Huffington (Issue #17)

VETS AND CRIME | SEINFELD | BASEBALL STATS

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

OCTOBER 7, 2012

Message In A Bottle What Couples and Doctors Are Learning About IVF

10.07.12 #17 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: Voter ID Law Blocked, Everett Death Threats, West’s Sex Fantasy MOVING IMAGE DATA: Wild Thing Q&A: Gene Robinson

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MIRACLE BABIES

BY CATHERINE PEARSON

TAUFIQ RAHIM: A Tale of Two Islams DANNY RUBIN: The Perils of Unfriending DOMENICK SCUDERA: All Celebrities Say Stupid Things, and Other Overgeneralizations

FROM TO: UIG VIA GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF JAMIE BEAVERS; GETTY IMAGES (2)

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COMING HOME

BY DAVID WOOD

CELEBRITY: The Disney Nickelodeon Meltdown Club COMEDY: Is Jerry Seinfeld Still Relevant?

THE GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK: J.D. Lewis TFU

ANGER MANAGEMENT

BY ARTHUR DELANEY

FROM THE EDITOR: A Wartime Epidemic ON THE COVER: Photo-Illustration

for Huffington by Dan Saelinger

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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AWartime Epidemic S HUFFPOST’S senior military correspondent, David Wood (who won a Pulitzer in the spring for his Beyond the Battlefield series) has relentlessly put the spotlight on the sacrifices and struggles of America’s veterans.

His story in this week’s issue of Huffington puts a spotlight on the true cost of the wars. “Among the grim repercussions of a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan— the dead, the battle-injured, the wreckage, the wasted billions—is this: while most soldiers return from war and resume a somewhat normal life, many do not,” he writes. Many return to face other

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demons: drug addiction, alcohol abuse or reckless behavior that can lead to fractured families or trouble with the law. The result is what one expert calls “an epidemic”: the estimated 223,000 veterans who are in prison—most of them veterans of Vietnam, but increasingly from Iraq and Afghanistan. David introduces us to 32-year-old Jamie Beavers, who has served two Iraq tours and suffered from PTSD and pill addiction. In February, when he was arrested and spent time in jail, his wife and daughters fled, leav-

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ing him to grapple with wounds that go beyond the physical. “It’s hard,” Beavers says. “I’m just trying to get back into things.”

Arthur Delaney has documented the lives and struggles of those caught in a different epidemic— long-term unemployment. In this issue, he tells the story of Stephen LaRoque, the North Carolina representative who helped engineer a Republican standoff that stopped 47,000 unemployed North Carolinians from receiving their checks. One of those was Kathryn Treadway, an unemployed mother of two, who wrote to LaRoque asking for help. As Delaney writes, LaRoque’s reply, and the events that followed, represent something larger than just one representative squabbling with his constituent. “Republicans at the state and federal levels broadly share his view on the plight of the unemployed, a view that often comes down to a simple, and simplistic, distillation: Able-bodied people who don’t work are just lazy, and it shouldn’t be the government’s job to help them.”

Elsewhere in the issue, Catherine Pearson reports on new

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evidence expanding our understanding of in vitro fertilization and how it may affect subsequent pregnancies. Among the recent findings are that 17 percent of women who gave birth as a result of in vitro fertilization became pregnant again within six years without IVF. CathWhile erine introduces us most soldiers to Michelle, who return from decided to use dowar and resume nor eggs after sufa somewhat fering two miscarnormal life, riages and giving many do not.” birth to a stillborn baby. But shortly after giving birth to a daughter through in vitro fertilization, she found out she was pregnant again, this time with a son. Catherine writes of Michelle’s complex feelings about the different ways her two children were born, but those feelings did not last long. As Catherine puts it, “Both children feel entirely hers, and both feel miraculous.”

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PENNSYLVANIA VOTER ID LAW STRUCK DOWN

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One more swing state setback for Mitt Romney: a lower court judge has ordered that a controversial voter identification requirement in Pennsylvania be postponed until next year.

The law, which would have required registered voters to show a valid photo ID to vote in the presidential election, has become a lightning rod in the debate over voter suppression attempts. While Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett claimed the six-month-old law was designed to prevent voting fraud, the Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House bragged in June that the law “is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.�

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MISSING JOURNALIST SURFACES IN SYRIA

An American journalist who went missing August 13 has turned up in a startling video posted on Youtube and Facebook. Austin Tice, who was covering Syria’s civil war for The Washington Post and McClatchy Newspapers, can be seen blindfolded with captors chanting “God is great” in Arabic as Tice cries “Oh Jesus.” His family confirmed his identity in a statement: “Knowing Austin is alive and well is comforting to our family. Though it is difficult to see our eldest son in such a setting and situation as that depicted in the video, it is reassuring that he appears to be unharmed.”

IT’S A BOY FOR MARISSA MAYER

Newly-minted Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer has given birth to her first child. “Baby boy Bogue born last night. Mom (@marissamayer) and baby are doing great—we couldn’t be more excited!” her husband, Zachary Bogue, tweeted Monday morning. A Yahoo! spokesperson told UK’s Register that Mayer will be “working remotely and is planning to return to the office as soon as possible, likely in 1-2 weeks.”

According to a tweet by Jeff Jarvis, Mayer is crowdsourcing ideas for the baby’s name with “a large-group email.”

ALLEN WEST’S ‘PORN 4 STAR’ FANTASY REVEALED A sordid letter from Rep. Allen West’s (R-Fla.) past may not help him with lady voters. The hand-written letter West reportedly sent his wife from Iraq in 2003 ordering her to be his “porn star” surfaced on Gossip Extra, a site run by former Palm Beach Post staffer Jose Lambiet.

An excerpt: “Angela, I need to know, are you committed to being my porn star? I do not want to hear ‘no’ or ‘we’ll see about that.’” West has voted to defund Planned Parenthood and accused the organization’s proponents of “neutering American men.”

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RUPERT EVERETT COURTS DEATH THREATS

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Rupert Everett’s big mouth has landed him in trouble again. This time he says his explosive comments about gay parenting have put his life in danger. “I’ve now had all this hate mail and there have been death threats, too,” the actor, who is gay, told UK’s Telegraph. “All the queens out there now have it in for me. I’m loathed by them.” Earlier this month, Everett told the Sunday Times Magazine he “can’t think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads.” He has previously advised other gay actors to stay in the closet for the good of their careers.

BACHMANN’S SYNAGOGUE VISIT GOES AWRY

When Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) visited a synagogue in the Chicago area on the eve of Yom Kippur, some congregants walked out and one immediately donated to her Democratic opponent, Jim Graves. “The holiness of the room and the holiness of the evening was greatly diminished for me, if not completely destroyed,” said Gary Sircus, who donated to the Graves campaign even though he does not vote in Minnesota, according to The Chicago Tribune. “Our congregation values and embodies tolerance, compassion, respect for individual rights, intelligence, science— all of the things that I think Michele Bachmann stands against.”

THAT’S VIRAL ONLY IN JAPAN

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

‘SONS OF ANARCHY’ STAR FOUND DEAD

SAMUEL L. JACKSON: ‘WAKE THE F*CK UP’ AND VOTE OBAMA

JOHN STEWART THINKS ROMNEY’S GETTING DUMBER

BY THE DAY

‘WE REALLY MESSED UP’

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Rainbow Family Each July for the past 40 years, people from all walks of life have formed temporary communities called Rainbow Gatherings in America’s national forests. Based on values of non-commercialism, non-violence, peace and love, these are leaderless campsites where money isn’t exchanged and “Welcome home” and “Loving you” are common greetings. The following photos are from a Rainbow Gathering this year in Eastern Tennessee. Participants remained anonymous out of respect for the group’s traditions.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY JARED HAMILTON PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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SOURCE: BASEBALL-REFERENCE.COM; ADDITIONAL REPORTING: SEAN W. KLENERT

Wild Thing

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Since the Wild Card was instituted in 1995, it’s had quite an impact on the World Series – resulting in five Wild Card teams taking home the Fall Classic trophy. This year, MLB doubled down on the Wild Card, adding a second Wild Card slot per league, which will play a one-game “play in” with the winner advancing to the division series. Will one of this year’s Wild Card teams collect its 11 wins to go all the way? As the leaves turn yellow, time will tell.

Here’s a look back at how past Wild Card winners have fared. –Josh Klenert

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Bishop Robinson Wants to Change Hearts and Minds PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEPHEN VOSS

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HE ANGLICAN COMMUNION was rocked in 2003 when the Episcopalian Diocese of New Hampshire ordained an openly gay man as its ninth Bishop. After a tumultuous decade that featured death threats and bullet-proof vests as well as a wedding to his partner of 25 years, Bishop Gene Robinson will be stepping down from his seat on December 31 of this year. But his work continues. A new documentary film on Bishop Robinson called Love Free or Die will be released this month, and he just published a book called God Believes in Love: Straight Talk About Gay Marriage, which answers the challenges to marriage equality that he has faced during his life spent serving the church, God and the power of love. — Paul Raushenbush

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The Bishop at a Human Rights Campaign event Monday in Washington, D.C.

Exit How do you describe the spiritual significance of marriage? The spiritual union between people is a great learning laboratory for understanding the relationship between God and a person. When you make a place in your heart for someone and you pledge to love him or her in a way that, on good days, exceeds your love for yourself, then it is a window into the way God loves us. As John said in the Gospel: “Where love is there God is also. When two people are in love, we are participating in the reality of God.” You are one of the few people out there who has been in both a heterosexual and homosexual marriage. How are they different? Fundamentally there is no difference in what two people entering into a marriage are seeking and working for—either gay or straight. But it happens to be a fact that heterosexual marriage has an historical overlay of sexism and that the man is head of the household.

That is the default position inherited over hundreds of years that women are the property of men. In modern times we have tried to remove the sexist connotations but that’s the default

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position. Gay marriage is threatening because having two people of the same gender is antithetical to a sexist understanding of marriage. So, my real feeling is this whole debate is about the beginning of the end of patriarchy.

What are the main obstacles to getting full marriage equality? Number 1 is religion. It is fair to say that 90 to 95 percent of all oppres-

Even if the church often answers the question of ‘are you loved or lovable’ wrong, God never does.” sion we have experienced as gay people has come through the hands of religious people, and it is going to take religious people to undo that. That’s what I am devoting my life to. Long after we have the legal remedies, there will still be hearts and minds to change.

The Anglican Communion is having trouble choosing a new leader. Do you think the church will splinter? It was supposed to splinter the day I

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was consecrated, and here we are nine years later and we’re still the Anglican Communion.

No, I don’t think it is going to splinter. At the Lambeth Conference [the main gathering of Anglican Bishops], the African Bishops said to the American Bishops: “Look, we don’t get this whole thing. You say we have gay people in our churches, we don’t know about that, but this comes way down on our list of priorities. We have people dying of malaria and AIDS, we’ve got abject poverty, civil war, women and children being abused—so, why don’t we work together on getting water to that village over there. And somewhere along the line we’ll get to this. And we might even discover that some of the people who are helping us get water are gay. And eventually we can learn about that.”

