Dark secrets adult Disney addicts are hiding: Sex, betrayal and bankruptcy... told by woman who escaped
Grown adults wearing sequined Mickey Mouse ears were tussling and yelling, elbowing and shoving, even punching each other out the way in a theme park souvenir store.
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The Independent
5 minutes ago
- The Independent
RushTok backlash: Why sororities aren't letting prospects post
Kylan Darnell became an overnight celebrity in the TikTok niche that documents the glitzy, ritualistic recruitment process for sororities. As a 21-year-old rising senior four years later, she's taking more of her sorority life offline. Darnell has until now been the embodiment of RushTok, a week-long marathon that has teens at schools around the country meticulously documenting their efforts to land a cherished spot in a sorority during the colorful, girly and enigmatic recruitment process known as rush week. Reactions to the content that once catapulted her to fame — depicting her life as a Zeta Tau Alpha member at the University of Alabama — had become so negative that it was affecting her mental health, she said. 'This year it was just like a whole different level of hate," Darnell said. Citing a need to protect prospects from harassment, many sororities have made similar moves, issuing a de facto ban against talking to the press or posting on social media during rush week at Alabama, where almost 13,000 students participate in the nation's largest on-campus Greek life. A centuries-old tradition Across the country, rush is typically a 10-day event where 'prospective new members' try out sororities through rounds of activities prescribing a strict slate of outfits and etiquette. In the lead-up, girls often submit "social resumes" and letters of recommendation from sorority alums. Participation often requires an eye-opening price tag. After spending sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on outfits, makeup and plane tickets, each of this week's 2,600 recruits paid $550 to participate. It's non-refundable if they don't get picked. If accepted, they'll pay an average $8,400 a semester to live in the sorority house, or $4,100 if they live elsewhere, according to the Alabama Panhellenic Association. The pressure can be so intense that an industry of consultants now helps girls navigate the often mysterious criteria for landing a desired sorority. Some charge up to $10,000 for months of services that can begin in high school. Throughout rush, many events are invite-only. At any point, girls can get a dreaded call informing them they've been dropped — that a sorority is no longer interested in letting them join. Matches are finally made on bid day as prospects rank top choices and sororities make offers. Morgan Cadenhead, now 20, gained such an audience on RushTok despite being dropped that she covered most of her tuition with income from social media. Then came the social cost as she was slammed online for criticizing Greek life. Now the marketing major — featured on Lifetime's 'Sorority Mom's Guide to Rush!' — said she's looking for offline work. A zealous TikTok following A fixation with rush was renewed when sororities resumed in-person recruiting after the pandemic. Social media became flooded with 'outfit of the day' and 'get ready with me' videos showing sorority members and recruits in well-lit rooms, sometimes flaunting exorbitantly priced designer wear or pieces purchased on Amazon, always precisely curated. Alabama's Greek life got attention before, when its traditionally white sororities racially integrated, accepting their first Black members in 2013. Targeted by protests following allegations of racial discrimination, the university agreed with the Justice Department in 2016 to encourage diversity. Today, Black students outside of traditionally Black sororities and fraternities represent 2% of the total Greek membership, the university website says. Meanwhile, online attention to rush has led to books, a polarizing documentary and the reality television series, widening the appeal of sororities in the South in particular, according to Lorie Stefaneli, a New York City-based consultant who flies to Tuscaloosa each year for rush. Stefaneli coaches girls from around the country, and about a third of her clients enroll at Alabama. She says many are drawn by the vibrant depictions of sisterhood, showing female friendships that can ensure girls feel seen and supported. 'That's the reason why a lot of them want to go to Alabama, is because they see it on TikTok,' Stefaneli said. Recruits told to stop posting — or else If they gain enough followers to become social influencers, RushTok participants can earn ad revenue and brand deals. Darnell's posts brought her financial independence, more than covering the $58,000 it costs her annually to attend Alabama from out-of-state. Rush can be fun and help girls build confidence, but it's also an 'emotional rollercoaster,' especially for girls who feel they need to reveal themselves to a massive audience, Stefaneli said. She answers phone calls at all hours of the night during rush week. 'I'm literally a therapist, I'm talking these girls down from a ledge,' she said. Numerous incoming freshmen told The Associated Press this week that they were expressly prohibited from speaking with the media or even posting about rush at Alabama. Darnell said the most selective 'Old Row' houses will automatically drop prospects who do. 'Now a lot of girls just come to the university to be influencers,' she said. 'It kind of gets in the way of sisterhood.' Some incoming freshmen — including Darnell's 19-year-old sister Izzy, with a vast social media following of her own — have chosen to post anyway, satisfying a demand that can reach millions of views within days. Izzy Darnell — who wouldn't share her choices for sorority ahead of Saturday's bid day — said her older sister's acumen has equipped her to navigate criticism and potentially predatory business deals. But she worries about how other girls might handle the fame and money. 'I just fear what some girls will do because they think they have to,' Izzy Darnell said.
