Anita Cannibal: not your average lawyer

August 27, 2008

breath_australian-cover_cover.jpgBlade has just finished reading Tim Winton’s much-admired latest novel, Breath. It explores the relationship between two teenage boys and a 36-year-old male mentor whose common bond is surfing. Sando takes his two apprentices surfing at ever more dangerous breaks until both, in their differing ways, have forever escaped the dread tag of being classified “ordinary men”. Ordinariness is equated with despair, but surfing big waves isn’t its only antidote. Extreme sex, in the form of erotic asphyxia, also rears its (coughing and spluttering?) head in a novel that, for Blade, is just a little too heavy on misery and desperation.

anita.jpgBut being ordinary – is it so bad? One person eminently well qualified to comment might be Traci Bryant, a.k.a Anita Cannibal. Ms Bryant is a law student at the University of West Los Angeles Law School, but, as Bitter Lawyer reveals, a lot more of her will often meet the eye: “OK, so Traci Bryant, a.k.a. Anita Cannibal, isn’t exactly your typical law student. Her resume is stacked with the usual suspects for a 1L—torts and contracts classes, volunteer work at a community outreach clinic, legal research on labor and employment law issues—but it also includes recent stints at the Chicken Ranch brothel in Nevada, ‘sword swallowing’ as a special skill, and starring roles in over 130 films, including Nurse Orgy 5 and Titty Titty Bang Bang. ”

Yes, Ms Bryant is a porn star and licensed prostitute as well as a putative lawyer. Hers is undoubtedly a life less ordinary, and, unlike those of the characters in Breath, it seems to be real. She is pictured here looking mercifully demure courtesy of the kind of Google search that tends to provide rather more than you bargained for

Blade will refrain from all further comment save that to say that he waits with eagerness for the next installment of Bitter Lawyer’s interview with Ms Bryant, one which will explore “How Traci got into porn… what brought her to law school… what her brothel clients and porn colleagues think of her being in law school… her favorite and least favorite parts of porn, stripping, and working in the brothels… what she wants to do with her law degree. ”

 

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Good work by Rusbridger

February 10, 2012
scissors

The headline says it all: ‘Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger takes pay cut‘.

Dan Sabbagh’s piece says a bit more: said editor ‘emailed staff at the newspaper to say that his salary in the upcoming 2012-13 financial year will be £395,010, compared with £438,900 in the current financial year’.

Some voices say: ‘How worthy.’

Others opine: ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

But we say: good work by Mr Rusbridger. For the sake of the media’s survival, we hope that others in senior positions in the industry will follow suit.

Image of toolkit allegedly deployed by Alan Rusbridger courtesy of Flickr user LollyKnit.

From the inside of the maze, ethically outwards

February 9, 2012

Curious times in the media; strange days at The Times.

Would ‘Dacre Cards‘ – the system of licensing journalists proposed by Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre – have prevented the embarrassment now palpable at the Times over the NightJack story?

Times editor James Harding’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry seemed heartfelt and contrite, albeit that the paper’s former long-serving and much-respected lawyer, Alastair Brett, seems to have been, er, rather dropped in it. Clearly, mistakes were made with regard to NightJack by young reporter Patrick Foster who, once he had hacked into NightJack’s account and thus discovered his identity, then embarked on a quest to expose it via legitimate methods. This, as Inquiry counsel Robert Jay QC put it, was “rather like working from the inside of the maze out”.

But had Foster been licensed via a Dacre Card, would this unsavoury episode in the Times’s history have been avoided?

We suspect not. A raft of laws were in existence at precisely the time when many News of the World journalists seemed to believe that they were entitled to hack any phone they liked. Those laws forbade them from doing so, and yet made no difference. Aside from the obvious objection to them – that they will squeeze out freelancers and citizen journalists – Dacre Cards would simply amount to something to circumvent.

What is really required is an ethical shake-up, from top to bottom. Society generally – not just journalists – needs a sense that some things are just plain wrong.

Supreme Court on Twitter

February 6, 2012

Something remarkable happened today. Yes, the Supreme Court launched its Twitter feed. It even has a Twitter policy, one of caveats, disclaimers and little by way of illumination but regardless: who would have thought that the successor body to the House of Lords would stoop to engage with the world of tweets, hashtags and retweets?

We look forward to the day when court business will be conducted via Twitter. Meantime, check out this link for an excellent blog on the Supreme Court.