A growing number of musicians — including most recently Chappell Roan — are leaving their management company after its founder’s emails were uncovered in the latest release of the Epstein files.
Wasserman, a major talent management company based out of Los Angeles, represents stars ranging from Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar to Phish, Bon Iver, Turnstile, and Kacey Musgraves.
The company has been in hot water since the Department of Justice dropped over 3 million pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender, and his associate, convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell.
Those released files included emails between the agency’s founder, Casey Wasserman, and Maxwell. Now, musicians signed to Wasserman Group are speaking out and cutting ties.
Here’s what you need to know.
Who is Casey Wasserman?
Wasserman is a successful entertainment agent and the founder and CEO of the Wasserman Group, which represents sports talent, musicians, artists, and content creators.
He is the grandson of media mogul and talent agent Lew Wasserman. He is also the chairperson of the organizing committee for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
What did Casey Wasserman’s emails to Ghislaine Maxwell say?
Wasserman’s emails, which were released by the Justice Department in January, reveal an exchange between him and Maxwell from 2003.
In the emails, Maxwell offers to give Wasserman a massage that would “drive a man wild.” Later, Wasserman tells Maxwell that he thinks about her “all the time” and asks what he has to do to see her in “a tight leather outfit.”
The Justice Department has not accused Wasserman of wrongdoing.
What kind of talent does the Wasserman Group represent?
Wasserman is regarded as one of the top talentagencies. The companyrepresents hundreds of the world’s biggest touring acts and oversees artists who perform across a range of musical genres.
The company’s artist roster includes Coldplay; Ed Sheeran; Joni Mitchell; Tyler, the Creator; Kendrick Lamar; Lorde; and many more.
Wasserman’s artist roster is no longer available on its website.
How are artists signed to Wasserman reacting?
Many have spoken out against the Wasserman CEO, calling for him to leave the agency. Some artists have gone as far as leaving the agency.
Bethany Cosentino, the front woman of Best Coast, was among the first to speak out, posting an open letter on Instagram last week calling for the founder to step down.
“As an artist represented by Wasserman, I did not consent to having my name or my career tied to someone with this kind of association to exploitation,” Cosentino said. “Staying quiet isn’t something I can do in good conscience — especially in a moment when men in power are so often protected, excused, or allowed to move on without consequence. Pretending this isn’t a big deal is not an option for me.”
Irish punk band the Dropkick Murphys announced over the weekend that they were alsoleaving Wasserman.
“It saddens us to part ways with [our agents], but the namesake of the agency is in the Epstein files so … we GONE,” the band wrote on Instagram.
Other bands, including Wednesday, Water From Your Eyes, and Beach Bunny, have made statements on social media about their concerns or their intentions to start the process of leaving the agency.
On Monday, Chappell Roan announced her exit.
“As of today, I am no longer represented by Wasserman, the talent agency led by Casey Wasserman,” Roan posted on Instagram. “I hold my teams to the highest standards and have a duty to protect them as well. No artist, agent or employee should ever be expected to defend or overlook actions that conflict so deeply with our own moral values. I have deep respect and appreciation for the agents and staff who work tirelessly for their artists and I refuse to passively stand by.”
In addition to artist pressure, Los Angeles politicians are calling for Wasserman to give up his role on the Olympics committee. The Hollywood Reporter also reported that agents who work at Wasserman are considering spinning off a new firm.
Still, not all artists believe they can make a clean break like Chappell Roan or the Dropkick Murphys.
Why can’t every artist leave the agency?
Wasserman client Alexis Krauss, of the group Sleigh Bells, released a lengthy statement condemning the CEO and detailing why she could not leave the company entirely, citing the financial impact it would cause.
“Do I wish I could burn it all down, boycott and divest? Sure I do. But to be totally honest, I can’t afford to,” Krauss said.
Krauss continued, “Would I love to just leave Wasserman Music? Yes I would. Can we? No, because I love and respect our agent and I trust him to make the decision that is best for himself, his family and his artists. The agents at Wasserman are not the villains.”
Several artists, including Krauss, emphasized that they do not work directly with — and in most cases have never met — Casey Wasserman.
Krauss added that her income allows her to pay her and her child’s health insurance, saying, “let’s remember that there’s no such thing as healthcare for working musicians. Call me spineless, but this is my truth. This is the hypocrisy of our realities as we try to do the least harm in an unscrupulous system.”
Are any Philadelphia-area artists managed by Wasserman?
Yes. Some include: Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties, the A’s, the Bacon Brothers, Diplo, the Disco Biscuits, Dr. Dog, G. Love & Special Sauce, the Menzingers, the Wonder Years, and Spaga.
As of publication time, none of these artists have made statements about Wasserman. This story will be updated if they do.
Has Casey Wasserman made a statement?
Yes. In a statement sent to the New York Times, Wasserman said he “deeply regrets” his correspondence with Maxwell, “which took place over two decades ago, long before her horrific crimes came to light.”
Wasserman added that he never had a “personal or business relationship” with Epstein.
The number of Americans who anticipate they will have “high-quality lives” in five years’ time has dropped to a nearly two-decade low, according to a poll released Tuesday.
Around 6 in 10 people surveyed said they expected their lives would be significantly better in the future than today. That is about nine percentage points lower than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Gallup, which began measuring Americans’ sense of optimism in 2008.
“I think that’s disconcerting, and says a lot about the mood of the American public today,” said Dan Witters, the research director for Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index.
