Names and faces
Actress Naya Rivera has been charged with domestic battery in
West Virginia. The Kanawha County sheriff ’s office tweeted Sunday that the 30-yearold actress had been arrested overnight, accused in Chesapeake of domestic battery against her husband. A sheriff’s office statement said Ryan Keith Dorsey told a deputy that Rivera struck him in the head and face. The statement says Dorsey had minor injuries and showed deputies a video that supported his account of the incident. Media reports cited a criminal complaint that says the incident happened while the couple were walking with their child. The sheriff said Rivera was released after being arraigned. Rivera is known for playing Santana Lopez on the hit TV show Glee. Dorsey is also an actor, appearing on shows including Pitch and Nashville.
The husband raised his hand, ready to assert what he considered his right in a male-dominated society. The wife was an accomplished police detective feared by the city’s criminals, whose duties clashed with the expectations at home. There, on the movie screen, he slapped her — and she slapped back. Harder. The audience, about 60 people in a smoke-filled Kabul, Afghanistan, theater, broke into applause. “People love that slap,” said Roya Sadat, the director of A Letter to the President, Afghanistan’s submission for best foreign language film at next year’s Academy Awards. “It’s not easy for the people to accept a woman slapping a man. But the film affects them. The slap is a really enjoyable slap — in fact, it’s a slap to the face of all the injustice women face here.” Sadat and her crew said that simply making A Letter to the President, an effort that took Sadat about seven years, feels like a victory. But the real payoff is the reaction to the slap and the idea that they are succeeding in getting a male-dominated society to empathize with a working woman. “We have always had an oppressor, and an oppressed, but we have had little discussion of the environment in which the accused lives in,” Sadat said. By the accused, she means her protagonist — Suraya, the senior police detective, who ends up accidentally killing her husband while defending herself from another violent outburst. The letter to the president of the movie’s title is hers; she is writing from prison, where she has landed on death row.