Daily Beast

YouTube/Piers Morgan UncensoredOne week after his contentious interview with Fiona Harvey—the real-life inspiration behind Netflix’s hit series Baby Reindeer, which details the obsessive habits of a stalker—Piers Morgan seems to be reconsidering his take on the situation. Appearing on ITV’s Lorraine on Tuesday, the British host argued that Netflix “failed in their duty of care to Harvey, there’s no question about that.”Harvey was rapidly tracked down and identified by fans of the Netflix series, which was written by and stars Richard Gadd. In the show, Gadd plays a fictionalized version of himself as the target of a prolific stalker named Martha who sends him thousands of emails, hundreds of voicemails, and even physically assaults him.Morgan pressed Harvey hard during his interview with her, which has already accumulated close to 11 million views on YouTube. Harvey conceded to Morgan that “there may have been a couple of emails,” that she sent to Gadd, but she insisted she “didn’t lunge at him across the bar, I didn’t go to jail.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via GettyA court in Paris ruled Tuesday that Roman Polanski did not defame a British actress who accused him of raping her when she was 16.The case was connected to a 2019 interview with magazine Paris Match in which the director, now 90, said Charlotte Lewis had lied about the alleged sexual assault. Lewis, 56, first made her allegations public in 2010, saying she’d been sexually abused by Polanski “in the worst possible way” in 1983 during a casting session for his film Pirates.The ruling Tuesday did not rule on the truth of the rape allegation but instead solely concerned whether Polanski’s comments in the interview constituted defamation, according to the Associated Press. He had denied the charges.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Amazon StudiosFew villains are scarier than the ones we cannot see. J.R.R. Tolkein knew this, which is why the Lord of the Rings novels never described the Dark Lord Sauron in any detail. We knew he had a body, and... that’s pretty much it. Peter Jackson’s original trilogy followed this rule as well; the films never revealed Sauron in flashbacks, instead showing us only his flaming eye at the top of Barad-dûr. Sadly, Amazon’s TV series Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has decided to squander all that mystique. The Rings of Power has already shown Sauron in the flesh. During the Season 1 finale, we found out that Halbrand—a stranger from the Southland who has a very, erm, interesting relationship with Galadriel—is actually Sauron himself. In a Season 2 teaser released Tuesday, however, Amazon unveiled our big bad villain’s new wig, and frankly, it’s simply too much.Sauron does not speak in this brief clip, but he does do a powerful energy thing with his hands. All morning, I’ve wondered why Amazon decided that Sauron should look more like a rejected Death Eater from Harry Potter than a formidable sorcerer who will one day subjugate all of Middle-earth, but then again, I guess you should never judge a book by its cover.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Yulia Morozova/ReutersLess than 24 hours after Vladimir Putin sent his defense minister packing after reportedly privately blaming him for failures in the war against Ukraine, another top Defense Ministry official was yanked out of bed by masked security forces.Counterintelligence agents reportedly arrived armed to the teeth to detain Lieutenant-General Yury Kuznetsov, the head of the Defense Ministry’s personnel department, on bribery charges Monday. The Investigative Committee announced in a press release Tuesday that Kuznetsov is currently in pre-trial detention on large-scale bribery charges.The charges against him, for the most part, remain unclear. Investigators say that from 2021 to 2023, while he was serving as head of the 8th Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Kuznetsov accepted a bribe from commercial enterprises in exchange for “performing certain actions in their favor.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Getty ImagesHarvard University announced Tuesday it had struck a deal with protesters to wind down an on-campus encampment that occupied its iconic Harvard Yard for nearly three weeks. The agreement will see students suspended during the demonstration be reinstated, and university officials have agreed to discuss student questions about a potential divestment from Israel amid its ongoing conflict against Hamas in Gaza. University spokesperson Jonathan Swain told WBUR that those talks will be attended by its interim president, Alan Garber, and Hopi Hoekstra, its dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Steven Hirsch/Getty ImagesDonald Trump’s former lawyer and personal fixer Michael Cohen is set to testify again Tuesday in the hush money trial following his long-awaited first appearance in the Manhattan courtroom Monday.Cohen, the most important witness for the prosecution, used his first day of testimony to place Trump squarely at the center of the scheme that prosecutors claim was used to bury negative stories in order to protect Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He also spoke about his experience acting as the former president’s lawyer, claiming: “Everything required Mr. Trump’s sign-off.”Cohen is key to the current proceedings because he made the $130,000 hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. Prosecutors say the deal was made to stop her from speaking out about an alleged one-night stand with Trump and potentially hurting his campaign. Trump has denied 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, which the prosecution claims involved falsely recording reimbursements to Cohen as legal expenses in an effort to hide the hush money payment.