American optimism is down across the board by 3.5 percentage points since 2024, and Hispanic adults have had the greatest drop in optimism in the past year, from about 69% to roughly 63%, according to Gallup. (The new figures are based on four quarterly surveys conducted throughout 2025 involving 22,125 respondents, and the poll’s margin of error is plus or minus half a percentage point. The margin is higher — plus or minus two percentage points — for divisions of race and political party.)
Gallup has used two questions to gauge the national mood as part of its National Health and Well-Being Index. Its poll asked around 22,000adult respondents to rank their current life — and where they imagine their lives will be in five years’ time — on a scale of 1 to 10.
Both ratings have slumped over the past five years across a pandemic,affordability issues, turbulent national politics, and global conflicts. The steep drop in optimism in 2025 suggests some Americans think their lives will worsen still, Witters said.
In the past year, around 62% of American adults ranked their current life at a 7 or higher, and around 59 percent anticipated their life in five years’ time would rank at an 8 or higher, according to Gallup.
The Gallup poll did not ask respondents to give reasons for their answers, but Witters said the recent slump in optimism began as high inflation rates staggered American consumers in 2021 and 2022, during the Biden administration.
“Even as the pandemic was kind of receding, those affordability issues, which of course linger on in not insignificant ways to this day, I think, had a lot to do with it,” Witters said.
The downturn has persisted after the reelection of Donald Trump. Democrats feel a lot worse about their future, reporting a 7.6 percentage-point drop in ratings of their future lives from 2024, while independents’ future ratings dipped by 1.5 percentage points. Republicans’ future life ratings increased by 0.9 percentage points.
It is common for optimism among partisans to swing after a new party wins the White House, but changes among Democrats and Republicans largely offset each other in 2021, after when Joe Biden was elected president, Witters said. That was not the case in 2025.
Black and Hispanic adults reported some of the largest declines in optimism in recent years. Witters said the trend suggests that minority groups have been hit hardest by affordability issues.
That Hispanic adults reported the steepest drop in optimism in 2025 — coupled with the partisan divide in optimism — could suggest Trump’s policies are partly to blame, Witters said. Latino voters swung against the Republican Party in November’s special elections, a break Democrats claim is a repudiation of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign.
Can American morale recover? Witters said Gallup’s polling is “highly sensitive to changes that are going on in the world” and has seen the country emerge from other periods of pessimism.
“There’s no reason to think that that can’t happen again,” Witters said. “It’s just a bit of a trough right now.”
As President Donald Trump calls for sweeping changes to election law — including saying that Republicans should “take over the voting” — Republicans in Congress are planning to vote this week on the SAVE America Act, which would make massive changes to how Americans vote ahead of November’s midterms.
They want to require all Americans to prove they are citizens when registering to vote, and to show an ID when voting in person or by mail, as well as make mail voting more difficult.
Trump and Republicans say this would make voters feel more confident there’s no fraud in federal elections. “We need elections where people aren’t able to cheat,” Trump told NBC News. “And we’re gonna do that. I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna get it done.”
But there’s no evidence of widespread election fraud. There is evidence, say some nonpartisan elections experts, that this bill could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters by requiring new voters to provide documents that tens of millions of U.S. citizens lack immediate access to.
The nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center asserts the bill “is harmful to our democracy and a threat to the freedom to vote for all Americans. … Its extreme documentation requirements would actually amount to one of the harshest voter suppression laws nationwide.”
Here’s how the SAVE Act could dramatically change elections and its chance of becoming law.
3 major changes
1. You’d have to provide a proof of citizenship to register to vote:Millions of Americans register to vote every year, and they are already required to verify they are citizens when they do. Under this bill, they’d have to prove it.
For example, those who change states, or are newly eligible to vote would have to provide proof of their citizenship, like a passport, a military ID submitted with proof of place of birth, or — when submitted alongside other documents — a birth certificate.Newly married voters who change their last name would have to reregister to vote with all of these documents — plus provide proof as to why their current name doesn’t match their birth certificate.
But about half of Americans don’t have passports, and not all Americans have a copy of their birth certificate.
“Our research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents,” writes the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice.
Even some Republican election experts have questioned whether all this documentation is necessary.
“The premise of the SAVE Act is we need to ensure there are processes that confirm citizenship,” says Matt Germer, director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative think tank. “But I think much of the burden of citizenship verification should be on the government, which holds much of this data in the first place.”
2. It requires IDs to vote nationwide: Strong majorities of Americans, including Democrats, support voters presenting a photo ID to cast ballots.
Only government (state, tribal, or federal) IDs would be accepted.
3. It would probably make voting by mail more difficult:Mail-in voting is popular and safe, say election experts. Almost all states offer some form of it. Trump has voted by mail, and Republicans certainly use it too.
But this bill would put strict restrictions on who can vote by mail without providing valid identification. Some disabled voters and active duty troops would be exempt from the new rules.
Some Republican election officials have expressed concern this takes away from states’ constitutional right to run their own elections how they best see fit. Mail-in voting first became popular among rural conservatives in Western states.
“When I was in office,” former Kentucky secretary of state Trey Grayson said in a recent interview, “the number one principle of election administration was that the states run elections and Congress should be minimally involved. On the Republican side, we really believed that. It was really, really important.”
Democrats adamantly oppose
The bill could pass the Republican-controlled House this week, but in the Senate, Democrats plan to block the legislation by filibustering it.
