Britt Tells Misleading Border Story in State of the Union Response
The Alabama senator used a story about sex trafficking to criticize the Biden administration’s border policies. But the events occurred in Mexico years ago.
Katie Britt, a first-term senator from Alabama, delivered the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.Credit…Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
The opposition party’s response to the State of the Union address is a golden opportunity for up-and-coming and lesser-known politicians to introduce themselves to the nation and boost their political profile.
Such was the case for Katie Britt, a first-term Republican senator from Alabama who, despite being a newcomer to the national stage, has been mentioned as a possible choice to be Donald J. Trump’s running mate. But her big debut on Thursday night has been marred by intense scrutiny of an anecdote at the center of her speech, which was delivered from her kitchen in Montgomery, Ala.
The story, about a Mexican who was a victim of sex trafficking at the age of 12, came in the context of an attack on President Biden’s border policies. In impassioned tones, Ms. Britt described a girl being raped multiple times a day in dire conditions at the hands of cartels before she was able to escape.
“This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it,” Ms. Britt said. “President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”
As a rhetorical device, it would be hard conjure up a more powerful and resonant example. But the story was highly misleading and improperly contextualized.
The woman referenced by Ms. Britt was, in fact, never trafficked across the border, nor has she sought asylum in this country. And her harrowing experience took place between 2004 and 2008, while a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the White House and President Biden was still a senator.
In other words, it had nothing at all to do with the current administration’s border policy. But that didn’t stop Ms. Britt from inflaming public fears about immigration and placing blame at Mr. Biden’s feet.
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis,” she said. “He invited it.”
Although Ms. Britt did not name the victim in her speech, she has previously shared the story of a woman who appears to be the same individual based on congressional testimony,news releases and news reports.
That woman, Karla Jacinto Romero, is a Mexican citizen who does not live in the United States and who has spokenfrequently about her experiences of being forced into sexual slavery for four years. In 2023, Ms. Jacinto participated in an event in Texas near the border with Mexico that was also attended by three senators, including Ms. Britt. In a videoreleased shortly after that trip, Ms. Britt discussed Ms. Jacinto’s experiences.
Ms. Jacinto, who spoke with the Times Saturday from Mexico, said she had not been informed ahead of time that Ms. Britt would be discussing her in the speech and only learned about it after a video pointing out the deceptive framing of the senator’s speech was posted by the independent journalist Jonathan Katz on TikTok on Friday.
“I only found out via social media,” said Ms. Jacinto, who continues to speak frequently about human trafficking and who is supported by a U.S.-based nonprofit, Reintegra, that provides educational grants to victims of sex trafficking in Latin America. “I thought it was very strange.”
She said she preferred to keep politics out of the question of human trafficking. “I am involved in the fight to stop trafficking and I don’t think it should be political,” she said. “The work I do is not a game.”
A spokesman for Ms. Britt, Sean Ross, stood behind her speech.
“The story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct,” he said in a statement. “And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.”
Mr. Ross did not respond to a follow-up question about what direct responsibility the Biden administration had for what Ms. Jacinto experienced or what an anecdote about sex trafficking entirely within another country had to do with U.S. border policies.
Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that Ms. Britt’s remarks were “debunked lies.”
This is not the first time that Ms. Jacinto’s experience has been used as a political bludgeon.
The January 2023 event, held in Eagle Pass, Texas, was organized by Marsha Blackburn, the Republican senator from Tennessee, who framed it as a mission to “examine the disastrous effects of Biden’s border crisis firsthand.”
At the event, Ms. Jacinto was accompanied by a former Mexican congresswoman, Rosi Orozco, who is active in human trafficking matters and lives in the U.S. The two women sat on a round table panel focused on human and sex trafficking and were featured in a short video with the three senators.
Soon thereafter, Ms. Blackburn published an op-ed headlined “Biden’s open border is not compassionate or humane.” After describing Ms. Jacinto’s travails, she wrote: “It is clear that we are experiencing a humanitarian and national security crisis, courtesy of President Biden.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for Ms. Blackburn said that “for years, Senator Blackburn has fought to prevent sex trafficking and has met with victims, such as Karla, to hear about the horrific abuses that occur.” The statement added that “countless women and children are sexually trafficked into the U.S.A. due to Biden’s open border agenda. Under President Biden, human trafficking has skyrocketed from a $500 million business in 2018 to around $13 billion a year in 2022.”
Andy McCullough, the executive director of Reintegra, which first helped Ms. Jacinto in 2017, providing funding so she could finish high school, said he was stunned to learn how Ms. Jacinto was portrayed at the Texas event and, again this week, in Ms. Britt’s speech.
“They presented Karla as someone who was trafficked across the border, and that’s not her story,” he said. “This issue is so horrific, and yet the narrative is being manipulated to make it a political thing. This is re-exploiting the very victims of exploitation that we are trying to help.”
Ms. Jacinto, 31, has been speaking against human trafficking for years. In 2015, she met Pope Francis at the Vatican and also spoke at a House foreign affairs subcommittee on global sex trafficking organized by Republican Representative Chris Smith of New Jersey. The hearing focused on strategies for combating the problem in other countries, rather than describing them as a product of U.S. border policies.
Concerned about how her story was being portrayed by politicians, Mr. McCullough brought Ms. Jacinto on as staffer at Reintegra last March, hoping that the organization could protect her and her message, paying her a small stipend and arranging for speaking opportunities.