What advice do you have for young LGBT people who are seeking spiritually grounded lives? The journey of coming out is an inherently spiritual one which asks the religious questions: Who Am I?, Where am I going? Am I worthwhile?

Am I loved, Am I loveable? So, LGBT people should recognize

that they are on a spiritual journey and that even if the church has treated them poorly and they have gotten as far away from church as they can get, they still have a spiritual life with spiritual needs. And even if the church often answers the question of “are you loved or lovable” wrong, God never does.

Top and bottom: the Bishop advocates gay marriage in D.C. earlier this week.

Middle: With his daughter Ella and husband, Mark Andrew, in 2003.

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TAUFIQ RAHIM

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A Tale of Two Islams “I WILL PAY WHOEVER kills the makers of this video $100,000. If someone else makes other blasphemous material in the future, I will also pay his killers $100,000.�

These words were uttered not by a firebrand cleric but by a cabinet minister in Pakistan,

ILLUSTRATION BY FRANCESCO BONGIORNI

Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, pushing the reaction to a provocative film (vacuously) satirical of the Prophet Muhammad to even more absurd levels.

We witnessed something different altogether in Libya, after the initial violence. On September 11 of this year, anti-film protests in Benghazi, combined with what is now regarded as a coordi-

Taufiq Rahim is a Dubaibased political analyst who blogs regularly on TheGeopolitico.com.

Voices nated terrorist attack, led to the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, other State Department personnel and Libyan security forces. Within two weeks, however, tens of thousands of ordinary Libyans had marched to the central al-Kish square in the same city, chanting, “No to terror, no to Al Qaeda,” eventually overrunning the bases of groups suspected of being complicit in the earlier attack.

Following the Arab revolutions of 2011, Islam has forcefully entered the public square, and as political forces jockey for power, we are witnessing a growing duel between radical rejectionists and groups favoring more inclusive engagement. If the former gain the upper hand in this battle, which differs country by country, it could plunge the wider Middle East into a decade of darkness.

With the revolutions in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, we have seen secular autocrats swept from power and Islamist forces come to the forefront. The contestation by religious parties in the democratic arena has meant the mainstreaming of political parties in the Arab world. The rise of well-known groups such as

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the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al Nahda party in Tunisia, however, has been accompanied by the emergence of a new political force, Salafists, who adhere to a very puritanical interpretation of Islam.

The political Salafists have tried to brand themselves as true defenders of the faith As in opposition to sopolitical called “moderate” forces jockey Islamists. In effect, for power, they are trying to we are out-Islam their opwitnessing ponents. While prior, a growing the Salafist moveduel between ment had only a limradical ited political role and rejectionists the more extreme of and groups their members were favoring more part of the wider jiinclusive hadi movement that engagement.” includes Al Qaeda, today they are using the new environment to assert themselves in the mainstream. While just emerging in the Arab world, it is a trend that countries like Pakistan have been dealing with for the last several years.

Despite their ability to mobilize

Voices in numbers and vitriol, the Salafists appear to be in the minority, as witnessed in recent election results across the Arab world. The majority, however, has not coalesced around a coherent ideology that can provide an alternative vision for progress and development. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while trying to be pragmatic, have been muddled in their message following the initial antifilm protests, because even their own slogan in effect limits debate: Islam is the solution. Thus, the outpouring of demonstrations in Libya trying to reclaim the public space from more radical fringes could be the exception rather than the trend.

We are therefore at a dangerous crossroads throughout the Middle East, North Africa and into South Asia, where given this political vacuum, radical Salafists are trying to overtake the public square, if not by numbers than by default. Moreover, certain interests within the Gulf are pushing these groups, which for them are preferable to more moderate Islamist forces that are seen as threatening to their regional legitimacy.

This strength, combined with the growing neo-Islamic McCarthyism

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practiced by the Salafist political forces could mean that the silent majority is definitively silenced for the foreseeable future.

There is no easy way out, and the situation within each country is different. If the curWith the rent crisis is viewed revolutions through the prism of in Libya, a provocative film and Tunisia, Egypt an offended Muslim public, we are missing and Yemen, we have the broader political seen secular implications. In efautocrats fect, we are seeing a swept from shift from the postpower and 9/11 decade fight of Al Islamist Qaeda versus autocratic regimes in the forces come region, to the people to the versus the populists. forefront.”

The film has only served as the pretext for what is now termed the “outrage industry” that fuels radicals in so many Muslim countries.

If the current situation is to change, it will only happen if forces, within and outside the Muslim world, empower the marginalized majority that is seeking to define a more inclusive and pluralistic future.

DANNY RUBIN

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The Perils of Unfriending

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NE OF THESE DAYS you swear you’re going to do it.

You’ll log into Facebook, head straight for your list of friends and start deleting people. You know, the girl you haven’t talked to since middle school. The random dude you met at a party who you haven’t spoken to in five years. The person you haven’t seen in so long that you forgot how you met in the first place.

Recently, one blogger compared deleting people to a crash diet. He even called it a “Facebook cleanse.”

Getting your house in order is a great idea—except on social media. The web has made us so interconnected and accessible that to delete people from your online world could harm you personally and professionally. Here’s why: Every person you delete on Facebook is one less networking opportunity down the road. Life happens in funny ways. Out of nowhere, you could suddenly need a person you haven’t heard from in a decade.

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Danny Rubin writes the blog News to Live By and can be followed on Twitter @ NewsToLiveBy

Voices For example, you’re in the job market and looking at accounting firms. You go to your list of Facebook friends, use the “search by workplace” option and find that Lauren, your old pal from 7th grade Social Studies, works at the company you had your eye on.

So, naturally, you send your long-lost friend a Facebook message, reconnect and hope she can put in a good word.

But what if you unfriended Lauren months ago during an impassioned “Facebook cleanse”?

With Lauren gone from your list, there is almost no way you would know she works at the accounting firm.

That’s the power of social networks; they allow everyone to remain loosely connected without having to interact on a regular basis. Just being friends on Facebook keeps us tied together.

Of course, there are plenty of studies that say maintaining a huge list of people on Facebook is bad for us.

Like this one from Men’s Health: Researchers asked a sample group of Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 65 to read some of their friends’ status updates.

Afterward, those Facebook users

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rated their lives as much less satisfying than people who didn’t check their news feed first.

Sure. We probably don’t need to read everything about everyone all the time. But there’s no way to predict which Facebook friend could be the one to help you land a new job or even recommend a solid babysitter, plumber or painter.

Let’s say a buddy from high school—who lives Every across town but you person you haven’t seen in years— delete on just bought a new house.

Facebook You know that because is one less he posted photos of networking the home on Facebook.

You’re also in the maropportunity ket for a new house so down the you shoot him a message road.” about mortgage rates and real estate agents.

Without being “friends” on Facebook, the conversation simply wouldn’t have happened.

We spend our entire lives amassing a network of people. Why cut them loose because they aren’t front and center in our world?

Just think: a person from way back in the day could hold the keys to your future dream job.

Aren’t you glad you didn’t hit “delete”?

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DOMENICK SCUDERA

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All Celebrities Say Stupid Things, and Other Overgeneralizations WHEN GRADING college papers, I often find myself writing “Don’t overgeneralize” in the margins of my students’ essays (in red ink, of course). This is in reaction to such statements as this: “Since the dawn of time, all playwrights have used irony effectively, but none have used it as well as Sophocles, the greatest of all ancient Greek writers, in his masterpiece of dramatic literature, Oedipus Rex.” Overgeneralizing simplifies ideas and leads to misinformed and misguided statements.

Recent news stories are filled with overgeneralizations, so the problem seems to have gone beyond college campuses. For instance, Paris Hilton was caught on tape saying that gay men are “the horniest people in the world” and Grindr users “probably have AIDS.” Paris has since backed off these

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comments and apologized, so perhaps we should give her a pass on this one. We can think of her initial comments as a first draft. She has since revised before handing in her final paper.

But Paris was not the only one simplifying and overgeneralizing recently. Chicago’s Cardinal George

Domenick Scudera is a professor of theater at Ursinus College

Voices stated that “society will be the worse” as a result of permitting gay marriage. Oh really? How exactly will our entire society be worse if same-sex couples are given the right to marry? Be more specific.

Please use examples. Until you provide clarification, your statement deserves, at best, a C-.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Piers Morgan that, “homosexuality ceases procreation.” Um... really? Precisely how does my homosexuality cease babies being born? I have been gay for more than forty years, and babies continue to pop out all over the world anyway. Mr. Ahmadinejad, please cite your sources.

Your thinking aligns with Cardinal George’s unfounded argument that same-sex couples marrying will cease the sanctity of opposite-sex couples’ marriages. Be more explicit when supporting your thesis.

Your argument does not hold up to scrutiny and close reading.

Ann Coulter told George Stephanopolous recently that “civil rights are for blacks.” She went on to clarify that civil rights do not pertain to immigrants, gays, or feminists. Ms. Coulter, I will give you a few points for being specific, but “civil rights are for blacks” is a bold, general

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statement that does not make much sense. Yes, African-American citizens deserve civil rights, but the idea of a civil right is that it pertains to each individual American, not just one class of people. You hold a B.A. and a J.D. so I expect more from you.

I suspect you are capable of a shaping a more nuanced argument. Your generalities are deliberate provocations, meant to incite anger on the left and to rally those on the right whose brains are wired to think in polemic black and white.

OverSo what is the result generalizing of these broad, sweepsimplifies ing generalities about ideas and leads homosexuality in our to misinformed public discourse? I and misguided believe that all people statements.” will be damaged by this kind of talk. The human race, far and wide, will not be able to think in complex ways. All the people in all the world will be influenced by all the celebrities and politicians who want to manipulate all the minds of the human species, and, ironically, this will harm all the gay homosexuals who are the ones whose lives are being discussed in oversimplified ways.

Oh, I’m sorry. Am I overgeneralizing?

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“ Be brave and celebrate with us your ‘perceived flaws,’ as society tells us. May we make our flaws famous, and thus redefine the heinous.”

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“ So I became an expert in living in denial.”

— Lady Gaga,

who has suffered from eating disorders, to fans on her site

— Arnold Schwarzenegger

to 60 Minutes, explaining how he began internalizing things during his bodybuilding days

“ Why is it that so often the ‘best’ places to live are relatively politically liberal? Could it be that caring about something other than making a profit is better?”

— HuffPost commenter Tim_Tim

on Businessweek ranking San Francisco the best city in the country

“ Having waitressed my way thru college, Ann Romney reminds me of the type of woman who would stiff me on big check for her and her girlfriends because I didn’t put lemon in their ice water.”

— HuffPost commenter twitch1956

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At Apple, we strive to make world-class products that deliver the best experience possible to our customers. With the launch of our new Maps last week, we fell short on this commitment.

We are extremely sorry for the frustration this has caused our customers and we are doing everything we can to make Maps better.

— Apple CEO Tim Cook

apologizing for his company’s half-baked Maps app

“ Somewhere in Texas is a GOP, religious, conservative, married, repressed white male teacher who is sobbing with joy.”

