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    Manhunt Underway for Former Police Chief Imprisoned for Murder and Rape

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    Grant Hardin, 56, escaped on Sunday from a high-security prison in Arkansas, where he was serving a decades-long sentence for first-degree murder and rape.A manhunt was underway in northern Arkansas after a former police chief convicted of first-degree murder and rape slipped out of a high-security prison, dressed in a fake law enforcement uniform.Grant Hardin, 56, who had previously served as the police chief in Gateway, Ark., escaped from the Calico Rock North Central Unit around 2:50 p.m. on Sunday, county officials said. He is considered extremely dangerous.An image released by the Stone County Sheriff’s Office on its Facebook page shows what it says is Mr. Hardin wearing clothes similar to a law enforcement uniform, escaping through a controlled gate while pushing a cart of utility materials.“It has been determined that Hardin was wearing a makeshift outfit designed to mimic law enforcement when he escaped the North Central Unit. He was not wearing a Department of Corrections uniform, and all DOC-issued equipment has been accounted for,” Rand Champion, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Corrections, said in a statement.Mr. Hardin was briefly the police chief in Gateway, a small town near the Missouri border. He held several other law enforcement positions in the state beginning in the 1990s, including as an elected constable, according to public records and local news reports. He was terminated multiple times, and was trailed by reports of using excessive force, poor performance and, in one instance, falsifying a police report, according to local news media.In 2017, Mr. Hardin was arrested and charged with shooting James Appleton just outside Gateway, where Mr. Appleton worked in the water department. According to the police affidavit, Mr. Appleton was pulled over in a pickup truck while he was on the phone with his brother-in-law, then was shot in the head at point-blank range with a shotgun.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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      Susan Brownmiller, Who Reshaped Views About Rape, Dies at 90

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      Susan Brownmiller, the feminist author, journalist and activist whose book “Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape” helped define the modern view of rape, debunking it as an act of passion and reframing it as a crime of power and violence, died on Saturday. She was 90.Alix Shulman, a longtime friend, confirmed Ms. Brownmiller’s death at a hospital in New York, which she said came after a long illness.“Against Our Will,” published in 1975, was translated into a dozen languages and ranked by the New York Public Library as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century.Among other things, it offered the first comprehensive history of rape across the centuries, starting with ancient Babylon, and examined its use as a wartime military tactic to further subjugate the losing side.The book’s publication — along with real-time reports of mass rape in war-ravaged Bangladesh — joined a tide of events that were reshaping society’s attitude toward rape.The ascendant women’s movement was already opening the public’s eyes about sexual violence. Anti-rape groups had started to form in the early 1970s. Groundbreaking works like “Our Bodies, Ourselves” (1971) were empowering women to take control of their bodies and their sexuality. When “Against Our Will” arrived, the country seemed ready to grapple with its implications.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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      Up Next at the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Trial: Dawn Richard and Former Employees

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      After four days with Casandra Ventura, known as Cassie, on the stand, prosecutors will be seeking to corroborate her testimony with additional witnesses.As the second week of Sean Combs’s racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking trial begins, the first witness is set to be Dawn Richard, a singer in two music groups backed by Mr. Combs who says she saw him physically abuse his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura.A performer in the now-defunct groups Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money, Ms. Richard began her testimony on Friday, recalling an incident from 2009 in which she said Mr. Combs attempted to hit Ms. Ventura, known as the singer Cassie, with a skillet, then punched and kicked her.“She went into fetal position — you could see she was literally trying to hide her face or her head,” Ms. Richard testified. She also said that Mr. Combs threatened her and a bandmate to keep silent about the event, saying he told them that “where he comes from, people go missing if they say things like that, if they talk.”Ms. Richard filed a lawsuit against Mr. Combs last year, shortly before he was arrested. She accused him in the suit of threatening her, groping her and flying into “frenzied, unpredictable rages” while he oversaw her career. The girl group Danity Kane was formed during the third iteration of Mr. Combs’s MTV reality show “Making the Band.”After the jury had been dismissed on Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Combs called Ms. Richard’s accusation of abuse from 2009 a “drop-dead lie,” noting that Ms. Ventura had not mentioned it during her four days on the witness stand.Ms. Richard is the first of a series of government witnesses scheduled for this week who are expected to testify about what they saw of Ms. Ventura’s 11-year on-and-off relationship with Mr. Combs.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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      Combs Defense Seeks to Undermine Cassie’s Rape Allegation as Testimony Ends

