Revised data from the health ministry turned into a debate about the war’s human cost. That death toll remains devastating.

Amid the chaos of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the United Nations’s humanitarian office has altered how it reports fatalities in the conflict — sparking another round of debate over the toll of Israel’s war in the Palestinian territory in response to the October 7 attacks by Hamas.

The overall reported death count likely remains very similar to what was previously known: around 35,000 people have been killed. But not all of those people’s identities have been confirmed — and among those that have, there has been a marked decrease in the number of women and children killed in the conflict and an increase in men as a proportion of those killed compared to previous estimated totals. Thousands more remain unidentified, meaning the numbers will change again as health authorities gather that information.

The UN’s update is, in many ways, a reflection of the difficulty of collecting data in a war zone, particularly when the medical system is as severely depleted as it is in Gaza.

In recent months, when detailed age and sex breakdowns were not available, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported fatality numbers from the Hamas-run Gaza Media Office. Now it is only reporting deaths when the body has been identified with a full name and other details by Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

That change led to a decrease in the number of women and children reported killed in the UNOCHA’s May 8 report, from approximately 14,500 children and 9,500 women in its previous reports to 7,797 children and 4,949 women, even as the overall toll remains roughly the same.

The report has occasioned a new round of debate over the war’s toll and how the media has reported it. When the war started, Israeli officials and some US commentators criticized the UN agency for using fatality numbers supplied by official bodies. US President Joe Biden at one point questioned the data, too. After the change in reporting methods, many of those same critics have seized on the new numbers as evidence that the number of women and children killed thus far in the war has been overblown, and that liberal media organizations are too willing to take Hamas’s word on death counts.

But as the report makes clear, the devastation in Gaza, and the deaths from Israel’s offensive, are not in dispute. The UN’s new data offers greater clarity on key details, but the renewed debate it has occasioned risks obscuring the horrors of a war zone where more than 35,000 deaths and severe hunger and disease are besetting the besieged population.

The new data on Gaza’s death toll, briefly explained

In the very beginning of the conflict, specific and detailed data on death tolls was easier to get because the health care system was more or less intact.

But as the Israeli offensive destroyed the territory, especially hospitals, that level of identification became difficult to ascertain in real time — hence the use of estimates via the Gaza Media Office. Only now does it appear that OCHA could report updated identified casualties from the Gaza Health Ministry.

The total number of people killed has not changed, OCHA says — and the initial estimates of over 14,500 children and 9,500 women dead may not change significantly in the long run, either; there are around 10,000 dead people that the health ministry has not yet identified with a first and last name, sex, age, and ID number.

That said, the UN hasn’t yet been able to conduct independent investigations to verify the data, due to the ongoing violence on the ground.

Prior to its revised May 8 report, OCHA and many media outlets — including Vox — reported fatalities in Gaza based on statistics from hospitals still operating in the region, along with media reports, especially in the northern part of Gaza where few hospitals remain fully functional as reported by Gaza’s media office. OCHA is still reporting statistics supplied by Hamas, but those numbers now reflect only people who have been fully identified, the UN Secretary-General’s spokesperson, Farhan Haq, told reporters in Geneva Monday, according to Reuters.

That switch puts the number of confirmed fatalities at 24,686 identified dead people in Gaza as of April — 10,006 men, 7,797 children, 4,959 women, and 1,924 elderly people, according to the Ministry of Health. Then “[t]here’s about another 10,000-plus bodies who still have to be fully identified, and so then the details of those — which of those are children, which of those are women — that will be reestablished once the full identification process is complete,” Haq said, which would bring the total numbers of deaths so far to approximately the 35,000 figure that has been widely reported.

Even this death toll is likely an undercount: By some estimates, there are an additional 10,000 people who may have died but were not taken to a morgue or hospital, or are still trapped under the rubble in Gaza, where, according to the World Bank, about 60 percent of residential buildings have been destroyed.

That speaks to the challenge of being precise and providing real-time data in a war zone. Before the war, Gaza had a robust data collection system. “I think what’s rare, and this is what allowed us to do some of our projection reports early on, is that this was a middle-income territory, so they had really, really good data and data collection systems,” Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, told Vox in an interview.

However, seven months into the fighting, many hospitals and health facilities have been decimated. At least 493 health care workers have been killed since the start of the war, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health; as the death toll climbs, there is less and less capacity to record complete data, and authorities have had to look to other data collection methods, such as family reporting, to gather information.

In the earlier part of the conflict, death toll data from all of Gaza’s hospitals and the Palestinian Red Crescent flowed to a central database in al-Shifa hospital, the Associated Press reported in November. Shortly after that story ran, Israeli forces began a multi-day siege and raid on the hospital on the grounds that Hamas used the facility as a logistical hub.

“Compared to most conflicts, these numbers are better than most other conflicts because they had existing systems,” Spiegel said. “But over time, I can say the confidence in the numbers has reduced because the systems can’t function anymore — because they’ve been mostly destroyed.”

The messaging war over the new death count

Some reporting has used the change to cast more general doubt on what we know about the destruction and death in Gaza.

When Israeli news outlet the Jerusalem Post noted the change in reporting in an article May 11, it also cited a report that had cast doubt on the reliability of fatality data from the Gaza Ministry of Health. In the following days, some commentators in the US took those critiques further. For example, Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is perhaps best known for his role in the Iran-Contra affair that involved the Reagan administration lying to the American public and Congress, questioned the entire death toll.

