Names and faces
■ Taylor Swift was announced by Time Magazine as 2023’s person of the year on Wednesday. She beat out a widely varied shortlist of candidates which included Barbie, King Charles III and Vladimir Putin among others. The honor went to Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year. “Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light,” Sam Jacobs, Time’s editor in chief, wrote. “Swift is the rare person who is both the writer and hero of her own story.” Commercially, 2023 was a success for Swift thanks to her concerts in “The Eras Tour” and a concert film released in October based around the tour itself. Along with rerecorded versions of her albums “Speak Now” and “1989” being released, her 2019 song “Cruel Summer” finally topped the Billboard Hot 100. Based off of an interview that they did with Swift, Time’s cover story included bits of information all correlating to the last year and other important events in her life. Swift shared details of how she started dating Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, along with her future rerecording of the 2017 “Reputation” album and her feelings on a public feud that she previously had with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian in the mid 2010s.
■ Sean “Diddy” Combs has had another lawsuit filed against him, this one accusing him of rape. The woman, who was not named in the court papers, said that Combs and two other men gangraped her in a New York recording studio 20 years ago when she was only 17 years old. The woman says in the suit that she had met Harve Pierre, the former president for Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment, in Michigan before being flown out with him on a private plane to meet Combs. Once she had arrived to the studio, she claimed that Combs, Pierre and a third unnamed man all took turns raping her after she had been given drugs and alcohol. Her lawyers said that they brought the claim under New York City’s Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, which allows accusers to file civil complaints involving sexual assault claims after the statute of limitations has run out. The lawsuit comes after Combs had three separate lawsuits filed against him last month. All three accused him of abuse and sexual assault, with the situations varying depending on the woman involved.