Tag: textabovecentergridwidth

In the Jinx sequel, Galveston trial judge Susan Criss sounds off on the strangeness of the situation.

“Chris Lovell was one of the jurors in the Galveston case who immediately befriended Bob as soon as the trial was over,” says Criss. “I think he was enamored with Bob because Bob is incredibly wealthy. He was hoping that would provide some financial rewards. I’ve never seen or heard of a juror forming a relationship with a defendant after trial. But then most defendants aren’t extremely wealthy with sort of a celebrity status.”

Referring to the Houston apartment cleanup, she adds, “It is astounding that 12 years after a murder trial, one of the jurors is helping Bob make his getaway.”

Lovell spoke to Jarecki for the first Jinx. “I didn’t set out to be Robert Durst’s friend,” he said. “I just set out to get some questions answered in my mind, but it has developed into a friendship, and I don’t have a problem with him at all.”

Doug Oliver

Lewin dubbed Doug Oliver “the rudest witness I’ve ever encountered in my career.” Vulture called him “a real estate developer who seems awful even by the low standards of real estate developers.” And Robert Durst referred to him as a loyal friend.

According to Charles Bagli of The New York Times, Durst earned Oliver’s allegiance by being generous with him at the beginning of his real estate development career. As Bagli recounts in The Jinx, Durst, who was the scion of a prestigious Manhattan real estate family, fronted the money for a tenement building Oliver wanted to buy. When they sold the building, Durst evenly split the profits with Oliver, launching a lifelong friendship.

“Doug Oliver was [Durst’s] bad-boy, knocking-around friend,” said Jarecki. “They went to St. Tropez and brought girls…. He was like the bad angel on Bob’s shoulder, or vice versa. They were off doing mischief. And he loved that about Bob.”

Oliver was a person worth questioning, according to Lewin, because “he was extremely close to Bob. He was talking to Bob in 1982, the week Kathie disappeared.”

But when Lewin initially connected with Oliver by phone, Oliver refused to cooperate with the deputy district attorney. That contentious phone call, which gets played in the series, ends with Oliver telling Lewin that he’d rather go to jail than get on a commercial flight to Los Angeles. Oliver also tells Lewin he’ll need a subpoena and a private-jet budget to get him to participate.

In the end, Oliver did bend to the law and testify—though he was admittedly uncooperative, bristling at questions and alleging he could not recall much that prosecutors asked him about (until prosecutors referred him to his previous statements).

After hearing Oliver’s nasty tone with the deputy district attorney, it’s eerie to hear him ooze sweetness in a call with Durst, featured in a new episode: “Whatever I can do for you, Bobby. It’d be my pleasure.”

Nick Chavin

Nick Chavin is another real estate friend whose loyalty Durst earned by leveraging his financial assets. After Chavin gave up his career fronting the X-rated country act Chinga Chavin—you read that correctly—he was introduced to Durst by their mutual friend Susan Berman.

How, in all of our collective years reading about Robert Durst, the late millionaire murderer and eccentric, did it not register that he had a best friend who was a former lewd country music rocker? Enter Nick “Chinga” Chavin, whose longtime relationship with and loyalty to the late Durst is the subject of Sunday’s Jinx Part Two episode, “Friendships Die Hard.”

Chavin made news in 2017 when he was unveiled as “a secret witness” in the Susan Berman trial. His bombshell testimony had been pried out of him by his wife, Terry, and Los Angeles deputy district attorney John Lewin, The Jinx sequel reveals, and directly implicated Durst in the murders of his first wife, Kathleen McCormack, and his other best friend, Susan Berman. Chavin’s claim that Durst confessed to killing Berman in 2014 (“It was her or me, I had no choice,” Chavin recalled him saying in his testimony)—along with evidence uncovered during the making of The Jinx—was crucial to Durst being finally found guilty of Berman’s murder after decades spent in the shadow of suspicion.

But there are so many rabbit holes in the Durst saga—three killings, the dismemberment of a neighbor, a national manhunt that ended because of a stolen chicken sandwich, a fugitive period where he dressed as a mute woman—that the story of Durst’s friend who fronted the music act Country Porn quickly faded. To filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, who tried unsuccessfully to get Chavin to participate in the original Jinx docuseries, Chavin was always a key piece to the Durst puzzle though.

