LOS ANGELES (AP) — From Miracle Mom to Octomom and now, perhaps soon, Homeless Mom, the bizarre life of Nadya Suleman and her 14 children has been a subject that rarely fails to hit a nerve among those who have followed her personal soap opera.
With Suleman on the verge of losing her home and declaring bankruptcy this week with total debts as high as $1 million to everyone from her parents to her baby sitters to the water company, the Octomom Odyssey seems headed for darker days.
Beyond the fascination with her public foibles, such as posing topless in an obscure British magazine and talk of a solo porn film, is the very real concern about the welfare of her octuplets and six older children — all borne from her zeal for in vitro fertilization.
Three of her six older children have disabilities for which she receives government financial support, Suleman has said. One is autistic, another has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and the third a speech impediment. The older children range in age from 5 to 10.
Soon, they could all be out of a home. The house where they have lived the past two years in the suburbs of Los Angeles is going on the auction block Monday
One thing that keeps driving interest in her is whether authorities should step in and take the children.
Not only is she broke, but it has come to light in recent weeks that the Southern California home where she and her children have lived the past two years is going on the auction block Monday.
Child welfare officials visited the La Habra home last week following a complaint that her children were living in squalor. They took no action, and Orange County Social Services spokeswoman Terry Lynn Fisher said Thursday the law prevents her from even confirming or denying the visit.
Speaking in general terms, however, Fisher said it’s not illegal for families to be homeless, to live in dirty homes or even in their cars, as long as that doesn’t place their children in danger.
University of Southern California sociologist Dorian Traube said that given Suleman’s notoriety, it would be surprising if the welfare agency hasn’t been monitoring her and her children for some time.
“Here you have 14 children whose mom is living on welfare, who has now declared bankruptcy, who is going in the media and posing topless and who most recently said she would be willing to do porn films if it meant that she could provide for her children,” said Traube, who has studied and written extensively about parent-child relationships.
If the Suleman saga is wrapping up, it would mark a sad end to something that, if only briefly, once seemed to some like the feel-good story of the year.
That was on Jan. 26, 2009, when Suleman’s octuplets were born at a Southern California hospital and made medical history when they all survived. In the days that followed, she was reportedly showered with offers for book and movie deals, reality TV shows and a mountain of free baby stuff.
Things changed quickly, however, after it was learned that Octomom was also Single Mom and Welfare Mom. And that she already had six children under the age of 8 and was living on a combination of welfare checks, food stamps, student loans and her parents’ largesse.
The movie, book and TV deals faded, and Suleman, now 36, turned to increasingly bizarre means of making money.
She endorsed birth control, but only for dogs and cats. That earned her $5,000 and a month’s supply of vegetarian hot dogs and burgers from the animal rights group People For the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
She once told Oprah Winfrey that she hated the term “Octomom” but then had it emblazoned on the back of the robe she wore into a boxing ring last year for a “celebrity” match against Amy Fisher, who gained fame in the 1990s as the “Long Island Lolita” when she shot the wife of her much older lover in the face.
Over the years numerous people tried to help and offer advice to Suleman, including such TV personalities as “Dr. Phil” and money guru Suze Orman.
Instead, she went through one publicist and attorney after another. At one point she even spurned six months of free child care by the group Angels in Waiting that had been arranged by celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred. The group’s co-founder, Linda Conforti-West, said at the time that Suleman seemed more interested in lining up a reality TV show than caring for the kids.
“Clients have to be willing to accept advice from those who have the experience and expertise to provide for them,” Joann Killeen, Suleman’s first publicist, said Wednesday. “I think it’s obvious why she’s gone through so many managers and attorneys and professional staff in the three years she’s been Octomom. Clients who don’t listen don’t make good clients.”
Suleman declined to be interviewed for this story.
