Jan 15, 2018 · The Insane Backstory Behind The Lawyer Who Shook Down Donald Trump (and Hulk Hogan) By Ryan Holiday • 01/15/18 10:30am Threatening to go public with damning information unless hush money is paid ...
The Insane Backstory Behind The Lawyer Who Shook Down Donald Trump (and Hulk Hogan) By Ryan Holiday Seriously, You—OK, We—Need To Stop Watching The News This Year
Nancy Grace, the prosecutor turned breakout star at CNN Headline News, has a particularly moving one. As she tells it, in the summer of 1980, she was a …
Sep 28, 2017 · Dallas county prosecutors, lead by the legendary and notorious District Attorney Henry Wade, indicted Ruby on November 26. "Things …
And she told it to Larry King in 2003: “This perpetrator had been in and out of trouble. And I always wonder, if someone had cared about the case—not necessarily throw them behind bars and toss the key, but to rehab the person, or to throw them behind bars, to get him off the street.”
Grace said, “I have not researched the defendant. I have tried not to think about it.”
In 2003, Ms. Grace told Larry King that the killer’s defense had been “Didn’t do it, wrong guy. Wrong place, wrong time.”
The most the defense could muster, Mr. Prior said, was a psychiatric evaluation, in which a doctor from the Georgia Central State Hospital declared Mr. McCoy “mildly retarded,” according to court documents.
Columbus Johnson, the deputy sheriff who arrested Mr. McCoy and took him to jail in 1979, is now a captain in his 34th year with the department. “He didn’t open his mouth the whole way,” Mr. Johnson said. “He never said anything to me or the other officers that transported him.”
At 8:30 that morning, Tommy McCoy, recently fired from his job at Ingram, went to his father’s house and took a pistol from the bedroom closet, according to the transcript of his confession given to two agents at the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department that evening. He wrapped the gun in a paper bag and hitched a ride with the family’s insurance man to his grandmother’s house, where he stayed until 11:15 a.m. Then he started walking toward Georgia Kraft.
At a chance meeting in Germany, Thiel enlisted the help of someone Holiday refers to only as “Mr. A,” and then Charles Harder, the Los Angeles attorney who recently represented Donald Trump in his wildly unsuccessful legal effort to stop the publication of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury .” Armed with $10 million or so from Thiel, Mr. A. and Harder dug up everything they could find about Denton, his colleagues at Gawker, Gawker itself, its parent company Gawker Media and some of the other people Gawker offended. They also needed a novel legal theory about what Denton had done, figuring that the First Amendment would protect Denton and Gawker.
He documents how, starting in 2007, the secretive Thiel sought to take revenge on Denton for outing him on Gawker just because Denton could, and because he figured the news would generate the clicks and the kind of attention Denton and his erstwhile enterprise craved. Thiel, rightly offended, began a stealth campaign to punish Denton for his callous and cavalier behavior.
He documents how, starting in 2007, the secretive Thiel sought to take revenge on Denton for outing him on Gawker just because Denton could, and because he figured the news would generate the clicks and the kind of attention Denton and his erstwhile enterprise craved.
Holiday is the founder of Brass Check, a marketing and advisory firm with clients like Google and the authors Tony Robbins, Tim Ferriss and of course Greene. (The name “Brass Check” is an example of Holiday’s wit: It refers both to a 1919 Upton Sinclair account of the journalism industry and to slang for when a bullet is in the chamber of a semiautomatic pistol and ready to be fired.) He is also the media columnist for The New York Observer, owned by a family trust associated with Jared Kushner. He is 30 years old; “Conspiracy” is his seventh book.
He apprenticed with the best-selling author Robert Greene, and before long American Apparel, the mostly defunct retail clothing chain, lured Holiday away to head the company’s public relations department in the middle of a crisis: Its founder, Dov Charney, was accused of sexual assault.
He and Hoover lived together in Los Angeles, New Orleans and then New York City. In 2013, they bought a ranch near Austin, and started raising two chickens, two goats — Biscuit and Bucket — and a family. By 2016 their brood had grown to include 10 cattle, three goats, chickens, ducks, geese, a guinea hen and a baby son.
Reports at the time revealed Bundy lured his victims with his seemingly good looks and charming personality. However, Browne was never swayed by his client.
But there was one moment when Bundy unveiled a completely different side before his murder trial in Miami.
He even sent one letter about seven pages long insisting he could help investigators capture Seattle's Green River Killer because he had “special insight into men like that.”
However, his reign of terror began in 1974 when young female college students began disappearing in Washington state. He killed women in Utah, Idaho and Colorado. Ted Bundy in court. (Oxygen) He was convicted in 1980 of killing Kimberly Leach , a 12-year-old whom he abducted, sexually assaulted and mutilated in Florida.
When criminal defense attorney John Henry Browne first met his client Ted Bundy in October 1975, the word 'evil' flashed in his mind.
John Henry Browne's episode of "In Defense Of" airs Sunday, July 15 at 8 p.m. on Oxygen. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Bundy was executed in 1989 at age 42.
David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.
Judge Posner is famously candid, so don’t expect him to go easy on ex-colleagues he disagrees with. I followed up with Judge Posner and asked how his stepping down would advance the cause of pro se litigants at the Seventh Circuit.