“This issue is horrendous,” Mr. McCullough said. “If we make it a political thing or a religious thing, we take away the reality of how awful it is. All of humanity should be fighting this issue.”
Fountainhead Arts soirée. Over 70 members showed up to pay tribute to the arts organization that keeps on giving joyous adventures. This is our second life. It has been a blessing.
The land that once housed Champlain Towers South at 8777 Collins Avenue is pictured June 3, 2022. The condo tower partially collapsed on June 24, 2021, killing 98 people.
Pool deck still likely origin of Surfside condo collapse, federal investigators say, by AARON LEIBOWITZ
ALEIBOWITZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM
A federal probe into the June 2021 collapse of a Surfside condo tower that left 98 people dead continues to point to the building’s pool deck as the most likely initiation point of the collapse, investigators said Thursday at a meeting in Maryland.
In their first public update since last fall on a years-long effort to determine what caused the tragedy, investigators for the National Institute of Standards and Technology presented a detailed look at how they are analyzing video footage and eyewitness interviews to inch closer to a conclusion.
Investigators said there is “strong evidence” that the collapse began in the pool deck of the 12-story, L-shaped Champlain Towers South building, though they have not yet ruled out an initial failure point “in some part of the tower” that could have led to the collapse of the pool deck.
“We have very, we think, conclusive evidence now that the pool deck collapsed before the tower,” said Glenn Bell, team associate leader for the investigation. “What we are still analyzing is what the initiating events were.”
Nearly $30 million has been spent on the probe since it began in 2021, investigators said Thursday. In addition to testing materials from the collapse site and building complex computer models, investigators have been interviewing survivors and other eyewitnesses with help from a team at Florida International University.
They have also been analyzing several videos to better understand the collapse sequence, including a video taken by a tourist the night of the collapse that showed water gushing into the garage and chunks of concrete covering the floor on the north side of the building.
Investigators said they worked with the FBI to enhance the video, which helps prove that the pool deck collapsed into the parking garage before the east portion of the tower collapsed.
A draft report of the investigation is still more than a year away, anticipated in May 2025. A final report is expected in September 2025 and will have implications for millions of high-rise dwellers around the world, with recommendations on changes to building codes and construction practices that could prevent a similar catastrophe from happening elsewhere.
We want our investigation of this failure to have lasting impact,” said Judith Mitrani-Reiser, the lead investigator on the NIST investigation and a Miami native. “We want it to save lives, and we want it to ensure this never happens again.”
The findings so far echo a Miami Herald investigation, which found that the pool deck collapsed several minutes before half of the tower fell. In consultation with structural engineers, the Herald identified major weaknesses in the structure and other problems that compounded in the weeks before the collapse. Those included areas where the pool deck appeared to be sagging dangerously, cracking a nearby planter.
Investigators said that among the “most probable” initiation points were failures in slab-column connections in the pool deck that caused the slab around the columns to drop. “Knocking noises” heard by some residents before the collapse bolster the notion that steel reinforcements had fractured at those connection points.
In a presentation last June, investigators said the 40-year-old building’s pool deck had “critically low margins against failure” because ofpervasive weaknesses in the structural design that were exacerbated by misplacement and corrosion of the reinforcing steel within the deck, as well as the addition of planters and heavy pavers that were not accounted for in the original designs.
While the team of dozens of engineers and other experts is considering about two dozen failure hypotheses, it is seeking to rule out possibilities that appear less likely.
That includes underground factors like a sinkhole in the limestone underneath the tower or uneven settlement of the building’s foundation. Investigators said Thursday there is “very low probability” that those factors contributed to the collapse.
The probe has found no evidence of an explosion or other extraordinary event that could have triggered the incident.
Investigators have yet to elaborate on how the pool deck collapse would have caused the tower to fall minutes later. But computer simulations performed by researchers at the University of Washington in collaboration with the Herald showed that when the deck fell and disconnected from a perimeter wall at the south end of the pool, damage would have spread into the tower along the ground floor near the gym at the center of the L-shaped structure.
Experts who consulted on the Herald’s forensic investigation said the preliminary deck collapse would have strained the columns along half of the tower’s perimeter, causing them to fracture and ultimately collapse inward along with the majority of the tower
Ken Sander in the 60’s. Looking pretty mod back in the dayHeader image: Alice Cooper 1972 promotional photo. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/public domain.Alice Cooper, Ken Sander and Alice’s mom, CES 1994.
It was late 1968 when my friend, the late Barry Byrens, said to me, “Linc,” (he loved calling me that, because I looked like Linc in the TV show The Mod Squad), “you need to get rid of that motorcycle and get a car, a convertible.” At the time I was subletting a cabin in Laurel Canyon and in fact had not thought about a car. I liked my motorcycle, but it was winter in LA and riding the bike at night was chilly.
Two days later I was at his house in West Hollywood up in the hills at 8929 St. Ives, just above Gil Turner’s liquor store at Doheny and Sunset Blvd. Barry had the newspaper open and said, “I found you a car at this car lot on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood.” He drove me down there in his Lincoln, a hardtop convertible.
