
Hailey Bieber's dad Stephen Baldwin reacts to her selling Rhode for $1 billion after rift with her and Justin
'It took her three years,' the actor told Adam Carolla during a recent episode of The Adam Carolla Show.
'What, did you think that was just some rotten tomatoes journey? The cool part of it is she's super smart, smart in business,' he continued of the 28-year-old.
His kind words came in the wake of a family rift after he publicly urged fans to pray for her and her husband Justin Bieber, which she considered to be him meddling in their affairs, a source told DailyMail.com.
'Succeeded as a model prior to everything she's doing now. But the cool part was she actually had an offer to do something pretty big and cool in the cosmetics a couple years ago and didn't.'
Stephen, 58, went on to explain that Hailey didn't just endorse a brand someone else came up with, she made products that she would use herself.
'The reason its succeeding is people are responding to it,' he noted. 'It actually works as hydration and all of that.'
Stephen is also dad to 32-year-old daughter Alaia Baldwin Aronow and he revealed he takes a hands-off approach to his kids' careers.
'I let my kids do what they're doing,' he shared. 'And if they want to throw a boomerang at me, I'll call them back.'
Plus, both of his girls are married to successful men and he gushed over Justin Bieber and Alaia's husband Andrew Aronow.
As Stephen added, 'I'm blessed that my two daughters married two great guys.'
He also insisted that family comes first.
'The sweet part of my kids, too, is, in the wake of whatever their success is, their dad remains the same,' he gushed.
'I've always been the same way. You know you're going to tell your daughter the truth.'
'What, did you think that was just some rotten tomatoes journey? The cool part of it is she's super smart, smart in business,' he continued of the 28-year-old.
Stephen, 58, went on to explain that Hailey didn't just endorse a brand someone else came up with, she made products that she would use herself. Seen here November 18, 2024
And he's crediting Hailey with helping Justin through the hard time he's having lately.
The Usual Suspects actor said: 'I am just glad he connected with a great gal to help him survive.'
Stephen added: 'Their happiness and their wellbeing and their health is more obviously now better than ever.'
In August 2024, Hailey and Justin welcomed their first child, son Jack Blues, and his grandad Stephen gushed with pride about the newborn describing him as 'incredibly cute'.
Asked about the new parents, who got married in 2018 after a whirlwind romance, Stephen said that new parenthood has been 'very relaxed' for the couple.
He added: 'They're just spending really sweet, private quality time with Jack and we're just getting ready to watch him come out on the world here, come out on the scene.'
He also offered his babysitting services: 'Sometimes grandpa can clean up. You know what I'm saying?'
Hailey is allegedly choosing to keep her parents away from her baby son Jack amid her ongoing tensions with the pair, according to sources who say she has long clashed with Stephen and Kennya Baldwin over religious and political beliefs.
Though her father celebrated the birth of his grandson with a post on Instagram, which Hailey did not like from her own account, the model's mother raised eyebrows after choosing not to mark the moment on her own social media feed.
It highlights Hailey's strained relationship with her parents, which reportedly started to 'break down' further when the beauty mogul fell pregnant.
'Hailey's relationship with her family has been eroding for some time now,' a source told DailyMail.com exclusively.
'She was closer with her mom, but that started to break down when she fell pregnant because she didn't want to tell her family for months.'
The insider explained that the situation that ultimately pushed Hailey over the edge was when her father shared a post asking fans to pray for Hailey and Justin, something which sparked concern for the couple.