— HuffPost commenter lib2dbone

on a Texas school district’s decision to expand its corporal punishment policy to include opposite-sex paddling

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“ Organic farming isn’t subsidized by our government like large agribusiness farming. So when we complain about the price of organic, we should remind ourselves how many millions of dollars is coming out of the taxpayers’ pockets for that ‘cheap’ food at the grocery store.”

— HuffPost commenter yttika1

“ He is so two-dimensional. I mean, up close and personal, there’s just nothing going on.”

— Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright

about Mitt Romney at a Women for Obama rally, according to NBC News

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10.07.12 #17 FEATURES MIRACLE BABIES COMING HOME ANGER MANAGEMENT

MIRACLE BABIES

CAN INFERTILITY TREATMENTS HELP WOMEN GET PREGNANT...

NATURALLY?

BY CATHERINE PEARSON ILLUSTRATION BY NOMA BARR

ichelle was still nursing her daughter, born through in vitro fertilization, when she found out she was pregnant again. It was entirely unexpected — she wasn’t using any fertility drugs.¶ Several years earlier, the Indiana mother found herself so determined to have her first child, she resorted to using donor eggs. She and her husband made the decision following a string of devastating failures: Michelle suffered two miscarriages and gave birth to a stillborn baby at 20 weeks. She tried three failed rounds of intrauterine insemination (IUI) — a procedure in which her husband’s sperm were placed directly in her uterus using a catheter. Then she moved on to IVF, which involves joining an egg and sperm together in a laboratory dish and placing the fertilized egg into a woman’s uterus.

Michelle tried one round using her own eggs. That failed, too.

In early 2003, at the age of 42, Michelle, who asked that only her first name be used for this article, made the difficult decision to place another woman’s fertilized egg in her body. She gave birth to a daughter, whom she lovingly describes as bright, daring and, at 8 years old, “all girl — pink and purple and sparkly.” Initially, she worried about using donor eggs and giving up a genetic link to her daughter. But now she cannot

believe she ever, even fleetingly, doubted her ability to love a child who wasn’t genetically hers. That feeling was confirmed when she gave birth to her second child, her biological son, now 7. Both feel entirely hers, she said, and both feel miraculous.

“Sometimes my husband and I hear them playing in the other room and we look at each other and say, ‘Can you believe how lucky we are?’” Michelle said.

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MIRACLE BABIES

Lucky, perhaps, but not alone.

Though few studies track how often a spontaneous pregnancy after use of assisted reproductive technology occurs, those that do suggest it is not uncommon. Most recently, a French paper published this summer in the journal Fertility and Sterility found that 17 percent of women who gave birth after IVF became pregnant again within six years — this time on their own.

Among couples whose IVF failed, the rate of spontaneous pregnancy was even higher: 24 percent of the women became pregnant in the

years after treatment. A 2008 German study found that 20 percent of couples who conceived a child by intracytoplasmic sperm injection — a form of IVF in which a single sperm is injected directly into an egg — and who subsequently tried to get pregnant naturally, succeeded. Estimates suggest that normal, healthy women have around a 20 to 25 percent chance of getting pregnant per menstrual cycle.

Many fertility doctors say the findings bear out, at least anecdotally. “I tell my [IVF] patients, ‘You know, after you have your baby, your OB is going to come to discharge you and tell you to use birth control if you don’t want to

Corridor of an in vitro fertilization laboratory.

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MIRACLE BABIES

get pregnant,” said Alice Domar, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Domar Center for Mind/Body Health. “And my patients look at me and say, ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me. I’ve had 18 cycles of IVF.’ And then they get pregnant.”

Though no expert has ever offered her a definitive explanation, Michelle believes her first pregnancy somehow healed her body.

“With my boy, it’s like I had one golden egg in there. I don’t know how to explain it,” she said. “But I don’t think it would have happened without my daughter. It’s like she taught my body what to do.”

Scientific theories do support Michelle’s hunch, particularly for women with certain conditions.

For example, about 50 percent of women with endometriosis, which causes the tissue that normally lines the uterus to grow elsewhere, have problems getting pregnant. Whether induced or natural, pregnancy “suppresses” the condition, Domar explained.

“For somebody who has a history of endometriosis, if she manages to get pregnant, those nine months of pregnancy are very healing to her

IVF IS A GRUELING, LOGISTICALLY CHALLENGING PROCESS, NOT A QUICK FIX. pelvis,” she said. “It would make more sense that she would be able to get pregnant after.”

An underweight woman faces a similar prospect, as long as her weight is a reason for ovulation problems. If she manages to get pregnant, even a window of several months to lose the baby weight may be long enough for her to become pregnant naturally with a second child.

AN INEXACT SCIENCE

An even simpler explanation is that some women are rushing into assisted reproductive technology and that given more time, they might have gotten pregnant on their own. Much about infertility and its roots is still a mystery, and to have a baby, the complex

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processes of ovulation and fertilization need to go just so. Around one-third of infertility cases are traced to female problems, such as ovulation disorders and structural complications; one-third stem from male problems like deficiencies in sperm count and ability to swim; and one-third are due to both partners, or are unexplained.

Knowing how much time to give biology to work is an inexact science that changes from couple to couple and from situation to situation. The most commonly agreedupon definition of primary infertil-

ity is when a woman has tried to get pregnant, and failed, for at least 12 months, and of the 15 states in the U.S. that provide some form of coverage for IVF, most stipulate that a woman must have been trying to get pregnant for at least that long before enlisting help. But groups like the American Society of Reproductive Medicine stress that earlier evaluation and treatment is warranted for women over 35.

Indeed, for someone like Michelle who was 40 when she began trying to have a child, a viable pregnancy is that much less likely.

“It’s all statistical. So long as a couple doesn’t have any of the absolutes — completely blocked

A lab technician presides over the process of artificial fertilization after an intracytoplasmic sperm injection at the University Women’s Hospital in Bonn, Germany.

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tubes, no sperm — as long as you have some chance each month, then statistically you will find that some couples will get pregnant on their own,” said Dr. Robert Oates, president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology. “We have to hold back our enthusiasm for getting to interventions like IVF too quickly and need to give biology some time to work when there’s a sense that it might.”

Nearly 12 percent of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 have sought some form of fertility assistance and, though only a small percent pursue the most aggressive options, more than 146,000 cycles of assisted reproductive technology — namely IVF — were performed in the U.S. in 2010. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1 percent of babies born each year are now conceived using some form of assisted reproductive technology.

“Because IVF is so successful now, I think some people are probably getting it who don’t really need it,” said Courtney Lynch, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology, epidemiology and pediatrics at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Cen-

“WITH MY BOY, IT’S LIKE I HAD ONE GOLDEN EGG IN THERE.” ter, whose research centers on risk factors for fertility problems.

Lynch said there is something of a don’t ask, don’t tell policy with reproductive endocrinologists and their patients. Rather than pressing for details on how often they have been having intercourse and how carefully they have been timing it, doctors take their patients at their word that they are good candidates for fertility treatment.

But IVF is a grueling, logistically challenging process, not a quick fix. Women are given drugs to boost their egg production, often hormones that must be injected daily. During that time, patients must undergo pelvic ultrasounds and blood tests to check their ovaries and hormone levels. Next their eggs are retrieved, an outpatient procedure that usually involves some form of sedation. That is followed by insemination, or the mixing of the sperm and egg in a

After three rounds of IVF, Cortney Carroll had resigned herself to adopting a child.

She then became pregnant on her own. Two and a half years later, she gave birth to her daughter who was conceived naturally as well.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM EWING

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lab. When a fertilized egg divides, it becomes an embryo which is monitored and, given that everything looks okay, transferred into a woman’s womb several days later.

The process is expensive — in the U.S., the average cost per cycle is at least $12,400 — and not without risks. There is a small chance of ovarian hyperstimulation and pelvic infection, as well as the possibility of multiple pregnancies if more than one embryo is transferred to a woman’s uterus. According to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, babies conceived by IVF have a slightly higher risk of birth defects — between 2.6 and 3.9 percent, compared to just to 2 to 3 percent in babies born naturally.

And then there is the enormous emotional toll of treatment.

“Those years were the low point in my life,” said Cortney Carroll, a bubbly 34-year-old

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with a wide, pretty smile who recently moved from Ohio to Virginia. “They were the saddest. I was crying constantly — every day, it was this up and down.

You’d get excited, you’d think, ‘These numbers are good! Yay!’ And then you’d just crash.”

Cortney grew up wanting to be two things: a dancer and a mom.

After a stress fracture in college ended her Broadway dreams, Cortney eventually ended up working in pharmaceutical sales. In 2001, she married her husband in front of 200 guests and the pair started trying for a baby in September 2004, when Cortney was 26.

“I thought it would be easy,” she said. “That was a dumb assumption.”

After about six months of trying, Cortney went to an OBGYN who preached patience — women under 35 are generally not considered infertile until they have attempted to get pregnant for one year. A few months later, she saw a different OBGYN who found a

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The step by step process of in vitro fertilization.

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blocked fallopian tube, not necessarily enough of a hindrance to make pregnancy impossible, but enough for Cortney to be put on Clomid, a pill that induces ovulation. She tried two rounds of the medication; neither worked.

By then Cortney was moving along a treatment trajectory familiar to many of the 7.4 million women in the U.S. who have used some form of infertility services in their lives. She was referred to a reproductive endocrinologist and tried three rounds of IUI, all failures. In November 2005, Cortney began preparing for her first round of IVF. Cortney found out she was pregnant on December 21, but seven days later her hormone levels had dropped.

“At that point, in doctor’sspeak, it’s called a ‘chemical pregnancy,’” she said flatly. “But it’s a miscarriage.”

Cortney’s next two rounds of IVF were also unsuccessful.

One was canceled because there weren’t enough ovarian follicles to retrieve, the next because none of her eggs had fertilized. Her fertility doctor said there was nothing more he could do and suggested she try a more pioneering out-of-state clinic. At that point,

SHOULD WOMEN FEEL BETRAYED? ELATED? CAN THEY MUSTER ANY SENSE OF TRUST IN THEIR OWN REPRODUCTIVE SYSTEMS? she had spent more than $12,000 out of pocket on co-pays, medications and anything her insurance didn’t cover.

In September 2006, Cortney took a medical leave from her job and flew to Las Vegas where she spent three weeks shuttling between various hotels and the Sher Clinic, part of one of the largest networks of infertility clinics in the U.S. She left Las Vegas hopped up on her highest dose of medication yet and the maximum number of embryos Sher’s doctors were able to transfer. She was certain she was

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pregnant. She was not.

A month after returning from the failed trip, Matt and Cortney started pre-adoption parenting classes at their local hospital.

They planned to return to Las Vegas in January for another IVF cycle, the final one that would be covered by insurance (her company’s plan covered a portion of her treatments), but they were beginning to wonder if conception was even an option for them.

The adoption classes were almost over when, on a November

day in 2006, Cortney took a home pregnancy test. She watched the line start to grow, tossed the test on her bathroom counter and got in the shower.

“At that point I was so used to negatives, it was like ‘Whatever,’” Cortney said.

A few minutes later she stepped out, looked at the test and called her husband in tears. A blood test hastily scheduled for that afternoon confirmed what the home kit had told her: Cortney was finally pregnant, all on her own. And two and a half years later, she gave birth to a second child who was also conceived naturally, this time a girl.

