Shannon Sharpe Sexual Assault Accuser Texts, Black Woman Settles Suit Against Tesla, Two Florida Alligators Ring a House Doorbell, Social Media Grapples With Shannon Sharpe Race Play, Houston's 'DL List' and Other Culture News From the Week
Shannon Sharpe hasn't spoken publicly about the sexual assault lawsuit against him yet, but now, his legal team is handling business in what many online are calling the messiest way. The former Denver Bronco was hit with a $50 million civil suit from a woman claiming he physically abused her and even threatened to kill her. - Phenix S Halley Read More
It looks like Elon Musk has to pay a Black woman big time after shocking allegations made in a lawsuit against Tesla. The verdict comes after Raina Pierce, a former employee who installed latches on car doors for the company, said she experienced racist and sexist behavior during her time at the company. And it was her own boss that did the unthinkable. - Phenix S Halley Read More
We've all had unwanted visitors show up unexpectedly at our door – that play cousin who never brings anything and eats you out of house and home or the auntie who always finds a not so subtle way to tell you that your house isn't quite clean enough. But imagine your reaction if the person banging on a door (Some internet stories show the alligators ringing the doorbell but no proof that ever happened) wasn't a person at all but an alligator trying to find a way into your home – with another alligator standing guard in the background. - Angela Johnson Read More
It's been a rough week for sports commentator Shannon Sharpe. As the sexual assault lawsuit against him continues to break the internet, there's one aspect of the legal case that has many Black folks weary about throwing Sharpe their support. - Phenix S Halley Read More
The Bible calls marriage a sacred covenant between a husband and wife. You can look to the seventh commandment, 'Thou shalt not commit adultery,' to find what the Good Book has to say about being faithful to your partner. But for one Arizona couple, fidelity was never a factor and now they are sharing their story on how they have managed to stay together for over 30 years, despite the husband's history of cheating. - Angela Johnson Read More
There is a heated debate happening on Black TikTok surrounding a trans woman's decision to open up her DMs to expose a list of Houston men who are reaching out to her on the down low (DL). The now-deleted original list is loaded with comments like 'What's up ma?' 'Hey, sexy' and 'Can I taste the rainbow?' from men who otherwise appear to be straight – some even appear with female partners and children in their profile pictures. - Angela Johnson Read More
If a fight is what the president wants, he's poking at the right bear! Much of the nation's powerful entities are complying with President Donald Trump's efforts to censure history, control teachings in schools and even deport university students. But Harvard University is taking a stand. - Phenix S Halley Read More
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More information has been released to public creating online scrutiny for the former NFL giant.
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Footage from a Florida homeowner's Ring doorbell camera shows the gigantic gator standing up on its hind legs to ring the bell
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Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Brutal arrest of Black student shows benefits of camera in car in recording police stops
A video that captured the brutal arrest of a Black college student pulled from his car and beaten by officers in Florida has led to an investigation and calls for motorists to consider protecting themselves by placing a camera inside their vehicles. William McNeil Jr. captured his February traffic stop on his cellphone camera, which was mounted above his dashboard. It offered a crucial view, providing the only clear footage of the violence by officers, including punches to his head that can't clearly be seen in officer body-camera video released by the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. Since McNeil had the foresight to record the encounter from inside the vehicle, 'we got to see firsthand and hear firsthand and put it all in context what driving while Black is in America,' said civil rights attorney Ben Crump, one of several lawyers advising McNeil. 'All the young people should be recording these interactions with law enforcement,' Crump said. 'Because what it tells us, just like with George Floyd, if we don't record the video, we can see what they put in the police report with George Floyd before they realized the video existed.' McNeil was pulled over that day because officers said his headlights should have been on because of bad weather, his lawyers said. His camera shows him asking the officers what he did wrong. Seconds later, an officer smashes his window, strikes him as he sat in the driver's seat and then pulls him from the car and punches him in the head. After being knocked to the ground, McNeil was punched six more times in his right thigh, a police report states. The incident reports don't describe the officer punching McNeil in the head. The officer, who pulled McNeil over and then struck him, described the force this way in his report: 'Physical force was applied to the suspect and he was taken to the ground.' But after McNeil posted his video online last month and it went viral, the Sheriff's Office launched an internal investigation, which is ongoing. A sheriff's spokesperson declined to comment about the case last week, citing pending litigation, though no lawsuit has been filed over the arrest. McNeil said the ordeal left him traumatized, with a brain injury, a broken tooth and stitches in his lip. His attorneys accused the Sheriff's Office of trying to cover up what really happened. 'On Feb. 19, 2025, Americans saw what America is,' said another of McNeil's lawyers, Harry Daniels. 'We saw injustice. You saw abuse of police power. But most importantly we saw a young man that had a temperament to control himself in the face of brutality.' The traffic stop, he said, was not only racially motivated, 'it was unlawful, and everything that stemmed from that stop was unlawful.' McNeil is hardly the first Black motorist to record video during a traffic stop that turned violent — Philando Castile's girlfriend livestreamed the bloody aftermath of his death during a 2016 traffic stop near Minneapolis. But McNeil's arrest serves as a reminder of how cellphone video can show a different version of events from what is described in police reports, his lawyers said. Christopher Mercado, who retired as a lieutenant from the New York Police Department, agreed with McNeil's legal team's suggestion that drivers should record their police interactions and that a camera mounted inside a driver's car could offer a crucial point of view. 'Use technology to your advantage,' said Mercado, an adjunct assistant professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. 'There's nothing nefarious about it. It's actually a smart thing, in my opinion.' Rod Brunson, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, said he thinks it's a good idea for citizens to film encounters with police — as long as doing so doesn't make the situation worse. 