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      The singer spent four days on the stand recounting what she described as an 11-year relationship in which she came to feel more like a sex worker than a girlfriend.Defense lawyers for Sean Combs pushed on Friday to undermine one of the most damaging allegations in the music mogul’s trial on sex-trafficking and racketeering charges — that he raped his longtime girlfriend, the singer Casandra Ventura, in 2018.On the last of four grueling days of Ms. Ventura’s testimony, Mr. Combs’s defense team pointed out inconsistencies in her recounting of when such an incident had occurred. They also noted that Ms. Ventura, an R&B singer known professionally as Cassie, never mentioned anything about an attack in a flurry of emotional breakup text messages that the couple exchanged soon afterward.The nature and history of the relationship between Mr. Combs and Ms. Ventura is central to the government’s case. Prosecutors have depicted the music mogul as a sexual predator whose employees helped stage marathon drug-fueled sessions, known as “freak-offs,” during which Ms. Ventura had sex with male prostitutes while Mr. Combs watched, and sometimes masturbated.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to all the charges, and his lawyers have portrayed Ms. Ventura as someone who fell deeply in love, participated willingly in the freak-offs but then, bitter with jealousy, has recast the relationship as a grim 11 years of beatings, blackmail and coerced sex.In that vein, the defense questioned Ms. Ventura about consensual sexual intercourse she had with Mr. Combs about a month after what she said was a night when Mr. Combs raped her in her home. Ms. Ventura was already dating her now husband, Alex Fine, at the time of the consensual sex with Mr. Combs, and she testified that while together with Mr. Combs, she received, but didn’t answer, a FaceTime call from Mr. Fine.“Your now husband didn’t know that you were with Mr. Combs at the time, correct?” a defense lawyer, Anna Estevao, asked Ms. Ventura. She replied that Mr. Fine eventually found out about her rape allegation and the subsequent intercourse she had with Mr. Combs. Ms. Estevao said Mr. Fine punched a wall in response.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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      Cassie Confronted by Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Lawyer Over ‘Freak-Offs’ During Trial

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      During cross-examination, the defense team depicted Casandra Ventura as fully engaged in staging and participating in the marathon sex sessions she says were abusive.Lawyers for Sean Combs worked on Thursday in court to portray his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, as a willing and full participant in sex marathons with prostitutes, as they sought to undermine her harrowing account of an abusive, coercive relationship riddled with violence.Ms. Ventura’s credibility is central to the government’s case, in which they have charged Mr. Combs, the music mogul, with sex trafficking and racketeering. Earlier this week she told the jury of eight men and four women of how she had suffered through hundreds of degrading sexual encounters and many injuries out of a misguided attempt to please a man she loved.But on the fourth day of Mr. Combs’s trial, the defense tried to recast Ms. Ventura, a singer known professionally as Cassie, as not nearly the victim she had portrayed herself to be. During cross-examination, Anna Estevao, one of Mr. Combs’s lawyers on a team led by Marc Agnifilo, repeatedly had her read text messages in which she expressed graphic enthusiasm for their sexual encounters, including the now famed “freak-offs” involving paid escorts.“I’m always ready to freak off lolol,” Ms. Ventura said in a message from 2009.In another exchange from around the same time, Ms. Ventura expressed her excitement in graphically sexual terms, and he told her: “I can’t wait to watch you. I want you to get real hott.”She answered: “Me too. I just want it to be uncontrollable.”Jurors gazed at the barrage of text messages, which were displayed on screens in front of them, sometimes leaning forward to get a closer look.Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to the charges and his defense has argued that the government is trying to criminalize unconventional, but lawful, sexual relations between consenting adults. In her first two days on the stand, Ms. Ventura said that she might have feigned interest at times to avoid Mr. Combs’s anger, and she recited a litany of incidents in which she was beaten when she failed.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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      In Menendez Brothers Case, a Reckoning With the 1990s

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      As a court reviewed the Menendez murder case, the culture and politics of the 1990s were scrutinized almost as much as the horrific crime.After Lyle and Erik Menendez were resentenced on Tuesday, paving the way for their possible release after more than three decades in prison, one of the first things their lawyer, Mark J. Geragos, did was make a phone call.Leslie Abramson, the brothers’ defense attorney at their trials in the 1990s who found herself parodied on “Saturday Night Live,” had in recent years warned Mr. Geragos that his efforts to free the brothers were doomed, in spite of the groundswell of support on social media.“No amount of TikTokers,” he recalled Ms. Abramson telling him, “was ever going to change anything.”Facing the bank of television cameras staking out the courthouse, Mr. Geragos told reporters he had just left a message for his old friend.“And so, Leslie, I will tell you it’s a whole different world we live in now,” he said. He continued, “We have evolved. This is not the ’90s anymore.”Indeed, over the last many months, the culture and politics of 1990s America seemed as much under the legal microscope as the horrific details of the Menendez brothers’ crimes and what witnesses described as the exemplary lives they led in prison ever since.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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      Cassie Testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Used Sex Videos as Blackmail

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      Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, said he threatened to use tapes of their sexual encounters, known as “freak-offs,” to control her behavior.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.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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      Is It Ethical to Buy Used Books and Music?

