case story about

Indiana AG Rokita reprimanded for comments on doctor who provided 10-year-old rape victim's abortion

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana’s attorney general violated rules of professional conduct when he made comments about a doctor who performed an abortion on a 10-year-old rape victim from Ohio, according to a court opinion filed Thursday.

The Indiana Supreme Court ruled that state Attorney General Todd Rokita "engaged in attorney misconduct " on a Fox News show in July 2022 about Dr. Caitlin Bernard, an Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist. The case garnered international attention after Bernard shared the story of the 10-year-old's medication abortion with the Indianapolis Star, part of the USA TODAY Network, in the immediate aftermath of the overturning of Roe v. Wade last summer.

The opinion states that Rokita violated attorney conduct rules when he described Bernard as an “abortion activist acting as a doctor — with a history of failing to report," during his interview on the show. Rokita will receive a public reprimand and will pay $250 to the clerk of the Indiana Supreme Court, according to the opinion. 

In a statement Thursday, Rokita continued to strongly criticize Bernard and said he could have fought over his "truthful 16-word answer" on Fox but wanted to "save a lot of taxpayer money and distraction." To resolve the complaint, Rokita said he was required to sign an affidavit "without any modifications."

"As I said at the time, my words are factual," Rokita said in the statement. "The (Indiana University Health) physician who caused the international media spectacle at the expense of her patient's privacy is by her own actions an outspoken abortion activist."

Representatives for Bernard told IndyStar Thursday that they would "let the reprimand speak for itself."

A battleground for abortion rights: How this Ohio ballot measure became a bellwether for 2024

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita admitted to violations

The Indiana Supreme Court's disciplinary commission filed charges in September alleging that Rokita violated professional conduct rules with statements about Bernard and the case of the 10-year-old Ohio girl who sought an abortion in Indiana.

The disciplinary commission investigates and prosecutes when attorneys are accused of violating Indiana courts' rules for professional conduct. The state's Supreme Court justices make the final determination if misconduct occurred and what discipline someone will receive.

Former Indiana University law school dean Lauren Robel filed one of the complaints against Rokita in the case, as did Don Lundberg , a former executive director of the disciplinary commission.

The state's Supreme Court's opinion Thursday specifically found that Rokita violated rules that say a lawyer cannot make public statements about an investigation that has a likelihood of "materially prejudicing" the proceeding and that a lawyer cannot "use means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay or burden a third person."

Rokita admitted to both violations, according to the opinion, and the justices dismissed a third charge for violating confidentiality requirements in state law prior to filing a complaint against Bernard with the Indiana Medical Licensing Board last year.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, said Rokita's statement on the court's misconduct ruling does not really acknowledge what he might have done wrong. Clark also worked as counsel for Washington D.C.'s attorney general and the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee.

"This isn't just about a technical violation of the rules, this is about abusing his office to hurt someone," Clark said. "There's gravity to that that I do not see reflected in his statement released today."

10-year-old girl sought abortion after rape

The story of the 10-year-old girl first appeared in a July 2022 IndyStar article  about reduced abortion access following the U.S. Supreme Court's Dobbs decision in June.

The 10-year-old had traveled from Ohio to Indiana in late June for abortion medication after her home state's six-week abortion ban took effect, which did not have exceptions for children who were raped. Ohio's abortion ban had been in effect for about two months before it faced legal challenges and was put on hold, reinstating abortion access until 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Within weeks the story received international attention and Indiana's Republican-dominated Legislature also  passed abortion restrictions . Abortion rights advocates and politicians, including President Joe Biden , used the case as a talking point for abortion debates.

Some opponents and conservatives had criticized the story, saying it was unproven. But the incident was confirmed after Gerson Fuentes, 28, was arrested and confessed to raping the Ohio girl last summer. Fuentes was sentenced to life in prison in July.

Abortion bans: Medical exceptions to abortion bans often exclude mental health conditions

Caitlin Bernard also found to violate standards

The Thursday opinion from the Indiana Supreme Court is just another chapter in the legal saga between Rokita and Bernard.

In November 2022 , Rokita asked the Indiana Medical Licensing Board to investigate whether Bernard violated professional standards by sharing the story of the 10-year-old abortion case.

The licensing board ruled earlier this year that Bernard violated privacy laws in handling the abortion patient's information and gave her a $3,000 fine. The licensing board's ruling in May was criticized by members of the medical community and an author of HIPAA, who said Bernard didn't do anything illegal .

In August, Bernard said she would not challenge the licensing board's ruling.

Rokita in September filed a lawsuit against Indiana University Health tied to Bernard and the abortion case, alleging the health care institution violated privacy laws.

IndyStar archives contributed to this report.

Contact IndyStar's state government and politics reporter Brittany Carloni at [email protected] or 317-779-4468. Follow her on Twitter /X @CarloniBrittany .

Top 10 Tips For Writing A Case Story

Does writing a case story feel like a bad trip to the dentist? You are not alone. Most professional services firms seem to struggle with them.

Yet we all know that we should do more. They can be an important part of your content marketing strategy . If done well, they can attract new prospects and help close more business.

Here are some of our favorite tips to make the process easier and much more effective.

1. Involve the client very early.

Some clients will shy away from participating and others have firm policies against them. But for many clients, being considered as a case story will be a strong positive.

Download the Marketing Planning Guide

They can look forward to special treatment and the possibility of increased visibility. This not only helps you gain cooperation, but it also encourages you to collect helpful information about the “before” situation.

2. Identify the client.

This is a huge credibility booster and should be done if at all possible. Yes, there are some circumstances where you cannot for ethical or legal reasons. But for many situations it is possible. And when you can, it is very helpful.

3. Use a quote.

Getting a direct quote from the client is another great way to add believability and credibility to your case story.

Also consider including a quote from the professional in your firm that worked on the client’s project. This helps make the case study seem more tangible and easier to identify with.  

4. Include keywords in the title and body copy.

Conduct keyword analysis of your case story’s topic and include them when you are writing. This will help search engines find the case story and spread the word. Include your identified keyword or keyword phrase both in the title of the case story and 2-3 times in the copy.

Some common keywords include the name of the client’s company and the nature of the service you provided.  

5. Tell a story.

Good stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They also have a struggle against the odds and a turning point. If it is too easy, there is no tension or suspense. Will it work or not?

While we are not suggesting turning your case stories into literature, a little bit of old-fashion story telling will go a long ways toward increasing reader interest and engagement.

Explain the client’s challenges and why your professional services firm was the right fit for their needs. Describe how you helped the client and try to paint a clear picture of what it’s like to work with your firm. And most importantly, show results and that you were able to deliver on your promises.

6. Use numbers.

Numbers add credibility in a way words just can’t. They can be useful in describing the magnitude of a challenge, the process you used and, of course, the results you achieved. Don’t be concerned if you don’t have perfect documentation. Even a few numbers help.

7. Use imagery.

Often overlooked, this is a great way to communicate a setting or give you a quick feel for a client. While most professional services do not easily lend themselves to a picture of the service (try photographing an audit or a computer program), there are other alternatives.

How about a picture of the client’s facility or their product? Think broader and you will find interesting visual content to spice up your case story.

8. Avoid jargon.

Have mercy on your readers and avoid industry jargon and acronyms. A surprising number of readers will not understand what you are trying to communicate.

Assume you are writing a case story for your aunt to read and you won’t be far off. The key here is to lay the situation out simply and to make your success easy to understand for any reader. Make your case stories easy to skim. Use short sentences, descriptive headings and bullet points.

9. Use video.

This is an increasingly common approach to telling a professional services case story. A professionally produced video can communicate a client’s experience and enthusiasm in a way that words alone cannot.

Video is especially appropriate if you have a high profile client who is excited about your service.

10. Get professional help.

You do not have to do it all alone. Using a professional to write a case story or edit a draft you have written can be a very smart move.

Given the obvious role that case stories can play in your content marketing campaign, it’s essential to get it right. For many firms, a single new client pays for all the case studies you’ll need to write.  

Writing a case story doesn’t have to be so painful. By using some of the tips we’ve outlined here, it can actually be interesting—and very profitable for your firm.

Marketing Planning Guide - Third Edition

The Marketing Planning Guide for Professional Services Firms

How Hinge Can Help

Case story writing is an integral part of many professional services firms’ strategies today .  The Visible Firm℠ is the leading marketing program for delivering greater visibility, growth, and profits. This customized program will identify the most practical offline and online marketing tools your firm will need to gain new clients and reach new heights.

Additional Resources

• How do you develop a robust marketing plan that covers all your bases: keeping pace with the marketplace, generating leads, and building your reputation all at once? We explore the answers to this and other questions in a brand new, fully updated edition of our popular Marketing Planning Guide for Professional Services Firms .
• Get a copy of our Online Marketing for Professional Services book to learn techniques that will generate more leads and increase awareness of your firm.
• Check out Hinge University  to gain the practical advice and skills you need to start marketing your firm the high-growth way.

Most Popular Posts

• A Game-Changing Business Development Strategy to Achieve Consistent Growth
• Brand Development Strategy: 10 Essential Steps for Your Professional Services Firm
• How to Master Strategic Marketing for Professional Services Firms
• Digital Branding for Professional Services
• 10 Essential B2B Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Professional Services Firm
• Digital Marketing Strategy for Professional Services
• Proven Rebranding Strategies for Your Professional Services Firm
• Elements of a Successful Brand 1: Brand Positioning
• The Top 5 Business Challenges for Accounting & Financial Services Firms
• Top 21 Examples of Key Differentiators for Professional Services Firms
• Elements of a Successful Brand 4: Brand Promise
• What Is the Cost of Video Production for the Web?

Send me all articles:

How to write a case story (with example)

Before writing a case story you need to collect information of the  interviewee  individuals by a systematic method. For collecting information from the interviewee, a questionnaire need to prepare from where you will ask questions to the interviewee.  

Subscribe to our mailing list to get the new updates!

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur.

How to do a case study research and prepare questionnaire (with example)

5 best natural remedy for acne, related articles.

9 Personal Skills that can secure your job

15 Most common interview questions and answers

How to get citizenship of any country

Moving to sweden- easiest way to migrate to sweden.

Judge orders anonymous jury for E. Jean Carroll case against Trump

The judge cited the former president's public statements against the court.

For the third time Friday, former President Donald Trump’s rhetoric is factoring into a court case against him.

A federal judge in New York said the upcoming civil defamation trial involving Trump and E. Jean Carroll will be heard by an anonymous jury, citing Trump's "repeated public statements" about the case and the court.

As part of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan's order, the names of the jurors will not be revealed, they will be kept together during recesses and assigned a member from the U.S. Marshal Service who "shall take the petit jurors to, or provide them with, lunch as a group throughout the pendency of the trial," and be transported together or in groups to an undisclosed location before they can return home.

The defamation trial is slated to begin in January.

MORE: Court will decide if Trump has presidential immunity against E. Jean Carroll's 2019 damage claims

Carroll, a former Elle magazine columnist, sued Trump in November 2019 over comments he made shortly after Carroll publicly accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s.

The former president said Carroll was "not my type" and suggested she fabricated her accusation for ulterior and improper purposes, including to increase sales of her then-forthcoming book, in statements following the allegations.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

The judge in the case has already determined that Trump's statements were defamatory, so the January trial will only determine damages. Carroll is seeking $10 million.

MORE: Trump liable for battery, defamation in E. Jean Carroll suit

Carroll prevailed in a second lawsuit in May that alleged defamation and battery, and she was awarded $5 million in damages. Trump is also appealing that case.

Kaplan's order came the same day that the judge in the New York civil fraud trial expanded the gag order and the judge in the federal election tampering case paused hers pending appeal.

• Donald Trump

Top Stories

11-year-old dead, 5 injured after shooting in Cincinnati: Police

• 3 hours ago

'Baby Holly' speaks out for the 1st time after being missing for over 40 years

• Nov 3, 8:49 AM

International manhunt launched after missing woman found dead at Boston airport

Police entered wrong home, held disabled woman, grandkids for hours, lawsuit alleges

• Nov 3, 2:39 PM

Uber, Lyft agree to pay combined $328 million for withholding money from drivers

• Nov 2, 6:30 AM

ABC News Live

24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events

New York judge widens Trump case gag order; limits in criminal case lifted

Judge Arthur Engoron looks on at the courtroom before the start of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s civil fraud case in New York, U.S., October 18, 2023. Jeenah Moon/Pool via REUTERS Acquire Licensing Rights

NEW YORK, Nov 3 (Reuters) - A judge on Friday issued an expanded gag order in the New York state civil fraud case against Donald Trump, while a federal appeals court temporarily lifted similar restrictions in a criminal case against the former U.S. president in Washington.

The order issued by Justice Arthur Engoron of the New York state court in Manhattan bars public statements by lawyers in the case about the judge's communications with his staff. The case brought by New York state's attorney general accuses Trump of inflating his assets and net worth to obtain favorable bank loans and lower insurance premiums.

Engoron first imposed a gag order on Oct. 3 after Trump shared on social media a photo of the judge's principal law clerk posing with U.S. Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, and falsely called her Schumer's "girlfriend."

