The Guardian Reports
The father of a women's world champion athlete today angrily denied accusations that the teenager was secretly born a man, insisting: "She is my little girl."
Caster Semenya, 18, is undergoing a gender test to prove she is female after beating her rivals by a huge margin to win the gold medal in the world championship 800 metres in Berlin.
Family, friends and teachers at her home in South Africa recalled how Semenya played football with boys, wore trousers instead of skirts and endured teasing by her peers. But all asserted that she is definitely a woman.
Jacob Semenya, her father, told the Sowetan newspaper: "She is my little girl. I raised her and I have never doubted her gender. She is a woman and I can repeat that a million times."
He attacked his daughter's critics, saying: "For the first time South Africans have someone to be proud of and detractors are already shouting wolf. It is unfair. I wish they would leave my daughter alone."
Semenya, who has a muscular build and deep voice, aroused suspicions recently with a dramatic improvement in performance. She went from a virtual unknown to the world's fastest woman over 800m this year when she clocked 1:56.72 at the African junior championships in Mauritius. She sliced more than a second off that with her winning time of 1:55.45 in Berlin on Wednesday.
Athletics' world governing body has asked South African officials to conduct a "gender verification test". The test, which takes weeks to complete, requires a physical medical evaluation, and includes reports from a gynaecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, an internal medicine specialist and an expert on gender.
There is bewilderment and indignation over the controversy in Fairlie, the impoverished village in Limpopo province where Semenya practised her running on dirt roads and poorly kept playing fields. She lived with her grandmother while at secondary school and grew up without electricity or running water.
Her grandmother, Maphuthi Sekgala, said: "I know she's a woman – I raised her myself. She called me after [the heats] and told me that they think she's a man. What can I do when they call her a man, when she's really not a man? It is God who made her look that way."
The 80-year-old added that Semenya had been teased when growing up because of her boyish looks. "If the teasing hurt her, she kept the hurt to herself and didn't show what she was feeling," she told South Africa's Times newspaper.
The athlete's mother said doubts about her daughter's gender were motivated by jealousy. Dorcus Semenya told the Star: "If you go to my home village and ask any of my neighbours, they would tell you that Mokgadi [Caster] is a girl. They know because they helped raise her. People can say whatever they like but the truth will remain, which is that my child is a girl. I am not concerned about such things."
A picture emerged of Semenya as a tomboy who transgressed the rigid gender roles of South Africa's traditional rural communities. Her mother said Caster's first love was football.
"Often I would ask her why she kept playing soccer, and with boys. All she said was, 'It's because I like it.' With her, everything was about soccer, soccer." Semenya was the only girl in the football team in Fairlie. Her former teachers spoke with pride about her prowess but admitted they had not always been certain of her gender. Eric Modiba, head of the Nthema secondary school, where Semenya was a pupil from 2004 until last year, said: "She was a happy child – I never saw her angry. She had a lot of friends, both boys and girls. She excelled at sport, especially athletics and football, which she played very well.
"I have never seen her in a skirt or dress, always trousers. Initially we doubted her gender but eventually we realised she's a girl. We've seen her birth certificate and her file from primary school. At about the age of 16 she started to associate with other girls and try different hairstyles. But she never developed breasts."
Morris Gilbert, a spokesman for Pretoria University's sports department, where Semenya is now a sports science student, said the issue of her gender had not been raised. "We are all very proud of her and of what she's achieved," he said. "The university stands behind her all the way."
The runner's coach, Michael Seme, laughed off the allegations, saying that Semenya fielded constant questions about whether she was a boy from younger athletes when training. "Then she has to explain that she can't help the fact that her voice is so gruff and that she really is a girl. The remarkable thing is that Caster remains completely calm and never loses her dignity when she is questioned about her gender."
Semenya had been "crudely humiliated" a few times and the closest Seme said he had seen her to anger was earlier this year when some people wanted her barred from using a women's toilet. "Then Caster said, 'Do you want me to pull down my pants that you can see?' Those same people came to her later and said they were extremely sorry."
Semenya also received the backing of the governing African National Congress, which called on South Africans to rally around "our golden girl".
The ANC said: "We condemn the motives of those who have made it their business to question her gender due to her physique and running style. Such comments can only serve to portray women as being weak."
The ANC's youth league condemned the "racist agenda" of "imperialist countries", while the Young Communist League argued: "This smacks of racism of the highest order. It represents a mentality of conforming feminine outlook within the white race."
