Many Americans' trips suffer because they are treated like Ugly Americans. Those who are treated like Ugly Americans are treated that way because they are Ugly Americans. They aren't bad people, just ethnocentric.
Even if you believe American ways are better, your trip will go better if you don't compare. Enjoy doing things the European way during your trip, and you'll experience a more welcoming Europe.
Europe sees two kinds of travelers: Those who view Europe through air-conditioned bus windows, socializing with their noisy American friends, and those who are taking a vacation from America, immersing themselves in different cultures, experiencing different people and lifestyles, and broadening their perspectives.
Europeans judge you as an individual, not by your government. A Greek fisherman once told me, "For me, Bush is big problem — but I like you." I have never been treated like the Ugly American. My Americanness in Europe, if anything, has been an asset.
You'll see plenty of Ugly Americans slogging through a sour Europe, mired in a swamp of complaints. Ugly Americanism is a disease, but fortunately there is a cure: A change in attitude. The best over-the-counter medicine is a mirror. Here are the symptoms.
The Ugly American:
criticizes "strange" customs and cultural differences. She doesn't try to understand that only a Hindu knows the value of India's sacred cows, and only a devout Spanish Catholic appreciates the true worth of his town's patron saint.
demands to find America in Europe. He throws a fit if the air-conditioning breaks down in a hotel. He insists on orange juice and eggs (sunny-side up) for breakfast, long beds, English menus, punctuality in Italy, and cold beer in England. He measures Europe with an American yardstick.
invades a country while making no effort to communicate with the "natives." Traveling in packs, he talks at and about Europeans in a condescending manner. He sees the world as a pyramid, with the United States on top and the "less developed" world trying to get there.
thinks the rest of the world is "ganging up on us" when our country (with Israel) is outvoted 172 to 2 in the United Nations.
the classic ugly American question overseas is "how much is that in real money?"
The Thoughtful American:
The Thoughtful American celebrates the similarities and differences in cultures. You:
seek out European styles of living. You are genuinely interested in the people and cultures you visit.
want to learn by trying things. You forget your discomfort if you're the only one in a group who feels it.
accept and try to understand differences. Paying for your Italian coffee at one counter, then picking it up at another may seem inefficient, until you realize it's more sanitary: The person handling the food handles no money.
are observant and sensitive. If 60 people are eating quietly with hushed conversation in a Belgian restaurant, you know it's not the place to yuk it up.
maintain humility and don't flash signs of affluence. You don't joke about the local money or overtip. Your bucks don't talk.
are positive and optimistic in the extreme. You discipline yourself to focus on the good points of each country. You don't dwell on problems or compare things to "back home."
make an effort to bridge that flimsy language barrier. Rudimentary communication in any language is fun and simple with a few basic words. On the train to Budapest, you might think that a debate with a Hungarian over the merits of a common European currency would be frustrating with a 20-word vocabulary, but you'll surprise yourself at how well you communicate by just breaking the ice and trying. Don't worry about making mistakes — communicate!
I've been accepted as an American friend throughout Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa. I've been hugged by Bulgarian workers on a Balkan mountaintop; discussed the Olympics over dinner in the home of a Greek family; explained to a young, frustrated Irishman that California girls take their pants off one leg at a time, just like the rest of us; and hiked through the Alps with a Swiss schoolteacher, learning German and teaching English.
Go as a guest; act like one, and you'll be treated like one. In travel, too, you reap what you sow.
Responsible Tourism
As we learn more about the problems that confront the earth and humankind, more and more people are recognizing the need for the world's industries, such as tourism, to function as tools for peace. Tourism is a $2 trillion industry that employs more than 60 million people. As travelers become more sophisticated and gain a global perspective, the demand for socially, environmentally, and economically responsible means of travel will grow. Peace is more than the absence of war, and if we are to enjoy the good things of life — such as travel — the serious issues that confront humankind must be addressed now.
Although the most obvious problems relate specifically to travel in the Third World, European travel also offers some exciting socially responsible opportunities. In this chapter are a few sources of information for the budding "green" traveler.
Consume responsibly in your travels — do your part to conserve energy. If your hotel overstocks your room with towels, use just one. Carry your own bar of soap and bottle of shampoo rather than rip open all those little soaps and shampoo packets. Bring a lightweight plastic cup instead of using and tossing a plastic glass at every hotel. Turn the light off when you leave your room. Limit showers to five minutes. Return unused travel information (booklets, brochures) to the tourist information office or pass it on to another traveler rather than toss it into a European landfill. In little ways, we can make a difference.
Understand your power to shape the marketplace by what you decide to buy, whether in the grocery store or in your choice of hotels. In my travels (and in my writing), whenever possible, I patronize and support small, family-run, locally owned businesses (hotels, restaurants, shops, tour guides). I choose people who invest their creativity and resources in giving me simple, friendly, sustainable, and honest travel experiences — people with ideals. Back Door places don't rely on slick advertising and marketing gimmicks, and they don't target the created needs of people whose values are shaped by capitalism gone wild. Consuming responsibly means buying as if your choice is a vote for the kind of world we could have.
Becoming a Temporary European
Most travelers tramp through Europe like they're visiting the cultural zoo. "Ooo, that guy in lederhosen yodeled! Excuse me, could you do that again in the sunshine with my wife next to you so I can take a snapshot?" This is fun. It's a part of travel. But a camera bouncing on your belly tells locals you're hunting cultural peacocks. When I'm in Europe, I'm the best German or Spaniard or Italian I can be. While I never drink tea at home, after a long day of sightseeing in England, "a spot of tea" really does feel right. I drink wine in France and beer in Germany. In Italy I eat small breakfasts. Find ways to really be there. Consider these:
Go to church. Many regular churchgoers never even consider a European worship service. Any church would welcome a traveling American. And an hour in a small-town church provides an unbeatable peek into the local community, especially if you join them for coffee and cookies afterwards. I'll never forget going to a small church on the south coast of Portugal one Easter. A tourist stood at the door videotaping the "colorful natives" (including me) shaking hands with the priest after the service. You can experience St. Peter's by taking photographs...or taking a seat at Mass (daily at 5 p.m.).
Root for your team. For many Europeans, the top religion is soccer. Getting caught up in a sporting event is going local. Whether enjoying soccer in small-town Italy, greyhound racing in Scotland, or hurling in Ireland, you'll be surrounded by a stadium crammed with devout locals.
Play where the locals play. A city's popular fairgrounds and parks are filled with local families, lovers, and old-timers enjoying a cheap afternoon or evening out. European communities provide their heavily taxed citizens with wonderful athletic facilities. Check out a swimming center, called a "leisure center" in Britain. While tourists outnumber locals five to one at the world-famous Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen's other amusement park, Bakken, is enjoyed purely by Danes. Disneyland Paris is great. But Paris' Asterix Park is more French.
Experiment. Some cafés in the Netherlands (those with plants in the windows or Rastafarian colors on the wall) have menus that look like a drug bust. Marijuana is less controversial in Holland than tobacco is these days in the United States. For a casual toke of local life without the risk that comes with smoking in the United States, drop into one of these cafés and roll a joint. If you have no political aspirations, inhale.
Take a stroll. Across southern Europe, communities paseo, or stroll, in the early evening. Stroll along. Join a Volksmarch in Bavaria to spend a day on the trails with people singing "I love to go a-wandering" in its original language. Remember, hostels are the American target, while mountain huts and "nature's friends huts" across Europe are filled mostly with local hikers. Most hiking centers have alpine clubs that welcome foreigners and offer organized hikes.
Get off the tourist track. Choose destinations busy with local holiday-goers but not on the international tourist map. Campgrounds are filled with Europeans in the mood to toss a Frisbee with a new American friend (bring a nylon "whoosh" Frisbee). Be accessible. Accept invitations. Assume you're interesting and do Europeans a favor by finding ways to connect.