The process of in vitro fertilization is hit or miss for some women hoping to conceive.

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“It was just up and down, up and down,” Cortney said, “and all the time trying to just have hope that it could happen.”

Though the ordeal strengthened her marriage — Cortney and her husband began going to church together and praying together every night — she confessed there were times when she felt desperate and completely alone.

‘JUST ADOPT, IT’LL HAPPEN.’

Those feelings of fear and anxiety are the basis for another popular explanation for these unexpected pregnancies, which hinges on the role that stress plays in women’s efforts to become pregnant. Research on the relationship between stress and fertility is far from conclusive, in part because of the chicken and egg challenges of mapping a woman’s stress. Does stress lead to her infertility, or is infertility the source of her stress?

These complexities help explain why recent scientific evidence tends to contradicts itself. A 2011 study in the journal Fertility and Sterility (on which Lynch was an author) used saliva tests to measure certain stress biomarkers in 274 women who were trying to

“TO HAVE A BABY, THE COMPLEX PROCESSES OF OVULATION AND FERTILIZATION NEED TO GO JUST SO.” get pregnant. Stress appeared to significantly reduce the probability of conception, and at least one small study has found emotional stress can hurt sperm quality. But a review published in the venerable British Medical Journal in 2011 found that a woman’s stress levels do not appear to affect her chances of getting pregnant after a single cycle of assisted reproductive technology.

“At this time, there has not been a clear link between stress, depression, anxiety and successful outcomes in infertility treatment,” said Dr. Marlene Freeman, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the perinatal and reproductive psychiatry program

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at Massachusetts General Hospital in Cambridge.

Nonetheless, the connection flourishes in the public imagination. Ask a handful of women who have dealt with infertility and they’ll roll their eyes over the number of times they heard some version of: “Just relax. If you stop stressing out, it’ll happen.”

“People say all those things that they think are helpful,” said Tracy Birkinbine, 40. “I heard them all the time: ‘Just adopt, it’ll happen.’”

Tracy started trying to have a baby in 1996 at 24 and taking Clomid soon thereafter. Earlier in her 20s she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that can make it harder to have children, but everything else looked good. Her doctors checked her tubes for blockage and analyzed her husband’s sperm.

By 26, Tracy was referred to a reproductive endocrinologist, who suggested she move on to IVF. She dove into three cycles, carrying around a fishing tackle box with needles to give herself injections of the fertility drugs needed to stimulate egg development. The medicines made her “not very nice” to her husband, she said.

Tracy, like many women in this

situation, was so driven to birth a baby that she felt inadequate when she could not. “I would say really stupid things, like, ‘You need to just divorce me and find somebody else who can give you a baby,’” Tracy said. “Or I would get really angry and say mean things that were not true and were hurtful. I knew it when I was saying it, but I couldn’t stop. I almost felt like a different person.”

But the most fraught period was the stretch known in infertilityspeak as “the two-week wait,” the time between the end of treatment and before the pregnancy test.

“It’s excruciating,” Tracy said.

“Every move I made, I was afraid

The process of cryopreservation, in which cells such as human embryos or a woman’s unfertilized eggs are frozen and stored away.

Tracy Birkinbine, 40, center, and her husband, Brian Birkinbine, clockwise from left to right, daughters, Amber, 15, Corinne, 10, and son, Cameron, 8. After three failed cycles of in vitro, the family adopted Amber from foster care. The other children were conceived naturally afterward. Tracy now has her own infertility and adoption counseling practice.

PHOTOGRAPH BY WHITNEY CURTIS

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I was going to push [the embryos] out. I was crazy. We lived in an old house, and I went to open the windows and used my abdominal muscles. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! I strained when I did that!’”

Harder still was trying to keep herself from seeing everything as a sign of pregnancy. “You start having the, ‘Oh, am I going to the bathroom a little more? Are my breasts starting to ache?’”

During Tracy’s second IVF cycle, the answers to those leading questions became “yes.” She was pregnant. Then three days later, her hormone levels dropped and it became clear it was only a chemical pregnancy. Altogether, Tracy underwent three cycles of IVF before she and her husband decided to adopt a child through foster care, and soon took in a 3½-year-old girl. Four months after the adoption was finalized, Tracy discovered she was pregnant with a girl. Just over a year later, she was pregnant again, this time with a boy.

“I wasn’t adopting, thinking, ‘If I adopt, I’ll get pregnant,’” Tracy said, acknowledging that she followed the exact pattern people told her she would.

None of her doctors ever gave

“AFTER YOU HAVE YOUR BABY, YOUR OB IS GOING TO TELL YOU TO USE BIRTH CONTROL.” her an explanation for her infertility, nor did they give her a reason why she was able to have children after failing with IVF and adopting.

The lack of clear answers can make it extremely difficult for women to know what to make of their bodies throughout the infertility process, particularly when, after years of pipe dreams and treatments, they suddenly have a baby on their own. Should they feel betrayed? Elated? Can they muster any sense of trust in their own reproductive systems?

Kari Harris, 29, took ovulation drugs for three years and had multiple IUIs — having her husband’s sperm injected into her uterus — as well as two miscarriages before she gave birth to her son. Now 2, he was conceived during her second cycle of IVF. As

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she and her husband were preparing to start another cycle to try for a second child, Kari found out she was pregnant, naturally.

She is due in December.

Her reaction to the news surprised her. “My first feeling was that I was angry. I was angry that this was happening after everything we had been through,” Kari said. “My feeling was, ‘We’re going to end up having a miscarriage.’ I was like, ‘This isn’t fair.

How is this happening?’”

When she got pregnant with her son, Kari was already on several medications to help prevent miscarriage; this time she was not.

Though she and her husband are “over the moon” and “beyond excited” about the prospect of having another baby, that joy is tempered by the fear that her body will fail her, as well as the guilt she feels about being able to have a second baby naturally when so many women cannot.

As an alum of the IVF world, her feelings about pregnancy — natural or otherwise — are defined by the turmoil of the process. “I just wanted to have a pregnancy I could enjoy, a normal pregnancy where I wasn’t scared all the time,” Kari said. “This was supposed to be that pregnancy for me, but it hasn’t been. I’m still in complete shock and disbelief that this is really happening.”

Egg donors are listed by vital characteristics such as eye and hair color, height, weight, ethnicity, religion and educational background.

Some eggs cost more than the standard rate because a donor may have more desirable characteristics.

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HOME

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TROUBLED, VIOLENT VETS TEST THE JUSTICE SYSTEM

By David Wood

Photographed by Ryan Smith Illustration by Mirko Ilic

JAMIE BEAVERS is a clean-cut, 32-year-old Catholic from south Philly. As a kid, he shot hoops to avoid the neighborhood drug toughs. He became a high school basketball star and won a full university scholarship. He played varsity until an injury sidelined him and the scholarship was withdrawn.

At loose ends, he enlisted in the Army in 2003 and was sent twice to Iraq, spending 27 months in combat and enduring multiple IED blasts and other trauma. He came home with Traumatic Brain Injury

and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and an addiction to the pills that medics in Iraq had provided to keep him going.

This past February, he was arrested and thrown in jail, sick, alone and hopeless. His wife, terrified of his nightmares and drug habit, had fled with their two girls. His brain injuries had dimmed his ability to think and speak, and left him so dizzy he often had to walk with a cane.

“Seems like I’m a 10 year-old kid in a 30-year-old body,” he said. “I just lost a lot of things people take for granted. And I became an addict of opiates. It just

Jamie Beavers, 32, suffers from PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury after two tours in Iraq.

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kinda spiraled out of control.”

Among the grim repercussions of a decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan — the dead, the battleinjured, the wreckage, the wasted billions — is this: while most soldiers return from war and resume a somewhat normal life, many do not. All too frequently, the trauma of combat leads to struggles with drug addiction or alcohol abuse, to outbursts of anger and violence at home or work, to petty crime or other reckless behavior that ends up in a confrontation with flashing lights and handcuffs.

No one knows the precise number of veterans already in prison.

An estimate by the Justice Department five years ago put the number at 223,000, most of them Vietnam-era veterans. Whatever the number, many serve their time without getting treated for the conditions that helped land them in prison in the first place.

There are more coming, in what will amount to a river of personal tragedies that is likely to clog the courts and, some say, will pose dangerous risks to civilian society.

“It’s going to be an epidemic,” says Guy Garant, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who handles a rising caseload of veter-

ans. “I’m seeing Vietnam veterans who went [to war] once, 40 years ago. Now we have guys 18, 19 years of age, going again and again. We’re going to have huge issues with this.”

War veterans, of course, are responsible for their actions, like everyone else. And some doubtless would have gotten in trouble no matter what their wartime experiences. But research has demonstrated that the trauma of combat makes men and women more likely to engage in criminal behavior.

Based on interviews with men who fought in Vietnam, the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study estimated that half of all combat veterans with PTSD had been arrested one or more times.

So far, the VA has formally diagnosed 207,161 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with PTSD, which suggests at least 100,000 of them are suffering from the demons of PTSD and have become ensnared in the criminal justice system.

But today’s generation of combat veterans may get into more trouble than their Vietnam counterparts. A 2009 report by the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego of 77,881 enlisted Marines with at least one combat deployment demonstrated that those Marines with

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a diagnosis of PTSD were six times more likely to be busted on drug charges than Marines without PTSD, and 11 times more likely to be discharged for misconduct.

Less is known about the longterm effects of mild or severe Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), military health officials say.

But already, the active-duty military force has its hands full with criminal misbehavior. The Army recently estimated that more than 8,000 active-duty soldiers have committed undetected drug-related crimes including illegal use and distribution of drugs.

Inside the Army’s active-duty ranks, documented violent sex crimes have doubled since 2006, from 665 rapes and sexual assault cases to 1,313 last year.

At present, there are 17,000 active-duty Army soldiers, the equivalent of three combat brigades, under arrest, in military prisons or under investigation.

If many of them are suffering from combat trauma, they’re probably not getting help. The military justice system is more concerned with punishment than with rehabilitation, according to Army Maj. Evan R. Seamone, chief prosecutor at Fort Benning, Ga. Troop behind bars rarely get the kind of diagnosis or treatment that could

Beavers is pictured in the back row, third from the right with fellow soldiers in Iraq.

Beavers frequents the Philadelphia Veterans Multi-Service and Education Center to meet with counselors who help him work on his resume and look for jobs, among other services.

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actually help, he says, and too often they’re given medication to keep them quiet.

“Wounded warriors experience symptoms that often manifest in criminal conduct,” Seamone wrote in a lengthy article in Military Law Review’s summer 2011 issue.

But in too many instances, simply punishing and then discharging mentally ill offenders is creating “a class of individuals whose untreated conditions endanger public safety and the veteran as they grow worse over time.”

Within the military, Seamone told The Huffington Post, “there’s a reluctance to talk about treatment for offenders after they have

been convicted and to get them involved in the intensive treatment that actually works at that stage of the process. Medication has become much more of a substitute for face-to-face therapy, which has proven highly effective in the treatment of PTSD.” As a result, he said, military offenders “are often in worse condition when they get out.”

