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Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Blake Lively's Critique of Justin Baldoni Gains Support from 19 Women's Groups
Blake Lively called out Justin Baldoni, and now, 19 women's rights groups are backing her. What started as a legal dispute has turned into a public reckoning, with advocacy organizations stepping in to defend Lively's right to speak out. They are not just supporting her claims of sexual harassment but also calling out Baldoni's legal tactics as dangerous to survivors everywhere. In a new wave of support, 14 additional organizations, including the National Organization for Women and the National Network to End Domestic Violence, filed amicus curiae briefs. They are urging the court to dismiss Justin Baldoni's $400 million defamation suit against Blake Lively. This brings the total to 19 groups that stand with her. These groups accuse Baldoni of using DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) strategies to silence Lively and twist the narrative. Furthermore, Lively's team directly called out Baldoni's shift in public stance. Once known for his feminist messaging in podcasts, interviews, and his viral 2017 TED Talk, Baldoni now faces criticism for betraying those same values. 'Where he once upon a time urged men to listen to the women in your life … to hold their anguish and actually believe them,' Lively's statement read. 'Now, contradicting years of his own public persona.' In a June 5 statement to Us Weekly, Lively's spokesperson emphasized the significance of the support from 19 organizations, including Child USA and Sanctuary for Families. 'All are united in opposing Justin Baldoni's attempt to dismantle a law designed to protect women who speak up, simply to protect himself,' the statement read. For those in need of more context, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's lawsuit battle started in December last year when Lively sued Baldoni, alleging sexual harassment and reputational damage. Baldoni denied the claims and countersued Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist for $400 million, accusing them of defamation. Both sides have filed motions to dismiss aspects of the case, with a trial expected in 2026. The post Blake Lively's Critique of Justin Baldoni Gains Support from 19 Women's Groups appeared first on - Movie Trailers, TV & Streaming News, and More.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Blake Lively's Allegations Against Justin Baldoni Supported By 19 Advocacy Groups
Blake Lively called out Justin Baldoni, and now, 19 women's rights groups are backing her. What started as a legal dispute has turned into a public reckoning, with advocacy organizations stepping in to defend Lively's right to speak out. They are not just supporting her claims of sexual harassment but also calling out Baldoni's legal tactics as dangerous to survivors everywhere. In a new wave of support, 14 additional organizations, including the National Organization for Women and the National Network to End Domestic Violence, filed amicus curiae briefs. They are urging the court to dismiss Justin Baldoni's $400 million defamation suit against Blake Lively. This brings the total to 19 groups that stand with her. These groups accuse Baldoni of using DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender) strategies to silence Lively and twist the narrative. Furthermore, Lively's team directly called out Baldoni's shift in public stance. Once known for his feminist messaging in podcasts, interviews, and his viral 2017 TED Talk, Baldoni now faces criticism for betraying those same values. 'Where he once upon a time urged men to listen to the women in your life … to hold their anguish and actually believe them,' Lively's statement read. 'Now, contradicting years of his own public persona.' In a June 5 statement to Us Weekly, Lively's spokesperson emphasized the significance of the support from 19 organizations, including Child USA and Sanctuary for Families. 'All are united in opposing Justin Baldoni's attempt to dismantle a law designed to protect women who speak up, simply to protect himself,' the statement read. For those in need of more context, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's lawsuit battle started in December last year when Lively sued Baldoni, alleging sexual harassment and reputational damage. Baldoni denied the claims and countersued Lively, her husband Ryan Reynolds, and her publicist for $400 million, accusing them of defamation. Both sides have filed motions to dismiss aspects of the case, with a trial expected in 2026. Originally reported by Devanshi Basu on ComingSoon. The post Blake Lively's Allegations Against Justin Baldoni Supported By 19 Advocacy Groups appeared first on Mandatory.