Challenge a local to the national pastime. In Greece or Turkey drop into a local teahouse or taverna and challenge a local to a game of backgammon. You're instantly a part (even a star) of the local café or bar scene. Normally the gang will gather around, and what starts out as a simple game becomes a fun duel of international significance.
Contact the local version of your club. If you're a member of a service club, bridge club, professional association, or international organization, make a point to connect with your foreign mates.
Search out residential neighborhoods. Ride a city bus or subway into the suburbs. Wander through a neighborhood to see how the locals live when they're not wearing lederhosen and yodeling. Visit a supermarket. Make friends at the Laundromat.
Drop by a school or university. Mill around a university and check out the announcement boards. Eat at the school cafeteria. Ask at the English language department if there's a student learning English whom you could hire to be your private guide. Be alert and even a little bit snoopy. You may stumble onto a grade-school talent show.
Join in. When you visit the town market in the morning, you're just another hungry local, picking up your daily produce. You can snap photos of the pilgrims at Lourdes — or volunteer to help wheel the chairs of those who've come in hope of a cure. Traveling through the wine country of France during harvest time, you can be a tourist taking photos — or you can pitch in and become a local grape picker. Get more than a photo op. Get dirty. That night at the festival, it's just grape pickers dancing — and you're one of them.
If you're hunting cultural peacocks, remember they spread their tails best for people...not cameras. When you take Europe out of your viewfinder, you're more likely to find it in your lap.
The anniversary of the Haiti earthquake falls on
Wednesday, and articles and interviews
commemorating the event have begun flooding the
Internet.I’ve been supplementing my reading with a
richer, longer, more personal view: Edwidge
Danticat’s essay collection “Create Dangerously: the
Immigrant Artist at Work Most of the essays originated in different forms in a
variety of publications, including “Our Guernica,”
part of which ran in The New Yorker as “A Little
While
(http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/02/01/100201taco_talk_danticat)”last
February, and which you can read on our site.
“Create Dangerously”is one of the better considerations of writing and identity I’ve ever
encountered. Danticat quotes one of my favorite lines from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “We,
as we read, must become Greeks, Romans,Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner;
must fashion these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn
nothing rightly.” She applies it specifically to the immigrant’s reading and writing
experience, which is necessarily shaped by borders and boundaries—linguistic and
cultural.These boundaries might serve to inhibit communication between readers and
writers of different cultures, but, she writes,“I … sometimes wonder if in the intimate,
both solitary and solidary, union between writers and readers a border can really exist.”I
think these borders do exist: it takes a great writer (and great readers) to break them
down. Danticat, by this measure, is a great writer.In these essays she maps the differences
between Haitian culture and Western culture and erases them, so helping us to “learn
rightly.”
Danticat moved to the United States when she was twelve, but she remained psychically
tied to the land of her birth, a place where people literally died for books—died for
writing them, died for reading them—the dangerous creation of the title (taken from
Camus’final lecture,“Create Dangerously (http://www.amazon.com/ResistanceRebellion-Death-Albert-Camus/dp/0679764011)”).What,
Danticat asks, is the duty of
the artist who has escaped this danger but is still defined by it?
The immigrant artist shares with all other artists the desire to interpret and
possibly remake his or her own world. So though we may not be creating as
dangerously as our forebears—though we are not risking torture, beatings,
execution, though exile does not threaten us into perpetual silence—still, while
we are at work bodies are littering the streets somewhere….
When our worlds are literally crumbling, we tell ourselves how right they
may have been, our elders, about our passive careers as distant witnesses.
Who do we think we are?
We think we are people who risked not existing at all. People who have had
a mother and father killed, wither by a government or by nature, even before
we were born. Some of us think we are accidents of literacy.
I do.
It’s this embrace of herself as an accident in a world ruled by accidents that,I think,
makes Danticat’s writing so powerful. She acknowledges that the prospect of writing
about tragedies and vanished cultures is a daunting one, yet she is not daunted: she
accepts that by some accident she exists and has the power to create, and so she does.
And this, ultimately, is how she preserves or resurrects part of what has been lost.We
create, she writes,“as though each piece of art were a stand-in for a life, a soul, a future….
We have no other choice.”
FLORENCE, Italy (AP) — An Italian court on Thursday convicted a Senegalese man of murdering an American woman in her flat after they met at a nightclub, and sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
Ashley Olsen, 35, was found dead in her apartment Jan. 9, 2016, after her boyfriend — an Italian artist in Florence — became alarmed when he hadn’t heard from her and asked the landlord to open the door. An autopsy found that she had been strangled and had suffered skull fractures.
Police arrested Cheik Tidiane Diaw a few days later after street surveillance cameras showed him walking with Olsen toward her home that night, and DNA traces were found on a cigarette butt and condom in her apartment.
Witnesses said they had met at a Florence nightclub a few hours before the attack.
Diaw told police he and Olsen, of Summer Haven, Florida, had fought but denied strangling her.
Prosecutors had sought the maximum sentence of life in prison.
Olsen had moved to Florence a few years before her death, joining her father, who teaches at a design school in the city famed for its Renaissance architecture.
Ashley Olsen trial update
The Florentine publishes this statement released by Olsen family attorney
Editorial Staff
APRIL 28, 2016 - 14:32
The Florentine publishes this statement released by the Olsen family attorney Avv. Michele Capecchi:
Tomorrow (April 29, 2016) at the courthouse of Florence the lawyers who defend and represent Mr. Cheik Diaw, the suspected killer of Ashley Olsen, will discuss an appeal before a closed chamber of council to request, for the second time in a month, their client to be released from jail (probably requesting home detention) while the investigation is still ongoing.
Ashley Olsen, a 35-year-old American woman, was found dead in her Oltrarno apartment, on January 8, 2016. Ashley Olsen, a 35-year-old American woman, was found dead in her Oltrarno apartment, on January 8, 2016.
This is the Tribunale del Riesame, which is a special procedure where the judges will not decide if he is guilty or not but whether to maintain his arrest and imprisonment before and during the trial, which is expected to begin in the next few months. From a judiciary point of view, the hearing will still be important because the judges, in order to confirm the measure of the arrest (during the investigation), will have to explain why they believe that it is better to keep Mr. Diaw in jail, and maybe produce new evidence that the police has already collected against the prosecuted.
Something similar happened last month (see here), when Mr. Diaw's lawyers submitted the same request, asking to convert imprisonment into home detention/electronic monitoring). In that instance, the Olsen family lawyer, Avv. Michele Capecchi, submitted a memorandum to the court with several arguments against their request, as too did the public prosecutor. In the end, the judge dismissed the request by Mr. Diaw’s lawyers, arguing that Mr. Diaw’s “confession” was full of inconsistencies and there were risks that would be involved in releasing him (including the risk of committing other crimes of the same type).
These are the words of the Judge who decided to keep Mr. Diaw in prison approximately a month ago.
"A carico di Cheik Diaw pesano un quadro indiziario 'grave e univoco' e un concreto pericolo di fuga, dovuto soprattutto alla sua situazione di immigrato irregolare, privo di permesso di soggiorno, di un lavoro regolare e, spiega sempre il giudice, 'dedito all'uso di sostanze stupefacenti. Del suo comportamento dopo l'omicidio, colpisce la mancanza di una presa di coscienza di quanto commesso e "l'assenza di pentimento".
[Serious and univocal evidence weigh on Mr. Cheik Diaw and there is a tangible danger of flight, due in particular to his situation as an illegal immigrant, with no permit to stay, no regular work and, as the judge also commented, 'a regular drug user'. His behaviour following the murder demonstrated a lack of conscience for his actions and a ' lack of remorse'.]
Tomorrow's decision, in this case, will be even more important: if Mr. Diaw is released the news will have considerable media resonance (the international press and those following the case will wonder how it is possible that in Italy an illegal immigrant, with no documents, no visa, and someone who has confessed to some degree can be set free before the beginning of his trial); if the request is refused, it will be important to read the judge's reasoning, since it may reveal new aspects of the investigation that the public prosecutor might choose to use in the actual trial.
source
Amanda Knox definitely did not dress up for Halloween as Amanda Knox. The website hiphalloweenideas.com once cheekily suggested that costume is Land’s End catalog chic, with a “How to learn Italian” book in the pocket. Add a few cartwheels.
