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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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      Cathy Merrick, Advocate for Indigenous People in Canada, Dies at 63

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      She was on the front lines of dogged fights against injustices, including a recent series of murders of Indigenous women by a white man.Cathy Merrick, a towering figure in the fight for Indigenous rights in Canada and the first woman to be elected grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, representing 63 First Nations, died on Sept. 6 in Winnipeg, the provincial capital. She was 63.The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs announced her death in a statement.Ms. Merrick died while doing what she had dedicated her life to: advocating for Indigenous people. She had just attended the trial of a corrections officer who had been charged in the death of an Indigenous inmate. The man had been acquitted, and Ms. Merrick was standing on the courthouse steps expressing her disappointment to the news media when she suddenly collapsed.She was taken to nearby St. Boniface hospital, where she was declared dead. The cause was not immediately known, and an autopsy was to be performed.Ms. Merrick’s death was met with deep grief across Canada. Hundreds attended her wake as she lay in state last week at the Manitoba Legislative Building, only the sixth person and the first woman ever to receive that honor.“Grand Chief Cathy Merrick was a relentless and incredibly effective advocate for First Nations peoples, especially for those most vulnerable,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada said in a statement.Catherine Ann McKay, whose traditional Cree name was Kameekosit Ispokanee Iskwew, was born on May 31, 1961, at Cross Lake, the English name for the Pimicikamak Cree Nation, in northern Manitoba. She was the adopted daughter of Hazel and Thomas Spence. Her mother was a nurse, her father a carpenter.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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      How Does Pregnancy Change the Brain? Clues Are Emerging.

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      As hormones surge, some brain areas shrink in what scientists say may be a fine-tuning that helps mothers bond with and care for their babies.Research is revealing intriguing clues about how pregnancy changes the brain. Studies scanning women’s brains before and after pregnancy have found that certain brain networks, especially those involved in social and emotional processing, shrink during pregnancy, possibly undergoing a fine-tuning process in preparation for parenting. Such changes correspond with surges in pregnancy hormones, especially estrogen, and some last at least two years after childbirth, researchers have found.A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience, adds to the picture by documenting with M.R.I.s brain changes throughout one woman’s pregnancy. It confirms previous results and adds detail, including that white matter fibers showed greater ability to efficiently transmit signals between brain cells, a change that evaporated once the baby was born.“What’s very interesting about this current study is that it provides such a detailed mapping,” said Elseline Hoekzema, a neuroscientist who heads the Pregnancy and the Brain Lab at Amsterdam University Medical Center and has helped lead studies analyzing brain scans of more than 100 women before and after pregnancy.Dr. Hoekzema, who was not involved in the new study, said it showed that along with previously documented “longer-lasting changes in brain structure and function, more subtle, transient changes also occur.”Dr. Ronald Dahl, director of the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study, said the emerging research reflected the key role of hormones in transitions like puberty and pregnancy, guiding neurological shifts in priorities and motivations.“There is that sense that it’s affecting so many of these systems,” he said. The study participant, Elizabeth Chrastil, is a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. She became pregnant in 2019, at 38, after in vitro fertilization. That allowed precise tracking of her pregnancy from the start.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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      Here’s What Workplace Menopause Guidelines Could Look Like