“She is not interested in having any filming or doing any interviews of any sort, especially entering her home and filming her kids for no compensation,” said her current spokeswoman Gina Rodriguez, whose other clients have included Tiger Woods mistress Joslyn James, reality TV star Tila Tequila and Lindsay Lohan’s mother, Dina.
Rodriguez didn’t say where Suleman plans to move after the house is auctioned but said she is looking forward to the next chapter of her life.
“She is excited about moving. She has been preparing,” she said in an email to The Associated Press.
Documents filed in court Monday for Suleman’s bankruptcy case list assets of no more than $50,000 and debts of $500,000 to $1 million. Her creditors include her parents, her gardener, a babysitting company, private school, pest control company, mortgage holder and state Department of Motor Vehicles, among others.
Orange County businessman Amer Haddadin, who sold Suleman’s father the four-bedroom home that’s about to be auctioned, said he’s owed $483,000, including 11 months of unpaid rent and a $450,000 note that Suleman never paid off. He says he has no sympathy for her, adding her actions led his mortgage holder to foreclose on him and destroyed his credit.
“She’s not only using the system, she’s abusing the system,” Haddadin said.
Lately, Suleman has made money posing topless for the British magazine and has a possible porn deal in the works, although the latter comes with a catch. She had said she’ll only do it if, to put it delicately, she is the only one being filmed. It would be what the industry calls a solo tape.
That led Vivid Entertainment Group co-founder Steven Hirsch, who once offered Suleman $1 million to do a porn film, to say he doubts his company would be interested in working with her in the future.
“I’m not sure that after that’s released that it would make sense,” he said.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — An ex-Marine filmmaker whose unit carried pocket digital cameras into some of the worst fighting in Iraq is using that footage, and post-war interviews, to open viewers’ eyes about combat and help himself deal with the lasting emotional impact.
The videos are stark. One Marine is so badly hurt he filmed himself giving himself the Last Rites.
Some of the fighters seem unaffected years later in civilian life, while others have gone through severe bouts of post-traumatic stress and one man, who in Iraq saved fellow Marines’ lives, wound up in prison back home.
Garrett Anderson hopes to show this all up close with “And Then They Came Home,” a documentary he is making from footage he and his comrades gathered on Nov. 22, 2004, one of the bloodiest days of fighting during Iraq’s second battle of Fallujah.
One of Anderson’s comrades died that day and six others in his platoon were wounded as they fought building to building in the city of Fallujah, searching for snipers. One of those shot was so badly wounded that he pulled out his digital camera and hit the record button as he gave himself the Last Rites so his family would have a record of it. Anderson plans to include that footage in his film.
“We were probably the first group of people who were allowed to go into combat with a digital camera in your pocket,” Anderson said recently from his home in Portland, Ore.
The Marines carried their own pocket cameras from their private lives and never saw a reason to leave them behind. Anderson said their commanders never said anything about it or tried to stop them.
“And so the whole battle was documented from the perspective of the guys who fought it, and we’re going to be able to use some of that footage,” he said.
Anderson and his colleagues hope it will be a healing experience for them, as well as an eye-opening one for those who have never seen war.
“I hope that they see how it really affects these young men that come back,” said Nathan Douglass, who was badly wounded on that day and is one of the 12 Marines who will recount their experiences in interviews Anderson plans to film this summer.
“It’s not just a video game,” Douglass added. “There are long-term effects, whether you are physically wounded or not. Sometimes I think the mental effects can be so much worse.”
Several of those to be featured suffered severe bouts of post-traumatic stress disorder, some even attempting suicide. One of the worst afflicted, a Marine who saved the lives of several comrades when he shot to death a would-be suicide bomber, is now in a Texas prison, serving a lengthy sentence for sexual assault.
Others, like Lance Cpl. Luis Munoz, who gave himself the Last Rites, seem largely unaffected by what they experienced. The naturalized U.S. citizen has returned to his native Mexico, where he works now as a police officer in the state of Coahuila, a region plagued by drug cartel violence.