New York Times
12-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Selma Miriam, Founder of the Feminist Restaurant Bloodroot, Dies at 89
Selma Miriam and Noel Furie were unhappy housewives, as they put it, when they met at a gathering of the National Organization for Women in Connecticut in 1972. Soon after, they divorced their husbands, came out as lesbians and set about creating a place for women to congregate. Ms. Miriam was a talented and adventurous cook, and at first they held dinners at her house, charging $8 for a weekly buffet of lush vegetarian dishes — a culinary choice they made because a friend pointed out that a feminist food enterprise should not contribute to the suffering of animals. In 1977 they opened Bloodroot, a feminist restaurant and bookstore tucked into an industrial building on a dead-end street in Bridgeport. They had no waiters, no printed menu and no cash register, and they did not advertise. Against the odds, the business thrived. 'The people who need us, find us,' Ms. Miriam always said. Selma Miriam died on Feb. 6 at her home in Westport, Conn. She was 89. The cause was pneumonia, her longtime partner, Carolanne Curry, said. 'We don't just want a piece of the pie, we want a whole new recipe,' Ms. Miriam declared in 'A Culinary Uprising: The Story of Bloodroot,' a feature-length 2024 documentary about the restaurant. (Another documentary, 'Bloodroot,' came out in 2019.) She was determined to live her values, as she put it, and Bloodroot was the embodiment of those values: a place for good conversation, activism and terrific food. It was also a non-hierarchical endeavor; customers served themselves and cleared their own tables. At first, Bloodroot was run as a collective, though the early members eventually moved on. In recent decades, it has been a collective of two: Ms. Miriam and Ms. Furie. (They dated very briefly many decades ago, and they remained fast friends.) An avid gardener, Ms. Miriam named the restaurant for the native plant that begins flowering in early spring and spreads through a root system that grows underground, forming new colonies of flowers. 'Separate but connected' was the metaphor she was after. She also liked the toughness of the name. With help from her parents, along with $19,000 she had squirreled away from her 75-cents-an-hour work as a landscaper and an onerous mortgage from the only bank among the many she approached that would loan to a woman in Connecticut in the 1970s, she bought a former machine shop in a working-class neighborhood in Bridgeport for $80,000. It was a funky space, but it had room for a garden in the back, and it overlooked Long Island Sound. She and her colleagues filled the place with thrift-shop furniture, political posters, and vintage photos and paintings of women. Over the years, customers contributed photos of their own mothers and grandmothers. 'The wall of women,' Ms. Miriam and Ms. Furie called it. The space had cozy nooks for armchairs, and the bookstore was filled with the feminist canon, as well as handwritten notes from fans, including the writers Andrea Dworkin, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, among the many who gave readings there. The house cats were named for feminist heroes like Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem. To create her ever-changing menus, Ms. Miriam drew on vegetarian culinary traditions from around the world, using food she sourced locally and grew in the restaurant's garden. The women who joined her in the kitchen — immigrants from Brazil, Ethiopia, Mexico, Honduras and Jamaica, among other countries — contributed dishes from their national cuisines. One of the women, Carol Graham, who is Jamaican, came up with the recipe for their jerk 'chicken,' made with tofu and seitan, which has long been one of Bloodroot's best sellers. Soups like Cambodian kanji, with rice, potatoes and cashews, were a mainstay. In recent years, Ms. Miriam had begun experimenting with vegan cheeses made from cultured nut milks. The New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao, who visited in 2017, just before the restaurant's 40th birthday, wrote that she was partial to a 'deeply flavored Cheddar-like number with a ripe, softly alcoholic aroma, named after the writer Willa Cather.' Bloodroot was conceived as a women-only community, but it drew men, too. Customers captivated by the homey atmosphere and the evolving menu stayed loyal for decades, which kept the place afloat in lean times. 'When we started,' Ms. Furie said in an interview, 'it felt like we were jumping off a cliff.' Paying homage to that spirit, a framed photograph from the 1991 movie 'Thelma and Louise,' about another pair of women who went rogue, hangs in Bloodroot's open kitchen. 'There are people who come in with their 3-year-old and say, 'I came here when I was 3, and now I'm back with my child,' and I think how amazing that we had that impact, without even planning it,' Ms. Miriam told The Washington Post in 2017. 'We followed our political and social beliefs, and had an appreciation for the earth and the animals — all the things that fall under the broad umbrella of feminism.' Selma Miriam Davidson was born on Feb. 25, 1935, in the Bronx, and grew up in Bridgeport. She was the only child of Faye and Elias Davidson, who opened a fabric store, Davidson's Fabrics, on Main Street in Bridgeport the year she was born. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Jackson College, then the women's school at Tufts University in Massachusetts, in 1956. (She majored in biology and psychology, but she said the best thing she learned in college was how to knit continental style.) She met her husband, Abe Bunks, who would become a lawyer, while she was in college. When they divorced in 1976, she began using her middle name as her surname. Ms. Miriam was frank about her history. She spoke of the illegal abortion she had at 15, with help from her parents, who did not want their only child to drop out of school. She talked about becoming pregnant in college, the result of an ill-fitting diaphragm, which curtailed her hopes of pursuing a Ph.D. in biology. She was preternaturally tough. The week Bloodroot opened, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her doctor removed the lump in an outpatient procedure, but told her that if she didn't have a radical mastectomy, she would be dead within three years. She refused because she didn't want to miss work. 'I was the only one who could cook,' she pointed out. The cancer never recurred, and she remained suspicious of the medical profession, preferring to treat herself with homeopathic remedies. For most of her life, she did not have health insurance. In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Miriam is survived by her children, Sabrina and Carey Bunks. Ms. Curry said she met Ms. Miriam when she came for lunch one day in 1988 — and she stayed for dinner for 37½ years. 'There's no reason we should have made this work, and in a lot of ways we didn't make it work,' Ms. Miriam said of the restaurant in 'A Culinary Uprising,' noting that Bloodroot was not always a moneymaker. 'But we've had a life.'
New York Times
01-03-2025
- New York Times
In U.S., Tate Brothers Are Met With a Mixed Reception
Andrew Tate rose to fame on a message of forceful masculinity that positioned men as rightful dominators over women. From his base in Romania, he promised to help guide men through 'the Matrix,' his conspiratorial term for a world that he says unfairly demonizes men, and called the criminal accusations against him evidence of persecution. Now, the sudden arrival of Mr. Tate and his brother Tristan Tate in Florida has alarmed women's rights groups and women who say they have been victimized by the brothers. Questions over whether U.S. officials intervened to help the Tates have only added to concerns that their ideology will thrive, even as they face separate investigations in Romania and Britain. Here is what to know about the response to their arrival in the country. Accusers called the move a 'slap in the face.' 'It felt like their power knows no bounds,' said Dani Pinter, a lawyer representing an American woman who has accused the Tate brothers of luring her to Romania to exploit her. The client, who has sued the brothers in a Florida court, was 'terrified and shocked' that they had come to the state, said Ms. Pinter, a senior vice president at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation. After their arrival, Ms. Pinter called it 'a slap in the face to all the victims of the Tate brothers, especially the U.S. victim who is not being protected by her country.' The brothers had been held in Romania since 2022, first over accusations that they romanced women with the intention of forming a criminal group to exploit them for financial gain, and then over sex crime charges from the British authorities. They have denied any wrongdoing and sued one of Ms. Pinter's client for defamation. 'We've yet to be convicted of any crime in our lives, ever,' Mr. Andrew Tate said after landing in Florida on Thursday. Some want them extradited to Britain. Four British women who sued Andrew Tate in Britain over claims that he had raped and abused them urged the British government on Friday to immediately request the brothers' extradition from the United States. The British authorities have sought their arrest over separate criminal accusations of rape and human trafficking. If the government does not request the extradition, 'it won't just be us it will be failing, but all British victims of alleged sexual violence,' the women said in a statement. A spokeswoman for the British Home Office, which oversees policing and crime policy, declined to say whether any extradition request had been made or received. 'I am really concerned that we are going to see their following grow and more of their followers feel like they're going to be invincible,' said Christian F. Nunes, the president of the National Organization for Women. Officials and others need to respond by being 'vocal defenders' of women and girls, she said. Conservatives were divided about their U.S. arrival. The brothers, who have zealously supported President Trump, have previously found support from his associates, including the president's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The Tampa Bay Young Republicans called the brothers 'free speech absolutionists' and welcomed them to the state. But Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said the Tates were not welcome in Florida, and the state's attorney general, James Uthmeier, also a Republican, said that his office would conduct a 'preliminary inquiry' into the brothers. 