The judge has fined Trump $15,000 for twice violating that gag order. The expanded gag order covers lawyers as well after a member of Trump's legal team, Christopher Kise, objected to the clerk passing notes to the judge during the trial. Defense lawyers in the case have made repeated objections about the working relationship between the judge and his clerk, including suggestions that she was biased. Trump also has accused her of bias.

Separately, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District if Columbia Circuit granted Trump's request to pause U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan's gag order that limited his statements in a case brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith accusing him of unlawfully trying to undo his 2020 election loss.

A three-judge panel, all appointed by Democratic presidents, scheduled oral arguments on Trump's appeal of the gag order for Nov. 20. Chutkan's order barred statements that target prosecutors and potential witnesses in the case.

Trump in the past has called Smith a "deranged lunatic" and a "thug," among other insults. Trump's lawyers have argued the order violates his free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment.

In the New York case, Engoron said on Friday he has an "unfettered right" to consult with his staff members throughout the trial, and that the gag order was intended to protect their safety.

"The First Amendment right of defendants and their attorneys to comment on my staff is far and away outweighed by the need to protect them from threats and physical harm," Engoron wrote.

Failure to honor the gag order, the judge said, "shall result in serious sanctions."

The order was issued after Trump's sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump testified this week. Their father is expected to testify on Monday.

Reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Susan Heavey; Editing by Will Dunham and Caitlin Webber

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Read Next / Editor's Picks

How the UAW's drive to 'end tiers' will change GM

Insight: US solar panel manufacturing boom threatened by cheap imports

Analysis: WeWork's troubles darken outlook for embattled office market

UAW gears up to organize at Toyota, other nonunion automakers

More from Reuters

Industry insight.

Henry Engler

Diana Novak Jones

Andrew Goudsward

Sara Merken

The 6 Elements of an Effective Case Story

By Jenny Gatchell   |   March 17, 2021   |   Content Marketing

A good case study describes the value and impact of the services you offer from your client’s perspective. This article outlines the six components of a compelling and effective case study.

“Do you have an example of that?” It’s the most common question we ask when interviewing companies for a thought leadership article. We’re looking for stories that bring the value of solutions and offerings to life. Specifically, we want to hear the details of how a client successfully used your services to drive tangible, measurable results in their own business. There’s really no better way to validate your company’s point-of-view than with a case story. And peppering thought leadership content with relevant examples makes for a more interesting and memorable read.

Of course, client stories can and should stand on their own in addition to being referenced in your content. Having these stories readily available on your website helps prospects vet your services. By building effective case stories you give potential new clients the chance to stand in your current clients’ shoes and see what it’s really like to work with you.

Here are the six components every good case study should use to make your clients’ successes as relatable as possible:

• Summary Statement
• Organizational Summary
• Problem Statement
• Solution Description
• Call-To-Action

Summary Statement: Give the Cliffs Notes Version of the Story

Provide a brief snapshot of your client’s story—problem, solution, and outcome—in a few sentences or brief paragraph. Readers can get the key points and decide if they want to dive in and read the full case.

Organizational Summary: Position Your Client as the Hero

In a sidebar or callout, tell a little bit more about your client and their story. What industry do they operate in? Who do they serve? Where are they located? And how big is their organization? Note that your client is the ultimate hero in this story. You want to showcase the client’s wisdom in choosing to leverage your solution to solve their challenges.

Problem Statement: Setup the Situation

Use this section to frame up the challenges facing your client. Be sure to include details or context around any issues complicating the situation. Aim to do this in about 50 to 100 words and be sure to tell the story from your client’s point-of-view. This will help your prospects better relate to the story, especially if they are facing similar challenges in their own businesses. If possible, include a client quote or even a brief video snippet where the client describes the challenges in his or her own words.

Solution Description: Describe the Resolution, with Your Client Leading the Way

This is the meat of your case story and will include the details about how your solution was developed and delivered. Aim to keep this section to about 200 to 300 words.

This is where it’s trickiest to keep your client positioned as the hero since you’ll obviously want to include specific details about the unique aspects of your solution and emphasize the merits of your company’s approach and point-of-view. You can do all those things—and still keep your client front and center. The key is to celebrate the client’s smart choice in selecting you and your services. Again, a quote or video snippet will work well here to highlight your client’s rationale for believing your solution would be the right answer to his company’s problems. You can also talk about any collaboration between you and the client. And, if possible, you can discuss how your services fit into the client’s bigger picture strategy for tackling the issue.

The solution section is also a great place to ensure your case story is visually interesting. Include images, graphics, visuals, or flow charts that help paint the picture of how the solution worked for your client.

Outcomes: Make the Results Pop

Finish your case story on a strong note by emphasizing the results. Include data to quantify the impact—such as how many dollars were saved or new clients won. We like to use bullet points here to give the information in bite-sized fashion and make the numbers and their significance really pop. You can also include another client quote or a video that helps validate your client’s decision to hire you.

Call-to-Action (CTA): Keep the Conversation Going

Finally, do not forget to invite your readers to continue exploring your solutions. For web versions of case studies, include a contact form for the organization. For print versions, include information about your organization along with contact information for your team to make it easy for your prospects to connect with you.

Closing Thoughts: The Proof Really Is in the Pudding

Client success stories are arguably one of the most important tools you have in marketing your services. Showing how other companies have leveraged your expertise and point-of-view to drive tangible results in their own businesses validates your claims and makes it much easier for potential clients to understand how you work. Plus, showcasing your current clients’ genius is good for your existing relationships, too. If you have stories you haven’t shared yet, now’s the time to put them out there. And give your clients’—and yourself—credit for the great work you do.

The Content Marketing Webinar for A/E Firms

The future of professional services marketing, the business value of content.

Jenny Gatchell is a Contract Copywriter for Rattleback. She helps clients find their voices, articulate their points of view, and tell their stories in ways that resonate with all audiences they need to reach.

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

Case Histories

Former soldier and policeman Jackson Brodie becomes a private investigator. Former soldier and policeman Jackson Brodie becomes a private investigator. Former soldier and policeman Jackson Brodie becomes a private investigator.

• Jason Isaacs
• Amanda Abbington
• Zawe Ashton
• 52 User reviews
• 4 Critic reviews
• See more at IMDbPro
• 3 wins & 6 nominations

• Jackson Brodie

• Louise Munroe

• Deborah Arnold
• Marlee Brodie

• Josie Brodie
• Marcus Stewart

• Archie Munroe
• Young Jackson

• Patrick Carter
• Francis Brodie

• Amelia Land

• Reggie Teague

• Martin Canning

• Joanna Hunter

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia Adaption of a Kate Atkinson novel.
• Connections Featured in The Wright Stuff: Episode #15.105 (2011)

User reviews 52

• Feb 22, 2013
• How many seasons does Case Histories have? Powered by Alexa
• WHO IS ON THE SOUNDTRACK?
• June 5, 2011 (United Kingdom)
• United Kingdom
• Brottsplats Edinburgh
• Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed

A newspaper giant tried to diversify its staff. White workers sued.

The proposed class-action lawsuit against gannett is among a wave of recent cases claiming some corporate diversity policies disadvantage white employees.

After more than 20 years of working for his hometown newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y., Steve Bradley was laid off amid pandemic-induced cost-cutting in May 2020. He was crushed, but he eventually took a communications job for a local school district.

Then, two years later, he received a startling message.

Sitting in the bleachers at the school softball field in July 2022, Bradley took a phone call from an unknown number. He listened as J. Nelson Thomas, an employment lawyer he’d never met, presented a jarring claim: Bradley was laid off because he is White.

Now, Bradley is one of five named plaintiffs in a proposed class-action lawsuit that claims the country’s largest newspaper publisher “discriminated against non-minorities” to achieve diversity goals. Filed in August in Virginia federal court, the suit alleges that Gannett fired White employees, denied them opportunities for advancement and replaced them with less-qualified minority candidates as the company sought to diversify its workforce.

The case is among the first to test the legality of corporate diversity practices in the wake of a June Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. That decision has sparked a wave of litigation aimed at racial considerations in the workplace, including claims that corporate efforts to increase diversity have disadvantaged White employees.

For Bradley, 56, the decision to pursue legal action wasn’t easy. He’d always thought it was good that Gannett was working to boost diversity. But he also “wanted to be judged” based on his work and the work of his team, he said, not his race.

“Somebody needed to stand up to them,” Bradley said in an interview. To know “that the decision was made because of how I look? I’m not okay with that.”

In a statement, Gannett declined to discuss the lawsuit but said it “always seeks to recruit and retain the most qualified individuals for all roles within the company.”

“We will vigorously defend our practice of ensuring equal opportunities for all our valued employees against this meritless lawsuit,” Polly Grunfeld Sack, Gannett’s chief legal counsel, said in an email.

Private employers have been barred for decades from making employment decisions based on race. Long-standing legal precedent has allowed companies to take targeted, temporary steps to mitigate historic racial inequalities in their workforces. But the recent ruling on college admissions suggests that it’s “no longer appropriate to be looking at someone’s race for the benefit of diversity,” said Devon Westhill, president and general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank.

While the vast majority of Americans are in favor of equal opportunity, “the way in which it’s practiced really is divisive,” Westhill said. “It foments resentment.”

In recent years, claims of race-based discrimination by White workers have made up only about 11 percent of charges submitted for review by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to data obtained by The Washington Post. But now many legal experts expect those numbers to soar. Westhill said race-based employee affinity groups, fellowships and grant programs exclusively for minorities are especially likely to face legal challenges, as are company policies that tie executive compensation to diversity targets.

Those targets are intended to promote racial and gender equity, which remains a struggle in corporate America. Women and people of color hold less than 14 percent of C-suite roles across Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies, according to data from executive search firm Crist Kolder Associates. Last year, American women earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by White men — a gap that worsens for women of color, according to data from Pew Research Center .

Leon Prieto, a professor of management at Clayton State University, said discrimination claims from White people often fail to acknowledge “the historical context” of workplace discrimination. “Historically speaking, many corporate cultures have been rooted in biases that favor Americans of European descent over others,” Prieto said. “This has been well-documented.”

Indeed, the earliest efforts to tackle racial disparities in the workforce began in the 1960s and ’70s, when companies used racial quotas to combat those biases in hiring, Prieto said. Such quotas were later deemed unconstitutional; Prieto said some companies still overly emphasize racial diversity among new hires instead of taking the more modern view that “DEI is not just about hiring ethnic minorities, it’s about embracing all talent.”

“A myopic focus on quotas doesn’t really address inclusion efforts,” Prieto said.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020, Gannett was among scores of corporate giants that made sweeping commitments to increase workforce diversity. The media juggernaut, which owns several hundred daily and weekly newspapers across the country in addition to its flagship publication, USA Today, repeatedly expressed aims to “reach racial and gender parity with the diversity of our nation,” according to the lawsuit . Along with other goals, the company set a target of increasing the number of people of color in leadership positions by 30 percent by 2025.

Gannett has yet to release its 2023 inclusion report, which offers an annual demographic breakdown of the company’s newsrooms and progress toward diversity goals. The most recent data on the company’s workforce diversity page shows that Gannett Media’s staff is nearly 70 percent White and 57 percent male. Black employees make up about 11.5 percent of staff members. Nearly 8 percent of employees are Hispanic, about 3 percent are Asian and less than 1 percent are indigenous.

In its 2022 inclusion report , Gannett highlighted progress toward its diversity goals, saying more than 16 percent of employees at the director level or higher were people of color, up 2.3 percent from the previous year. “People of Color and Women in leadership continues to grow at a faster pace than overall representation,” the report noted.

This progress came at a cost to White employees, the lawsuit claims. Management directed leaders to exclude White candidates, as the company prioritized race over job performance and other professional qualifications, according to the complaint. Gannett also tethered executive performance to success with diversity goals, the complaint states.

“The implementation of this policy resulted in the termination of numerous well qualified workers based purely on their non-minority status,” the complaint states.

Gannett’s diversity efforts predate the commitments the company made after George Floyd’s murder, according to Thomas, the attorney representing the former Gannett employees.

“What you see happening is Gannett seeing the George Floyd situation and saying, ‘Hey, we do this stuff already, let’s go public with it,’ ” Thomas said. The plaintiffs are asking Gannett to put an end to the 2020 policy, and to award them lost pay, benefits and other monetary damages.

In nearly three decades as an employment attorney, Thomas said he has never before represented a White person claiming racial discrimination. But he felt compelled to take the case, he said, after hearing how Gannett tried to meet diversity targets.

“This country needs racial diversity,” Thomas said. “But if companies go about doing it this way, it’s going to kill it.”

The circumstances around Bradley’s firing first caught Thomas’s attention when a reporter at the Democrat & Chronicle sent Thomas screenshots from a text exchange she’d had with the paper’s executive editor, Michael Kilian. The reporter had questioned Gannett’s diversity efforts involving Asian Americans. Kilian defended his management record by replying that he had hired the first Asian American city editor in Utica decades earlier and that he once had an Asian American lieutenant.

And, Kilian added, he “laid off Steve [Bradley]” instead of one of Bradley’s former colleagues on the sports staff, who is Asian American.

