Not Unethical, Just…Ick. And Sad.

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

I don’t know how to categorize this. Perhaps the issue is how popular culture and show business make attention junkies out of people, making them do what former “Baywatch” (and “E.T.” !) actress Erika Eleniak is doing: making an exhibition of herself for sickos and fetishists, exchanging any shred of dignity for money.

I confess to always haveing a warm place in my heart for Erika. I first saw her as the girl Elliot kisses like John Wayne kissed Maureen O’Hara in “The Quiet Man” because he was psychically linked to E.T. who was watching the movie on TV. Next time I saw Erika she popped out of a cake naked in “Under Siege,” and then it was on to playing Ellie May Clampett in the movie version of “The Beverley Hillbillies,” then to “Baywatch.” Next came middle age and the fast slide to Hallmark films, then reality shows. Erika had some star power, but she wasn’t exactly Meryl Streep.

Now TMZ brings the depressing report that at 56, Elliot’s true love joined OnlyFans to let foot fetishists pay to see her apparently still-comely feet. Soon she was enticed into more daring peep shows. Erika is earning $10,000 a week, with 1,100 ill people who are eager to pay to gawk at an over-the-hill actress as she debases herself.

I wrote about this phenomenon in April in one of the “Confronting My Biases” posts. But then the OnlyFans sellout was Shannon Elizabeth, whose career, if you can call it that, makes Erika seem like Katherine Hepburn by comparison.

Today Erika has arms covered with tattoos, which, as I wrote recently, is often a symptom of someone coping with deep emotional pain. I can’t find anything exactly unethical in this scenario, except to think that if there weren’t an OnlyFans, someone like Erika would have to find a more promising, nurturing, productive way to find fulfillment in her post-celebrity existance. Now she’s at a dead end, a lucrative one, perhaps, but still perilously close to a life nadir.

In “Nightmare Alley,” Tyrone Power ends up as a carnival geek, biting the heads off of live chickens. That’s worse, certainly, but then his character only starts out as carnival barker who once said of the geek, “I can’t understand how anybody could get so low.”

I wonder what Erika Eleniak, when she was young and gorgeous with what seemed like a vibrant career ahead of her, would have said about women who expose themselves to creepy men, alone, through a video camera in their bedroom.

I’m really sorry, Erika.

So is Elliot.

Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: I Join An Effort To Show How Unethical E. Jean Carroll’s Lawyer Is

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

From the National Legal and Policy Center today:

The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) has filed an appeal of the rejection of its complaint against E. Jean Carroll’s attorney Roberta Kaplan by the Attorney Grievance Committee (AGC) of the New York Supreme Court.

On August 3, the Committee, or rather its Chief Attorney Jorge Dopico, who apparently serves as political gatekeeper, rejected the complaint alleging that Kaplan failed to inform the court or President Trump’s lawyers that Carroll falsely replied in October 2022 to a deposition question about whether anyone else was paying for her lawsuits against President Trump. Carroll replied “No” even though Kaplan knew that the suit was funded by an organization bankrolled by left-wing billionaire and Jeffrey Epstein associate Reid Hoffman.

As the complaint noted, “At that moment, Kaplan knew that answer was false but waited almost six months later until the eve of the trial to correct the record by informing opposing counsel and the court that Hoffman had funded the lawsuits”…

As an exhibit to the Request, Kamenar submitted an Expert Witness Report by noted ethics expert Jack Marshall of ProEthics. His Report concludes: “The deliberate failure of Attorney Roberta Kaplan to follow the requirements of the New York State Bar’s Rules of Professional Conduct was serious and substantial. It caused significant harm to her client’s adversary and the administration of justice in the case at issue, as any distortion of the relevant facts in any matter will. The record, in my expert opinion, demonstrates Ms. Kaplan’s lack of honesty, trustworthiness and competence, rendering her continued engagement in the practice of law to be a threat to the integrity and reputation of the legal profession.”