'Florida has zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women,' Mr. Uthmeier said on Thursday. A lawyer for the influencers said on Thursday that he had lobbied American lawmakers on the brothers' behalf, but declined to comment on whether that effort had been successful. Romanian officials have denied any intervention from U.S. officials in the case. Still, the ties to the administration left women's rights groups worried that the brothers and their views would be bolstered in an environment where the administration has targeted diversity, equity and inclusion programs and protections against gender discrimination. The Tate brothers, much like Mr. Trump, have tapped into the genuine suffering that men and boys experience as they struggle with loneliness, suicide, drugs and the feeling that their identities as men have been demonized, said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University in Washington. The brothers have sold access to an online community and courses that promised to teach men how to use women to build wealth. They offer the narrative, Dr. Miller-Idriss said, that 'you can be back on top — all you have to do is dominate women.' 'To some extent, a lot of boys and men feel like he's saying the things nobody else will say,' she said, 'and the MAGA campaign and the Trump campaign has done the same thing.' They still face investigations. What happens now that the brothers are in the United States remains unclear. Joseph McBride, a lawyer for the brothers, did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Romanian prosecutors did not name the brothers, but said that two British American citizens who had been allowed to leave Romania would still need to appear before a court there when summoned. Although an indictment against them in Romania was withdrawn, investigations over sex trafficking accusations are still active. Without an active indictment, the lifting of a travel ban against the Tate brothers was legal, said Silvia Tabusca, a law lecturer at the Romanian-American University in Bucharest. 'If they are not coming back, they will face an international warrant and international action,' she said. But it is possible, she said, that the United States could decide to protect them by arguing that Romania's judicial system is not fair. Vice President JD Vance criticized Romania's democracy in a speech last month in Germany after Romania annulled its presidential election results after finding signs of Russian interference. Ms. Tabusca nonetheless said that because the potential charges the brothers face carry long prison sentences, the investigation in Romania is likely to continue even if they are absent. 'They are not escaping these charges,' she said. It remains to be seen, she said, whether the brothers will return to Romania for a court hearing scheduled for later this month.
Boston Globe
16-02-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Maria Teresa Horta, the last of Portugal's ‘Three Marias,' dies at 87
Advertisement 'To feminists around the world, as well as to champions of a free press, the police action against the Portuguese women in June 1972 was an outrage that slowly became the focus of an international protest movement,' Time magazine wrote in July 1973. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The Three Marias — Horta, Maria Isabel Barreno (1939-2016) and Maria Velho da Costa (1938-2020) — became international feminist folk heroes, and the book's fame alerted the world to repression under the Portuguese dictatorship. Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and Adrienne Rich were among the writers who declared their public support. The National Organization for Women voted to make the case its first international feminist cause. The case was not Horta's first brush with controversy. In 1967 she had been 'beaten in the street' after the publication of her breakthrough volume of poetry, 'Minha Senhora de Mim' ('My Lady of Me'), she told her biographer Patrícia Reis in 2019. That book 'challenged something deeply rooted in this country,' she said: 'the silencing of female sexuality.' Frequent knocks on the door by the Portuguese secret police became part of her life. The themes of her work grew from what she characterized as a dual oppression: being a woman in Portugal's male-dominated society and growing up in a police state. 'I was born in a fascist country, a country that stole liberty, a country of cruelty, prisons, torture,' she told an Italian interviewer in 2018. 'And I understood very early on that I couldn't stand for this.' Advertisement She also wouldn't stand for the oppression of women in Portugal's traditional macho culture. 'Women are beaten or raped just as much by a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, whoever, as by a worker, a peasant and so on,' she told the Lisbon daily Diário de Notícias in 2017. 