We got there and it was a 1964 copper-colored Chevy Corvair convertible. Barry, me, and the salesman took it for a test drive. On a side street south of Sunset I tried to turn the car around and stalled it. It had a stick shift, so I pushed in the clutch and brake. I turned the key to restart it and the Corvair rolled backwards a foot or so and hit a fire hydrant. I don’t think I pressed the brake hard enough. Getting out, we saw a small ding put in the trunk just above the license plate. I was horrified at what I had done, but the salesman said “no sweat” and we continued the test drive, then left.
Two days later Barry found another Corvair convertible but this one was a light blue 1966. We went down and after the test drive, I was sold. It was $999. I plunked down $250 down and the payments would be $48 a month. I drove it back to Barry’s house. Later that day the salesman from the first car lot called and said, “your car is ready to be picked up.” I looked at Barry (I did not know what to say) and he took the phone from me. Barry said, “he doesn’t want the car!” “Why not?” the salesman asked. “He just doesn’t want it,” and then the salesman started getting pushy. Finally, after a back-and-forth Barry says, “he doesn’t want it because it has a dent in the trunk!” The salesman was speechless, and Barry told him to fu*k off and hung up.
My best new toy ever, it is my first car, and driving with the top down is a beautiful thing. Barry was right. One night I am driving up Doheny Drive going to Barry’s house to hang out and I see a hitchhiker. He has long hair and looks like one of us, so I pull over and pick him up. He introduces himself as “Alice Cooper.” Interesting, I think to myself; there must be a story here. “Unusual name,” I say to Alice, and he explains that it is his stage persona and the name of his band. “This is not a sexual identity thing either,” he quickly adds. He goes on to explain that he had recently formed the band and they were in rehearsal here in Hollywood.
I tell him I am from New York City and he says he is from Phoenix. I say that is not far from Los Angeles, and Alice answers that in fact it is very far from LA We both have a laugh at that one. They are getting ready for their debut. I had met more than a few musicians in Los Angeles who had told me that they were forming a band and rehearsing – and never heard of them again. But I got the feeling that this Alice Cooper guy was more realistic and solid, so I thought it might happen with for him. We got to Alice’s destination and he asked me to stop and drop him off.
I loved this Hollywood life; so friendly with everyone just hanging out. Whenever I had no plans for the evening, I would go to Ben Frank’s on Sunset to hang out. the parking lot was always packed with girls and long-haired guys, a couple of hundred young folks just milling around and getting to know each other. In New York we had something similar to that at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park, where the hippies, freaks and musicians would hang out, but the scene would only be happening on Sunday afternoons.
One night I am at Ben Frank’s with Jon Lane, my (late) friend from New York City who was visiting me, and these two girls I had seen around came up to us and asked if we wanted to go party with them. Tempting, but we were hungry and were planning to go inside to Ben Frank’s and have dinner, so we passed. A couple of nights later we were back in the parking lot and this kid I kind of knew came over to us and said, “you know Audrey and her friend, right?” The guy tells me they had died. What? Yeah, he says, they overdosed on heroin; the police found them. Jonny turned to me and said, “that could have been us.” Even though we didn’t do smack, they might have convinced us to try it.
That, I was beginning to find out, was the other side of Hollywood life. As open and friendly as things were, there was another side that was dangerous, with quick turns and sudden deaths. All kinds of different people come to Southern California. New York City is the melting pot of the world, and Los Angeles is the melting pot for young Americans.
Maybe a couple of weeks or so later I see Alice Cooper hitching again. He jumps in my car and I told him I was going to a friend’s house to hang out and if he wanted, he could come too. It wouldn’t quite be a party but there would be people there listening to music and most would be smoking. Alice says, “I don’t smoke pot.” I replied, “really?” He answered, “I don’t have a problem with it but I personally do not like it.” “Oh, so what do you do? “I love beer, Budweiser in fact.” I am not sure if they will have beer and Alice says, “let’s stop somewhere so I can pick up some Bud.”
I think we stopped at Gil Turner’s and he ran in and bought a six pack of Bud. Then we drove to my friend’s house and joined the scene. That was the thing about LA – you could just drop in on anyone you knew, and it was okay. You would show up they would invite you in and ask if you wanted to smoke.
After about a half an hour I look over and see Alice on the floor sitting with his back leaning against the wall and drinking a can of beer. He had two empties on the floor and was working on his third. No one was drinking with him; it was a pot crowd, but he looked comfortable, fit in and seemed like he was enjoying himself. The evening went on and after a couple of hours I left with a girl and we went to my cabin in Laurel Canyon.
One afternoon the rock group Love showed up to the cabin and we all hung out and partied. Love, led by the brilliant but eccentric Arthur Lee, were one of the leading bands on the LA scene during the mid to late 1960s. However, Arthur Lee wasn’t with them when they showed up. I asked about it and the band said that they had parted ways. The often-unruly Lee was quick to fire musicians.
I have been told that Roger Daltrey said that Arthur Lee was on the spectrum. In their earlier days, the members of Love lived in a decrepit Hollywood mansion once owned by Bela Lugosi. Arthur Lee and Love evolved from the group formerly known as Grass Roots (not the Grass Roots that had many hit singles) and were known in LA for their spirited and entertaining live performances. Arthur was immensely proud of his racially-mixed band, one of the first in rock and roll. In late 1966 the three hottest bands in Los Angeles were The Byrds, The Doors and Love.