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      The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on what consumers owe to artists.Is it ethical to buy used books and music instead of new copies that will financially reward the author or artist? What do consumers owe to producers of art? — Gerald BarkerFrom the Ethicist:There’s actually a lot to be said for buying used and sustaining the low-cost democracy of art’s second life. For one thing, there are environmental advantages in the practice: Physical media are designed to endure and be shared beyond the first owner. And artists can benefit from secondary markets in real, if less tangible, ways. Works that circulate widely can enhance the artist’s reputation, whether it’s a book read and passed along, a record rediscovered in a thrift shop or a painting resold at auction. Enthusiastic new audiences, prominent displays and word-of-mouth appreciation can all contribute to a creator’s stature. (Notice that this situation is very different from music-streaming platforms, where artists are basically meant to be paid for each listen, but the recompense is often a pittance.)What artists, especially the good ones, are owed is not a cut of every encounter we have with their work but a system that gives them a real opportunity to sell their work, to build a career, to find a public. After that, their creations rightly become part of the wider cultural world, as with books in a library or paintings in a museum, where countless people can enjoy them freely across the generations.Used-book stores or vintage-record shops, where hidden gems lurk like geodes waiting to be split open, play a role, too. Such venues don’t just preserve art; they bring enthusiasts together, spark conversations and cultivate new audiences. In Michael Chabon’s novel “Telegraph Avenue,” a vintage-record shop is both a community hub and a battlefront for cultural preservation; in Helene Hanff’s book “84, Charing Cross Road,” treasured titles help sustain a human connection across an ocean. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I stumbled across both in used-book stores, providing their authors no royalties but plenty of affection. This setup isn’t a failure of fairness; it’s part of how creative work gains cultural traction.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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      Cassie Recounts ‘Violent Arguments’ and ‘Physical Abuse’ by Sean Combs

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      The singer began testifying for a federal jury in the sex-trafficking and racketeering case against Mr. Combs.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, began testifying for a federal jury on Tuesday morning in the sex-trafficking and racketeering case against Sean Combs.The much-anticipated testimony was Ms. Ventura’s first major public comment since she filed a bombshell lawsuit against Mr. Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, in late 2023, in which she accused him of having instituted a system of abuse and control over her life and career for more than a decade. That case led to a government investigation and Mr. Combs’s arrest in September 2024.In the first minutes of her testimony, she was asked by prosecutors to describe the more than decade-long relationship she had with Mr. Combs.“There were violent arguments that would usually result in some sort of physical abuse,” she answered. “Dragging, different things of that nature.”Ms. Ventura, 38, who is visibly pregnant, wore a form-fitting brown outfit. As she entered court Mr. Combs turned back in his chair to see her walk in. His lawyers had asked the judge to have her present on the stand before the jury entered, a request that the judge apparently denied.Her husband, Alex Fine, was allowed to be present in the courtroom for the beginning of her testimony, but the judge said Mr. Fine would have to leave during discussions of sexual assault.Ms. Ventura was expected to recount for the jury how Mr. Combs instituted a system of abuse and control over her life and career for more than a decade. Prosecutors say the executive dangled ever-disappearing music opportunities; beat her when she stepped out of line; and plied her with drugs, forcing Ms. Ventura to have marathon sex sessions with male prostitutes while he taped the encounters.Though legal filings in the case had merely identified her as Victim-1, there was never much doubt that the singer, who had been Mr. Combs’s on-and-off girlfriend for more than a decade, was the witness at the center of the racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking case against him.It was Ms. Ventura’s decision in late 2023, following extensive therapy, to bring a federal lawsuit accusing Mr. Combs of rape and years of physical abuse — and his decision not to settle before it became public — that set into motion the criminal investigation that led to the trial. Combs and Ventura quickly reached an eight-figure settlement in the civil case.Ms. Ventura was Mr. Combs’s on-and-off girlfriend — and employee — almost from the time they met in 2005 until she finally severed ties from his storied record label, Bad Boy, in 2019. Lawyers for Mr. Combs have portrayed the relationship as loving but deeply toxic while maintaining that any sexual arrangements were completely consensual. More