Semenya herself is said to be bemused by the speculation. Phiwe Mlangeni-Tsholetsane, the South African team manager in Berlin, said: "She said to me she doesn't see what the big deal is all about. She believes it is a God-given talent and she will exercise it."
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NYDailyNews Reports
The latest nude photo scandal to hit young Hollywood involves "Twilight" star Ashley Greene.
Photographs showing the 22-year-old actress baring all for the camera were leaked onto the Internet on Monday.
But don't bother trying to find them on the Web. The actress' attorneys quickly took action and pulled down all the risqué pictures posted online.
"The photos in question, which appear to be of our client, are illegal and are being unlawfully displayed," her lawyer said in a statement. "Our client intends to take legal action."
Greene's legal team also confirmed to PerezHilton.com that the pictures are legit.
"Ms. Greene is the owner of the copyrights in these photos, and as copyright owner, Ms. Greene owns the exclusive rights, among others, to reproduce, distribute, and to display the photos."
The actress appeared Sunday at the Teen Choice Awards in Los Angeles, where she accepted the Choice Fresh Face Female award. Her hit vampire flick dominated the event and raked in 11 surfboard trophies.
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TimesOnline Reports
An actor who appears in the Harry Potter films today admitted growing cannabis.
Jamie Waylett, 19, who plays bully Vincent Crabbe, pleaded guilty to growing 10 plants in tents at his mother’s home.
The teenager and his friend, John Innis, 20, were arrested when Waylett took a photograph of police as the pair drove past officers.
Innis’s black Audi was then searched and police discovered a knife and eight bags of cannabis. They also discovered pictures of the cannabis plants on the digital camera that led them to Waylett’s mother’s house in Kilburn, northwest London.
After searching the premises they found 10 cannabis plants.
They also found another three bags of cannabis in Innis’s possession.
Appearing at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court, Waylett, of Kilburn, North London, admitted production of cannabis during his first court appearance.
Innis, from Barnet, North London, admitted possession of a knife and having 11 bags of cannabis. The pair are due to be sentenced next week.
Victoria Oja, for the prosecution, said: “He admitted purchasing seeds and growing them into plants. He confirmed it was for personal use at the time.”
Dressed in a black suit and sky-blue shirt, he sat with his head bowed in the dock after admitting the offence. His lawyer pleaded with the judge not to send him to jail for the sake of his career.
Adjourning the hearing, the chief magistrate, Timothy Workman, said: “Clearly the possession of cannabis is a serious matter and indeed the possession of knives is serious as well.
“At the moment I’m not giving you any promises as to how the court will deal with this case.”
Cheryl Rudden, for the defence, told the court: “He has co-operated fully. He is a young man in the public eye and he has of course done something which is far from approved of in society.
“What I would not want you to do is make an example of him in that way. The effect on him is such that there are possible issues as to his future within his field.”
She said that he had been videoing the road side for a music compilation when he caught the attention of officers.
Waylett played a sidekick of the villain Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films.
The latest instalment in the series, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, went on general release yesterday.
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ESPN Reports
Former NBA All-Star Antoine Walker has been arrested on criminal charges stemming from $822,500 in gambling debts in Las Vegas.
Douglas County sheriff's Sgt. Jim Halsey says Walker was arrested Thursday at a Harrah's Tahoe cabaret bar on Lake Tahoe's south shore.
Deputies were notified of his presence by an employee who had seen a television report about an arrest warrant issued for Walker two days before.
Walker is accused of three felony counts of writing bad checks. Clark County prosecutors say he failed to make good on 10 checks totaling $1 million to Caesars Palace, Planet Hollywood and the Red Rock Resort.
Walker has repaid $178,000 of the debts that were incurred from last July to January.
Walker was released from jail after posting $135,000 cash bail.
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KVBC Reports
He partied and gambled heavily in Las Vegas. And now, another sports figure finds himself in legal "foul trouble."
Tuesday afternoon, a Las Vegas judge issued an arrest warrant for ex-NBA star Antoine Walker. He's facing felony bad check charges for allegedly not paying back some enormous casino debts.
News 3's Steve Crupi is digging deeper into the details of this case and reports that three big casinos are involved.
According to the criminal complaint, Caesars Palace, Planet Hollywood, and the Red Rock Station gave former NBA star Antoine Walker huge amounts of gambling money.
He allegedly received $1 million in all, most of which he has not re-paid.
Walker played last year for the Minnesota Timberwolves. And before that, he was a three-time all-star with the Celtics.
