Social Media Was a CEO’s Bullhorn, and How He Lured Women
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Let's take away the real lesson though: we should mistrust personal brands; celebrity is always contrived. The perceived charisma of celebrities is as carefully engineered as a mobile app's UI/UX, based on expected (read: researched) audience response.
The ending is also a banger. Price's ex-wife went public with her allegations of abuse just before this story went to print. Despite that short notice, Weise is able to confront Price about the allegations in detail, and document his bizarre reaction, a forewarning of Price's sociopath tendencies:
> Price’s life may get more complicated the week of Dec. 7, when TEDx plans to post online a public talk by his former wife, who changed her last name to Colón. She spoke on Oct. 28 at the University of Kentucky about the power of writing to overcome trauma... Colón stood on stage wearing cerulean blue and, without naming Price, read from a journal entry she says she wrote in May 2006 about her then-husband. “He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again,” she read. “He also threw me to the ground and got on top of me. He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face. I was shaking so bad.” Later in the talk, Colón recalled once locking herself in a car, “afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.”
> I read those quotes to Price. “I’m just going to take a second because this is very surprising to me,” he said. He paused. “I appreciate and respect my former wife, and she played a very positive role in my life,” he said. “Out of respect for her, I wouldn’t feel comfortable responding to a supposed allegation she may have said coming from a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter when I have absolutely zero evidence of an allegation being made.” I told him that I wanted to be clear: I was giving him the chance to deny the claims. “My comment is very responsive,” he said. “I would be more than happy to provide a comment if and when I actually get the benefit of seeing what you are referencing.”
> About three hours later, Price called back. “There’s one more thing that I would like to add to my previous statement,” he said. “The events that you described never happened.”
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