“It’s Jim Crow 2.0,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) told MS NOW recently. “What they’re trying to do here is the same thing that was done in the South for decades to prevent people of color from voting.”
This isn’t the first time Republicans have tried to pass some version of the bill, and Trump has been increasingly vocal about election reform. Some of his ideas appear blatantly unconstitutional. But that hasn’t stopped the president from arguing for them.
WASHINGTON — An annual meeting of the nation’s governors that has long served as a rare bipartisan gathering is unraveling after President Donald Trump excluded Democratic governors from White House events.
The National Governors Association said it will no longer hold a formal meeting with Trump when governors are scheduled to convene in Washington later this month, after the White House planned to invite only Republican governors. On Tuesday, 18 Democratic governors also announced they would boycott a traditional dinner at the White House.
“If the reports are true that not all governors are invited to these events, which have historically been productive and bipartisan opportunities for collaboration, we will not be attending the White House dinner this year,” the group wrote. “Democratic governors remain united and will never stop fighting to protect and make life better for people in our states.”
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican and the chairman of the NGA, said in a letter Monday to fellow governors obtained by The Associated Press that the White House intends to limit invitations to the association’s annual business meeting, scheduled for February 20, to Republican governors only.
“Because NGA’s mission is to represent all 55 governors, the Association is no longer serving as the facilitator for that event, and it is no longer included in our official program,” Stitt wrote.
The NGA is scheduled to meet in Washington from Feb. 19-21. Representatives for Stitt, the White House and the NGA didn’t immediately comment on the letter.
Brandon Tatum, the NGA’s CEO, said in a statement last week that the White House meeting is an “important tradition” and said the organization was “disappointed in the administration’s decision to make it a partisan occasion this year.”
The governors group is one of the few remaining venues where political leaders from both major parties gather to discuss the top issues facing their communities. In his letter, Stitt encouraged governors to unite around common goals.
“We cannot allow one divisive action to achieve its goal of dividing us,” he wrote. “The solution is not to respond in kind, but to rise above and to remain focused on our shared duty to the people we serve. America’s governors have always been models of pragmatic leadership, and that example is most important when Washington grows distracted by politics.”
Signs of partisan tensions emerged at the White House meeting last year, when Trump and Maine’s Gov. Janet Mills traded barbs.
Trump singled out the Democratic governor over his push to bar transgender athletes from competing in girls’ and women’s sports, threatening to withhold federal funding from the state if she did not comply. Mills responded, “We’ll see you in court.”
Trump then predicted that Mills’ political career would be over for opposing the order. She is now running for U.S. Senate.
The back and forth had a lasting impact on last year’s conference and some Democratic governors did not renew their dues last year to the bipartisan group.
WASHINGTON — Under questioning from Democrats Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledged that he had met with Jeffrey Epstein twice after his 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a child, reversing Lutnick’s previous claim that he had cut ties with the late financier after 2005.
Lutnick once again downplayed his relationship with the disgraced financier who was once his neighbor in New York City as he was questioned by Democrats during a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He described their contact as a handful of emails and a pair of meetings that were years apart.
“I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with him,” Lutnick told lawmakers.
But Lutnick is facing calls from several lawmakers for his resignation after the release of case files on Epstein contradicted Lutnick’s claims on a podcast last year that he had decided to “never be in the room” with Epstein again after a 2005 tour of Epstein’s home that disturbed Lutnick and his wife.
The commerce secretary said Tuesday that he and his family actually had lunch with Epstein on his private island in 2012 and he had another hour-long engagement at Epstein’s home in 2011. Lutnick, a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, is the highest-profile U.S. official to face bipartisan calls for his resignation amid revelations of his ties to Epstein. His acknowledgement comes as lawmakers are grasping for what accountability looks like amid the revelations contained in what’s known as the Epstein files.
In countries like the United Kingdom, the Epstein files have triggered resignations and the stripping of royal privileges, but so far, U.S. officials have not met the same level of retribution.
Senators want to dig into Lutnick’s ties to Epstein
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the Democrat who questioned Lutnick, told him, “There’s not an indication that you yourself engaged in any wrongdoing with Jeffrey Epstein. It’s the fact that you believe that you misled the country and the Congress based on your earlier statements.”
Van Hollen, (D., Md.) stopped short of calling for Lutnick’s resignation on Monday, but requested documentation from Lutnick on any of his ties to Epstein.
“It’s absolutely essential that he provide Congress with those documents, given the misrepresentations he’s made, and then we’ll go from there,” he said.
Lutnick during the Senate hearing said he would give that request some thought, adding, “I have nothing to hide.”
However, several Senate Republicans were also questioning Lutnick’s relationship with Epstein. Sen. Roger Wicker, (R., Miss.) said the visit to Epstein’s private island “would raise questions.” And Sen. Thom Tillis, (R., N.C.) told reporters, “It’s something I’m concerned with.”
Tillis stayed away from calling for Lutnick to leave his post, but added that “he would do himself a service by just laying exactly what and what did not happen over the course of what seems to be an interesting relationship that included business entanglements.”
House members call for resignation
Meanwhile, House members who initiated the legislative effort to force the release of the files are calling for Lutnick to resign. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky called for that over the weekend after emails were released that alluded to the meetings between Lutnick and Epstein.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, joined Massie in pressuring Lutnick out of office on Monday.
“Based on the evidence, he should be out of the Cabinet,” Khanna said.