OUR JAILS ARE FULL OF VETERANS Since 2001, the Army has discharged 19,842 soldiers guilty of multiple felonies, according to the Army report.

Military service members

Drug free and working on securing his life, Beavers frequently meets with counselors as part of his probation and treatment program.

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“ EVERYONE WHO GOES [TO WAR] COMES BACK A DIFFERENT PERSON.” charged with a drug offense are often simply booted out of the military without treatment — regardless of whether it was the military that got them hooked on pain medication, as is commonly the case.

Jamie Beavers says he was given opiates by doctors in Iraq for pain, anxiety and fatigue so he could stay on duty. But when he returned home, he no longer qualified for the drugs. Too late: he was already addicted. He found an illegal supply out on the streets — and when he popped positive on an Army drug test, he was booted out, without the opportunity for treatment. “Go see the VA (Department of Veterans Affairs),” he says he was told..

“This is criminal,” said Howard Gormley, an Army infantryman who fought in Vietnam and retired after 27 years as a Philadelphia cop. “They (the military) get ‘em hooked on drugs — then put them out on the street.”

“They should never let them out

here until they’ve cured them,” adds Gormley, who works with incarcerated veterans for the nonprofit Philadelphia Veterans Multiservice and Education Center.

What makes it harder for military ex-offenders is that they are often discharged with “bad paper” — bad conduct discharges — that bar them from receiving the VA benefits they need, such as PTSD counseling or substance abuse therapy, let alone the GI bill or housing assistance. That makes it easier to fall back into old habits of drugs and crime. Already, there is an increasing flow of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans into the criminal courts of Philadelphia, said Rebecca Hicks, a justice outreach specialist for the Philadelphia VA Medical Center.

“Everyone who goes [to war] comes back a different person,” says Patrick F. Dugan, a Philadelphia municipal court judge who handles veterans cases.

Dugan is a former enlisted paratrooper with tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He currently serves

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COURTESY OF JAMIE BEAVERS

as an Army reserve captain. Dugan has the rolling gait of a veteran paratrooper and the cut-throughthe-BS attitude of a combat veteran. When veterans come into his court they get no slack; in fact he is tougher on veterans than on defendants who haven’t served. But he understands where they’ve been.

In Iraq, a 19 year-old female soldier in Dugan’s unit was decapitated in an IED blast. “What does that do to the people near her?” he said.

“Everyone is going to be affected by that for the rest of their lives. I get chills just talking about it.”

Most people, Dugan believes, come home from war and go on to do great things. Others get in trouble.

“People are going to have issues, and we have to address those issues, and I believe we have failed our veterans in the past — our jails are full of veterans. This is one area America has neglected.

We have to do better.”

MY WIFE WAS SCARED OF WHO I WAS

Jamie Beavers was arrested the first time on a clear, cold morning in February, just after 8 a.m.

He’d awoken that morning coughing up blood. Alarmed, he

threw on clothes and was speeding up Broad Street toward the VA hospital in West Philadelphia when the cops pulled him over. He blew zero on a breathalyzer, but without his cane, he stumbled when he was asked to walk a straight line.

He went right to jail. There, he had time to take stock.

During his first tour in Iraq, with the 3rd Infantry Division, Beavers worked as a turret gunner on an armored Humvee, helping guard truck convoys on a dangerous patch of road, route Tampa out of Camp Anaconda. IED blasts were common; he recalls being blown up at least six times. It was a nerve-wracking job: the turret gunner is the most vulnerable to IED blasts because he is often blown out of the vehicle

Jamie Beavers, right, during his reenlistment ceremony.

Beavers and Judge Patrick F. Dugan of the Philadelphia Veterans Court, which offers the option of probation and rehabilitation instead of just punitive measures.

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and killed. Beavers was on call 24/7.

“When the bell rang, we had 45 minutes to dress, load up the truck and get a security briefing,” he said.

He’d lie half-awake sweating on his cot, knowing when the bell rang he’d be heading out again where insurgents would try to kill him.

“Every time the bell rang I thought, ‘I could die,”’ he said.

After one powerful IED blast wrecked his truck and left him unconscious, he woke up in the base hospital where he says he was prescribed various pain and anti-anxiety medication, including morphine, oxycodone, Roxicet, dilaudid and Xanax, to get him back on duty and keep him there.

Not for another year would the military begin routinely sidelining soldiers exposed to blast.

After his 12-month deployment was over, he was transferred to the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii, and four months after he got home from Iraq he deployed again.

This time he was in combat for 15 months. He returned with the shakes, hearing problems and raging nightmares about the things that he saw and did, “things that were inhumane that still stick with me to this day and I’m trying to get through that.

“I’d wake up in the middle of the night and hear the bell going off, or I’d be yelling ‘Kill him!’ and seeing snipers at the window,” he said.

“My wife was scared of who I was.”

After Army doctors in Hawaii cut him off from prescription drugs, Beavers started buying illicit medication to try to calm things down.

He was never tested for or diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury, so he was never offered therapy or any other treatment.

Three weeks before he was due for another Iraq tour, Beavers was discharged from the Army after having tested positive for drugs.

Back home in Philadelphia, he stumbled into the VA medical center and asked for help. He got it: he was diagnosed with Traumatic Brain Injury and PTSD; counselors helped him win a 100 percent disability from the VA and he began counseling sessions for his PTSD. But like many other veterans, he found the VA itself was overwhelmed. “I was being seen four times a week, then three, then two, then once every two weeks, and then once a month, because they had such a caseload,” he said. “I felt like I got thrown to the back of the bus, and that kind of threw me into a bad depression. I didn’t

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know where to turn for help.”

That’s when Beavers met Judge Patrick F. Dugan, the presiding judge of the Philadelphia Veterans Court.

One of dozens popping up across the country, the Philadelphia Veterans Court is an alternative to criminal court and it emphasizes treatment and rehabilitation rather than simple punishment. Offenders with military records are diverted into Veterans Court if they choose.

The idea of providing treatment — and not just punishment — for veterans in trouble didn’t crystallize until 2008 in Buffalo, where a

local judge, Robert Russell, found veterans swamping his drug court.

He saw that veterans with drug addiction weren’t getting helped by being thrown into prison; they were just being recycled. He enlisted the local VA medical center and volunteer veterans to help out and began sentencing the defendants in his court to probation — and help.

Word of the Buffalo court’s effectiveness spread rapidly, and today some 95 communities across the country have their own veterans treatment court.

Philadelphia’s veterans court was

A mural honoring veterans at the Philadelphia Veterans Multiservice and Education Center.

Sernat quo et harum quat esciet volo consecero ium et most quis dolorio natio omniet entet ut a dolumet occae voluptates vit imet quatio et qui cus unt pelliqu aeriorum.

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“ THEY GET ‘EM HOOKED ON DRUGS — THEN PUT THEM OUT ON THE STREET.” launched in 2010, and on Friday mornings, when Dugan strides into room 406 of the Philadelphia Criminal Courts building and gavels the court into session, things run pretty much routinely.

The defendants who shuffle in front of Dugan’s high bench, most of them charged with non-violent crimes such as drunk driving or drug possession, are often a hangdog lot. They seem embarrassed to be there and especially so when Dugan mentions his paratrooper background and exhorts them to shape up. He peers down at them with the mixture of irritation, exasperation and fondness that sergeants often reserve for their wayward soldiers.

“I want you to remember the pride you felt when you put on the uniform for the first time,” he tells them. “That’s the person I want to see in my courtroom.

Stand up straight! Treat people with respect!”

Here’s the deal, he says. You’re

here because you’ve committed a criminal offense. If you volunteer for veterans court, we can connect you with the veterans services you need — medical, dental, PTSD counseling, drug abuse therapy, housing, job assistance, education.

You do six months or a year of probation, show up for your appointments on time, come in here once a month, and you graduate with your record expunged.

But this is voluntary. You can go have your case tried in criminal court. If you decide to work with me here, he tells them, you gotta stay with it. You miss appointments, you don’t check in here, you go back to jail.

Most vets take the deal. They go off to the VA for a complete assessment, and on that basis Dugan imposes a sentence of treatment and probation, and, depending on the defendant’s history and severity of the crime, sometimes jail time as well.

Most, but not all, complete the treatment. In one recent court session, one veteran failed to show up;

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a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Another also failed to show, but word came that he had attempted suicide and was being treated in a VA hospital. But the vast majority appear one final time in Judge Dugan’s courtroom to “graduate’’ from the program. According to the VA’s Rebecca Hicks, fewer than 10 percent turn up as repeat offenders.

What seems to make veterans courts across the country work is that the service providers — case managers from the VA and repre-

sentatives from city, county and non-profit agencies — all sit right in the courtroom. Help is not some distant bureaucracy with a crowded, take-a-number waiting room; it’s right at hand.

The benefits of this approach are clear. Court dockets and jail cells aren’t clogged with veterans who’ve abused drugs or alcohol; those veterans are out on probation and in treatment. Many of them are seeing a physician for the first time in years, going back to school, going to Narcotics Anonymous and PTSD counseling. Some have found housing after years

Beavers outside of the Philadelphia Veterans MultiService and Education Center.

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of living on the streets.

All this happens with the prosecutor, the probation officers, VA case managers — and Judge Dugan — watching carefully.

“I don’t consider this to be more lenient,” Dugan says. “I expect more out of these guys because of their military background. They went through basic training. They did stuff. They volunteered to go in harm’s way. And they earned these benefits.”

Garant, the assistant district attorney, insists he treats veterans more harshly than other offenders.

“A guy charged with (drug) possession, pleads guilty in criminal court, he gets six months probation and no treatment — but he walks,” Garant said. “Same guy in Veterans Court, we make him go through treatment and that may take a year during which time he’s on probation. So he does more time, but he gets help.

“I don’t want to put these guys in jail,” Garant said. “I don’t want to give them a record. I want to get them help.”

TRYING TO GET THROUGH THAT

This summer, things were looking good for Jamie Beavers. He was out

on six months probation, checking in regularly in Dugan’s Veterans Court, finishing up a methadone drug treatment program at the VA medical center and attending Narcotics Anonymous. He is working with counselors at the Philadelphia Veterans Multiservice and Education Center on getting his bills paid, working on his resume, hunting for employment, and applying for affordable housing.

He and his wife are separated, but every other weekend, he was seeing his two girls, 8 and 20 months — “the only time I feel really joyful,” he said.

Just when things were going well, trouble struck again. Picking up his daughters on a mid-August Friday night for pizza and videos, he got into an argument with his wife; things escalated, the cops were called, and Jamie was arrested. His mother posted bail.

The clash and arrest threw Beavers into a deep depression. Barred from seeing his eight year-old and baby daughter, he lay in bed much of the day in his second-floor apartment just off Shunk Avenue in south Philly, refusing to answer his phone or email. He stopped showing up at the vets center.

Gormley, the ex-cop, became

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“ I SAW THINGS THAT WERE INHUMANE THAT STILL STICK WITH ME TO THIS DAY.” alarmed and tracked him down.

“What often happens in these cases is they get into trouble and stress and go back on drugs,” Gormley said. “I’m worried.”

