The William Westerfeld House is a haunted time capsule
State of play: The more-than-a-century-old gothic Victorian at 1198 Fulton St. has been the site of a Czarist Russian-run brothel and social club, jazz-era flophouse, psychedelic-using hippie commune and host to occult film sets and rumored satanic rituals, earning it an eerie reputation.
Catch up quick: The 28-room mansion was built in 1889 by local architect Henry Geilfuss for the affluent German baker and confectioner William Westerfeld, who was in poor health when he died there just a few years later.
The intrigue: The house is colloquially referred to as "The Russian Embassy," earning the moniker after Russian émigrés purchased it in the late 1920s and turned the ballroom into a club called "Dark Eyes" for social gatherings.
It later belonged to various owners, including The Palace Hotel architect John Mahoney and underground filmmaker Kenneth Anger, who regularly hosted friends like Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey.
Today, gothic enthusiast Jim Siegel owns the house and has restored its original Victorian flourishes with the hope it can become a museum one day.
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Newsweek
36 minutes ago
- Newsweek
Anna Delvey Rabbit Drama Explained After Bunnies Dumped in Park
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Notorious fraudster Anna Delvey is back in the spotlight this week after an assistant on one of her photoshoots admitted to abandoning rabbits in a New York park — the bizarre end to an unusual chain of events. Newsweek has emailed Delvey outside of regular working hours for comment. Why It Matters Delvey, whose real name is Anna Sorokin, first made headlines back in October 2017, when she was arrested for pretending to be a German heiress to deceive hotels, banks and individuals out of over $200,000. In 2019, she was found guilty of eight theft-related charges. She was released from prison in 2021 but was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for overstaying her visa. She was released from ICE in 2022 and is currently under house arrest. Her story was the subject of the Netflix miniseries Inventing Anna, in 2022. L: Anna Delvey is seen on May 16, 2025 in New York City. R: A Desert Cottontail rabbit, also known as Audubon's cottontail, pauses in a cactus garden in Santa Fe, New Mexico. L: Anna Delvey is seen on May 16, 2025 in New York City. R: A Desert Cottontail rabbit, also known as Audubon's cottontail, pauses in a cactus garden in Santa Fe, New Mexico. BG048/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/What To Know The case of the abandoned rabbits began with a post on a local Facebook group about a bunny dumped in Brooklyn's Prospect Park, according to Terry Chao, a vegan blogger who documented the drama on her Instagram account. Chao and others saved the cotton-tailed hopper on Monday, and named it Parker. Three days later, Chao said, a second rabbit was seen in the park and also rescued. This rabbit was christened Moon. It was a mystery as to how the two long-eared lagomorphs ended up in Prospect Park. Then, the Anna Delvey photos appeared. The scammer-turned-social-media-star posted a series of images to her Instagram profile posing with two rabbits on leashes. A video of her and the tethered carrot munchers was also uploaded. Chao said she was notified on Saturday about the shoot but initially did not know that the bunnies she had saved in the park were the same animals in Delvey's photoshoot. However, she soon realized they were, and in a strange twist of fate, revealed she had been contacted by the photographer's assistant, Christian Batty, about using her own pet for the shoot. "I saw the person tagged in the insta post, oh, it was the same person who tried to scout my bunny!" Chao wrote. "That's weird, I thought. Wait, the bunny Anna is holding and trancing (a type of hold on the bunny's back that puts it into a fear state) is strikingly similar to Parker." Instagram users began accusing Delvey and her team of abandoning the rabbits, which they denied. In one reply, Delvey wrote: "I will find and sue dimwits like yourself who simply refuse to accept that the bunnies that were borrowed for our shoot are safe at home with their owners." Batty wrote in response to another commenter: "It isn't the same bunny, as that bunny is located in Yonkers. And as you said you found 4 bunnies in prospect park, we only had 2. One so happens to look like one of the ones you found in the park and now it's Anna's fault? It sounds like someone trying to find an easy solution to a problem bigger than a photoshoot with rabbits that were ethically sourced!" Batty eventually though, came clean. In a post shared by Delvey on Instagram Stories the assistant wrote: "I lied to Anna, and the rest of Anna's team about the rabbits." "When I realized the rabbits were being surrendered to me, I panicked. At 19, with no experience caring for animals, no pet-friendly housing, and no knowledge of available resources, I felt overwhelmed and made the worst possible choice. Believing mistakenly, that there were existing rabbits in that area, I released them there, thinking that was my best option. That belief was wrong, and I regret it deeply." Newsweek contacted Batty for comment via direct message on Facebook, and also on Instagram, but that account later appeared to be deactivated. Chao said on Instagram that Batty "did physically show up to help me successfully catch" a third rabbit that appears not to have been used in the final photoshoot Newsweek emailed Chao for further comment outside of regular working hours. What People Are Saying Terry Chao, on Instagram, wrote: "I hope this entire episode has helped in spreading awareness that you CANNOT DUMP YOUR PETS in the park. Owning a pet is a PRIVILEGE not a right." What Happens Next Chao shared in posts to social media that she is taking donations to help care for the bunnies, and looking for foster families for them.