To those who have known Anderson for years, the 26-year-old filmmaker also appears, at least on the surface, to have been largely unaffected.
Since returning to civilian life in 2007, he has shed his Marine buzz cut, grown a beard and is engaged to be married in the fall. He works for a private company that enforces parking regulations in Portland, and he likes to take in Trailblazers games in his free time, although he laments with good humor that it will likely be years before the team contends for an NBA title.
Truth is, though, he was one of the most seriously affected.
“He was never the same boy afterward,” says his father, Dennis Anderson, longtime editor of the Antelope Valley Press in the Los Angeles suburb of Palmdale, where the younger Anderson grew up.
Old friends say they did notice upon his return that he was drinking heavily. They initially dismissed that as just an ex-Marine blowing off steam. That was until he ended up in a hospital following a mental breakdown after a night of binge drinking.
To this day, he says, the first thing he thinks of each morning is the name of the fellow Marine who was killed on Nov. 22, 2004.
“This documentary is going to be a healing process for me,” he says.
Anderson and his colleagues have talked for years among themselves about that fateful battle, the footage they gathered and how it affected them. During one of those conversations, he said, he realized how he and a friend had seen different things that day and how it affected them differently. He thought the various memories of the 12 different people in his platoon would be worth putting on film. All 12 agreed.
Although there have been documentaries made about war for as long as there have been cameras to film them, documentarians say it is unusual for the warrior himself to be the one making the film and using his own battle footage.
“Live action, American, filmmaker as subject on war trauma is not, to my mind, terribly common,” said Michael Renov, associate dean of academic affairs at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and author of “The Subject of Documentary.”
Perhaps the effort that comes closest to it, he noted, was Ari Folman’s 2008 Oscar-nominated film “Waltz With Bashir,” in which the filmmaker interviewed Israeli soldiers he fought with in the 1982 Lebanon war and used animation to visualize his story.
One of the hardest things for Anderson to do will be to fill in the years between the battle and what his fellow Marines are doing now and still be able to effectively show how war changed them, said Mitchell Block, who produced the Oscar-nominated war documentary “Poster Girl.”
For that film, onetime cheerleader and Iraq combat veteran Robynn Murray allowed cameras to follow her for more than a year, vividly capturing her struggles to overcome PTSD.
Having the close relationship he does with the people he’s filming could overcome missing out on those years between the battle and the present day, Block said, but only if his subjects have compelling stories to tell.
Anderson and childhood friend Antonio de la Torre of Los Angeles hope to have the documentary finished by the fall, about the time of his wedding and in time for next year’s film festival circuit.
They are making it on a budget of $30,000, most of it raised through the website kickstarter.com.
“That may seem like peanuts to most people,” Anderson says with a laugh. “But me and my buddy Antonio have been working together for more than a decade with digital editing and we’ve written up a pretty clean budget and we think we can do it.”
The two made their first film in high school, a mockumentary that took the filmmakers to Nevada’s infamous Area 51 in a jokey attempt to prove long-held conspiracy theories that space aliens live there. They have since gone on to film commercials for small local television stations. This will be their first documentary.
With reams of war footage and 12 engrossing stories to tell, Anderson believes they are up to the task.
“I’ve had the luxury of growing up with digital media, and I could see right away when I was younger that this was going to be the future,” he said. “It gives the artist the opportunity to bypass a lot of the old ways, and in the future I hope it comes down to it’s going to be more about story and not about budget.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — We saw his face a bloody, pulpy mess. And in 1992, when the four Los Angeles police officers who beat him after a traffic stop were acquitted, it touched off anger that affected an entire generation. Now, 20 years later, this is the face of Rodney King, and this is what has happened to him in the interim.
He’s been a record company executive and a reality TV star among many other things.
To millions of Americans, though, he will always be either a victim of one of the most horrific cases of police brutality ever videotaped or just a hooligan who didn’t stop when police attempted to pull him over.
