Families and Family Life

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      Sean Combs and the Limits of the ‘Family Man’ Defense

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      On Monday, Sean Combs was arrested in Manhattan on racketeering and sex trafficking charges. If he’s convicted of the racketeering charge, it could potentially land him a life sentence. His legal team defended him that day with references to his role as a father. “Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children and working to uplift the Black community,” they said in a statement. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.”Combs has pleaded not guilty to these charges. Last year, after being accused of sexual assault in four separate lawsuits, Combs defended himself in part by invoking his family: “Let me be absolutely clear: I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”The latest charges are vile, describing years of sexual and physical abuse, enabled by Combs’s vast fortune and the pull of his celebrity. The government outlines the way Combs and his staff allegedly used their power to “intimidate, threaten and lure female victims into Combs’s orbit, often under the pretense of a romantic relationship. Combs then used force, threats of force and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sex acts with male commercial sex workers.”Combs was denied bail on Tuesday. His lawyers tried to appeal the decision with a letter to the judge. In this missive, Combs’s lawyers paint “victim 1” as simply a jilted, lonely lover. “That one person was an adult woman who lived alone, who never lived with Sean Combs. She had her own friends, she had her own life, as adults tend to do. Mr. Combs and this person were very much in love for a long time,” the letter states. “This one person often expressed anger and jealousy because Mr. Combs had another girlfriend, as will be testified to by many witnesses and as the written communications show.”Despite the fact that the world has seen video evidence of Combs assaulting his ex-girlfriend, his lawyers seem to believe that pitting Combs, a “loving family man,” against an “adult woman who lived alone” would be an effective defense.They’re trying it because, to some extent, we still assign a positive moral value to getting married and having children. It’s why Republicans keep using Kamala Harris’s lack of biological children to attack her character. Combs’s lawyers are also likely playing on built in prejudices against Black women in particular, who have always had a harder time being seen as respectable, aspirational or worthy of protection in the public eye.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      5 Books to Make Caregiving a Little More Manageable

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      Health care professionals and other experts shared recommendations for anyone providing and receiving care.Tina Sadarangani, a geriatric nurse practitioner in New York City, has spent years working with older adults and their families. She counsels patients on the medications they should take, the eating habits they should change and the specialists they should see.But it wasn’t until her own father became seriously ill — requiring a slew of medications, deliveries, physical therapy and more — that she understood the experience from what she calls “the other side of the table.”Dr. Sadarangani, who has a doctorate in nursing, comes from a family of medical providers. But most of the people who care for loved ones don’t have this expertise.“If it was this complicated for our family,” Dr. Sadarangani said, “how were people with no medical backgrounds doing this every day in America?”Resources like books aren’t a panacea, she said. But they can help validate experiences, offer advice and make us feel less alone. Here are five titles, recommended by health care providers and other experts, to help those who help others.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gail Lumet Buckley, Chronicler of Black Family History, Dies at 86

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      She wrote two books about multiple generations of her forebears, including her mother, Lena Horne.Gail Lumet Buckley, who rather than follow her mother, Lena Horne, into show business, wrote two multigenerational books about their ambitious Black middle-class family, died on July 18 at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 86.Her daughter Jenny Lumet, a screenwriter and film and television producer, said the cause was heart failure.Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history in the early 1980s, when her mother asked her to store an old trunk in her basement. It had belonged to Ms. Horne’s father, Edwin Jr., known as Teddy, and contained hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations, to Sinai Reynolds, who had been born into slavery around 1777 and who in 1859 bought her freedom and that of members of her family.“There were photographs, letters, bills, notes,” Mrs. Buckley told The New York Times in a joint interview with her mother in 1986, as well as “speakeasy tickets, gambling receipts, college diplomas.”Those disparate paper fragments of history helped her structure “The Hornes: An American Family” (1986).Mrs. Buckley was inspired to chronicle her family history when she discovered, in an old trunk, hundreds of artifacts that had belonged to relatives dating back six generations.Alfred A. KnopfWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      8-Year-Old Is Killed and Two Adults Wounded in Queens Stabbing

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      Police officers arrived at an apartment in Jamaica to find a man holding his father at knife point and an 8-year-old mortally wounded.It was just after 5 p.m. on the Fourth of July when a bleeding woman staggered out of a Queens apartment building, begging for help.She had been stabbed in the back.When police officers from the nearby 103rd Precinct arrived, they found a grisly scene in a fifth-floor apartment: an older son holding his father at knife point; a younger boy nearby, dying from his wounds, the police said.The officers said the older son was holding his father in a headlock. They told him to drop the knife multiple times in English and Spanish, they said. When he did not, officers fired one round, striking the older son, who dropped the knife, said John Chell, the chief of patrol for the New York Police Department.The suspect is being treated for his injuries at a nearby hospital.“This was a tragic and horrific event,” Chief Chell said at a hastily gathered news conference on Thursday evening outside the apartment building, at the corner of Sutphin Boulevard and 94th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens.Police officials did not speculate on a motive for the attack that left the younger boy, who was 8 years old, dead. The family members’ names were not released, nor was the precise nature of the relationships among them.Police officials said the investigation was continuing. “This is a domestic incident,” Chief Chell said. “There is a relationship with all them here, and we’ll figure that out.”The police said that the woman, who is 29, and the father, 43, were expected to recover from their injuries. An 8-month-old girl who was also in the apartment was unharmed, the police said.Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, said that the officers who had responded to the scene were crushed by the news that the boy had succumbed to his injuries: “One of them said, ‘We wish we could have got here a little sooner to save this young life.’” More

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      Bidens Border Crackdown Could Disproportionately Affect Families

