Since becoming New to Las Vegas, I have been amazed at the ability of places in Nevada to pop up in big stories focused elsewhere, often as a precursor. Remember the Watergate scandal triggered in 1972 when henchmen working for President Richard M. Nixon broke into Democratic Party offices in Washington, D.C.? By some accounts, it, had its origins in a bribe Nixon had taken from reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, then living in a Las Vegas hotel.
There’s still a video on the Internet of Donald J. Trump partying in Las Vegas in 2013 with Russians and some hangers-on. One of them later wrote an infamous email promising Russian government dirt on Hillary Clinton. The matter became a focus of that Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation begun four years later into purported Trump-Russian ties in the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won.
A New York City judge today is formally pronouncing a sentence on Trump after a jury last year convicted him on 34 felony counts of covering up a $130,000 hush money payoff made there in 2016 to stop porn actress Stormy Daniels from chatting up a one-night stand she said she had had with The Donald in 2016. The venue of the liaison? Why, Nevada, of course, specifically the Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course in Stateline, Nev., near Reno. In a 2018 interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes,” Daniels said she was subsequently threatened in a Las Vegas parking lot by an unknown man to “forget the story.”
It is with this backdrop that I write about a book to be published next month concerning a controversial Hollywood episode during World War II in the life of the legendary actor and director Charlie Chaplin (1887-1977) that has an interesting Nevada angle. The work is When Charlie Met Joan: The Tragedy of the Chaplin Trials and the Failings of American Law (University of Michigan Press).
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