Month: July 2022

Bill Russell had more N.B.A. championship rings than he had fingers and as many Most Valuable Player Awards as all other Boston Celtics players combined.

But in the hours after Russell’s family announced his death on Sunday, N.B.A. players remembered him as so much more.

Legend. Trailblazer. “Everything we all aspired to be,” Isiah Thomas, the Hall of Fame point guard from the Detroit Pistons, said in a post on Twitter.

Russell, 88, spent 13 seasons with the Celtics in the 1950s and 1960s, including three as a player-coach. He was the first Black coach in the N.B.A., and he was known for his civil rights activism during and after his playing days. He has remained visible around the N.B.A. as a fan, mentor and symbol of greatness. The finals M.V.P. trophy is named after him, and he would often attend games wearing a purple hat with the initials of one of his favorite players, Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in 2020.

Players across basketball generations hailed him on Sunday.

From the 1980s, there were Thomas and another Hall of Fame point guard, Magic Johnson of the Lakers.

“Bill Russell was my idol,” Johnson said on Twitter, citing Russell’s basketball talent and position on the “front line fighting for social justice.”

He continued: “Despite all of his achievements, he was so humble, a gentle giant, a very intelligent man, and used his voice and platform to fight for Black people.”

Michael Jordan, who dominated the 1990s with the Chicago Bulls, said in a statement that Russell was a “pioneer.”

“He paved the way and set an example for every Black player who came into the league after him, including me,” Jordan said. “The world has lost a legend.”

Notable players from the 2000s also spoke of Russell with reverence and a warmth that showed the Celtics icon’s lasting influence in the league.

“I can go on all day about what u meant to me,” Paul Pierce, the Celtics Hall of Famer, said in a tweet.

Pierce, too, called Russell a “pioneer” and “trailblazer.” He also mentioned his “great laugh” and shared a picture of Russell talking with Pierce and other N.B.A. players. “I’ll never forget this day we was like kids sitting around a camp fire listening to your stories,” Pierce wrote.

Pau Gasol, whose Lakers faced Pierce in the finals twice, shared a picture on Twitter of himself with Russell, calling him “one of the most dominant players in @NBA history.”

“I’ll forever be honored to have met you,” he said.

Players from the 2010s and present day also pointed to Russell’s humor, activism and basketball skill.

Noting on Twitter that there was no 3-point line or social media during Russell’s heyday, Celtics guard Marcus Smart posted a list of Russell’s accomplishments.

“Just played and dominated in a day and a league that was def not soft,” Smart said.

Smart’s teammate Jaylen Brown shared a photo of Russell with Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Jim Brown in 1967, when a group of Black athletes were showing support for Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam War.

Calling Russell “one of the greatest athletes ever,” Brown said: “Thank you for paving the way and inspiring so many Today is a sad day but also great day to celebrate his legacy and what he stood for.”

In recent years, N.B.A. players — Brown included — have more prominently carried on Russell’s legacy of civil rights activism. Phoenix Suns guard Chris Paul, who was the president of the players’ union during its social justice efforts after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, also posted about Russell on Twitter on Sunday.

“Unapologetically himself at all times!! The ultimate leader and just happened to be one of the best hoopers ever! RIP Mr Russell, you will be dearly missed,” he wrote.

AUSTIN, Texas — When viral lies harm private people, are the courts their best refuge? A trial to decide how much the conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones must pay a Sandy Hook family for defaming them attempts to answer that question.

Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, the parents of Jesse Lewis, 6, who died at Sandy Hook, are requesting $150 million in compensatory damages for years of torment and threats they endured in the aftermath of Mr. Jones’s lies about them on Infowars, his Austin-based website and broadcast. They are suing him in the first of three trials in which juries will decide how much he must pay relatives of 10 people killed in the Dec. 14, 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., for spreading lies that they were actors in a “false flag” operation, planned by the government as a pretext for gun control.

Last year Mr. Jones lost a series of Sandy Hook defamation cases by default, setting the stage for the damages trials.

Mr. Heslin, Ms. Lewis and J.T. Lewis, Jesse’s brother, will testify this week.

More important than money, the parents said, is society’s verdict on a culture in which viral misinformation damages lives and destroys reputations, yet those who spread it are seldom held accountable. “Speech is free, but lies you have to pay for,” Mark Bankston, the parents’ lawyer, told the jury in his opening statement last week. “This is a case about creating change.”

But the trial demonstrates how difficult it is to counter the views of die-hard conspiracy theorists. Over nearly three days of testimony last week, Daria Karpova, Infowars’ corporate representative, advanced bogus claims, refusing even to rule out the possibility that the trial itself was a staged event. She cast Mr. Jones as the victim, worrying over his health and saying the Sandy Hook lawsuits have cost him “millions.”

