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Colorado Republican gubernatorial nominee Victor Marx recently bragged about physically abusing his wife and said he’d do it again. After billionaire David Ellison sealed up his $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, he promptly put video game executive Bobby Kotick, who has longstanding ties to Jeffrey Epstein, on the board of the parent company overseeing both CNN and CBS. In Arizona, Democratic congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia — who is running in a ruby-red district — says she was beaten and sexually assaulted in the middle of the night while fixing a campaign sign. And in Vermont, both state and federal prosecutors filed surprise charges against anti-ICE protesters just days before a major week of action at an ICE surveillance hub.
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Colorado’s Republican gubernatorial nominee, Victor Marx, is in hot water. On Tuesday night he told supporters on a video call that he’d once shoved his wife, Eileen, into a door. He justified it by saying he was teaching her a lesson in self-defense, and argued she’d been fake-crying and then responded to his concern by kicking him in the groin.
Marx said he and his wife were like Mr. and Mrs. Smith, bragging that his wife owns both a tomahawk and a hand grenade. He then told people on the call that he would “do it again,” adding that next time he would simply not get close enough for her to kick him.
This comes after Marx told the story on a local radio interview last week, in which he said he shoved his wife just to give her a scare. Eileen Marx defended her husband, saying he wasn’t a domestic abuser and that he was simply teaching a martial arts lesson in their home. On that same show, Marx confirmed a separate rumor that he’d once grabed his young son and launched him onto his bed, making the boy cry. Marx insised he didn’t hurt his son.
The couple co-founded the organization All Things Possible, which critics have said could be dangerous. Marx’s group has funded out-of-state surveillance projects and hired private security contractors. This summer, Marx said on a Colorado TV station that he was once forced to kill someone when he was only seven years old. He refused to elaborate when asked if he’d ever killed anyone else.
On Tuesday, Paramount officially completed its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, creating a single megacompany called Skydance. That puts CNN, CBS News and a whole host of Hollywood studios and TV channels all under the thumb of CEO David Ellison, the son of billionaire Trump donor Larry Ellison.
That same day, Ellison announced that Bobby Kotick, who is the former CEO of video game company Activision Blizzard, would serve on the company’s board. The Wall Street Journal reported that Kotick allegedly knew about alleged sexual misconduct at his company for years but failed to act.
However, the most alarming news is Kotick’s lengthy history with convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. According to emails the Justice Department released earlier this year show, both Kotick and Epstein were regularly in touch going all the way back to 2012, including a 2013 invitation from Kotick for Epstein to come to his home for drinks Kotick also emailed back and forth with Ghislaine Maxwell. One chilling exchange showed Kotick and Epstein discussing designing video games that would influence children with both digital and real-world rewards.
Writer and programmer Reyna Cervantes called the Kotick appointment “deeply evil stuff.” The fact that the man who now owns both CNN and CBS News picked someone who was buddy-buddy with Epstein to help steer the company reveals a lot about who those newsrooms will actually serve.
In Arizona, longtime long-haul trucker Bernadette Greene-Placentia is challenging MAGA Republican Congressman Abe Hamadeh in the deep-red 8th Congressional District. She’s been busy all summer long going out in the middle of the night to fix damaged campaign signs in order to avoid high heat and traffic.
But the Phoenix New Times is reporting that just after 2 AM early on a Friday morning, someone hit her on the head as she crossed a dark parking lot. When she awoke, she found that a strange man sexually assaulting her. A second man approached while she was being assaulted, and she kicked at him until he walked away. The men left her face down on the concrete beside her running vehicle, and she says she only has fractions of memory from the immediate aftermath.
She suffered bruised and believes she may have endured a concussion. She spent most of the weekend essentially incommunicado. The following Sunday, her campaign team noticed something was wrong with her at a canvassing event. Greene-Placentia told her communications director, Craig Beckman, that she’d been assaulted by two men while she was repairing campaign signs. Beckman said he spent a long time reassuring the candidate that the attack wasn’t her fault.
At first, Greene-Placentia wanted to just forget about the assault and not report it to police. But she said that since she’s telling voters she’ll fight for Arizonans, she felt she could no longer keep saying that without also fighting for sexual assault survivors. She went on to report the attack to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office roughly two weeks later. The investigation is still ongoing as of today.
Greene-Placentia said she wants women who have been assaulted to know it’s okay for them to talk about their experience. She added that if her campaign asks supporters to get uncomfortable, she has to be willing to do the same. She now no longer goes out at night to fix damaged signs.
The quiet town of Williston, Vermont hosts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center. There are only two facilities like it in the country. Analysts there comb the internet and social media to track down potential targets for deportation and send their information to agents in the field, sometimes in just 30 minutes.
According to The Intercept, that building has become a hotspot for one of Vermont’s largest recurring protests. Dozens of people, including clergy members, have been arrested during demonstrations. At first, no arrestees were actually charged, because Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George declined to prosecute the protesters.
However, that all changed in late September, when the Vermont State Police went around George’s office entirely and instead took cases directly to Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, who is a Democrat. Clark then filed misdemeanor charges against 13 protesters. And last week, federal prosecutors tacked on charges against five of those protesters, whose ages range from 22 to 80.
Organizers called attention to the timing of those charges, as the cases hit the docket right before a national week of action organizers have been plannin that were expected to attract hundreds of people. Protest organizer Julie Macuga said activists believe the charges were engineered with the intent of scaring people away from doing civil disobedience at the facility. AG Clark faced severe backlash from members of her own party. Roan Wade, who is one of the 13 protesters facing charges, said the state charges expose the hypocrisy of Democrats who say they oppose Trump’s agenda while enabling it in the prosecution of people expressing their First Amendment rights. Wade made sure to state for the record that repression breeds resistance.
As billionaires continue to gobble up more cable channels and newspapers seemingly every day, the number of news outlets willing to tell the truth and hold power accountable grows ever smaller.
Thanks for reading. I’m John Byrne, in for British Chris. Thanks for reading, and thanks for independent media. Once again, please tap the ❤️ and hit restack if you haven’t already so we can get these stories in front of the people who need them.