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The Guardian
33 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Paula Bomer: ‘If you describe yourself as a victim, you're dismissed'
When I arrive at Paula Bomer's apartment building in south Brooklyn I am briefly disoriented in the lobby, until I hear the yapping of dogs and amid them, her voice calling my name. Bomer is tall and striking, in her mid-50s. I met her last year at a reading in Williamsburg, Virginia, where she seemed like someone who cared almost manically about literature and also like someone who would be fun to hang out with, two qualities not always confluent. I had heard of these anxious dogs before, when she and I met for dinner a few months ago, and she disclosed that her life was now spent managing canine neuroses. 'I got them when my dad died,' she says, in between offering me matcha, coffee, tequila or wine (it's 2.30pm on a Sunday; Bomer doesn't drink any more, save a glass of champagne on selling her book, but doesn't mind if others do). 'The dogs were a mistake,' she says, 'But that's OK, I'll survive it.' Bomer was involved with the cohort of mid-2000s US writing broadly characterised as 'alt lit', an irreverent internet vernacular-driven movement personified by Tao Lin. She published anonymously on the website HTML Giant and had her first novel, Nine Months, in a drawer for 10 years. Mark Doten of Soho Press picked it up in 2012. Since then she has been widely admired in the literary world for her transgressive, vivid work, which often examines women at points of great pressure from an uncanny perspective – her fans include Sam Lipsyte and Jonathan Franzen. This admiration has not yet fully broken through to a mainstream audience, but her new book looks set to do so. Bomer's latest novel, The Stalker, is all about the nastiest, most parasitic kind of survival. Its antihero, Robert Doughten Savile or 'Doughty', is the bearer of an entitlement so groundless and infinite that it obliterates anyone he approaches. Born to a once-wealthy Connecticut family but now without material means, he uses his charisma and total confidence to live in New York as he believes he deserves. He lies effortlessly, inventing lavish real estate deals while in fact whiling away his afternoons watching George Carlin specials, smoking crack in the park, and allowing older men to perform oral sex on him in Grand Central for a little extra cash. In the evenings, meanwhile, he is primed to identify and zone in on women who may prove useful. This is Doughty's great gift, knowing what a woman needs and what she will tolerate to get it, how his cruelty is best deployed or concealed. To nauseating effect, his skill escalates operatically as the book continues. It's a knockout novel, one I've passed around to friends, scenes from which I still feel a thrill of horror to recall. 'Originally I wanted him to be the devil,' she says. 'The actual devil, evil incarnate. But then I found myself humanising him. And I kind of regret it.' By the simple relentlessness of his presence, his unwillingness to allow the women enough space or thought to disengage from his influence, he comes to represent male intrusion on female life. 'On a daily basis, if you leave your building you are dealing with some shitty man spewing garbage,' she says. 'It wears on us, and that's why I have a problem with critics being weary of the survivor-victim thing: 'Oh just get over it, it's boring, you can be strong.' It's like, I did try that. I did that: 'I'm strong. I'm going to shoot pool with the guys.' Although, I really do like to shoot pool.' We derail here while she leads me to her office, pleasantly cluttered with paintings like the rest of the flat, so that she can show me her pool cue, which she has had since she was 19. I ask if she was good. 'You rank 'em out of six, I was a solid three. But on a good day I could beat a six.' We return to the question of victim fatigue, something that has been on my own mind lately, having just read a brilliant memoir called Trauma Plot by Jamie Hood, which exists partly in conversation with the cultural malaise around making art about having survived violence and abuse. Both Hood's book and Bomer refer to a New Yorker essay by Parul Sehgal titled The Case Against the Trauma Plot, which argues that overuse of trauma as a narrative device has led to constricted, rote work. Sehgal subsequently panned Sarah Manguso's autobiographical divorce novel, Liars, describing it as 'thin and partial', and asking: 'What is this vision of womanhood, of sexually indiscriminate infants running households?' Bomer, on the other hand, was so moved by Manguso's depiction of infidelity and the violence of being lied to that she wrote Manguso a fan letter (one of seven she has written in her life, Philip Roth and Franzen among recipients of the others). 'Sehgal misses the entire point of the book, which is that Manguso is now free – not bitter, free. Whenever you describe yourself as a victim, you're immediately dismissed … I feel like finding Doughty's voice in my book was my way, hopefully, to be heard – in the way that no one wants to fucking hear another story about women. And yet he's such an everyman. So it's like, here's your cliche then.' Bomer was raised in Indiana by a French professor father and an Austrian mother who was a translator and a painter: 'She refused to become an American citizen, for political reasons. Which really makes sense now, right? She was ahead of her time in a million different ways.' Her childhood was marred by the worry and dread following her father's suicide attempt when she was five; she went on to study psychology in what she describes as 'an attempt to cure' her father. She was married for 20 years and raised two children, writing as much as possible. When pressed for her strategy there she replies, 'I had no social life and my house was a mess.' In 2011, she published her first story collection, Baby; her second, Inside Madeleine, followed in 2014. All were warmly received, but her moment of success around the publication of Inside Madeleine could not take hold fully because, in her words, she 'disappeared'. Her father had killed himself not long before, and her mother was in the last stages of a long illness. 