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| By The Free Press |
It’s Friday, October 16. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Unpacking the charges against the radical trust fund baby Fergie Chambers. Is dealing with the government about to get even worse? Why is a 2000s pop star feuding with a Brooklyn toy shop over a very expensive bird robot? And much more.
But first: Is any man safe from “Jane Doe”?
Jeremy Taylor worked at Oakland School for the Arts for nearly two decades when the call came. It was the principal, telling him he was being suspended.
Taylor was called for an interview with an investigations company hired by the school. He’d been accused of having sex with a woman when she was a student of his nearly two decades prior.
Investigators didn’t tell him they’d already talked to “Jane Doe,” the woman who accused him. And they didn’t appear to have very much evidence to back up her claim.
“I fully thought I was going to be back in the classroom once they finalized their report,” he told me.
Instead, the investigation concluded that he’d not only slept with Doe but also that he’d exhibited “grooming” behaviors with two other minors. This despite the fact that those former students, in interviews, had said nothing untoward had happened.
Taylor was fired, arrested, and charged with committing a lewd act upon a child before he was eventually cleared. This was in 2022, and he hasn’t worked since.
Most examples of “he said, she said” encounters—including the “Cornell 7” case currently being litigated in the court of public opinion—involve men who, all evidence suggests, behaved in a way that was morally reprehensible on some level. In the case of Jeremy Taylor, however, there was never any proof that he had sex with Doe at all—or did anything that should have cost him his job. On the contrary, there was a lot of evidence that Doe made the allegations in the midst of a severe mental health crisis.
The more I dug into his case, the stranger things looked. What made Doe change her mind about what seemed like an innocent student-teacher relationship between herself and a man she previously believed was gay? And why didn’t anyone even seem to consider the possibility that his accuser might be lying? Read my investigation to find out.
—River Page
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Fergie Chambers Tried to Help Iran’s Terror Efforts, the U.S. Claims | |||||
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‘I’m a Government AI, and I’m Here to Help’ | |||||
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If you’ve spent any time on social media this week, you’ve probably seen—out of the corner of your eye, at least—that the 2000s icon Kelly Clarkson has been feuding with, of all things, a curiosity shop in Brooklyn called Art of Play. The accusation? That the store refused to sell her a $15,000 mechanical bird, and looked at her like she couldn’t afford it.
What fresh hell is this? And why have so many freethinking Americans devoted hours this week to debating it? Suzy Weiss and Dan Ahdoot break it all down in the latest episode of Second Thought, with the help of special guest Michael Moynihan. “She says she was treated like a hooker,” says Suzy, but “being a sex worker is like the greatest thing you could be in Brooklyn.”
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