Love’s Forever Changes was released in 1967 and was and still is considered a masterpiece. The name of the album comes from a story Arthur had heard. This guy had broken up with his girlfriend. She exclaimed, “You said you would love me forever!” and the guy replied, “Well, forever changes.” The album was brilliant but did not sell as well as expected. Arthur, being very volatile, changed band personnel frequently. (In 1995 he was wrongfully convicted of a gun charge and, being his third strike, his career was interrupted by a prison sentence until 2001. After prison, Arthur formed a new band and toured and made some records. However, even though he was much more disciplined, he never again achieved his earlier promise. Sadly, he passed away from leukemia in 2006 at the age of 61.)
Some weeks later I am driving my Corvair with the top down and see Alice Cooper walking up on Sunset. I yelled to him asking if he needed a ride. With a friendly wave he said no and kept on walking east towards the Old World restaurant. The next time I saw Alice was when I was in Chicago on tour with Nektar in 1974. By this time he had become a huge star with songs like “I’m Eighteen” and “School’s Out.” We said a quick hello to each other in the lobby of the upscale Chicago Holiday Inn on Lake Shore Drive.
In 1994 I was an on-air technology correspondent and host for The Cable Doctor Show, and was covering the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. I saw that Alice Cooper was making a celebrity appearance. “Meet Alice Cooper and his Mother.” An unusual scenario, but there he was in an exhibitor’s booth, posing for Polaroid pictures with his mother. I went over and he introduced me to his mom and said, “you look different with short hair! And what is with the jacket and tie?” In response I told him I was a technology journalist on television, but that he looked exactly the same, and as you can see, that made him smile. That smile reminded me of when I first met him. He certainly has come a long way for a kid named Vince from Phoenix. I think this is pretty much the way he planned it.
I found out during my interview with Lucia Giudice of Puccio Fine Art, for my Art Lovers Forum podcast, that many New York galleries are leaving their ground floor spaces for less expensive showrooms on upper floors in office buildings and by appointment only. Many of the galleries are doing most of their sales online and through art fairs. Lucia revealed lots of other surprises.
Lucia Giudice
Art Lovers Forum Episode 7
Lucia Giudice is the founder of New York City based Puccio Fine Art. She is also a dear friend of mine. We lived in the same upper East side coop for many years and she was the first gallerist I became close to. I used to visit her gallery on East 63rd all the time. Now she sells exclusively online.
She has an educational background in Political Science and Art History, and several decade’s worth of experience in the art world. Most importantly as the daughter of Italian Immigrants and niece of sculptor Paul Puccio; she has always been involved with art, artists, galleries, art shows, foundries, studios and workshops. Puccio Fine Art was established in 2003 out of a love for art collecting and need for space to showcase works. Her focus is in the secondary market, by masters such as Warhol, Picasso, Dali, Lichtenstein, Stella, Rosenquist and Matisse. She has been a member of the International Fine Art Appraisers, the Association of Women Art Dealers and previously served on the Board of the Italian Welfare League.
Progress requires sacrifice. As a result, the forward march of technological innovation has left many casualties: landlines, video stores, paper maps, civil discourse, facts. Words and phrases have become acronyms, and emojis have replaced emotions. Doing something “in real life” has become such a novelty, a remarkable event, that we had to create an acronym for it. WTF?
Then along came the coronavirus. Suddenly, it became almost impossible to do anything IRL. The pandemic is now over (I think). But in just a few years it killed almost three million people worldwide. It also killed a number of social constructs and customs. One of those things is the power lunch.
The art at Michael’s includes pieces by Jasper Johns, David Hockney, and Frank Stella.
“Power lunch” was first coined by an editor at Esquire in 1979, when magazines had the ability to create Zeitgeist-defining phrases. It was used to describe the lunchtime scene at the Four Seasons in the Seagram Building, in Midtown Manhattan. Four years earlier Esquire had run Truman Capote’s “La Côte Basque 1965,” a short story about what would soon be called a power lunch that would later figure prominently in Ryan Murphy’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.
And while the term may have been coined in New York, about a New York restaurant, there is, or perhaps was, a power lunch in almost every city or town around the world for as long as there have been powerful people with a midday appetite.
The power lunch was never about eating, though; it was about being seen, staying relevant, holding on to or building on whatever kind of power or influence you have, or think you have, whether that’s financial, political, social, or cultural. It was about business, optics, gossip, social standing. It was about having a literal and metaphorical “seat at the table.”
But the media power lunch always towered over the rest. The crowd had better clothes, bigger personalities, a higher tolerance for alcohol, more creative and interesting work, and a higher proportion of women, balancing out the gender makeup of the dining room. Every big media center had a media power lunch, but nobody did it quite like New York, the media center of the universe.
In the middle of the day, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s, when business was booming, the media elite ditched their desks en masse, with the precision and predictability of the Flintstones’ opening sequence, got into their idling Lincoln Town Cars, and were driven three or four blocks to a few specific restaurants to power-lunch, which might as well have been a verb during this era.
The power lunch was never about eating. It was about having a literal and metaphorical “seat at the table.”
There were really only three options, all located in Midtown: the Four Seasons, Philip Johnson’s midcentury masterpiece; the Royalton hotel’s flashier 44, whimsically designed by Philippe Starck and run by the well-connected English restaurateur Brian McNally; and Michael’s, the least flamboyant of the three, tucked under a nondescript apartment building on West 55th Street.