He added, “It’s not about any particular person. In this country, we have to make a decision. Are we going to allow the rich and powerful people who are friends and (had) no problem doing business and showing up with a pedophile who is raping underage girls, are we just going to allow them to skate?”
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Detroit Pistons center Jalen Duren, a former Roman Catholic star, was among four players ejected Monday night after a fight broke out in the team’s game with the Charlotte Hornets.
Charlotte’s Moussa Diabate and Miles Bridges were tossed along with Detroit’s Isaiah Stewart and Duren. Hornets coach Charles Lee was ejected in the fourth quarter after he had to be restrained from going after an official while arguing a call.
The Pistons won, 110-104. The loss ended the Hornets’ bid to match a franchise record with 10 straight wins.
Duren had the ball and was driving toward the basket with just over seven minutes left in the third period when he was fouled by Diabate. Duren turned around to get face-to-face with Diabate and the two appeared to butt heads. Duren then hit Diabate in the face with his open right hand, starting a confrontation that lasted more than 30 seconds and ultimately ended with a brief police presence on the floor.
While Pistons forward Tobias Harris was holding Diabate back, Diabate threw a punch at Duren. Duren walked away and Bridges charged at him, throwing a left-handed punch. Duren retaliated with a punch. Diabate attempted to charge again at Duren and had to be held back.
Charlotte Hornets forward Moussa Diabate is held back by Detroit’s Tobias Harris as he fights with Pistons center Jalen Duren (0).
Stewart left the bench to confront Bridges, who responded with a punch, and the players tussled. At one point, Stewart got Bridges in a headlock and delivered multiple left-handed blows to his head.
Duren called it an “overly competitive game.”
“Emotions were flaring,” Duren said. “At the end of the day, we would love to keep it basketball, but things happen. Everybody was just playing hard.”
Duren said that opposing NBA teams have been trying to “get in our head” all season.
“This isn’t the first time that people have tried to be like extra aggressive with us and talk to us, whatever the case may be,” Duren said. “But as a group we have done an OK job of handling that energy and intensity. At the end of the day, emotions got high with everybody being competitive. Things happen.”
Duren did not say how the fight started, referring reporters instead to the video replays.
The Hornets did not make Bridges and Diabate available for interviews after the game.
However, Bridges took to Instagram late Monday night to say: “Sorry Hornets nation! Sorry Hornets Organization.! Always gonna protect my teammates forever.”
“It looked like two guys got into a heated conversation and it just kind of spiraled from there,” Lee said.
Crew chief John Goble said in a pool report after the game that the players were ejected because they “engaged in fighting activity during the dead ball. After review, we assessed fighting fouls and by rule they were ejected from the game.”
Pistons coach J.B. Bickerstaff defended his players after the game.
“Our guys deal with a lot, but they’re not the ones that initiated, they’re not the ones who crossed the line tonight,” Bickerstaff said. “It was clear, through frustration, because of what J.D. [Duren] was doing, that they crossed the line. I hate that it got as ugly as it got.
“That’s not something that you ever want to see,” Bickerstaff added, “but if a guy throws a punch at you, you have a responsibility to protect yourself. That’s what happened tonight. If you go back and watch the film, they’re the ones who initiated crossing the line and our guy had to defend himself.”
Tensions continued to mount at the Spectrum Center after the fight.
Midway through the fourth quarter, Lee was ejected and had to be restrained by Hornets guard Brandon Miller while yelling at officials for a no-call after Charlotte’s Grant Williams collided with Detroit’s Paul Reed.
“Grant was walking down the paint and barely touched somebody and the guy fell over and that is what we are going to call a foul,” Lee said. “They have a hard job to make these calls, but I don’t think that was the consistency with which that had been called the rest of the game.”
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is expected this week to revoke a scientific finding that long has been the central basis for U.S. action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, according to a White House official.
The Environmental Protection Agency will issue a final rule rescinding a 2009 government declaration known as the endangerment finding. That Obama-era policy determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare.
A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly ahead of an official announcement, confirmed the plans, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
“This week at the White House, President Trump will be taking the most significant deregulatory actions in history to further unleash American energy dominance and drive down costs,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement Tuesday.
The endangerment finding is the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants, and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. It is used to justify regulations, such as auto emissions standards, intended to protect against threats made increasingly severe by climate change — deadly floods, extreme heat waves, catastrophic wildfires, and other natural disasters in the United States and around the world.
Legal challenges would be certain for any action that effectively would repeal those regulations, with environmental groups describing the shift as the single biggest attack in U.S. history on federal efforts to address climate change.
An EPA spokesperson did not address when the finding would be revoked but reiterated that the agency is finalizing a new rule on it.
Brigit Hirsch said via email that the Obama-era rule was “one of the most damaging decisions in modern history” and said EPA “is actively working to deliver a historic action for the American people.”
President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” previously issued an executive order that directed EPA to submit a report on “the legality and continuing applicability” of the endangerment finding. Conservatives and some congressional Republicans have long sought to undo what they consider overly restrictive and economically damaging rules to limit greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Lee Zeldin, a former Republican congressman who was tapped by Trump to lead EPA last year, has criticized his predecessors in Democratic administrations, saying they were “willing to bankrupt the country” in an effort to combat climate change.
Democrats “created this endangerment finding and then they are able to put all these regulations on vehicles, on airplanes, on stationary sources, to basically regulate out of existence … segments of our economy,″ Zeldin said in announcing the proposed rule last year. ”And it cost Americans a lot of money.”
