Friday, October 19, 2018

When AJ Met Jason... Episode 7 - Updated



Who is Will Menaker's girlfriend and why is Jason Miller suing her? His girlfriend is Katherine Krueger, the reporter who wrote the September 21 Splinter.com article about a legal filing that claims Miller put an abortion drug in a smoothie then gave it to a stripper who was pregnant with his baby. Jason didn't like the story and filed a $100 million lawsuit against the website and the reporter. He doesn't like the tweet above, either, apparently, because he's added Menaker to the suit: 

Court documents reviewed by The Daily Beast show Miller and his legal team have added Menaker to a $100 milion defamation lawsuit against Gizmodo Media Group and Splinter News reporter Katherine Krueger. (From The Daily Beast, read the article here.) 

Matthew Yglesias commented via tweet...
... and, of course, so did AJ: 



The list of "Previously, on When A.J. Met Jason" posts keeps growing: 


And one more thing. I know lots of words but I admit "homunculus" was new to me, so I looked it up. Here's what dictionary.com says:
  1. an artificially made dwarf, supposedly produced in a flask by an alchemist.
  2. a fully formed, miniature human body believed, according to some medical theories of the 16th and 17th centuries, to be contained in the spermatozoon.
  3. a diminutive human being. 
Friday afternoon update: An interesting tweet from AJ:
I've been watching this story play out ever since I first heard about it in December, 2016 and every now and then, as things have gotten uglier and uglier, I've tried to sort it all out in my head. How did two people who liked each other enough to have sex together two years ago get to the point where they're now trying to destroy each other? Based on everything I'd read so far, it appeared to me that the first act of bad faith was Jason's. When he and AJ started dating in October, 2016, he told her he was separated from his wife and the divorce papers were all typed up, ready to be filed the day after the election. AJ has subsequently said that wasn't true, that she became a "mistress without knowing it," with the clear implication that Jason was never actually separated. It was my belief that from that act of untruthfulness all the subsequent nastiness flowed.

Was Jason really separated after all? Or did he want people to think he was, so he didn't look so bad when it became apparent that he was romantically involved with AJ? (I wrote about the dangers of dating a separated man in When AJ Met Jason, Episode 2. Read it here.) Either way, everyone involved now looks not only bad but unhinged to one degree or another. As I've said before, it can't end well.

Update #2, on Wednesday 10/24. A couple of days ago the New York Times weighed in on all this:

One minor sordid subplot of the Trump era has been the ugly custody battle between Jason Miller, senior communications adviser on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, and A.J. Delgado, a former Trump campaign surrogate. 

Miller and Delgado started an affair during the presidential race; Delgado became pregnant while Miller's wife was pregnant as well. Now Miller and Delgado are involved in a vicious custody battle over their son, which Delgado chronicles on her Twitter feed. 

For all its squalor, this is a story of public interest. It's reportedly the reason Miller didn't become White House communications director, instead signing on to defend Trump as a CNN contributor. 

So it was news when Delgado claimed, in a court filing, that Miller had made a previous girlfriend pregnant and then put abortion-inducing medication in her smoothie. In September the website Splinter, part of Gizmodo Media, reported on the filing, noting that Miller denied the allegations.  

In response, Miller made an aggressive legal move that's becoming more common on the right, suing the report's author, Katherine Krueger, and Gizmodo Media for $100 million. When Krueger's boyfriend, a co-host of the cult left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House, called Miller a "rat-faced baby killer" in a tweet, Miller added him to the suit. Representing Miller are two veterans of the team that sued Gawker Media into oblivion for publishing a sex tape of the wrestler Hulk Hogan, a case partly bankrolled by Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel. (Gizmodo is a spinoff of Gawker.)  

There is an air of dark absurdity about this saga. Miller is unlikely to prevail, because there are broad protections for journalists to report on claims made in legal filings, whether or not they are true. (From a 10/22 Opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg, read it here.)

Saturday morning, update #3: Jason doesn't tweet as much as AJ does, but he did respond to this article.

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