While another White, male sports staffer was laid off alongside Bradley, the complaint states that “no non-minority members of the sports writing staff were terminated during this time period.”

“Any news site can work harder at inclusion, but we have done our best at a time of constant cuts,” the message from Kilian concluded. Kilian did not respond to requests for comment.

Thomas soon encountered other ex-Gannett staffers who alleged the company had discriminated against White employees in its quest to meet diversity goals. Plaintiff Stephen Crane, a former editor of the Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind., alleges he was told to consider only minority candidates for open positions. Crane claims he had to rescind an offer to a White, male candidate “despite the fact that he tried, but could not find enough qualified minority applicants,” the lawsuit says. Crane alleges he faced retaliation for raising concerns about how Gannett was going about meeting diversity targets. He resigned in 2021.

Another plaintiff, Noah Hiles, found himself working alone in summer 2021 when the only other sports staffer quit just two months after Hiles joined the Beaver County Times in Aliquippa, Pa. Hiles offered to use his contacts to help fill the opening and “was informed that the position needed to be filled by a minority,” the complaint states.

Hiles helped find a minority candidate, who eventually was hired. Then Hiles learned the employee — whom he was now overseeing — was making 17 percent more than him. Frustrated, Hiles approached management about a raise but was told that Gannett paid the new employee more “to ensure they satisfied their racial quota and that he would accept the position,” according to the complaint.

Federal court halts private grant program for Black female entrepreneurs

Although Bradley was laid off before Gannett set its post-George Floyd diversity targets, he believes these goals cost him the chance to return to a newsroom. In early 2021, Bradley applied to become executive editor overseeing Gannett newsrooms in New York’s Mohawk Valley. He made it through multiple rounds of interviews and was told in February 2021 that he was a finalist for the job, along with one other White, male candidate, according to the complaint.

Then, he stopped hearing from Gannett.

A month later, Bradley learned that a new candidate had emerged. The job went Sheila Rayam, a former reporter and community engagement editor — and the first Black person to hold the position. In an interview with Buffalo State University last year, Rayam said her editor had approached her about the role, asking “if she’d like to run her own newsroom.” Rayam is now the executive editor of the Buffalo News.

Rayam declined to comment.

Law firm opens diversity fellowship to all students after lawsuit

In Rayam, Bradley said he saw someone with less newsroom management experience, who hadn’t been interested in the job and who was recruited by Gannett executives over more qualified White candidates. But he said he takes issue with Gannett — not Rayam or others the company opted to keep or promote.

“This is a company that, if the government or another business were doing what they were doing, they’d have their watchdog reporter call over to them,” Bradley said. “If you’re going to hold the rest of the world to a standard, you should live up to that standard yourself.”

After the initial phone call with Thomas, Bradley said he felt shocked and overwhelmed. He went for a long walk, rethinking the end of his time at Gannett. He then spent months debating whether to go ahead with a lawsuit.

Ultimately, Bradley said, he decided he had to speak out about his experience.

“Racism is racism, and right is right and wrong is wrong,” Bradley said. “Decisions should be based on the quality of a candidate and the quality of performance and not protected class issues. That’s really what it comes down to.”

Paul's Case

29 pages • 58 minutes read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides that feature detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, quotes, and essay topics.

• Story Analysis
• Character Analysis
• Symbols & Motifs
• Literary Devices
• Important Quotes
• Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

Summary: “paul’s case”.

Willa Cather’s short story “Paul’s Case” was published in 1905 in McClure's Magazine . In its original iteration, the story was titled “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament,” but it was later shortened to the current title. The story became a popular one of Cather’s, in part because it was one of the only few that she allowed to be anthologized, but also for the debates over its interpretation. “Paul’s Case” was turned into a TV movie for PBS’s The American Short Story anthology series and into an opera.

This study guide cites Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, & Other Writings  from the Library of America 1992 edition.

Get access to this full Study Guide and much more!

• 6,250+ In-Depth Study Guides
• 5,250+ Quick-Read Plot Summaries
• Downloadable PDFs

Although it has been removed in subsequent publications, the story’s original subtitle—“A Study in Temperament”—aptly encapsulates the trajectory and literary goals of Cather’s work. The story centers on the titular Paul , a young man from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. At the beginning, Paul is facing a disciplinary tribunal at his school. School administrators and various teachers are present, as is Paul’s father (Paul’s mother is deceased). Immediately, Cather describes Paul’s physical appearance as being at odds with the banal surroundings: “[T]here was something of the dandy about him, and he wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red carnation in his button-hole” (468). The red carnation is taken by the teachers to indicate a lack of remorse for his behaviors, which include classroom disruptions, daydreaming, and his general demeanor.

Paul stands before this council and lies that he hopes to return to school. The whole proceeding, which has brought many other students to tears, has little or no effect on Paul. At the end of the assembly, in another action that is interpreted as insolent, Paul bows: “[H]is bow was like a repetition of the scandalous red carnation” (469).

The SuperSummary difference

• 8x more resources than SparkNotes and CliffsNotes combined
• Study Guides you won ' t find anywhere else
• 100+ new titles every month

As the educators convene after Paul’s departure, they all agree that something was off about him. They speak about his odd behavior and attributes. They leave the building feeling shameful of their dismissal of the young man. The whole event called to mind for one member “a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors” (470).

Meanwhile, Paul exits the meeting in joyous spirits, whistling a tune from the opera Faust. From this meeting, Paul travels to his job at Carnegie Hall, where he is an usher. There is a concert tonight, and he goes to get ready. The job gives him untold joy for myriad reasons. It offers him the opportunity to look at the art replicas in the building (a bust of Augustus Caesar and a Venus de Milo); he feels comfortable and proud in his usher’s uniform; he can hobnob with the cultural elite who attended the events—“all the people in his section thought him a charming boy” (471); but most importantly, Paul can listen to the music. Cather anoints this occurrence with a flurry of life-affirming clauses. When the music is playing, Paul “felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendour” (471-72). The only unpleasant aspect of the night’s experience is that Paul sees his English teacher in attendance and must put down a seat for her.

After the concert, Paul waits for the German soloist from the concert by her carriage. She exits the hall with the conductor and bids auf wiedersehen to Paul, who then follows their carriage to the hotel. As he sees the singer enter the hotel, he imagines himself in there as well, eating rich dishes and drinking lavishly at a party.

While Paul is outside the hotel, there is a storm, so he returns home. He imagines his drab room in his father’s house on Cordelia Street, with its pictures of George Washington and John Calvin. He approaches his home feeling dejected after a night of dazzling events. A depression sets in, primarily for his current “repulsion for the flavourless, colourless mass of every-day existence” (474). Upon the threshold of his home, he decides not to enter through the front door for fear that he might be “accosted” by his father for returning late. He creeps to the back of the house and sneaks in through a basement window, feeling miserable.

The following Sunday, Paul observes his neighborhood: the citizens sitting on their front porches, women dressed in their Sunday best, men sitting on cushions on the sidewalk, telling stories and talking, children fighting. Paul’s sisters talk with the minister’s daughter’s next door. Paul’s father is talking with a young man who he hoped would serve as a model to Paul. This man is a clerk at one of the steel corporations, he is married to a schoolteacher, and has four children. Paul likes to hear this young man tell his stories of his boss traveling to Venice, Monte Carlo, and Cairo for business.

Paul garners the favor of a performer, Charley Edwards , who allows him to hang around his dressing room. Being around Edwards and Carnegie Hall in general provides great meaning to Paul’s life: “It was at the theatre and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the rest was but a sleep and a forgetting” (477). The theater, music, performance—these become Paul’s sanctuary and his connection to the world. Cather makes this very explicit when she writes, “[I]t would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly the stage entrance of that theatre was for Paul the actual portal of Romance” (477). It offers him the chance to imagine another life.

As much as the theater offers him a richer interior life, it provides no pathway for him. Paul expresses no desire to become an actor or musician. He wants only to experience their performances and to be in their intimate company, trading stories of the world.

In the meantime, Paul’s status at school worsens. He declines to do his work and is eventually expelled. However, the school, aware of his commitment to the Hall, contacts the theater with reports of Paul’s behavior. As a punishment, the school gets the theater to replace him with another usher and have him banned from the premises.

During a January snowstorm, Paul takes a train to New Jersey, escaping Pittsburg secretly in an uncomfortable Pullman train car. After long planning sessions with Charley Edwards, Paul heads for New York City. On his stopover at the Jersey City train station, he keeps an eye out for people who might recognize him while he eats breakfast. Later, finally in New York, he goes to a men’s clothing store, where he spends ample time and money on a plethora of new outfits.

That afternoon, he arrives at the Waldorf hotel, which will be his home for the foreseeable future. He lies to the staff about his identity, fashioning a story about how his parents are abroad and he is in the city awaiting their return. Because he offers to pay for the room in advance, the staff easily buys this fiction.

Entering his new hotel room abode, Paul feels at ease as the room matches the image he had in his head in nearly every way. He does, however, ring for the bellboy to bring flowers up to the room. After the flowers arrive, Paul bathes and then dresses in new silk undergarments and a new red robe. He surveys the city from his eighth floor window before falling into a deep, peaceful sleep under the aroma of the flowers.

The following day, Paul reflects on his decision of leaving: “It had been wonderfully simple when they had shut him out of the theatre and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the whole thing was virtually determined” (481). Paul is only surprised by his own courage and assiduity to execute his plan. Having done so, he feels relief, his mind eased of the dread that constantly plagued him in his life on Cordelia Street.

Cather reveals that Paul, before leaving, stole a considerable sum of money from the Hall before leaving Pittsburgh; with this money, he can finally live the type of life he’s always imagined. For example, one day early on in his stay, he sleeps late and spends his first waking hour dressing slowly, feeling that “[e]verything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be” (482).

On a snowy day, Paul is awash in the splendor of the city: flower’s all around and snowflakes spiraling to the city streets. His hotel is filled with music, chatter of its guests, various perfumes, and expressive colors. He sits down to dinner and thinks about his past:

Cordelia Street—Ah, that belonged to another time and country! Had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such shimmering textures, and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had (483-84).

One afternoon, Paul meets a student from Yale who has come down to the city. The young men have dinner and stay out all night together. Paul doesn’t return to his hotel until seven o’clock the next morning as his friend takes the train back to Connecticut. Despite their night together, they leave on tense terms.

In the succeeding days, Paul tries to not arouse the hotel staff’s suspicions about his fabricated life, and because he so seamlessly acts and carries himself in a worldly manner, they don’t catch on. Paul himself feels perfectly at ease in this world. Everything is going as planned until he reads about his wrongdoings in the Pittsburgh paper: The paper details his disappearance and the robbery, along with rumors that he’s been seen in a New York hotel and that his father is searching for him. Paul also reads that his father has fully refunded the amount of the theft and that there will be no prosecution—but even without fear of legal repercussions, Paul is dismayed at the mere thought that his father will soon find him. The “gray monotony” of Cordelia Street, he feels, is an even worse fate than jail.

Paul is crestfallen and worried that his new lifestyle is over, and he has “the old feeling that the orchestra had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over” (485). That day, Paul is overcome with anguish as he carries out his usual daily routines. The next morning, he awakes to pains in his head and feet, his throat is dry, and he worries that his father is nearby to pick him up. On top of all these anxieties, his money is running low. The narration reveals that on his first day in New York, Paul bought a revolver, which he now has placed on his hotel room dressing table; he spends an hour staring at the revolver but decides against shooting himself. He feels nauseated. His new life is under threat: “It was the old depression exaggerated; all the world had become Cordelia Street” (487).

Paul takes the train back to Newark and a carriage back to Pennsylvania. On the way, he gets out to walk along the railway tracks and reflect on his situation. In his coat is a red flower, which is wilting in the cold:

The carnations in his coat were dropping with the cold, he noticed; all their red glory over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had seen in the show windows that first night must have gone the same, long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass. It was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run (487-88).

Paul looks at the languishing flowers as a train approaches. As it zips by, he jumps out in front of it. As the train strikes him, he feels relaxed, and with that fatal blow, “Paul dropped back into the immense design of things” (488).

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Ready to dive in?

Get unlimited access to SuperSummary for only $0.70/week

Related Titles

By Willa Cather

Study Guide

A Lost Lady

Willa Cather

A Wagner Matinee

Plot Summary

Coming, Aphrodite!

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Lucy Gayheart

Neighbour Rosicky

One Of Ours

O Pioneers!

Shadows on the Rock

The Professor's House

The Sculptor's Funeral

The Song of the Lark

Featured Collections

American Literature

View Collection

National Suicide Prevention Month

Pride month reads.

Crime & Courts

After a limo driver disappears, a fugitive’s web begins to unravel and sets off an international manhunt

Oregon man sentenced for LGBTQ hate crimes in Idaho, including trying to hit people with car

Illinois nurse who was terrorized by her ex turned to the court for help. She was dead a year later.  

Woman sues Atlanta Braves and Jorge Soler after allegedly being injured by ball thrown into stands

Nbc news videos.

Missing woman's body found in vehicle at Boston Logan International Airport

More nbc news videos.

