Let Us Now Hate Famous Men

When terrible dudes lose, it is incumbent upon us to dunk on them luxuriously. Today, we raise a glass.

The rise of Presidents Trump and Musk isn’t the first time in history that the worst men in the world came to rule it, it just may be the most consequential. It means that evolved mature people like ourselves, who have cleared toxic mouth-breathers from our daily lives and auras, must climb down from our well-moisturized mountains to reckon with them on a grander scale.

If the big little shits who hold the reins of power are going to drag us down into the mud, the least we can do is play in it. The manosphere still shows its ass spectacularly, and occasionally suffers consequences. We need to celebrate the losses of these malevolent hairdos when we can, loudly cheering the rare golden moments when they who fucked around find out.

Today we’re going to don our folkloric clogging shoes and stomp on the heads of a curated selection of terrible guys who are presently flailing over their L’s—if for no other reason than our spirits demand it after whatever the dangerous fuck that was in the Oval Office with Volodymyr Zelenskyy yesterday.

Some of the below may be news to you. Some of it won’t be, but I hope you will join me for it nonetheless, like a bitter reunion with a hateful old friend. You will recognize a few of these loser princes; some of them you won’t. In my self-designated role as your French culture sherpa, I hope to hip you to some new faces to throw darts at, because we’re here to learn and gloat. If I’ve done my job, you will come to delight in their setbacks as much as I do.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

Brokey Giuliani Still Has a Lot of Open Cases

“Giuliani time” doesn’t mean what it once did. So, Rudy gets to keep his New York and Palm Beach pads after reaching a settlement with Lady Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Atlanta-based poll workers whose lives he torpedoed in 2020. But Dominion and Smartmatic still have open defamation complaints against him, as does his former assistant Noelle Dunphy, for sexual battery. (And while we’re at it, the state of Arizona, for election interference, too.) Too bad the hotshot prosecutor turned Viagra-gobbling day drunk has been disbarred in New York and DC. He can’t represent himself, and the cases there are going to be expensive. Even Giuliani’s account on Cameo, where you could pay a small cash sum for him to send you a custom-recorded message, is closed. We’ll miss his disheveled rambling. It was fun when it wasn’t psychotic and dangerous.

Accused Sex Pest Juan Branco Might Also Get Disbarred

Who is Juan Branco, you might be asking? Well, he’s running for president of France in 2027, at which point I plan to revive this list and put him right back on it. The son of a fancy movie producer, Branco came up through a raft of elite schools and did policy consulting for upper-tier French politicians before breaking bad in 2013 and going “anti-system.” He went on to represent Russia friendlies like Julian Assange and Kemi Seba, a nutjob anti-Semite from Strasbourg once on the take from the Wagner Group. (Seba’s own nonstop bullshit got his French citizenship stripped, a quite extreme L we nonetheless salute.)

Branco likes to out people, and leak, but he has finally doxed too close to the sun. Starting in 2021, four women came forward to accuse him of rape and sexual battery; in return, he ran private correspondence, naked pictures and witness statements from them, both on his Twitter account and his self-aggrandizing website, Aurores, an off-brand Wikileaks complete with a “Send Us Your Secrets” tab. It was the publishing sealed testimony part of the doxing that got his law license suspended for three years last December. Branco has appealed, and he has the right to practice while he awaits the final ruling. But the three sexual assault cases are still open and moving forward.

Branco predictably couches all of the above as the system trying to take him down. I’ll spare you the ROFL-ludicrous anti-NATO Frexit platform he’s running on in his alibi campaign, and the “citizen trials” he proposes, Bane-like, in his latest book, Comment fabriquer une guillotine. Nor do I recommend his latest drop, a one-on-one with Aleksandr Dugin, the theorist behind Putin’s most repugnant imperialism, uploaded two days ago. Branco says he’s doing it to be “ready on day one” for intellectual engagement with men of the world. One of the more photogenic conspiracy theorists, he has nonetheless lost the other two times he's run for office. The third time will be a delight.