Atlantic
a day ago
- Atlantic
A Novel That Skewers Meritocracy
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Welcome back to The Daily's Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what's keeping them entertained. Today's special guest is Isaac Stanley-Becker, a staff writer who has reported on Steve Witkoff's role as President Donald Trump's 'shadow secretary of state,' the early tenure of Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, and the dire situation at the Federal Aviation Administration. Isaac has crowned 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' as the greatest song of all time, enjoys rereading old email exchanges with friends, and is transfixed by the ambiguous nature of Mark Rothko's paintings. The Culture Survey: Isaac Stanley-Becker A good recommendation I recently received: A German politician recently recommended Michael Young's satirical 1958 novel The Rise of the Meritocracy to me. The book popularized the term meritocracy, but Young, a sociologist who helped develop Britain's postwar welfare state, meant it as a pejorative. His story envisions a dystopian future society stratified by educational achievement rather than social class, concluding with a wave of protests in which a group called the 'populists' rebel against the meritocratic elite. My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: Rereading old emails with friends. I've always been drawn to letters (I recommend the published correspondence between the poets Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, with a terrific translation by Christopher Clark), and email is an approximation of that experience. I enjoy returning to the little asides and evasions and expressions of affection. The television show I'm most enjoying right now: The Bear is a perfect TV show, and I'm savoring the fourth season at the moment. I tell everyone who gets overwhelmed by the chaos of the first season to wait because good things are in store. The show is a tender study of people struggling to do right by themselves and others. It's also a paean to Chicago, my hometown, a city about which Nelson Algren wrote: 'Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.' Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A friend recently soothed her baby with a West African lullaby called ' Mami wata,' by Issa Dakuyo. A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: 'Slow Show,' by the National, and '40-16 Building,' by Nas. An online creator whom I'm a fan of: I'm not sure how Melvyn Bragg would feel about the designation of 'online creator,' but I'm a fan of his show on BBC Radio 4, In Our Time, in which he convenes several experts on a given topic and peppers them with questions for about an hour. There's something for everyone: hypnosis, Bauhaus, the Haymarket Affair. One of my favorite episodes is on W. H. Auden —it's fitting for the 2020s, our own ' low dishonest decade.' The last museum or gallery show that I loved: I recently took a tour through five centuries of the Middle Ages in a single room at the Palazzo Citterio, in Milan. Objects as disparate as northern-Italian mosaics and Gothic marble heads recorded the eclectic interests of Lamberto Vitali, a 20th-century critic and collector who believed that art was able to dissolve geographical and temporal boundaries. An author I will read anything by: For fiction, Péter Nádas. For nonfiction, Kathryn Schulz. For commentary, I'm a devoted reader of Adam Tooze's Substack and articles in the Financial Times. A painting, sculpture, or other piece of visual art that I cherish: I'm very fond of Mark Rothko's paintings, and some of the best are on view in the National Gallery of Art's East Building, including No. 1 (1961). When I'm face-to-face with these hovering blocks of color, I can't tell whether I'm looking at something natural or unnatural, human or inhuman. Rothko's own words lend this ambiguity a sense of high drama. As part of the 'Paintings on Paper' exhibition from about a year ago, the National Gallery displayed his haunting statement: 'You think my paintings are calm, like windows in some cathedral? You should LOOK AGAIN. I'm the most violent of all the American painters. Behind those colors there hides the final cataclysm.' A musical artist who means a lot to me: Bob Dylan. I think 'Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' is the greatest song of all time. A favorite story I've read in The Atlantic: I loved Jennifer Senior's recent story on insomnia. But everything Jennifer writes is completely captivating. The last thing that made me cry: I cried during I'm Still Here, a film about the military dictatorship in Brazil and the disappearance of the dissident politician Rubens Paiva. What got me, in particular, was the moment when a photographer visited the Paiva family home and told them to look sad for the camera, but they insisted on smiling and laughing. I was overcome by this simple fortitude. The last thing that made me snort with laughter: I laughed out loud reading my friend Johannes Lichtman's novel Such Good Work, about a recovering addict whose quest for moral purpose takes him to Sweden amid the international refugee crisis. It's a sweet and very insightful bildungsroman that captures the absurdities of life in the first quarter of the 21st century. A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: Patience doesn't come easily to me, but I try to listen to the admonition that begins Galway Kinnell's 'Wait': Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven't they carried you everywhere, up to now? Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The Week Ahead Rehab: An American Scandal, a book by the Pulitzer finalist Shoshana Walter on true stories about the opioid crisis, and the dark side of the rehab industry (out Tuesday) Americana, a new movie about a Lakota ghost shirt that sets off violence in a small South Dakota town (in theaters Friday Love Is Like, a new album by the pop-rock band Maroon 5 (out Friday) Essay Captain Ron's Guide to Fearless Flying I'd experienced 21 years of unmemorable flights before my own fear of flying took hold. In May 2015, I was traveling from my home state of Iowa to New York City for a summer internship. I was already nervous about moving, and then, somewhere above Illinois, the plane hit a patch of turbulence and dropped what felt like a thousand feet. Several people screamed. For the first time in my life, I began to experience what I would later understand to be panic: My face and neck went clammy, and black spots filled my vision. At one point, an overhead bin popped open and a few unbuckled passengers smacked their head on the ceiling. They were all okay, and, physically, so was I. But I had unlocked a new fear. More in Culture What's really behind the cult of Labubu Mrs. Dalloway's midlife crisis The tech novel's warning for a screen-addled age Six books that explain how flying really works Catch Up on The Atlantic Does the stock market know something we don't? How Democrats tied their own hands on redistricting Annie Lowrey: Children's health care is in danger. Photo Album This week, NASA marked the 13th anniversary of its Curiosity rover landing on Mars. Curiosity has now traveled more than 22 miles over the course of 4,620 Martian days, making numerous discoveries across this planet. Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter
Buzz Feed
2 days ago
- Buzz Feed
15 Celeb Scandals That Should've Been WAY Bigger
I honestly can't believe more people don't talk about the Katy Perry vs. nuns debacle. Essentially, Perry bought a former convent in 2015 — only the nuns of Most Holy and Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary had already sold it to restaurateur Dana Hollister, who had moved in. The archdiocese, who sold the property to Perry, claimed the nuns hadn't had the right to sell the property, and a messy legal battle began. In one post-judgement hearing (after the judge ruled against the nuns), one of the nuns, 89-year-old Catherine Rose Holzman, collapsed and died. The nuns preferred Dana as an owner because she would keep the convent open to the public, converting it into a hotel. Also, they would not get any money from the sale to Perry, despite the fact that they had originally purchased the convent in the first place. Holzman also said, "Katy Perry represents everything we don't believe in. It would be a sin to sell to her." Hours before her death, Holzman spoke to the press, saying she and the other nuns had asked the Vatican for help. Holzman pleaded with Perry "to please stop" pursuing the purchase, saying, "It's not doing anyone any good except hurting a lot of people." The last surviving nun, Sister Mary Callinan, told the New York Post in 2019 that Perry has 'blood on her hands." It's unclear if the sale even ever actually went through, and it doesn't look like Perry has ever lived there. It doesn't appear Perry has addressed the case publicly. Speaking of Perry — I feel like most people aren't aware of her sexual misconduct allegations, beyond the viral uncomfortable video of her kissing an American Idol contestant. She's additionally been accused of touching and kissing a Russian TV host without consent and exposing model Josh Kloss's genitals to others at a party. Oh, and remember the time she squeezed 18-year-old Shawn Mendes's butt? Katy issued a response stating, 'I don't want to say 'guilty until proven innocent,' but there's no checks and balances: A headline just flies, right? And there's no investigation of what it is. I don't want to add to the noise. I want to add to the truth, basically.' However, she did not explicitly deny the allegations, saying, 'I don't comment on all the things that are said about me because if I chase that dragon, it would be about true and false-ing my whole life. It's distracting from the real movement.' I also feel like Jenny McCarthy didn't get quite enough flack for forcibly grabbing and kissing Justin Bieber onstage at the 2012 American Music Awards. Justin, who was 18 at the time, even said directly after the incident that he felt "violated." McCarthy later said, 'I couldn't help it, he was just so delicious, so little, and just, ahhhk, I wanted to tear his head off and eat it," and that she "kind of molested him." She added, 'I want some Bieber fever — and I want a Bieber rash. It'd be like cougar rape.' It doesn't appear Bieber or McCarthy ever addressed this incident beyond McCarthy's above comments directly afterwards. I feel like the controversy people talk about surrounding Nicki Minaj is usually related to her vaccine-related