That claim allowed the families’ lawyers to share records with the jury showing that Infowars reaped revenues of more than $50 million annually in recent years.

At the heart of the trial is a June 2017 episode of NBC’s “Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly,” in which Ms. Kelly profiled Mr. Jones. In the broadcast Mr. Heslin protested Mr. Jones’s denial of the shooting. He recalled his last moments with Jesse, saying, “I held my son with a bullet hole through his head.”

Afterward, Mr. Jones and Owen Shroyer, a lieutenant of Mr. Jones at Infowars, aired shows implying that Mr. Heslin had lied. “Will there be a clarification from Heslin or Megyn Kelly?” Mr. Shroyer said on Infowars. “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”

Lawyers say the three trials hold lessons for other cases against conspiracy-minded defendants, from the Jan. 6 insurrectionists to Trump allies sued for falsely claiming that voting machine manufacturers helped “steal” the 2020 presidential election. Mr. Jones is also under scrutiny for his role in events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

“These Sandy Hook parents have spent years of their lives and sacrificed whatever is left of their privacy to shine a light on peddlers of disinformation, not only to seek justice for their children, but to make folks who profit from tragedy consider the consequences of their actions,” said Karen Burgess, a trial lawyer at Burgess Law in Austin who represented Dominion Voting Systems when it was sued by Texas conspiracy theorists who said the company helped rig the 2020 vote. Facing sanctions from the court, the conspiracy theorists dropped their suit against the company.

Lawyers for the Sandy Hook families say a verdict, expected this week in the first trial, could send a signal to other conspiracy purveyors about the cost of online lies and set into motion a chain of events that could shut Infowars down.

Still, the path forward is not clear. On Friday Mr. Jones put Infowars’ parent company, Free Speech Systems, into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which usually automatically halts all pending litigation. Free Speech Systems, however, requested that the bankruptcy court lift that automatic stay, so the trial in progress can continue to a verdict. That motion is set for a hearing Monday morning in a bankruptcy court in Victoria, Texas. Judge Maya Guerra Gamble of the Travis County District Court indicated that the trial would proceed.

Lawyers for the families say a big jury award this week along with the bankruptcy could threaten Infowars’ operations, but many details about Mr. Jones’s current finances are murky.

For now the filing puts on hold the remaining two Sandy Hook damages trials, both scheduled for September.

In court last week, Mr. Jones’s lawyers launched a defense advanced by other defendants in politically charged defamation cases: Our national discourse has become so polluted by disinformation, they said, that who really knows what is true or false?

Federico Andino Reynal, Mr. Jones’s lawyer, blamed errors in mainstream media reports about Sandy Hook for the bogus theories spread by Mr. Jones.

“He had seen what he perceived as so many lies and so many cover-ups and so much hand-washing of the facts that he had become biased,” Mr. Reynal said. “He was looking at the world through dirty glasses. And if you look at the world through dirty glasses, everything you see is dirty.”

But Infowars staffers testified that they did not check easily available facts about Sandy Hook — or much else — before broadcasting their incendiary assertions. Lawyers for Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis, using internal emails and testimony from Infowars staffers, showed how Mr. Jones and his top lieutenants ignored multiple warnings that continuing to broadcast Sandy Hook lies would harm the survivors and land Infowars in legal trouble.

In a videotaped deposition, a former employee, Rob Jacobson, said he repeatedly delivered these warnings to Infowars staffers, “only to be received with laughter and jokes.”

The NBC episode, which was shown in court, was particularly striking. In it Mr. Jones made a variety of damaging false claims, including dismissing a 2017 suicide bombing that killed 22 adults and children at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, as an attack on “a bunch of liberal trendies,” who support “Islamist” immigration.

Mr. Shroyer also testified that he failed to fact-check a false report on the episode defaming Mr. Heslin because he did not have the time.

At the trail last week, Mr. Jones’s seat at the defense table often remained empty. His lawyer, Mr. Reynal, has declined to say whether he will testify, adding that Mr. Jones is in charge of his defense. Mr. Reynal told the judge that Mr. Jones’s absences were because of a “medical condition” that Mr. Jones, speaking outside the courthouse, described as an untreated hernia.

But he continues to broadcast his show, where he and Mr. Shroyer derided the trial last week, violating the judge’s order not to comment on it. When Mr. Jones did come to court, he drove up in a motorcade and sat in the courtroom surrounded by bodyguards. Last week Mr. Reynal thrust a raised middle finger into the face of the families’ lawyer in a dispute over exhibits that nearly ended in a fistfight.