But Beavers was okay. He’d stayed off drugs, and was just returning from the methadone clinic at the VA. “I haven’t seen my girls for weeks and that’s been really hard,” he said. “But no, I didn’t go back to the drugs, I’m done with that.”

In Veterans Court, Garant and Beaver’s public defender, Melissa Stango, are working to have Beavers’ domestic violence case combined with his DUI violation so he can continue his rehabilitation under Dugan’s supervision.

But he still faces an uphill slog through the debilitating effects of his brain injury toward a more normal life.

In the military, he said, “I saw things that were inhumane that still stick with me to this day, and

I’m trying to get through that. I did two tours, killed a bunch of people, got blown up six times, have PTSD and can’t hear out of my left ear. I have a 100 percent disability from the VA.” Until now, he said, “I was never in trouble with the law.”

Beavers has a gentle, friendly demeanor and smiles often. He speaks haltingly, sometimes searching for a word. Traumatic Brain Injury has left him with some memory loss and he sometimes has difficulty focusing, paying attention. He hopes to get a job to keep up with his bills and child support payments, and eventually to get back into college, maybe to earn a degree in counseling so he can work with other veterans with PTSD or addiction problems.

“I know I’m a little behind because of my injuries and because I’ve been out of school for so long,” he said. “It’s hard…I’m just…trying to get back into things. If I can get a college degree and a good job by the time my daughter hits high school… that’d be good.”

ANGER MANAGEMENT

THE CURIOUS CAREER OF STEPHEN LAROQUE When Kathryn Treadway pulled into the driveway in a tree-filled subdivision in Kinston, N.C., at 9 a.m. on a Friday in May, 2011, she didn’t know whether the man who lived on the three-and-a-half acre property would welcome her or call the police. ¶ They had never met in person, but the previous evening they had sparred over email. ¶ The owner of the house, Stephen LaRoque, was a senior Republican in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

He had helped his party stall a measure to maintain the state’s eligibility for long-term federal unemployment insurance. ¶ North Carolina’s unemployment rate was 10.5 percent at the time, and the standoff in the statehouse had stopped checks for 47,000

BY ARTHUR DELANEY ILLUSTRATION BY EDDIE GUY

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long-term unemployed North Carolinians — many of whom had already depleted their savings trying to keep their lights on and their children warm with a fraction of their former income.

Treadway, then 35, was one of them. She’d lost her job doing medical transcription work early in 2010, and she and her husband had two young kids to feed. She wrote LaRoque and other top Republicans explaining her troubles.

“I am begging you on behalf of our family, before we lose absolutely everything, to please work out a compromise and pass the extension of these benefits to give us more time to try to help ourselves,” she said in her email.

Most politicians might have responded to such a plea with a boilerplate letter thanking Treadway for her views on the matter — if they bothered to respond at all. But LaRoque, then 47, wanted to help. He suggested that Treadway apply for work at a nearby chicken processing plant. Having already applied there and been told no jobs were available, Treadway called LaRoque dishonest. He quit being nice.

“Most anyone can find a job if they can pass a drug test and are

physically able to work,” he replied. “I have tried to find people to do yard work but it seems most are too good for manual labor.

Based on the tone of your email it is not difficult to see why you can’t find a job.”

LaRoque told Treadway that if she was really willing to work, he’d pay her $8 an hour to clean his yard. She drove from her home in Goldsboro, 26 miles away, the next morning, ready to get dirty, she told The Huffington Post at the time. (Though both Treadway and LaRoque spoke with HuffPost in the past, neither agreed to be interviewed for this article.)

The incident between Treadway and LaRoque is more than just a local squabble. Republicans at the state and federal levels broadly share his view on the plight of the

“IF PEOPLE NEED A JOB,THEY NEED TO GO LOOKING FOR A JOB, AND THEY NEED TO TAKE WHAT THEY CAN GET UNTIL THEY CAN FIND SOMETHING BETTER.” unemployed, a view that often comes down to a simple, and simplistic, distillation: Able-bodied people who don’t work are just lazy, and it shouldn’t be the government’s job to help them.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney espoused the view earlier this year, when he told donors at a private campaign fundraiser that he believed that half the country is dependent on government.

“I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives,” Romney said.

Just as Romney’s tough talk about personal responsibility seems out of sync with his own privileged background, LaRoque, too, has seemingly played by a different set of rules. His job offer to Treadway may have triggered a sequence of events that shredded his own tale of personal success achieved solely through bootstrap entrepreneurship and ultimately

led to a grand jury indictment — leaving him on the verge of possibly losing everything he has.

A MAN WITH IDEAS

LaRoque hadn’t always taken such a hard line on workers. After earning an MBA from East Carolina University in 1993, he founded two nonprofits, the East Carolina Development Company in 1997 and the Piedmont Development Company in 2004.

The nonprofits acted as a transit point for loans from a U.S. Department of Agriculture lending program aimed at alleviating poverty and spurring economic growth in low-income, rural areas nationwide. Known as the Intermediary Relending Program, it allowed groups like LaRoque’s to borrow the money at a one-percent interest rate and then relend it at a higher rate to struggling rural businesses, with the idea that the groups would use the profits to pay operational costs and relend principal that borrowers had paid back.

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When LaRoque won his seat in the General Assembly in 2002, representing North Carolina’s 10th District, a local reporter with the Morning Star of Wilmington, N.C. accompanied him on a drive to see some of the homes that had gone up thanks to ECDC loans to a local developer. Hurricanes had recently caused flooding in the area, and 13 displaced families had taken up residence inside the brick-and-vinyl homes.

“A flooded-out family moved into that one,” LaRoque said, slowly driving by the buildings,

“and a group of about six older people on Social Security who were flooded by [Hurricane] Floyd live in that one.”

LaRoque told the reporter that he planned not only to bring fiscal discipline to the statehouse, but also to make sure the state actively promoted economic development in his district, which had lost six percent of its residents during the 1990s due to flooding and a lack of jobs — even as the state saw 21 percent population growth during that period.

LaRoque’s relative open-mindedness had even earned him the support of some local Democrats.

“Let me put it this way: This

LaRoque’s attorney Joe Chesire speaks to reporters.

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state, county and nation are in a crisis situation, economically,” Lenoir County Commissioner Oscar Herring, a Democrat, told the reporter in 2002. “We’ve got to do something about it, and Stephen was a man with ideas.

He impressed me.”

In January 2003, disaster struck LaRoque’s district again when an explosion destroyed a pharmaceutical plant, killing six people and injuring 36 in the town of Kinston. That February, LaRoque championed a bill to make sure surviving workers would receive unemployment compensation because their jobs had been lost.

“The folks in Kinston really need this,” LaRoque told reporters, according to the Associated Press. “They’ve got rent to pay the 1st of March and they’ve got grocery bills.”

By 2011, however, well into the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, many Republicans at the state and federal levels had grown tired of treating unemployment as a disaster. In North Carolina, when it came time to pass a law so the state’s long-term jobless could continue receiving federal unem-

ployment insurance, Republicans there saw an opportunity.

They tried to use the benefits as leverage to extract major budget cuts from Democratic Gov. Bev Perdue. But Perdue didn’t give in, and tens of thousands of jobless workers became collateral damage as Republicans held up their benefits in a legislative standoff that dragged on for weeks. Treadway claimed in her email to LaRoque that her family had lost its home to foreclosure during the impasse.

Perdue eventually defied Republicans with an executive order that unilaterally reinstated the benefits. She cited unnecessary eviction notices in her order. “The people I hear from say they can’t keep the lights on,” Perdue said. “Banks are ready to foreclose.”

For Republicans like LaRoque, the issue was a philosophical one.

Unemployment was at least partly a failure of personal responsibility, rather than solely an economic problem beyond the control of individual workers.

But for North Carolina’s longterm unemployed, the battle over jobless benefits was personal.

“You and your party promised to represent us when we needed you and you have failed miserably,” Treadway said to LaRoque in their email exchange. “I sin-

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cerely hope karma comes around to bite you in the butt when election time comes.”

SHUTTERSTOCK / RITU MANOJ JETHANI

A FIGHTIN’ MAN

However collaborative and appealing to Democrats LaRoque had been when he first ran for office, by 2010 a more combative side started to show. He had been voted out of office in 2006, but by 2010 wanted his seat back from Democrat Van Braxton.

Braxton played hardball, distributing campaign flyers that alleged LaRoque, through his rural lending operation, screwed the proprietor of a barbecue restaurant through irresponsible lending that ended in foreclosure.

“LaRoque stole my business,” Bruce Patterson, the business owner, said in the flyer. “He stole my home.”

Patterson had borrowed $379,900 from the East Carolina Development Company in the late ‘90s, but fell behind on payments in 2006, leading ECDC to foreclose on both the restaurant and Patterson’s home upstairs. Patterson claimed LaRoque pushed the financing on him, then wouldn’t negotiate a modification when times got tough.

LaRoque insisted he hadn’t done anything improper, and then sued Braxton for defamation, continuing the case even after he’d won back his state seat. Braxton’s legal team began requesting documentation from LaRoque. The lawyers had uncovered an audit by the USDA’s Office of the Inspector General questioning LaRoque’s business practices and suggesting, as Braxton’s attorney put it to the Kinston Free Press, “that LaRoque may owe $4.5 million back to the government for making loans in violation of the program under which he was operating.”

LaRoque stonewalled, refusing to cough up documents and finding himself in contempt of court — all for an election he’d already won. It wasn’t the only unnecessary fight he picked.

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In May of 2011, two weeks before he met Kathryn Treadway, LaRoque took offense to a press release from the local NAACP that said Republican obstruction of unemployment insurance would harm the state’s African-American population. LaRoque called the NAACP “racist.” He told local TV station WRAL, “I’m sick of getting these race-baiting, racisttype action alerts, e-mails, whatever you want to call them.”

In the midst of all of this, Treadway pulled into LaRoque’s driveway last year, ready to take on the job he’d offered.

LaRoque greeted her politely, according to both of their accounts at the time, and began fulfilling his promise to give her work. He got her started pulling dead tomato and bell pepper plants out of pots, then pouring the soil into a big container so he and his wife, Susan, could reuse it later. After that, he asked her to clear some fallen tree limbs from the yard.

Treadway quit after one hour.

“It was just too much. I’m not used to doing manual labor, and the crap he wanted me to do was something two men would do,” she told The Huffington Post at the time, adding that she thought

LaRoque deliberately tried to humiliate her. “I’m used to making $22 an hour. I’m not gonna sit there for $8 an hour and come home having a stroke.”

LaRoque paid her $8 in cash, and she drove home.

“If people need a job, they need to go looking for a job, and they need to take what they can get until they can find something better,” LaRoque told HuffPost after the incident, vindicated in his view of joblessness. “I still think that a lot of those people are not actively looking for work.”

The online community reacted strongly to a Huffington Post story in May 2011 about Treadway’s fight with LaRoque. Online commenters criticized LaRoque and posted his email address and phone number at the North Carolina General Assembly.

LaRoque jumped into the article’s comment thread to defend himself, leaving more than 100 spirited comments over two days.

Most of them calmly answered other commenters’ questions, but in a few he let his exasperation show.

