10 NEWS People
Why Carroll stays armed
E. Jean Carroll recently moved her gun to her
bedside table, said Ed Pilkington in The Guardian
(U.K.). “It’s loaded,” says Carroll, 75, holding the
revolver by its fake pearl handle in her tiny cabin
in upstate New York. She’s been sleeping with it
at arm’s reach for several weeks, since publish-
ing What Do We Need Men For?, which recalls
“the hideous men of my life.” No. 20 is President
Trump, who Carroll says pinned her against the wall of a dressing
room in the Manhattan department store Bergdorf Goodman and
penetrated her against her will (she dislikes the word “rape”). It
was late 1995 or early 1996, she says. Since making the accusation,
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist for Elle, has received several
death threats, while Trump brushed it off by saying, “She’s not my
type.” His defense “was so dumb,” Carroll says. “‘When I rape
a woman, I don’t rape a 52-year-old in Bergdorf. I rape a blond
28-year-old.’” Trump has been largely unscathed by her allegation
and numerous accounts of sexual assault by other women, which
she attributes to society’s expectations about presidents. “We crave
powerful male leaders who grab what they desire without asking.”
When Dad is Charles Manson
Michael Brunner didn’t know as a child that his father was a mur-
derous cult leader, said Maria La Ganga and Erik Himmelsbach-
Weinstein in the Los Angeles Times. Brunner is the only child of
Charles Manson and Mary Theresa Brunner, the first recruit to his
infamous “family,” but he was just 14 months old in 1969, when
Manson ordered the horrific murders of pregnant actress Sharon
Tate and four others. By the time Manson was convicted and sen-
tenced to death, Brunner was living with his maternal grandparents
in Eau Claire, Wis., who adopted him and didn’t tell him who
his father was. In elementary school, he learned the truth from a
classmate. But he didn’t think much about Manson until he was
grown. Then he began reading up on him, and fell under the sway
of Nikolas Schreck, a German conspiracy theorist who claims that
the killings attributed to Manson were committed by others in
Hollywood, who used him as a scapegoat. “The public has been
fed some untruths, and this whole thing has been glorified and
glammified and blown out of proportion,” Brunner, 51, says. “Did
he order these crimes? I don’t believe he did.” Brunner, married
and living in the rural Midwest, had one brief communication with
his father, writing an email that Manson answered, “Write on.”
Brunner put off responding, and Manson died of cancer in prison.
“I just never did it. And then it was too late.”
Diane Keaton is no longer interested in romance, said Sarah
Cristobal in InStyle. After her defining role as Woody Allen’s ex-
girlfriend in Annie Hall, for which she won the Academy Award in
1978 for Best Actress, Keaton had relationships with such co-stars
as Allen, Al Pacino, and Warren Beatty. But s he never married
and long ago gave up on men. At age 50 she adopted the first of
two children and turned her attention to being a mom and to her
acting career. “I haven’t been on a date in, I would say, 35 years,”
says Keaton, 73. “I have a lot of male friends, but no dates.” Keaton
says she remembers “exactly why” she became so career-oriented:
Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s, she watched her mother
compete for “Mrs. America,” a pageant for married homemakers.
“My mother was really an artist herself, and she could’ve had an
amazing career,” Keaton says. “She just wasn’t born at the right
time.” Despite accomplishments as an actress, Keaton says she has
never felt “powerful or confident.” Her elaborate style of dressing—
with big turtlenecks, hats, and baggy pants—“is very protective,”
she says, admitting she prefers to keep the world at a distance. “I
would call myself somebody who avoids, more than anything else.”Getty
,^ Newscom,
APKeaton, behind her walls
QAmerican rapper A$AP Rocky
remained jailed in Sweden this week
despite President Trump’s attempted
intervention. Rocky, 30, claims he and
his bodyguards acted in self-defense
when a fight broke out June 30 in
the streets of Stockholm. Yet Swed-
ish authorities arrested Rocky on
assault c harges and denied him bail,
angering the New York rapper’s fans
and celebrity friends. Trump, perhaps
seeking to score points with African-
Americans after a difficult week for
race relations, took the advice of
Kanye West and Kim Kardashian
and phoned Swedish Prime Minister
Stefan Löfven. “I assured him thatA$AP was not a flight risk and offered to
personally vouch for his bail,” Trump said.
Sweden, however, does not have bail, and
Löfven said he “will not attempt to influence
the legal proceedings.”
QMAGA hat–wearing beauty queen Kathy
Zhu was stripped of her Miss Michigan title
last week after her racially charged tweets
resurfaced. Just one day after crowning
Zhu, pageant organizers said the 20-year-old
could no longer be considered “in good char-
acter” in light of tweets from 2017 and ’18. In
one, Zhu chides a critic of police shootings
of black men, saying, “Did you know that
the majority of black deaths are caused by
other blacks? Fix problems within your own
community before blaming others.” In an-
other, she says women who wear a hijab are
“oppressed under Islam.” After the pageantcalled the tweets “insensitive” and “offen-
sive,” Zhu, an avid Trump supporter, said she
was the victim of anti-conservative prejudice.
QFilmmaker Oliver Stone asked Russian
President Vladimir Putin to be his daughter’s
godfather, according to a transcript of their
bizarre exchange released last week. The
Oscar-winning director, who is a fan of the
Russian autocrat, was interviewing Putin in
Moscow when the despot mentioned taking
part in the christening of a Ukrainian ally’s
daughter. “According to Russian Orthodox
tradition, you can’t refuse such a request,” Pu-
tin said. Stone then requested that Putin be-
come “the godfather for my daughter,” who’s- “Does she want to become an Orthodox
Christian?” Putin asked. “OK, we’ll make
her that,” Stone said. The conversation then
moved on to “homosexual propaganda.”