The media power lunch was fading well before the pandemic, as takeout and delivery options improved and the working lunch took hold, while the media business became more dispersed. The Internet and the Great Recession led to a contraction in legacy-media-advertising spending. Expense accounts began to wither and die, and the business has been on a downward trajectory ever since. In 2023, more than 20,000 American media jobs disappeared. This year may be even worse.
A Few Hokas, but Zero Yeezys
Michael’s, the sole survivor of the big three media-power-lunch spots, is a restaurant frozen in time. That can be a selling point, as was the case with the magnificent Four Seasons, but not if that time happens to be 1989, when Michael’s was opened by the California restaurateur Michael McCarty. (The original Michael’s is in Santa Monica.) And there is still more than a fragrant whiff of the 80s here: the wall-to-wall carpeting, the dusty track lighting, the mirrored column in the center of the dining room, the worn Breuer chairs.
What’s not frozen in time, which is unfortunate for a restaurant that relies on media expense accounts, is the media industry. So I was surprised that Michael’s began filling up at around 12:30 P.M. on a cold Thursday in February. One after another, parties of two and four were led to their tables, mostly older gentlemen in suits with open-collared shirts, like it’s 1998 and “business casual” still means simply losing the tie. Although most of them had replaced their wing tips or loafers with sneakers. I saw a few pairs of Skechers, a few Hokas. By one P.M., the place was packed. It was like the dinner rush for the early-bird special in an assisted-living community.
For years, the New York Post’s media columnist Keith Kelly would often detail the boldfaced power lunchers at Michael’s in his “Media Ink” column, sometimes even including a seating chart. Kelly retired in 2021, so the restaurant now tweets a daily list of their boldfaced lunch guests (#INTHEHOUSE) to their 2,800 followers.
Scrolling back, there were repeat visits by familiar faces, such as P.R. veteran Peggy Siegal, adman turned Joe Scarborough sidekick Donny Deutsch, gadfly Michael Wolff, former Time Inc. head Norm Pearlstine, and literary agent Lynn Nesbit. Tina Brown, Jeff Zucker, Michael Kors, David Axelrod, New Jersey governor Phil Murphy, Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Scaramucci, and Rex Reed have all made recent appearances at Michael’s, too. The only semi-notable person I recognized when I went—and it took me a minute to place her—was former Vogue staffer and Melania Trump memoirist Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.
Time hasn’t been kind to the quality of Michael’s food. It ranges from just O.K. to not very good to whoa. In fact, the less said about the food, the better. I know, the power lunch isn’t about the food, but at these prices, it needs to be improved. A piece of salmon is $44; an eight-ounce filet mignon, $58. The burger ($38), the Cobb salad ($35), and the Niçoise ($36), while all pricey, are probably the safest bets on the menu.
My $40 branzino consisted of two limp fillets that were so thin the fish must have been on Ozempic. A $16 side dish of gray, gloppy mushrooms tasted like it was straight from a can. A number of plates had that unmistakable look of food that had been sitting under a heat lamp for 20 minutes—its garnishes wilted and depressed, looking sadder than photographs of 1970s England—and yet the dishes arrived so quickly it’s impossible they had been. I’m afraid that when it comes to the food, Michael’s has simply stopped trying. Which is a shame, because I remember it being better than this.
And yet there’s something nostalgically charming about the place. The room is comfortable and bright, lined with some really wonderful art, including pieces by Jasper Johns, David Hockney, and Frank Stella. The tables are spaced a reasonable distance apart. There was a communal understanding that we should use our inside voices. There were no tables of young people living their truth, or their best life, or some combination of those two empty promises, which seems to include being exceedingly loud in restaurants.
At Michael’s, you can have a conversation without having to lean in to hear what your dining partner is saying, and there are fewer and fewer restaurants I can say that about. Even the Kenny G–style smooth jazz playing quietly was refreshing. In an increasingly chaotic and fraught world, for almost $200 with the tip and a little more than an hour of my day,
Michael’s brought me back to a better time, a simpler time. It gave me some comfort about my own mortality, and made me feel, however fleetingly, that maybe, just maybe, everything was going to be O.K. You can’t really put a price on that.
Sure, its lunchtime crowd resembles a casting call for a reboot of Cocoon. But no one was wearing Yeezys or Lululemon. There were no influencers or reality-television “stars.” No one was staring at their phone. No one was taking pictures of their food. People were simply talking to each other—the ultimate throwback.
At Michael’s, it’s the diners who are offered a sense of agency and purpose in a world that has left them behind. For an hour or two, they can make believe it’s still the waning days of the 20th century, the media business is thriving, and the future looks bright. It’s a wonderfully empathetic and humanistic concept, playing out every day over lunch at Michael’s, IRL.
Jeff Koons’s Art Is on the Moon, but His Prices Have Cratered. Can Power Players Reignite His Market?
Major shows will soon hit Hong Kong, New York, and London. Will a collector pay more than $50 million for his sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles?
The artist’s soaring ambition shows no sign of abating, market doldrums be damned. In the past year alone, Koons has taken on the moon, where his sculptures just landed after a weeklong journey—and the sun (more on that later).
Here on Earth, some of the 69-year-old artist’s biggest champions are working hard to reverse the recent downward trajectory in his prices.