Peter Zalzal, a lawyer and associate vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund, countered that the EPA will be encouraging more climate pollution, higher health insurance and fuel costs, and thousands of avoidable premature deaths.
Zeldin’s push “is cynical and deeply damaging, given the mountain of scientific evidence supporting the finding, the devastating climate harms Americans are experiencing right now and EPA’s clear obligation to protect Americans’ health and welfare,” he said.
Zalzal and other critics noted that the Supreme Court ruled in a 2007 case that planet-warming greenhouse gases, caused by burning of oil and other fossil fuels, are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
Since the high court’s decision, in a case known asMassachusetts v. EPA, courts have uniformly rejected legal challenges to the endangerment finding, including a 2023 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Following Zeldin’s proposal to repeal the rule, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reassessed the science underpinning the 2009 finding and concluded it was “accurate, has stood the test of time, and is now reinforced by even stronger evidence.”
Much of the understanding of climate change that was uncertain or tentative in 2009 is now resolved, the NAS panel of scientists said in a September report. “The evidence for current and future harm to human health and welfare created by human-caused greenhouse gases is beyond scientific dispute,” the panel said.
After Sharif Street Jr. got into a highly public fight at Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s 2024 inauguration ceremony, his boss, City Councilmember Jim Harrity, extended him some grace.
Harrity, who credits Street Jr.’s father, State Sen. Sharif Street (D., Philadelphia), with giving him a second chance earlier in his own career, kept the junior Street on staff as a special assistant, saying the incident was a lapse in judgment.
But according to another staff member in Harrity’s office, it was not the only transgression.
Shanelle Davis, a former constituent services representative, filed a federal lawsuit last week against the city claiming that she told supervisors months before the inauguration fight that Street Jr. had sexually harassed her while she was at work, including twice grabbing her and making sexualized comments about her body.
She said in the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, that no action was taken and Street Jr. remained on staff.
Davis is seeking unspecified damages from the city, which she claims violated state and federal laws related to gender-based discrimination. Street Jr. is not named as a defendant in the suit, but he is mentioned throughout the 13-page filing.
Davis’ complaint portrays a dysfunctional workplace environment in the City Hall office, including an alleged physical altercation between Street Jr. and another staffer for which no one was reprimanded. Davis, who is Black, claimed another colleague in Harrity’s office made racist comments, including hurling the N-word toward her.
Davis, who was hired in late 2022, said in the lawsuit that she was fired for underperforming at her job about a year later, after Harrity won reelection.
Her attorney did not respond to a request for comment Monday. Street Jr. did not respond to calls seeking comment.
Harrity, a Democrat who represents the city at-large and was a longtime aide to the elder Street, said in a statement that he “categorically denounce[s] workplace harassment, or any conduct that undermines a respectful and professional work environment.”
He declined to comment further, citing the ongoing legal proceedings. A spokesperson for the city law department also declined to comment.
The lawsuit is the latest legal trouble involving Sharif Street Jr., 26, who over the last three years has pleaded guilty to criminal offenses in Philadelphia, Montgomery, and Delaware Counties. In August, his employment with the city was terminated the week he pleaded guilty to charges in connection with the inauguration assault and another incident.
City Councilmember Jim Harrity speaks to colleagues on during a Council session in September.
Street Jr. comes from one of Philadelphia’s most well-known political families. His grandfather is former Mayor John F. Street, his mother is Common Pleas Court Judge Sierra Thomas Street, and his father is a state senator and the former head of the state Democratic Party who is now running for a seat in Congress.
Anthony Campisi, a spokesperson for the elder Sharif Street’s congressional campaign, said the state senator had “no knowledge” of the sexual harassment allegations.
“Sharif loves his son unconditionally and has supported his son through personal troubles, like so many parents across Philadelphia,” Campisi said. “That being said, Sharif unequivocally condemns sexual harassment in all its forms and is looking for the legal process to play out.”
City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, who took over as leader of the chamber in 2024, declined to comment. Under City Council rules, individual members are responsible for hiring and terminating their own employees.
State Senator Sharif Street (D., Phila.)is in the state House chamber as Gov. Josh Shapiro makes his annual budget proposal Feb. 3, 2026.
Street Jr. was arrestedseveral times over three years while working in City Hall as an assistant in Harrity’s office, court records show. Davis’ lawsuit comes about six months after Street Jr.’s employment in Harrity’s office ended, according to payroll records.
In January 2024, Street Jr. punched a security guard at the entrance to Parker’s inauguration ceremony at the Met Philadelphia on North Broad Street. He told The Inquirer at the time that he was defending his grandfather, the former mayor, whom he said the guard had grabbed because they were trying to enter at a back entrance without waiting in line.
“I saw my grandfather get grabbed and I just sort of blacked out,” Street Jr. said. His father defended him at the time, saying the security guard had initiated the altercation.
Later that month, Street Jr. was charged in connection with a hit-and-run from the previous August that left a 14-year-old injured.
The two cases were consolidated in Common Pleas Court, and Street Jr. pleaded guilty in August to charges of assault and causing an accident that resulted in an injury. According to prosecutors, he was sentenced to 60 days in jail.
Four months later, when he was no longer working in city government, Street Jr. was briefly jailed in Delaware County following what police in Upper Darby described as a “prolonged struggle” during a traffic stop. He pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, a summary offense.
