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Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Diddy’s former girlfriend Casandra Ventura, testified today to a terrifying moment involving the music mogul in September 2016. Bongolan said she was sleeping on the couch at Ventura’s 17th-floor Los Angeles apartment when Diddy banged on the door. She went out to the balcony to smoke marijuana, and Diddy, who had gotten inside, “came behind me and lifted me up and had me on top of the rail,” she testified. He held her for about 10 to 15 seconds, she said, and “for a second, I thought I was going to fall.” She said Diddy was yelling at her and she didn’t know why.
Here’s what else to know about today’s testimony:
Bongolan testified that while upset, Diddy once threw a knife in Ventura’s direction, and she threw it back; both their throws missed. In another interaction, Bongolan said, Diddy allegedly told her something along the lines of, “I am the devil and I can kill you.” She testified that Diddy had taken cocaine at the time he made the comments.
During cross-examination, defense lawyer Nicole Westmoreland tried to discredit Bongolan’s memory of the alleged dangling incident. Bongolan answered, “I don’t remember,” multiple times when challenged.
The government also called Frank Piazza, a forensic video expert, who testified about the authenticity of the hotel security video of Diddy assaulting Ventura in March 2016 as well as related cellphone videos. The hotel video, which has been central to the prosecution’s case, was not altered, according to Piazza.
🔎 The view from inside
By Adam Reiss and Jing Feng
Diddy watched the jury closely when they first took their seats. He was also attentive when it came to the testimony. Much of today was spent looking at security footage and cellphone videos, and he peered at the monitor in front of him.
Forensic video expert Frank Piazza testifies about the time stamps on security footage of the 2016 InterContinental Hotel altercation during Sean “Diddy” Combs’ sex trafficking trial in New York.Jane Rosenberg / Reuters
Piazza’s testimony going over the videos may have seemed technical, but the long stretch spent looking at Diddy assaulting Ventura could also have a cumulative effect on the jury.
In other news: Diddy’s lawyers complained to Judge Arun Subramanian that although Diddy has 300 minutes for phone calls, for some reason, he can’t get in touch with lawyers at night. Defense lawyer Xavier Donaldson called it “unacceptable.” Subramanian said he would reach out to the jail and see what could be done.
👨⚖️ Analysis: Is the video relevant?
By Danny Cevallos
The last two days have featured testimony about the 2016 hotel beating video. The government first called a hotel security officer who testified that Diddy paid $100,000 in cash in a brown paper bag in exchange for the video. Today, prosecutors called a forensic video expert, who narrated the events on screen, frame by frame. So why is the video relevant if Diddy was not charged with the assault that was recorded?
The defense tried mightily to exclude the video, arguing, in part, that any relevance was outweighed by the prejudicial effect. It lost.
How the video fits into the government’s theory of the case appears to be this: Prosecutors allege the drug-fueled sexual encounters known as “freak offs” constituted commercial sex acts (for purposes of sex trafficking).
The video shows Diddy using force or coercion — one of the necessary elements of sex trafficking — to prevent Ventura from escaping a “freak off,” as she said during her testimony.
The cash payment to hotel security is then an effort to conceal that conduct. Plus, racketeering charges are often about a boss corrupting his own company.
Finally, the government is very skilled at finding a way to introduce the most devastating evidence against a defendant — which it’s done here.
🗓️ What’s next
Tomorrow: The defense plans to continue cross-examining Bongolan as court resumes later than usual. Also, a Diddy accuser who will go by the pseudonym “Jane” is expected to begin multiple days of testimony. Jane, who was identified as “Victim-2” in the prosecution’s indictment, was allegedly engaged in commercial sex acts “as a result of force, fraud or coercion.”
PSA: Every night during Diddy’s trial, NBC’s “Dateline” will drop special episodes of the “True Crime Weekly” podcast to get you up to speed. “Dateline” correspondent Andrea Canning chats with NBC News’ Chloe Melas and special guests — right in front of the courthouse. Listen here. 🎧
Democrats will have to win some red states if they have any hope of taking control of the Senate next year, and the senator tasked with leading that effort believes President Donald Trump has given them an opening after he won those states easily months ago.