“Sir you just called my deceased mother a Bitch,” LaRoque wrote in one comment. “I dare say you wouldn’t do that to my face...

You are a real ASS!” “So you want to get rid of the state legislature?” he said in an-

“I THINK HE’S GOT STRONG CONVICTIONS AND HE’S WILLING TO GO OUT OF THE NORM AND DEFEND HIS POSITIONS AND HIMSELF.” other. “That’s a real bright idea...

Did you come up with that one on your own?”

In response to claims that he’d been a cheap boss, LaRoque contended that he himself made very little money from his part-time job as a state legislator. His annual statehouse salary of $13,950, divided by the number of hours he worked, he said, amounted to an hourly wage of $6.71.

“If I were to make $8 an hour that would be a 19% increase and I don’t think the taxpayers of North Carolina would appreciate the legislature giving itself a 19% wage increase,” he wrote. “My net pay each month is $44 and change. That equals about $1.50 a day or about 19 cents an hour.”

But being a state rep wasn’t, of course, LaRoque’s only gig.

His online antagonists quickly started seeking more information. Several readers looked up the East Carolina Development

Company’s tax forms online and discovered that LaRoque earned a low six-figure salary from that organization alone. They emailed the documents to journalists, including Sarah Ovaska, a reporter who had been covering the unemployment standoff at the statehouse for N.C. Policy Watch, a local, left-leaning think tank.

After receiving the tip, Ovaska began digging deeper. Over the course of a two-month investigation, she discovered that LaRoque had paid himself hefty salaries for a decade, mainly from ECDC, and that he loaned federal money to friends and political allies. He put his wife and brother on his two nonprofit companies’ boards of directors, and kept other board members uninformed about his pay. (Having family members on a board isn’t illegal, but it’s frowned upon by the IRS for conflict-of-interest reasons.)

Ovaska also found the same USDA audit criticizing LaRoque’s use of the Intermediary Relending Program that Braxton’s lawyers

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had used in their court battle. LaRoque, Ovaska noted in her story, had a record of “questionable management and financial dealings.”

Shortly after Ovaska’s story came out in August 2011, LaRoque called a press conference to denounce her findings. He called N.C. Policy Watch a “liberal propaganda tabloid” and claimed that his compensation at the non-profits was commensurate with the assets he managed.

LaRoque also said his salary at the non-profits came from interest on loans that borrowers paid back, not from taxpayer dollars.

Moreover, he noted, Ovaska’s article had been an act of retaliation — the head of the NAACP’s North Carolina chapter sat on the board of a group affiliated with N.C. Policy Watch, which published Ovaska’s article, and Laroque pointed out that he had once criticized the chapter head as a racist.

LaRoque’s press conference failed to clear his name.

A DIFFERENT PERSON

In September 2011, shortly after the N.C. Policy Watch story came out, state and federal authorities subpoenaed LaRoque as part of a joint investigation into ECDC’s

activities as a non-profit.

In July of this year, the investigation — which included the Internal Revenue Service, the USDA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation — produced a 72-page grand jury indictment charging LaRoque with four counts of theft and four counts of fraud. If found guilty on all counts, LaRoque faces 80 years in prison.

The timing of the subpoenas led most local reporters to conclude that Ovaska’s journalism had sparked the investigation, but it’s possible authorities had already been looking into LaRoque because of the defamation case.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina, which announced the indictment, declined to comment on the investigation.

John Archie, Van Braxton’s lawyer, said he figured authorities would jump on LaRoque based on what he’d uncovered in the discovery process for the defamation suit.

“We got to the point where everybody was fairly comfortable

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that something was going to happen with the feds so we settled the lawsuit.”

LaRoque dropped the defamation case last November — after he’d been subpoenaed in the federal investigation — and paid $17,250 in contempt fines.

Whether it was his foray into an Internet comment section or his lawsuit against an already-defeated opponent that led to LaRoque’s downfall, there’s no question that his willingness to jump into battle also played a role.

“He’s just a different person,” said Braxton, when asked why LaRoque is so combative in court and online. Braxton said he grew up in Kinston but only knew LaRoque from the campaign. “I think he’s got strong convictions and he’s willing to go out of the norm and defend his positions and himself. It’s probably an attribute most politicians and elected officials would not do.”

It turned out the defamation case and Ovaska’s investigation uncovered only part of the story.

For a decade, the indictment alleges, LaRoque overpaid himself from his non-profits and stole federal loan money to, essentially, go shopping.

According to the indictment, in 2005, LaRoque used taxpayer dollars to buy himself a new Toyota Avalon for $37,729. In 2007, he did it again to buy a slightly used Toyota Tacoma for $21,958.

A week before his wife’s birthday in February 2008, he spent nearly $10,000 on jewelry, including two Faberge-style eggs.

In December 2008, LaRoque allegedly used company money to buy more than $15,000 worth of Faberge-like eggs and Faberge egg-themed jewelry, including a necklace and earrings.

The jewelry was allegedly for LaRoque’s wife, Susan, whom the indictment suggests LaRoque met through his business. In 2001, the ECDC lent $150,000 to a company called Susan’s Carpet and Interiors, which Susan Eatman owned, at a lower interest rate than other

LaRoque, right, with his attorney at his first court appearance on August 6, 2012.

LaRoque could face 80 years in prison.

IN DECEMBER 2008, LAROQUE ALLEGEDLY USED COMPANY MONEY TO BUY MORE THAN $15,000 WORTH OF FABERGE-LIKE EGGS AND FABERGE EGG-THEMED JEWELRY, INCLUDING A NECKLACE AND EARRINGS. ECDC borrowers received. Later that year, Susan’s Carpet installed carpet in LaRoque’s home, which LaRoque again paid for with ECDC funds. Shortly thereafter, Eatman (described in the indictment either as “Susan’s Carpet Owner” or “LaRoque’s Wife”) joined the ECDC board. LaRoque married her in 2007.

In January 2009, Susan LaRoque sold her carpet business in hopes of buying an ice skating rink in Greenville, N.C., according to the indictment. Later that year, with yet more funds from ECDC, she bought Bladez on Ice for a few hundred thousand dollars. ECDC money also was used to buy a new zamboni. In 2010, the indictment alleges, LaRoque and his wife also illegally used taxpayer dollars to buy a house for her daughter to rent.

LaRoque’s lawyer told the North Carolina News & Observer that LaRoque will be vindicated in court.

His Republican colleagues in North Carolina’s General Assembly seem less supportive. After the grand jury indicted LaRoque in July, State House Speaker Thom Tillis asked LaRoque to resign.

LaRoque obliged.

“I do not want my continued presence in the General Assembly to be politicized or to distract from the important work that still needs to be done there,” he wrote in a letter to Tillis. The trial will start early next year.

LaRoque’s days as a lawmaker might have been numbered anyway.

He lost a close primary contest in May. Ahead of the election, he explained to a local reporter how he evaluated himself as a lawmaker.

“I tell folks my greatest accomplishment’s when I can help a constituent, and my worst failure’s when I can’t,” he said.

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ERIN CLEMENTS AND STEPHANIE MARCUS

ILLUSTRATION BY TROY DUNHAM

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Exit N SEPTEMBER 16, just hours after 26-year-old actress Amanda Bynes was stopped by police and cited for driving on a suspended license (her 6th incident of reckless driving in five months), fellow former childstar-turned-road-menace Lindsay Lohan decided she’d seen enough.

“Why did I get put in jail and a nickelodeon star has had NO punishment(s) so far?” Lohan complained to her 4.3 million fans via Twitter.

Bynes and Lohan are products of the two largest child-star factories in America. Bynes made her name on Nickelodeon, getting her start on the variety show All That, eventually earning top billing on her own series, The Amanda Show, which ran from 1999 to 2002. Lohan is a Disney creation, with film credits ranging from 1998’s The Parent Trap to 2005’s Herbie: Fully Reloaded.

By now, however, both actresses are better known for their runins with the law. Lohan has faced a range of charges over the years, including DUI, misdemeanor possession and grand theft, while Bynes has racked up two DUIs and two hit-and-runs during her

O

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more recent downward spiral. But they’re hardly the only veterans of the two childrens’ entertainment empires to mess up in public: Miley Cyrus (Disney) was caught smoking salvia, Jamie Lynn Spears (Nickelodeon) got pregnant at 16, Shia LaBeouf (Disney) and Ryan Rottman (Nickelodeon) were

Why did I get put in jail and a nickelodeon star has had NO punishment(s) so far?”

­— Lindsay Lohan on Twitter

charged with drunk driving, while Demi Lovato (Disney) and Matthew Underwood (Nickelodeon) have struggled with drugs.

In an effort to ward off future generations of trainwrecks, Disney and Nickelodeon have both instituted orientation programs designed to prepare young performers for the vicissitudes of fame. Disney launched its program, Talent 101, only recently in 2007, shortly after a nude photo of High School Musical actress Vanessa Hudgens hit the internet. Modeled in part on the NBA’s Rookie Transition Program, the course requires incoming talent, as well as their parents and

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Exit siblings, to listen to guidance from various department heads.

“The decision to begin an orientation program, Talent 101, coincided with the emergence of social media and was in response to an increase in requests from young actors and their parents to help them navigate the experience of suddenly being in the global public sphere,” Disney rep Patti McTeague told Huffington.

Nickelodeon, whose representatives declined to comment for this article, has for the past decade required its stars to undergo a similar course to learn the ropes, on and off set. A 2007 Entertainment Weekly article characterizes that program as a “boot camp” that teaches kids to be media-savvy, and also imparts technical knowledge (what exactly is a key grip, anyway?) and professional expectations (perhaps Lohan never learned the meaning of “call time”).

As child stars are thrust into the spotlight — often treated like brands complete with record deals, TV movies and myriad other franchises — these programs have become a necessity. Many are unprepared for the immense pressure of these demands, ones even adults

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struggle to handle with grace.

“When you go into a Disney show you are typically anywhere from 10 to 16, and that’s when you are finding yourself,” says Debby Ryan, who is poised to be Disney’s next Selena Gomez. “That’s when you are so influenced by your friends, by what you are watching, and when you are part of the [young Hollywood] community... you kind of have this added pressure of not only fulfilling that standard, but being that standard.”

And while Ryan appears to have a handle on her grueling schedule — which includes the beginnings of a music career and clothing line — many others aren’t as well-adjusted.

A 2011 study published in the

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Actress Debby Ryan, 19, is a Disney veteran, currently starring in Jessie, and best known for her role in The Suite Life on Deck.

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journal of Child Development found that teenagers who work 20plus hours per week have a higher incidence of drug and alcohol use.

The study underscores a sentiment expressed by former Mickey Mouse Club member Paul Petersen, who founded the child-actor support group A Minor Consideration: “Fame is a dangerous commodity for a young person. It distorts the entire maturation process. You are subjected to forces that are almost incomprehensible to people who have never been ‘famous.’”

Disney both acknowledges that they play a role in its performers’ welfare, and denies liability.

“We give them all of the tools they might need, but the network is not responsible for raising their children,” Gary Marsh, the president of Disney Channels Worldwide told The Hollywood Reporter in June.