He’s indisputably the black motorist whose beating on a darkened LA street led to one of the worst race riots in American history.
It’s been an up-and-down ride for King since he went on television at the height of those riots and pleaded in a quavering voice, “Can we all get along?”
He’s been arrested numerous times, mostly for alcohol-related crimes. In a recent interview with The Associated Press he said, “I still sip, I don’t get drunk.”
He has been to a number of rehab programs, he said, including the 2008 appearance on “Dr. Drew” Pinsky’s “Celebrity Rehab” program.
Still, he was arrested again just last year for driving under the influence.
It was his fear of being stopped for drunken driving on March 3, 1991, King said, that initially led him to try to evade police who attempted to pull him over for speeding.
After he did stop, four LA police officers hit him more than 50 times with their batons, kicked him and shot him with stun guns. A man who had quietly stepped outside his home to observe the commotion videotaped most of it and turned a copy over to a local TV station.
After a jury with no black members acquitted the officers on April 29, 1992, the city’s black community exploded in rage. Fifty-five people died, more than 2,000 were injured over three days.
King received a $3.8 million settlement from the city, but said he lost most it to bad investments, among them a hip-hop record label he founded that quickly went broke.
He makes money these days taking part in events like celebrity boxing matches. He’s also promoting his just-published memoir, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption.”
A tall, physically imposing man who is disarmingly friendly, self-effacing and soft-spoken, King, 47, maintains he is happy.
“America’s been good to me after I paid the price and stayed alive through it all,” he says. “This part of my life is the easy part now.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. porn industry’s movers and shakers accused Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Monday of pandering to conservative voters when he vowed to crack down on their business if elected.
In a statement posted on his website, Santorum said the United States is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” which he said has been shown to produce brain changes in children and adults, cause the destruction of marriages, and contribute to prostitution and violence against women.
Santorum offered no evidence to back up those assertions. Steven Hirsch, who runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, dismissed them as “ridiculous and just plain wrong.”
“It just feels like another ridiculous attempt by Rick Santorum to appeal to the far right,” said Hirsch, chief executive and co-founder of Vivid, one of the industry leaders in the marketing of sex films, books and other ventures.
Rape, teen pregnancy and sex crimes have all dropped since porn became widely available through the Internet in the early 1990s, Hirsch said.
He and others said they believe Santorum targeted the porn industry because he sees it as an easy target.
“But what he doesn’t understand,” Hirsch said, “is that in the age of the Internet, people are more comfortable with adult material than ever before. He thinks that this will appeal to his core base of voters, and that may be true, but it certainly won’t appeal to the mainstream population.”
The porn industry generates about $8 billion a year when films, Internet downloads, sex toys, dance clubs and other ventures are included, according to the industry trade publication Adult Video News.
The city of Los Angeles, where industry officials say almost all of the country’s porn films are made, recently enacted an ordinance requiring that actors use condoms, But that provision only applies to films made on location and not in a studio.
Hirsch and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt acknowledged that if Santorum is elected he could appoint an attorney general who would step up porn prosecutions. But they added that winning convictions would be another thing.
The public has gotten so much more tolerant of porn, Flynt said, that he routinely sees things on television now that he couldn’t publish in his magazine 30 years ago, when he was fighting his own obscenity battles in court.
“While they may not be interested in certain practices themselves, people don’t want to impose their values on other people,” Flynt said.
“The reason why you don’t see a rash of obscenity prosecutions in the country today is because they can’t get a conviction,” he said. “If they could convict these people they would be prosecuting them.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The U.S. porn industry’s movers and shakers accused Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum on Monday of pandering to conservative voters when he vowed to crack down on their business if elected.
In a statement posted on his website, Santorum said the United States is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” which he said has been shown to produce brain changes in children and adults, cause the destruction of marriages, and contribute to prostitution and violence against women.
