The furor over the painting points to the Crown’s larger problems.

As far back as the 1500s, the British Royal Family has used formal portraits to project a positive and authoritative image. Their most recent entry, however, is giving audiences a very different impression, the latest in a series of public relations blunders at a tenuous time for the monarchy.

The new portrait of King Charles, by British artist Jonathan Yeo, features the monarch looking on serenely while wearing a red Welsh Guards uniform against a red backdrop. Aside from his hands and face, the portrait is covered in red paint strokes, a visual that for some onlookers, recalled flames, blood, and horror films.

“It looks like he’s bathing in blood,” a commenter quipped on an Instagram post announcing the portrait. “To me it gives the message the monarchy is going up in flames or the king is burning in hell,” another commenter wrote.

In his description of the painting, Yeo says a chief aim was to capture Charles’s evolution as a leader and ascension to the throne. The painting also includes a butterfly hovering above Charles’s right shoulder, an addition the king reportedly suggested himself to illustrate his transformation and commitment to environmental causes.

For some, the bold palette of the painting conjured more brutal aspects of the monarchy’s history, however. Certain observers have interpreted the work as a reminder of the Crown’s bloody advancement of colonialism. “It almost alludes to some sort of massacre that he’s been part of,” Tabish Khan, a London art critic, told Business Insider. “Given the royal family’s history and ties to colonialism and imperialism, it’s not hard for people to look at it and then make the leap that it’s somehow related to that.”

Others have dabbled in memes referencing The Picture of Dorian Gray, the painting of a villain from Ghostbusters 2, and the anecdote Charles once told about wanting to be Camilla’s tampon.

And while much of the response has been poking fun at the portrait, the controversy also points to deeper issues the monarchy faces, as it navigates an uncertain transition after Queen Elizabeth II’s death and grapples with its own past.

The painting aimed to capture Charles’s transformation

Yeo, an established artist who has also painted former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as Charles’s father Prince Philip and his wife Queen Camilla, sat with Charles four times for his first portrait as King.

“Royal portraits in the past have had an important role to play in signifying power and projecting an image,” the BBC’s Katie Razzall writes. “They were part of the tools used to ensure the survival of the monarch.”

One of Yeo’s aims with the painting, which he began in 2021, was to underscore Charles’s essence as a person, how he’s changed as he’s taken on the role of king and the struggles he’s endured. “My interest is really in figuring out who someone is and trying to get that on a canvas,” Yeo told the BBC.

Yeo’s website describes the color scheme as injecting a “dynamic, contemporary jolt” to the work, differentiating it from past portraits. The red is also inspired by the bright red color of the Welsh Guards uniform and is intended to give a nod to Charles’s military service; he became a colonel in the Welsh Guards in 1975. It’s also a color Yeo has used in the past, with paintings of actor Giancarlo Esposito and World War II veteran Geoffrey Pattinson featuring similar color schemes.

Many of Yeo’s past works are composed much like Charles’s, with one dominant color serving as the background and the subject’s face seemingly floating in the foreground.

According to Yeo, both the king and queen had previously seen parts of the painting and appeared to respond positively at the time. “Yes, you’ve got him,” Camilla reportedly said about his capturing Charles’s personality. The artist notes that Charles was surprised by the color, but broadly seemed to like the unfinished work he saw. In a video clip of the official unveiling, Charles himself appears initially startled by the painting.

The portrait’s reception recalls the monarchy’s problems

Much like US presidential portraits, the paintings of UK monarchs are intended to send a message about their leadership and character.

In one of former President Barack Obama’s portraits, artist Kehinde Wiley featured him surrounded by green foliage, a move that honored his upbringing in different places, and that marked a break from past presidential portraits.

The red in King Charles’s portrait had much less flattering connotations for some observers, though, as they see allusions to the country’s colonialism. For centuries, the British Empire violently seized power in numerous countries — including India, Kenya, and New Zealand — and the monarchy was a key symbol of its authority in those places.

Even today, the king is still considered a figurehead, and the “head of state” in 15 independent countries that are part of the British Commonwealth. Many — including Jamaica — are actively working to remove Charles as their official “head of state,” a role that’s purely symbolic but nonetheless represents Britain’s history of oppression.