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      The Menopause Society announced a new initiative to support workers during this life stage. Whether employers implement it is another story.Two years ago, Dr. Stephanie Faubion stood at the microphone at a meeting of the Menopause Society thinking, “This is going to be a problem.” Someone in the room had asked a question about the challenges of going through menopause in the workplace, and the conversation had turned to ways employers could step in. Dr. Faubion, the organization’s medical director, worried that asking for additional provisions for women would fuel more gender discrimination — if women required special treatment, employers would have more reason to not hire or promote them. “What are we going to do, give women a cold room?” she remembers saying.But last spring, she and other researchers published a study on the costs of menopause at the office that helped change her thinking. Women were missing work — $1.8 billion worth of working time each year. Some quit altogether because of menopause. “I was like, alright, we can’t just bury our heads in the sand over this,” Dr. Faubion, director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Women’s Health, said. “We’re going to have do something.”Today, the Menopause Society rolled out an initiative providing employers with guidance on how to support women going through menopause. It includes tips for managers to talk about menopause at work and policies employers can consider, like ensuring that the health care plans they offer cover treatment options for menopause symptoms.The program, called Making Menopause Work, also provides suggestions for making it easier for menopausal employees to get through the workday, like flexible bathroom breaks for those dealing with unpredictable or heavy bleeding, and improving ventilation and using uniforms made with breathable fabrics so that hot flashes are less uncomfortable. There are talking points workers can bring to their employers and an assessment to gauge how well a workplace responds to menopause.The initiative is the latest symbol of growing recognition that menopause takes a toll on women in the workplace. This year, Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission stated that employers are legally obligated to make “reasonable adjustments” for women experiencing menopause symptoms if they are severe enough to amount to a disability. In 2021, the European Menopause and Andropause Society released its own recommendations urging employers to address menopause in the workplace through measures like explicitly covering menopause in sick time policies, and allowing women in customer-facing jobs to take breaks to manage symptoms like hot flashes. Some companies in the United States and abroad have started offering menopause-specific benefits.The question now is whether all this will translate into actual change.“The cynic in me is like, ‘Yeah, good luck with that,’” Dr. Faubion said.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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      Former Miss Teen USA Contestant Rebukes Vance for Using Her Flub to Attack Harris

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      Caite Upton wrote on social media that “online bullying needs to stop,” after JD Vance posted a clip of her mangled answer from the 2007 Miss Teen USA pageant to mock Kamala Harris.Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who since becoming former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate in July has been criticized on several occasions for comments demeaning women, found himself again embroiled in controversy this week when he used a viral clip of a beauty pageant contestant’s meltdown to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.On Thursday, Mr. Vance shared a video clip from the 2007 Miss Teen USA competition in which Caite Upton, who was representing South Carolina, gave a mangled answer to a question about why many Americans could not locate the United States on a map.“BREAKING: I have gotten ahold of the full Kamala Harris CNN interview,” Mr. Vance wrote on X.That evening, CNN was set to broadcast the first major interview with Ms. Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. Mr. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. quickly reposted Mr. Vance’s post, writing: “This is total Fake News from JD. We all know that Kamala isn’t that articulate.”In a social media post on Friday, Ms. Upton objected to Mr. Vance’s dredging up the 17-year-old clip of her pageant struggles, remarks that were reported by The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., and later deleted, after she appeared to have deactivated her account on X.“Regardless of political beliefs, one thing I do know is that social media and online bullying needs to stop,” she wrote, according to the newspaper.A representative for Ms. Upton, who competed in the pageant under the name Lauren Caitlin Upton, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.In 2015, Ms. Upton told New York magazine that the embarrassment she felt over the viral video had led to depression and thoughts of suicide.When Mr. Vance was asked whether he had been aware of Ms. Upton’s mental health challenges during an appearance on CNN on Friday, he said that he had not at the time he posted the clip.“My heart goes out to her, and I hope that she’s doing well,” he said.When asked whether he wanted to apologize, Mr. Vance said that he did not have regrets.“Politics has gotten way too lame,” he said, adding, “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke, but I wish the best for Caitlin.” More

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      Conservative Moms, Charmed by Trump, Would Rather Avoid His Misogyny

