Team Crime Story:
This week’s Crime Story activity actually began last Friday, with Ken White’s piece for us about The College Bribery Scandal called Felicity Huffman’s Smarter Choices. That article got considerable traffic throughout the weekend and into the middle of last week as it coincided with the announcement of Huffman’s sentence of 14 days in jail and a $30,000 fine.
We followed that with my story story about the implications of President Trump’s unhinged Twitter tirade against John Legend and Chrissy Teigen for the future of his administration’s approach to criminal justice reform.
On Tuesday and Thursday the Crime Story Podcast presented my interviews with Steve Zaillian, director, executive producer, and co-writer of the critically-acclaimed HBO miniseries The Night Of, and with Jonathan Tropper, co-creator of the Cinemax series Banshee, which explores ideas of crime and justice in unique and interesting ways.
On Wednesday Molly Miller’s It’s Kind of Like a Heist… Or Dodgeball took us inside the jury selection process in the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building which Molly describes as “equal parts inspiring – a testament to egalitarian democracy – and totally bat-shit crazy.”
On Friday we published The RightWay To Shut Off the Foster Care to Prison Pipeline, in which Sean Smith visits the Crenshaw headquarters of the RightWay Foundation, and its inspiring leader Franco Vega. The Foundation works to stem the flow of young people recently emancipated from the LA County foster care system into unemployment, homelessness, and incarceration.
In that piece, we also announced that Crime Story and the RightWay Foundation will be partnering on a unique creative collaboration: working closely with Crime Story journalists, a self-selected group of RightWay youth will craft narratives about their experiences in and out of the foster care system, which will then be published on crimestory.com.
Finally, Jared Harris, who is up for an Emmy tonight for his extraordinary performance in Chernobyl, graciously agreed to read excerpts from the closing statement of Vincent Oliver in a special Crime Story Podcast presentation of my article Wait, What?: A Closing Statement.
Next week on Crime Story, we will present a four part Crime Story Podcast interview with the Creator of The Wire, David Simon. We will have more of our unique brand of Crime Story LA reporting from the Los Angeles Criminal Courts, and we will have another Expert Witness column from Andrew Block that explores his experiences as Director of the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice.
Thanks for reading and listening.
Sincerely,
Kary Antholis
Publisher/Editor, Crime Story
editor@crimestory.com