An Entire French TV Channel Went Dark Because of Cyril Hanouna

Cyril Hanouna is like the Joe Rogan of France: a hammy populist comedian traipsing ever further to the political right, bringing a lot of fans with him. In 2010, he created a massively popular nighttime chat show called Touche Pas à Mon Poste!, which translates roughly to “don’t touch that dial.” (Prefiguring the reigning spirit of anti-wokisme, it’s also a pun on a French antiracist organization encouraging white men to become better allies to men of color.) The show was a vulgar takedown of the self-seriousness of French TV chat culture—a breath of fresh armpit farts, if you will. Then it got folded into the growing media empire of far-right French robber baron Vincent Bolloré, a member of Opus Dei in good standing. Hanouna’s talk started to get a lot more political, and by the time of the 2022 presidential election, TPMP was more or less the unofficial headquarters of Eric Zemmour, the pencil-necked replacement theorist who tried for a minute to knock Marine Le Pen off her perch as France’s leading fascist. (Zemmour’s humiliating downfall deserves its own entry here, but it’s Saturday and this is a lot of French shit already, so let’s take it easy.)

All of French television answers to a government watchdog called ARCOM which rigorously enforces compliance with political equal time rules, and against aggravated insult, fake news and unacknowledged spon-con, all of which Hanouna had been docked for over the years. On shows he fronted, he was also fined for insults to the disabled, conspiracy theorizing, and showing nude photos of a rival TV presenter when she was under 18. ARCOM finally said enough is enough, and as of yesterday, C8, the channel that ran TPMP is dark forever. At least some of its nine million daily viewers will reunite with Hanouna when he restarts TPMP on another network this fall. Because of course, he will be back to offend another day. For now, at least there is one less Bolloré-fronted channel polluting the ethers.

Girl what are you wearing?

Drake’s Tour de Fail

As one of the few surviving examples of meritocracy, the epic rap beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has been my happy place for the last year. Lamar is raising two kids with his high school sweetheart, advocates therapy and gives to charity without fanfare. He is fiendishly talented, elegant, clever and hardworking. His one-off concert last Juneteenth united rival gangs, laying the groundwork for what could be a historic truce, likened to “a cure for cancer” by fellow LA rapper Ice-T. Drake is an auto-tuned former child actor with questionable authenticity and a habit of much younger women. I have never liked his whiny, warbly music. His lyrics are petty and tediously sexist. He is one of the highest earning rappers in history, and yet it must not be enough because now he shills for a gaming platform called Stake—as online gambling among young men rises to epidemic proportions.

Lamar broke money and chart records in the process of thoroughly humiliating Drake, who was so pissed he… sued his record company. The claims of bad faith market manipulation look tendentious and thin, but if Drake wins the case, it could create a precedent of prior restraint in battle rap (!!), effectively killing the genre. The sore losing is on a scale that’s hard to fathom.

And then Drake went on tour in Australia, ostensibly to support a lukewarm-selling new album. But the tour has not sold out its 15,000-ish capacity arenas, even with ticket prices at under $20. Even after Stake gave Drake a pile of money to give away onstage at each show, causing fans to put up humiliating placards begging for largesse for mortgages, debts and surgeries. Two days ago, Drake claimed scheduling conflicts (for a concert he set up months ago?), abruptly canceled the tour and got back on his private 767 to go back to his weird mansion in Toronto. It’s called the Embassy, and it looks like the physical embodiment of Drakkar Noir.

Dude your filler abuse is absolutely out of control.

Diddy Will Die in Prison

You are obviously aware that the cases against the hip-hop mogul mount by the day. Problematic MAGA-flavored trial lawyer Tony Buzbee, who represents at least a dozen plaintiffs against Sean Combs on the civil level, guesstimates there are between 150 to 300 potential suits out there, independent of the federal RICO charges, for sexual assault, rape, harassment, and more, more, more.

I am going to elide these civil actions and much-deserved prosecution with another case that should have long ago been brought, for crimes against music. There isn’t enough space here to get into how Combs vampirized talent and debased America’s most vibrant musical genre with brainless low-vibe glitz. Let’s just agree that monotonous, materialistic, lazy bars over entire choruses of antiseptic pop hits must also be punished, if it please the court.

I am tempted to go on all day, but I am late for dinner at Michel’s. Please feel free to regale me with toxic man losses I have missed below in the comments.