“If the committee does not reverse the summary dismissal of our complaint, it smacks of a coverup,” Kamenar told the Daily Signal

Readers here know my opinion of Ms. Kaplan’s ethics orientation. I would not publicize the fact that I was hired to issue an ethics opinion for a client, but this client chose to publicize it themselves.

You can read the NLPC appeal here. The original ethics complaint is here. Click here for my Expert Witness Report.

Comment of the Day: “Baseball Ethics Quiz: The Hug”

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

If I have learned one thing writing Ethics Alarms since 2009 is that I don’t know anything, particularly regarding which posts will spark the most interest or the most lively debates. I never expect the usual volume of commentary on my baseball ethics posts (the first ethics post I ever wrote, on the old Ethics Scoreboard, was on baseball: Pete Rose), but yesterday’s quiz regarding Red Sox pitcher Peyton Tolle’s impulsive hug of an opposing player as he applied an inning ending tag spawned commentary that raised some aspects of the incident that I never considered.

Best of all was this Comment of the Day by AM Golden, on “Baseball Ethics Quiz: The Hug.”

[Oh: I’m from Old School Boston. I have always been uncomfortable with hugs of any kind, from any one, for any reason. I have learned over the years when to submit and also when taking the initiative in a hug is expected of me and therefore only polite.]

***

For transparency purposes, I have to disclose that I am a big fan of hugging.

It took a very long time for me to realize that not everyone likes to be hugged, though. Also, that there is a time and a place to hug people.

A workplace setting, for example, that wants to be taken seriously might want to discourage hugging among colleagues and, especially, between superiors and subordinates. An employee that wants to be taken seriously might decide that hugging people in the office undermines that goal. One never knows how another person may react to spontaneous hugging, after all. It might be welcomes, it might be spurned, it might give you an unwanted love interest or it might get you reprimanded by HR.

During a baseball game, a player is expected to be professional. Is it any different from being in a boardroom, a classroom or an examining room?

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Incompetent Elected Official of the Month REDUX & Unethical Apology of the Month Too: Rep.Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.)

/ Jack Marshall / Leave a comment

Wow, it takes some impressive ineptitude to get two “Incompetent Elected Official of the Month” designations in less than 30 days, but this creep was up to the challenge.

Yesterday the House voted 413-2 to censure Edwards. The House Ethics Committee recommended the action after it found last month that he had engaged in unprofessional and inappropriate behavior with two former female staffers. EA wrote about that stage of this episode here.

Edwards then stood up and sort-of-kind-of apologized, but not really, saying,

“I want to say something directly and publicly to the two women who have been at the center of all of this. I am sorry. I’m sorry that my actions, my judgement or the way that I expressed a friendship ever put either of you in an uncomfortable position. My intentions were only grounded in what I understood our friendship to be and in genuine admiration and respect that I had for each of you. Not only as professionals, but as people. I ask each of you, Republican and Democrat alike, to look beyond the headlines and examine what the committee actually found. I am not asking for special treatment, I am asking for fair treatment. I am asking you to decide if the punishment before you is supported by the evidence proportional to the conduct actually established.”

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Reminding Us That The Axis News Media Is Now Trying To “Rig” The 2026 Mid-Terms…

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

Just to get the framing straight: The Axis news media reflexively states that President Trump’s long-standing position that the 2020 Presidential Election was “fixed,” “rigged” or “stolen” is “baseless.” This is, as EA has pointed out many times, deliberate disinformation and the product of pernicious bias.

While it is impossible to prove that the election was “stolen” and that Trump actually won (and thus he should quit saying that, but you know he won’t) there is plenty of basis for the claim that the 2020 election was rigged, etc. The news media sees no “base” for that because the news media is what rigged it.