Maybe it’s because I’ve watched every blessed one of them, starting as a curious, nearly 8-year-old boy in 1967, but the Super Bowl has always felt like the ultimate barometer of where the American Experiment is at. Super Bowl LX (that’s 60, for those of you smart enough not to take four years of Latin in high school) was no exception. The actual game was something of a snoozefest, but the tsunami of commercials revealed us as a nation obsessed with artificial intelligence, sports betting, weight loss, and anything that can lift us from middle-class peonage without having to do any actual work. As Bad Bunny said, God bless America.
Bad Bunny’s real message: From P.R. to Minnesota, we are neighbors
Bad Bunny (center top) performs Sunday during the halftime show of the NFL Super Bowl XL football game between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots in Santa Clara, Calif.
Right-wing media prattled on for months about how Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican reggaeton superstar who is the world’s most streamed artist, would politicize and thus ruin the NFL’s halftime extravaganza at Super Bowl LX in Santa Clara, Calif.
The babble became a scream seven days before the Big Game kicked off, when Bad Bunny won the record of the year Grammy Award and began his acceptance speech with the exhortation “ICE out!” adding, “We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens — we are humans, and we are Americans.”
But on the world’s biggest stage Sunday night — seen by 135 million in the United States, a Super Bowl record — Bad Bunny sang not one word about Donald Trump, not that MAGA fans even bothered to hold up a translation app. The white-suited Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio danced his way through the history of Puerto Rico and the Americas writ large, from the plantations of yore to the exploding power lines of the hurricane-wracked 21st century. He whirled past an actual wedding, stopped for a shaved ice, and for 13 spellbinding minutes turned a cast of 400 into what his transfixed TV audience craved at home.
BadBunny built his own community — a place not torn asunder by politics, but bonded by love and music.
Without uttering one word — in Spanish or English — about the dire situation in a nation drifting from flawed democracy into wrenching authoritarianism, the planet’s reigning king of pop delivered the most powerful message of America’s six decades of Super Bowl fever. Shrouded in sugar cane and shaded by a plantain tree, Bad Bunny sang nothing about the frigid chaos 2,000 miles east in Minnesota, and yet the show was somehow very much about Minneapolis.
Bad Bunny finally gave voice to what thousands of everyday folks in the Twin Cities have been trying to say with their incessant whistles.
We are all neighbors. The undocumented Venezuelan next door who toils in the back of a restaurant and sends his kids to your kids’ school is a neighbor. But Haiti is also a neighbor, as is Cuba. We are all in this together.
The word I kept thinking about as I watched Bad Bunny’s joyous performance is a term that didn’t really exist on New Year’s Day 2026, yet has instantly provided a name to the current zeitgeist.
The great writer Adam Serwer — already up for the wordsmithing Hall of Fame after he nailed the MAGA movement in 2018 in five words: “The cruelty is the point” — leaned hard into the concept of “neighborism” after he traveled to Minneapolis last month. His goal was to understand an almost revolutionary resistance to Trump’s mass deportation raids that had residents — many of whom had not been especially political — in the streets, blowing those warning whistles, confronting armed federal agents, and tracking their movements across the city.
Serwer visited churches where volunteers packed thousands of boxes of food for immigrant families afraid to leave their homes during the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and talked to stay-at-home moms, retirees, and blue-collar workers who give rides or money to those at risk, or who engaged in the riskier business of tracking the deportation raiders.
“If the Minnesota resistance has an overarching ideology,” Serwer wrote, “you could call it ‘neighborism’ — a commitment to protecting the people around you, no matter who they are or where they came from.” He contrasted the reality on the ground in Minneapolis to the twisted depictions by Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, who’ve insisted refugees are a threat to community and cohesion.
Of course, it’s not just Minneapolis, and it’s not just the many, liberal-leaning cities — from Los Angeles to Chicago to New Orleans and more — that were the incubators of the notion that concerned citizens — immigrant and nonimmigrant alike — could prevent their neighbors from getting kidnapped. Even small towns like rural Sackets Harbor, N.Y., the hometown of Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, rose up in protest to successfully block the dairy farm deportation of a mom and her three kids. It’s been like this everywhere regular folks — even the ones who narrowly elected Trump to a second term in 2024 — realize mass deportation doesn’t mean only “the worst of the worst,” but often the nice mom or dad in the house, or church pew, next to theirs.
Only now that it’s arrived is it possible to see “neighborism” as the thing Americans were looking for all along, even if we didn’t know it. It is, in every way, the opposite vibe from the things that have always fueled fascism — atomization and alienation that’s easy for a demagogue to mold into rank suspicion of The Other.
I’m pretty sure Bad Bunny wasn’t using the word neighborism when the NFL awarded him the coveted halftime gig last fall. But the concept was deeply embedded in his show. He mapped his native Puerto Rico as a place where oppression has long loomed — from the cruelty of the sugar plantations to the capitalist exploitation of the failed power grid — but where community is stronger.
Then Benito broadened the whole concept. Reclaiming the word America for its original meaning as all of the Western Hemisphere, Bad Bunny name-checked “Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil,” and Canada, as well as the United States. These, too, are our neighbors. “God bless America,” he shouted — his only message of the night delivered in English.
So, no, Bad Bunny never mentioned Minneapolis, but a tender moment when he seemingly handed the Grammy he’d won just aweek ago to a small Latino boy had to remind viewers of the communal fight to save children like the 5-year-old, blue bunny hat-wearing (yes, ironic) Liam Conejo Ramos, who was just arrested, detained, and released by ICE. (A false rumor that the Super Bowl boy was Ramos went viral.)