String of opioid overdoses reported at Virginia high school

Closing arguments begin in Sam Bankman-Fried criminal fraud trial

Alabama couple arrested after corpse found by new homeowner

New York man charged after pointing gun at child in Halloween mix-up

Sam Bankman-Fried takes the stand in his criminal fraud trial

Sam Bankman-Fried defends social posts during cross-examination in fraud trial

Texas pediatrician fatally stabbed in unprovoked attack

Illinois landlord pleads not guilty in stabbing death of Palestinian American boy

Florida family pleads for leniency after 13-year-old fatally stabs mother

Suspect arrested in deadly Halloween weekend shooting in Tampa

Sam Bankman-Fried takes the stand in FTX trial

Body of missing 5-year-old boy found in Milwaukee dumpster

Police: Hundreds of tips being investigated in Maine shootings

Sam Bankman-Fried set to testify in his own fraud trial

Manhunt for Maine shooting suspect enters second day

Sheriff: Man suspected of killing Maryland judge found dead

Maine State Police break down timeline of Lewiston shooting

Jim Kavanaugh: This is a guy who's on a murderous rampage

Officials urge Maine residents to shelter in place

Bodycam shows Dallas man arrested in case of mistaken identity

Woman accused of murdering pro cyclist Mo Wilson tracked her on fitness app, prosecutors say

Texas woman who left for India after the search for her son began is now charged with killing him

North Dakota woman accused of fatally poisoning boyfriend for his inheritance

Tennessee youths and doctor ask the Supreme Court to take up transgender care ban

Man arrested in cold case Halloween killing after 41 years

Guns in America

Man allegedly points gun at 6-year-old who left halloween goody bag at wrong house.

Ex-GOP state senator charged with traveling for sex with minor, receiving child sex abuse images

Ohio woman accused of meeting men for sex before fatally drugging them pleads not guilty

Jewelry stolen from Colorado players in Rose Bowl locker room heist, police say

A killer known for his 'zombie hunter' costume is on death row, but some suspect he has another victim

Ohio woman charged with 'serial killings' allegedly met men for sex before fatally drugging them

It was youth night at a maine bowling alley when gunfire erupted, police identify 40-year-old man as suspect in mass shooting in lewiston, maine.

Murder charge reinstated against Philadelphia police officer who shot Eddie Irizarry in his car

Four years after fire engulfed a California dive boat, killing 34, the captain’s trial begins

Florida man allegedly threatened to shoot someone at CVS unless given 'all bottles' of Viagra

Suspect in NYC gay bar robbery scheme changes plea to guilty

Man shoots himself after officers tried to question him about four escapees from Georgia jail

Family sues Panera Bread after college student who drank Charged Lemonade dies

Man who was living in New Hampshire woods found guilty of murder in deaths of retired couple

Fatal stabbing of a synagogue president has no evidence linking to antisemitism, police say

Ex-wife of a man suspected in the killing of Maryland judge accused him of child abuse last year, documents show

Former major-league pitcher arrested in alleged murder and attempted murder of his in-laws

His wife was killed the day before their eviction. A decade later, he faced another foreclosure — and a murder charge.

Business News

Prosecutors in sam bankman-fried trial compare defense argument to 'dumb and dumber'.

Case Stories: Telling Tales About School

Writing, listening, reflecting, dialogue and perspective, case stories: telling, listening, and discussing.

Two teachers listen as a colleague, Gerald Leblanc, housemaster of the Lowell House School, reads his story aloud:

The Problem with Ms. Parasol. I'm losing sleep and what's left of my hair as my worries about Ms. Parasol grow. In the middle of a lecture on Boyle's law last Thursday she stopped, picked up her things, and left the room 15 minutes before the end of class. Two weeks earlier she didn't show up at all for sixth period. Mr. Hammer found her in the department center, reading. She said she had "lost track of time."

Ms. Parasol has been a science teacher at Kirk High School for more than 40 years. She is somewhat of a legend in this large but provincial city, and has taught the law of inertia to most of our adult population. Ironically, she is slowing down, but refuses to consider retirement. She asserts she is "sorely needed" here and bristles at any mention of leaving. She is late to school almost every day and I have to find coverage for her homeroom. She has difficulty correctly identifying students so she fouls up the attendance records. On four separate occasions she reported her handbag stolen, only to have it surface in the department center or staff restroom.

Ms. Parasol has never received an unsatisfactory evaluation, so I am now documenting these incidents. I've also started "visiting" her classroom more regularly, although she has responded with indignation. The other day she told me, "An administrator, especially a former student, could be a little more sensitive to an older staff member."

To compound these problems, the rest of the facultyis protective of Ms. Parasol and not supportive of me. While it's easy to document what's happening, I don't know how to ease her out with dignity. It could take years to get her to retire. What does that mean for the students? Some people tell me just to get rid of her, but it's not so simple.

Clarifying questions. The two colleagues ask: Have you confronted Ms. Parasol about being late to school and any of the other incidents that you told us about? Did you tell her why you are visiting her classroom? What is your school's system's policy on retirement?

Framing and interpreting the issues. The three teachers discuss the problem from different perspectives, including: What is the central issue here? What are some alternatives for dealing with Ms. Parasol? What would be the consequences of taking any of these actions? Did they consider that Ms. Parasol might have a physical or mental problem, like Alzheimer's disease? Why is the faculty not supportive of the administration? Are we sensitive enough to the different stages of adult development? Are there other resource people at the school who might help with this issue?

Dialogue. Speaker 1: "In my judgment, the kids come first. This calls for direct action."

Speaker 2: "How about creating a part-time position and allowing her to phase into retirement?"

Leblanc: "That's avoiding the issue."

Bohm, D. (1994). Thought As A System . London: Routledge.

Buber, M. (1970). I and Thou . New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Buber, M. (1988). The Knowledge of Man: Selected Essays . Atlanta Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, Inc.

Bridges, E. M. (1992). Problem-Based Learning for Administrators . Oregon: ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management.

Christensen, C. R., D. S. Garvin, and A. Sweet, eds. (1991). Education for Judgement: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership . Boston: Harvard Business School.

Patricia Maslin-Ostrowski has been a contributor to Educational Leadership.

Chuck Christensen has been a contributor to Educational Leadership.

ASCD is a community dedicated to educators' professional growth and well-being.

Let us help you put your vision into action., from our issue.

To process a transaction with a Purchase Order please send to [email protected]

As part of our annual inventory audit process, ASCD will be pausing all order fulfillment operations beginning at 12 noon eastern (U.S.) on Thursday, November 16, through November 21.

Order fulfillment will resume on Tuesday, November 21, when the audit is complete.

Please contact us at 1-800-933-2723 if you have questions about your order status.

• Entertainment
• The Rousing True Story Behind <i>The Burial</i>

The Rousing True Story Behind The Burial

T he crowd-pleasing courtroom drama finds new cinematic life in Maggie Betts’ rousing sophomore feature The Burial , which opens in select theaters Oct. 6 and begins streaming on Prime Video Oct. 13. The film tells an entertaining and gradually deepening David and Goliath story about an independent funeral home owner, Jeremiah “Jerry” O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones), who not only wins a lawsuit against a massive corporate competitor that aims to put him out of his proud family business, but also exposes the deeply rooted systemic issues inside the so-called “death care” industry, with the help of his fierce attorney Willie Gary ( Jamie Foxx ).

The true story that inspired The Burial was the subject of a New Yorker article by Jonathan Harr, published with the same title in 1999 . In it, Harr portrayed in great detail the specifics and the players of the real 1995 court case—including the Canada-based Ray Loewen, who owned more than 700 funeral homes and over 100 cemeteries in the United States; the Mississippi-based O’Keefe, whom Loewen aimed to force into bankruptcy; and the wildly successful lawyer that O’Keefe hired, Gary—a sharp, self-made, and flashy personal injury attorney from Florida, who came from from humble beginnings as a sharecropper’s son and later developed a taste for $3,000 suits.

Stylistically well-suited to a courtroom drama with another ensemble-driven and exquisitely orchestrated film, 2017’s Novitiate , under her belt, Betts explained how she adapted the true story for the screen in a recent conversation with TIME, maintaining the gist of the real case, but taking liberties to augment certain themes, particularly race. “For a large duration of it, [the real case] was a very boring contract trial,” says Betts. “Race was not central to it, per se. But it was always there, bubbling beneath the surface. I’m obviously interested in race as an African American director. And the [ New Yorker ] article [also] seemed to be interested in it.”

The real lawsuit

Owning eight funeral parlors in Mississippi, Jeremiah O’Keefe was a conscientious man whose Irish ancestors had been in the undertaking trade since the Civil War years, according to a story published in the New York Times in January 1996, just months after the trial concluded. The O’Keefes lost their longtime family home during the Great Depression, but Jerry managed to buy it back some 50 years later, turning his reclaimed childhood estate into a funeral parlor.

Jerry and his wife Annette also held a funeral insurance company, whose policies a Jackson-based funeral home was supposed to sell exclusively as per the two parties’ longstanding deal. But when Loewen bought said funeral home, he ignored the deal and started to sell his own insurance policies. Upon that breach of contract, O’Keefe sued the Loewen Group, which agreed to settle in 1991, with terms signed off by both parties. But evidence showed that the Loewen Group never honored the settlement as decided, and instead continued to string the financially strapped O’Keefe along, preventing him from doing business in the funeral markets that Loewen wanted to take control of as part of a disturbingly familiar and greedy Wall Street model of constant expansion.

Operating in accordance with his go-big-or-go-home principle, O’Keefe’s attorney Gary initially proposed a settlement amount of $125 million, an unthinkably high sum for a case of this kind. But upon Loewen’s refusal to settle, the dispute went to court and a majority-Black Jackson jury ruled in favor of Gary’s client, awarding them a figure that was significantly higher: $500 million in damages.

A fresh rewrite of a decades-old script

Initially written by Doug Wright (who is credited as a co-writer), The Burial mostly sticks with the above basic facts, but Betts takes generous liberties throughout. The script had been floating around since the late ‘90s, with directors like Alexander Payne and Ron Howard circling it at different points. When it came to Betts, she initially passed, preferring to keep her focus on the female experience as she did in Novitiate , which tells the story of a young woman’s journey through Catholicism and its darkly domineering power structures. But when Covid hit, with the future of her other projects uncertain, Betts reconsidered with one condition: she’d have the freedom to make the script her own. “It was a good script, but the point of view was dated,” Betts recalls. “It felt like it was from another era, from the ‘90s.” So in her rewrite, she took a freewheeling approach, adding various fictional characters and moments to the story, a method supported by the loosely worded “inspired by true events” disclaimer at the start.

While the Loewen Group had Black attorneys on their real-life team of counsels, they were all men. So one of the biggest updates Betts made was changing the lead Loewen lawyer to a powerful Black woman—the entirely fictional Mame Downes, played by Jurnee Smollett . Betts also added a number of other Black characters into the story, particularly to Gary’s team, to give their fun energy and banter what she calls “a Black flavor.” She explains, “I wanted [it] so that none of the Black characters had a need for white people in their life. Completely self-sufficient. Mame works for Ray Loewen, but she's on her own path and she doesn't need [him].”

A fan of old-fashioned courtroom dramas since childhood, Betts decided to fully embrace their somewhat hokey recipe instead of pushing against its conventions. “It’s such a weird genre, sort of dated,” she says with a chuckle. “But I used to watch them when I was a kid. I'm not even talking about A Few Good Men or that famous one with Harrison Ford [ Presumed Innocence ], because they’re almost too quality. But like Jagged Edge or Extreme Justice . I had a nostalgia for it.” So Betts studied and followed their formula, recognizing the conceptual freshness of Black attorneys representing white clients in her film. She also added dramatic embellishments to the trial throughout, including a fictional boardroom negotiation scene toward the end where O’Keefe and his wife refuse Loewen’s offer to settle.

Willie Gary vs. Jamie Foxx

“I could never imagine anyone else,” Betts says about casting Foxx to play Gary. To her, Foxx’s comedic timing, his ad lib ability that often made her laugh to the point of tears, and his charming personality were a perfect match for the real character, a determined go-getter who lived in an ostentatious Florida mansion as depicted in the movie. Being deeply experienced in portraying real people, from Ray Charles to Just Mercy ’s Walter McMillian, Foxx preferred to create his own Willie Gary, so he kept his time with the (still living) real Gary limited. But various true facts about him made it into the script, such as the time a racist gatekeeper turned him and his wife Gloria (Amanda Warren) away from an apartment complex they were going to rent when Gary was in law school.

Based on their extensive research, Betts and production designer Kay Lee matched Gary’s office to his real workspace almost exactly, and costume designer Mirren Gordon-Crozier took of cues from Gary’s old photos to build a showy wardrobe for Foxx. “Look him up,” says Betts with affection. “He doesn't wear as many colors. But everything is glistening and glittering.” For Gary’s suits—based in reality, but exaggerated—the duo was influenced by the R&B bands and musical figures of the era, adorning the looks with enough bling and the same kinds of expensive watches the real Gary wore. “It’s a representation of Black wealth. When Black people arrived at this moment, they're getting really rich and not trying to assimilate to what white wealth is. There was a kind of free expression. Like, ‘I've got money.’” Echoing Gary’s vibe, the team styled his entire entourage like a cheesy Black boy band. “I had this image of them coming down the hallway like a Bell Biv DeVoe video, a posse based on music videos from the ‘90s.”

