Prosecutors at the Maricopa County Attorney's Office say Justin Gregg raped Jennifer McAllister in June 2001, while the pair were patients at a county psychiatric hospital. At the same time, lawyers for Maricopa County say McAllister is making the whole thing up. Those attorneys are vigorously defending a lawsuit McAllister...
Advice columnist Amy Alkon had a delicious secret. In her spare time, she'd been actively insulting the owners of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) with an inspired piece of performance art. This past spring she wrote about her one-woman campaign in our sister publication in Los Angeles. The column ignited a...
Six months ago, I received an impassioned e-mail from a woman in south Chandler. She was responding to a column I had written a week earlier about Bishop Thomas O'Brien's long history of coddling and secretly transferring priests who had molested children. In the e-mail, the woman told the story...
Avery Wiseman has never eaten anyone. But he's written about it, in The Next Taboo: Curing Cancer Through Cannibalism. Wiseman's newest book has been receiving national attention, mostly from people who have mistaken the good doctor's first novel for nonfiction. Wiseman doesn't seem all that concerned about the mix-up. The...
I figured I wouldn't like Nova Gyna. I confess to being creeped out by the whole he/she thing, which Nova Gyna (pronounced "no vagina," and Latin for "new woman") writes about in her new book, The Occasional Woman. I expected to find a scary drag queen, maybe even one of...
Sometimes The Spike just wants to bang its pointy little head against a brick wall. The one at Phoenix's downtown Fire Station 1 will do nicely this time. What's got The Spike in a lather this week is a recent federal court judgment against the City of Phoenix to settle...
Rebecca Kastl wraps her long fingers around a coffee mug and lifts a latte to her lips. The steaming brew fogs her glasses, for a moment obscuring her sky-blue eyes. Kastl, 34, is articulate and bookish, but she's no geek. Currently working as a network engineer, she is serenely confident...
Lucy didn't pay $1,200 and fly across the country just to watch naked strangers in cowboy hats probe their anuses. A widow and business owner from the Deep South, Lucy says that, since her husband's death, she has been fascinated with spirituality and is intent on exploring a variety of...
We may never get back the true Mystikal, the real Mystikal, the Mystikal who put his skills on the table first, then looked around for some well-deserved ass. That was the Mystikal of "Y'all Ain't Ready Yet," and indeed we weren't. When the New Orleans rapper dropped that single in...
There's a naked man hammering nails just outside the door of the restaurant. I can see him through the glass pane, working in happy rhythm as he repairs a damaged windowsill. Up, down, up, down, his hammer rises and strikes; tick-tock, tick-tock, his penis rocks, keeping the beat like a...
There's no need for the exchange of overpriced trinkets to distract me from the agony of having to play the same old tired roles -- rankled adult child, tormented kid, alcoholic uncle -- that I spend the rest of the year struggling bravely to escape. Hardly. This Christmas Eve I...
Last year, Betty Blowtorch earned $45,000 on tour -- not a bad take for a then-unsigned all-chick sleaze-rock band with songs like "Shut Up and Fuck." Of course, Betty Blowtorch spent $44,000 to earn that 45K, paying the rent with day jobs between two-week touring stints. Reminiscing about a decade...
The recovery of the Eastern North Pacific gray whale from the brink of extinction is arguably the single greatest turnaround of an endangered species, and the whale's myriad connections to human cultural conflicts are no less impressive in their scope. In New Times' special project "Shades of Gray," reporters from...
Robert Scott Crane insists he had no idea that people would be so fascinated with his famous father's penis (or is that his father's famous penis?). "We knew it would be big," Scotty Crane says, "but we didn't know how big." He's talking not about the member in question --...
Much of the discussion surrounding the growth of DJ culture had focused on the myriad subgenres and styles that have exploded in recent years. From drum 'n' bass, house and jungle to techno, trance and acid jazz, it seems that each season brings with it a new prevailing trend. But...
On a warm day in mid-May, the Black Canyon School campus is quiet and clean, the rose and hibiscus bushes as well-groomed as the girls in their white sneakers, khakis and regulation bras visible beneath peach polo shirts. The Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections girls school -- off Happy Valley...
Jennifer Kindelspire is 20 years old. Petite and pale. Big brown eyes. Kinda quiet. The other Church members fear her. They call her a monster. They say Kindelspire can outpull anybody. Nobody wants to go up against Kindelspire. She's like a bull. She once pulled an armored truck across a...
In blooper scenes included on the soon-to-be-released gay porn feature Behind the Set, we see a decidedly mirthful 19-year-old Christian Valentino dancing and clowning about, all smiles as he bounces his flaccid penis off the heads of other actors. The reel also reveals another side of the Phoenix-based Valentino, a...
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film-actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It'll be a 30-minute show, Leary probably...
Contained within a care package sent by C.D. Payne is a self-penned press release introducing the author as "the Rodney Dangerfield of comic novelists," complete with a picture of the bug-eyed comedian and his shopworn catch phrase "I can't get no respect." As it turns out, this is the letter...
It's 1942, the final year of John Barrymore's life, and we've joined the once-great actor in a tiny playhouse, where he's come to recapture his former glory. Instead, he delivers a sodden recitation of his days as the clown prince of Broadway's Royal Family, recalling many of his famous friends...
Maria Hernandez was 18 when a young man filled her head with exciting stories about the world that awaited them to the north. She slipped across the border with her first love, leaving behind her family's Guadalajara farm and the dirt floor where she slept with 12 siblings under one...