That costume idea was a thing back in 2011. Knox had returned home to Seattle after spending four years in Italian prison for a murder conviction of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. Tuesday is the ninth anniversary of Kercher’s death.
This Halloween, Knox dressed up as fictional superhero Jessica Jones.
The choice reflects her vindication as perhaps America’s most famous exoneree. Italy’s Supreme Court declared her definitely innocent, citing “stunning flaws” in the investigation.
She’s innocent, and if you don’t believe her, talk to Jessica Jones.
But Knox is still making the transition from social-media meme to spokeswoman for innocence cases. She is back in the news because of the new Netflix documentary, titled “Amanda Knox,” which shows how the case fell apart, through interviews with Knox, her prosecutor and a sleazy British tabloid journalist who played co-conspirator to the rush to justice.
“I was at peace with the idea that people would never treat me as a human, and that was one of the main motivations I’ve had to bring attention to other exoneree stories,” Knox said when we met at a Capitol Hill coffee shop last week.
“It’s not as simple as treating me like a little doppelgänger cultural reference point that you can just throw and project anything you want onto. It’s more difficult when you’re right in front of me, and I’m clearly not that.”
In person, she comes across as thoughtful and still wounded. Now 29, Knox has graduated from the University of Washington, works as a freelance writer and lives in Seattle’s Central District with her cats and her writer boyfriend. Her previous engagement to a childhood friend ended last year. She says she is occasionally recognized in Seattle and is usually greeted warmly.
After mostly hiding for years, Knox will speak to just about anyone who invites her, from high-school classes to conferences of exonerees. She is pitching a documentary series to TV networks about innocence cases. There’s certainly no shortage of stories: a study led by University of Michigan law professor Sam Gross estimates that 4 percent of death-row inmates are innocent.
Knox said the documentary proposal is intended to be “not a who-done-it, but a how-done-it.”
“I want to make sure I’m not exploited and the people I talk about are not exploited,” she said. “I never want to be part of the kind of journalism I went through, honestly.”
Knox’s persistent detractors point to the false confession she gave under interrogation in Italy, wrongfully implicating her former boss. But that’s also a common theme among exonerees: More than 25 percent of people later found innocent gave a wrongful confession.
Knox was convicted of slandering her ex-boss, and that still stands. She is appealing the conviction to the European Court of Human Rights. She is alleging she was hit by her interrogators and denied an interpreter.
In her new role as champion for exonerees, Knox has an antidote for false confessions: Videotape all interrogations. “Instead of calling it a false confession, they should be called a false admission,” said Knox. “It’s all authored by them (police).”
That statement will probably prompt a fresh round of attacks on social media. The Twitter hashtag #amandaknox has vile troll fodder. On her personal blog, Knox shows a chillingly detailed torture threat she received last year.
Knox has an antidote for that problem, too. “The automatic assumption is you should be defensive, because obviously people are attacking you in a way that is insane and unwarranted and out of context,” she said.
“But the first step toward defending yourself is being vulnerable, and engaging the person who is pointing the finger at you with compassion. Not all trolls are going to be human with you. But the only thing you can do is sit there across from someone and acknowledge that you are a human being, and you aren’t just confined to their definition of you.”
That sounds like a task that would require Jessica Jones’s superhuman strength. But when your name was reduced to a Halloween costume, you’ve got to give it a try.
source
Jonathan Martin's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His email address is jmartin@seattletimes.com
Amanda Knox definitely did not dress up for Halloween as Amanda Knox. The website hiphalloweenideas.com once cheekily suggested that costume is Land’s End catalog chic, with a “How to learn Italian” book in the pocket. Add a few cartwheels.
That costume idea was a thing back in 2011. Knox had returned home to Seattle after spending four years in Italian prison for a murder conviction of her roommate, Meredith Kercher. Tuesday is the ninth anniversary of Kercher’s death.
This Halloween, Knox dressed up as fictional superhero Jessica Jones.
The choice reflects her vindication as perhaps America’s most famous exoneree. Italy’s Supreme Court declared her definitely innocent, citing “stunning flaws” in the investigation.
She’s innocent, and if you don’t believe her, talk to Jessica Jones.
But Knox is still making the transition from social-media meme to spokeswoman for innocence cases. She is back in the news because of the new Netflix documentary, titled “Amanda Knox,” which shows how the case fell apart, through interviews with Knox, her prosecutor and a sleazy British tabloid journalist who played co-conspirator to the rush to justice.
“I was at peace with the idea that people would never treat me as a human, and that was one of the main motivations I’ve had to bring attention to other exoneree stories,” Knox said when we met at a Capitol Hill coffee shop last week.
“It’s not as simple as treating me like a little doppelgänger cultural reference point that you can just throw and project anything you want onto. It’s more difficult when you’re right in front of me, and I’m clearly not that.”
In person, she comes across as thoughtful and still wounded. Now 29, Knox has graduated from the University of Washington, works as a freelance writer and lives in Seattle’s Central District with her cats and her writer boyfriend. Her previous engagement to a childhood friend ended last year. She says she is occasionally recognized in Seattle and is usually greeted warmly.
After mostly hiding for years, Knox will speak to just about anyone who invites her, from high-school classes to conferences of exonerees. She is pitching a documentary series to TV networks about innocence cases. There’s certainly no shortage of stories: a study led by University of Michigan law professor Sam Gross estimates that 4 percent of death-row inmates are innocent.
Knox said the documentary proposal is intended to be “not a who-done-it, but a how-done-it.”
“I want to make sure I’m not exploited and the people I talk about are not exploited,” she said. “I never want to be part of the kind of journalism I went through, honestly.”
Knox’s persistent detractors point to the false confession she gave under interrogation in Italy, wrongfully implicating her former boss. But that’s also a common theme among exonerees: More than 25 percent of people later found innocent gave a wrongful confession.
Knox was convicted of slandering her ex-boss, and that still stands. She is appealing the conviction to the European Court of Human Rights. She is alleging she was hit by her interrogators and denied an interpreter.
In her new role as champion for exonerees, Knox has an antidote for false confessions: Videotape all interrogations. “Instead of calling it a false confession, they should be called a false admission,” said Knox. “It’s all authored by them (police).”
That statement will probably prompt a fresh round of attacks on social media. The Twitter hashtag #amandaknox has vile troll fodder. On her personal blog, Knox shows a chillingly detailed torture threat she received last year.
Knox has an antidote for that problem, too. “The automatic assumption is you should be defensive, because obviously people are attacking you in a way that is insane and unwarranted and out of context,” she said.
“But the first step toward defending yourself is being vulnerable, and engaging the person who is pointing the finger at you with compassion. Not all trolls are going to be human with you. But the only thing you can do is sit there across from someone and acknowledge that you are a human being, and you aren’t just confined to their definition of you.”
That sounds like a task that would require Jessica Jones’s superhuman strength. But when your name was reduced to a Halloween costume, you’ve got to give it a try.
source
Jonathan Martin's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His email address is jmartin@seattletimes.com
BY GARY DETMAN
CAPE CORAL, Fla. (CBS12) — Police are investigating after a woman told police a man in a Donald Trump mask stabbed her.
According to Cape Coral Police, the woman went outside to smoke a cigarette just after midnight when a man came from around the corner and asked her for her money and drugs.
The woman, who brought a steak knife outside for her protection, started wrestling with the man for control of the knife, police said.
The attacker eventually stabbed her in the stomach and ran off.
She said he wore a black shirt, black pants, black gloves and a Donald Trump mask covering his face.
Police searched the area by air and by ground. Officers found the knife on the woman's patio but no sign of the attacker.