In this capacity, and others, the modern monarchy remains a key symbol of the UK’s governance, even though royals don’t have practical policymaking power like Parliament and the prime minister.

As such, many experts and people from former colonies have been eager to see the monarchy do more to reckon with its imperial history, and to more explicitly acknowledge it.

“Imagine a very different kind of monarchy, where in the name of decency rather than politics, a monarch could say things like, ‘We acknowledge and regret the role of Britain, the British government and the British monarchy in slavery and colonialism.’ That kind of moral leadership could have such a different impact in the world,” Priya Satia, a history professor at Stanford, previously told Time.

The portrait is, in a sense, the least of the monarchy’s recent problems as it navigates a difficult transition following Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign. There was the awkward rupture with Charles’s youngest son Prince Harry and his wife, American actress Meghan Markle. Charles publicly disclosed a cancer diagnosis in February. His daughter-in-law, Princess Catherine of Wales, revealed her own cancer diagnosis in March, following months of rampant speculation about her well-being.

What was once a canvas for projecting royal authority has instead become another reckoning with what the monarchy stands for and the brutal history it’s failed to fully confront.

And why it’s not nearly enough.

The US Department of Defense has completed a temporary pier off the Mediterranean coast of Gaza to deliver urgently needed aid — an important goal, but really only a $320 million bandage on the humanitarian crisis 2.3 million people are currently facing.

The US military announced that on Thursday at 7:40 am Gaza time the pier had been attached to land; trucks began moving supplies Friday. The World Food Program is coordinating aid delivery.

The purpose of the pier is to facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, which has been erratic and insufficient for the past seven months following Israel’s initial siege on the territory after Hamas’s attack in October. Both Israel and Egypt have closed border crossings at times over the past seven months, and aid groups accuse Israel of restricting the food, clean water, fuel, and medical aid that passes through even when the borders are technically open.

More than 35,000 people have been killed so far in the war already, primarily due to Israeli bombing campaigns.

People in all parts of the region, especially the north, are facing acute levels of hunger. That’s obviously a crisis in and of itself; it also makes people more vulnerable to dying from communicable diseases, particularly because the Israeli campaign has decimated Gaza’s health care system. Clean water is nearly inaccessible; people in Gaza are living on less than 2 liters a day, according to UN estimates, well short of the 7.5 to 15 liters people need each day for basic consumption and sanitation in emergency situations and 70 liters under normal situations.

The pier is expected to deliver primarily food aid, but also treatment for malnutrition, like high-nutrient food bars and other therapeutic foods for acute cases, according to USAID. US officials have also emphasized the need to get clean water and fuel into Gaza, but have not yet provided specifics regarding how and how much of those commodities will enter through the maritime corridor.

To be clear, there are better, more efficient ways to get aid into Gaza, experts say. The US can use its leverage — access to weapons — with Israel to increase aid via land routes. It could push for a ceasefire agreement that would allow humanitarian organizations to deliver aid in exchange for Hamas releasing hostages it took during its October 7 attack on Israel.

The fact that the US has to resort to building a pier to get aid into Gaza underscores how fraught the US-Israeli relationship has become — and how the Biden administration seems unable or unwilling to make any broader changes in its policy toward Israel.

How will the pier work?

Biden first announced the plans for the maritime corridor in his State of the Union address on March 7, emphasizing the immense need for humanitarian aid in Gaza. Government officials have repeatedly stressed that the pier is meant to be a temporary addition to overland aid flows through border crossings, and that US troops won’t be entering Gaza.

Aid is supposed to come via ship from Cyprus to the new port’s staging area, where the cargo will be inspected by the Israeli military and then handed over to the World Food Program and international NGOs for distribution. The US, the United Arab Emirates, the UK, France, the European Union, Cyprus, and the United Nations are all contributing either logistical support or humanitarian assistance.

The route to get there, though, is immensely complicated.

1. Donors will send humanitarian aid via air or sea to Cyprus, where local authorities and Israeli representatives will screen the cargo and pack it for transit to Gaza — a process which can take between two and three days, Juan Camilo Jimenez Garces, a representative from World Central Kitchen, told the New York Times.
2. Then, commercial ships will transport the approved goods from Cyprus to a floating platform two miles from the floating pier — a journey that can take anywhere from 15 hours to a couple of days, according to the Times, depending on the type of ship and weight of the cargo, as well as weather conditions.
3. Once the ships arrive, the cargo will be loaded onto trucks which are then driven onto US military vessels — much like driving a car onto a ferry. Unlike commercial vessels, those ships can navigate the shallower waters close to the Gaza coastline. The military ships then transit to the pier itself, where the trucks will disembark and drive to the shore, under the close observation of the Israeli military.