But international organizations have previously considered numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health to be reliable, and independent post-conflict reporting has typically borne that out.

As Vox’s Keren Landman wrote in November:

Historically — in conflicts in 2008, 2014, and 2021 — the health ministry’s fatality numbers closely matched death tolls resulting from independent research by United Nations humanitarian agencies. The current conflict is far more complex than those prior conflicts were, and far fewer nongovernmental agencies are currently able to do that independent verification work in Gaza. However, it is reasonable to expect that when organizations like B’tselem verify deaths in the future, they will find numbers similar to what the ministry is now releasing — if not higher, given how many people remain unaccounted for.

Death statistics become politically important in the context of any war. Hamas does not release the numbers of its fighters killed, and the Gaza Ministry of Health does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its death tolls. (Hence the focus on the number of men killed, as a potential proxy for that information.) The new breakdown from the Ministry of Health indicates that more than 10,000 men have been killed and identified in Gaza thus far, though it is unlikely all of those men were militants affiliated with Hamas or another Palestinian group.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nevertheless claimed last week that 14,000 militants had been killed over the course of the war.

Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Vox in an interview last week: “There’s a consensus that Hamas still has at least half of its fighters in the field,” out of as many as 40,000 fighters at the start of the war.

In reality, we don’t know how many of the dead in Gaza are Hamas militants, or even precisely how many fighters the group had prior to the start of the war. It’s hard to gauge to what extent Israel is achieving its goal of eradicating Hamas and whether those aims justify its invasion of Rafah, the southern city where more than a million displaced Palestinians have been forced to flee.

But both Israel and Hamas have reasons for exaggerating or obscuring parts of the death toll, particularly with the US threatening to cut off weapons to Israel should it launch a large-scale invasion into Rafah.

However, the politicization of these statistics shouldn’t distract from this staggering fact: 35,000 people have been killed in seven months of war. “We know that a tremendous amount of these people are civilians,” Spiegel said. “That’s probably the most important thing.”

A Texas man who killed a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020 was pardoned yesterday. Here’s what it says about politics in 2024.

Donald Trump advertises his authoritarianism like it’s a golf course adorned with his name.

The presumptive GOP nominee has repeatedly promised to sic the Justice Department on his political adversaries, vowing to appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after” President Joe Biden, “the entire Biden crime family, and all others involved with the destruction of our elections, borders and our country itself.” He has repeatedly praised the extrajudicial killing of looters and drug dealers, and implored police officers to brutalize criminal suspects.

But Trump’s attitude toward lawbreakers who are aligned with his movement is decidedly more lenient. He has repeatedly assured those who commit violence on his behalf — like the January 6 rioters who tried to forestall the peaceful transfer of power in 2021 — that he will immunize them from legal accountability through presidential pardons.

Thus, the frontrunner in America’s 2024 election has adopted a gangster’s mentality toward crime: the criminality of any given action is determined by its compatibility with his interests, not the law.

In theory, the constitution — with its elaborate division of powers — should constrain Trump’s assaults on the rule of law. That’s surely true to a point. But if Trump’s authoritarian impulses are backed by his fellow Republicans, then the structural constraints on his power in a second term would be less than reliable.

Unfortunately, two recent developments indicate that the long arc of Republican politics is bending toward lawlessness.

Texas just let a far-right radical get away with murder

First, in Texas, you can commit murder without suffering the legal consequences of that crime, so long as your victim’s politics are loathed by the right and your case is championed by conservative media. Or at least, this is the message sent by Gov. Greg Abbott’s pardoning of Daniel Perry.

In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, the proliferation of Black Lives Matter protests had filled Perry with apparent bloodlust. Then an active-duty Army officer, Perry texted and messaged friends, among other things:

• “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters.”
• “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex … No protesters go near me or my car.”
• “I wonder if they will let [me] cut the ears off of people who’s decided to commit suicide by me.”

When a friend of Perry asked him if he could “catch me a negro daddy,” Perry replied, “That is what I am hoping.”

Weeks later, Perry was driving an Uber in Austin, Texas, when he came upon a Black Lives Matter march. According to prosecutors, Perry ran a red light and drove his vehicle into the crowd, almost hitting several protesters. Activists gathered angrily around Perry’s car. Garrett Foster, a 28-year-old Air Force veteran who was openly carrying an AK-47 rifle, approached Perry’s window.

Perry then shot Foster dead.

At trial, Perry’s defense team alleged that Foster had pointed his rifle at the defendant. But witnesses testified that Foster never brandished his weapon, only carried it, which is legal in Texas. And Perry corroborated that account in his initial statement to the police, saying, “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” A jury convicted Perry of murder last year.

But this week, the governor of Texas used his pardoning power to release Perry from prison.

In a statement, Abbott said, “Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney.” He noted that in the Lone Star State, a person is justified in using deadly force against another if they “reasonably believe the deadly force is immediately necessary” for averting one’s own violent death. The Texas governor argued that it was reasonable for Perry to believe his life was at stake since Foster had held his gun in the “low-ready firing position.”

Yet this claim is inconsistent with Perry’s own remarks to the police, which indicated that Foster did not aim a rifle at his killer, but merely carried it. Needless to say, seeing a person lawfully carrying a firearm cannot give one a legal right to kill them.