Doctors at Lee Memorial Hospital treated the woman for non life-threatening injuries.
SOURCE
The parents of Ashley Olsen, the American woman who was murdered in Florence last month, have denounced the “offensive” media coverage of her case, saying that the depiction of their daughter as a party girl who had made a fatal mistake by bringing the wrong man home was contrary to “Ashley’s morals, beliefs and personality as we know her”.
Ashley Olsen funeral: family and friends mourn loss of murder victim in Italy
Read more
Several articles about Olsen’s death have claimed that the 35-year-old native of Florida, who was found strangled in her apartment and suffered fatal blows to her head, had consensual sex with her alleged killer, Tidiane Cheik Diaw, in the hours before she was murdered.
Some of those reports – including in the Guardian – have quoted the attorney representing Diaw, who has claimed that her death was an accident, and investigators in the case who said they had consensual sex. Others have referred to Olsen’s “habits” and sexual “preferences”.
But Olsen’s family have staunchly disputed those claims in a letter released to media outlets on Tuesday. They say that the sex must not have been consensual, based on the fact that Olsen allegedly had sought treatment for a severe bladder infection days before she died, a condition that was so bad that she was taking antibiotics.
“She never would have consented to any sexual activity with anyone during this timeframe, and in light of her medical condition, it simply would not make sense,” her parents said in the statement.
“If it is true, as the authorities declared during a press conference, that Ashley was under the influence of alcohol or other substances, then any type of sexual activity that she might have had that night was not consensual. She was not the kind of girl who would have consented, willingly,” they said.
Ashley Olsen: art community in shock over American's murder in Florence
Read more
Olsen was well-known in the city’s artist community, and was described by friends as a vibrant woman who was fulfilling her dream by living in the Renaissance city.
Olsen’s parents, Walter and Paula Olsen, and Gabrielle Olsen Bogart, pointed out that Diaw – a Senegalese national who entered Italy illegally just a few months earlier – was not an acquaintance of their daughter. In fact, most media outlets reported that the two had met that night in a nightclub.
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“The fact that she spent her last hours in a club is not a sin nor should it be used to judge her character or her lifestyle. It is therefore unacceptable, offensive and deeply wrong to think – as has been insinuated – that she ‘deserved what later happened to her’ simply because she allowed a stranger in a public place to talk to her,” her parents said.
They also pointed to the fact that two mobile phones had been taken from the American’s studio apartment, along with other missing personal belongings.
“It is unfortunate that Ashley is not here to speak about what happened that night, only the person who was with her truly knows. The Italian authorities have some idea, but we have not been given much information,” the statement said.
“While, we cannot bring Ashley back, we can help keep her legacy as a beautiful, kind-hearted woman alive,” the said.
An attorney for Diaw said the defendant had punched Olsen in the neck and pushed her to the ground, where she hit her head. He also alleged that Diaw never strangled Olsen and had not intended to kill her.
The U.S. Supreme Court will not consider a case from Native American inmates in Alabama prisons who want to wear their hair long in accordance with their religious beliefs and tradition.
The justices’ refusal to hear their appeal lets stand an appeals-court decision from last summer that ruled in favor of the Alabama Department of Corrections and its grooming policies, which require male inmates to keep their hair short, defined as “off neck and ears.” The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in August upheldprison officials’ argument that long hair posed hygiene and security risks, and could be used to conceal weapons or contraband or could help escaped inmates change their appearance. That decision is now the final word in the case.
The inmates’ lawyer said Monday that “their sacred and ancestral core religious traditions are at stake,” according to the Associated Press.
The lawsuit, Knight v. Thompson, was first filed in 1993. The Eleventh Circuit, which has ruled on the case four times, explained in a 2013 ruling that while many other jurisdictions allowed long hair, it could not force Alabama to observe the same policies:
In the end, Plaintiffs ask us to hold that because many other prison systems have chosen to accept the costs and risks associated with long hair, the [Alabama Department of Corrections] must accept them as well. This we cannot do. Although many well-run institutions have indeed decided that the benefits of giving inmates more freedom in personal grooming outweigh the disadvantages, the [Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons] does not prevent the ADOC from making its own reasoned assessment. Allowing male inmates to wear long hair carries with it established costs and risks, and the RLUIPA does not require the ADOC to embrace them merely because other institutions have.
The ADOC may, of course, decide in the future that these costs and risks might be worth absorbing, especially in view of the high value that long hair holds for many religious inmates. And the ADOC might also find persuasive James Madison's admonition that “[i]t is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to him,” and “[t]his duty is precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”
Most state prison systems allow for religious exemptions on prison grooming policies, including for long hair. The 10 prison systems that ban long hair are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia, according to the Native American Rights Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides legal assistance to Native American tribes and people.
The Supreme Court in February ordered the Eleventh Circuit to reconsider its 2015 decision after the Court’s ruling in a case involving inmates and grooming policies a month earlier. In that case, Holt v. Hobbs, the Supreme Court sided with a Muslim inmate in Arkansas who wanted to grow a ½-inch beard in accordance with his religious beliefs, and ruled that the state prison system had violated religious rights by prohibiting inmates from growing beards.
I
have made a side job out of selling my used clothing online and you can too.
It's a great way to make money on the side or even a full-time business if you
play your cards right. I will go over the basic steps and help you on your way
to creating your online store and making it work for you. Let me help you learn
how to sell your used clothing online.
I recommend starting with eBay because it's very simple to setup and account
and eBay guides to step-by-step. If you already have your eBay seller's wings and
you want to move on to bigger and better than I recommend Store Envy. It's
simple to use but you will need to promote your account via Twitter, Instagram
and also a Facebook Fan page. I recommend running specials on Instagram along
with contests that ask your followers to repost your photo in order to win. I
would not recommend selling on Instagram based on my experience because there
is not system setup for sales and it can get sticky. Just use this media
platform to promote. Make you add a link to you store in your profile and let
your followers know that is where the link is located. I also recommend using
appropriate emojis on your profile and in your posts to Instagram. This will
draw attention to your post if you are selling, for example, a tunic. You would
want to add emojis that has to do with Summer weather like the sun, tulip or
even a sunglasses emoji.
The most important thing you must know is what clothing to sell which means you
have to have an eye for fashion and what people are buying online. Most people
that sell used clothing online buy from yard sales or second-hand shops and
resale the items for profit but there is an art to this. You need to know your
labels from designer to department stores. I recommend going sites such as Ebay
and Tradesy to see what is selling. Use your screenshot tool to grab items
similar to the items you have in stock and are looking to list immediately.
This way you can quick reference the price and the photos for when you are
ready to list your item.
Another major key is to check the clothing for damage such as holes, missing
buttons and stains.
You may want to invest in a garment rack, wooden hangers and a travel steamer.
Most people have a smartphone and if you don't have one I recommend getting one
or buying a camera online. Smartphones are a great investment if you plan on
selling online as you can download the eBay app along with other apps needed to
sell. A major reason why you really need a smartphone is you can also download
free photo editing software at the app store. I suggest a travel steamer
because they are more affordable and you may not want to spend a lot of cash
upfront. The wooden hangers photograph the best and will let your buyer know
that you are selling an item of high quality. All of these items can be
purchased fairly inexpensively which is a serious plus!
Now on to your photos. Before you begin taking photos of the clothing you may
want to surf eBay to see how the higher rated sellers are taking their photos.
Make sure you observe their lighting and positioning, props and if they are
using models. Take notes and use your screenshot tool so you can quick
reference a look later. I mentioned earlier in this article that you should
really use a smartphone for your photos and to sell. This is key. It's like you
all-in-one tool and will become your best friend. I know I recommended photo
editing apps but careful not to change the color of your articles of clothing
as you do not want to mislead a potential buyer.
You are now ready to list your item! Make sure you list the brand, clothing
size, colors, material, if it's new with tag or used, measurements (as this is
a common buyer question) and what kind of article of clothing it is. If the
items runs small add that to the description or any other pertinent details
that may be asked.