The other key players

Taking a different tack than Foxx, Jones was keen to learn more about the actual person to align his performance with something closer to reality. Because O’Keefe died in 2016, Jones did his research through online videos, combining his findings with what he and the production team learned from the community that knew O’Keefe. “His family was still around. And when we were location-scouting funeral homes, [we realized] everybody knew them a little bit,” says Betts. “People had little stories about him, usually incredibly flattering and sweet. So Tommy Lee Jones had this affection and affinity for the real man.”

In the role of Loewen, Bill Camp plays up the real man’s capitalist, dog-eat-dog mentality. “I mentioned There Will Be Blood ’s Daniel Plainview to him. Totally different movie, but just in the sense that this guy had no remorse about it,” says Betts. Because the topic of Loewen’s extravagant yacht came up numerous times in the real trial, Betts transposed his tone-deaf flaunting of luxury signifiers to a decidedly key scene in the courtroom, amplifying its significance through Camp’s exacting performance. 

Elsewhere, Gary’s righthand counselor Hal Dockins (Mamaoudou Athie) and O’Keefe’s other attorney Mike Allred ( Alan Ruck ) were based on real people, with the actual Allred harboring a documented “prejudice against Black people,” which he confesses in the film as he did in real life . Also in Gary’s team, Reggie Douglas (Dorian Crossmond Missick) was loosely inspired by a real attorney named Robert Parenti, largely fictionalized by Betts in his fun and funny demeanor in step with the film’s tone.

How Betts mined the real story’s racial nuances

In the film, viewers learn about a standing deal that the Loewen Group had with the Black National Baptist Convention, which enabled Loewen to buy NBC’s graveyards and use Black church workers as sales agents to sell Loewen burial contracts in financially underprivileged areas. That story was very much based in truth, even though the disturbing and racist implications of it weren’t as apparent until Betts spelled them out in her script. “[Loewen] had been very exploitative of the African American community,” Betts says. “The deal with the NBC was basically getting Black people to take advantage of other Black people; like puppeteering.”

In order to magnify the truth behind this capitalistic manipulation, Betts wrote fictional (but truth-based) accounts of victim testimonies, edited together through an elegant montage of talking heads. Through it, we hear from actors portraying people who were price-gouged in their most vulnerable moments, or weren’t offered some of the common funeral services (like embalming or viewing at Loewen’s funeral homes) commensurate with the prices they paid, as the 1996 New York Times piece also notes . “Those testimonies were meant to [imply], it was bigger than this case. It was really about corporate exploitation, of not only poor minority groups, but poor people in general. So I took the theme of the trial and gave it these mouthpieces,” says the director.

With deliberate tonal shifts—from comedic, to serious and profound, back to some comedic relief as the trial progresses—Betts infused The Burial with narrative touch points where race incrementally became more relevant to the story. “And then it hits this big revelation about the history of race in America,” she says. “Ultimately, I thought, The South is like a graveyard for slaves, that capitalism was built on slavery. And these ghosts of the past were going to rise up and have influence over the trial.”

What happened after the trial

As the film’s end cards indicate, the Loewen Group eventually agreed to a $175 million settlement offer after appealing the jury’s verdict. Ray Loewen was forced to resign as President and CEO of his company not long after, with the Loewen Group eventually filing for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Homes continue to thrive, the same end cards advise, remaining the largest family-owned funeral business in Southern Mississippi. As for Willie Gary, known to refer to himself as “The Giant Killer,” he went on to become one of the country’s most prominent trial lawyers, winning cases against the likes of Anheuser-Busch and the Walt Disney Company.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight
• Sheikh Hasina and the Future of Democracy in Bangladesh
• The Oct. 7 Massacre Revealed a New Hamas Social Media Strategy
• The War Is Making Americans Question Their Relationships
• Matthew Perry Wanted to Be Remembered for Helping Others
• Safiya Sinclair: Why I Finally Cut My Dreadlocks
• The Best Inventions of 2023
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies of 2021

Two cases about Hertz claimed top spots in 2021's Top 40 Most Popular Case Studies

Two cases on the uses of debt and equity at Hertz claimed top spots in the CRDT’s (Case Research and Development Team) 2021 top 40 review of cases.

Hertz (A) took the top spot. The case details the financial structure of the rental car company through the end of 2019. Hertz (B), which ranked third in CRDT’s list, describes the company’s struggles during the early part of the COVID pandemic and its eventual need to enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. 

The success of the Hertz cases was unprecedented for the top 40 list. Usually, cases take a number of years to gain popularity, but the Hertz cases claimed top spots in their first year of release. Hertz (A) also became the first ‘cooked’ case to top the annual review, as all of the other winners had been web-based ‘raw’ cases.

Besides introducing students to the complicated financing required to maintain an enormous fleet of cars, the Hertz cases also expanded the diversity of case protagonists. Kathyrn Marinello was the CEO of Hertz during this period and the CFO, Jamere Jackson is black.

Sandwiched between the two Hertz cases, Coffee 2016, a perennial best seller, finished second. “Glory, Glory, Man United!” a case about an English football team’s IPO made a surprise move to number four.  Cases on search fund boards, the future of malls,  Norway’s Sovereign Wealth fund, Prodigy Finance, the Mayo Clinic, and Cadbury rounded out the top ten.

Other year-end data for 2021 showed:

• Online “raw” case usage remained steady as compared to 2020 with over 35K users from 170 countries and all 50 U.S. states interacting with 196 cases.
• Fifty four percent of raw case users came from outside the U.S..
• The Yale School of Management (SOM) case study directory pages received over 160K page views from 177 countries with approximately a third originating in India followed by the U.S. and the Philippines.
• Twenty-six of the cases in the list are raw cases.
• A third of the cases feature a woman protagonist.
• Orders for Yale SOM case studies increased by almost 50% compared to 2020.
• The top 40 cases were supervised by 19 different Yale SOM faculty members, several supervising multiple cases.

CRDT compiled the Top 40 list by combining data from its case store, Google Analytics, and other measures of interest and adoption.

All of this year’s Top 40 cases are available for purchase from the Yale Management Media store .

And the Top 40 cases studies of 2021 are:

1.   Hertz Global Holdings (A): Uses of Debt and Equity

2.   Coffee 2016

3.   Hertz Global Holdings (B): Uses of Debt and Equity 2020

4.   Glory, Glory Man United!

5.   Search Fund Company Boards: How CEOs Can Build Boards to Help Them Thrive

6.   The Future of Malls: Was Decline Inevitable?

7.   Strategy for Norway's Pension Fund Global

8.   Prodigy Finance

9.   Design at Mayo

10. Cadbury

11. City Hospital Emergency Room

13. Volkswagen

14. Marina Bay Sands

15. Shake Shack IPO

16. Mastercard

17. Netflix

18. Ant Financial

19. AXA: Creating the New CR Metrics

20. IBM Corporate Service Corps

21. Business Leadership in South Africa's 1994 Reforms

22. Alternative Meat Industry

23. Children's Premier

24. Khalil Tawil and Umi (A)

25. Palm Oil 2016

26. Teach For All: Designing a Global Network

27. What's Next? Search Fund Entrepreneurs Reflect on Life After Exit

28. Searching for a Search Fund Structure: A Student Takes a Tour of Various Options

30. Project Sammaan

31. Commonfund ESG

32. Polaroid

33. Connecticut Green Bank 2018: After the Raid

34. FieldFresh Foods

35. The Alibaba Group

36. 360 State Street: Real Options

37. Herman Miller

38. AgBiome

39. Nathan Cummings Foundation

40. Toyota 2010

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

A man wants to trademark 'Trump too small.' The case has made it to the Supreme Court

Nina Totenberg

At the Supreme Court Wednesday, a case asks whether a California lawyer can own a federal trademark covering the phrase "Trump Too Small."

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Donald Trump finally got to the Supreme Court today - indirectly. He was not a plaintiff or a defendant or a target, but his name and image were the issue, as NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.

NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Today's case dates back to a presidential primary debate in 2016 and Senator Marco Rubio's mocking of then-candidate Trump as having small hands.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DONALD TRUMP: He hit my hand. Look at those hands. Are they small hands?

TRUMP: And he referred to my hands - if they're small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there's no problem, I guarantee you.

TOTENBERG: Two years later, part-time Democratic activist Steve Elster applied to trademark the phrase Trump too small for use on T-shirts. The Patent and Trademark Office rejected the proposed mark on grounds that it falsely suggested a connection with a living person without his written permission. The trademark office said that Elster is free to market his T-shirts without a trademark that could force others to pay him a fee for use of the phrase. Elster appealed, and a federal appellate court ruled that the provision unconstitutionally limited his free speech rights to political commentary. That argument had few, if any, takers at the Supreme Court today. Justice Sotomayor.

SONIA SOTOMAYOR: The question is, is this an infringement on speech? And the answer is no. He can sell as many shirts with this saying. There's no limitation on him selling it.

TOTENBERG: Justice Thomas made a similar point in questioning Elster's lawyer.

CLARENCE THOMAS: Mr. Taylor, can your client make the shirts or mugs or whatever he wants to make now without registration?

JONATHAN TAYLOR: He can, Justice Thomas.

THOMAS: So what speech precisely is being burdened?

TAYLOR: The burden on speech is that my client is being denied important legal rights and benefits that are generally available to all trademark holders who pay the registration fee solely because his mark expresses a message about a public figure.

TOTENBERG: That prompted this observation from Justice Kagan.

ELENA KAGAN: We've said as long as it's not viewpoint-based, government can give the benefit to some and not the benefit to others.

TOTENBERG: Justice Gorsuch chimed in...

NEIL GORSUCH: There have always been content-based restrictions of some kind.

TOTENBERG: ...And Justice Kavanaugh...

BRETT KAVANAUGH: Congress thinks it's appropriate to put a restriction on people profiting off commercially appropriating someone else's name.

TOTENBERG: ...And Justice Jackson.

KETANJI BROWN JACKSON: Trademark is not about the First Amendment. Trademark is about source identifying and preventing consumer confusion.

TOTENBERG: And finally, there was this from Chief Justice Roberts.

JOHN ROBERTS: What do you do about the government's argument that you're the one who is undermining First Amendment values? Because the whole point of the trademark, of course, is to prevent other people from doing the same thing. So if you win slogan Trump too small, other people can't use it, right?

TOTENBERG: Lawyer Jonathan Taylor said if that really is a problem, Congress could fix it, but he didn't say how. Bottom line today? Yes, Virginia, there are some things the Supreme Court justices apparently do agree on.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF MAREN MORRIS SONG, "GIRL")

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

Violence against women must stop; five stories of strength and survival

Facebook Twitter Print Email

Conflicts, humanitarian crises and increasing climate-related disasters have led to higher levels of violence against women and girls (VAWG), which has only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing into sharp focus the urgent need to stem the scourge.

Globally, nearly one-in-three women have experienced violence, with crises driving the numbers even higher.

Gender-based violence (GBV), the most pervasive violation of human rights, is neither natural, nor inevitable, and must be prevented.

Marking the 16 Days of Activism to combat violence against women and girls, UN Women is showcasing the voices of five survivors, each of whose names has been changed to protect their identity. Be forewarned that each character sketch includes descriptions of gender-based violence.

‘Convinced’ she would be killed

From the Argentine province of Chaco, 48-year-old mother of seven, Diana suffered for 28 years before finally deciding to separate from her abusive partner.

“I wasn't afraid that he would beat me, I was convinced that he would kill me,” she said.

At first, she hesitated to file a police complaint for fear of how he might react, but as she learned more about the services provided by a local shelter, she realized that she could escape her tormentor. She also decided to press charges.

Living with an abusive father, her children also suffered psychological stress and economic hardship.

Leaving was not easy, but with the support of a social workers, a local shelter and a safe space to recover, Diana got a job as an administrative assistant in a municipal office.

Accelerate gender equality

• Violence against women and girls is preventable.
• Comprehensive strategies are needed to tackle root causes, transform harmful social norms, provide services for survivors and end impunity.
• Evidence shows that strong, autonomous women’s rights movements are critical to thwarting and eliminating VAWG.
• The  Generation Equality Forum  needs support to stem the VAWG violence.

“I admit that it was difficult, but with the [mental health] support, legal aid and skills training, I healed a lot,” she explained.

Essential services for survivors of domestic violence are a lifeline.

“I no longer feel like a prisoner, cornered, or betrayed. There are so many things one goes through as a victim, including the psychological [persecution] but now I know that I can accomplish whatever I set my mind to”.

Diana is among 199 women survivors housed at a shelter affiliated with the Inter-American Shelter Network, supported by UN Women through the  Spotlight Initiative  in Latin America. The shelter has also provided psychosocial support and legal assistance to more than 1,057 women since 2017.