But pesky realities like this carry less weight than conservative media’s delusional grievances. Shortly after Perry’s conviction in April 2023, then-Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson aired a segment portraying Perry as a helpless victim of “a mob of rioters” and a “Soros-funded” district attorney. Carlson decried the jury’s verdict as a “legal atrocity” and lambasted Abbott for standing idly by while his state invalidated conservatives’ right to defend themselves. “So that is Greg Abbott’s position,” he said. “There is no right of self-defense in Texas.”

The next day, Abbott pledged to work “as swiftly as Texas law allows regarding the pardon of Sgt. Perry.”

Republicans are making it clear they can’t be trusted to check Trump’s most lawless impulses

During a second Trump presidency, the independent power of Democratic officials might limit the reach of his authoritarian machinations. A Democratic House or Senate would serve as a check on illiberal legislation, while blue states could leverage their own constitutional authority to impede legally dubious executive orders.

But as Abbott’s conduct shows, we should not trust Republican politicians to defend the rule of law. Like Trump, many in the conservative movement believe that its supporters should be held to a more lenient legal standard than its enemies. And they also evince some sympathy for political violence aimed at abetting right-wing power.

Crucially, this illiberal faction of the GOP seems to include some Supreme Court justices.

To this point, the Roberts Court has checked some of Trump’s more egregious affronts to the constitutional order. Should the GOP secure the opportunity to build an even larger conservative majority, however, that could change.

This week, Americans received a reminder of just how radical the Supreme Court’s most right-wing justices have become. In the weeks following the January 6 insurrection, die-hard Trump supporters across the country hung upside-down flags in protest of Biden’s supposed theft of the election. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that one such flag had hung outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito, even as he was presiding over judicial challenges to the 2020 election’s results. Alito claims he had no involvement in the flying of the flag, which his wife had hung upside down in response to “a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.” Notably, this explanation does not deny the political meaning of that symbol in January 2021.

Alito joined Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch in dissenting from the court’s decision not to hear a challenge to election procedures in Pennsylvania. Thomas’s wife, the conservative activist Ginni Thomas, had also publicly signaled support for the January 6 demonstrators.

If Trump secures the opportunity to appoint additional Supreme Court justices, it is all but certain that they will be at least as sympathetic to his extremism as Alito or the Thomas family.

None of this means that Trump’s election would mark the end of the American republic. But it does suggest that both Trump and the conservative movement arrayed behind him pose an intolerable threat to the most liberal and democratic features of our system of government.

New footage seems to confirm some details of his ex-girlfriend’s lawsuit, as other cases against the rapper continue.

With a violent 2016 surveillance video made public on Friday appearing to show rapper-mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs kicking, dragging, and throwing an object at his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in the hallways of a luxury hotel, the public reckoning facing Diddy is reaching a new boiling point.

The graphic video, obtained and published by CNN, seems to confirm some details alleged in Ventura’s November lawsuit against Combs. According to CNN, the footage was filmed on March 5, 2016, at a now-shuttered InterContinental hotel in Los Angeles.

The tape appears to show Ventura, a singer who performs under the name Cassie, walking down a hallway toward elevators, and Combs running after her in a towel. He throws her to the ground and repeatedly kicks her, and then attempts to drag her down the hallway, presumably back to their room, though she frees herself. Later, he appears to throw a vase at Ventura.

In her lawsuit, Ventura, who dated Combs and was signed to his label, alleged that he abused her, urged her to have sex with male sex workers while he filmed, and that he later raped her. That lawsuit included allegations of a 2016 incident at the InterContinental hotel.

In a statement at the time of the suit, Combs’s attorney responded that, “Ms. Ventura has now resorted to filing a lawsuit riddled with baseless and outrageous lies, aiming to tarnish Mr. Combs’s reputation and seeking a payday.” But the publication of the video this week adds a layer of seeming corroboration to at least some of the accusations made against the rapper.

Ventura’s case, settled one day after it was filed, set off a torrent of similar lawsuits, several of which include brutal and disturbing details. Plaintiffs state that Diddy — whose birth name is Sean Combs and who has also publicly gone by Puff Daddy, Puffy, and Love — raped them and, in some cases, trafficked them by coercing them to engage in sex with other men. Together, the cases have redirected public attention toward longstanding allegations of violence against Combs, leading some brands to cut ties with him and Hulu to scrap his upcoming reality show.

Speculation around the accusations escalated as homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach linked to Diddy were raided by federal authorities, who revealed that the raids were linked to an ongoing investigation into sex trafficking allegations.

Combs has denied the allegations, saying in a December statement, “I did not do any of the awful things being alleged. I will fight for my name, my family and for the truth.”

Especially in the 1990s and 2000s, Diddy was a figure of enormous power, not just in hip-hop but in the business and entertainment worlds writ large. In recent months, however, multiple people have sued him, saying he used that influence and wealth to sexually victimize and, in some cases, traffic them, while avoiding consequences for decades.

The cases have captured the public’s attention in part because Combs was such an influential executive and gatekeeper in music and fashion, yet one who had long been the subject of allegations of violence, including arrests. They are among the first major allegations in years against a major figure in the music industry, which many feel has failed to reckon with abuses of power, even at the height of the Me Too movement. Combs is just one of many powerful men who have evaded scrutiny but whose alleged past conduct is being revisited with fresh and more critical eyes — in some cases thanks to the landmark New York laws that have allowed people alleging sexual abuse to file civil lawsuits past the time period specified by the statute of limitations.

Indeed, Combs is now drawing comparisons to R. Kelly, with frequent critic 50 Cent announcing that he will produce a series about Combs in the style of the bombshell docuseries Surviving R. Kelly, with the proceeds going to assault survivors.