“I look at the map, and every state’s on the table because of this growing backlash that President Trump’s decisions have created, with his cuts to Medicaid and his unwillingness to address affordability issues,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., told NBC News in an interview at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee headquarters on Wednesday.
Gillibrand also said she isn’t ruling out taking sides in Democratic primaries as her party looks to net four Senate seats to take control of the chamber, saying that she is “definitely not ruling out anything in any state.”
“We’re going to look at every state on a case-by-case basis and make our assessment as to who’s the best candidate in that state, and then make decisions based on that,” Gillibrand said.
Democrats’ ripest targets in 2026 are GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, which Trump lost by nearly 7 percentage points in November, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, which Trump won by 3 points. Both incumbents are battle-tested, winning contested races in their last cycles on the ballot.
Former Democratic Rep. Wiley Nickel has already launched a run in North Carolina, while former House staffer Jordan Wood is running in Maine. But Democrats are still eyeing Maine Gov. Janet Mills and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper as possible recruits.
While Cooper is weighing a run, Mills has not exactly sounded enthusiastic about challenging Collins, telling the Maine Trust for Local News in April, “I’m not planning to run for anything. Things change week to week, month to month, but at this moment I’m not planning to run for another office.”
Asked if it has been difficult to recruit against Collins, who has a record of winning tough races, including victory in 2020 even as Trump lost Maine decisively,Gillibrand said negative reaction to Trump’s policies is “changing the thinking of a lot of potential candidates.”
“So I am certain we will have formidable candidates in North Carolina and Maine because of this growing backlash that President Trump has created,” Gillibrand said.
Even if Democrats win those two states, and hold on to their current seats in other battlegrounds, they would still need to flip two additional Senate seats in states Trump won by double digits last year to get to a majority. That could mean targeting ruby red states like Texas, Iowa, Alaska, South Carolina and others.
Democrats do not currently hold a single Senate seat in the 24 states that Trump carried in all three of his presidential runs, after several red-state losses in 2024. And Trump won each of those states by double digits last year.
Gillibrand said the “magic formula” for Democratic success involves a combination of “deep Republican backlash” to Trump and some of his policies, like slashing social safety net programs and imposing steep tariffs, and “extraordinarily strong candidates who represent their states well,” as well as boosts from the DSCC to help those candidates build up their campaigns.
Contested Democratic primaries are already taking shape in Iowa, where GOP Sen. Joni Ernst is up for re-election, as well as in competitive states where Democrats are defending open seats, including Michigan and Minnesota.
Ernst has also been in the spotlight for responding to a constituent at a town hall who suggested the House Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts could cause people to die and saying, “Well, we all are going to die.”
Asked if such comments give Democrats a better shot at defeating Ernst next year, Gillibrand said Ernst’s remarks exemplify Trump’s “very callous approach towards health care, cutting seniors, cutting people with disabilities, children, pregnant women and veterans off of their Medicaid.”
Gillibrand said those cuts are creating “a significant backlash that certainly puts a state like Iowa in play” along with “many other red states around the country.”
Democrats, meanwhile, are going to be focused on “commonsense, kitchen table issues” of affordability and public safety, Gillibrand said.
The New York Democrat argued those were winning messages for successful candidates in her home state last year, where she led a coordinated campaign with Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to boost Democratic House candidates.
Democrats flipped three GOP-held House seats in New York even as Trump made gains throughout the state. Trump ultimately lost New York but improved on his 2020 election margin by 11 points, which was the biggest swing toward Trump of any state in the country.
Republicans are looking to capitalize on Trump’s gains as they target Hochul in her re-election run next year, as well as other House Democrats. (Gillibrand said she is supporting Hochul for re-election as she faces a primary challenge from Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado.)
Republicans are also looking to reprise attacks on Democrats over whether transgender women should be allowed to compete in female sports.
One Nation, a nonprofit tied to the GOP super PAC Senate Leadership Fund, already launched an attack on the issue against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia. Ossoff represents one of two states, along with Michigan, that Democrats are defending that Trump also carried last year.