'I think that's a form of protection — it's safeguarding them against false claims of criminal behavior or interfering with officers, etcetera,' Brunson said. Although the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office declined to speak to the Associated Press last week, Sheriff T.K. Waters has spoken publicly about McNeil's arrest since video of the encounter went viral. He challenged some of the allegations made by McNeil's lawyers, noting that McNeil was told more than a half-dozen times to exit the vehicle. At a news conference last month, Waters also highlighted images of a knife in McNeil's car. The officer who punched him wrote in his police report that McNeil reached toward the floor of the car, where deputies later found the knife. Crump, though, said McNeil's video shows that he 'never reaches for anything,' and a second officer wrote in his report that McNeil kept his hands up as the other officer smashed the car window. A camera inside a motorist's vehicle could make up for some shortcomings of police body cams, which can have a narrow field of view that becomes more limited the closer an officer gets to the person being filmed, Mercado said. After the police murder of Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, some states and cities debated how and when citizens should be able to capture video of police. The Constitution guarantees the right to record police in public, but a point of contention in some states has been whether a civilian's recording might interfere with the ability of officers to do their job. In Louisiana, for example, a new law makes it a crime to approach within 25 feet of a police officer in certain situations. Waters acknowledged those limitations at a news conference last year, as he narrated video of a wild brawl between officers and a fan in the stands at EverBank Stadium during a college football game last year between Florida and Georgia. The sheriff showed the officers' body-cam videos during the start of the confrontation near the top of the stadium. But when the officers subdued the suspect and were pressing against him, the footage didn't capture much, so the sheriff switched to stadium security video shot from a longer distance away. In McNeil's case, the body-cam video didn't clearly capture the punches thrown. If it had, the case would have been investigated right away, the sheriff said. For the last 20 years, Brunson has been interviewing young Black men in several U.S. cities about their encounters with law enforcement. When he began submitting research papers for academic review, many readers didn't believe the men's stories of being brutalized by officers. 'People who live in a civil society don't expect to be treated this way by the police. For them, their police interactions are mostly pleasant, mostly cordial,' Brunson said. 'So it's hard for people who don't have a tenuous relationship with the police to fathom that something like this happens,' he said. 'And that's where video does play a big part, because people can't deny what they see.' Martin writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Lawrence Taylor, once arrested in Rockland on sex charge, now on Trump youth fitness panel
When President Donald Trump unveiled his executive order on Thursday, July 31, to reestablish the Presidential Fitness Test for schoolkids, NFL Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor was at his side. Taylor has another record: he pleaded to a misdemeanor sex charge stemming from a 2010 Rockland County arrest. Taylor, named by Trump that day as a member of the President's Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition, was accused of having sex with an underage girl in a Rockland County hotel. The girl was being sex trafficked, court records show. In 2011, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of sexual misconduct and patronizing a prostitute as part of a plea deal. The original charges, handed down by a Rockland County grand jury, included one count of third-degree rape, which could have brought up to four years in prison if he was convicted. How Rockland case exposed trafficking in the suburbs The case included a federal conviction for the man who sent the young girl to Taylor's room. The incident showed that sex trafficking, long considered an international crime, could happen in the suburbs. In 2010, a 16-year-old Bronx runaway reported she had been transported to a Rockland County hotel, then called the Holidome, just off Exit 14B of the New York State Thruway in Ramapo. She was sent by her trafficker to Taylor's room for the planned encounter. The girl later testified she went into the room tear-stained and bruised from her trafficker's brutality. Taylor, who is 6-foot-3 and around 240 pounds at the time, had said he believed the girl was 19. Taylor's arrest came after the girl had texted her uncle, who contacted police. Ramapo police arrested Taylor, who was visiting the area from Florida. The trafficker was subsequently sentenced to seven years in prison after he pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of enticing or facilitating interstate travel to engage in a commercial sex act. Level 1 sex offender registry in Florida Because he was considered a Level 1 offender, Taylor is not on the New York sex offender registry; he is, however, listed with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Sex offender ranking systems go from Level 3, considered at the highest risk of reoffending, to Level 1, for offenders exhibiting the lowest risk of a repeat offense. While Taylor is no longer under any form of confinement, supervision or any other court-imposed sanction in Florida, as of 2024, he was still required to register in accordance with Florida law. Taylor, nicknamed 'Godzilla' in his NFL days, in 2021 and again in 2024 reportedly failed to report a change of address as mandated by his sex offender status. 'I'm here to serve,' Taylor tells Trump For his part, Taylor, a Trump friend and supporter, expressed pride in, if not a bit of confusion about, his new role. 'I don't know why, I don't know what we are supposed to be doing, but I'm here to serve and I'm here to serve you,' Taylor said during Thursday's event. 'I'm going to do the best I can for as long as I can.' Trump responded: 'Nobody like him.' The two-time Super Bowl champion founded the Lawrence Taylor Family Foundation, which provides programs and services for underserved youth, 'leveling the playing field and tackling diversity, one play at a time.' Human trafficking in the suburbs The National Human Trafficking Hotline reported nearly 8,000 reports of sex trafficking in the U.S. in 2021. Victims of forced labor trafficking, in many cases, also are sex trafficked. Get help or report a tip at the National Human Trafficking Hotline, or 1-888-373-7888. This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Lawrence Taylor on Trump youth fitness panel once in Rockland sex case
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
Chiefs star Rashee Rice says he's learned following a terrible decision. But has he?