Indeed, far from being merely a legitimate basis for a theory, the Axis of Unethical Conduct’s powerful journalism wing’s four year-long efforts to mislead, frighten and enrage voters for the purpose of bringing down Trump and his first administration are blazingly etched in the tablets of history like the Ten Commandments are carved in stone by God in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”:

  • The fake “Russiagate” story
  • The routine negative tilt of virtually all Trump Presidency coverage not on Fox News
  • The hostile badgering by the White House Press Corps, exemplified by CNN’s Jim Acosta
  • The press’s cheerleading for the first purely partisan impeachment
  • The fearmongering in the news media to force and support the insane national shutdown during the pandemic, crashing what had been a successful economy under Trump (and making the dubious election procedures used in the election possible).
  • The failure of reporters to raise the already evident issue of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline during the campaign (I noticed it; why didn’t they?)
  • The Hunter Biden laptop cover-up.

Amazingly, that’s not a complete list. Not even close.

Despite some backlash and scattered efforts to reform, the news media is still determined to bring Trump down and reverse his policies. Current and ongoing efforts include vilifying I.C.E, extolling “good illegal immigrants,” promoting the most extreme agenda items of the pro-transsexual fad (or, more properly, social contagion), obsessing over relative trivia (the Kennedy Center, et al.) while burying indisputable policy successes, and broadcasting dubious polls Again, that is a partial list. The lies, spin, misrepresentations and instances of journalists acting as Democratic (and, mirabile dictu, Democratic Socialist/Communist) activists is now intensifying as the 2026 mid-terms approach. The Axis wants the Democrats to control Congress so the President can be neutralized by an endless stream of House impeachments until the end of his term, whereupon Democratic prosecutors can work to put him in jail after as many show trials as it takes. Apparently it also wants non-citizens to vote, elections to be intrinsically untrustworthy, the borders to be open again, as many unborn babies as possible killed, women getting trounced by biological males in women’s sports, a rigged Supreme Court, more crimes in major cities, and permanent discrimination against whites males, among other blessings.

All of this is a long prelude to noting how CNN, through its venerable hack Wolf Blitzer, spread a lie last week about the substance of Trump’s (excellent and necessary) attempt to limit mail-in ballots.

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It’s Sort of Comforting, In A Way, That Ann Coulter Is Just As Big An Unethical Jerk As Way Back When People Took Her Seriously…

/ Jack Marshall / 3 Comments

Here’s Ann on her substack (of course she has a substack) still pounding away on “The Great Replacement” theory:

Americans see videos of thousands of Muslims marching through London and Paris, and say, Europe is finished. Shocked at the unassimilable cultures being dumped on them, Europeans imagine no one has ever suffered so much.

So it’s unanimous. The U.S. is so lucky to have Hispanic immigrants instead of Muslims!

The consensus opinion could not be more wrong. Europe has only just begun its experiment with “multiculturalism.” The U.S. is so far along on this journey, it would be a miracle for the country to survive another half century in any recognizable form.

In addition to being screwed by the sizable group of Americans always clamoring for cheap labor, the U.S. is uniquely screwed by its geography, as pointed out by Harvard professor Samuel Huntington twenty years ago. We are the only developed country that shares a border with a third world country—and that border is 2,000 miles long, protected by a picket fence. Moreover, the income gap between Mexico and America is greater than any other two contiguous countries in the world.

But why not cheer for the U.S. becoming another Mexico, as The Wall Street Journal does? Think of all that cheap labor!

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Campaign Ad Horrors: Are The Candidates Really So Stupid or Do They Think The Public Is So Stupid or Is The Public Really As Stupid As The Candidates Think They Are?

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

One side benefit of having to watch all the Red Sox games as Boston closes in on a serious run for the 2026 World Series is getting a chance to see the various campaign ads for Congressional candidates in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and the other New England states served by the New England Sports Network (NESN) that broadcasts the games to “Red Sox Nation.” Let me rephrase that: getting the chance to see how idiotic the ads are.

The one you see above, by Democrat Chris Pappas, is easily the best of the dozens of ads I have seen, and it’s idiotic—infuriatingly vague, misleading, and using broad innuendos that don’t make any sense.