Dream Hampton, producer of Surviving R. Kelly, told the Times late last year that an accounting was arriving for the Bad Boy founder. “Puff is done,” she said.

The suits against Combs also show that despite recent backlash, the Me Too movement and the legal and cultural changes that came with it have had an enduring impact. Even if allegations of sexual assault and harassment do not make daily headlines the way they did in 2017, the reckoning is ongoing — and no industry is likely to remain immune forever.

Diddy built an empire across multiple businesses

Combs is a producer and rapper who rose to be an influential figure across music, media, and fashion. He started Bad Boy Records in New York in 1993, when he was in his early 20s, and soon signed Notorious B.I.G., whose two albums helped define New York hip-hop in that era. Bad Boy grew into a multimillion-dollar business, and Combs produced iconic ’90s acts from Jodeci to Mary J. Blige. When Biggie was killed in 1997, Combs released a Grammy-winning tribute, “I’ll Be Missing You,” which “helped inaugurate a commercial boom in hip-hop that lasted until the end of the nineties,” according to Michael Specter of the New Yorker.

Combs was also one of the first to blend the worlds of hip-hop, business, and luxury. His fashion label, Sean John, founded in 1998, became known for high-end menswear. He promoted brands of vodka and tequila and hosted exclusive white parties in the Hamptons with guests like Martha Stewart. Though no longer as central a figure as he was in the ’90s, Combs remains a rich and well-connected celebrity: Within a span of weeks last fall, he held a joint album release and birthday party attended by stars such as Naomi Campbell and Janet Jackson, performed for a sold-out crowd in London, and appeared at the homecoming celebration for his alma mater, Howard University, where he made a surprise $1 million donation.

Samir Hussein/Getty Images for Sean “Diddy” Combs

As Combs built his empire, however, he was accused of multiple acts of violence. In 1999, he was arrested for beating another executive with a chair, a phone, and a champagne bottle; he had to pay a fine and take an anger management class, according to the New Yorker. The same year, he was involved in a shooting at a club in Manhattan, where he was attending a party with his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez; witnesses said they saw him with a gun, but he was ultimately acquitted after a public, much-watched trial.

He has also been accused of threats and violence against women. In a 2019 interview, for example, his ex-girlfriend Gina Huynh said he had thrown a shoe at her and dragged her by the hair. But these reports have not received mainstream public attention — until now.

Singer Cassie filed suit against Diddy in November

In November, Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, sued Combs, alleging sexual assault and sex trafficking. In the suit, first reported by the New York Times, Ventura said she had experienced years of abuse from Combs, starting soon after she met him in 2005, when she was 19. She said that he beat her repeatedly, at one point kicking her in the face, and that later, in 2018, he raped her. She also said he trafficked her by coercing her to have sex with sex workers in different cities while he filmed and masturbated. She tried to delete the photos and videos afterward, but Combs retained access, she said in the suit, at one point making her watch a video she thought she had deleted.

Ventura’s suit also said that Combs and his associates used his power and wealth to intimidate her into silence and compliance, with his employees threatening to damage her music career if she spoke out against him. In one particularly shocking detail, Ventura said Combs threatened to blow up the rapper Kid Cudi’s car because Cudi and Ventura were dating; the car later exploded. “This is all true,” a spokesperson for Kid Cudi told the Times of the car exploding.

Leon Bennett/Getty Images

Through his lawyer, Ben Brafman, Combs accused Ventura of blackmail. “For the past six months, Mr. Combs has been subjected to Ms. Ventura’s persistent demand of $30 million, under the threat of writing a damaging book about their relationship,” Brafman said in the statement, which also accused Ventura of lying in her lawsuit to seek a “payday.” Ventura’s lawyer, Douglas Wigdor, said Combs had actually offered Ventura money for her silence, which she had declined.

Ventura’s suit was settled for an undisclosed amount within a single day. The singer stated that she had “decided to resolve this matter amicably on terms that I have some level of control.”

But Ventura’s decision to come forward publicly opened the floodgates, and more reports of assault and abuse began pouring out.

Other people say Diddy harmed them

Three other women soon filed suit against Combs. In the second suit, Joi Dickerson-Neal says he drugged and raped her in 1991. In the third, Liza Gardner says that in 1990, he coerced her into sex and choked her, causing her to lose consciousness. Jonathan Davis, a lawyer for Combs, said in a statement to the Times that Combs denied these allegations as well: “Because of Mr. Combs’s fame and success, he is an easy target for accusers who attempt to smear him.”

In the fourth suit, the woman identified as Jane Doe says she was a junior in high school when she met then-Bad Boy president Harve Pierre and another Combs associate in Detroit. They convinced her to fly on their jet to New York, the suit says, where they and the rapper gave her drugs and alcohol and then violently raped her.

“Ms. Doe has lived with her memories of this fateful night for 20 years, during which time she has suffered extreme emotional distress that has impacted nearly every aspect of her life and personal relationships,” the suit says. “Given the brave women who have come forward against Ms. Combs and Mr. Pierre in recent weeks, Ms. Doe is doing the same.”

In response to that suit, Combs released a statement denying all reports of violence, calling them “sickening allegations” made “by individuals looking for a quick payday.” Pierre has also denied the allegations, saying in a statement to TMZ, “I have never participated in, witnessed, nor heard of anything like this, ever.”