ST. JOSEPH, Miss. – Rashee Rice swears he's changed. He insists that he's no longer the same person who went drag racing on a Dallas freeway in the spring of 2024 and not only risked his life and promising career for some apparent thrill-seeking moment yet also risked the lives of others. He says he's learned a hard lesson. And, oh yeah, Rice, 25, maintains that after rehabbing from the torn lateral collateral ligament in his right knee, he's in better physical condition, too. The third-year Kansas City Chiefs receiver on Saturday made his first public comments since being sentenced last month to 30 days in jail and five years probation after pleading guilty to two third-degree felony charges stemming from the high-speed racing incident that caused a multi-car collision. Discipline from the NFL is likely looming, probably in the form of a multi-game suspension that will keep the starting wideout out of the lineup at the start of the season. "I've completely changed," Rice said after the morning practice at Missouri Western State University. "Honestly, you've got to learn from things like that. So, I've learned and I've taken advantage of being able to learn from something like that." Rice sure sounded like a man who has grown from his ordeal, as unnecessary as the freeway race was. Whether that reflects contrition, maturity, getting coached up on talking points or any combination of such represents just part of the takeaway from his media session. Then there's this: Thankfully, no one was killed as a result of Rice's foolish decision. No, it never should have happened. You'd think he would have known better than put it all on the line as he clocked 119 miles an hour in the Lamborghini that caused a six-car collision – then cowardly walked away from the scene of the wreckage. Yet it did happen, leaving Rice – who has reportedly settled civil cases for at least $1 million – to deal with his personal wreckage. When someone asked about the lesson he's learned, Rice said: "It's how valuable any opportunity is, any moment is. "This right here, us being able to be on the field coached by Coach (Andy) Reid and have such a great quarterback (Patrick Mahomes) is honestly a gift, it's a blessing." Here's to hoping that Rice, drafted in the second round from Southern Methodist in 2023, sees this way beyond football terms. No, none of us are perfect. Yet Rice, with a second chance to build on his promising start of an NFL career – he posted the second-most receiving yards (262) by a rookie in playoff history – is now a walking example of what not to do. And part of the deal for Rice will be the challenge to repair his reputation, which will take time and action. In the meantime, he's the football player going through the rigors of training camp while under the cloud of uncertainty. Based on the league's history, now that Rice's legal case is resolved, a likely suspension would come before the Chiefs open the season with a game in Sao Paulo, Brazil on Sept. 5 against the AFC West division rival Los Angeles Chargers. I asked Rice how he's processing the possibility of a suspension. "Honestly, it's still in the works," he said. "My legal team is handling that. All I can do is focus on what I can control right now and that's me doing what I do best right here on the field." Apparently, Rice has picked up the pace from where he left off last season, when he suffered the torn LCL in Week 4. At the time of the injury, Rice was one of the NFL's leading receivers with 24 receptions for 288 yards and 2 TDs. He declares himself 100% and physically even better than his pre-injury form. "I feel 100%," he said. "I'm excited to be back out here with the guys. I'm kind of, basically, back where I left off at. So, the one thing is to be able to be back on the field to continue to do what I do." The coach vouched for that. "He's done a nice job off the field, he's doing a nice job on the field," Reid said after Friday's practice. "You learn from your mistakes; that's the important part. So, all of that. On the field, he's just been full speed ahead – no pun intended." No, Andy, it's hardly a laughing matter. Contact Jarrett Bell at jbell@ or follow on social media: On X: @JarrettBell On Bluesky: This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Has Rashee Rice truly learned from his terrible decision?