What restaurant has “VIP sections”? The analogy between a restaurant and Congress is so strained it makes my brain hurt. What does “play by their own rules” mean?

I view any Democrat as ethically estopped from complaining about members of Congress engaging in stock trading. The most powerful Democrat in Congress for decades, Nancy Pelosi, was also the most flagrant beneficiary of Congressional inside trading. The Trump Administration has done a great deal to lower prescription drug prices, but nothing except nationalized health care or government guaranteed income can prevent citizens from having to make choices regarding how to spend their money.

But, again, this is by far the best ad I’ve seen. Several boast that they should be elected to Congress to “stand up to Trump.” What does that mean? The Democrats will vote against anything Trump supports even if its rainbows and lollipops. “Standing up to Trump” means what, making mean faces at him? Insulting him, like members of The Squad or Jasmine Crockett? How does that help constituents? Many also say they will “stand up to” or “oppose” I.C.E. Does that mean they support open borders? Do they not want to get the dangerous illegals out of their constituency? Or are these just meaningless, focus group-tested buzz words? Almost all of them say that if elected they will “bring costs down.” Do they not know that costs as a whole never “come down,” do they think people are so stupid they don’t know that, or are people so stupid they really think that?

Maybe it’s my imagination, but I don’t think so: I remember campaign ads once containing occasional genuine, practical, achievable policy positions. Now its all virtue signaling: Elect me because I hate Trump. Elect me because I don’t like I.C.E. Elect me because I’d really like to do all of these things I won’t have the power to do but at least I have good intentions.

Who are the morons here? Everyone?

Baseball Ethics Quiz: The Hug

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

Peyton Tolle is a Boston Red Sox rookie and already a team mate and fan favorite for his big extrovert personality that matches his huge frame (6’6,” about 260 pounds), highlighted by Tolle’s obvious joy at playing a kid’s game for a living.

In yesterday’s Red Sox 9-8 extra-innings win over the Seattle Mariners (The Red Sox are having one of their most entertaining seasons ever), Tolle, was Boston’s starting pitcher, did something that nobody could recall any previous major league baseball player doing. As you can see above, when the hulking Tolle went to tag out Mariners player Dominic Canzone on the first base line after fielding a bouncer back to him on the mound, he preceded his tag with a smile and a hug.

Some old timers gag when they see opposing team players even chatting cordially at first base. The unwritten rule of baseball was that on the field the other team was literally a mortal foe, and its players were to be treated as such. In the 1960s a player who did what Tolle did would be excoriated, fined, exiled to the manager’s “dog house” and probably demoted to the minors.

Last night the Red Sox players seemed to get a kick out of their exuberant rookie’s latest surprise—he also likes playing tricks on team mates—saying, “That’s Tolle!” as the agreed-upon answer when questioned by reporters after the game. The sports media was all positive, with ESPN calling The Hug “The most wholesome play of the season.”

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Ethics Hero: Tuskegee University President Dr. Mark Brown

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Now and then there are moments when I feel that indeed I have not lived in vain.

Tuskegee University president Dr. Mark Brown (above), a retired Air Force major general, issued a memo to all students of the “traditional black institution” this academic year declaring that all students will be required to follow a dress code right out of 1962.

“The university has developed a new policy for student attire on campus, classroom attendance, and cell phone use in classrooms,” Brown wrote in a message to students. “Tuskegee students now have a dress code for public and professional places. The Student Handbook requires students to arrive on campus with a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting. Students are prohibited from wearing revealing clothing in class, to the cafeteria or in official settings like Convocation. They are also not able to wear bedroom shoes, bonnets, or du-rags to class or the cafeteria. The goal here is not meant to restrict you from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare you with a solid foundation for the workforce you will enter once you leave Tuskegee. Employers are less forgiving and too often presentation may overrule stellar preparation.”

“Tuskegee University continues to prepare the best and brightest for a lifetime of success,” Brown added. “With these changes, we want to ensure every student is as prepared as they can be. I look forward to seeing you in August.”

To which I say,

Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?

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