“Each candidate will address it as they see fit,” Gillibrand said when asked how Democrats should respond to those attacks.
Gillibrand said she is “very optimistic that Sen. Ossoff will not only win his race, but show rest of the country, you know, who he is and what Democrats stand for.”
As more parts of the world face intense drought, new technologies are emerging to clean and reuse existing water. Investors are seeing potential for big profits.
Water treatment is expensive. It uses a lot of energy and produces its own waste that gets disposed of at a hefty price. Capture6, a startup in Berkeley, California, says it’s developing a solution, and one with an added benefit to the environment.
Capture6′s technology repurposes industrial and water treatment waste, generating clean water and capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“That combination of water treatment, brine management, and carbon capture all at once is part of what makes us unique, what makes our process innovative,” said Capture6 CEO Ethan Cohen-Cole, who co-founded the company in 2021. “We are able to do so at reduced energy costs.”
The process is complex. It starts with the waste from any sort of water treatment process. Once the solids are removed, that waste is called brine, which is leftover water plus concentrated salt — sodium chloride. Treatment facilities usually have to pay to get rid of it.
But Capture6 takes that brine, strips out the fresh water and separates the salt into sodium and chlorine. It then turns the sodium into lye.
“That lye has the really neat property that if you expose it to the air, it will bond with CO2 and strip it from the air, and that’s the punch line to the process,” said Cohen-Cole. “We have processed the waste salt, we’ve returned fresh water to our partner, and we’ve captured CO2 from the air.”
It’s a particularly attractive proposition in areas most in need of clean water. Capture6 is working in Western Australia, South Korea, and in drought-stricken California, at the Palmdale Water District north of Los Angeles. The district is still testing the technology, but is already projecting huge cost savings in its brine management.
“It will save us 10% on that capital cost, as well as saving us 20 to 40% in operational costs,” said Scott Rogers, assistant general manager at Palmdale Water District. “We’re recovering anywhere from 94% to 98% water out of water that would just normally be wasted.”
Rogers says it’s early but when more facilities start using the technology, it will create a circular economy that can benefit the environment.
Capture6 has raised $27.5 million from Tetrad Corporation, Hyundai Motors, Energy Capital Ventures, Elemental Impact and Triple Impact Capital.
Cohen-Cole says the company’s entire process could run on renewable energy, so all of the CO2 that it captures will be net negative, improving the environment. That allows the company to generate added revenue by selling carbon credits.
It’s just one technology in a growing field of carbon capture, removal and sequestration. Others include direct air capture, burying carbon underground or injecting it into the ocean.
The Trump Administration recently canceled $3.7 billion worth of awards for new technology, including carbon capture, to fight climate change. Capture6 has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy and from state-level sources including California, according to the company. So far, none of that has been canceled.
— CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Russian President Vladimir Putin told him that Moscow would retaliate against Ukraine’s major drone attack over the weekend, casting doubt that a peace deal to end the war could come soon.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said he and Putin spoke for about an hour and 15 minutes and conveyed that it wasn’t going to lead to “immediate” peace between Russia and Ukraine.
“We discussed the attack on Russia’s docked airplanes, by Ukraine, and also various other attacks that have been taking place by both sides. It was a good conversation, but not a conversation that will lead to immediate Peace. President Putin did say, and very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields,” Trump wrote, referring to Ukraine’smassive drone attack on Russian air bases that took place Sunday.
Trump said they also discussed negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. “President Putin suggested that he will participate in the discussions with Iran and that he could, perhaps, be helpful in getting this brought to a rapid conclusion,” he said. “It is my opinion that Iran has been slowwalking their decision on this very important matter, and we will need a definitive answer in a very short period of time!”
Putin aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters during a phone briefing that the Russian president accused Ukraine of trying to thwart peace talks. Ushakov also said Trump told Putin that the U.S. was not made aware in advance of Ukraine’s massive drone attack Sunday.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A delegation of Ukrainian officials held meetings this week with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser, as well as Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau.