Diana’s full story is  here .

Survivor now ‘excited about what lies ahead’

Meanwhile, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept through Bangladesh, triggering a VAWG surge, many shelters and essential services shut down

Romela had been married to a cruel, torturous man.

“When I was pregnant, he punched me so hard I ended up losing my baby...I wanted to end my life”, she said.

She finally escaped when her brother took her to the  Tarango  women’s shelter, which in partnership with UN Women, was able to expand its integrated programme to provide safe temporary accommodations, legal and medical services, and vocational training to abused women who were looking for a fresh start.

Living in an abusive relationship often erodes women’s choices, self-esteem and potential. Romela had found a place where she could live safely with her 4-year-old daughter.

Opening a new chapter in her life, she reflected, “other people always told me how to dress, where to go, and how to live my life. Now, I know these choices rest in my hands”.

 “ I feel confident, my life is more enjoyable ,” said the emancipated woman.

Tarango  houses 30–35 survivors at any given time and delivers 24/7 services that help them recover from trauma, regain their dignity, learn new skills, and get job placement and a two-month cash grant to build their economic resilience.

“Our job is to make women feel safe and empowered, and to treat them with the utmost respect and empathy,” said Programme Coordinator Nazlee Nipa.

Click  here  for more on her story.

Uphill battle with in-laws

Goretti returned to western Kenya in 2001 to bury her husband and, as dictated by local culture, remained in the family’s homestead.

“But they wouldn’t give me food. Everything I came with from Nairobi – clothes, household items – was taken from me and divided between the family,” she recounted.

For nearly 20 years after her husband’s death, Goretti was trapped in a life of abuse until her in-laws they beat her so badly that she was hospitalized and unable to work.

Afraid to go to law enforcement, Goretti instead reached out to a local human rights defender, who helped her get medical attention and report the case to the local authorities.

They wouldn’t give me food. Everything...was taken from me and divided between the family – Survivor

However, she quickly discovered that her in-laws had already forged with the police an agreement in her name to withdraw the case.

“But I cannot even write”, Goretti said.

Human rights defenders in Kenya are often the first responders to violations, including GBV. Since 2019, UN Women and the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights ( OHCHR ) have been supporting grass-roots organizations that provide legal training and capacity-building to better assist survivors.

In addition to reporting the issue to local police and the courts, human rights defender Caren Omanga, who was trained by one of these organizations, also contacted the local elders.

“I was almost arrested when confronting the officer-in-charge”, Ms. Omanga explained. But knowing that the community would be against Goretti, she started “the alternative dispute-resolution process, while pushing the case to court”.

Finally, with her case settled out of court, Goretti received an agreement granting her the property and land title that she had lost in her marriage dowry, and the perpetrators were forced to pay fines to avoid prison.

“It is like beginning a new life after 20 years, and my son is feeling more secure… I’m thinking of planting some trees to safeguard the plot and building a poultry house”, she said.

Read Goretti’s story in its entirety  here.

Raising consciousness

In Moldova, sexual harassment and violence are taboo topics and, fearing blame or stigmatization, victims rarely report incidents.

At age 14, Milena was raped by her boyfriend in Chisinau. She was unaware that her violation was a sexual assault and continued to see her abuser for another six months before breaking up. Then she tried to forget it.

“This memory was blocked, as if nothing happened”, until two years later, upon seeing an Instagram video that triggered flashbacks of her own assault, she said.

Almost one-in-five men in Moldova have sexually abused a girl or a woman, including in romantic relationships, according to  2019 research  co-published by UN Women.

Determined to understand what had happened to her, Milena learned more about sexual harassment and abuse, and later began raising awareness in her community.

Last year, she joined a UN Women youth mentorship programme, where she was trained on gender equality and human rights and learned to identify abuse and challenge sexist comments and harassment.

Milena went on to develop a self-help guide for sexual violence survivors , which, informed by survivors aged 12 – 21, offers practical guidance to seek help, report abuse, and access trauma recovery resources.

Against the backdrop of cultural victim-blaming, which prevents those who need it from getting help, the mentoring programme focuses on feminist values and diversity, and addresses the root causes of the gender inequalities and stereotypes that perpetuate GBV and discrimination.

“The programme has shown that youth activism and engagement is key to eliminating gender inequalities in our societies”, explained Dominika Stojanoska, UN Women Country Representative in Moldova.

Read more about Milena  here .

Support survivors, break the cycle of violence

A 2019 national survey revealed that only three-out-of-100 sexual violence survivors in Morocco report incidents to the police as they fear being shamed or blamed and lack trust in the justice system.

Layla began a relationship with the head of a company she worked for. He told her he loved her, and she trusted him.

“But he hit me whenever I disagreed with him. I endured everything, from sexual violence to emotional abuse…he made me believe that I stood no chance against him”, she said.

Pregnant, unmarried and lonely, Layla finally went to the police.

To her great relief, a female police officer met her, and said that there was a solution.

“I will never forget that. It has become my motto in life. Her words encouraged me to tell her the whole story. She listened to me with great care and attention”, continued Layla.   

She was referred to a local shelter for single mothers where she got a second chance.

Two years ago, she gave birth to a daughter, and more recently completed her Bachelor’s Degree in mathematics.

“I was studying while taking care of my baby at the single mother’s shelter”, she said, holding her daughter’s hand. 

UN Women maintains that building trust and confidence in the police is an integral part of crime prevention and community safety.

When professionally trained police handle GBV cases, survivors are more likely to report abuse and seek justice, health and psychosocial  services  that help break the cycle of violence while sending a clear message that it is a punishable crime.

Over the past few years, the General Directorate of National Security, supported by UN Women, has restructured the national police force to better support women survivors and prevent VAWG.

Today, all 440 district police stations have dedicated personnel who refer women survivors to the nearest specialized unit.

“It takes a lot of determination and courage for women to ask the police for support”, said Saliha Najeh, Police Chief at Casablanca Police Unit for Women Victims of Violence, who, after specialized training through the UN Women programme, now trains her police officers to use a survivor-centred approach in GBV cases.  

As of 2021, 30 senior police officers and heads of units have been trained through the programme.

“Our role is to give survivors all the time they need to feel safe and comfortable, and for them to trust us enough to tell their story”, she said.

Prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Morocco has also expanded channels for survivors to report and access justice remotely through a 24-hour toll-free helpline, an electronic complaints mechanism, and online court sessions.

Click  here  for the full story.

These stories were originally published by UN Women.

• violence against women
• gender-based violence

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

The True Crime Stories We Won’t Forget

Arsenic poisoning at a church, a jewelry heist and other cases that our reporters covered have stuck with them.

By The New York Times

All true crime stories start as crime reporting, often in the daily newspaper.

Before the narrative is shaped for your streaming device, earbuds or bookshelf, the facts are gathered by a journalist. What happened? Where and when? Who is the victim? And do the police know who did it?

Any journalist who has covered crime has stories they can’t shake. These tales can be harrowing, bizarre, or even, in rare circumstances, oddly inspirational. We asked our journalists to share the ones they still think about, even decades later.

Ellen Barry, Boston bureau chief:

Someone put arsenic in the coffee after a church service in New Sweden, Maine — sickening several congregants and killing one. I was sent up there in 2003 by The Boston Globe, to the far reaches of Aroostook County. It was both quaint and horrific, someone trying to kill their neighbors. Eventually, it emerged that one of the ushers had done it, as revenge for losing a theological battle. As the population in that area drained away, two small Lutheran churches were consolidated into one. Identical to outsiders, the two churches had what was for them a deeply significant doctrinal difference. In one, the priest faced the congregation when blessing the host; in the other, the priest faced the altar. The poisoner had lost that battle. He ultimately killed himself. It was a grim story about the dilemmas of those stretches of our country that are losing population, having to let go of their particular identity.

Lynda Richardson, senior staff editor, Travel:

Eddie Brown began running in a snake-infested Florida swamp in 1952. In the 44 years after he escaped from a chain gang while serving a robbery sentence, Mr. Brown worked, raised children and lived quietly in East New York. But he was always shadowed by the gnawing fear that his past would catch up with him. I covered his case as a Metro reporter in 1996, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the chain-gang fugitive, having recently read about the racial horrors of the Jim Crow South in Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys.”

Eddie Brown’s past resurfaced after he was in a minor car accident and the police ran a routine check that showed he was wanted in Florida. He was taken away in handcuffs. Florida initially requested his extradition, and New York law enforcement officials began the proceedings. Mr. Brown spent nearly 40 days in the Brooklyn House of Detention before he was released on $1,000 bail. It was an immensely satisfying moment to see him walk out of the courthouse, finally a free man, as a sea of news photographers with flashing cameras and reporters — more than I’ve ever seen — awaited him.

Dan Barry, domestic correspondent:

When I worked for The Providence Journal many years ago, I often wrote about the mobsters who were very much present in that Rhode Island city. You knew that this was Bobo’s social club, this was Baby Shanks’s cafe, and this was the place where Old Man Patriarca, the boss, used to run everything. You also knew that two men connected to a certain restaurant had made a guy named Joe Onions disappear long ago — but had never revealed where they had, uuh, laid him to rest.

Fast forward to 2008. One of the men is dead and the other is dying . The police pick him up on a nickel-and-dime charge, and ask, for the umpteenth time, where is Joe Onions buried. To their shock, he agrees to spill.

I have strong ties still to the state, and when I heard about this case, it sounded like a short story — about an old wiseguy who decides to go out by doing the right thing. I had to write it.

Nicholas Kulish, domestic correspondent, Investigations:

The century-old KaDeWe department store stands eight stories tall but looms even larger in the German consciousness. A short walk from the old New York Times bureau where I worked in West Berlin, the luxurious shopping destination is a symbol both of Berlin’s Roaring Twenties and the country’s postwar economic miracle. So when I learned that there had been a jewelry heist — with the thieves caught on the surveillance camera lowering themselves into the store on a rope ladder, evading the motion detectors and making off with millions of dollars’ worth of jewels — I knew it was a big crime story on the biggest stage.

My contacts in the Berlin police department told me that the thieves had made just one mistake, leaving behind a glove at the scene with DNA inside. A good story needs a twist but a great story boasts two: The DNA evidence led not to a single suspect but a pair, identical twins, identified as 27-year-old Hassan and Abbas O. The German justice system couldn’t lock them both up and each could claim the other did it. So, they walked. It may not have been the perfect crime, but it was a pretty sweet alibi.

Alan Feuer, reporter, Metro:

A Bronx man spent 25 years in prison for a rape he did not commit . Why? Because a witness accidentally took the police to the wrong apartment — 16B, not 16C — and the police arrested and prosecuted the man they found there.

Manny Fernandez, Houston bureau chief:

One night in 2006, a police officer in the Bronx responds to a fight at a White Castle. He rolls up and sees a man with a gun kneeling over another man in the parking lot. He tells the gunman to drop the weapon, but the gunman doesn’t respond. The officer opens fire, and the gunman is critically wounded and later dies . The gunman, it turns out, was a fellow officer : An off-duty Bronx policeman who was intoxicated and had just been beaten up by a group of guys at the White Castle.

It’s the mistaken identity that gets me. You can freeze-frame the shooting as the bullet’s in the air and study it: There are worlds upon worlds of fate, mystery and human connection at play. These two officers worked at station houses nearly two miles apart, and yet here they were drawn together in a few tense, confusing seconds in a fast-food parking lot. As I wrote, “In this city, people live their whole lives separated by such short distances and never once cross paths.” I don’t think the officer was ever prosecuted for the shooting. I think it was ruled a justified shooting. But how does a cop live with a thing like that, and move on?

Armando Arrieta, deputy editorial director, syndication:

This unsolved case — in which seven people, including children, were shot point-blank during a robbery inside a bowling alley — has been a cloud over a small New Mexico city near the Mexican border for decades. Four of the victims were killed (a 12-year-old victim shot in the head managed to call 911), and no arrests have ever been made. I grew up in the area, and it has been a source of sorrow and local mythology ever since it happened in 1990. In fact, the brutality of this crime over a few thousand dollars, the massive, multiagency law enforcement response and the fact that no credible witnesses have ever come forward to identify suspects all continues to perplex everyone who remembers that day.

Casey Anthony: A Complete Timeline of Her Murder Case and Trial

The young mother raised suspicions with her behavior after the disappearance of her daughter, Caylee, though prosecutors were unable to conclusively tie her to the toddler's death.

However, there would be no closure for those outraged by a mother's neglect of her child, as Casey escaped conviction in 2011, while the questions of who killed her young daughter and why were never resolved.

August 9, 2005: Caylee Marie Anthony is born

Caylee arrives after Casey's repeated denials to other family members about her pregnancy. Although she suggests possible partners, including then-fiancé, Jesse Grund, and another young man who supposedly died in a car accident, the identity of Caylee's father is never publicly revealed.

June 16, 2008: Casey drives off with Caylee

Caylee was raised in the Orlando home of her grandparents, Cindy and George Anthony, but the day after an alleged family argument on Father's Day, June 15, Casey leaves with her young daughter and rebuffs efforts to reconcile in person.