“The reason Nick was so important, and the reason all these people [in Bob’s inner circle] were so important, goes back to this thing we said when we started working on [Part Two],” Jarecki tells Vanity Fair. “How do you kill three people over 30 years and get away with it? It takes a village. That village became, to me, the centerpiece of Part Two—the idea that there’s this constellation of people who all see themselves as good, decent people…and yet here they are helping a murderer.”

Like many, if not all, of the people loyal to Durst over the decades, Chavin was financially entangled with the real estate heir, as The Jinx details. Chavin met Durst (through Berman) in the early ’80s, shortly after the musician pivoted to a career in real estate advertising. Durst’s family owns one of Manhattan’s most prestigious real estate empires, and in the episode Chavin tells Jarecki that Durst “gave me my business career, the whole thing, on a platter” by getting his family’s business to sign with him.

Chavin testified that his career took off between the lucrative account and the credibility it gave him.

The two hung out in their personal time too. “We had what we called ‘boys night out,’ and we’d go out and go to nightclubs and bars,” Chavin testified. He further explained in the testimony that the two double dated and, even though Durst was married to McCormack at the beginning of their friendship, Durst would sometimes take his wife and other times bring a girlfriend. Chavin and Durst also visited the famous Manhattan sex club Plato’s Retreat, according to an interview Chavin gave Rolling Stone. “I was a lot more conservative than he was,” Chavin said, explaining to the outlet that Durst would often light up a joint wherever he happened to be. “When you’ve got the money to buy your way out of stuff you can do a lot of shit,” he said.

“Right,” Durst agreed.

By this point, Lewin had listened to Jarecki’s 20 hours’ worth of Jinx interviews. He reminded Durst that the millionaire had said in the past that something did bother him about All Good Things.

“Oh, killing all the dogs,” Durst remembered. (Gosling’s character kills the family dog in the film.) Lewin theorized that Durst would never hurt a dog. Durst agreed, though he couldn’t answer as definitively on the subject of hurting women. (When Lewin suggested Durst dismembered the body of his first wife, Kathie, Durst replied, “I’m not gonna go there.”)

Though Durst was worth an estimated $100 million, he admitted to applying for food stamps because he got a kick out of cheating the government. He said he had shoplifted “since I was a little kid” because he had no interest in waiting in line. “I’ve got other things I want to do,” he said. Other kids are taught to respect authority; as Durst told Lewin, “I didn’t have to follow the rules.” At another point, Durst said he declined a television network’s offer to make a special on him that would cast him as a good person. That would be going too far, in Durst’s book: “I never felt that I was really a good guy,” he said.

He volunteered that a previous lawyer didn’t want him to tell the Galveston, Texas, jury about his daily routine: “I’m a millionaire. I don’t have to work. I get up most mornings and smoke pot.” (At another point, he told Lewin, “I’ve been smoking pot every day, all my life, for as long as I can remember.”)

Durst spoke obliquely about his relationship with former inmates, presumably those he met while awaiting his 2003 Morris Black murder trial. After his arrest, Durst jumped bail and was caught in Pennsylvania trying to shoplift a chicken sandwich. The capture blew his inmates’ minds.

“None of the inmates could understand that, at all: ‘You have lots of money. Why’d you get caught?’” Technically, he was caught because he was attempting to steal lunch, a newspaper, and a Band-Aid (with $500 cash in his pocket and $37,000 in the car). Again, why risk your freedom for something so relatively small?

“I can’t explain it to you,” said Durst. “I couldn’t explain it to the inmates. I mean, it was just ridiculous…. I hated being a fugitive…. I was the worst fugitive the world has ever met…. Maybe I wanted to get caught. I certainly can’t explain it any other way.”

Bizarrely, he told Lewin about learning how to more effectively dismember a human body after he chopped up Morris Black. “The way I was doing it was the hard way,” Durst said. “Subsequently, I’ve been told that a surgeon would cut up a body the same way you do a chicken. You go into the joint. And you cut around the joint. You get rid of all the ligaments. And then, the thing comes out. You’re not gonna go and try to cut through the God-damned bone, like I did.”