The women came forward last year because two New York laws — one of which paved the way for E. Jean Carroll’s successful lawsuit against Donald Trump for sexual abuse and defamation — opened limited windows of time in which people can file civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse, even if the statute of limitations has passed. One of those windows closed in late November, explaining the flurry of complaints.

While the suits mostly describe behavior the plaintiffs say happened years ago, a February filing by Rodney Jones Jr., known as Lil Rod, says that Combs subjected him to unwanted touching and attempted to “groom” him when they worked together on The Love Album: Off the Grid in 2022 and 2023. Jones says that at a party in 2023, he was forced to drink tequila mixed with drugs, then woke up “naked with a sex worker sleeping next to him.” He says that Combs offered money and threatened violence to get him to solicit sex workers and perform sex acts with them.

Combs has denied Jones’s allegations. In a statement, Shawn Holley, a lawyer for Combs, said, “We have overwhelming, indisputable proof that his claims are complete lies,” and called Jones “nothing more than a liar who filed a $30 million lawsuit shamelessly looking for an undeserved payday.”

In the wake of these civil lawsuits, raids in Los Angeles and Miami Beach in March have pointed to an apparent criminal investigation. According to the Times, the raids on homes connected to the rapper were part of an inquiry by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York and agents with the Department of Homeland Security. Few details were available in the immediate aftermath, and lawyers for Combs have not yet responded to requests for comment from Vox or the Times. However, the raids suggest a potential new level in the Combs case, with law enforcement sources also telling the Los Angeles Times they were linked to sex trafficking allegations.

Combs was rumored to have left the country on Monday after his private plane traveled to Antigua, but he was later spotted in the Miami-Opa Locka airport. Regardless of his whereabouts, the investigations in Los Angeles and Miami Beach have once again placed the rapper under intense public scrutiny.

Is this the music industry’s Me Too moment?

The growing number of reports, and their chilling details, have led companies and influential people in media and business to distance themselves from the rapper. Diageo, the beverage brand with which Combs partnered on vodka and tequila, removed his image from its website. Capital Preparatory Schools, a New York charter school network Combs helped expand, posted a statement on the school’s website saying it was cutting ties with him (though the statement was later removed). Combs also stepped aside as chair of Revolt, a TV network he helped start in 2013.

The cases against Combs are coming to light against a backdrop of other accusations against major figures in music. In November, a woman sued Neil Portnow, former head of the Grammy Awards, saying he had drugged and raped her in 2018. The same month, a former employee sued music executive L.A. “Babyface” Reid, saying he sexually assaulted and harassed her, leading to irrevocable damage to her career in the music industry.

They also occur at a time when Ye, a music and fashion mogul whose career has parallels with Diddy’s, has lost many of his brand partnerships after public antisemitic and racist statements as well as what many say was a years-long pattern of verbal abuse and harassment, which may have been kept quiet in part because partnering with him was so lucrative for brands.

While the Me Too movement forced reckonings around sexual assault and harassment in industries from film to other media to restaurants in 2017 and 2018, many in the music business felt that its biggest players were relatively unscathed. R. Kelly, for example, faced few consequences until Hampton’s widely watched 2019 docuseries drew renewed attention to the accusations — despite repeated allegations that he’d had sexual contact with underage girls, several lawsuits, and even a 2008 criminal trial over child sexual abuse material. Many argued that the reason Kelly was given a pass for so long was that the women coming forward to report abuse by him were Black. In 2021, he was convicted of sex trafficking and sentenced to 30 years in prison; a second 20-year sentence was added the following year, with all but one year to be served concurrently with the first sentence.

Three women stated publicly in 2017 that another influential music industry figure, Def Jam Recordings co-founder Russell Simmons, had raped them. Like Kelly, he was the subject of a documentary focusing on the allegations, though he has not faced charges.

Now, Ventura and the other people filing suit are reporting violent rape, intimidation, and abuse by one of the biggest names in music, someone who symbolized the movement of hip-hop into both mainstream and high-end culture. Combs in his heyday was an icon of power and influence in music, fashion, and business, and the lawsuits represent a new willingness to call that power to account.

They also serve as a reminder that the Me Too movement has made enduring changes, including influencing law and policy and creating a road map for survivors of assault to come forward and share their stories.

Update, May 17, 3:05 pm ET: This story, originally published on December 20, 2023, has been updated to reflect recent developments, including the publication of a video appearing to show Sean “Diddy” Combs kicking and dragging singer Cassie Ventura.

The “Nonsense” singer’s pop magic comes from being in on the joke.

I must tell you that I have been Ratatouille’d. Except instead of a rodent making me cook gourmet meals, it’s a blonde 4’11” pop star named Sabrina Carpenter controlling my motor functions to make me repeat a phrase that doesn’t even make sense: “That’s that me espresso.”

“We don’t have Coke, is Pepsi okay?” That’s that me espresso.

“How much do you want to contribute to your 401(k)?” That’s that me espresso.

“Sir, do you know why we pulled you over? Do you know how fast you were going?” That’s that me espresso.

Like the man Carpenter’s singing about in “Espresso,” I am up thinking about her every night — and of course her espresso.

So what does it mean? The lyric is an unconventional way to tell us that Carpenter is so hot and charming that men are obsessed with her. It just happens to be centered on a grammatically flawed phrase featuring the reduplication of the word “that” that for all its silliness has burrowed nonsensically into brains nationwide. Yes, “me espresso” sounds like a baby asking for a caffeinated beverage. Sometimes the best pop songs don’t make total sense or follow the commonly accepted rules of metaphor or syntax.