Negotiators from Ukraine and Russia met in Istanbul on Tuesday for peace talks during which they discussed exchanges of prisoners of war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday. Zelenskyy said that Russia gave Ukraine an “ultimatum,” not a memorandum for a cease-fire agreement. He also said he’s ready to meet with Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdoğan in the coming days.
Despite these negotiations over ending the war that began in 2022, the conflict has continued. In addition to the massive drone attack Ukraine launched against Russia over the weekend, Ukraine has also attacked key Russian bridges, including a critical one that connects Russia to its territory of Crimea.
“Dance Moms” star Abby Lee Miller sued a prominent Los Angeles hospital on Tuesday, alleging that doctors left a foreign object in her body after performing surgery.
Miller, known for her starring role on the hit reality TV show, is suing Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and two doctors for medical malpractice, professional negligence and medical battery.
The 59-year-old former reality star alleges that the physicians left a catheter inside of her abdomen after she had spinal surgery in 2020. She is seeking nearly $1.5 million in damages.
“Abby Lee Miller suffered for years from an object left inside of her during spinal surgery; despite complaints to various physicians, not one ordered imaging of any kind to diagnose the source of her pain,” Nadine Lewis, Miller’s attorney, said in a statement.
Since the surgery in 2020, Miller — who is paraplegic — said she repeatedly reported the discomfort to physicians who “systemically dismissed her chronic pain and let her suffer for years with a catheter inside of her abdomen,” the suit reads.
Miller’s abdominal discomfort “had escalated into persistent and debilitating pain, impacting her quality of life on a daily basis” by March 2024, according to the suit. Later that year, while she was seeking care for an unrelated issue at a different hospital, she was referred to an emergency room for the pain.
Two days later, in June 2024, a CT scan revealed that a foreign object was inside her abdomen, the suit says, and she had the bright blue catheter surgically removed.
“This is not just medical battery, it reflects a larger, devastating truth: women’s pain is too often ignored or dismissed by the very professionals sworn to care for them,” Lewis said. “Abby’s case is a chilling reminder: even when women are vocal and visibly in distress, their pain is still not believed.”
A spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai said in a statement that the hospital can’t comment pending legal matters nor discuss any patient’s medical treatment due to federal and state privacy laws.
“However, the care and safety of our patients, staff and visitors are always Cedars-Sinai’s top priorities,” the hospital said. “We are dedicated to ensuring that we meet the highest standards of care for all those we serve.”
A receptionist for Dr. Hooman Melamed, one of the physicians Miller is suing, hung up the phone when asked if the doctor would like to comment.
Dr. Paul Dwan, the other physician cited in the suit, declined to comment.
In 2017, Miller made national headlines when she was sentenced to a year in federal prison for concealing assets from a bankruptcy court, and one count of failing to report an international currency transaction.
“It’s the million-dollar question,” he said. “I don’t have a supremely satisfying answer.”
Three different types of sargassum exist in the Caribbean and nearby areas, reproducing asexually as they remain afloat thanks to tiny air sacs. They thrive in different ways depending on sunlight, nutrients and water temperature, factors that scientists are currently studying, Barnes said.
Experts also have said that agricultural runoff, warming waters and changes in wind, current and rain could have an effect.
While large clumps of algae in the open ocean are what Barnes called a “healthy, happy ecosystem” for creatures ranging from tiny shrimp to endangered sea turtles, sargassum near or on shore can wreak havoc.
It can block sunlight that coral reefs need to survive, and if the algae sinks, it can smother reefs and sea grasses. Once it reaches shore, the creatures living in the algae die or are picked off by birds, Barnes said.
Huge piles of stinky seaweed also are a headache for the Caribbean, where tourism often generates big money for small islands.
“It is a challenge, but it’s certainly not affecting every single inch of the Caribbean,” said Frank Comito, special adviser to the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association.
In the popular tourist spot of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, officials have invested in barriers to prevent sargassum from reaching the shore, he said.
In the Dutch Caribbean territory of St. Maarten, crews with backhoes were dispatched in late May as part of an emergency clean-up after residents complained of strong smells of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which can affect a person’s respiratory system.
