After the actor Martin Sheen had the city of Malibu, California, declared a haven for the homeless, several homeless people camped out on his beachfront property. He summoned the police to have them removed.

Allure, January 1992:

[Jane] Fonda is rapping on about menopause. "You know where I had my first hot flash?" she asks, sounding excited. "At the Acropolis. During the sound and light show. I'm not kidding.

"It was last year. Ted and I were sailing with another couple around some of the islands. We arrived in Athens. My moods had been very erratic. And Ted said to me, 'Honey, do you suppose this is menopausal?' And I thought, Nooo! Two days later, we were sitting at night looking at the show at the Acropolis. I started feeling this kind of burning tingling all down my fingers and chest, and ... it was such a kick that Ted had known what was going on with me and I hadn't." ...

Though she is wildly chatty, almost embarrassingly so, on the subject of estrogen-replacement therapy—"it stops the biological clock a bit in terms of vaginal lubrication and things like that"—certain topics are verboten.

†

Patricia J. Williams discusses the Tawana Brawley affair in her book, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, published by Harvard University Press. In 1987 Brawley, a 15-year-old black girl who lived in Wappingers Falls, New York, alleged that she had been abducted and sexually assaulted by white racist lawmen after being discovered in a vacant lot with cigarette burns and dog feces on her body. Following public uproar, a grand jury concluded that Ms. Brawley's account was a hoax, and that she had faked the rape to escape punishment for being out late that night. This resulted in uproar of a different sort.

No matter who did it to her—and even if she did it to herself. Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her, some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension. And it is this much that I grieve about. The rest of the story is lost, or irrelevant in the worst of all possible ways.

†