Nonsense is actually what 25-year-old Carpenter does best.

Whether it be sex with exes, dirty rhyme schemes, or being hot, a clown, or the other woman, Carpenter’s surprisingly long career has been seriously devoted to never taking things too seriously. With an SNL appearance on the horizon, and her airy track looking to be the inescapable song of summer — on Friday, May 17, Carpenter released an “Espresso” EP containing five versions of the song, including the “Double Shot” sped-up version and an extended “Espressooooo” mix — there is no better time to understand the bubbly allure and sparkly lore of Sabrina Carpenter.

The Olivia Rodrigo song that kickstarted Sabrina Carpenter’s adult career

With the overnight success of “Espresso,” which was released in April, it might seem like Carpenter is pop music’s flavor of the month. But she didn’t just come out of nowhere.

Carpenter has been releasing music since her debut album Eyes Wide Open in 2015, five albums in total. She started out honing her craft as part of the Disney machine, breaking out on Girl Meets World in 2014. But it’s her presence in one of the biggest songs in 2021, one she didn’t actually sing, that made the then-21-year-old famous.

Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

Turn the clock back a little over three years: 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo had just burst on the scene with “Drivers License,” an angsty ballad about a boy who broke her heart. In it, Rodrigo hints that the breakup involved another woman. “And you’re probably with that blonde girl,” she sings, adding: “She’s so much older than me. She’s everything I’m insecure about.”

Since this is an article about Sabrina Carpenter, and Carpenter is blonde and four-ish years older than Rodrigo, you’ve probably guessed that Carpenter is who Rodrigo might be singing about.

Rodrigo acted on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a show on Disney+, and was rumored to be dating co-star Joshua Bassett. The two wrote songs together, some of which were featured on the program. The characters they played — Nini and Ricky — were a romantic pair. Disney couldn’t have asked for a better script.

But in August 2020, Rodrigo hinted she was going through a breakup. Around the same time, Bassett was spotted with Carpenter, a fellow Disney star. Adding fuel to the fire, Bassett and Carpenter donned a couples costume for Halloween, going as Sharkboy and Lavagirl.

Despite all these public appearances and social media clues, Rodrigo, Carpenter, and Bassett have never explicitly addressed the love triangle they may or may not have been a part of. But they haven’t explicitly denied the rumors either. Like Rodrigo, Carpenter seems to have turned it into music.

Carpenter seemed to address the drama in her 2021 song “Skin.” “Maybe you didn’t mean it. Maybe blonde was the only rhyme,” Carpenter sings, telling the subject of her song — who may or may not be Rodrigo — that she’s sorry but not that sorry, and she won’t let the digs get under her, under her, under her skin.

It’s a relatively plaintive track that wasn’t as big as “Drivers License” — not many songs are as big as Rodrigo’s monster hit. It wasn’t until her next album, 2022’s emails i can’t send, that Carpenter gave her final word and started to lean into her new persona. On the sneakily edged “Because I Liked a Boy,” Carpenter is even less apologetic. She declares that she is going to be herself — the other woman, the cool girl, the hot girl, the mean girl, and everything in between — because that person can’t be any worse than what’s already been said about her (“Now I’m a homewrecker, I’m a slut I got death threats filling up semi-trucks”).

“Dating boys with exes. No, I wouldn’t recommend it.” Carpenter cheekily sings. It’s a poppier, more ironic take on her new bad-girl image.

At first blush, the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic doesn’t seem to be that different from the way culture has always pitted pop princesses against each other. Whether it’s Britney and Christina, Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, Brandy and Monica, or Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, there’s always been an inclination that every female pop star needs a rival.

Thanks to the alleged love triangle, Rodrigo and Carpenter have that built in. They have very thinly veiled songs about each other — a territory some of those past “rivals” have never really ventured in.

But what makes the Rodrigo-Carpenter dynamic unique is that they’ve both figured out how to make the “rivalry” work in their favor, embracing their respective images even while leaving the specific rivalry behind. They’re each more famous than their supposed feud. They’re each more famous than the boy, too.

Both singers make art that illustrates that liking boys is a humiliating experience. Rodrigo’s music is all about getting dumped by losers; Carpenter’s is about how all these losers are obsessed with her. Being dumped by a guy who dresses up as Sharkboy is equally as pathetic as dressing up as Lavagirl with that same guy.

At the end of the day, they both come to the same realization: When it comes to men, there is no winning — unless it’s using them to make some really good pop music.

Sabrina Carpenter’s unique brand of “Nonsense”

Prior to “Espresso,” the biggest hit of Carpenter’s pop career was an easy, breezy pop confection called “Nonsense.” It’s not about Rodrigo or Bassett, but about how liking a boy makes Carpenter feel (hint: silly). The song has a splendid little bit in which Carpenter sings, “It feels so good, I had to jump the octave,” and she does in fact, sing up a note. Carpenter is not afraid of a gimmick, a little wordplay, or even some wink-y pandering to the audience.

Her commitment to the bit was a huge part of what made “Nonsense” so popular. In live performances, Carpenter started ad-libbing the outro of the song. The original goes:

This song is catchier than chickenpox is.

I bet your house is where my other sock is.

Woke up this morning thought I’d write a pop hit.

How quickly can you take off your clothes? Pop quiz.