The stakes are high. Koons’s auction totals have plummeted since his gleaming steel Rabbit (1986) fetched $91 million in 2019, making him the most expensive living artist in the world, the crown he still holds. Last year was particularly bad: Sales fell to just $27.8 million, down 84 percent from the peak of $170.8 million in 2014, according to the Artnet Price Database.
Almost 40 percent of the 292 Koons lots offered failed to find buyers. He ranked 72nd on a list of artists’ annual auction revenue, down from 55th in 2022—itself a demotion from 2019, when he was 15th, according to Artnet data.
Such ebb-and-flow is not new for Koons. At various points in his long career, he has been the world’s most famous artist and the comeback kid. Right now he appears to be both at the same time. And so this spring, several powerful secondary market players are mounting Koons exhibitions in New York, London, and Hong Kong to remind everyone of his greatness.
They believe that his market will bounce back, realigning itself once again with his art historical significance.
“There’s no question about it,” said Dakis Joannou, who’s been collecting Koons for almost 40 years, becoming a close friend along the way.
Several significant works that the Greek collector originally acquired are now heading to Hong Kong for “Jeff Koons: 1979–1999” at Art Intelligence Global (AIG), the advisory firm co-founded by Amy Cappellazzo and Yuki Terase. The exhibition unites a dozen pieces from Koons’s early series, including the “Inflatables,” “Equilibrium,” and “Made in Heaven.” Most will be appearing in Asia for the first time, according to AIG. One work, Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988), has an asking price in excess of $50 million. The exhibition will open on March 23 alongside Art Basel Hong Kong.
“Jeff Koons is one of the most well-known names in Asia, and yet he’s never really had a proper survey there, especially of the early works,” Terase said in an interview. “We are doing something very meaningful because a lot of people have only seen the works on social media and the internet, but never in person.”
In London, Skarstedt gallery will display five mural-size canvases in “Jeff Koons: Paintings, 2001–2013.” Opening March 1, the show will arrive in time for the marquee London auctions of Impressionist, modern, and contemporary art. It will include works from the “Easyfun-Ethereal” series, which started with seven paintings commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin in 2000. (None of the Guggenheim’s paintings are in the show, the gallery confirmed. But two other pieces from the series are included, having recently come to auction, with Hot Dog, 2002, fetching $1.9 million in November and Pancakes, 2001, selling for $867,000 in 2021.)
Then, New York’s Mnuchin Gallery will revisit its watershed 2004 exhibition, “Jeff Koons: Highlights of 25 Years,” which included many of his greatest hits, including Michael Jackson and Bubbles. The show began a new chapter for the artist, following a painful decade marked by the end of his first marriage in a bitter divorce and his near-bankruptcy while creating the “Celebration” series.
“It was an awe-inspiring show,” said Michael McGinnis, a partner at Mnuchin, remembering its impact when he was the head of contemporary art at Phillips.
Stellar reviews followed and Koons’s auction market took off, crossing $20 million in auction sales for the first time that year. It would not sink below that level until the global pandemic hit in 2020, when annual sales plummeted to just $2.7 million.
Mnuchin’s show, set for late April, will present 25 artworks spanning the artist’s entire five-decade career. “It will be a wow, wow, wow kind of show,” McGinnis said, declining to elaborate on the specific works because loans have not been finalized.
Those in the know whispered that hedge-fund billionaire and Mets owner Steve Cohen may loan his yellow Balloon Dog (1994–2000), instead of the orange sibling that was in the original show, courtesy of its then owner, Peter Brant. (Yes, it does fit!) Sadly, the Rabbit, which was in the 2004 show, is unlikely to make an appearance. (Museums hold three of the four pieces in the edition; the only one in private hands was reportedlybought by Cohen in 2019 and subsequently resold to billionaire financier Ken Griffin, market insiders told me.)
Back in Hong Kong, AIG’s lineup will include works that have become icons after appearing in prestigious exhibitions, such as the artist’s 2014 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. (Large Vase of Flowers, 1991, a massive, intricately carved wood bouquet, graced the cover of the Whitney’s exhibition catalog.) Terase and Cappellazzo are preparing for crowds, given the value of the artworks and their consequent insurance requirements.
“There will be a line around the block to see the show,” Cappellazzo said.
Several pieces have been closely linked to Joannou’s massive art collection, and they return to the market after decades. Take One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. JK 241 Series), a seminal 1985 work comprising a basketball suspended in a tank. Joannou saw it at Koons’s first solo exhibition at the International With Monument Gallery in New York’s East Village. It made a memorable first impression, he said, “something I couldn’t get out of my mind.” He bought the work for $2,700.
“And that’s how eventually I got to meet Jeff and the whole thing started from there,” Joannou told me.
Joannou went on to acquire examples from almost every subsequent series Koons made (until the two most recent ones). He waited six years to get the red Balloon Dog, the first puppy from the “Celebration” series (and only after paying for its production). Twenty years would go by before he received a giant pile of Play-Doh (1994–2014).
The artist and his patron became close over the years. Joannou is the godfather of Koons’s son Ludwig. The artist created the famously unorthodox (camouflage-inspired) look of his collector’s yacht, Guilty, and designed a heart-shaped wedding cake for his daughter’s wedding. (That concoction featured 2½-foot-tall figures of a swan and a rabbit that would later become 12- and 14-foot-tall sculptures.) The two men’s families vacationed together on Greek islands. In 2010, Joannou invited Koons to curate a controversial show of his collection at the New Museum.