Review your article title, description and photos for errors and if you are
happy with your listing hit the submit button.
I suggest keeping a steady flow of clothing on your site and try to not let
your store ever be empty because this could make return buyers go elsewhere.
I hope Ths information was helpful to you and I wish you success with selling
your used clothing online.
What they don’t understand about birthdays
and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and
nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two,
and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel
eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday,
only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still
ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven. Like some days you might say something
stupid, and that’s the part of you that’s still ten. Or maybe some days you
might need to sit on your mama’s lap because you’re scared, and that’s the part
of you that’s five. And maybe one day when you’re all grown up maybe you will
need to cry like if you’re three, and that’s okay. That’s what I tell Mama when
she’s sad and needs to cry. Maybe she’s feeling three. Because the way you grow old is kind of
like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls
that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That’s how being
eleven years old is. You don’t feel eleven. Not right away. It
takes a few days, weeks even, sometimes even months before you say Eleven when
they ask you. And you don’t feel smart eleven, not until you’re almost twelve.
That’s the way it is. Only today I wish I didn’t have only
eleven years rattling inside me like pennies in a tin Band-Aid box. Today I
wish I was one hundred and two instead of eleven because if I was one hundred
and two I’d have known what to say when Mrs. Price put the red sweater on my
desk. I would’ve known how to tell her it wasn’t mine instead of just sitting
there with that look on my face and nothing coming out of my mouth.
“Whose
is this?” Mrs. Price says, and she holds the red sweater up in the air for all
the class to see. “Whose? It’s been sitting in the coatroom for a month.” “Not mine,” says everybody. “Not me.” “It has to belong to somebody, ”Mrs. Price
keeps saying, but nobody can remember. It’s an ugly sweater with red plastic
buttons and a collar and sleeves all stretched out like you could use it for a
jump rope. It’s maybe a thousand years old and even if it belonged to me I
wouldn’t say so. Maybe because I’m skinny, maybe because she
doesn’t like me, that stupid Sylvia Saldivar says, “I think it belongs to
Rachel.” An ugly sweater like that all raggedy and old, but Mrs. Price believes
her. Mrs. Price takes the sweater and puts it right on my desk, but when I open
my mouth nothing comes out. “That’s not, I don’t, you’re not…Not
mine.” I finally say in a little voice that was maybe me when I was four. “Of course it’s yours, ”Mrs. Price says. “
I remember you wearing it once.” Because she’s older and the teacher, she’s
right and I’m not. Not mine, not mine, not mine, but Mrs.
Price is already turning to page thirty-two, and math problem number four. I
don’t know why but all of a sudden I’m feeling sick inside, like the part of me
that’s three wants to come out of my eyes, only I squeeze them shut tight and
bite down on my teeth real hard and try to remember today I am eleven, eleven.
Mama is making a cake for me for tonight, and when Papa comes home everybody
will sing Happy birthday, happy birthday to you. But when the sick feeling goes away and I
open my eyes, the red sweater’s still sitting there like a big red mountain. I
move the red sweater to the corner of my desk with my ruler. I move my pencil
and books and eraser as far from it as possible. I even move my chair a little
to the right. Not mine, not mine, not mine. In my head I’m thinking how long
till lunchtime, how long till I can take the red sweater and throw it over the
schoolyard fence, or leave it hanging on a parking meter, or bunch it up into a
little ball and toss it in the alley. Except when math period ends Mrs. Price
says loud and in front of everybody, “Now, Rachel, that’s enough, ”because she
sees I’ve shoved the red sweater to the tippy-tip corner of my desk and it’s
hanging all over the edge like a waterfall, but I don’t care. “Rachel, ”Mrs. Price says. She says it
like she’s getting mad. “You put that sweater on right now and no more
nonsense.” “But it’s not –“ “Now!” Mrs. Price says.
This
is when I wish I wasn’t eleven because all the years inside of me—ten, nine,
eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one—are pushing at the back of
my eyes when I put one arm through one sleeve of the sweater that smells like
cottage cheese, and then the other arm through the other and stand there with
my arms apart like if the sweater hurts me and it does, all itchy and full of
germs that aren’t even mine. That’s when everything I’ve been holding
in since this morning, since when Mrs. Price put the sweater on my desk,
finally lets go, and all of a sudden I’m crying in front of everybody. I wish I
was invisible but I’m not. I’m eleven and it’s my birthday today and I’m crying
like I’m three in front of everybody. I put my head down on the desk and bury
my face in my stupid clown-sweater arms. My face all hot and spit coming out of
my mouth because I can’t stop the little animal noises from coming out of me
until there aren’t any more tears left in my eyes, and it’s just my body
shaking like when you have the hiccups, and my whole head hurts like when you
drink milk too fast. But the worst part is right before the
bell rings for lunch. That stupid Phyllis Lopez, who is even dumber than Sylvia
Saldivar, says she remembers the red sweater is hers. I take it off right away
and give it to her, only Mrs. Price pretends like everything’s okay. Today I’m eleven. There’s a cake Mama’s
making for tonight and when Papa comes home from work we’ll eat it. There’ll be
candles and presents and everybody will sing Happy birthday, happy birthday to
you, Rachel, only it’s too late. I’m eleven today. I’m eleven, ten, nine,
eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, and one, but I wish I was one
hundred and two. I wish I was anything but eleven. Because I want today to be
far away already, far away like a runaway balloon, like a tiny o in the sky, so
tiny—tiny you have to close your eyes to see it.
The January killing of hedge-fund manager Thomas Gilbert Sr., allegedly by his 30-year-old son, Thomas Gilbert Jr., stunned New York society. For many in the younger man’s circle, however, it wasn’t such a shock. Benjamin Wallace charts the implosion of a silver-spoon life.
For the past 11 summers, the village of Sagaponack, on the eastern end of Long Island, has been the site of a Monday-night ritual hippie-ishly incongruous with the moneyed community of homeowners in this part of the Hamptons. At Sagg Main Beach, a flat, broad ribbon of sand dividing the Atlantic Ocean from Sagaponack Pond, the crowds begin to gather near six P.M., when a small circle of musicians starts pounding out Brazilian music on drums and sleigh bells, and beachgoers cluster around to listen and dance and take in the sunset with a beer.
Last September 1, at a drum circle near the end of the season, 32-year-old Peter Smith was hanging out with family and friends when he saw a face at once familiar and unwelcome. Smith’s family had been coming to Sagaponack since 1973; his father, a retired Lazard Frères banker, had bought a historic house just down the road from the beach. The house had a timber frame and gabled roof, and part of it dated to the 1600s; Mr. Smith (also named Peter) was house-proud, often seen in a painter’s cap and tool belt as he devoted countless hours to the home’s meticulous restoration. But it was no museum piece, instead serving as a hub for loved ones and the larger community, including friends like Louis Malle, Larry Rivers, and former roommate Oliver Stone, and for years it was the site of an annual blowout summer party that drew as many as 800 people.
Gilbert at his arraignment in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on February 5, 2015.
By Steven Hirsch.
Peter the younger, a co-founder and C.O.O. of a shop-local e-commerce start-up called MadeClose, was popular and sociable, but when Tommy Gilbert approached him on the beach that evening, he was terrified, friends of Smith’s say. (Smith declined to be interviewed.) Only two years earlier, the young men had been friends, with much in common. Both had attended the elite Buckley boys’ school, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Both came from families who belonged to the insular Wasp preserve known as the Maidstone Club, in East Hampton. Both loved to surf. For a time, they had been roommates in Brooklyn.
But then Gilbert had developed an obsessive vendetta against Smith, according to mutual friends, which culminated in a brutal attack on the street in October of 2013 that put Smith in the hospital and led him to obtain an order of protection against Gilbert. Now, though, nearly a year later, as vaguely tribal rhythms competed with the crashing surf for the crowd’s attention, Gilbert, in violation of the order of protection, “literally came out of the darkness,” someone close to Smith says, and ominously told Smith it was his last chance to have the order rescinded and be his friend once more. As others physically blocked Gilbert from Smith, “he was trying to get Peter to leave the crowd and walk down the dark, desolate beach with him, away from the bonfires and people.”