'My father's death was horrific and violent. My mother's was slow. There was no way to process. People don't want to be around you when you're suffering.' Bomer was divorced 10 years ago, and describes The Stalker as a sort of divorce book, 'but not divorcing a particular man, it's divorcing men – a kind of man,' she says, before instantly discluding her two sons and her many friends. After our meeting, she emails me to clarify some of her comments and concludes: 'We don't believe people the first time they hurt us, or the second, or the third – until we do. Because we want to have compassion and believe that if we show love and kindness … we will reap it back. And that is where we are wrong. Many, many people are ciphers. They will add nothing to your life, and they will leave with so much of you.' It's difficult to reconcile the blunt fatalism of a statement like that one, or indeed the exhilaratingly ghastly novel she has written, with the generous and joyful woman I met. But perhaps the exorcism she has performed with this marvel – a divorce book with no divorce; a book called The Stalker with not that much stalking in it; a book by a middle-aged woman that, following five others, looks set to become her breakthrough hit – has made her so. Not bitter, as she says, but free. The Stalker by Paula Bomer is published by Soho Press. 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The Independent
33 minutes ago
- The Independent
Sean 'Diddy' Combs gets standing ovation from inmates after court victory, his lawyer says
Sean 'Diddy' Combs got a standing ovation from fellow inmates when the music mogul returned to jail after winning acquittals on potential life-in-prison charges, providing what his lawyer says might have been the best thing he could do for Black incarcerated men in America. 'They all said: 'We never get to see anyone who beats the government,'' attorney Marc Agnifilo said in a weekend interview days after a jury acquitted Combs of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy charges. Combs, 55, remains jailed after his Wednesday conviction on prostitution-related charges and could still face several years in prison at an upcoming sentencing after being credited for 10 months already served. After federal agents raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami in March 2024, the lawyer said he told Combs to expect arrest on sex trafficking charges. 'I said: 'Maybe it's your fate in life to be the guy who wins,'' he recalled during a telephone interview briefly interrupted by a jailhouse call from Combs. 'They need to see that someone can win. I think he took that to heart.' Blunt trial strategy works The verdict came after a veteran team of eight defense lawyers led by Agnifilo executed a trial strategy that resonated with jurors. Combs passed lawyers notes during effective cross examinations of nearly three dozen witnesses over two months, including Combs' ex-employees. The lawyers told jurors Combs was a jealous domestic abuser with a drug problem who participated in the swinger lifestyle through threesomes involving Combs, his girlfriends and another man. 'You may think to yourself, wow, he is a really bad boyfriend,' Combs' lawyer Teny Geragos told jurors in her May opening statement. But that, she said, 'is simply not sex trafficking.' Agnifilo said the blunt talk was a 'no brainer." 'The violence was so clear and up front and we knew the government was going to try to confuse the jury into thinking it was part of a sex trafficking effort. So we had to tell the jury what it was so they wouldn't think it was something it wasn't,' he said. Combs and his lawyers seemed deflated Tuesday when jurors said they were deadlocked on the racketeering count but reached a verdict on sex trafficking and lesser prostitution-related charges. A judge ordered them back to deliberate Wednesday. 'No one knows what to think,' Agnifilo said. Then he slept on it. Morning surprise awakes lawyer 'I wake up at three in the morning and I text Teny and say: 'We have to get a bail application together," he recalled. 'It's going to be a good verdict for us but I think he went down on the prostitution counts so let's try to get him out.' He said he 'kind of whipped everybody into feeling better' after concluding jurors would have convicted him of racketeering if they had convicted him of sex trafficking because trafficking was an alleged component of racketeering. Agnifilo met with Combs before court and Combs entered the courtroom rejuvenated. Smiling, the onetime Catholic schoolboy prayed with family. In less than an hour, the jury matched Agnifilo's prediction. The seemingly chastened Combs mouthed 'thank you' to jurors and smiled as family and supporters applauded. After he was escorted from the room, spectators cheered the defense team, a few chanting: 'Dream Team! Dream Team!' Several lawyers, including Geragos, cried. 'This was a major victory for the defense and a major loss for the prosecution,' said Mitchell Epner, a lawyer who worked with Agnifilo as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey over two decades ago. He credited 'a dream team of defense lawyers' against prosecutors who almost always win. Agnifilo showcased what would become his trial strategy — belittling the charges and mocking the investigation that led to them — last September in arguing unsuccessfully for bail. The case against Combs was what happens when the 'federal government comes into our bedrooms,' he said. Lawyers gently questioned most witnesses During an eight-week trial, Combs' lawyers picked apart the prosecution case with mostly gentle but firm cross-examinations. Combs never testified and his lawyers called no witnesses. Sarah Krissoff, a federal prosecutor in Manhattan from 2008 to 2021, said Combs' defense team 'had a narrative from the beginning and they did all of it without putting on any witnesses. That's masterful.' Ironically, Agnifilo expanded the use of racketeering laws as a federal prosecutor on an organized crime task force in New Jersey two decades ago, using them often to indict street gangs in violence-torn cities. 