July 15, 2008: Cindy reports that Caylee is missing

After learning that a family car used by Casey had been impounded, George retrieves the car and is overwhelmed by the smell that remains even after a bag of trash is removed from the trunk. Cindy tracks down her daughter later that day and, over a string of 911 calls, reports that Caylee has been missing for a month, demands Casey's arrest and notes the vehicle's odor, saying, "It smells like there's been a dead body in the damn car."

July 16, 2008: Casey is arrested

Casey leads investigators on a pair of wild goose chases, first to the uninhabited apartment of a nanny named Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez, who allegedly ran off with Caylee on June 9, and then to Universal Studios, where Casey pretended to have a job. She is arrested and charged with child neglect, lying to investigators and interfering with a criminal investigation.

July 22, 2008: Casey is declared a 'person of interest' at a bond hearing

The hearing introduces evidence that a cadaver dog had zeroed in on the odor of human decomposition in the car trunk and the Anthonys' backyard, as well as Cindy's admission that they had all seen Caylee after June 9. Although Casey is being held on relatively minor charges, the judge is disturbed enough by the evidence and the young mother's seemingly indifferent behavior to set bail at $500,000.

August 20, 2008: Casey's bond is posted

California bounty hunter Leonard Padilla announces that he has paid the $500,000 with the hope that Casey will lead them to Caylee.

August 30, 2008: The bond is rescinded

The reversal comes a day after Casey's arrest for allegedly stealing and cashing checks from a friend, with the angry crowds demonstrating outside the Anthonys' home contributing to the decision. "I came, I gave it my best shot, she didn't want to talk to me. What can I say?" Padilla says. Anthony will again be released after other parties combine to post the bond on September 5, although she will return to jail by the end of the month.

October 14, 2008: Casey is charged with first-degree murder

The unsealed indictment also charges her with aggravated child abuse, aggravated manslaughter and four counts of providing false information to law enforcement. In response, Casey's lawyer, Jose Baez, says his client's actions will become clearer at trial: "I sincerely believe when we have finally spoken, everyone, and I mean everyone, will sit back and say, now I understand, that explains it."

October 24, 2008: Forensic reports from an examination of Casey's car are released

The reports note that a hair strand discovered in the trunk is "microscopically similar" to those found on Caylee's brush and showed "characteristics of apparent decomposition." Additionally, an air sample from the trunk is found to contain chemical compounds consistent with human decomposition.

December 11, 2008: The skeletal remains of a young girl are discovered

The bones are found in a bag in a wooded area less than a half-mile from the Anthonys' home by utility worker Ray Kronk. It is later revealed that Kronk had sought to convince police to search the area back in the summer.

December 20, 2008: The remains are confirmed to be those of Caylee

The Orange County chief medical examiner reports that the bones showed no evidence of trauma and that Caylee's death is being ruled a "homicide of undetermined means." Although the skull is found with duct tape around the nose, mouth and jaw, the advanced state of decomposition ultimately prevents investigators from pinpointing an exact cause and date of death.

January 23, 2009: George is taken into custody after a suicide attempt

George is reported to be "despondent and possibly under the influence of medication and alcohol" when he is located at a hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida, along with a five-page suicide note.

April 13, 2009: Prosecutors announce their intention to pursue the death penalty

Although earlier court papers indicated that the death penalty would not be in play, the new notice of intent cites "sufficient aggravating circumstances" to justify its imposition.

May 24, 2011: The trial commences with the defense's bombshell claims

The trial begins with the prosecution's opening salvo of Casey being a party girl with no use for a young daughter, as evidenced by the month spent shopping and drinking during Caylee's absence.

Those remarks are soon eclipsed by Baez's stunning opening statement which asserts that Caylee drowned in the family swimming pool and that George sought to cover up the accidental death. The lead defense lawyer also alleges that George had molested Casey, thereby igniting her habit of lying to cover up the pain and that Kronk, the utility worker, had found Caylee's body and planted it in the woods.

Taking the stand as the first witness, George denies that he ever molested his daughter or knew anything about Caylee's drowning.

May 27, 2011: A witness offers his theory about the smell in Casey's car

Simon Birch, the manager of the towing company that impounded Casey's car in June 2008, testifies that he had encountered multiple vehicles with dead bodies during his three decades in the business and that the smell from Casey's car was consistent with those past experiences.

That same day, the fiancée of Casey's brother also takes the stand and describes the "very special bond" she observed between Caylee and her mother.

June 6, 2011: A forensics expert takes the stand

Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory explains how the "shockingly high" amount of chloroform – a chemical released by decomposition, as well as one that can be used to knock someone unconscious – detected in the car trunk led to his conclusion that a dead body was indeed present. However, his testimony is contradicted the following day by an FBI scientist, who compares the chloroform level in the trunk to the amount found in household cleaners.

June 8, 2011: The jury ponders the relevance of search engines

A software designer testifies that someone had searched for "chloroform" a whopping 84 times and also looked up such terms as "head injuries," "ruptured spleen," "chest trauma" and "internal bleeding" on the Anthonys' home computer in March 2008, during the regular work hours of George and Cindy. The designer later reports an error in his detecting software and determines that the user visited a site related to chloroform only once.

June 23, 2011: Cindy refutes previous testimony

In a crucial day for the defense, Cindy claims that she was the one who researched chloroform on her computer. She also testifies that a stain found in the trunk, allegedly caused by Caylee's decomposing body, was there when the family purchased the car eight years earlier.

July 3, 2011: The two sides present their closing arguments

Continuing with the narrative that Casey was overly burdened by Caylee, lead prosecutor Jeff Ashton emphasizes to the jury how the young mother was motivated enough to go to extremes to achieve her freedom. "Something needed to be sacrificed, that something was either the life she wanted or the life thrust upon her," he says. "She chose to sacrifice her child."

While forbidden from revisiting the unsupported molestation claims, Baez nevertheless delivers an effective closing argument by pointing out the lack of evidence that could definitively place Caylee's body in the car trunk or tie Casey to her daughter's death.

July 5, 2011: Casey is found not guilty of murder

After almost six weeks of testimony and 400 pieces of evidence presented in court, the jury of seven women and five men takes less than 11 hours to reach a verdict of not guilty .

July 7, 2011: Casey is sentenced to time already served

Casey receives a four-year sentence and a $4,000 fine for the four counts of lying to police, but the prison time is canceled out by the near three years already spent behind bars and credit for good behavior.

July 17, 2011: Casey is released from jail

Casey exits the Orange County Jail shortly after midnight, passing the approximately 100 protesters who showed up to demand justice for Caylee. "It is my hope that Casey Anthony can receive the counseling and treatment she needs to move forward with the rest of her life," her lawyer says in a statement.

Notorious Figures

Amateur Sleuth Sues For D.B. Cooper Clues

D.B. Cooper

Lyle Menendez

Erik Menendez

A Timeline of Natalee Holloway’s Unsolved Case

Dennis Rader

Peter Sutcliffe

Rosemary West

Jack Unterweger

Bobby Joe Long

America's Most Famous Murder Cases

A Look at 10 of the Country's Most Notorious Killers

• Criminals & Crimes
• Serial Killers
• The U. S. Government
• U.S. Foreign Policy
• U.S. Liberal Politics
• U.S. Conservative Politics
• Women's Issues
• Civil Liberties
• The Middle East
• Race Relations
• Immigration
• Canadian Government
• Understanding Types of Government

From serial killers to celebrity victims, some sensational murder cases grab our collective imagination and won't let go, like the unsolved Oakland County murders . The following is a look at a handful of the most infamous murder cases in recent American history. Some of the killers have been caught, tried, and punished. Other cases remain open and may never be solved.

John Wayne Gacy: The Killer Clown

An entertainer who played "Pogo the Clown" at children's parties, John Wayne Gacy was one of the most infamous serial killers in America. Beginning in 1972, Gacy tortured, raped, and murdered 33 young men, most of whom were just teenagers. His reign of terror lasted six years.

While investigating the disappearance of 15-year-old Robert Piest in 1978, police were able to track Gacy down. Authorities discovered 26 bodies of young men in the crawlspace under Gacy's home. The bodies of three other victims were found on his property, and the rest were found in the nearby Des Plaines River.

Gacy was charged with 33 murders. He went to trial on February 6, 1980. After an unsuccessful attempt at an insanity defense, Gacy was convicted on all 33 counts of murder. The prosecution sought and was granted the death penalty as sentencing for 12 of Gacy's murders. John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994.

Ted Bundy is probably the most notorious serial killer of the 20th century. Though he admitted to killing 36 women, it's speculated that the actual number of victims is much higher.

Bundy graduated from the University of Washington in 1972. A psychology major, Bundy was described by his classmates as a master manipulator. Bundy lured his female victims by faking injuries, then overpowering them.

Bundy's murder spree spread across many states. He escaped custody on more than one occasion. It all ended for him in Florida with his 1979 murder conviction. After numerous appeals, Bundy was executed in the electric chair in 1989.

David Berkowitz: Son of Sam

David Berkowitz (born Richard David Falco) terrorized the New York City area in the 1970s with a string of brutal, seemingly random homicides. Also known as "Son of Sam" and "the .44 Caliber Killer," Berkowitz wrote confession letters to police and media after his crimes.

Berkowitz's rampage began on Christmas Eve in 1975 when he reportedly stabbed two women to death with a knife—but he was better known for walking up to parked cars and shooting his victims. By the time he was arrested in 1977, he had killed six people and wounded seven more.

In 1978, Berkowitz confessed to the six murders and received a sentence of 25 years to life for each. During his confession, he claimed that a demon came to him in the form of the dog belonging a neighbor named Sam Carr and had commanded him to kill.

The Zodiac Killer: Unsolved

The identity of the Zodiac Killer, who haunted Northern California from the late 1960s to the early ’70s leaving behind a trail of lifeless bodies, is still unknown.

This bizarre case involved a series of letters sent to three California newspapers. In many of the missives, an anonymous perpetrator confessed to the murders. Even more chilling, however, were the threats he made saying that if his letters were not published, he would go on a murderous rampage.

The letters, which continued through 1974, are not all are believed to have been written by the same man. Police suspect that there may have been several copycats in the high-profile case. The man who came to be known as the Zodiac Killer confessed to 37 murders. However, police can only verify seven attacks, five of them resulting in death.

A similar California cold case, the Keddie Cabin murder case , has been unsolved since 1981.

Charles Manson and the Manson Family

Bettmann/Getty Images

In the late 1960s, a charismatic drifter with delusions of rock and roll grandeur named Charles Manson coerced a number of young women and men, many of whom were vulnerable teenagers, to join a cult called " The Family. "

The group's most infamous murders took place on in August 1969. On the night of August 8, directed by Manson, several of his "family members" invaded a home in the northern hills of Los Angeles. Over the course of the night and into the next morning, they killed five people, including director Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, who was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time and Abigail Folger, heir to the Folger Coffee fortune. The next night, Manson family members continued their spree, murdering supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary.

Manson was indicted and convicted along with the family members who'd carried out the murders at his behest. Manson was sentenced to death, however, he was never executed. He lived the rest of his life in prison and passed away in 2017 of a heart attack.

Ed Gein: The Plainfield Ghoul

 Bettman /Contributor/Getty Images

Plainfield, Wisconsin was home to an unassuming farmer turned handyman named Ed Gein, but the rural farmhouse Gein called home masked the scene of a series of unspeakable crimes.

After his parents passed away in the 1940s, Gein began to isolate himself. He became infatuated with death, dismemberment, bizarre sexual fantasies, and even cannibalism. His forays into his gruesome predilections began with corpses from local cemeteries. By 1954, he'd escalated and was killing elderly women.

When investigators searched the farm, what they found was a literal house of horrors. From the collection of body parts, they were able to determine that 15 women had fallen victim to the Plainfield Ghoul.

Gein was incarcerated for life in a state mental facility without the possibility of release. He died of cancer in 1984.

Dennis Lynn Rader: The BTK Strangler

Pool/Getty Images

From 1974 through 1991, the Wichita, Kansas area was gripped by a string of murders that were attributed to a fiend known as the BTK Strangler. The acronym stands for "Blind, Torture, Kill." The crimes went unsolved until 2005.

After his arrest, Dennis Lynn Rader confessed to killing 10 people over the course of 30 years. He had notoriously toyed with authorities by leaving letters and sending packages to local news outlets. His last correspondence in 2004 led to his arrest. Even though Rader was not apprehended until 2005, he committed his last murder prior to 1994—when Kansas enacted the death penalty.

Rader pled guilty to all 10 murders and was sentenced to 10 consecutive life sentences in prison.

The Hillside Strangler: Angelo Anthony Buono Jr. and Kenneth Bianchi

In the early 1970s, the Zodiac killer had ceased preying on victims in California but by the end of the decade, the West Coast was once again being terrorized by a serial killer—or in this case, killers—dubbed "the Hillside Strangler."