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      Parents with children represent 40 percent of migrants who crossed the southern border this year. Now, they will be turned back within days, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times.A new border crackdown unveiled by the Biden administration this week is likely to disproportionately affect families, whose soaring numbers in the last decade have drastically changed the profile of the population crossing the southern border.Family units have come to represent a substantial share of border crossers, accounting for about 40 percent of all migrants who have entered the United States this year. Families generally have been released into the country quickly because of legal constraints that prevent children from being detained for extended periods.They then join the millions of undocumented people who stay in the United States indefinitely, under the radar of the U.S. authorities, as they wait for court dates years in the future.But according to a memo issued by the Homeland Security Department and obtained by The New York Times, families will be returned to their home countries within days under President Biden’s new border policy, which temporarily closed the U.S.-Mexico border to most asylum seekers as of 12:01 a.m. Wednesday.The implications of the new policy are enormous for families, who are some of the most vulnerable groups making the journey to the United States. Advocates warn that it could have dangerous repercussions, making parents more likely to separate from their children or send them alone to the border, because unaccompanied minors are exempt from the new policy.The vast majority of families seeking asylum are from Central America and Mexico, which places them in a category described in the memo as “easily removable,” akin to single adults from those regions. The memo lays out how the authorities are to carry out the new policy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jill Biden Leaves France to Attend Hunter Biden’s Trial

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      The first lady’s departure from a high-profile foreign trip was a dramatic illustration of the Biden family’s personal priorities. She is expected to return to France on Saturday.Jill Biden, the first lady, left President Biden’s side in France on Thursday to make the trans-Atlantic trip back to Delaware, where Hunter Biden is standing trial on gun charges.The first lady is then scheduled to return to France for a state visit on Saturday, according to her communications director, Elizabeth Alexander.The departure of the first lady from a high-profile foreign trip was perhaps the most dramatic illustration yet of the Biden family’s personal priorities, which lie some 3,600 miles away from France, in Courtroom 4A of the J. Caleb Boggs Federal Building in Wilmington, Del.Hunter Biden is on trial on charges of lying about his drug use on a form to buy a gun in October 2018, and of illegally possessing the weapon.The boomerang trip also says something about the resolve of the first lady, who is not a blood relative of Hunter Biden but who is the woman who raised him since he was a small child. Over time, she has become her family’s protective backbone.“I’m his mom,” she said in an interview in 2022, when Hunter Biden was the subject of a federal investigation. “I mean, I have to support him and love him, and, you know, I’m constantly talking to him, sending him texts; ‘How you doing?’ Because it’s tough.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Are You Having a Millennial Mom Midlife Crisis?

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      Mothers have been exhausted since the beginning of time, but some difficulties are specific to the millennial generation.There was dog urine on the carpet, vomit on her blouse and a queasy 7-year-old to look after, but Dr. Whitney Casares had just a few spare moments to clean up and change so she could resume the keynote presentation she had been giving when the school nurse called.Dr. Casares, 42, a pediatrician in Portland, Ore., tried to clean up both messes and race back to her computer. “But I was completely unnerved and underperformed,” she said. “When my husband” — who hadn’t picked up when the school called — “and younger daughter came home a few hours later, the first words out of their mouths were ‘Didn’t you get anything for dinner?’ and ‘Why does it smell so bad in here?’”In that moment, said Dr. Casares, the author of “Doing It All: Stop Over-Functioning and Become the Mom and Person You’re Meant to Be,” she related to a Taylor Swift lyric: “I did all the extra credit, then got graded on a curve.”It has always been exhausting to be a mother, but each generation has had its particular pressures and ways of coping. Boomer moms didn’t expect motherhood to be anything but difficult, though the lack of social awareness around anxiety and depression meant most would never openly discuss it. Generation X moms had to prove that they could do everything men could do — and then come home and work a second shift. Some Gen Xers were children of divorce, manifested an ironic detachment from their troubles and were prescribed Prozac to deal.And then came millennial moms, the women raised on “You go, girl!” in the 1980s and ’90s and who today are in their 30s and early 40s. On average, they enrolled in college in higher numbers than men, married later and delayed having children, sometimes to prioritize careers and other times because — with student debt and less wealth than previous generations — it felt impossible not to.Still, it seemed like some things had worked out in their favor. Perhaps they could juggle work and motherhood more successfully. Maybe their male partners, if they had them, would be more attuned to gender imbalances at home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Seder Is About Family, Food, Freedom. And Now, It’s Also About the War.

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      At Passover Seders, many families addressed the war in Gaza. In some cases, generations clashed and tensions arose. “That’s the Jewish way,” said one host.Bonnie Rosenfeld had 38 people crowded into her home in Rockaway, N.J., on Monday night. She has hosted Passover Seders for years, but none that felt quite like this. She wanted to address “the elephant in the room” up front.So as they lit candles to mark the start of the holiday, they also recited a set of prayers alluding to the war in Gaza — for the remaining Israeli hostages, for peace, for the horrors unfolding, she said, on both sides.It was, in her eyes, a recognition of the obvious:“This night is different,” said Ms. Rosenfeld, invoking the Four Questions traditionally recited on the holiday. “This Seder is different.”That sentiment echoed around the country this week, as families and groups of friends gathered for the start of Passover amid the complicated swirl of emotions and fiery political debates stirred by the monthslong Israel-Hamas war.The festive holiday, for many, has instead felt solemn. And its familiar rituals, this year, have seemed anything but routine.Dining chairs were left empty in symbolic remembrance of the remaining hostages. Guest lists were trimmed to avert interpersonal disharmony. Old stories and prayers took on new meaning. Timeworn rituals were tweaked to accommodate the off-kilter mood of the moment. Swords were crossed over generational lines.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More