'I knew the weak points in the statute,' he said. 'The statute is very mechanical. If you know how the car works, you know where the fail points are.' He said prosecutors had 'dozens of fail points.' 'They didn't have a conspiracy, they just didn't,' he said. 'They basically had Combs' personal life and tried to build racketeering around personal assistants.' Some personal assistants, even after viewing videos of Combs beating his longtime girlfriend, Casandra 'Cassie' Ventura, had glowing things to say about Combs on cross examination. Once freed, Combs likely to re-enter domestic abusers program For Combs, Agnifilo sees a long road ahead once he is freed as he works on personal demons, likely re-entering a program for domestic batterers that he had just started before his arrest. 'He's doing OK,' said Agnifilo, who speaks with him four or five times daily. He said Combs genuinely desires improvement and 'realizes he has flaws like everyone else that he never worked on.' 'He burns hot in all matters. I think what he has come to see is that he has these flaws and there's no amount of fame and no amount of fortune' that can erase them," he said. 'You can't cover them up." For Agnifilo, a final surprise awaited him after Combs' bail was rejected when a man collapsed into violent seizures at the elevators outside the courtroom. 'I'm like: 'What the hell?'' recalled the lawyer schooled in treating seizures. Agnifilo straddled him, pulling him onto his side and using a foot to prevent him from rolling backward while a law partner, Jacob Kaplan, put a backpack under the man's head and Agnifilo's daughter took his pulse. 'We made sure he didn't choke on vomit. It was crazy. I was worried about him,' he said. The man was eventually taken away conscious by rescue workers, leaving Agnifilo to ponder a tumultuous day. 'It was like I was getting punked by God,' he said.


The Guardian
42 minutes ago
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on the BBC's future: the broadcaster's independence and funding face challenges
The BBC will soon charge US users for full news access. In Britain, it may seem a distant prospect, but if universality can be dropped abroad, how long before it's tested at home? With the BBC's charter due for renewal in 2027, the funding debate is intensifying. What becomes of the licence fee will define the broadcaster's future. There is increased scrutiny of Auntie's independence and impartiality after political pressure was applied through censure, funding freezes and contentious board appointments. What the BBC should look like in a fragmented media landscape is uncertain. A big question is whether the licence fee levied on households should be replaced by subscription, limited advertising or public funding. The last option is surely a non-starter, opening the door to more direct political control. Carrying adverts would force the BBC to compete with other broadcasters for cash, and destabilise existing providers. A subscription-style BBC, even if technical hurdles were overcome, wouldn't be a national institution. Those most in need of public-service media – navigating disinformation, political alienation or regional marginalisation – would be left out. Once you charge, the question isn't how to inform, educate and entertain the public; it's who can afford to be included. Partial subscription might keep some core services – like news – free, while others are paywalled. This would entrench a two-tier public service. The BBC is a large organisation and not without its faults. But critics with vested interests often exaggerate them. What began as commercial pressure has been inflamed by culture wars. Success – from Peaky Blinders to Blue Planet – has not shielded it from attack. No wonder the director-general, Tim Davie, warned in May of a looming 'trust crisis'. It's now easier to list the political groups at war with BBC News than those who trust it. The row over Glastonbury – and the BBC's retreat – underscores the pressure on Mr Davie. But the broadcaster's fight isn't just with critics. It's also battling for attention in an ecosystem flooded by algorithmic noise. Since the last charter renewal in 2016, streamers, podcasts and AI have disrupted the landscape, collapsing trust in 'legacy' media. When outrage spreads faster than facts, and filter bubbles shape belief, the BBC's global stature as a respected public institution matters more than ever. Every government leans on the BBC – at a price. The BBC pulled a documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, citing vague concerns about 'partiality'. Channel 4 aired it instead. Meanwhile, Robbie Gibb, a controversial Johnson-era appointee, helps shape BBC editorial priorities as a board member. A former Tory spin doctor, he became the Jewish Chronicle's owner, appointing an editor who pushed a hardline pro-Israel stance and oversaw multiple scandals. He refused to reveal who was funding the paper. His role in guiding how the BBC reviews its Middle East coverage raises concerns about impartiality. More than 400 media figures last week called for his removal. His departure is long overdue. In 1977, the Annan committee reimagined broadcasting for a changing Britain. Channel 4 was the result. The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, who has sensibly called for a modern Annan‑style review, is chary of backing Mr Davie. But broader reform is needed in a time of distrust and disruption. For the BBC, this could offer not just a funding fix but a democratic roadmap. The charter review must rebuild a trusted civic platform – a public good, not a private preserve.