality or Black behavior'. Meg Booth, Chris Booth's wife, was in November elected as the treasurer of Maple Valley Township running as a Republican. Her public social media profile does not feature the kind of extremist messaging that Chris Booth offers on his platform, though she has interacted with posts on his Facebook account, which is also freighted with racist messaging and neo-Nazi imagery. Chris Booth also 'liked' posts in which his wife discussed her candidacy.

Brutal arrest of Black student in Florida shows benefits of recording police from new vantage point
Brutal arrest of Black student in Florida shows benefits of recording police from new vantage point

The Independent

time3 hours ago

  • The Independent

Brutal arrest of Black student in Florida shows benefits of recording police from new vantage point

A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles. William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a unique view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can't clearly be seen in officer body camera footage released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement," Crump said. Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on due to bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the sheriff's office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's office spokesperson declined to comment about the case this week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and several stiches in his lip. His attorneys accused the sheriff's office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated but 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful." McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile 's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events than what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a unique point of view. "Use technology to your advantage," said Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etc.,' Brunson said. Although the sheriff's office declined to speak to The Associated Press this week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He pushed back against some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him claimed in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police bodycams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. However, after the police murder of Floyd, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet (7.6 meters) of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a football game last year between the universities of Georgia and Florida. The sheriff showed the officers' bodycam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the bodycam footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the bodycam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the past 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he first began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. ' People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial," Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. "And that's where video does play a big part because people can't deny what they see.'

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