But arguably, this super performance had peaked a few moments earlier, when the singer exited the wedding scene stage with a backward trust dive, caught and held aloft by his makeshift community in the crowd below. Bad Bunny had no fear that his neighbors would not be there for him. Viva Puerto Rico. Viva Minneapolis. Viva our neighbors.
Yo, do this!
Some 63 years after he was gunned down by a white racist in his own driveway, the Mississippi civil rights icon Medgar Evers has been having a moment. A fearless World War II vet whose bold stands for civil rights as local leader of the NAACP in America’s most segregated state triggered his 1963 assassination, Evers’ fight has become the subject of a best-selling book, a controversy over how his story is told at the Jackson, Miss., home where he was killed, and now a two-hour documentary streaming on PBS.com. I’m looking forward to watching the widely praised Everlasting: Life & Legacy of Medgar Evers.
After the Super Bowl, February is the worst month for sports — three out of every four years. In 2026, we have the Winter Olympics to bridge the frigid gap while we wait for baseball’s spring training (and its own World Baseball Classic) to warm us up. Personally, I try and sometimes fail to get too jacked up around sleds careening down an icy track, but hockey is a different story. At 2:10 p.m. on Tuesday (that’s today if you read this early enough), the puck drops on USA Network for the highly anticipated match between the world’s two top women’s teams: the United States and its heated rival Canada. Look for these two border frenemies to meet again for the gold medal.
Ask me anything
Question: How is it that some towns have been able to prevent ICE from buying warehouses and turning them into concentration camps, while others say they are helpless against the federal government? What does it mean that several are planned for within a couple of hours of Philly? — @idaroo.bsky.social via Bluesky
Answer: Great question. It seems ICE and its $45 billion wad of cash are racing in near-secrecy to make this national gulag archipelago of 23 or so concentration camps a done deal. The places where they’ve been stopped, like one planned for Virginia, happened because locals were able to pressure the developer before a sale to ICE was concluded. That’s no longer an option at the two already purchased Pennsylvania sites in Schuylkill and Berks Counties. The last hope is pressure from high-ranking Republicans, which may (we’ll see) have stopped a Mississippi site. Pennsylvanians might want to focus, then, on GOP Sen. Dave McCormick. Good luck with that.
What you’re saying about …
It’s conventional wisdom that the best argument for a Gov. Josh Shapiro 2028 presidential campaign is his popularity in his home state of Pennsylvania, the battleground with the most electoral votes. So it’s fascinating that none of the dozen or so of you who responded to this Philadelphia-based newsletter wants Shapiro to seek the White House, although folks seem divided into two camps. Some of you just don’t like Josh or his mostly centrist politics. “I think he’s all ambition, all consumed with reaching that top pedestal, not as a public servant, but because he thinks he deserves it,” wrote Linda Mitala, who once campaigned for Shapiro, but soured on his views over Gaza protesters, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and other issues. Yet, others think he’s an excellent governor who should remain in the job through 2030. “Stay governor of Pa. when good governance and ability to stand up to federal (authoritarian) overreach is dire,” wrote Kim Root, who’d prefer Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear for the White House.
📮 This week’s question: A shocking, likely (though still not declared) Democratic primary win for Analilia Mejia, the Bernie Sanders-aligned left-wing candidate, in suburban North Jersey’s 11th Congressional District raises new questions for the Dems about the 2026 midterms. Should the party run more progressive candidates like Mejia, who promise a more aggressive response to Trump, or will they lose by veering too far left? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Dems 2026” in the subject line.
Backstory on how the F-bomb became the word of the year
Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day performs Sunday before the start of Super Bowl XL in Santa Clara, Calif.
I’m old enough to remember when the world’s most famous comedy riff was the late George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” — its point driven home by Carlin’s 1972 arrest on obscenity charges that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. A half century later, you still can’t say dirty words on broadcast TV — cable and streaming is a different story — but that fortress is under assault. In 2026, America is under seemingly constant attack from the F-bomb.
It is freakin’ everywhere. When the top elected Democrat in Washington, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, cut a short video to respond to the president’s shocking post of a racist video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, he said, “[F-word] Donald Trump!” If uttered in, say, 1972, Jeffries’ attack would have been a top story for days, but this barely broke through. Maybe because that word is in the lexicon of so many of his fellow Democrats, like Mayor Jacob Frey, who famously told ICE agents to “get the [F-word] out of Minneapolis,” or Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who begged federal agents to “leave us the (bleep) alone.” (Smith is retiring at year’s end and seems to no longer give a you-know-what.)
The poor guys with their finger on the silence button at the TV networks, where you still can’t say Carlin’s seven words, can barely keep up. The F-bomb was dropped at this year’s Grammys, where award-winner Billie Eilish declared “(Bleep) ICE!” as she brandished her prize. The F-bomb was dropped, of course, at the Super Bowl, when the only true moment of silence during 10-plus hours of nonstop bombast came during Green Day’s pregame performance of “American Idiot,” when NBC shielded America’s tender ears from hearing Billie Joe Armstrong sing about “the subliminal mind(bleep) America.”
We’re only about six weeks into the new year, but it’s hard not to think that Merriam-Webster or the other dictionary pooh-bahs won’t declare the F-bomb as word of the year for 2026, even if I’m still not allowed to use it in The Inquirer, family newspaper that we are. So what the … heck is going on here? One study found the F-word was 28 times more likely to appear in literature nowthan in the 1950s, so in one sense it’s not surprising this would eventually break through on Capitol Hill or on the world’s biggest stages.