But the most poignant manifestation of their friendship appeared two years ago on the island of Hydra in Greece, where each summer Joannou’s Deste Foundation taps contemporary artists to transform a small, cliff-side former slaughterhouse into an art display.
Notoriously controlling and perfectionist, Koons held the details of the project in absolute secrecy, making everyone involved sign non-disclosure agreements, according to Joannou, who first saw it just half an hour before the public opening.
“It was like giving me a present of the first impression,” he said.
What he saw left him speechless. Koons transformed the dark, rugged bunker space into a temple to Apollo, complete with replicas of ancient frescoes discovered in a house near Pompeii (now displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art), a polychrome animatronic sculpture of the Greek sun god accompanied by a snake flicking its tongue, and a 30-foot-wide, blazing-gold wind spinner shaped like the sun, mounted on the roof to greet boats entering the port.
“I think of it as the island’s Statue of Liberty,” said Linda Yablonsky, the author of a forthcoming biography of Koons. “For those of us who know Dakis and know Jeff, that was a very touching and meaningful gesture.”
Meanwhile, just as this column was going to print, Koons’s artworks—small replicas of the moon—landed on the lunar surface, the first authorized artworks to reach that rocky terrain. Koons’s ability to pull off such a feat is what gives his fans confidence in their investments, despite market turbulence.
“He’s moving every time in the area that you could not have even imagined,” Joannou said when we spoke. “You can never catch up with him. Now he’s off to the moon!”
Koons’s market is also ready for blastoff, his boosters argue.
“This is the right time to buy Jeff Koons,” said Alberto Mugrabi, a collector and trader whose family bought the orange Balloon Dog for $58.4 million in 2013. “Jeff Koons has only one way to go, and that’s up.”
Once hailed as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates, Mike Lynch is facing 20 years in prison if found guilty of conspiracy and fraud linked to his company’s sale
Every moment of every day, Mike Lynch is being watched. It’s easy to imagine the British tech tycoon’s days, shuffling around the kitchen, watching American political pundits scream at each other on cable news, all under the watchful eye of the video cameras strategically placed throughout the rooms of the San Francisco house he has called home since he was extradited to the US in May 2023.
In addition to 24-hour video surveillance, a GPS monitor fitted to his ankle ensures that he complies with rules that prohibit him from leaving the house except for medical or religious reasons. The judge overseeing his impending criminal fraud trial slightly relaxed those terms recently, allowing him outside between the hours of 9am and 9pm — but not without the escort of two private security guards, paid for by Lynch.
Even then, he cannot go beyond the city limits. He has surrendered his passport, and put up $100 million in a bond that he would lose if he tried to flee. This seems unlikely. Lynch, said his security company, has been a “model supervisee”.
Such is the life of the 58-year-old once fêted as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates: under house arrest, facing 17 counts of conspiracy, wire fraud and securities fraud. If found guilty, Lynch could spend the next 20 years in a federal prison. The decision as to whether he does spend his golden years behind bars falls to 12 jurors, who will hear the opening arguments in a San Francisco courtroom from March 18.
It all started 13 years ago with Lynch’s crowning achievement: the $11.7 billion sale of his data analytics company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard (HP), the American tech giant. The deal was celebrated. It turned Autonomy into a rare British tech success story and Lynch into one of the richest men in Britain.
Then it all went wrong. Just a year after the takeover closed, HP wrote down the value of Autonomy by 75 percent — or $8.8 billion. The company uncovered what it claimed was a sprawling fraud designed to make it seem as though Autonomy was far bigger, and more profitable, than it actually was. Lynch was fired, and the lawsuits began to fly. What ensued has been an improbably protracted legal dispute that is finally approaching its denouement.
The US government will make its case that Lynch was a mafioso-style fraudster who cooked his company’s books and duped one of America’s most prominent companies into overpaying. Lynch has strenuously and repeatedly denied the allegations. He has also launched an explosive lawsuit against the Serious Fraud Office in the UK over its handling of data related to the case.
The odds are stacked against the computer scientist from Chelmsford, Essex, who a friend from the British tech scene called “one of the great brains of his generation”.
Lynch was extradited after a High Court session in London, presiding over a separate but related case, found in 2022 that HP — now called Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) — had “substantially proven” that he had defrauded the Americans and broke US law in doing so. The company operated dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, and derived nearly 70 percent of its sales from the American operation. HPE last week asked the High Court to force Lynch and the former Autonomy finance chief Sushovan Hussain to pay it $4 billion in damages.Risky business: the former Autonomy finance chief, Sushovan Hussain.
Several former lieutenants have struck plea deals to testify against Lynch. Hussain, Lynch’s one-time right-hand man, has only just walked out of a federal prison after being found guilty in 2019 of 16 counts of fraud related to the HP deal. Hussain, who began his sentence at the low-security Allenwood prison in Pennsylvania, was released on January 30, and has returned to his home in the UK. Lawyers for Hussain, 59, who was born in Bangladesh and came to Britain when he was seven, declined to comment.
Lynch’s trial will be the third that covers broadly the same facts. In both previous cases — the Hussain trial and the civil case against Lynch in the High Court in London — HPE won.