Richard Lewis has never been anything less than an open book. To watch the self-proclaimed “Prince of Pain” onstage was to feel as if you were trapped inside his brain and being exposed to every last one of his neuroses. From his struggles with depression and anxiety to his eating disorder to being a recovered alcoholic and addict, we got to know the man very well.

After nearly 50 years, Lewis hung up the mic on January 20, 2018, at Zanies in Chicago. I met him the night before his swan song, thanks to a mutual friend, the late author and journalist Bill Zehme. We spent half an hour backstage, Lewis wearing sunglasses and lying on the couch with his head tilted back, as though we’d come to analyze him. Thanks to the sunglasses, we never knew if his eyes were opened or closed.

For the following conversation, we met via Zoom. Once again Lewis was hiding behind the shades, though he wasn’t being pretentious, he was just protecting himself from the California sun beaming through his window. Behind him, there were framed photographs featuring some of his heroes—Lenny Bruce, Muhammad Ali, and Jimi Hendrix. Those greats all come up in casual conversation with Lewis, but perhaps nobody comes up more frequently than Larry David.

Their paths were destined to cross. They were born three days apart at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital in 1947. They attended the same summer camp, then met again in their 20s as comedians in New York. Since then, they’ve been fixtures in each other’s lives, which is why David asked him to be part of Curb Your Enthusiasm nearly 25 years ago. “I can’t tell you how loving he is—the best friend you could ever imagine,” Lewis told me. “The show gives me another vehicle to express my feelings to Larry, because we are the oldest of friends.”

Lewis and I met to talk about the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, but the conversation went far and wide. The past few years have been difficult for him, because of a series of surgeries and a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. Despite it all, he struck me as vibrant, sharp—and hilarious—as ever.

Vanity Fair: Your first appearance this season has you and Larry in a golf cart. You tell him you’re going to leave him money in your will, and he dismisses the notion, saying he doesn’t need it. Does that kind of sum up your relationship with him? You offer up a nice gesture and it turns into a whole thing?

Richard Lewis: It’s almost like lunch. On many episodes, I would beat him to the host at the restaurant and say “It’s on me.” So when this scene came up, I jumped on this thing. This would be the ultimate thank you: I’m leaving him money, even though he wouldn’t need it. And he goes on to say he doesn’t, but I don’t care. Then it provokes a fight. He goes, “Fuck you,” and I go, “Fuck you.” It goes back-and-forth like a ping pong match between two neurotics.

A month after pop star and TV personality Paula Abdul accused fellow So You Think You Can Dance judge Nigel Lythgoe of sexual assault, his replacement has been named. For its 18th season, recording artist and Kids’ Choice snub-ee JoJo Siwa will take over Lythgoe’s seat on the competition show’s panel, continuing a run that began with a judge role in Season 17.

In late 2023, Abdul filed suit against Lythgoe, who was also a producer on So You Think You Can Dance. According to Abdul, Lythgoe subjected her to sexual assault, verbal abuse, and bullying, but fearing retaliation, she did not report the alleged issues during her tenure on the series.

Lythgoe denies Abdul’s claims, telling Vanity Fair through a spokesperson that he is “shocked and saddened by the allegations” and said, “Not only are they false, they are deeply offensive to me and to everything I stand for.”

Days later, two contestants from the ABC competition show All American Girl filed a separate lawsuit against Lythgoe claiming on-set groping and sexual assault, Variety reports. The full suit is available online. 

Following the second suit, Lythgoe announced, “I have informed the producers of So You Think You Can Dance of my decision to step back from participating in this year’s series.”

“I did so with a heavy heart but entirely voluntarily because this great programme has always been about dance and dancers, and that’s where its focus needs to remain. In the meantime, I am dedicating myself to clearing my name and restoring my reputation.” 

While he does that, the So You Think You Can Dance show will apparently carry on, but with choreographer Allison Holker, dancer Maksim Chmerkovskiy, and Siwa—who has also competed on Fox’s Special Forces: World’s Toughest Test and on Dancing with the Stars—at the table at which Abdul and Lythgoe used to sit.

