In 2002, a Chicago comedy duo, Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov, landed their big break: a chance to perform at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo. When Louis C.K. invited them to hang out in his hotel room for a nightcap after their late-night show, they did not think twice. The bars were closed and they wanted to celebrate. He was a comedian they admired. The women would be together. His intentions seemed collegial.

As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.

They thought it was a joke and laughed it off. “And then he really did it,” Ms. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times. “He proceeded to take all of his clothes off, and get completely naked, and started masturbating.”

In 2003, Abby Schachner called Louis C.K. to invite him to one of her shows, and during the phone conversation, she said, she could hear him masturbating as they spoke. Another comedian, Rebecca Corry, said that while she was appearing with Louis C.K. on a television pilot in 2005, he asked if he could masturbate in front of her. She declined.

Now, after years of unsubstantiated rumors about Louis C.K. masturbating in front of associates, women are coming forward to describe what they experienced. Even amid the current burst of sexual misconduct accusations against powerful men, the stories about Louis C.K. stand out because he has so few equals in comedy. In the years since the incidents the women describe, he has sold out Madison Square Garden eight times, created an Emmy-winning TV series, and accumulated the clout of a tastemaker and auteur, with the help of a manager who represents some of the biggest names in comedy. And Louis C.K. built a reputation as the unlikely conscience of the comedy scene, by making audiences laugh about hypocrisy — especially male hypocrisy.

Leigh Corfman says she was 14 years old when an older man approached her outside a courtroom in Etowah County, Ala. She was sitting on a wooden bench with her mother, they both recall, when the man introduced himself as Roy Moore.

It was early 1979 and Moore — now the Republican nominee in Alabama for a U.S. Senate seat — was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. He struck up a conversation, Corfman and her mother say, and offered to watch the girl while her mother went inside for a child custody hearing.

“He said, ‘Oh, you don’t want her to go in there and hear all that. I’ll stay out here with her,’ ” says Corfman’s mother, Nancy Wells, 71. “I thought, how nice for him to want to take care of my little girl.”

Alone with Corfman, Moore chatted with her and asked for her phone number, she says. Days later, she says, he picked her up around the corner from her house in Gadsden, drove her about 30 minutes to his home in the woods, told her how pretty she was and kissed her. On a second visit, she says, he took off her shirt and pants and removed his clothes. He touched her over her bra and underpants, she says, and guided her hand to touch him over his underwear.

Minnesota state Sen. Dan Schoen sexually harassed women involved in state politics while serving as a DFL lawmaker, according to multiple women who have spoken to MinnPost. Schoen, currently a first-term senator from Cottage Grove, previously served two terms in the House. He also works as a paramedic and police officer in Cottage Grove.

The women describe behavior by Schoen that ranges from persistent and unwanted invitations to meet to physically grabbing a woman from behind. One woman, who asked to not be identified, said he sent her a photo of male genitalia via Snapchat.

Schoen, who was presented with the allegations in a meeting with MinnPost, was aware of each incident but said in a subsequent statement that the allegations are “either completely false or have been taken far out of context. It was never my intention to leave the impression I was making an inappropriate advance on anyone. I feel terrible that someone may have a different interpretation of an encounter, but that is the absolute truth. I also unequivocally deny that I ever made inappropriate contact with anyone.”

“Despite this, if any of my actions or words have ever made another person feel uncomfortable or harassed, I deeply regret it and truly apologize,” Schoen continued. “This is not who I am nor is it the person I would want anyone to feel I am.”

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press. In other cases, journalists directed by Weinstein or the private investigators interviewed women and reported back the details.

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories. Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally. He also enlisted former employees from his film enterprises to join in the effort, collecting names and placing calls that, according to some sources who received them, felt intimidating.

In some cases, the investigative effort was run through Weinstein’s lawyers, including David Boies, a celebrated attorney who represented Al Gore in the 2000 Presidential-election dispute and argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court. Boies personally signed the contract directing Black Cube to attempt to uncover information that would stop the publication of a Times story about Weinstein’s abuses, while his firm was also representing the Times, including in a libel case.