Investigators would eventually learn that rather than a lone murderer, there were two culprits behind the chilling crimes: the killing duo of Angelo Anthony Buono Jr. and his cousin, Kenneth Bianchi. Beginning in 1977, in a killing spree that started in Washington State and extended all the way to Los Angeles, the heinous pair raped, tortured, and murdered a total of 10 girls and young women,

After their arrest, Bianchi turned on Buono, and in order to avoid the death penalty, he confessed to the killings and sexual assaults. Buono received a life sentence and died in prison in 2002.

The Black Dahlia Murder

The 1947 Black Dahlia case remains one of the best-known unsolved murder cases in America. The victim, dubbed "The Black Dahlia" by the media, was a 22-year-old would-be actress named Elizabeth Short whose mutilated body (the corpse was cut in half) was found in a Los Angeles by a mother out for a walk with her young child. There was no blood found at the scene. The woman who found her initially thought she'd stumbled across a store mannequin.

In all, almost 200 people have been suspected in Short's murder. A number of men and women even confessed to leaving her body in the vacant lot where she was found. Investigators have never been able to pinpoint the killer.

The case is similar to the more modern Bonny Lee Bakley murder , for which her husband (actor Robert Blake) was tried but not convicted.

Rodney Alcala: The Dating Game Killer

Rodney Alcala received the nickname "The Dating Game Killer" thanks to his appearance as a contestant on the popular TV show of the same name. His date from that appearance declined the rendezvous, finding him "creepy." Turns out she had good intuition.

Alcala's first known victim was an 8-year-old girl whom he attacked in 1968. Police found the raped and strangled girl holding onto life along with photos of other children. Alcala had already gone on the run, though he was later captured and sentenced to prison.

After being released from his first prison sentence, Alcala killed four more women, the youngest just 12 years old. He was later convicted of one murder and sentenced to death in California. However, given the number of photos recovered from a rented storage locker, it's believed that he's responsible for many more brutalities.

In March of 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on capital punishment in the state, effectively granting Alcala, along with more than 700 other death row inmates, a stay of execution.

• Profile of Serial Killer Rodney Alcala
• John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown
• Profile of Serial Killer Arthur Shawcross
• Profile of Serial Killer Tommy Lynn Sells
• Wesley Shermantine and Loren Herzog
• The Grim Sleeper Serial Killer Case
• Profiles of Notorious Male Criminals
• Profile of Richard Kuklinski
• Charles Manson and the Tate and LaBianca Murders
• Profile of Serial Killer Debra Brown
• Profile of Sean Vincent Gillis
• The Trial of Leopold and Loeb
• The Most Notorious Serial Killers in History
• Gilles de Rais 1404 - 1440
• Sadistic Killer and Rapist Charles Ng
• Aggravating and Mitigating Factors

By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.

• UNSOLVED MURDERS
• SOLVED MURDERS
• UNIDENTIFIED PERSONS
• CASE BY STATE
• PRIVACY POLICY
• TERMS OF SERVICE

Brian Rodriguez-Sigala behind bars for murdering Javier Rodriguez-Ramirez after he reportedly refused to confess his sins

Browsing: TRUE CRIME

Kerieda beavers behind bars for the murder of her boyfriend, tevael parker, christopher vaughn behind bars for the roadside murders of his wife, kimberly, and their three children, bao n. luu: murder of a 27-year-old man, whose charred body was found inside his vehicle, remains unsolved, kankakee county jane doe 2002: death of an unidentified female, whose skeletal remains were found near a highway, is still unsolved, norris evans: murder of a 27-year-old mother of four, whose body was found inside her home, remains unsolved, shamonica brown: murder of an 8-year-old girl, whose body was found outside a church, remains unsolved, charles turgot jones: murder of a 19-year-old man, whose body was found in a shallow grave, remains unsolved, felicia hines: murder of a 24-year-old woman, who was found inside a vehicle, remains unsolved, vernon castle clark behind bars for the fatal tire iron attack on friend, jose lopez-perezm, during argument.

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.

Ad Blocker Enabled!

Your cart is empty

hot summer sales of the week

iPhone 14 Series Electroplating Square Frame Case with Lens Protection

iPhone 14 Series Camera Lens Protector kickstand Case

iPhone 14 Series New Generation Camera Shell Glass Case

iPhone 14 Series Metal Lock Bumper Case with Lens Ring Protection

iPhone 14 Series New Generation Electroplating Protective Case

iPhone 14 Series Frameless Bumper with Glass Lens Protector

iPhone 14 Series Matte Chrome Phone Case with Camera Protection

iPhone 14 Series New Generation Magnetic Case

Featured collection.

iPhone 13 Series New Generation Electroplating Protective Case

iPhone 13 Series Metal Lock Bumper Case with Lens Ring Protection

iPhone 13 Series New 2nd Generation Electroplating Case

iPhone 13/14 Series New Generation Logo Engraved Glass Case

iPhone 13/14 Series Dragon Ball Z Limited Edition Case

iPhone 13 Series Metal Lock Frame Camera Protection Magsafe Case

iPhone 13/14 Series Luxury Transparent PC Premium Magsafing Case

iPhone 13 Series Eagle Series Case with Gold Lens Ring Protector

• Reading Lists
• New Nonfiction
• Awards/Festivals
• Daily Thrill
• Noir/Hardboiled
• Espionage/Thriller
• Legal/Procedural
• Literary Hub

Crime Fiction in Moscow: Spies Aside, Just Crimes and Very Cold Cases

"crime and the city" visits a world of smugglers, defectors, and thieves in law..

OK – here’s the rules, the “Moscow Rules” if you like. All books below are set in the Russian capital but are not about spooks and espionage. Moscow and spy novels are a whole other, very long, and admittedly fascinating, shelf. But this is Crime and the City , so we’re sticking with cops and robbers, killers and detectives.

And so, let’s start with one of the best crime novels of the twentieth century, now forty years old but, if you’ve never read it, still as fresh as a daisy. I submit for your perusal Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park (1981) and the debut of Moscow Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko in the dying days of the Soviet Union. Three corpses in Moscow’s Gorky Park – two men and a woman – shot and their faces and fingertips cut off to prevent identification. Smuggling, defection, betrayal, the grim reality of the USSR versus the dream of the West. I’ll say no more – it’s a classic. If you haven’t read it do so, now…

After Gorky Park Arkady does go walkabout throughout the series – Havana, Chernobyl, the frozen tundra of Siberia – and then in Stalin’s Ghost (2005) he returns to Moscow – Vladimir Putin’s Moscow. Muscovites keep reporting sightings of a spectral Stalin wandering the city’s Metro. Arkady is still, after quarter of a century and several regimes since Gorky Park , unpopular with his bosses. He investigates and finds himself at the heart of a string of murders that seem to point to a gang of Chechen War veterans. Arkady also stays in Moscow for Three Stations (2010), which pitches our weary hero into the maelstrom of bling-bling early twenty-first century Moscow in the quest for a stolen baby. Arkady Renko’s final outing, Tatiana (2013), also finds him in contemporary Moscow when (in shades of true events and the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya) investigative reporter Tatiana Petrovna falls to her death from a sixth-story window the same week that a Russian mob billionaire, Grisha Grigorenko, is shot and buried with the trappings afforded minor royalty. Arkady is caught between the Vory v Zakone (‘Thieves in Law’ mafia groups) rough and ready crime gangs of the era and dissident reporters.

Cruz Smith published his last Arkady Renko novel, The Siberian Dilemma , in 2019 taking Renko out east to the tundra. Here’s hoping there will be more to come from the dogged Moscow investigator.

Arkady Renko doesn’t get all the crime in Moscow to himself. A few more Moscow-set crime novels…

• In Sergey Kuznetsov’s Butterfly Skin (2014) Ksenia, an ambitious young editor of an online newspaper, is on the hunt of a serial killer stalking female victims throughout the city. But Ksneia finds herself confronting not just a killer but also her own dark desires.
• AD Miller’s Snowdrops (2011) is set in mid-nineties go-go “Wild East” Moscow and features Nicholas, a British, Russia-based, commercial lawyer. Nicholas gets involved with two Russian girls, Masha and Katya, liaisons that drag him down into the scary underworld of Russia. Snowdrops is a virtuoso piece of first person writing as Nicholas sinks into the demimonde. Miller has described Snowdrops as a “moral thriller”, and we wait for the protagonist’s moral decisions along the way.

A few historical crime novels harking back to the days Stalin ruled Moscow through to the new post-Soviet world. And three excellent series.

Tom Robb Smith’s Child 44 (2008), adapted into a successful movie in 2015, is the first in a trilogy featuring Ministry of State Security (MGB) agent Leo Stepanovich Demidov. Child 44 is loosely based on the real-life crimes of Andrei Chikatilo, the so-called “Butcher of Rostov”, a prolific and horrific serial killer of children, though set slightly earlier than in reality, back into Stalin’s Russia. Demidov lives in Moscow with his wife Raisa. He commands a unit tasked with tracking down and arresting dissidents, a “crime” in the USSR his wife is later accused of.

Domidov returns in The Secret Speech (2009), three years after the events of Child 44 and now Leo has established the Homicide Division of the KGB. He is tasked with investigating the apparent murder of Suren Moskvin, an MGB officer. To investigate Leo must look back into the dark murderous years of Stalin’s rule. Finally, in Agent 6 (2011) Leo has left the secret police. His wife Raisa, and their daughters Zoya and Elena, are invited on a “Peace Tour” to New York City, a trip that ends in political disaster and death. Leo must investigate this very personal tragedy and murder and find out who is “Agent 6”, an investigation that will take him from the familiar streets of Moscow to the mountains of Soviet-controlled Afghanistan, and finally to the backstreets of New York.

It’s always surprised me that more people don’t know Irish author William Ryan’s Captain Korolev series set in 1930s Moscow. The books have recently been reissued as the ‘Moscow Noir’ series. The first in the series, The Holy Thief (2010), starts in 1936 Moscow – a city in fear of Stalin’s Great Terror and the mass purges. Captain Alexei Korolev, a detective with the Moscow Militia, investigates the murder of a woman found in a deconsecrated church. The trouble starts when he discovers the victim is an American bringing political trouble for him and contact with the Thieves, the bosses of Moscow’s underworld. As the bodies mount the chances of Korolev been taken to the basement of the Lubyanka (secret police HQ) for a bullet in the neck .

Book two in the trilogy In the Bloody Meadow (2011 and published as The Darkening Field in the USA) Korolev has narrowly avoided being sent to Siberia and instead is tasked with investigating the suspected suicide of a young woman, Maria Lenskaya. Starting in Moscow Korolev finds himself heading east to the Ukraine and Stalin’s enforced famine. Finally in The Twelfth Department (2013) Korolev, now surviving into 1937, has to find the killer of a top Russian scientist shot dead in front of the Kremlin. As more scientists die Korolev finds himself unwillingly caught in a turf war between two rival factions within the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. All in all, a great trilogy.

As is Stuart Keminsky’s sixteen-novel Inspector Rostnikov series. Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov is a police investigator in Moscow. The series goes back to the USSR – the first, Rostnikov’s Corpse (also known as Death of a Dissident ), was written in 1981 and concluded with 2010’s A Whisper to the Living . Pretty much all the Rostnikov’s are good and reading the entire series probably qualifies you to drive a Moscow taxi. The fifth, A Cold Red Sunrise (1988), won the Edgar Best Novel award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1989 while others in the series have been nominated in other years.

And finally, when it comes to writing about Moscow there’s no escaping the staggeringly prolific Boris Akunin and his Detective Erast Fandorin series set in nineteenth century Russia (with regular side trips to other countries). In the first in the series, The White Queen (1998), we encounter young Fandorin starting out, in 1876, as a clerk in the Criminal Investigations Department of the Moscow Police, investigating a seemingly straightforward case of public suicide by a rich young man, though uncovering a powerful and terrible conspiracy. In The Death of Achilles (1998) it is now 1882 and Fandorin returns to Moscow from diplomatic service in Tokyo with his Japanese manservant Masa. Mikhail Sobolev, who apparently suffered heart failure in his hotel room. Fandorin, Moscow’s Governor-General’s Deputy for Special Assignments has just died of a heart attack, but was it accidental?

Fandorin returns to Moscow in several more books in the series – The State Counsellor (1999 ) , taking on revolutionaries; The Coronation (2000), 1896 and the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II; She Lover of Death (2001), where it’s the turn of the century and a “suicide club” has all Moscow terrified. Fast forward to 1911 and Fandorin investigates murders in the theatres of Moscow in All the World’s a Stage (2009). Moscow pops up in many of Akunin’s short stories and other novels where the main action is the Russo-Japanese War, Constantinople, Baku or any of the other dozen cities and historical events Fandorin finds himself involved with. It’s hard to find more old Moscow than in Akunin’s books.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Paul French

Previous article, next article, get the crime reads brief, get our “here’s to crime” tote.

Popular Posts

CrimeReads on Twitter

The Ordinary, the Sublime, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Advertisers: Contact Us

Privacy Policy

• RSS - Posts

Support CrimeReads - Become a Member

CrimeReads needs your help. The mystery world is vast, and we need your support to cover it the way it deserves. With your contribution, you'll gain access to exclusive newsletters, editors' recommendations, early book giveaways, and our new "Well, Here's to Crime" tote bag.

Become a member for as low as $5/month