But the bigger problem is that America’s descent into authoritarianism and daily political outrage has devolved to such a point where, every day, permissible words no longer seem close to adequate for capturing our shock and awe at how bad things are. Only the F-bomb, it turns out, contains enough dynamite to blow out our rage over masked goons kidnapping people on America’s streets, or a racist, megalomaniac president who still has 35 months left in his term. Yet, even this (sort of) banned expletive is losing its power to express how we really feel. I have no idea what the $%&# comes next.
What I wrote on this date in 2019
What a long, strange trip for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the four richest people on the planet. Today, Bezos is in the headlines for his horrific stewardship of the Washington Post, which has bowed down on its editorial pages to the Trump regime, lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and laid off 300 journalists. It’s hard to recall that seven years ago, Bezos and Trump were at war, and there was evidence Team MAGA had enlisted its allies from Saudi Arabia to the National Enquirer to take down the billionaire. I wrote that “a nation founded in the ideals of democracy has increasingly fallen prey to a new dystopian regime that melds the new 21st century dark arts of illegal hacking and media manipulation with the oldest tricks in the book: blackmail and extortion.”
My first and hopefully not last journalistic road trip of 2026 took me to Pennsylvania coal country, where ICE has spent $119.5 million to buy an abandoned Big Lots warehouse on the outskirts of tiny Tremont in Schuylkill County. I spoke with both locals and a historical expert on concentration camps about their fears and the deeper meaning of a gulag archipelago for detained immigrants that is suddenly looming on U.S. soil. It can happen here. Over the weekend, I looked at the stark contrast between Europe’s reaction to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — where ties to the late multimillionaire sex trafficker are ending careers and even threatening to topple the British government — and the United States, where truth has not led to consequences so far. The Epstein fallout shows how the utter lack of elite accountability is driving the crisis of American democracy.
One last Super Bowl reference: Now that football is over, are you ready for some FOOTBALL? Now just four months out, it’s hard to know what to make of the 2026 World Cup returning to America and coming to Philadelphia for the very first time, and whether the increasing vibe that Donald Trump’s United States is a global pariah will mar the world’s greatest sporting event (sorry, NFL). Whatever happens, The Inquirer is ready, and this past week we published our guide to soccer’s biggest-ever moment in Philly. Anchored by our world-class soccer writer Jonathan Tannenwald and Kerith Gabriel, who worked for the Philadelphia Union between his stints at the paper, the package provides not only an overview of the World Cup in Philly, but previews the dozen teams who will (or might) take the pitch at Lincoln Financial Field, with in-depth looks at the powerhouses (France) as well as the massive underdogs (Curaçao). June is just around the corner, so don’t let the paywall become your goalkeeper. Subscribe to The Inquirer before the first ball drops.
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WASHINGTON — The heads of the agencies carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda are testifying in Congress Tuesday and faced questions over how they are prosecuting immigration enforcement inside American cities.
Trump’s immigration campaign has been heavily scrutinized in recent weeks, after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two protesters at the hands of Homeland Security officers. The agencies have also faced criticism for a wave of policies that critics say trample on the rights of both immigrants facing arrest and Americans protesting the enforcement actions.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Rodney Scott, who heads U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Joseph Edlow, who is the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, will speak in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
This is the first time all three have appeared in Congress since the department received a huge infusion of money from Congress last summer and since immigration enforcement operations intensified across the country. The officials are speaking at a time of falling public support for how their agencies are carrying out Trump’s immigration vision.
Under Lyons’ leadership, ICE has undergone a massive hiring boom and immigration officers have deployed in beefed-up enforcement operations in cities across the country designed to increase arrests and deportations. The appearance in Congress comes as lawmakers are locked in a battle over whether DHS should be funded without restraints placed over its officers’ conduct.
The administration says that activists and protesters opposed to its operations are the ones ratcheting up attacks on their officers, not the other way around, and that their immigration enforcement operations are making the country safer by finding and removing people who’ve committed crimes or pose a threat to the country.
Lyons is likely to face questioning over a memo he signed last year telling ICE officers that they didn’t need a judge’s warrant to forcibly enter a house to arrest a deportee, a memo that went against years of ICE practice and Fourth Amendment protections against illegal searches.
During Scott’s tenure, his agency has taken on a significant role in arresting and removing illegal immigrants from inside the country. That increased activity has become a flashpoint for controversy and marks a break from the agency’s traditional job of protecting borders and controlling who and what enters the country.
Under commander Gregory Bovino, a group of Border Patrol agents hopscotched around the country to operations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and New Orleans where they were often accused of indiscriminately questioning and arresting people they suspected were in the country illegally. Bovino says his targets are legitimate and identified through intelligence and says that if his officers use force to make an arrest, it’s because it’s warranted.
A Border Patrol agent and Customs and Border Protection officer both opened fire during the shooting death of Alex Pretti, one of two protesters killed in Minneapolis in January. The other protester, Renee Good, was shot and killed by an ICE officer.
After the Pretti shooting, Bovino was reassigned and Trump sent his border czar Tom Homan to Minneapolis to assume control.
USCIS has also faced criticism for steps it has taken including subjecting refugees already admitted to the U.S. to another round of vetting and pausing decisions on all asylum cases.