“The smell is quite terrible,” Barnes said.
Meanwhile, in the French Caribbean, officials expect to soon use storage barges and an upgraded special vessel that can collect several tons of seaweed a day.
The sargassum “disfigures our coasts, prevents swimming and makes life impossible for local residents,” French Prime Minister François Bayrou recently told reporters.
But Comito said such vessels are “massively expensive” and not a popular option, noting that another option — using heavy equipment —- is labor-intensive.
“You have to be careful because there could be sea turtle eggs affected,” he said. “It’s not like you can go in there and massively rake and scrape the whole thing.”
Some Caribbean islands struggle financially, so most of the cleanup is done by hotels, with some offering guests refunds or a free shuttle to unaffected beaches.
Every year, the amount of sargassum expands in late spring, peaks around summer and starts to decline in the late fall or early winter, Barnes said.
The new record set is hardly stationary — experts said they expect even more sargassum for June.
President Donald Trump’s overnight volley of social media posts revealed his frustrations with decision makers whose cooperation he needs to secure some of his top economic objectives.
Early Wednesday morning, Trump pointed to fresh data from the private payroll processor ADP showing the weakest monthly jobs total since March 2023 as further evidence that the Federal Reserve should lower interest rates to make borrowing easier for consumers and businesses.
“ADP NUMBER OUT!!! ‘Too Late’ Powell must now LOWER THE RATE. He is unbelievable!!! Europe has lowered NINE TIMES!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. (The European Central Bank has in fact cut interest rates seven times since last June.)
The remarks extend the president’s long-running and unprecedented pressure campaign on the Fed chief, whom he invited to the White House last week and then renewed his demand that interest rates be lowered in person. The meeting prompted a terse statement from the central bank emphasizing its independence from political influence.
Trump’s post early Wednesday came after a separate one overnight complaining about his efforts to reach a new trade agreement with China and its president, Xi Jinping.
“I like President XI of China, always have, and always will, but he is VERY TOUGH, AND EXTREMELY HARD TO MAKE A DEAL WITH!!!” Trump wrote at 2:17 a.m.
After campaigning on immediate economic relief for U.S. households, Trump has spent his first several months back in the White House attempting to rewrite the rules of global trade in America’s favor. In the process, he and his top officials have sought to check voters’ expectations as the U.S. presses for new trade deals with dozens of countries that have proved less eager to strike swiftly than the administration had hoped.
Meanwhile, court rulings have gummed up some of the president’s unprecedented tariff agenda, which economists increasingly say could trigger “stagflation” — higher inflation alongside lower growth and higher unemployment.
Trump is also grappling with pushback on his massive agenda bill from Elon Musk — previously his highest-profile and best-resourced ally — after the tech titan called the bill a “disgusting abomination” on Tuesday. NBC News reported Wednesday that House Speaker Mike Johnson said Trump is “not happy” about Musk’s “180” on his agenda. Trump has not directly commented on Musk’s comments.
The Congressional Budget Office now projects the bill will add $2.4 trillion to the national debt over the next 10 years.
Trump has brushed aside such concerns, using the presidential bully pulpit to assign blame to those he perceives as obstacles to his economic agenda — messages that senior administration officials are amplifying.
“The president did say that he believes the Fed chair is making a mistake by not lowering interest rates, which is putting us at an economic disadvantage to China and other countries,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said last week about his meeting with Powell. “The president’s been very vocal about that, both publicly and now I can reveal privately as well.”
Forthcoming economic data may fan the president’s frustrations anew. Analysts expect fresh federal jobs data later this week to show 125,000 U.S. job gains last month, fewer than the 177,000 added in April. That report is due for release Friday morning, a day after the European Central Bank is widely expected to lower rates again when it updates its monetary policy on Thursday.
But Europe’s economic outlook is far more uncertain than that of the United States. Inflation in the Euro area now hovers below the ECB’s target of 2% as the bloc has grown just 0.3% in the first quarter. Germany, typically the economic engine of the region, has contracted two years in a row and trade tension could make matters worse. In general, E.U. growth has been hit by weaker energy prices, slower wage growth and a strengthening currency that have all put pressure on business activity.