In an Instagram story posted to her account Friday, Siwa said, “Oh my gosh, this show is iconic and legendary for so many reasons … I am beyond excited, the talent is actually insane and I cannot wait for everyone to see them.” 

Siwa’s wait will end at 9 p.m. ET on Monday, March 4, when So You Think You Can Dance’s next season makes its premiere on Fox.

The scene at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday seemed to be a happy one: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stood shoulder-to-shoulder with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) co-founder Vince McMahon. The magnate and the action star were all smiles as he rang the exchange’s opening bell, a gesture intended to celebrate his move to join the board of the WWE’s parent company, TKO Group Holdings. Just a few days later, the makeup of TKO’s board would change again, but this time, McMahon was presumably less jolly. 

The 78-year-old abruptly resigned as the executive chairman of the board of directors on Friday after a former employee accused McMahon of sex trafficking, rape, and workplace harassment.

McMahon’s statement said he was leaving the board “out of respect” for WWE and TKO Group.

The allegations, which were made as part of a lawsuit brought by Janel Grant in Connecticut’s US District Court, are not the first time McMahon has faced high-profile claims of abuse. In 2022, McMahon temporarily resigned from the role he then held with the WWE following a Wall Street Journal report detailing millions in so-called “hush money” allegedly paid out to “keep secret allegations of sexual misconduct and infidelity.” A subsequent investigation by the WWE’s board “found that over 16 years he had spent $14.6 million in payments to women who had accused him of sexual misconduct,” the New York Times reports; a second internal investigation revealed an additional $5 million paid to two women. McMahon, for his part, denied that any interactions he had were nonconsensual. 

McMahon was also accused of sexually assaulting a Florida tanning salon employee in 2006. He was arrested by Boca Raton police and charged with sexual battery, but prosecutors declined to move forward with the case, the Daily Beast reported in 2018.

Despite the multiple scandals, McMahon—who owned the bulk of the WWE’s shares—returned to the company in 2023, where he was seemingly re-embraced by Johnson and others, including influential Hollywood figure Ari Emanuel. Emanuel’s company, Endeavor, merged with the WWE in 2023; the new parent organization, known as TKO, named McMahon its executive chairman.

But that changed on Friday. According to the WSJ, which was the first to report on Thursday’s lawsuit, Grant accused McMahon of multiple 2021 assaults, said he coerced her into relations with other company executives, and alleged that he shared revealing photos and videos of Grant with other staffers, among other claims. The full filing, which details Grant’s claims in graphic detail, is available online. 

The timing for the suit couldn’t have been worse for TKO, which named Johnson to its board Tuesday. “I’m very motivated to help continue to globally expand our TKO, WWE, and UFC businesses as the worldwide leaders in sports and entertainment,” Johnson said, name-checking two McMahon-affiliated businesses in a statement reported by ESPN. The same day, the company announced a landmark deal with Netflix in which the WWE’s flagship show, Raw, would depart linear television for the streaming giant.

Both moves resulted in glowing comments from folks like Johnson’s fellow wrestler-turned-actor John Cena, who told Variety that he “couldn’t be happier” for McMahon’s companies.

“WWE’s always my family,” Cena said of the formerly McMahon-led org this week. “I’ll always be there in any capacity they’ll have me.”

Cena, I should note, has been a longtime supporter of McMahon’s. He addressed the earlier claims against McMahon in a 2023 interview with the Associated Press, saying then, “I love Vince McMahon. He’s everything you could want in a great friend, business partner, father, mentor. I love the man.” When asked about the allegations against McMahon, Cena replied, “When you love somebody, you take them as imperfectly perfect as they are. We all make mistakes, we all have poor decisions.”

It’s unclear if Cena continues to hold that view, and a request for comment was not responded to as of publication time. However, by Friday, TKO started to distance itself from its executive chair.

“Mr. McMahon does not control TKO nor does he oversee the day-to-day operations of WWE,” the company said in a statement. “While this matter predates our TKO executive team’s tenure at the company, we take Ms. Grant’s horrific allegations very seriously and are addressing this matter internally.”

On Friday, TKO staffers were informed via email that McMahon had left his company once more. “He will no longer have a role with TKO Group Holdings or WWE,” TKO president Nick Khan said in a memo viewed by the NYT.