march 1997

The proliferation of retail boutiques in California did not really bother him, Evan told me, but the billboards did. Advertisements for delivery, advertisements promoting the substance for relaxation, for fun, for health. “Shop. It’s legal.” “Hello marijuana, goodbye hangover.” “It’s not a trigger,” he told me. “But it is in your face.”

When we spoke, he had been sober for a hard-fought seven weeks: seven weeks of sleepless nights, intermittent nausea, irritability, trouble focusing, and psychological turmoil. There were upsides, he said, in terms of reduced mental fog, a fatter wallet, and a growing sense of confidence that he could quit. “I don’t think it’s a ‘can’ as much as a ‘must,’” he said.

In a sudden development Tuesday, Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime attorney and fixer, pleaded guilty to bank fraud and tax fraud and said he broke campaign-finance laws at the president’s behest, with the goal of quieting allegations of sexual affairs.

The plea on eight felony counts, entered Tuesday afternoon in federal court in Manhattan, is the culmination of an investigation by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York that became public in April, when the FBI raided Cohen’s office, home, and a hotel room where he was staying. In reality, the story runs back even further, to payments that Cohen arranged in 2016 to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the two women who alleged affairs with Trump. Cohen has not agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, but reportedly decided to enter a plea to save himself public exposure and the cost of defending himself.

When Paul Manafort first joined the Trump campaign, many of his close friends could envision this day as it would unfold, more than two years later.

They told me months ago that they could long foresee the chain of events: How taking a job with the Trump campaign would bring media attention to Manafort’s sordid past as a consultant in Ukraine, how scrutiny of his career would inevitably pique the interest of the Feds, how an investigation into his financial dealings would end badly for him. And end badly for him it did—a guilty verdict on eight counts of tax and bank fraud, and years in prison awaiting him.

It all raises a question, and it is the question that gets asked about Manafort more than any other: Why didn’t he cut a deal with the government? Why did Manafort place himself in a position almost guaranteed to maximize his pain and suffering?

It’s easier than ever to buy things online. It’s so easy that Ryan Cassata sometimes does it in his sleep. Cassata, a 24-year-old singer-songwriter and actor from Los Angeles, recently got a notification from Amazon that a package had been shipped to his apartment, but he didn’t remember buying anything. When he logged onto his account and saw that a fanny pack and some socks were on the way, he remembered: A few nights back, he had woken up in the middle of the night to browse—and apparently shop on—Amazon.

He shops when he’s awake, too, buying little gadgets like an onion chopper, discounted staples like a 240-pack of gum, and decorations like a Himalayan salt lamp. The other day, he almost bought a pizza pool float, until he remembered that he doesn’t have a pool. “I don’t really need most of the stuff,” he tells me.

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This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. But today promises unalloyed joy. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.

At 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory—the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family—Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.”

The author of the explosive dossier outlining the president’s alleged ties to Russia won an important legal victory on Monday, when a judge dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought against his firm by the co-founders of Russia’s largest private bank.

In his decision to toss the case “with prejudice”—that is, permanently—Judge Anthony C. Epstein of the Washington, D.C., Superior Court concluded that the author of the dossier, the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, acted “in furtherance of the right of advocacy on issues of public interest” when he decided to brief reporters on the dossier’s findings in the summer of 2016. Steele’s conduct is therefore protected by “anti-SLAPP” statutes, according to the judge, which aim to halt lawsuits brought to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected free speech.  

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—When Paul Manafort’s trial on tax and bank fraud charges began over two weeks ago, it seemed like a slam-dunk case built on a straightforward paper trail that was unlikely to divide a jury. It was the first, and presumably the surest, prosecution to date by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. On Tuesday afternoon, just over halfway into their fourth day of deliberations, the jurors issued a stunning verdict that provoked audible gasps in the courtroom: They could not reach consensus on a majority of the charges, convicting Manafort on just eight of 18 felony counts against him.

The split verdict was perhaps foreshadowed by the jurors’ request last week, in their first note to Judge T.S. Ellis III, for the court to redefine “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Still, the eight guilty counts could put Manafort in prison for up to 80 years, in a vindication for the special prosecutor and a setback for President Trump, who has for months been loudly denouncing the probe as a “witch hunt.”

The clinic permitted Paul Manafort one 10-minute call each day. And each day, he would use it to ring his wife from Arizona, his voice often soaked in tears. “Apparently he sobs daily,” his daughter Andrea, then 29, texted a friend. During the spring of 2015, Manafort’s life had tipped into a deep trough. A few months earlier, he had intimated to his other daughter, Jessica, that suicide was a possibility. He would “be gone forever,” she texted Andrea.

His work, the source of the status he cherished, had taken a devastating turn. For nearly a decade, he had counted primarily on a single client, albeit an exceedingly lucrative one. He’d been the chief political strategist to the man who became the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, with whom he’d developed a highly personal relationship.

On Sunday night, The New York Times published a report detailing the Italian actress Asia Argento’s 2017 payments to the actor and musician Jimmy Bennett after he alleged that she sexually assaulted him in 2013. According to the Times report, Argento settled Bennett’s claims with payments totaling $380,000 after he accused her of assaulting him in her hotel room during a May 2013 reunion in Marina del Rey, California. At the time of the alleged assault, Argento was 37 and Bennett was 17. The state’s age of consent is 18.

Though the Times story was published this week, Bennett filed his intent to sue in November 2017, a month after The New Yorker published an investigation into the predatory behavior of Harvey Weinstein. Dozens of women alleged that Weinstein had targeted them with sexual advances, and Argento claimed that Weinstein raped her when she was 21. She has since become one of the most vocal #MeToo advocates within the entertainment industry, most notably giving a speech during the closing ceremony of May’s Cannes Film Festival that referred to the annual gathering as Weinstein’s “hunting ground,” and as the place where he raped her.

One of the most compelling characters in the recent Showtime documentary miniseries The Fourth Estate is the New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. Haberman joined the newspaper in 2015 to help cover Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, and since then, she explains, her workload has been all-encompassing. Haberman is rarely seen on camera without a phone in her hand or attached to her ear. “The biggest mistake I made was promising my children that they would get their mother back at the end of the campaign,” she says. In one memorable scene, she takes a break in the middle of recording a podcast to reassure her son that he can’t die in a nightmare.

The Fourth Estate makes for fascinating television despite the fact that the majority of the series simply captures people in meetings or people making calls or people commuting back and forth to work. As Stephen Marche wrote in 2014 for Esquire, the reality of journalists is that they’re “one of the less glamorous species of humanity,” and the most reliable trait of the truly gifted ones is that they’re perpetually on the phone—which is presumably why the entertainment industry has long preferred an alternate depiction of journalists, particularly when it comes to women. On television and in film, the fictional lady reporter tends to look less like Haberman and more like Camille Preaker, portrayed in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects by Amy Adams.