The trial proceedings have taken a toll on Mr. Heslin and Ms. Lewis. They hired security after they spotted people waiting for them outside their hotel, and they have heard Infowars loyalists describe them as pawns in Mr. Jones’s pursuit of online clout.

During his testimony in court on Thursday, Mr. Shroyer suggested that it was the lawsuits, not his and Mr. Jones’ lies, that exacerbated the families’ suffering. “I’m very upset that this continues,” he said, citing its “tremendous negative effects on my career and livelihood.”

Richelle DeVoe was two weeks shy of closing on a house with her partner of 10 years, when their relationship imploded. Her future suddenly snapped into focus: She was 30 and had a successful career as a marketing strategist, but she’d never feel truly secure without a permanent roof over her head.

She took a leap in 2019 and bought an investment property, a duplex in Missoula, Mont., intending to live in one unit and rent the other. “It was the crappiest house on the block,” she said.

But it was what she could afford. “I made the decision entirely from a financial standpoint,” she said. “What I didn’t realize was how much confidence and pride and empowerment I’d feel.”

She added, “It had so many tangential benefits, that emotional feeling of ‘I did this,’ and I did this for me’.”

Investing in real estate or becoming a landlord has inherent stress, especially in a volatile market. But many women seeking independence, especially after a breakup or divorce, have discovered emotional empowerment and even healing. They’ve conquered a steep learning curve, often in the face of skepticism. And they’ve found a unique support system, where excising relationship ghosts is as important as learning to negotiate interest rates.

“You have a group of women who are really looking to develop themselves personally,” said Becky Nova, 38, a cancer researcher in New York City who started an organization called Lady Landlords in March 2020. “We’re not crocheting. We’re building generational wealth.”

Women comprise nearly one third of the membership of the National Real Estate Investors Association. But a decade ago, the women were often part of wife-husband investor teams, said Charles Tassell, the chief operating officer of the association. Today, “the 30 percent holds, but they’re not spouses,” he said. “There are more single, individual women coming in. Not remnants of a couple.”

Communities designed to support female real estate investors have also seen steady growth. Lady Landlords and Real Estate InvestHER have engaged Facebook followings and loyal podcast audiences. They also host local meet-ups and annual conferences and offer paid mentoring services. Ms. Nova charges $2,400 for a three-month coaching package. An annual mentorship program with Real Estate InvestHER costs $7,500.

In their language and mission, both groups say that taking care of yourself mentally and emotionally is critical to building a successful business.

‘This is exactly what I need.’

Elizabeth Faircloth, 44, a co-founder of Real Estate InvestHER, lives with her husband in New Hope, Pa. In 2004, they began investing in real estate together, but over the next decades, the financial strain of the recession and later becoming a mother left her reeling.

“I started to lose myself. I’m working with my husband and building a business, but trying to figure out my identity as a new mom and married woman,” she said.

In 2015, she connected with Andresa Guidelli, a Brazilian immigrant who lived in Chestnut Hill, Pa. The women soon joined forces, flipping dozens of properties and building new construction. By 2017, over chats at Panera Bread, they began talking about creating their own women-led group for female peers.

But Ms. Faircloth cautioned Ms. Guidelli, who was in the middle of ending her marriage.

“I remember Liz telling me, ‘I don’t think this is a good time for you. You’re going through a divorce,’” Ms. Guidelli recalled. “And I said, ‘this is exactly what I need.’”

It turned out that Ms. Faircloth, though happily married, needed it too. “I have my own identity. My own place in my life that is mine. It wasn’t in the shadows of my husband,” she said.

Ms. Faircloth and Ms. Guidelli began InvestHER in 2018. “We need to do this for other women. How do they balance their life and create financial freedom on their own terms?” Ms. Faircloth recalled thinking.

Today they have a podcast, a meet-up group with 56 chapters and a 12,000-member Facebook page that caters to budding investors. Strive, their application-only membership program, mentors seasoned investors who are looking to scale up and need systems to manage large teams.

“We leverage the knowledge and experience of other women in everything from syndication, self storage, small multis, midterm rentals, you name it,” said Ms. Guidelli. “When investors rely on their own experiences, they limit their growth.”

Ms. Faircloth said the organization helps women “balance their life and create financial freedom on their own terms.” She added, “We talk about being on a journey, not the destination. You could be financially free. You could have all the money in the bank. But it’s not, ‘I got the duplex, I got the six-plex.’ Because there will be another thing. It’s meaningless if you’re not enjoying it.”

Stacey Conte, 34, discovered the Real Estate InvestHER community shortly after ending her marriage in 2018. Court records show a history of domestic abuse. “I really had no support system at the time of my divorce,” she said. The group filled that gap, especially the other women she met who started investing “when they made the transition to being a single mom.”

