In the news
■ A federal jury last week awarded $15 million to Vanessa Bryant after finding that Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and firefighters violated her family’s civil rights by taking and sharing photos of mangled bodies at the site of the 2020 helicopter crash that killed her husband, NBA legend Kobe Bryant; their 13-year-old daughter, Gianna; and seven others.The jury also awarded $15 million to Chris Chester, whose wife, Sarah, and daughter, Payton, were among the deceased. In testimony, deputies and firefighters admitted to showing photos of body parts at a bar, a cocktail party, and an awards gala.The plaintiffs had sought an additional $75 million for emotional distress, but the jury did not award that. Bryant said she would donate the money to her family’s nonprofit sports foundation.
■ Shivon Zilis, an executive at Elon Musk’s brain-chip company Neuralink, claims that the twins she had with Musk last fall were conceived through in vitro fertilization, not through an affair. Zilis has told fellow employees at Neuralink that she was never sexually or romantically involved with Musk, Reuters reported last week.That claim has allowed Musk, 51, and Zilis, 36, to continue working together, despite company policy prohibiting personal relationships between a boss and underling. Musk, who speaks frequently about the dangers of declining birth rates, is father to nine children with three women.
■ Two Floridians pleaded guilty last week to stealing and selling the diary of President
Biden’s daughter Ashley shortly before the 2020 election. Aimee Harris, 40, and Robert Kurlander, 58, admitted they took the diary and other personal items from a home where Ashley Biden, 41, had lived for months.They then sold the diary to the right-wing activist group Project Veritas for $20,000 each.The contents of the diary, which include Ashley Biden’s intimate thoughts about family and recovering from addiction, were eventually published by a different website. Harris and Kurlander are now cooperating with authorities in an ongoing investigation of Project Veritas, which said in a statement that its purchase of the stolen diary was “news gathering” protected by the First Amendment.