As of Thursday, ”We have about 500 tons of humanitarian assistance loaded on ships,” Vice Admiral Brad Cooper said in a news briefing. “That’s about a million pounds ready for delivery in the coming days,” with thousands of tons of aid “in the pipeline.” The Department of Defense says it anticipates about 90 truckloads per day of aid to get into Gaza through the maritime corridor, ramping quickly up to 150 trucks per day.

Why is the pier needed?

One of Israel’s first steps following the October 7 attacks was to launch an all-out siege on Gaza. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant instituted that policy on October 9, saying: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.”

Siege warfare is against international law, and Israel was eventually forced to let in aid, albeit only via the Rafah crossing that Gaza shares with Egypt. That crossing opened to allow aid through in late October but still only allowed in a fraction of the aid Gaza’s population of 2.3 million people had prior to the war. Israel opened the Kerem Shalom crossing, also in southern Gaza, in December, but there have been periodic blocks to aid delivery, right-wing Israeli protests blocking entry to the crossing as well as a closing early in May because of an attack by Palestinian fighters near the crossing killed four Israeli soldiers.

Gaza has been under blockade by Israel to some degree since Hamas took over the region in 2007. Hamas as the governing body has no control over Gaza’s borders, limiting the territory’s ability to trade and leaving Gaza heavily dependent on outside aid.

Though the area is very densely populated and highly urbanized, domestic agriculture was a significant part of the economy prior to the current war; about 44 percent of household food came from Gaza-based production, according to a January report from the International Food Policy Research Institute.

By January, a third of all the agricultural land in Gaza had been rendered unusable, according to the report, and war and displacement had essentially halted the agriculture industry. The outside aid that is still getting in is not nearly enough for people to survive on, experts say.

“One-fourth of calories needed is what’s getting in,” Tak Igusa, a contributor to a joint Johns Hopkins and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine report on death projections in Gaza due to the war, told Vox in March. “So just imagine having one-fourth of what you usually eat for such a long duration. And it’s getting worse.”

There was a temporary increase in aid following international backlash to the Israeli killing of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen, an NGO that had delivered 43 million meals to Palestinians in Gaza prior to the incident. But the increased aid has not been sustained, especially since Israel began operations in Rafah earlier this month, interrupting the flow of goods through the border crossing there, which Egypt has now closed.

Will this fix the crisis?

In short, no. The scale of this preventable crisis is just too big for this one effort alone to solve.

Other solutions are quite clear: keeping the land border crossings open, pushing the Israeli government to allow sufficient aid in, and prioritizing deconfliction processes so humanitarian workers can safely do their jobs. Overland mechanisms like trucks can move faster, and more than 2,000 trucks filled with supplies are already on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, according to Jesse Marks, senior advocate for the Middle East at Refugees International, unable to get their cargo to people that need it.

There is also concern about the safety of the people involved in the aid operation, given the fact that more than 250 aid workers have been killed over the course of the war. Just this week, an aid worker was killed by Israeli fire while working for the UN in Rafah. The person was riding in a clearly marked UN car.

USAID and the World Food Program will oversee aid distribution in coordination with other NGOs. USAID Response Director Dan Dieckhaus told reporters in a briefing Thursday that “deconfliction” processes — coordination with the Israeli military so that aid workers can perform their jobs — is a serious concern. “We’re not at all satisfied with where they’re at now,” Dieckhaus said of discussions with the Israeli government around those processes.

Hamas could also see Israeli military presence at the port as a threat, opening the risk of attack.

Ceasefire talks — ongoing in Cairo when Israel launched the Rafah operation — also seem to be stagnant.

“The administration is pushing for more attention to civilian casualties, more humanitarian aid, and a sooner end to widespread military operations,” Jennifer Kavanagh, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox. “On the other hand, they’re continuing to send, maybe not the biggest bombs, but plenty of offensive weapons for Israel to continue to carry out an offensive campaign.”

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.