And he is again racking up big numbers, but not on the scoreboard.
The criminal complaint against Walker says he received ten separate casino loans for $100,000. He has failed to pay back more than $800,000-worth of that money, lost gambling last year at Caesars, Planet Hollywood, and the Red Rock.
Walker is not the first sports figure to run up massive unpaid debts. Last year, it was former NBA star Charles Barkley who was late with his payments. He spoke about his love of blackjack back in 2007.
"I like to gamble. I'm going to gamble. I like to gamble, it's my money."
But it's not always a gambler's money: Casinos routinely "loan" players vast sums, having them sign markers that are treated like checks under Nevada law.
The Clark County District Attorney's Office sees a lot of bad check cases involving casinos.
"On a daily basis, we see large amounts of money that people don't repay," confirms prosecutor Bernie Zadrowski.
The arrest warrant for Antoine Walker comes at a time when the NBA's attention is already on Las Vegas, with its summer league in its fifth day. The event features young players, however, most of whom aren't making big money yet.
But one question people always ask is aren't the casinos just as much at fault in these cases? They hand over such big sums of money to people who may not be making the best decisions.
But this is something the casinos don't like discussing.
A court date of July 20 has been set for Antoine Walker; no word yet on whether he's made any arrangements to turn himself in.
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During happier times: Kesha Ni'Cole Nichols showed off her engagement ring as she attended an event with Richard Jefferson in New York on June 13.
It was supposed to be the best day of their lives.
Former New Jersey Nets star Richard Jefferson and onetime Nets dancer Kesha Ni'Cole Nichols were set to tie the knot at the Mandarin Oriental last Saturday, NYPost.com reports.
But in an unexpected turn of events, Jefferson bailed the night before their wedding.
The cold-footed fiancé ditched his stunning bride-to-be at such late notice that some guests had already shown up to the extravagant $2 million event that never took place.
Jefferson — who was traded to the San Antonio Spurs in June — dumped Nichols just before the weekend, according to sources.
Although Nichols, 29, immediately called her family and friends to alert them of the ill-timed news, the basketball pro waited much longer.
"He called about two hours before the wedding. It was nuts," said one Jefferson pal.
Although Jefferson never showed up to the hotel, he made sure to give his best friend his Black Amex credit card, with which the guests made good use of during the night.
A jilted Nichols, who was "not entirely caught off-guard," checked into the hotel and was upgraded to a suite on the 45th floor overlooking Central Park on what would have been her wedding night, according to a source at the hotel.
"She just wants to keep this as quiet as possible and move on," a Nichols family insider told FoxSports. "She's doing just fine."
Neither Jefferson nor Nichols have responded to requests for comment.
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A horrified Belgian woman woke up in a tattoo parlor with 56 stars covering the left side of her face, after, she claims, she only asked for 3, The Daily Mail reports.
Eighteen-year-old Kimberly Vlaeminck is suing Romanian tattoo artist Rouslan Toumaniantz for 10,000 Euros to pay for its removal.
Although Toumaniantz maintains that Vlaeminck asked for all 56 stars and he has the witnesses to prove it, he is willing to split the cost of removal.
"Kimberley is unhappy and it is not my wish to have an unsatisfied client," Toumaniantz said. "There is a way to remove the tattoos with the help of a laser. I accept to pay for half the cost."
Toumaniantz insists that Vlaeminck left his shop happy and satisfied with the job he had done decorating her face. She only started complaining after her father and her boyfriend saw her and were horrified, the Daily Mail says.
Vlaeminck blames the language barrier for the mess up. She asked for the three stars in French and limited English, and she says Toumaniantz didn't understand her.
But the tattoo artist maintains he understood her perfectly.
"She asked for 56 stars and that's what she got," he said.
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Oscar-winning writer-director Steven Soderbergh isn't coy about his motive for casting Sasha Grey in his low-budget indie drama "The Girlfriend Experience." In a movie entirely populated by nonprofessional actors, who better to portray a $2,000-an-hour Manhattan call-girl than one of the most prolific and in-demand adult film stars working the so-called San Pornando Valley?
Still, he cops to a certain degree of exploitation. Soderbergh gave Grey the lead role in the film (which opens Friday) fully intending to milk her X-rated fame for all it is worth. "I was very much counting on the fact that the interest in her would be greater than the interest in the movie," Soderbergh said. "We would be drafting off her notoriety rather than vice versa. I needed her. That's no different than getting Brad Pitt to be in your movie, albeit in a different context."