.
Four months later, the Smith house on Sagg Main Street would be in ashes, Gilbert’s father dead with a bullet wound in his head, Tommy in jail, and large swaths of New York society horrified and bewildered.
“A LITTLE BIT OFF”
On paper, Tommy Gilbert seemed sprung from the daydreams of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He grew up in what his father called “a small mansion” in Tuxedo Park, New York, and then at various tony Manhattan addresses (a Park Avenue apartment, a town house on East 61st Street). He was the son of an investment banker and a former debutante and was raised in an environment of extreme privilege. From Buckley, he’d gone to Deerfield Academy, then Princeton. He was a strapping six feet three inches, gym-bodied and catalogue-model-handsome, with a man-bun-worthy sweep of blond hair and piercing blue eyes. Anyone glancing at the galleries of black-tie society pictures online would have seen a dashing man-about-town, seemingly at ease among his fellow swells.
But those trappings concealed a less gilded truth. Thirty years old and five years out of college, Gilbert seemed never to have a full-time job and was on an allowance from his parents reported to have been $600 a week plus the $2,400 monthly rent for his modest apartment on West 18th Street, in Chelsea. He told friends about having come up with an algorithm that was earning him a living as a day trader and spoke of starting a hedge fund, even filing papers with the S.E.C. last May to register a hedge fund he named Mameluke Capital, but his Wall Street talk appears to have gotten ahead of itself. He had failed the Chartered Financial Analyst Level II exam—a helpful credential for Wall Street work—not once but twice, he confided to a female friend. “It seemed like something his heart wasn’t really in or he cared to pass,” she says. “When I asked him about it, he didn’t seem like he was even studying.” That didn’t make him unique, as an old Buckley school-mate who met Gilbert for drinks at the Stumble Inn, on East 76th Street, two Christmases ago says: “Growing up on the Upper East Side, he’s not the only kid to be 30 and still supported by his parents. He seemed like a guy who was a failure to launch.” Adds another Buckley alumnus in Gilbert’s circle, “When you heard him say, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve got a hedge fund I’m working on,’ you were like, Yeah, clearly that’s not happening, ‘cause having a very social conversation in your backyard is high-pressure for you.”
Other than his looks, it was Gilbert’s social unease, more than anything, that made an impression. In recent years, many people meeting him for the first time found Gilbert quiet to the point of strange. He would respond to polite questions with awkward silence, have trouble making eye contact, and show obvious discomfort when talking with strangers. Women initially magnetized by his beauty would lose interest after five minutes of labored conversation. He did odd things: this past November, at a cocktail fund-raiser for the Harbor Science & Arts Charter School at the Hotel Americano, in Chelsea, he was the only person wearing a tuxedo. Someone who knew the Gilbert family through the Maidstone describes Tommy as “a little bit off…. He just had a blank stare and was never animated. He’d almost sound scripted, which made me think maybe he was on a mood leveler.”
The Buckley School’s student council in 2000.
He hadn’t always been so. At Buckley, he’d been verbose and cocky, a member of the student council and starting running back and captain of the football team at a school that emphasizes athletics. He was, in the words of a former school-mate, “a golden boy.” It was after he went to Deerfield, in northwestern Massachusetts, that something changed. “That’s when I first started hearing stories about him,” another ex-Buckleyite says. Kids who, along with Gilbert, had gone from Buckley to Deerfield began relating anecdotes of how, when they approached their old friend at the boarding school to talk, “he’d literally run away.”
At Princeton, he majored in economics, writing a senior thesis titled “The Word Effect: Effects of the Word Content in the Financial Times on Firms’ Earnings in the U.K.,” but his degree was also not without an asterisk. He had taken six years to graduate, which may or may not have had something to do with an incident on May 8, 2007, four weeks before Gilbert was originally slated to receive his diploma. That afternoon, he was arrested by Princeton Borough Police and charged with possession of cocaine and psychedelic mushrooms and with third-degree aggravated assault for attacking an emergency-first-aid worker who was tending to him, according to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, which was unable to provide further details. Gilbert entered New Jersey’s pre-trial intervention program, upon the successful completion of which, in September 2008, the assault charge was dismissed. It took him until the spring of 2009 to finally get his degree.
But to the people who’d known him since he was a kid—a group of peers who’d gone to Buckley, summered in the Hamptons, and belonged to the Maidstone—his social anxiety seemed within the bounds of normal, and they knew he could also be affable and game for anything: playing tennis and squash, surfing, going to movies and events and each other’s birthday parties. He was a dependable wingman, always up for buying a ticket to someone’s benefit, and paying his part of the bill. “People are unfairly making him out to be a spoiled brat,” a friend says. “He was the nicest kid in the world and not spoiled at all, but he enjoyed a certain lifestyle that he could not afford.” Sometimes he’d even be the one to reach out or put things together. “He was enjoyable to be around,” one of those peers, James Bohannon, says.
Still, according to people who socialized with him, Gilbert lacked close friends, and in the summer of 2012, in the Hamptons, Peter Smith befriended him. With their shared Buckley-Maidstone pedigree and love of surfing, Smith took Gilbert under his wing, inviting him to live with him in his row-house apartment, in Williamsburg. When others called Gilbert strange, it was Smith who came to his defense. When others left Gilbert off of invitations, it was Smith who went out of his way to include him. It was in his relationship with Peter Smith, however, that Gilbert’s unraveling would find a disturbing and violent focus.
At first, being roommates was uneventful. Gilbert’s anger, when it surfaced, was directed at his father, friends of Smith’s say; he’d regularly rant about how mean and controlling he was. But then Gilbert and Smith went on a surfing trip to Costa Rica, and there Gilbert was erratic, according to these friends, leveling accusations that Smith had been flirting with a young socialite named Lizzy Fraser, a Barnard graduate once dubbed “the ghost of Edie Sedgwick reincarnate” by Gawker, whom Gilbert had dated and remained interested in. (“Peter had zero interest in her,” a knowledgeable source says.) Friends say after they returned to Brooklyn, Gilbert’s angry behavior continued; he’d shout at his father over the phone and slam doors. Smith, growing alarmed, and having decided to invite his girlfriend to live with him, asked Gilbert to move out.
The Smith family’s house in Sagaponack before a fire destroyed it, on September 15, 2014.
From PatrickMcMullan.com.
Gilbert did not react to the eviction peaceably, by two accounts. Smith was spending a lot of time at a second house in Sagaponack owned by his family, working to launch his start-up in the company of a small team of colleagues and a recently acquired puppy named Rocket, a highly energetic Weimaraner, with which Smith, adhering to the instruction of a dog trainer, was sometimes strict. One day, Gilbert showed up at the house and, a friend says, began “freaking out on” Smith, accusing him of abusing the dog. Not long after, according to several sources, Gilbert showed up at the house again and stole a flagpole from out front; the next day, he returned and impaled the front door with it. The Smiths didn’t call the police, because the family was hoping it could be resolved privately.
For months, Smith had been telling family and mutual friends about Gilbert’s behavior, and almost invariably they thought he must be exaggerating. “Peter was the only one who had seen the frightening and dangerous side of Tommy, and nobody took it seriously,” a source says. “Nobody thought this handsome, well-educated, privileged Princeton man was capable of violence.” Gilbert’s looks may have gotten him a pass. “If Tommy looked like me,” says a friend, “people would have thought he was an insane person fairly quickly.”