By contrast, Goldman Sachs expects U.S. GDP to expand by more than 3% in the second quarter.
If Trump has been frustrated so far, he may still hold some cards that allows him to see his agenda through — though it may involve relenting on some key issues. Earlier this week, Fed governor Christopher Waller — a Trump appointee — gave an updated view of the economic landscape.
“As of today, I see downside risks to economic activity and employment and upside risks to inflation in the second half of 2025,” Waller said Monday at a conference in South Korea, “but how these risks evolve is strongly tied to how trade policy evolves.”
PARIS — Coco Gauff overcame 10 double-faults and the first set she’s dropped in the tournament to beat Madison Keys 6-7 (6), 6-4, 6-1 at the French Open on Wednesday, reaching the semifinals for the third time.
It was a contest filled with plenty of mistakes by both Americans, who each has claimed one major championship. They combined for 101 unforced errors and just 40 winners across more than two hours under a closed roof at Court Philippe-Chatrier on a drizzly, chilly day.
Nearly half of the games — 14 of 29 — featured breaks of serve. But from 4-all in the second set, Gauff held four times in a row while reeling off eight of the match’s last nine games. She made two unforced errors in the last set, including just one double-fault.
The No. 2-seeded Gauff won the 2023 U.S. Open and was the runner-up at the 2022 French Open. She’ll play Thursday for a berth in another Grand Slam final, facing either No. 6 Mirra Andreeva or 361st-ranked French wild-card entry Loïs Boisson.
The other women’s semifinal is quite a matchup: three-time defending champion Iga Swiatek vs. No. 1-ranked Aryna Sabalenka. They advanced with quarterfinal victories Tuesday.
It was Swiatek who stopped Gauff at Roland-Garros in the semifinals last year and in the final three years ago.
“I have a lot more work left to do,” said Gauff, who raised her arms overhead then spread them wide apart after the last point against Keys, “but I’m going to savor this one today.”
Gauff began particularly poorly, trailing 4-1 and twice standing just one point from a 5-1 deficit. Gauff bowed her head or sighed after some miscues. Then, suddenly, she got going, using her speed and instincts to stretch points until Keys — the Australian Open champion in January — missed.
That helped Gauff get within a point of taking that set. But the 21-year-old based in Florida double-faulted three times in the tiebreaker, and soon was headed to the locker room to regroup.
That set was sloppy. Gauff had seven winners to 21 unforced errors. Keys has 12 winners to 28 unforced errors, 19 of which arrived from her powerful forehand.
“Her forehand is probably one of the best — if not the best — on tour. I was just trying my best to get it on the other side of the court,” Gauff said. “I knew that I just had to be able to run today and as soon as the ball came short, just punish her for it.”
Repeatedly, Gauff scrambled this way or that to get her racket on a shot from Keys that against plenty of other players would end the point. And often enough, it worked well, leading to a miss by Keys, who occasionally admonished herself with a slap on her right leg.
“With her ability to cover the court,” Keys said, “you’re going to have to win the point multiple times before it’s actually over.”
The crowd offered more support to Gauff. There were chants in English of “Let’s go, Coco! Let’s go!” and in French of “Allez, Coco!”
She ended Keys’ 11-match Grand Slam winning streak and now can continue her own pursuit of a second major trophy.
Edmund White, the groundbreaking man of letters who documented and imagined the gay revolution through journalism, essays, plays and such novels as “A Boy’s Own Story” and “The Beautiful Room is Empty,” has died. He was 85.
White’s death was confirmed Wednesday by his agent, Bill Clegg, who did not immediately provide additional details.
Along with Larry Kramer, Armistead Maupin and others, White was among a generation of gay writers who in the 1970s became bards for a community no longer afraid to declare its existence. He was present at the Stonewall raids of 1969, when arrests at a club in Greenwich Village led to the birth of the modern gay movement, and for decades was a participant and observer through the tragedy of AIDS, the advance of gay rights and culture and the backlash of recent years.