When she toured in Europe in 2023 she gave her German audience a bespoke naughty verse:

Down below the waistline is the fun zone.

Baby hit me if you wanna come bone.

Ich liebe dich you know I love you Cologne.

Fans who came and saw her perform at Coachella this year saw Carpenter reference her boyfriend Barry Keoghan’s infamous Saltburn scene:

Made his knees so weak he had to spread mine

He’s drinkin’ my bath water like it’s red wine

Coachella, see you back here when I headline.

During a stop in Sydney:

I can’t believe a plane can fly this far.

I met the cutest Aussie at the bar.

He said, “Are you from here?” I said, “Naur.”

Last year, she even created a special holiday edition, “A Nonsense Christmas” in which she somehow naughties holiday cheer and gift-giving:

Look at all those presents, that’s a big sack

Boy, that package is too big to gift wrap

Woke up this morning, thought I’d write a “Chris-Smash”

How quickly can you build a snowman? Think fast

Iambic pentameter this is not, but Carpenter’s schtick of cheeky, PG-13 rhymes showed off a pop star who isn’t afraid to laugh, especially at her own expense. While these outros could easily fall into raunch or being explicit, Carpenter uses wit as her restraint. Clown humor gives her something to play her image and our expectations against.

Carpenter’s interplay between humor and hotness is also evident in her video for “Feather,” a cotton candy-like kiss-off. The video has Carpenter pulling up to a church in a bubblegum pink hearse. It turns out her blush-hued deathmobile is full of the bodies of creepy men ogling her, and Carpenter is praying for their souls as she traipses through the chapel in a black veil and tulle lingerie.

The video was filmed at Brooklyn’s Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church and eventually made its way to the higher-ups at the Brooklyn Archdiocese, who were extremely upset at the video’s imagery. They admonished not just Carpenter but the staffers who approved the video shoot.

Carpenter was unfazed by the holy rebuke. “We got approval in advance,” she told Variety. “And Jesus was a carpenter.”

According to Johnny Cash and the Gospel of Mark, Sabrina is correct.

“Espresso” and the summer of Sabrina Carpenter

While you could chalk “Espresso” up to luck, it’d be a disservice to Carpenter and how hard she’s worked.

This is a former Disney kid who’s been playing the game for a decade. For the last few years, she’s carefully crafted a savvy, in-on-the-joke image. She’s also been putting in the work on the festival circuit and taking opportunities like the MTV VMAs pre-show (Rodrigo performed at the main show), crafting her naughty jingles and taking them on the road. This summer, she opened for Taylor Swift (who, according to certain fans, may be employing Carpenter as part of a proxy war against Rodrigo, who may or may not have written her song “Vampire” about Swift) and performed at Coachella, where she debuted “Espresso.”

The song catching fire is no doubt lucky, but Carpenter put herself in the best position to make that good fortune happen.

It also helps that “Espresso” effectively crystallizes the persona that Carpenter has been creating for herself: a proudly flippant ditz who is so much savvier than she seems.

Like Carpenter, espresso is traditionally hot, potent, and tiny. Espresso is a bit fancier than an everyday drip — one must go out and procure it or buy one of those elaborate machines. Espresso, unlike coffee, is more of an occasion.

Grammatically, the phrase “that’s that me espresso” is a train wreck with no survivors. After listening to the song hundreds of times, I still cannot figure out if the “me espresso” in question is a metaphor in which Carpenter is comparing her essence to that of espresso. Or perhaps it’s possessive and “me espresso” refers to something of hers. Maybe she is simply identifying an entirely new type of coffee beverage.

The repetition emphasizes that the guy in question — perhaps her famously Irish boyfriend Barry Keoghan — is so obsessed with Carpenter that he can’t fall asleep. He just can’t stop thinking about her and she knows it.

“Espresso” also mentions other objects like Mountain Dew and Nintendo that ostensibly keep men up all night. Later in the song, flanked right up against the chorus, Carpenter admits she’s up past her bedtime too. She sings that she’s “working late” because she’s a “singer,” emphasizing that final syllable in a comically exaggerated way. She stresses the “er” in singer, forcing the word to rhyme with fin-ger. I now no longer want to pronounce singer any other way.

But what if this is the correct way? What if everything we thought we knew about singers is wrong? I mean, while some concerts can go till 11 pm and later, are graveyard shifts part of the singing occupation? Are singers putting in the same hours as diner waitresses and convenience store clerks? How long, exactly, did it take to create “Espresso?”

Just when Carpenter seems to be post-grammar and post-terminology and communicating with us in a way so profound beyond words, she smirk-sings the word “stupid” as a tag right after a verse that goes, “That morning coffee, brewed it for ya. One touch and I brand-newed it for ya.”

God, that’s so dumb. And so brilliant. That’s that me espresso.

Update, May 17, 11:20 am ET: This post was originally published on May 14 and has been updated with news of the Espresso EP.

Why juggle 25 people a week when you can make 30-second videos instead?

Dr. Julie Smith is sitting behind a rainbow of five Post-it notes, each meant to represent one of the “Top Five Signs of High-Functioning Depression.” Said signs will be familiar to anyone who has spent time scrolling through the part of social media devoted to improving one’s mental health: “You do everything the world asks of you, so no one would ever know you feel empty inside,” you don’t find pleasure in the same things anymore, social events are tiring. Perhaps you relate to No. 3: “You find yourself scrolling on social, watching hours of TV, and eating junk food to numb those feelings.”