First, I would like to thank all my supporters for the how they came through for me, in ways completely above and beyond, during both the 2014 and 2016 election cycles. As you all know, we came so incredibly close both cycles. As much as I am warmed by your unwavering support, I feel that in a way I let you down and need to explain our loss in the 2016 cycle, a loss of only 2,009 votes. As you know our campaign could not, and did not, coordinate with any outside groups, but we were aware of their publicly available ad buy reservations while we were structuring our media strategy in the final weeks. When the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) pulled their ad buy from our race two weeks before election day, it was a blow that we were not able to recover from. Even if I wanted to reach deeper into my own pocket to replace that broadcast media exposure, there wasn’t enough time to do so. The NRCC succeeded in doing something the Democrats were unable to do, leave us flat footed and unable to mount a commensurate campaign. I do very much thank those outstanding folks at Congressional Leadership Fund who stood with us until the end, matching Nancy Pelosi’s House Majority PAC’s ad buys against me. It is inexcusable that the NRCC hung me out to dry and left me vulnerable to the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee’s media attacks by shifting their planned ad buy to an incumbent, an incumbent who won by very solid double digits.

Secondly, I have decided not to have my name on the ballot this election cycle, this is not a cycle I feel comfortable with. In my study of this coming cycle, the Democrats have an impressive offensive strategy. The best encapsulation of this was yesterday by Nathan Gonzales: “Democrats have an impressive group of challengers — retired Navy SEALs and Army Rangers, former CIA operatives, prosecutors and businesswomen and -men who have grown multimillion-dollar companies. Even a scientist who develops life-changing cures is among the fresh crop of Democratic recruits… these are serious individuals mounting credible campaigns.” The Republicans, in my direct and personal experience, are recruiting folks without a strategy, polling, or an explainable path to victory. In my opinion, these candidates will be the sacrificial lambs the NRCC will build their incumbent protection strategy upon. If there is a meaningful change of leadership and priorities at the NRCC, I might be open to looking at another run in the 2020 cycle.

Thirdly, while my name probably will not appear on any ballot in 2018, I intend to be VERY involved in policy and politics this cycle. This should speak for itself, I ask not to be contacted by media as I am currently immersed in getting my planned initiatives off the ground. When I am ready to unveil my projects, that will be the time to talk about them publicly.

Of course, things change, and as things change I will continue to review options and possibilities, but at the present time I plan not to run for any office this cycle.

Thank you to all my awesome supporters!
-Stewart Mills

A Harvey man's contention that he was denied his constitutional right to an attorney when New Orleans police ignored his request for a "lawyer dog" two years ago was rejected by the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Justices voted 6-1 last week to deny the writ application of Warren Demesme, who awaits trial in Orleans Parish on charges of first-degree rape and indecent behavior with a juvenile under 13.

Demesme, 24, was arrested in October 2015 on allegations that he sexually assaulted two juvenile victims, including the rape of one preteen girl. He faces a mandatory life sentence if convicted of the rape charge.

(snip)

The ambiguity, Crichton wrote, was contained within Demesme's tortured syntax as he told police, "If y'all, this is how I feel, if y'all think I did it, I know that I didn't do it so why don't you just give me a lawyer dog cause this is not what's up." "In my view, the defendant's ambiguous and equivocal reference to a 'lawyer dog' does not constitute an invocation of counsel that warrants termination of the interview(," Crichton wrote."

Are we to believe that New Orleans detectives who are interrogating a suspect would stare in incomprehension if a suspect says, "Gimme a lawyer, dog?" Let's say those detectives asked a person where he lived and that person said, "Kenner, brah," would police go looking for "Kennerbrah" on a map?

Of course not. That's why Justice Chrichton's written opinion is so problematic. It makes a suspect's use of the vernacular grounds for the state ignoring that suspect's request for legal counsel. The ruling pretends to not know how real human beings, including real Louisianians, talk. It pretends to be wholly unfamiliar with the vernacular when that's just about all anybody around here speaks.