Edmund White in Milan, Italy, in 2010.Leonardo Cendamo / Getty Images file
A resident of New York and Paris for much of his adult life, he was a novelist, journalist, biographer, playwright, activist, teacher and memoirist. “A Boy’s Own Story” was a bestseller and classic coming-of-age novel that demonstrated gay literature’s commercial appeal. He wrote a prizewinning biography of playwright Jean Genet and books on Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud. He was a professor of creative writing at Princeton University, where colleagues included Toni Morrison and his close friend, Joyce Carol Oates. He was an encyclopedic reader who absorbed literature worldwide while returning yearly to such favorites as Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and Henry Green’s “Nothing.”
“Among gay writers of his generation, Edmund White has emerged as the most versatile man of letters,” cultural critic Morris Dickstein wrote in The New York Times in 1995. “A cosmopolitan writer with a deep sense of tradition, he has bridged the gap between gay subcultures and a broader literary audience.”
The age of AIDS, and beyond
In early 1982, just as the public was learning about AIDS, White was among the founders of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which advocated AIDS prevention and education. The author himself would learn that he was HIV-positive in 1985, and would remember friends afraid to be kissed by him, even on the cheek, and parents who didn’t want him to touch their babies.
White survived, but watched countless peers and loved ones suffer agonizing deaths. Out of the seven gay men, including White, who formed the influential writing group the Violet Quill, four died of complications from AIDS. As White wrote in his elegiac novel “The Farewell Symphony,” the story followed a shocking arc: “Oppressed in the fifties, freed in the sixties, exalted in the seventies and wiped out in the eighties.”
But in the 1990s and after he lived to see gay people granted the right to marry and serve in the military, to see gay-themed books taught in schools and to see gay writers so widely published that they no longer needed to write about gay lives.
“We’re in this post-gay period where you can announce to everybody that you yourself are gay, and you can write books in which there are gay characters, but you don’t need to write exclusively about that,” he said in a Salon interview in 2009. “Your characters don’t need to inhabit a ghetto any more than you do. A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.”
In 2019, White received a National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honor previously given to Morrison and Philip Roth among others.
“To go from the most maligned to a highly lauded writer in a half-century is astonishing,” White said during his acceptance speech.
Childhood yearnings
White was born in Cincinnati in 1940, but age at 7 moved with his mother to the Chicago area after his parents divorced. His father was a civil engineer “who reigned in silence over dinner as he studied his paper.” His mother a psychologist “given to rages or fits of weeping.” Trapped in “the closed, sniveling, resentful world of childhood,” at times suicidal, White was at the same time a “fierce little autodidact” who sought escape through the stories of others, whether Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” or a biography of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.
“As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excite me or assure me I wasn’t the only one, that might confirm my identity I was unhappily piecing together,” he wrote in the essay “Out of the Closet, On to the Bookshelf,” published in 1991.
Edmund White in 1986.Louis Monier / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images file
As he wrote in “A Boy’s Own Story,” he knew as a child that he was attracted to boys, but for years was convinced he must change — out of a desire to please his father (whom he otherwise despised) and a wish to be “normal.” Even as he secretly wrote a “coming out” novel while a teenager, he insisted on seeing a therapist and begged to be sent to boarding school. One of the funniest and saddest episodes from “A Boy’s Own Story” told of a brief crush he had on a teenage girl, ended by a polite and devastating note of rejection.
“For the next few months I grieved,” White writes. “I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for?”
He had a whirling, airborne imagination and New York and Paris had been in his dreams well before he lived in either place. After graduating from the University of Michigan, where he majored in Chinese, he moved to New York in the early 1960s and worked for years as a writer for Time-Life Books and an editor for The Saturday Review. He would interview Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote among others, and, for some assignments, was joined by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Socially, he met Burroughs, Jasper Johns, Christopher Isherwood and John Ashbery. He remembered drinking espresso with an ambitious singer named Naomi Cohen, whom the world would soon know as “Mama Cass” of the Mamas and Papas. He feuded with Kramer, Gore Vidal and Susan Sontag, an early supporter who withdrew a blurb for “A Boy’s Own Story” after he caricatured her in the novel “Caracole.”