The skeptics were silenced on the evening of October 3, 2013. That night, both Gilbert and Smith had been invited to attend the premiere of And After All, a short film co-produced by their friend Jack Bryan and starring Annabelle Dexter-Jones (and in which Gilbert appeared as an extra), but as Smith emerged onto the street from his building near Bedford Avenue, in Williamsburg, Gilbert stepped out of the darkness and jumped him, Smith later told police, slamming Smith’s head repeatedly against the pavement. Afterward, Smith called James Bohannon and texted him a picture of his face. Gilbert had broken his nose and given him a concussion. Bohannon also spoke with Gilbert that night: “I said, ‘What are you doing? Peter’s our friend. We’ve known him our whole life. This is where you can make a decision either way.’ ” Gilbert didn’t respond. “That was the odd thing. He didn’t defend it at all. He just said, ‘Peter’s crazy—you don’t understand.’ ” Another friend who spoke with both men that night says, “When I was talking to Tommy on the phone, the thing that made me think, This guy’s not on this earth and possibly dangerous, was the flag thing”—Gilbert was “aggressively manic” in describing the incident, with “repetitive language, contradictions, raw anger, all in one diatribe.” After being attacked in Williamsburg, Smith filed for and was granted the order of protection.
Even then, Gilbert seemed not to appreciate the gravity of what he’d done. “Afterwards,” another source says, “Tommy was like, ‘Hey, buddy, why can’t we be friends? Hey, buddy, friends fight.’ Peter was terrified.” The rest of their social circle finally started taking what Smith had been telling them seriously. “For no reason,” Bohannon says, “Tommy was creating this insane idea in his head that Peter was out to get him. Everyone knew this was out of nowhere. It just definitely seemed like some sort of mental event was going on that was scary.”
“That was a real turning point in everybody’s association with Tommy,” echoes another friend. “I don’t know a lot of people who hung out with him after that.”
THE TOMMY SITUATION
If Thomas Gilbert Jr. had an enviable education, Thomas Gilbert Sr. was a person of exalted position. The second of two sons of Abner Gilbert, a textiles-machinery executive who’d been C.E.O. of Cutting Room Appliances Corporation, in New York, Tom Gilbert Sr. was an Andover-Princeton-Harvard man. At 70, he ran a hedge fund, lived on Manhattan’s Beekman Place—where he and his wife, Shelley, had raised both Tommy and a younger daughter, Clare—owned a summer home in the gated Georgica Association, in Wainscott, and, besides belonging to the Maidstone, was a member of the exclusive River Club, on East 52nd Street.
In college, as in later life, Tom senior had been known for being exceptionally put-together in his dress, complementing his wide-wale corduroys with saddle shoes. At Princeton, he was a first-string center halfback in soccer and also a varsity squash player. Lanny Jones, who’d go on to become the managing editor of People, was on the soccer team and in the Colonial eating club with Gilbert and remembers him as “an elegant guy. He had a certain Gatsby-esque quality, and I don’t mean that negatively at all. He was a gentleman, a throwback.” Later in life, Gilbert took part in squash tournaments as far away as Kuala Lumpur and played the archaic racket sport known as court tennis. He wasn’t too stuffy to quip, in notes to fellow Princeton alumni, that his wife’s occupation was variously “Housewife, Consort,” and “The Boss of Gilbert, Gilbert, Gilbert and Gilbert & Company.” But it was also clear that he was someone for whom pedigree was of signal importance: even at 70, he still listed in his accomplishments an award from Andover for the highest academic achievements of any entering freshman.
Firefighters battle the blaze at the Smith house; Gilbert is “a person of interest.”
By Michael Heller.
Appearances were deceiving in his case, too, for he was evidently feeling money pressure. His career path had meandered, starting on Wall Street (eventually with the old-line investment bank Loeb Partners), but in recent years he had jumped from one entrepreneurial venture to the next and wound up at the unlikely destination, at his age, of starting his first hedge fund. The Gilberts still lived on the East Side but in less grand circumstances than just a few years earlier, having moved from the town house on East 61st Street to a one-bedroom apartment on Beekman Place that rented for $6,000 a month. The hedge fund, three years after launch, had only $7.3 million under management, a pittance in that world. The Georgica house was up for sale, and last year Gilbert Sr. took out a $4 million equity loan against it. (In an S.E.C. filing the year the hedge fund began, Gilbert reported having raised a total of just $575,000 from three investors, so it’s possible the money was to be an infusion to boost the fund’s nominal size.) When his estate recently went to probate, in Manhattan Surrogate’s Court, its value was revealed as $1.6 million, a shockingly small amount for someone with his social affiliations who’d made a career on Wall Street. In the last year, he seemed stressed, and a Hamptons resident who had dealings with him goes as far as to say, “I think he was a failed person who didn’t have the resources to maintain that lifestyle.” (The Gilbert family did not respond to requests for interviews.)
If Gilbert’s son knew of these pressures, they didn’t seem to soften his feelings toward his father. Last year, according to one source, he told the tennis pro at the River Club not to match them in doubles. He was constantly griping about him, concerned that he was going to cut him off, though when he talked about him to Anna Rothschild—a publicist 19 years his senior whom Gilbert dated for several months last year—she says, it was “with hurt, not anger.” He told her that his father was always disappointed with him. “Nothing he did was ever good enough.”
It’s unclear what steps, if any, Gilbert’s parents were taking to deal with their son’s escalating violence. Rothschild says he told her that he’d been on Xanax for his anxiety years earlier, and that he’d undergone a lot of psychotherapy since; other sources say Gilbert had been on some kind of psychiatric medication within the last year, and reportedly he saw a psychiatrist as recently as December. “Tommy is somebody who got a really textbook example of mental illness,” says someone who has known him since childhood, and who spoke with him about the medications he was on. “He’s a sweet, high-achieving guy who was taken down by chemicals in his brain.”
Among his and Peter Smith’s circle of friends, over the past year and a half, “the Tommy situation” was never far from their thoughts. In the year after Gilbert assaulted Smith in Williamsburg, the local S.P.C.A. showed up over and over at the Sagaponack house where Smith was working, having received phone calls warning that a dog was being abused there. It was obvious to Smith and mutual friends that Gilbert had placed the calls. “That was completely preposterous,” Bohannon says of the idea that Smith would treat the dog poorly. “I actually adopted it from foster care and gave it to Peter. He took amazing care of it.” After yet another of the S.P.C.A. visits, says a different friend, “Peter confronted Tommy’s dad and said, ‘You’ve got to figure out your fucking son ‘cause he’s a crazy person.’ It was always: ‘Tommy’s Tommy—what are you going to do? Hahaha.’ But I think in private he really gave it to Tommy.”
Thomas Gilbert Jr. and then girlfriend Briana Swanson pose with the Nesquik bunny in Manhattan in July 2014.
A childhood friend remembers a 13th-birthday party in Locust Valley with a small group that included Tommy Gilbert, where “Tommy brought the fireworks, and that was fine—we’d arranged it ahead of time. But the fireworks were the thing we got caught for. They were loud.” The birthday boy’s “parents were like, What the fuck? We said Tommy brought them. Tommy’s parents refused to believe it. They said, ‘No. We asked him—he said no. We don’t think it happened.’ So there was a tendency, when Tommy would do something extreme, for them to underplay it. I don’t know if that was just their way of dealing publicly, and internally they were harsh about it.”
By last spring, Gilbert’s violence wasn’t directed only at Smith. He went to sleep for several hours in the Maidstone men’s locker room one day, and when a golf pro asked him to leave, other members say, Gilbert threatened to kill him and he was banned from the club indefinitely. Then last summer, on the evening of July 5, Bohannon’s band, Mr. Badger, was playing at Stephen Talkhouse, a popular Amagansett bar with live music. Gilbert was there, and before the band went on, Bohannon spoke briefly with him. “He seemed on edge.” Before the night was up, Gilbert had assaulted two of their mutual friends—Bosco Diaz and Timmy Briggs—attempting to choke one before being pulled off by bouncers and ejected from the bar, according to friends of all three men. He managed to re-enter and attack a second time, and was then thrown out for good. Once again, the issue had been Lizzy Fraser.