The British psychologist and author is an inescapable presence on TherapyTok, where psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed therapists — along with a swarm of “coaches” with varying levels of credibility — make short, digestible videos educating the public about how to decode their own brains. She’s amassed a following of 4.7 million not just by distilling mental health into 60-second spoken-word listicles but by using intensely colorful gimmicks to draw in viewers who might otherwise think they’re about to watch an object being crushed in a satisfying way. Before explaining “3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present” or “5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person,” Dr. Julie will use a visual hook — she’ll pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that “high-functioning depression” and “highly sensitive person” aren’t actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not.

That’s because these clips have less in common with actual mental-health treatment than they do with your average “get ready with me” video. At a time when people may be getting fatigued with therapy, it seems like some therapists don’t want to do it anymore, either. Hence the sheer number of them who are spending less time seeing clients and more time producing content in the hopes that millions of people will see it. While most full-time therapists whose rates are set by insurance companies max out at around $100,000 per year, therapists who are full- or part-time content creators can make much, much more. @TherapyJeff, real name Jeff Guenther, an individual and couples therapist in Portland, Oregon, says he can make eight or nine times that amount on social media in the form of brand deals, merch, and direct subscriptions. When I clarify whether he’s making nearly a million dollars, he says, “It’s been an especially good year.”

Though he still sees about eight to 10 clients on Mondays and Tuesdays (a full-time therapist would see about 20 to 25 clients a week, he says), Guenther is best known for his straight-talking TikToks about dating and relationships where he’ll refer to his audience as “anxiously attached babes” or “relationship girlies” who are “still in their healing phase but horny AF.” With 2.8 million followers and a dating-advice book coming out this summer, he is perhaps the best example of how to become a therapist influencer by making people feel as though he’s on their side.

Therapists have always been influencers, in a way — they may write books, do speaking gigs, or promote products — but in order to get famous on TikTok, they must play by its rules. What works on the app is simple, visually arresting videos that make you feel like they landed in your lap with a kind of cosmic destiny (the comments on these videos often repeat some version of “my For You page really said ‘FOR YOU.’”) Therapists do cute little dances next to cute little graphics about what it’s like to have both ADHD and PMDD; they’ll lip sync to trending songs in videos about how to spot a depressed client who might have made a suicide plan; they’ll hop onto memes as a way to criticize parents who haven’t gone to therapy.

The most successful TikTok counselors don’t typically advertise their one-on-one therapy services; instead, they’ll sell products that establish themselves as mental-health experts but have the potential to net influencer-size salaries. Many offer digital courses similar to those of other educational influencers; they’ll promote their books, merchandise, or in the case of Dr. Kojo Sarfo, his comedy tour, where he sometimes asks the audience about their mental health diagnoses. Tracy The Truth Doctor also offers special mental-health coaching to fellow influencers.

And then there’s the validating relationship they cultivate with viewers: Guenther has referred to people who call others “too sensitive” as “emotionless turds” and says he wishes he could write “psychologically lethal” texts on behalf of his clients (while acknowledging that this would be considered unprofessional). “I have been accused of being a toxic validator,” he admits. “Like, imagine that your ex-boyfriend is watching my content. Somebody might be coming across, like, a piece of my content that they can use in order to feel better about themselves, even when they should probably actually be doing some work and taking accountability.” But ultimately, who TikTok shows his videos to isn’t in his control.

Like many therapists on TikTok, Guenther is also extremely forthcoming about his own personal struggles in a way that previous generations of therapists might look down upon. He speaks about going no-contact with his mother, also a therapist, and his experience as the “scapegoat of the family.” (His tips for fellow scapegoats: Wear a T-shirt with the words “Official Family Scapegoat” on it; tell your mother she’s “constantly hijacked by shame” before asking her to pass the potatoes.) Elsewhere, the counselor KC Davis of “Struggle Care” recently confessed to a bout of hyperfixation with romantasy novels so intense it led her to forgo showering and basic care tasks; Therapy Jessa has filmed herself crying, while Courtney Tracy, better known as Courtney the Truth Doctor, makes intimate “get ready with me” videos and speaks about what it’s like to have borderline-personality disorder and autism as a therapist.

Despite his gangbusters year as a content creator, Guenther says his career as it stands now isn’t sustainable. Spending so much time on TikTok, he tells me, has affected his own mental health. “It’s exhausting. There’s burnout. It’s a gross place to be,” he says, pointing to the endless demands of the algorithm, hate comments, and the bizarre parasocial relationships that form among audiences who feel that because they watch his content they have direct access to him. “I want to get out of here because Daddy Algorithm is my boss and I get a performance review every single day based on an algorithm that’s mysterious and doesn’t make any sense.”

If the content is a little trite, and the therapists don’t enjoy making it, what good is any of it doing? You can make the case that by turning mental health into TikTok engagement bait, influencer-therapists are lowering the stigma of mental illness and encouraging people to seek treatment, or at least to provide a stopgap for those who can’t access direct care. But what it also seems to be is a stopgap for therapists who are burned out by the daily grind of seeing clients one-on-one with little opportunity for career growth, whose salaries are mostly outside their own control. And who can blame them? Even if viewers know watching therapy content isn’t the same thing as actually going to therapy, when a professional therapist comes up on your feed to tell you exactly what you most want to hear at a time when you’re most in need of hearing it — that you are good, that you will be okay, and also here’s a cute little visual hook — you’ll keep watching.