'Women have always been beaten and have always been raped. People do not consider the violence that goes on in bed, in the sexual act with their husband.' In 1971, these preoccupations inspired Horta to start meeting every week with two friends and fellow authors, Barreno and da Costa, to share written reflections on the common themes that troubled them. They were inspired by a classic work from the 17th century, 'Letters of a Portuguese Nun,' supposedly written by a young woman shut up in a Portuguese convent to the French cavalry officer who had abandoned her. Scholars now believe the work was fiction, but its powerful expression of pent-up longing and frustration resonated with the three Marias. Like the nun in the book, they used letters to one another, as well as poems, to express their unhappiness as women in their early 30s, educated by nuns, married and with children, in a Lisbon stifling under a 35-year dictatorship, rigid Catholicism and ill-judged colonial wars in Africa. When they published the writings as 'New Portuguese Letters,' they vowed never to reveal to outsiders, much less the police, who had written what. 'Their views and natures were far apart,' Neal Ascherson wrote in The New York Review of Books in a review of the 1975 English translation, titled 'The Three Marias.' 'Maria Isabel the coolest, Maria Teresa the gaudiest personality, Maria Fátima the one who swerved away from pure feminism toward social and psychological analyses of a whole people's oppression.' Advertisement The strange hybrid — Ascherson called it 'a huge and complicated garland' — is suffused with repressed rage at the condition the women find themselves in. 'They wanted the three of us to sit in parlors, patiently embroidering our days with the many silences, the many soft words and gestures that custom dictates,' one of the letters says. 'But whether it be here or in Beja, we have refused to be cloistered, we are quietly, or brazenly, stripping ourselves of our habits all of a sudden.' Another letter says, 'We have also won the right to choose vengeance, since vengeance is part of love, and love is a right long since granted us in practice: practicing love with our thighs, our long legs that expertly fulfill the exercise expected of them.' Although Ascherson found the book 'often maddeningly imprecise, self-indulgent and flatulent,' he said that 'where it is precise, the book still bites' and 'where it is erotic, it is neither exhibitionist nor coy but well calculated to touch the mind through emotion.' A few Portuguese reviewers welcomed it as 'brave, daring and violent,' as author Nuno de Sampayo put it in the Lisbon newspaper A Capital. They predicted a difficult reception. Prime Minister Marcello Caetano attempted to put the authors in jail, calling them 'women who shame the country, who are unpatriotic.' On May 25, 1972, the state press censor banned the book. The next day it was sent to the criminal police department in Lisbon. When the authors' trial opened in 1973, the crowd was so great that the judge ordered the courtroom cleared. Advertisement In May 1974, nearly two years after their arrests and two weeks after the Portuguese dictatorship was overthrown, the Three Marias were acquitted. Judge Artur Lopes Cardoso, who had been overseeing the case, became a sudden convert, declaring the book 'neither pornographic nor immoral.' 'On the contrary,' he said, 'it is a work of art of high level, following other works of art produced by the same authors.' Maria Teresa de Mascarenhas Horta Barros was born in Lisbon on May 20, 1937, the daughter of Jorge Augusto da Silva Horta, a prominent doctor and a conservative who supported the dictatorship, and Carlota Maria Mascarenhas. Her paternal grandmother had been prominent in the Portuguese suffragist movement. Maria attended Filipa de Lencastre High School, graduated from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Lisbon, and published her first book of poetry at 23. She would go on to write nearly 30 more, as well as 10 novels. She was also a critic and reporter for several newspapers and the literary editor of A Capital. In the 1980s, she edited the feminist magazine Mulheres, which was linked to the Portuguese Communist Party. (She was a member of the party from 1975 to 1989.) No matter the genre — poetry, fiction or journalism — she considered writing a public duty. 'The obligation of a poet is not to be in an ivory tower; it is not to be isolated but to be among people,' she told the online magazine Guernica in 2014. 'As a journalist, I never isolated myself. I was a journalist at a daily newspaper and every day I went out on the street. Every day I had contact with people.' Advertisement She won most of her country's top literary prizes, but she caused a stir in 2012 when she refused to accept the D. Dinis Award because she objected to the government's right-leaning politics. She is survived by her son, Luis Jorge Horta de Barros, and two grandsons. Her husband, the journalist Luis de Barros, a former editor of the newspaper O Diário, died in 2019. 'People ask me why I am a feminist,' Horta told Guernica in 2014. 'Because I am a woman of freedom and equality and it is not possible to have freedom in the world when half of humanity has no rights.' This article originally appeared in