In that regard, it probably helps that Grey, 21, can be considered a porn star only by the same reductive logic that would characterize Kobe Bryant as merely a "basketball player." The actress -- real name Marina Ann Hantzis -- is professionally distinguished by her take-no-prisoners attitude toward the hardest of hard-core sex scenes and consensual degradation. Aggressively staking a claim for herself in the industry from almost the moment she turned 18, Grey's porn oeuvre extends to more than 150 films -- "Sasha Grey's Anatomy," "House of Sex & Domination" and "Teenage Whores" (parts 2 and 3) being among the few titles printable in a family newspaper. For her ambitiousness, she took home the Adult Video News Awards' female performer of the year in 2008, becoming the youngest person to win.
Moreover, Grey is establishing herself as a burgeoning multimedia mogul. She calls herself a "performance artist," is filming a documentary, writing a graphic novel and a "sex philosophy" book and recently launched her own production company with the twin goals of changing the look of pornography and empowering women.
"Part of the reason I got into this business was to change it," Grey said. "I can take my fantasies and ideas and deliver those to an audience. It's all an extension of who I am."
Dan Miller, editor in chief of AVN magazine, explained what separates Grey from her industry's rank and file. "She brings it in her sex scenes," he said. "She means business. Sasha's been able to showcase a way of going about it, a fearlessness, that has resonated with adult critics and made producers take notice. She's in the top 10 in-demand female performers."
Over lunch in a Hollywood restaurant, picking at a salad she variously described as tasting "like ammonia" and later, wasabi, Grey made working with Soderbergh -- the force behind the blockbuster "Ocean's" franchise as well as more personal projects starring non-pro actors such as "Bubble" and the HBO series "K Street" -- seem like no biggie. Never mind that, outside of adult films, she had never professionally acted (despite having studied theater from age 12 to 18). And that working from a bare-bones plot "outline," she was responsible for improvising her own dialogue.
"Steven wanted a natural quality and for things to be spontaneous," Grey said. "So it was about trying to find a way to bring my training into the film and also leaving room for this open-ended, never-ending surprise that came into each scene."
Grey portrays Chelsea, a high-class escort whose upscale clients enlist her for more than just sexual encounters. She provides them a "GfE" -- the titular "girlfriend experience" -- of simulated romance and faux emotional intimacy. While operating in a high-gloss world of posh hotels, pricey restaurants and designer clothing, the men in her life -- customers, potential pimps, her boyfriend, a nosy journalist and a sleazy escort review blogger known as "the Erotic Connoisseur" -- attempt to control Chelsea as she plies her trade against the real-life backdrop of last fall's stock market crash and presidential election.
As Soderbergh sees it, Grey's day job and ambitiousness lent her portrayal the kind of verisimilitude you can't learn at drama school. He first hatched the idea to hire her for the film after reading a 2006 Los Angeles magazine profile of Grey's first few months in the adult movie business, "The Teenager & the Porn Star."
"I needed somebody who in a sexual situation could be in control and in command," he said. "Sasha has a macro vision of how she is going to conduct herself. She has a five-year plan. That was very similar to the escorts we interviewed before we made the film -- you hear a lot of GfE's talk like that. But it's very unusual in the porn world."
The actress' literary agent, Marc Gerald, is working with Grey on a coffee-table book featuring photos she took on porn sets over the last few years; it will function as a kind of "manifesto" for her singular outlook. The as-yet-untitled book from Vice/MTV Books has a tentative publication date of early next year.He pointed out that the actress operates "to the extreme" in both her business and creative pursuits. "She has an intellectual curiosity you can't force or manufacture," Gerald said.
For her part, Grey -- a petite Sacramento native who speaks with a kind of flat affect and still possesses the physique of a teenage girl -- seemed more interested in talking about her new production company Grey Art than "The Girlfriend Experience." The plan going forward is for her to act as her own manager, work exclusively for herself (rather than one of the big agencies that represent most porn performers) and even direct her own movies.
"All women have the right to be feminist whether you're pro-porn or anti-porn," she said. "But I think it's definitely about continuing to put the control in women's hands. And sending a positive message to our society that every girl in porn is not abused and cracked out."
Grey continued: "I have this brand, I have my name. And I'm going to do what I want because people will buy it. People will enjoy it. So don't tell me I have to follow this formula and sit inside the box. Because I don't."
chris.lee@latimes.com
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