tweets, but the one they should be talking about is far worse. Back in 2021, Minaj and her husband Kenneth Petty were sued for intimidating a woman (Jennifer Hough) who had previously accused Petty of raping her at gunpoint. In fact, Petty had been convicted of attempted rape back in 1994 and served four and a half years in prison. In the lawsuit, Hough alleged Minaj had "directly and indirectly intimidated, harassed, and threatened [Jennifer Hough] to recant her legitimate claim that Defendant Petty raped her.' Hough later dropped the lawsuit against Minaj, who called it "an entirely frivolous case which plaintiff's counsel has brought against me in an effort to use my name to generate publicity for himself." The civil case against Petty is ongoing, but Minaj has been dropped as a co-defendant, though she is still "prominently mentioned" in the lawsuit. Shia LaBeouf garnered critical acclaim for his film Honey Boy, which was meant to be based on his childhood. Notably, in the film, the main character's father is abusive. Except LaBeouf later admitted that the depiction of his father as abusive was "fucking nonsense" and that he'd "vilified [him] on a grand scale." He continued, 'My dad was so loving to me my whole life. Fractured, sure. Crooked, sure. Wonky, for sure. But never was not loving, never was not there. He was always there…and I'd done a world press tour about how f***ed he was as a man. ... My dad never hit me, never." Kevin Hart admitted to domestic violence in his memoir I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons, even saying he once spent the night in jail after an argument with his then-partner Torrei turned physical. He described thinking, 'When it got violent where we're fighting — Am I really fighting? Am I holding my hands up as if she's a man right now? Oh my God. This is…I'm out. I've really got my hands up to not defend, but counter. Like, I'm waiting for you to throw a punch. Cuz I'm about to counter the s*** out of you.' Jamie Dornan once stalked a woman in order to prepare to play serial killer Paul Spector in The Fall. 'This is a really bad reveal: I, like, followed a woman off the train one day to see what it felt like to pursue someone like that. I really kept my distance," he revealed to the LA Times. "She got off a few stops earlier than I was planning so I said right, I have to commit to this. I followed her around a couple of street corners and then was like: What are you doing?" "It felt kind of exciting, in a really sort of dirty way. I'm sort of not proud of myself," Dornan continued. "But I do honestly think I learned something from it, because I've obviously never done any of that. It was intriguing and interesting to enter that process of 'what are you following her for?' and 'what are you trying to find out?'' He even wondered aloud, "Can we get arrested for this?" before telling the story. Joe Jonas reportedly asked out Gigi Hadid when she was only 13 years old. "He asked me to a baseball game, and I said no," Hadid revealed. "I was so nervous; I literally didn't even know what it meant to hang out with a boy." If Hadid's timeline is right, Jonas would've been 19 at the time, but since Hadid says this happened at the Grammys, it was more likely when Hadid was 14 and Jonas was 20 (as this was the first time Hadid attended the Grammys). After Hadid told Jonas "maybe next time," she says Joe "wrote his number on a piece of paper and gave it to my mom." The two later dated in 2015, when Hadid was 20 and Jonas was 26. Am I the only one who didn't know that Robert De Niro, along with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., once offered $100,000 to anyone who could prove that vaccines are safe? This came after participating in a panel that flouted debunked vaccine claims, including that they cause autism. (De Niro's son has autism.) Oh, and De Niro wanted to put an anti-vax film in the Tribeca Film Festival, calling it "very personal" to him, though he later pulled it. For the record, De Niro has said he's not anti-vaccine, and that he simply wants "safe vaccines." We also obviously know about the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp defamation trial, but one part that consistently gets overlooked is Paul Bettany's part. Bettany, a friend of Depp's, exchanged numerous texts with Depp about Heard, some of which concerned burning and drowning her. 'I'm not sure we should burn Amber," Bettany wrote after Depp suggested it. "She is delightful company and pleasing on the eye. We could of course do the English course of action and perform a drowning test. Thoughts? You have a swimming pool." Depp reportedly wrote back, 'Let's drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she's dead.' Bettany reportedly replied, 'My thoughts entirely. Let's be certain before we pronounce her a witch.' Depp later said he was ashamed of these messages, said they were an example of 'irreverent and abstract humour' based on a Monty Python sketch, and claimed "none of that was ever intended to be real." Bettany later called it an "unpleasant feeling" to have his private messages read aloud in court and said he hadn't spoken out about it at the time because he didn't want to "just pour fuel on the fire." Speaking of Depp — unsealed court documents from the same defamation