Santorum offered no evidence to back up those assertions. Steven Hirsch, who runs the Vivid Entertainment Group, dismissed them as “ridiculous and just plain wrong.”
“It just feels like another ridiculous attempt by Rick Santorum to appeal to the far right,” said Hirsch, chief executive and co-founder of Vivid, one of the industry leaders in the marketing of sex films, books and other ventures.
Rape, teen pregnancy and sex crimes have all dropped since porn became widely available through the Internet in the early 1990s, Hirsch said.
He and others said they believe Santorum targeted the porn industry because he sees it as an easy target.
“But what he doesn’t understand,” Hirsch said, “is that in the age of the Internet, people are more comfortable with adult material than ever before. He thinks that this will appeal to his core base of voters, and that may be true, but it certainly won’t appeal to the mainstream population.”
The porn industry generates about $8 billion a year when films, Internet downloads, sex toys, dance clubs and other ventures are included, according to the industry trade publication Adult Video News.
The city of Los Angeles, where industry officials say almost all of the country’s porn films are made, recently enacted an ordinance requiring that actors use condoms, But that provision only applies to films made on location and not in a studio.
Hirsch and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt acknowledged that if Santorum is elected he could appoint an attorney general who would step up porn prosecutions. But they added that winning convictions would be another thing.
The public has gotten so much more tolerant of porn, Flynt said, that he routinely sees things on television now that he couldn’t publish in his magazine 30 years ago, when he was fighting his own obscenity battles in court.
“While they may not be interested in certain practices themselves, people don’t want to impose their values on other people,” Flynt said.
“The reason why you don’t see a rash of obscenity prosecutions in the country today is because they can’t get a conviction,” he said. “If they could convict these people they would be prosecuting them.”
LOS ANGELES (AP) — They’ve still got their trombones and their trumpets, their cornets and their clarinets.
But the high school marching bands of Southern California are tuba-less these days, and their music directors think they know why.
There’s a banda bandit on the loose, they say. Someone, they believe, is breaking into high schools from the east side of Los Angeles to the shores of Manhattan Beach and stealing expensive tubas to supply a fast-growing black market for banda music.
Once little known north of Mexico, banda has become the fastest growing genre of Latino music in the United States over the past 20 years. It is particularly popular in Los Angeles, where musicians gather in places like Mariachi Plaza to offer their services to parties, weddings, quinceaneras and other events.
“Musically, it’s appealing because it’s so dynamic and colorful and bright,” Josh Kun says of the fast-paced, joyous dance music that sprung from the polka tunes that German and French immigrants carried to the Mexican state of Sinaloa in the 19th century.
“Beyond a purely musical context,” says the University of Southern California expert on cross-border popular culture, “it is attractive because it is also the musical context for Mexican immigrant life. … It’s about living between two worlds and sustaining your identity in that balance.”
It also is all about the tuba, the most important instrument in the band.
Without a guy standing front and center blowing out those fast-paced “oompah, oompah, oompah” notes that only a tuba can make, a banda band is nothing.
“The band is driven by the tuba and the drummer,” says Bill Roper, a professional tuba player. “The tuba serves the time function and the bass function, and the rest of the band can’t exist without that.”
Plus, the tuba is so big and pulsating that no one in the audience can ignore it, making it a very sexy instrument in its own right, says Roper. Indeed, people have been known to stuff money by the handful into the horn of a particularly talented tuba player.
So forget the trumpet player, the trombonist or the clarinetist. The tubist is to banda what the lead guitarist is to rock ‘n’ roll.
This is why some of the music teachers at the schools that have been hit say they believe banda bandits are responsible.
“I don’t think anyone would go through all the trouble to break locks, break in and explicitly take tubas just to break them down,” says Ruben Gonzalez, the music teacher at South Gate High School, which has lost five tubas. “They’re worth a lot more money on the black market than they are if you melt them down. It’s just a question of where are they selling them, here or out of state or in Mexico.”
