Posts Tagged ‘Sean “Diddy” Combs’

Within seconds… seconds…of receiving the Batman news, we were flooded by e-mails from PR folks, therapists and life coaches about the implications of Christian Bale‘s assault arrest on the Bat brand. Surprisingly, nobody has written to speculate how the arrest will affect, say, Bale’s mom and sis.

Here’s one interesting missive:

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Reality Check: The L.A. Times is reeling from the embarrassing revelation yesterday that a story linking Sean “Diddy” Combs to the murder of Tupac Shakur was, in a word, bullshit. In a story today by James Rainey (man, does that guy get the bum assignments), the paper does a mea culpa, apologizing for writing a story based on fabricated documents, and giving props to the Smoking Gun for figuring the whole thing out.

Get Out Your Checkbooks: Rap talent manager James Rosemond said the Times article created “a potentially violent climate in the hip-hop community.” His attorney, Jeffrey Lichtman, added: “I would suggest to Mr. Philips and his editors that they immediately print an apology and take out their checkbooks — or brace themselves for an epic lawsuit.”

Questions Remain: We hope this isn’t the last we hear of this story because we still have a ton of questions. For one, Chuck Phillips says he believed the veracity of the forged FBI documents because they were filed in court. So, who filed them? Who masterminded this hoax? So help us, if Ashton Kutcher is involved, we’re gonna throw our computers out the window and move to a farm.

The Smoking Gun reports that the records the LAT used to uncover “new details” in Tupac’s murder were fake. According to the LAT:

Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton said today he will launch an internal investigation into the authenticity of documents used in a story last week asserting that the newspaper had uncovered new evidence implicating associates of rap impresario Sean “Diddy” Combs in a bloody 1994 assault on hip-hop superstar Tupac Shakur.

Stanton ordered the review after the editor of the celebrity-centric website, The Smoking Gun, told the newspaper that he had reason to doubt The Times’ account and in particular the FBI records that were supposed to buttress the story.

The website this morning posted a story saying the records — purportedly statements by an unnamed informant to an FBI agent, which the newspaper posted on its website — appeared to be forgeries. The Smoking Gun (www.thesmokinggun.com ) said the documents seemed suspicious for multiple reasons, including the fact that they appeared to be written on a typewriter, rather than a computer, and included blacked-out sections not typically found in such documents.

Oops.