A FIRE IN THE HAMPTONS
Gilbert had lived a more marginal existence in the past year: he was estranged from his old circle of friends, his ties to his own family frayed, his finances precarious, his employment nonexistent, even his housing in jeopardy. According to a friend, he was living in his parents’ Georgica house without their permission. In March, Gilbert Sr. called the police after finding the thermostat turned up and a stain on a rug on the second floor. Rothschild recalls that the only time she saw Gilbert receive a phone call in the months that they dated was when his mother called to ask if he’d been at the Hamptons house, because the alarm had gone off.
By May, the relationship with Rothschild had run its course, and through a mutual friend he met a woman named Briana Swanson, a chef who’d appeared briefly on Gordon Ramsay’s reality show Hell’s Kitchen.Within weeks of meeting, she had moved into Gilbert’s Chelsea apartment, where, according to a knowledgeable source, she soon saw firsthand the fraught mixture of family dysfunction and financial anxiety that consumed him. He told her he had permission from his parents to build a small cabin on their property in Georgica, and they camped a couple of nights in a tent on the beach nearby while he spent the days clearing brush from the site, but his parents were renting out the house, and he had to abort the project after the tenant arrived and asked him what he was doing. Gilbert and Swanson ended up leasing an apartment in Amagansett instead, but he was often a week late with his part of the rent.
Sometimes, their relationship was normal. He’d surf for hours while she read on the beach. He’d work up a huge appetite through his strenuous activity, and she’d cook for him. He could be affectionate, walking over to kiss her, putting his arm around her even as he drove his Jeep, giving her his ice-cream Snickers after she dropped hers. He could also be intensely private. She wasn’t allowed anywhere near his computer, according to a source, nor near either of the small safes he kept in the Amagansett and Chelsea apartments. He talked about modeling or acting, and sometimes videotaped himself reading parts, but it was clear that these efforts weren’t leading to any work.
Socialite Lizzy Fraser, a former girlfriend of Gilbert’s, at a fund-raiser in New York in 2010.
From PatrickMcMullan.com.
Gilbert made no secret of the tensions with his family. On Father’s Day, he didn’t call his father, and he reportedly last spoke with his parents in August. He and Swanson never went to the Maidstone, a source says, though Gilbert didn’t mention that he’d been banned. He told Swanson about the order of protection Smith had against him, which upset him because it meant he couldn’t see a lot of his friends. He mentioned, one time when he’d grown especially quiet, that he was trying out a new medication. According to later reports, he fretted because his father had told him he was going to whittle down his weekly allowance to $400 or even $300.
After the Stephen Talkhouse incident, Gilbert’s paranoia began to increase around Swanson too, a knowledgeable source says. She’d wake up to find him scrolling through her texts. He’d accuse her of being in cahoots with his old friends, of flirting with men he had introduced her to, of “messing” with him. But it was Peter Smith, once again, on whom Gilbert would destructively fixate. After Gilbert confronted Smith on the beach on Labor Day, and although his actions constituted a violation of the order of protection, Smith didn’t go to the police. That would change two weeks later.
At 5:35 A.M. on September 15, a ground-floor window was broken at the Smith house at 850 Sagg Main Street, triggering an alarm. Ten minutes later, the house, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was an inferno. At 5:42 A.M., the Bridgehampton Fire Department responded, and it was soon joined by the Sag Harbor, Southampton, and East Hampton Fire Departments, as well as 75 volunteer firefighters. The house was too hot for them to enter, so the firemen fought the fire from outside, taking around three hours to extinguish it. By then the south side of the house had burned to the ground, and the north side, though still standing, was severely damaged. (The Smiths would eventually have the whole site bulldozed.)
A neighbor reported seeing a man in the cemetery across the street, watching the fire from among the tombstones, and investigators later found a gas can and gas-soaked rags there. The Smiths and those familiar with what they had been going through strongly suspected that Gilbert must have done it. Most concerning, at the day and time the house was set on fire, Peter would usually have been there sleeping. Smith now informed police of Gilbert’s approach on the beach two weeks earlier, and on September 18, as Gilbert was driving on North Wainscott Road, East Hampton police stopped him and charged him with violating the order.
He was released, but he was now a person of interest in the fire investigation, particularly after the police spoke with Briana Swanson. A knowledgeable source says Swanson had arrived in the Hamptons on the 13th, and the next morning, before she’d even removed her bag from his car, Gilbert suggested they go to lunch. Once they were in the car, though, Gilbert drove her to the train station instead, telling her to go back to the city—he needed space; he needed to work. On the 18th, Swanson, unaware of the fire three days earlier, tried calling and texting Gilbert and was unable to reach him. When she saw him in the city a few days later, he explained that he’d been arrested for violating the order of protection. Gilbert didn’t say anything about a fire.
A few days later, they broke up after Swanson arrived back at the Chelsea apartment and saw a flirty text exchange with another woman on Gilbert’s tablet. She left the apartment with her clothes in garbage bags, texting a friend who told her about the fire for the first time. Later, according to several people with knowledge of the events, Swanson told investigators that the rags found in the cemetery across from the Smith house in Sagaponack appeared to match a set of purple bedsheets Gilbert had recently bought.
HANDCUFFS AND HOLLOW-POINTS
On January 4, Tommy Gilbert went to his parents’ apartment building at 20 Beekman Place, took the elevator to the eighth floor, and persuaded his mother to go out and buy him a sandwich. He wanted to speak with his father, who just an hour earlier had played doubles at the River Club. Shortly after, neighbors heard a gunshot, and his mother, returning to the apartment because of what she reportedly told police was “a bad feeling,” found her husband in their bedroom, on his back between the bed and the wall near the windows, dead with a single bullet hole in his head and his hand clasping a .40-caliber Glock pistol on his chest. Police believed this to have been an attempt to stage the scene as a suicide, and when they arrested Tommy Gilbert late that night, after breaking down the door of his Chelsea apartment, they found a disturbing collection of items, including hollow-point bullets, a red-dot laser gunsight, handcuffs, and a credit-card-skimming device along with 21 blank white credit cards.
Gilbert on the beach in Montauk in May 2014.
Since then, Gilbert’s onetime friends and school-mates, people who grew up to believe that if you went to certain schools and belonged to certain clubs and looked a certain way you could reliably be expected to conform to certain rules of behavior, have wondered what, if anything, could have been done to avert the terrible recent events. In the months before Thomas Gilbert Sr. died, a lot of people had become afraid of his son. It was openly known, among what one social acquaintance estimates as “150 to 400 people,” that Gilbert was under suspicion for the fire at the Smith house in Sagaponack. Briana Swanson was so frightened that in October she fled town, going home to Iowa but telling Gilbert she was going south; according to a knowledgeable source, she actually detoured through South Carolina and posted pictures on Facebook of the cabin where she was staying, then un-friended him, so that as far as he knew she was still in South Carolina. “We knew that unless he got help something bad was going to happen,” Bohannon says. “I had no question someone was going to get killed,” says another friend.
On February 5, Gilbert, who had been held at the Rikers Island jail since his arrest on a charge of second-degree murder, was escorted into a Lower Manhattan courtroom for his arraignment with his hands cuffed behind his back. Asked by Judge Melissa Jackson what plea he wished to enter, Gilbert paused briefly before saying, in an assertive voice: “Not guilty.” His hair and beard had been roughly trimmed since his last hearing, and he was wearing an orange Department of Corrections jumpsuit; as news photographers with telephoto lenses took his picture, his attorney, from the high-profile defense firm of Brafman & Associates, asked the court to disallow cameras on the grounds both that Gilbert’s inelegant appearance was “prejudicial” and that this was a circumstantial case with no eyewitnesses, so propagation of his image could muddy the waters should a witness later come forward. “Counsel, please,” the judge said with an almost audible eye roll, noting widespread news coverage of the case as she denied the application.
The Smith family have told friends that they hope to rebuild their Sagaponack home exactly as it was.
