Big Fat Story
The Summer Olympics in Beijing was a chance for communist China to show its best face to the world, and they didn't take any chances. During the $100 million opening ceremony, nine year old Lin Miaoke was the "smiling angel" whose song to the motherland stole the world’s hearts. But it turned out it was not Lin but seven year old Yang Peiyi we heard. The news that a snaggletoothed girl with a chubby face had been switched for one with perfect features caused universal outrage and dismay. "Fake singing for national honor?" asked a posting on a Chinese news portal. "Is this national honor or national shame?" And that wasn’t the only deceit the Chinese party bosses perpetrated on opening night. The spectacular fireworks display was also faked, created in a movie studio lab and slapped on top of the live TV pictures. "We said earlier that aspects of this opening ceremony are almost like cinema in real time," NBC’s Bob Costas told his audience. "Well this is quite literally cinematic." Chairman Mao would have approved.
Photo: Zhou Liang/Xinhua/AP
Sex and drugs rock Interior’s Minerals Management Service.
The Interior Department is used to dealing in dirt, but the scandal that enveloped it in September was filthy even by their standards. The agency was brought down by its inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, who told Congress, "Simply stated, short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior." It emerged that department employees from the innocuous sounding Minerals Management Service were trading lucrative contracts with oil industry executives for—what else?—sex and drugs. The department's Denver HQ was run like a crooked private sector energy company, with oil and gas sold on the open market for gifts and favors, the New York Times reported. The employees kept the party going at work, engaging in sex with each other and snorting cocaine in office hours in what the Inspector General's report called a "culture of substance abuse and promiscuity."
Photo: Carlos Javier Sanchez/Bloomberg News/Landov
How does a newspaper manage to libel the head of Formula One Racing when it catches him red faced and red bottomed—having sadomasochistic sex with five prostitutes at once? Why, over-egging their already sensational story by describing his favorite fetish as a "sick Nazi orgy," that’s how. It's all in a day's work for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World, the British tabloid that wrote its lurid account of the unlikely sexual preferences of Max Mosley, the motor racing czar, after secretly videotaping his steamy sex sessions. Mosley, whose father Sir Oswald was leader of the British fascists and spent World War II behind bars, later retrieved a shade of dignity when a judge ruled the paper had wrongly attributed a Nazi theme to the orgy and declared it the right of every Englishman to do as he likes in private without having it splashed across the front pages. So that’s why they call it a stiff upper lip.
Photo: Daniel Berehulak/Getty
Forgotten Scandals of 2008
While we were busy reveling in Blago’s Senate seat auction, Spitzer’s dirty dalliances, and Madoff making off with $50 billion, a few other sexy scandals slipped our notice. Here are six to remember. Plus: The Daily Beast celebrates the best (and worst) of the year.
Once a month for a year, Aliza Shvarts, an art major at Yale, artificially inseminated, then ingested a morning after pill to induce a miscarriage. Because she never tested to see whether she was actually pregnant, she may or may not have had a series of abortions. “The reality of the pregnancy, both for myself and for the audience, is a matter of reading," she explained. Termination or no, Yale's administration was not amused by her semen semiotics. They contended the “artistic” venture was an elaborate fiction, generating a “he said, she said” which drew unwanted media attention to the university. “I started out with the university on board with what I was doing. And because of the media frenzy they've been trying to dissociate with me," Shvarts told the New York Daily News. “I'm not going to absolve them by saying it was some sort of hoax when it wasn't." The project was condemned by both sides of the abortion debate as depraved attention seeking. Or, as it is commonly known, contemporary art.
Topless minister exposes herself in bugged phone call.
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's 72-year-old billionaire prime minister, has a messy history with the striking 32-year-old Mara Carfagna, a model famous for her naked internet galleries turned government minister. Last year Berlusconi proclaimed he would have married Carfagna "immediately" if he were not already married to his wife, Veronica. For some reason the second Mrs. Berlusconi (who succeeded his first wife, Carla, in 1985), didn't take the quip too well. She went public, demanding through an open letter in a newspaper that her husband apologize. He did, but then compounded his offense by appointing Carfagna Italy's “minister for equal opportunities,” although she was grossly unqualified for the post. The Mara Affair didn't stop there: this summer Berlusconi was caught on a police wiretap having phone sex with Carfagna, leading to an opposition satirist wittily accusing them of having “oral sex.” The scandal has, of course, been compared to the Clinton/Lewinsky affair, though, this being Italy, there is no chance of an impeachment.
Photo: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty
It's not easy being super-rich. Susanne Klatten, 46, a blonde married billionaire heiress to the BMW car fortune and the richest woman in Germany, had to go public about her secret sex sessions with a young Swiss gigolo this year after he began blackmailing her. The tricky Tyrolian tryster, Helg Sgarbi, 41, seduced Klatten and made dispassionate love to her while his accomplice, Ernano Barretta, 64, made secret videos of their antics. Armed with the embarrassing tapes, Sgarbi demanded $49 million from the distraught Susanne, claiming he needed mountains of cash to pay off a murderous mafia boss whose young daughter he had accidentally killed in a car accident. After coughing up $7.5 million, Susanne blew the whistle. Sgarbi’s motive? He says he was seeking revenge on behalf of his father, a Polish Jew enslaved in a BMW factory during WWII. That, and the money.
Photo: Thomas Lohnes/AFP/Getty
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