trial suggest that Depp was investigated by the LAPD and the Department of Family Services for allowing his then-15-year-old daughter, Lily-Rose, to live with her 23-year-old boyfriend next door to him in his condo. No charges were filed, and Depp has never publicly responded to these allegations, though the witness in the documents testified that they felt Depp had made false statements in order for the charges not to be filed. These statements were made in response to questions asking about Depp's supposed "penchant for not telling the truth" and were part of a larger case, so there were no other mentions I could see relating to possible statutory rape charges. Depp was not cross-examined on this specific claim. Heard did not seem to address these claims either, beyond alleging that Depp had once let an older musician whom Lily-Rose had a crush on stay over at his house when Lily-Rose was 14. Lily-Rose has not commented on these specific claims. "I asked him afterwards, I said, 'It must have gone pretty well,' and he said, 'Yeah,'" the witness, who appears to be his former agent Tracey Jacobs*, described. "I said, 'Well you couldn't have told them the truth.' And he just smiled." None of the claims reference specific names, but according to People magazine, Lily-Rose dated model Ash Stymest when she was 16 and he was 24, so this may have been the "boyfriend" the witness refers to, as the age gap lines up.*The court documents name her as one of the witnesses, then the ensuing transcripts refer to the specific witness speaking as an experienced talent agent who stopped working with Depp in 2016 after a 30-year working relationship. While Halle Berry has never publicly named her attacker, she has claimed that one of her exes, a well-known star, once "hit her so hard, her left eardrum was punctured" causing her to flee so quickly "there were skid marks." Singer Christopher Williams, who dated Halle, later alleged that the attacker was Wesley Snipes. Ex-boyfriend David Justice later claimed the same in a series of now-deleted tweets that were supported by Berry's ex-husband Eric Benét. Snipes and Berry did not respond to requests to comment from E! when it reported on the incident in 2004. Sean Penn was also accused of attacking Madonna when they were married. He allegedly tied her to a chair for nine hours, until she was able to escape and run to the police station. Originally, Penn was charged with battery and inflicting 'corporal injury and traumatic conditions,' but Madonna later pulled the complaints, though she did file for divorce. R&B singer Michel'le has publicly accused Dr. Dre (with whom she shares a child) of beating her so badly that she had to get plastic surgery on her nose to repair the damage. In the Season 1 reunion special of R&B Divas: Los Angeles, when host Wendy Williams pointed out that she had to be referring to Dr. Dre, Michel'le replied, "He knows it. That was very public," and said he often gave her black eyes right before she'd shoot music videos. According to Michel'le, they also started a relationship when she was only 17. Dr. Dre later publicly apologized for his past behavior toward women (which Michel'le didn't feel was genuine because it was public and not personally to her), and acknowledged that some allegations against him were true, though he then denied having abused Michel'le. And finally, we'll end on the scandal surrounding the never-released Tobey Maguire and Leonardo DiCaprio movie Don's Plum. Basically, Maguire and DiCaprio starred in a movie that was essentially about a group of awful people talking in a diner. The movie was never released in the US, and in fact is not allowed to be released in the US after a legal battle where Maguire and DiCaprio claimed they had never been informed the film was a feature with a commercial release. (Director R. D. Robb and producer Dale Wheatley later settled with Maguire and DiCaprio.) Years later, Wheatley made the film available via request on his site freedonsplum, writing "Leonardo DiCaprio has done everything in his power to bury this film and me along with it." Wheatley also alleged frightening behavior from Maguire, who he says screamed at him for 12 hours about releasing the film. Oh, and he's also tweeted that "Leo is Tobey's little bitch," and that "there's something strange about their relationship — I do believe Tobey has something on Leo." One man's opinion, sure, but I still think this whole saga is pretty wild, and there's a lot we don't know. If you want to learn more, the New York Post even ended up making a documentary about it, but the most in-depth description IMO is this Reddit write-up by gestatingsquid, which is based on Wheatley's comments and interviews (which are also linked in the post). Obviously, we can't confirm Wheatley's comments or gestatingsquid's conclusions, especially since neither Maguire nor DiCaprio have spoken publicly about the film. Our only comments from the two come from the case itself, which this Vanity Fair piece reviewed, and are mostly in reference to the claims in the lawsuit about whether or not the film was a short. Maguire did not reply to requests for comment from Vanity Fair, and DiCaprio declined to comment. What's a celebrity scandal or allegation that you feel never blew up? Let us know in the comments.