Ms. Conte said she wanted to create the same security for others, so she started rehabbing properties for Section 8, the federal program that subsidizes rent for low-income households. “A lot of applicants on Section 8 are single moms,” she said.

In early 2022, Ms. Conte and her business partner, Betsy Tinervin, who is also a single mother, bought three boarded up cottages on a busy road in Lakeland, Fla. They gutted them, repainted them in cheerful colors and installed a wooden fence and security system “to give moms and kids a sense that they have their own space,” Ms. Conte said.

In each renovation, the women are trying to send the future occupants a message: “You will figure it out, you have options, you’re not stuck, you’re not the negative words projected on you.”

Ms. Conte has found a balance in her business between making money and nourishing her soul.

Alexia Ealey, a travel nurse who lives in Dothan, Ala., also began investing after a failed relationship. She said she helped her ex-boyfriend with a transportation business, but she said it was more his dream than hers. “I felt like I put everything on hold to push someone else’s wagon when I should have been pushing my own,” said Ms. Ealey, 32.

She sold her own home and used the money to buy four single-family houses in need of renovations. She lived with her parents while rehabbing them. Today, she primarily rents them to other travel nurses.

“I felt like I owned myself, like that was a form of self-love to go back and redeem my dream, my path,” Ms. Ealey said. “I went from being heartbroken, lost, confused, and in just one year, I was able to turn that into having about half a million in assets.”

During the process, she became active in both the Lady Landlords and Real Estate InvestHER Facebook communities, heartened to meet others like herself. “So many went from being married and in relationships and ended up losing everything, but took the little money they had and put it into real estate,” she said.

Their stories alleviated her fears that she’d taken too big a risk.

Gender Bias

But there are pitfalls, often related to gender bias. One 2020 paper from the Yale School of Management found that single women see much lower returns from buying and selling real estate than single men.

The Lady Landlords and Real Estate InvestHER message boards are full of questions and complaints about how to address unequal treatment. “I’ll get one post that’s ‘Hey, what type of flooring should I buy,’” said Ms. Nova. “And one post that’s ‘Hey, contractors showed up and asked where my husband was or I have a male tenant and he’s not paying rent, what’s the best way to ask for it safely?”

Ms. DeVoe said she felt a hefty dose of impostor syndrome during the renovation process. “Working with contractors was a nightmare being a woman,” she said. On the job site, if her father was around, the men would always address him. “And my dad being this wonderful human would be like ‘I’m not the boss, you have to talk to her.’ And they’d look confused.”

Even the paperwork smacked of sexism, she said. On Ms. DeVoe’s property deed, right beside her signature, are three words in all-caps: AN UNMARRIED WOMAN. “I was like, you guys are rubbing it in my face,” she said. (The state of Montana does not require deeds to list marital status.)

Gender bias can hit all layers of real estate investing, said Mr. Tassell of the real estate investors association. It’s important for investors, especially women, to keep their guard up when visiting job sites or meeting tenants at off hours: “With self-care also comes self-defense,” he said.

Because women face discrimination in the industry, “they have to be a little more careful and conscientious about whether someone is preying on them or not,” he said.

Real estate investing isn’t simple. It requires strategic thinking, negotiating chops and a specific knowledge base. “You get ripped off quite a bit, but you learn,” said Cathy Dilger, a 58-year-old designer who has been investing since 1994. “It’s truly a field of hard knocks learning.”

Being a landlord can be highly stressful, but she found that her passive income from her 21-unit portfolio allowed her to “take a breath and sit back” instead of scrambling for work, after she divorced last year. “I get to discover what I am passionate about,” she said. “I forgot.”

In June, she joined about 400 women in Charlotte, N.C., for InvestHER Con, a two-day conference, that Real Estate InvestHER billed as a “full circle transformational experience.”

There was a nursing and relaxation room. Attendees were encouraged to take “mindful breaks,” where they could network or recharge. Ms. Guidelli said she was so overcome by the sight of women lining up at the microphone that she broke down crying.

On the first day, participants were asked to close their eyes and envision themselves five years in the future: Where were they? How did they feel?

Despite the dissolution of her marriage, which Ms. Dilger called “devastating,” she said she realized, “I’ve got this. I’m healthy. I’m comfortable. I feel good.”

It’s a feeling that women in the industry describe as accomplishing something significant on their own.

Ms. DeVoe is now engaged and she’s given the potential division of her assets some thought: “I’ve made this home, this beautiful, nurturing place to be,” she said. “I’ve told my partner that I’ll share our income moving forward, but the duplex is mine.”