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#los-angeles
2 articles
The Death of Marilyn Monroe: The Star, the Overdose, and the Theories
In the early hours of 5 August 1962, Marilyn Monroe — the most photographed and adored star of her age, an icon of Hollywood glamour recognised the world over — was found dead in the bedroom of her modest home in the Brentwood district of Los Angeles. She was thirty-six years old. The Los Angeles County coroner determined that she had died of acute barbiturate poisoning, a lethal quantity of sleeping pills in her system, and classified the death as a 'probable suicide,' consistent with her long and painful history of depression, insomnia, and dependency on the drugs that both sustained and endangered her. It should have been, and in its essentials was, the tragic end of a brilliant, fragile woman whom fame had exploited more than it had protected. But the investigation that night was careless and confused, the timeline muddled, the accounts of those present contradictory; and Monroe's rumoured connections to President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, gave rise almost immediately to whispers, and then to an enduring industry, of conspiracy — that she had been murdered, or silenced, to protect powerful men. Sixty years on, those theories persist, unproven and unpersuasive, while the documented evidence points, as it did from the start, toward a lonelier and more ordinary tragedy. This is the story of the death of Marilyn Monroe — what is known, what is not, and why the difference matters.
#FreeBritney
On February 1, 2008, a Los Angeles judge approved a temporary conservatorship over the 26-year-old pop singer Britney Spears, naming her father Jamie Spears co-conservator of her person and estate. The arrangement was supposed to last days. It lasted 13 years and 9 months. During that period, Spears released four studio albums, performed a four-year Las Vegas residency that grossed approximately $138 million, was the subject of two New York Times documentaries, and could not, by court order, leave the house without permission. The conservatorship was terminated on November 12, 2021, after a 24-minute testimony in which Spears told Judge Brenda Penny that she had been forced onto lithium, prevented from removing an IUD, and that everyone involved 'should be in jail.' The fan movement that had been arguing this for a decade — #FreeBritney — turned out to be right.
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