The Guardian
6 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘I'm the one to beat': is Taylor Swift's Showgirl era set to take h to even greater heights?
Taylor Swift's podcast interview with her American football player boyfriend, Travis Kelce, this week yielded plenty of tidbits for fans. Across two hours of loose chat on New Heights, the show Kelce helms with his brother Jason – also a football player – Swift revealed she was obsessed with sourdough and lurked on baking blogs. The couple spent the summer with her family, caring for her 73-year-old father, Scott, after he had a quintuple heart bypass. She gave Kelce a lesson on Hamlet and taught him how to avoid internalising speculation about their two-year relationship. You could call them the tentpoles of the 35-year-old pop star's brand: literary passions and professional self-awareness. One surprising revelation came near the end. Until the record-breaking 149-date Eras tour that Swift mounted from 2023-24, she said she had 'never allowed myself to say: 'You've arrived. You've made it.'' Being the only artist to win the Grammy for album of the year four times hadn't done it; not the records broken, the acclaimed shifts from country to mainstream pop to indie. Nor her staggeringly successful campaign to re-record her first six albums to devalue their master recordings, sold by her first record label to an industry nemesis, and then on to a private equity company. 'But the Eras tour,' she said, 'I was like, this is nothing like what I've experienced before. It was so much better than anything else.' Eras leapfrogged becoming the first billion-dollar tour to become the first $2bn tour. That would be plenty of cause for celebration and a good long rest. So would, as Swift announced in May, finally owning the rights to those first six albums, having successfully negotiated to buy the asset outright. (It ended her re-recording project: her 2006 debut is done and waiting, and she barely started 2017's Reputation.) Her legacy isn't just culturally assured, but materially secure. But Swift evidently isn't ready to let that feeling of having 'made it' go. She appeared on New Heights to announce her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl, arriving just 18 months after its predecessor and 10 months after Eras concluded: she is apparently congenitally incapable of rest, with a lot to process. The public will – correctly – have long assumed that Swift has well and truly made it like no one ever has. But the record's promised contents, intentions and release strategy are set to make Swift – and Kelce alongside her – hysterically famous at a new level, capitalising on and shifting industry norms in a way that may leave her detractors researching bunkers in which to hide from it all. Swift's new album does not arrive until 3 October, but this week's edition of the industry newsletter Record of the Day led with a tongue-in-cheek congratulations to 'everyone at EMI and Taylor Swift on her latest No 1 album The Life of a Showgirl'. Supernova success is a foregone conclusion: last year's introspective The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) was the first album to pass a billion streams in its first week, reaching 1.76bn. Swift is beloved on an unfathomable scale. She is one of the last monocultural pop stars. You suspect she could have toured Eras for five years and still sold out every night. Her devout Swifties, casual pop fans and curious rubberneckers will likely propel Showgirl past TTPD's record, such is the critical mass behind her, no matter what it sounds like. Her reign, says Annie Zaleski, the author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind the Songs, is unprecedented because 'she's so consistent and continuing to evolve'. But on the podcast, Swift sounded surprisingly aware of the limitations of TTPD – too wordy, too long, too downbeat – and keen to course-correct. That project, she said, had been about 'catharsis', 'mess' and 'rawness' following an apparently humiliating fling with the 1975's Matty Healy. TTPD comprised 16 songs; and on release day, Swift dropped a previously unannounced 15-track sister album, The Anthology. For Showgirl, she said she craved 'focus and discipline': just 12 songs going behind the scenes of her Eras life, with 'melodies that were so infectious you're almost angry'. She made a surprising admission about her recent quality control: 'Keeping the bar really high is something I've been wanting to do for a very long time.' Swift recorded Showgirl with the Swedish co-producers Max Martin and Shellback in Stockholm around Eras' spring 2024 European run. The second of her three dates in the Swedish capital was the 89th date of the Eras tour: she named her fifth album, partly produced by the Swedes, 1989 after her birth year. Given the endless number games she plays, sowing numerology clues for fans setting up her future movements, you can assume the scheduling was no accident. Martin and Shellback co-produced Red (2012), 1989 (2014) and Reputation (2017), homes to her biggest pure-pop smashes, among them Style, 22, and Blank Space. Her first subsequent album without them, 2019's playful Lover, was regarded as ending that imperial period. Since then, Swift's music has grown more muted and experimental, often in collaboration with the producers Jack Antonoff and the National's Aaron Dessner, as if she were trying to carve out a sustainable future for a 30-something songwriter: 2020's folksy Folklore and Evermore, the dusky pop of 2022's Midnights, TTPD. They spawned no comparable radio hits; her biggest in recent years is Lover's Cruel Summer, never officially released as a single but adopted as a fan favourite. Swift now seems to be framing those records as a phase – her art school years. The Showgirl era seems to be an attempt to recapture the kind of musical ubiquity where little kids yell your lyrics at birthday parties, as they did with 2014's Shake It Off and now do with songs such as Chappell Roan's Hot to Go! 