Behind the Story
In a grainy black-and-white video, Lynch is sat at his desk, sharpening a long, broad knife while his underlings, each of them wearing a fedora, explained why their part of “the business” was struggling. One bemoaned his inability to fit a rival’s “wife in the trunk of the car” because “the broad’s legs was too long”. Fed up with excuses about workers’ inability to “collect”, another lieutenant became so angry he smashed a telephone with a baseball bat. Lynch, knife in hand, opined coolly: “Well chaps, I think that went rather well, didn’t you?”
This scene was not, of course, the portrayal of an actual mafia boss discussing actual mafia business. It was far worse. It was a corporate video. Autonomy made it nearly 20 years ago, for a 2005 internal sales conference as a jokey attempt to motivate the troops.
Now it is being used as evidence. Federal prosecutors have argued in court documents that it provides a glimpse into Lynch’s fearsome management style — (Hussain was the fedora-wearing lieutenant with the baseball bat). The government plans to call witnesses to testify that Lynch regularly compared Autonomy to the Mob and projected the image of a man “to whom the rules do not apply”. He allegedly told one employee: “You can never leave, we are like the mafia, we are like family.” In another instance, it is alleged that he told his head of investor relations that he could have a research analyst “killed” for criticizing the company.
Lynch, the documents say, exercised an “unusual” level of control, “so much so that Dr Lynch’s approval was required for any purchase over $30,000”, the documents allege. The argument was clear. If there was a fraud as the government alleges, Lynch not only knew about it, he directed it.
Amid the blizzard of motions and counter-motions ahead of the trial, Lynch’s attorneys have argued that evidence, including the 2005 video and Lynch’s apparent affinity for Bond villains — he named conference rooms “Dr No” and “Goldfinger” — should be excluded as flimsy attempts to assassinate his character. “The government seeks to turn innocuous banter into sinister behaviour on Dr Lynch’s part,” his lawyers wrote. “This claim is absurd.”
The core of the government’s case centers on the period between 2009 and 2011, when HPE bought the company. It claims that Lynch and Stephen Chamberlain, Autonomy’s former vice-president of finance who is also a defendant, engaged in an elaborate scheme to artificially inflate Autonomy’s balance sheet, and thus its value.
They “backdated” deals so they could report higher sales to investors, court documents allege. They concealed the fact that some sales were achieved through murky “reciprocal” agreements, where Autonomy would sell software to a third party but then effectively repay them by buying goods and services it did not need.
In addition, a sizeable chunk of Autonomy’s business was due not to software but lossmaking sales of hardware, according to court documents. This was a problem not least because Autonomy sold itself as a “pure software” company, a designation that brings with it a much higher market value than companies that sell low-margin equipment.
The U.S. government will make its case that Lynch was a mafioso-style fraudster who cooked his company’s books and duped one of America’s most prominent companies.
Lynch’s lawyers, in motions seeking to expand the possible evidence that they can use to rebut the claims, argue that the charges are baseless. “HP was not defrauded and got exactly what it bargained for,” they wrote.
The Lynch team argues instead that it was HPE’s own dysfunction that hobbled the company that Lynch had spent 15 years building. At the time of the deal, HP was a struggling tech dinosaur known for its laptops and printers. Its chief executive, Léo Apotheker, had announced the takeover in August 2011, but he was replaced by the former eBay boss Meg Whitman before the deal closed in October. She was HP’s third chief executive in as many years.
The Autonomy deal was part of HP’s tortured attempt to build a fast-growing arm to handle data for large companies, a business that was very different from its core PC and printer operation. In 2015, the company split into a consumer-facing laptop and printer business and an IT infrastructure company,.
Lynch’s lawyers plan to show that not only did HPE bungle the integration of a complex business but also that it was fully aware of the lossmaking hardware business before the deal was done. What is more, they plan to show that Autonomy’s accounting “irregularities” were immaterial to the company’s overall value. Indeed, his lawyers have argued in pre-trial documents that in the summer of 2012, HPE valued the company internally at $13.7 billion — $2 billion more than the amount it paid.
This assessment was made nearly a full year after the company had closed the takeover, a period during which it had full access to Autonomy’s books. By then, the buyer had also received information from a “whistleblower” who raised concerns about Autonomy’s business. And yet, HPE remained convinced that Autonomy was worth more than the amount it had paid a year earlier.
Just two months later, however, HPE changed its tune. It announced the huge write-down, attributing $5 billion of the reduction to fraudulent accounting. Lynch’s lawyers claim that they have internal HP emails and documents that “demonstrate that virtually none of the write-down was attributable to alleged accounting misconduct”.
In the High Court proceedings, Lynch testified over 21 days. He is expected to take the stand in the San Francisco trial as well. The judge, Charles Breyer, knows the conflict well. It was in his court five years ago that Hussain was found guilty.
Breyer told Lynch’s lawyers in court, however, that they should not be concerned that he has pre-judged the case. “I don’t remember any of it. You know? I mean, maybe. It was — what? — five years ago? I don’t know how long ago it was. Maybe that’s the shelf life of what occupies my brain.” He added: “I don’t know what, if any, [Lynch’s] involvement was. So in that regard, it’s a clean slate … and we’ll just see how it goes.”
Danny Fortson is the West Coast correspondent at The Sunday Times of London. William Turvill is the chief business correspondent at The Sunday Times. And Jill Treanor is the city editor at The Sunday Times
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