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyPrince William’s prestigious joint engagement with his father King Charles III Monday to formalize his appointment as the head of Prince Harry’s old army unit marks “the final nail in the coffin” for any hope of reconciliation between Harry and his family, a source has told The Daily Beast.The ceremony naming William Colonel-in-Chief of the Army Air Corps came after a weekend of claim and counter-claim by the Palace and Team Sussex about what hospitality was extended to Harry on his trip to the U.K. overshadowed Harry and wife Meghan Markle’s very positively received tour of Nigeria.The royal insider said: “Harry has been stripped of security, stripped of his HRH title, denied a meeting with his father, and now his brother—who loathes him—is being made head of his old regiment. He was not deliberately humiliated last week, but his lack of significance as a member of the royal family was highlighted. It’s notable that the king didn’t send a message of support for Harry’s celebration of ten years of the Invictus Games—and even more notable that he found time to meet David Beckham but not his own son. Making William head of the Army Air Corps was previously announced, but the timing of the handover is the final nail in the coffin. The message that he is now just another outsider could not be any clearer.”Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesAfter a months-long break from the stage—during which she took every opportunity to cheer on her Super Bowl-winning boyfriend from the stands—Taylor Swift is back on the road. The pop star’s Eras Tour swept the Americas last year, and now it’s Europe’s turn. Swift will spend the next four months hitting major hubs like London and Stockholm before returning stateside for one more North American leg this fall.So, yes, we’re now heading into year two of headline-dominating Eras Tour discourse. Since debuting the three-hour victory lap of her greatest hits last March in Arizona, Swift’s show has already managed to gross over $1 billion, making the Eras Tour the first tour in history to cross that milestone. It’s projected that by the time the tour concludes, a $2 billion gross could be within Swift’s reach. Thus far, fan reviews of their experiences at the Eras Tour have been overwhelmingly positive. But the sheer size of the stadiums Swift is packing have necessitated infrastructural sophistication from its organizers on a level that’s rarely, if ever, been seen in pop music. As such, there have been a few hiccups.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty ImagesKathleen Hanna has never been one to mince words, so why would she start now?The punk-rock trailblazer’s memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, arrives on Tuesday and finds Hanna writing both searingly about men who abused her, and humorously about everything from clueless record execs to her friend Kurt Cobain. Along the way, she traces her life from her difficult childhood growing up with a sadistic and alcoholic father, to her ’90s notoriety as the front woman of Bikini Kill, the punk outfit that spearheaded the third-wave feminist movement known as Riot grrrl. The 55-year-old artist also gives rare insight into her diagnosis of late-stage Lyme disease that sidelined her for years, as well as her marriage to a Beastie Boy.Below, read about some of the book’s best bits, from the stories of how she coined the phrases “girl power” and “smells like Teen Spirit” to that infamous confrontation with Courtney Love.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyListen to this full episode of The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon and Stitcher.A few short months ago, the conventional wisdom emanating from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign seemed to be that the former president was looking for a female to join him as his running mate, seemingly in an attempt to soften his image and recapture some of the suburban women that polls show have soured on him recently.But, following a series of scandals and disagreements that have roiled the race to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, it appears that many of the women once thought to be favorites have taken themselves out of the running, according to Semafor politics reporter Shelby Talcott, who joins The New Abnormal this week to discuss the state of the 2024 race.Read more at The Daily Beast.