'My business is making music and taking care of my fans and I have ways of monitoring what they want from me and how best to entertain them, which is my job,' she told the Kelces. Eras was divided into segments reflecting each of her albums (except her 2006 debut): imagine it as a 149-night focus group. Swift's monitoring also cannot have failed to note that her brand of hermetically sealed, grown-up pop has been ceding ground to Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx, who have seized culture's centre with less inhibited and far rowdier hits than the exacting Swift has ever made. Or perhaps ever could: one insurmountable difference is that Roan and xcx are unlikely to ever monitor fan desire or cater to it. And Martin, despite being second only to John Lennon and Paul McCartney for having the most US No 1 singles, has waned as a hitmaker. 'I don't think she can get ahead of those artists because she's such a millennial pop star,' said a publicist for comparably superstar acts who asked to remain nameless. 'She can't create trends like those younger artists because they have a lot less to lose.' There is a sense that Swift is catching up: that she's clocked criticisms, read the room. She released 19 physical variants for TTPD, and was accused of exploiting fans and damaging the environment with excess vinyl production, a practice Billie Eilish has called 'wasteful'. Showgirl appears to have a fairly industry-standard four. She is also competing with herself: if there is a tour, says the music business expert Eamonn Forde, it will have to take a significantly different form to Eras – residency-style, perhaps Vegas or in a bespoke venue, as recently done by Adele – to avoid unfavourable comparisons to the biggest tour of all time. Swift drew mass media coverage for her appearances at Kelce's games with the Kansas City Chiefs, prompting some aggrieved football fans to boo whenever she appeared on the jumbotron. In a trailer for her episode of New Heights, traditionally a sports show, Swift joked: 'I think we all know that if there's one thing that male sports fans want to see in their spaces and on their screens, it's more of me.' Unluckily for them, the brand-building between Kelce and Swift looks set to make their association unavoidable. New Heights is part of their lore: after Kelce tried and failed to land a meeting with Swift after an Eras show, he told listeners he wanted to meet her. Intrigued, she took him up on it. The synchronicity began. It can be no mistake that Kelce's cover of GQ magazine landed the same week as Swift's podcast. Meanwhile, Swift rarely gives interviews: New Heights offers a mutually beneficial space where the couple wield full control, albeit with a soft touch: giving cute disclosures, such as his love of wild otters or her running to tell him about getting her masters back when he was gaming with the boys. The moment capitalised on the prevailing trend for A-listers to reserve their media engagements for fairly fannish video podcasts, making traditional journalists fear for their jobs as they dutifully write up any news lines. Premiering Wednesday night in the US, the episode livestream crashed; within 24 hours it had 13m YouTube views, not including other podcast platform stats. The value to advertisers is huge, especially in anticipation of future Swift revelations. And Kelce, a comparatively old player at 35, is rumoured to be retiring after the coming season – his 13th year, Swift's lucky number – so will be power-brokering his post-game career. He admitted to GQ he had literally taken his eye off the ball, with underwhelming stats in his past two seasons, because he was chasing other opportunities. 'It's his Steven Bartlett, Diary of a CEO move,' said the publicist. 'It's future-proofing their lives. He can't be a football player for ever; she can't be a pop star for ever. It makes them a unit – look at how it worked for the Beckhams.' After a backlash around 2015-16 resulting from her beef with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, Swift managed to convincingly reboot her brand: a dedicated, literary songwriter who fights for artists' rights. To onlookers outside the NFL, Kelce's is ripe for shaping from two years of dating Swift. The couple are clearly conscious of this: Kelce told GQ he had 'become way more strategic in understanding what I am portraying to people', something you may imagine constitutes pillow talk in a business-minded household. 