“In all my years of therapy I never got to the bottom of my impulse toward treachery, especially toward people who’d helped me and befriended me,” he later wrote.
Early struggles, changing times
Through much of the 1960s, he was writing novels that were rejected or never finished. Late at night, he would “dress as a hippie, and head out for the bars.” A favorite stop was the Stonewall, where he would down vodka tonics and try to find the nerve to ask a man he had crush on to dance. He was in the neighborhood on the night of June 28, 1969, when police raided the Stonewall and “all hell broke loose.”
“Up until that moment we had all thought homosexuality was a medical term,” wrote White, who soon joined the protests. “Suddenly we saw that we could be a minority group — with rights, a culture, an agenda.”
Edmund White in 2001.Sophie Bassouls / Sygma via Getty Images file
Before the 1970s, few novels about openly gay characters existed beyond Vidal’s “The City and the Pillar” and James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room.” Classics such as William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” had “rendered gay life as exotic, marginal, even monstrous,” according to White. But the world was changing, and publishing was catching up, releasing fiction by White, Kramer, Andrew Holleran and others.
White’s debut novel, the surreal and suggestive “Forgetting Elena,” was published in 1973. He collaborated with Charles Silverstein on “The Joy of Gay Sex,” a follow-up to the bestselling “The Joy of Sex” that was updated after the emergence of AIDS. In 1978, his first openly gay novel, “Nocturnes for the King of Naples,” was released and he followed with the nonfiction “States of Desire,” his attempt to show “the varieties of gay experience and also to suggest the enormous range of gay life to straight and gay people — to show that gays aren’t just hairdressers, they’re also petroleum engineers and ranchers and short-order cooks.”
With “A Boy’s Own Story,” published in 1982, he began an autobiographical trilogy that continued with “The Beautiful Room is Empty” and “The Farewell Symphony,” some of the most sexually direct and explicit fiction to land on literary shelves. Heterosexuals, he wrote in “The Farewell Symphony,” could “afford elusiveness.” But gays, “easily spooked,” could not “risk feigning rejection.”
His other works included “Skinned Alive: Stories” and the novel “A Previous Life,” in which he turns himself into a fictional character and imagines himself long forgotten after his death. In 2009, he published “City Boy,” a memoir of New York in the 1960s and ’70s in which he told of his friendships and rivalries and gave the real names of fictional characters from his earlier novels. Other recent books included the novels “Jack Holmes & His Friend” and “Our Young Man” and the memoir “Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris.”
“From an early age I had the idea that writing was truth-telling,” he told The Guardian around the time “Jack Holmes” was released. “It’s on the record. Everybody can see it. Maybe it goes back to the sacred origins of literature — the holy book. There’s nothing holy about it for me, but it should be serious and it should be totally transparent.”
The 2025 NBA Finals are finally here as the top-seeded team in the West, the Oklahoma City Thunder, square off with the red-hot Indiana Pacers. Game 1 tips off at 8:30 p.m. ET on Thursday from the Paycom Center.
Thunder star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who took home MVP honors this year after he led the league in scoring, has been the catalyst all postseason. He averaged 29.8 points, 6.9 assists and 5.7 rebounds as the Thunder cruised to the Finals with wins against the Memphis Grizzlies, the Denver Nuggets and the Minnesota Timberwolves. Jalen Williams (20.4 points per game) and Chet Holmgren (8.6 rebounds per contest) have also come up big.
Oklahoma City has just four losses in the playoffs so far.
The No. 4-seed Pacers, meanwhile, weren’t exactly expected to get to this point. But thanks to huge performances from their superstar, Tyrese Haliburton (18.8 points, 5.7 rebounds and 5.7 assists per game), they eliminated the Milwaukee Bucks, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the New York Knicks in impressive fashion. Balance has been the key for Indiana, a team with six players averaging double-digit scoring this postseason.
Who will come out on top? Stay with NBC News all series for the latest from Oklahoma City and Indianapolis.