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      Former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a convention of the Moms for Liberty in Washington.It didn’t look like a typical Trump rally.There were trays of mini-cupcakes and macarons. There were squadrons of helicopter moms buzzed off white wine. The excited women were wandering around the basement of a Marriott in downtown Washington, waiting for former President Donald J. Trump to show.It was the Joyful Warriors summit thrown by a bunch of agitated parents known as the Moms for Liberty, a conservative activist group that was founded during the Covid pandemic. The group, which has more than 130,000 members across the country, has become quite influential in Republican politics.Their parental preoccupations were made apparent by the programming and pamphleteering on display. There were panels called “What Does It Mean to Abolish the Department of Education?” and “Moms Know Best: Protecting Kids from Secret Gender Transitions in Schools.” There was literature on child sex trafficking and on the damage wrought by Covid-era school closures, and there were copies of a book titled “Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors Into Social Justice Warriors is Destroying American Medicine.”The Moms For Liberty can get a bit carried away — one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler (“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future”) and then issued an apology disavowing the Führer (“We should not have quoted him in our newsletter”) — but still, their summit on Friday made for a good case study. It was packed with the sort of voters Mr. Trump hopes can help him win in November: fired-up suburban women.The attendees of the summit are among the voters whom Mr. Trump needs to win over.Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters“These are women that have largely never been political,” Tiffany Justice, the group’s co-founder, said. “They’re people who, in the busiest time of their lives, realized that they needed to get involved in politics.”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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      Kamala Harris Wants You To Retire Your ‘Future Is Female’ Sign

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      When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.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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      Trump’s Attacks on Harris Invoke Ancient Roman Misogyny

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      Anastasia KraynyukThe meddler, the schemer, the veiled power behind the throne, the poisoner, the witch. The image of sinister female power hiding in the dark permeates our cultural consciousness. It is a trope that stretches back to the ancient world, when women were excluded from politics and men sought ways to prove that their participation would be unnatural and dangerous. As ancient texts became part of the Western canon, such suspicion became ingrained into our patterns of thought, surviving long after the conditions that created them.About an hour after Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race in July, a Trump-aligned super PAC released an attack ad. “Kamala was in on it,” a narrator says. She “knew Joe couldn’t do the job, so she did it.” Mr. Trump picked up the theme soon after. Ms. Harris had, he argued, long concealed Mr. Biden’s incapacity, to ensure her own nomination. As focus on the handover itself fades, this idea has come to underpin one of the Trump campaign’s key lines of attack: Ms. Harris has been the power behind the throne all along, and Mr. Biden simply a front. In an early August interview, JD Vance argued that Ms. Harris must have “been the one calling the shots” all along. Mr. Trump has insisted that “Day 1 for Kamala was three and a half years ago.”The accusation that Ms. Harris covered up the state of Mr. Biden’s health is not dependent on her gender. It’s doubtless that Mr. Trump would have deployed the same argument, in one form or another, against a male opponent. But leveled against Ms. Harris, it hits upon the ancient seam of rhetoric that associates women with the clandestine exercise of power, giving it a degree of consequence it would never have carried against a man.The Romans loved a conspiracy theory, and rumors of women-led cover-ups pepper their history. This motif took hold most robustly in the peculiar conditions of the early Roman Empire, as the male aristocrats who’d once ruled the Roman Republic became concerned that women were co-opting power that was rightfully male. It was said that after Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, died, his wife, Livia, continued to issue positive news about his health until she had secured the succession of her son Tiberius. A century later, people whispered that Pompeia Plotina, wife of the emperor Trajan, had concealed her husband’s death for some days, signing his letters to the Senate and forcing through the adoption of her favorite, Hadrian, as his successor.When they talk about women in politics, Roman historians paint us a world of plots designed to circumvent the will of the emperor and the Roman people — and the Trump campaign suggests something similar in its vision of Ms. Harris’s “undemocratic” nomination. It is hard to find a woman of the imperial family who is not accused of using poison — the most covert means of assassination — in pursuit of her goals, and women’s intrigues were often set under cover of night. Messalina, for example, supposedly used a series of fake nightmares to dupe her husband, Claudius, into executing one of her enemies.The rhetoric had elements of truth: The public sphere was all but exclusively accessible to men, and the strongest weapon available to women was influence exerted privately on male rulers. But it was exaggerated beyond all historical reality. The women of the imperial family were well-educated veterans of the political game, with huge public profiles. Petitioners frequently addressed missives to empresses, and some women were granted semiofficial titles that, like the vice presidency, carried the potential for (but no guarantee of) great power. Secrecy was stressed not because it reflected the truth, but because it made a point: Female power was destabilizing and the women who held it were not to be trusted.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