But Petersen says that when networks are pushing their actors to become multi-million dollar franchises, they do have a responsibility to help them adjust to the inevitable pitfalls of fame.

“Whenever a child grows up in an environment when they are the income earner, you have the world kind of turned on its head,” he says.

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Petersen — whose group has been called to sets to perform interventions with children struggling emotionally — welcomes the arrival of programs like Talent 101, but he says what young stars really need is support from those who have been there.

“Outsiders can’t help these kids — there is so much resistance from a young performer to

Whenever a child grows up in an environment when they are the income earner, you have the world kind of turned on its head.” listen to anyone else other than someone who has been through it themselves,” he says.

As for Bynes, Petersen observes: “We are watching what amounts to a cry for help. And the kind of help that’s required is not another movie role, or a spread in a magazine.”

Ultimately, he says, “The solution is often to take a break.”

Swipe down to see where Disney/Nickelodeon stars are today

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Jerry Seinfeld attends “Surprise Oprah! A Farewell Spectacular” on May 17, 2011 in Chicago, Illinois.

Is Jerry Seinfeld Still Relevant?

BY KATLA McGLYNN

Exit IFTEEN YEARS after he exited America’s favorite comedy, Jerry Seinfeld is re-entering the comedy consciousness in the biggest way since the 2009 Seinfeld reunion episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Last month, his name haunted a three-episode arc on Louie, the old comic heavyweight challenging the modern comic heavyweight, Louis C.K. His new web series — Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee – ended its first season last week, just as he prepares to return to his roots: the comic, 58, is taking the stage this month for a comedy tour through New York City, hitting each of the five boroughs. It’ll mark his first solo show in the city since he taped HBO’s “I’m Telling You for the Last Time” in 1998, the same year he pulled the plug on his iconic sitcom.

Some are calling this Seinfeld’s “second act.” But if you look closely, it’s all been part of the same act.

When Seinfeld disappeared in 1998, he left America in a feelgood era, hungry for more sublime chatter about nothing. September 11, 2001, was far away, the recession hadn’t happened yet, George

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W. Bush was only in charge of Texas and color-coded terror charts didn’t exist. In a way, it feels like Seinfeld didn’t experience any of the trauma of the last 15 years. As he said on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon recently, he’s lived on the Upper West Side for his entire adult life, only moving within a three-block radius.

In a way, it feels like Seinfeld didn’t experience any of the trauma of the last 15 years.”

We welcome him back not as a comedian whose material has gotten better with age — or one recovering from a period of decline — but as we would a 90s time capsule. There are no bad memories inside, Bee Movie and Marriage Ref now forgotten aberrations. It’s a capsule filled with the good, old days of Seinfeld, which still makes us laugh like the first time on third, fourth, fifth viewings. Seinfeld managed to retain his relevancy simply by going away, letting us relive his mindlessly satisfying humor.

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Exit “Jerry Seinfeld is more or less the perfect mainstream comic,” Leo Benedictus wrote in the Guardian. “He doesn’t swear; he does not express political opinions... he is rarely topical, so his shows don’t date.” At a benefit show two years ago, he did 10 minutes of material on cell phones and bottled water.

Cell phones and bottled water. And it was funny! His web series uses a modern medium to resume his timeless diner chats, taking you right back to Monk’s coffee shop (and in a hackneyed way).

Perhaps the most telling instance of his relevance was on Louie, when C.K. and Seinfeld compete for David Letterman’s job, and we see both the 90s star and the comedian du jour have what it takes. C.K. may not enjoy the level of fame he does in reality on his show, but the real-life parallels are hard to ignore: while Seinfeld exudes confidence and commands a $12 million price tag, a beleaguered C.K. — one of today’s most popular comedians — is worth only $1 million to the network.

Humor stays popular when it continues to resonate with regular people, and Seinfeld is still that safe, familiar choice for Americans.

However wealthy and sheltered his

SEINFELD

HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

We welcome Seinfeld back not as a comedian whose material has gotten better with age, but as we would a time capsule from the ‘90s.” life has been, he’s never stopped being the champion of comedy of the everyday. In an interview earlier this summer, Seinfeld lamented that he is constantly associated with “the little show about nothing” because that’s not the way he looks at it: “To me these are great things and essential things. I’m very well-known as an obsessive of the minute, but it’s not minute to me.”

Cell phones. Bottled water. Can you think of two things more essential?

“The Big Salad” episode from season 6 of Seinfeld.

Exit

APPROVAL

BIANCA BOSKER

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With that in mind, we present to you six apps to help you live like it’s 2112:

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Insta-fluency in any tongue: Speak into the SayHi app and it’ll say the phrase back in the language of your choice. (So long as you’ve got internet. If not, try Jibbigo.)

Tap the camera icon inside the Google app to get “Goggles,” which let you search wine labels, artwork, landmarks and products just by snapping a photo. Warning: May blow your mind.

Quite literally, Oldify will help you time travel: this terrifying app shows you how saggy, gray and wrinkled you’ll look in the future. Not recommended for newlyweds.

(See also: Baldify.)

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The purpose of the trip to touch a few lives and make a difference

wherever we could.”

Exit

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

J.D. Lewis

12K Race, 12 Months, 12 Countries

BY EMMA DIAB

J.D. LEWIS FELT like a big loser. He was quite sure his two sons were going to think he was the worst dad in the world, and quite possibly in the history of fatherdom. His big plan — for the Lewis family to travel to 12 countries in all seven continents, doing volunteer work for an entire year — had even been picked up by the local news media in Charlotte, and he worried they’d PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA MILLIGAN

HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

Exit never be able to raise enough money. Worse, his kids had told all of their friends. He sulked. He was bedridden. Lewis had just about given up hope when he received a surprising email.

“We had gone to a noodle shop,” Lewis says. “My phone buzzed, I’ll never forget — it was the craziest thing.” The sound alerted him to an email from none other than Yoko Ono, who knew of his project through a friend. “I heard about your project,” it read. “Just go do it!”

“I emailed her back,” recalls Lewis, a Charlotte resident and acting coach. “And I said your single email changed the course of our lives because it made us get off of our butts and do it.”

Lewis’ NGO, TwelveinTwelve, started after his eldest son Jackson approached him with a meaningful question.

“Jackson came home from school one day a year and a half ago and said, ‘dad we have an incredible life, how come we aren’t doing more to make a difference in the world?’”

EARLY YEARS Lewis was in awe of the conscientiousness of his eldest son, recalling his own youth wryly.

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

“When I was 13 all I cared about was smoking pot and surfing,” he said. “And I was a mess of a kid — I lost both my parents, didn’t know how to process grief.”

Lewis describes his childhood as a Stephen King novel — his mother had died of an overdose and his father took a gun to his head a year later.

Pursuing a career as an actor, Lewis landed many commercials

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Lewis peruses the mementos from his travels.

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GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

COURTESY OF J.D. LEWIS

In A Single Year...

Left to right: Lewis with a blind child in Rwanda; the family in Antarctica; Jackson and a Howler monkey in Argentina; Buck and a young monk at the Dalai Lama’s compound in India; the boys with kids at Transit in St.Petersburg, Russia; Jack and Buck with an elephant in Thailand; Jackson with schoolchildren in Kenya; and Jackson with special needs child Ray Ray in China.

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and small acting bits on shows such as Friends. He eventually developed a romantic relationship with director Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City), living together for some time before King’s big break. Soon, both men went in different directions. “I said, ‘Michael, I’m really over the whole Hollywood thing — I just want to be a parent.’”

Nine months later, Lewis adopted Jackson as an infant. Four years later, he adopted his second son, Buck, now 9. The kids lived in L.A. for a while, growing up on movie sets, until Lewis moved them to Charlotte, N.C., to start a normal life of

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

swim teams and Little League while he opened up an acting studio.

THE TRIP After raising $20,000 through a 12K race, the Lewis family were set to take on 12 different locations: Antarctica, Argentina, Australia, China, Haiti, India, Kenya, Peru, Russia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Thailand. Jackson was given the role of global team blogger, while Buck wrote to LEGO asking the CEO to help him share his favorite toy with less-fortunate kids. Crates of legos were subsequently shipped to all locations ahead of their arrival.

Their first stop was Saint Petersburg, Russia, where they worked

HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

These bracelets and figurines were made by children in Haiti, known as “restaveks.”

The children work as domestic servants in exchange for room and board with an affluent family.

Exit with a government-subsidized home for runaway children called Transit. The Lewis boys met a Nigerian girl who was sent by her family to work for a pimp who’d abandoned her when she reached the city. Lewis arranged for the girl to contact her brother. By the time they left, Transit was arranging for her to reunite with him in Nigeria.

“When we went to leave she came up to me and said, ‘what would I have done if you hadn’t been there J.D. You saved my life,’” he recalls in a strained voice.

The premise and execution of TwelveinTwelve is not without its opponents, however.

“A few people have been critics, saying, ‘don’t be fooled this was just a frivolous vacation.’ It was not a vacation!” he says, affronted, recalling the 12 hour work days in the opal mines and remote hospitals of the Australian Outback and the year spent living mostly in huts with no electricity or water.

“The purpose of the trip was to touch a few lives and make a difference wherever we could,” he says.

BACK IN CHARLOTTE Lewis has been busy — when Huffington caught up with him, he had been back stateside for

GREATEST PERSON OF THE WEEK

HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

about a month, and was making plans to start helping some of the organizations from his post in Charlotte.

“A number of them are like, ‘Okay! You’re home, let’s get going!’ And I’m like, whoa it’s a lot of work — I’m putting together a team of people who are helping me organize a foundation.”

It’s all about having the passion to want to do it. People have these excuses for why they don’t go out and live, but that’s all they are: excuses.”

Lewis plans on choosing 12 organizations from the countries he visited to address their most pressing needs. He was also given the chance to speak at the DNC to raise awareness about his campaign.

For those who long to pick up and go on a trip like the Lewis boys, he has some advice.

“It’s all about having the passion to want to do it,” Lewis says. “People have these excuses for why they don’t go out and live, but that’s all they are: excuses.”

TFU

WHITNEY CURTIS/GETTY IMAGES (AKIN); SHUTTERSTOCK (BATHROOM, FISH); WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES (DARK MONEY); IKEA (CATALOG)

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HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

Todd Akin: Employers Should Be Allowed to Pay Women Less Because of ‘Freedom’

2

Transgender New Yorkers Face Violence Using Public Bathrooms

3

CLIMATE CHANGE WILL SHRINK FISH BY 2050

4

Dark Money Groups Buy More Than Half of Political Ads to Sway Senate Race

Ikea Erases Women From Catalogue

Exit

HUFFINGTON 10.07.12

TFU

SHUTTERSTOCK (LLAMA, INJECTION, FIREFIGHTER, FREEZER, KID WITH SODA)

Woman Killed

by Falling Llama

7

Improperly Licensed Beautician Gives Face-Deforming Injections

8

WOMAN TRIES TO SET FIREFIGHTERS ON FIRE

9

Chinese Parents Store Dead Son’s Body in Freezer for 6 Years

10

Kids Guzzle 7 Billion Calories From Sugary Drinks Each Year

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