'No man has ever said those words,' said the publicist. Kelce's image is openhearted romantic. Notably, he is Swift's first significant boyfriend to seem undaunted by her celebrity – her previous six-year relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn took place almost entirely in private. A sweet aspect of the New Heights episode was two beefy jocks being so excited by and supportive of a girly pop star. Swift joked of his public entreaty to date her that 'this is sort of what I've been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager'. The couple riffed on memes questioning Kelce's intelligence – 'it's so hot when she says big words,' he said when Swift called Folklore 'esoteric' – which is in itself very smart: positioning Kelce as lovable and non-threatening. Swift said she immediately warmed to him for not being 'judgmental', describing him as 'a vibe booster in everyone's life … like a human exclamation point'. The implication is that he could pep up your sentences if you let him into your heart. Kelce's post-football business is being everyone's boyfriend, not just Swift's. His pesky family ties to Maga Trumpists won't hurt him in the US; if Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris in the last election, were to be questioned about this, 'her argument can be that she's the leftwing voice in these rooms', the publicist said. Win-win. Although Swift seemed keen to establish some distance from the voluble TTPD era, a song from The Anthology about her and Kelce's relationship seems to outline her present mindset. 'I'm making a comeback to where I belong,' she sings on The Alchemy. 'Ditch the clowns, get the crown / Baby, I'm the one to beat … These blokes warm the benches / We've been on a winning streak.' That streak is assured: next year marks the 20th anniversary of Swift's self-titled debut, and she will inevitably release the re-recording to mark the occasion. Showgirl's successor will be her 13th album, a significant moment in her lore. There are rumours of a behind-the-scenes Eras documentary to complement the record-breaking concert movie, extending the moment's IP. Any new tour will once again recalibrate the live industry. Before Swift drops a note of music, or Kelce touches grass, they're the coming season's reigning champions.
Daily Mail
6 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Bill Maher stuns with savage Hunter Biden barb after Melania Trump threatens $1 billion lawsuit for Epstein remarks
Bill Maher took aim at Hunter Biden after Melania Trump revealed she plans to sue him for defamation after he claimed she was introduced to Donald Trump by Jeffrey Epstein. The first lady revealed Wednesday that she will sue Hunter for $1 billion after he refused to apologize and take down a podcast video where he made the false claim. Maher, one of the few liberals who criticized the coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, took his shots at the troubled former First Son on his HBO show. 'Melania says she's gonna sue Hunter Biden,' he said, to immediate chuckles from the audience. 'That's not the joke part! I really like this where she says she's gonna sue him for a billion dollars.' He then explained why the first lady was suing Biden before delivering the punchline. 'If Hunter loses, it's going to be weird for him writing a woman a check because she's not a prostitute,' Maher joked to laughs and applause. Maher famously said in 2022 there was a 'conspiracy to get rid of' ex-President Donald Trump that involved suppressing the New York Post's infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. The controversy began in an interview with the Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan podcast, where Hunter Biden cited a Daily Beast report for his claim about the first lady sourced to author Michael Wolff. The first lady's lawyer Alejandro Brito called Hunter Biden's comments 'false, defamatory, and lewd'. 'Given your vast history of trading on the names of others-including your surname-for your personal benefit, it is obvious that you published these false and defamatory statements about Mrs. Trump to draw attention to yourself,' Brito wrote in a letter, first obtained by Fox News Digital. After Mrs. Trump threatened legal action, Hunter shared his public reaction on Callaghan's show. 'F**k that. That's not going to happen,' Biden replied, after Callaghan showed him a copy of the letter. Hunter defended his comments, citing reporting from Wolff's book, and a 2019 story from the New York Times that reported Epstein was 'claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump'. Other media outlets backed down from the false claim, including the Daily Beast, which retracted the story and apologized. Political operative James Carville also deleted a podcast video where he made the claim and apologized. Hunter defied the lawsuit threat and vowed to take the Trumps to court, even as he estimated the lawsuit would probably cost 'millions' of dollars. 'If they want to go through the process, then they know it's going to cost them an enormous amount of money to do it,' he said. 'We gotta figure out how we're going to pay for it.' The president is championing the decision by his wife to sue Biden for his claim. 'I told her, let's go ahead and do it. I let her use my lawyers,' Trump revealed to Fox News radio host Brian Kilmeade in an interview on Thursday. 'She was very upset about it.' Trump repeated that the claim was false and easily disproven. 'Jeffrey Epstein had nothing to do with Melania and introducing,' he said, criticizing Hunter and other media outlets that aired the claim. 'But they do that to demean, they make up stories ... I mean, I can tell you exactly how ... it was another person, actually. I did meet through another person. But it wasn't Jeffrey Epstein.' The president pointed to his success in getting media outlets to back down in response to lawsuits, which prompted his endorsement of the lawsuit. 'I said go forward, you know, I've done pretty well on these lawsuits lately,' Trump said.