His school has been hit twice this year, once in October when thieves broke into the band room and took three tubas, then several weeks later, when they came back and grabbed two more. The school has only three left, leaving them with “more players than tubas,” Gonzalez said.
“We have alarms, we have locks, but the second time, they just came in like gangbusters,” he said. “All they took were tubas. Once they got in, they could have taken any instruments they wanted, but all they took were tubas.”
In the modest Los Angeles suburb of Bell, where one in five people live in poverty, someone broke into the band room and took two tubas. They also ignored every other instrument there, said band director Ligia Chaves-Rasas.
At Huntington Park High School, two tubas have gone missing.
In affluent Manhattan Beach, someone made off with four tubas at Mira Costa High School, and in Compton, someone took eight tubas from Centennial High School.
Los Angeles Unified School District police did not return several recent calls, but Gonzalez said they have told him they were investigating. School police haven’t said who they suspect.
Although players say cheap knockoffs are becoming more available from China, a good new brass tuba can cost $6,000 or more, and even a decent used one can fetch a couple thousand dollars.
“Everyone should get their horns insured,” said Victor Mortson, who teaches brass at Riverside’s Ramona High School, where some of the smaller sousaphone tubas vanished over the recent Christmas holiday. He said he no longer risks leaving his tuba in his car.
South Gate High officials pegged the loss of their five tubas at $30,000. They are trying to raise donations from the community to replace them.
The tubas favored by banda players are the lighter sousaphones, which marching band members carry. But in some instances, thieves have also been grabbing the heavier ones used by concert orchestras.
In their cases, those big tubas can weigh as much as 50 pounds, making them arguably the most difficult instruments to steal, after the piano and the bass drum.
But even before banda music’s rise in popularity, tuba dealers say, the instrument’s high cost has always made it vulnerable to theft.
Four years ago, somebody stole 14 sousaphones from North Carolina Central University’s marching band, and the group had to borrow instruments to take part in a competition.
“They are instruments that are expensive and that are in demand,” said USC’s Kun. “In another context, it might be an electric guitar or a really tricked-out synthesizer. But because we’re talking about Southern California, it’s a tuba.”
___
Online: YouTube videos of banda music
FILE - A March 11, 2009 file photo shows Nadya Suleman raising her hand as she tries to elude paparazzi outside her home in La Habra, Calif. Suleman has filied for bankruptcy and her home is scheduled to be auctioned on Monday, May 7, 2012. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)(Credit: AP) 
This Feb. 2006 photo provided by Josh Echeverria shows U.S. Marine Garrett Anderson in a prone firing position in Kunar Province, Afghanistan. Anderson, an ex-Marine filmmaker whose unit carried pocket digital cameras into some of the worst fighting in Iraq is using that footage, and post-war interviews, to open viewers' eyes about combat and help himself deal with the lasting emotional impact. (AP Photo/Josh Echeverria)(Credit: AP) 
FILE - This March 31, 1991 frame from a video tape shot by George Holliday from his apartment in a suburb of Los Angeles shows what appears to be a group of police officers beating a man with nightsticks and kicking him as other officers look on. The April 29, 1992 acquittal of four police officers in the beating sparked rioting that spread across the city and into neighboring suburbs. Cars were demolished and homes and businesses were burned. Before order was restored, 55 people were dead, 2,300 injured and more than 1,500 buildings were damaged or destroyed. (AP Photo/George Holliday/Courtesy of KTLA Los Angeles)(Credit: AP) 
In this March 2, 2012 photo, The Horn Guys store manager/trumpet player Mike Davis moves new tubas inside the store, in La Crescenta, Calif. There's a Banda Bandit on the loose, some music directors say. Someone who is breaking into high schools from the East Side of Los Angeles to the shores of Manhattan Beach and stealing expensive tubas to supply a fast-growing banda black market.(AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)(Credit: AP) 