Yesterdays News 10/16

Monte Mader (0:00)

Happy Friday, good morning, and welcome to Yesterday's News, where I cover yesterday's news in about 15 to 20 minutes. The goal of these videos is to help you stay informed, get some of your life back, maybe spend a little less time on social media, and since it's longer form, I can talk about stories with a little bit of nuance. Thank you for your flexibility this month. I have been traveling a lot, I've mentioned that a few times on the video. Some days, it's just simply not been possible to record these. Wednesday and Thursday were two of those days, very long. Even to yesterday and today, I'm having five flights in two days, so it's very busy. And just a reminder that next week, starting on Sunday, I will be headed to Scotland for my birthday trip. Yesterday's news will still be coming out. It may be a little slightly different time during the day since I'm gonna be five hours ahead of Eastern time. I will definitely not be doing yesterday's news on Tuesday, that is my birthday, I plan on taking that day off. And I'll have a few days on the trip that I plan on being completely off social media and the internet if I can help it. When I know what those days are, I will not be the whole time, I will still be reporting and working because it's leading into midterms. But I will have a few days there that I'm taking off. So when I know what days exactly, I will let you know. On this day, October 16th, 1793, Marie Antoinette is executed before a crowd. She was 37, the Revolutionary Tribunal had convicted her the night before. After a two day trial, she was convicted of dilapidating national finances, conspiring against French liberty, inciting violence and mass starvation, military attacks, high treason, and they even added a coerced charge of incest with her eight-year-old son, largely discredited, but they did add that on the top. At noon, she was taken in an open cart through the streets to the Place de la Revolution, hands bound, hair shorn in a plain white dress so that the city could watch. Tens of thousands did. Jacques-Louis David sketched her from a window as she passed. On the scaffold, she accidentally stepped on the executioner's foot and apologized saying, Pardon me, Monsieur, I did not do it on purpose. The blade fell at 12.15, the head was shown to the crowd, and the crowd cheered, and within a year, the men that sent her to that scaffold would find themselves on it as well. Again, public execution is for spectacle, and to prove a point about what the state can do, what the mob can do.

Thankfully, Trump administration has said they will not be live streaming the execution that they planned on in December. More on that in a second. At the University of Chicago fraternity, men cheered outside a locked bathroom while a woman was assaulted inside. Her friends had to fight their way in. According to a Chicago police report first obtained by the Sun-Times, a 21-year-old woman at a party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi House was found not fully conscious in a locked bathroom with a man on top of her, both partially undressed. Her two friends told police a group of men outside the door were cheering and appearing to encourage the activity inside, saying things like, when's my turn, and I want to go in there. And this comes from the police report, they physically blocked the girls from entering, one friend was grabbed by the hair when she tried to intervene, because they knew they were looking for their friend, the men lied to them, said, no, no, no, she's not in here. But they did, so they fought these men, one girl stood between the men and the other one while she picked the lock, they literally had to pick the lock to get inside. And when they confronted the man, he said everything was cool as though nothing had occurred. The university has identified the person of interest and banned him from campus, no one is in custody as of yet. This is obviously the story of the Cornell case, it's told again two weeks later. The girl in question from the police report, she went to the party, she went with friends, she had a couple of drinks but she was not drinking a lot. She said she started feeling unwell, she goes to find a bathroom, the man follows her to the bathroom, pushes her inside, locks the door behind him. They haven't reported yet that their drugging might be involved, but based on how she said she was feeling and that they found her partially conscious only after only a couple of drinks, I think it is possible that we may find out that her drink was spiked. I think it's very possible. But her two friends, I'm so proud of the two of them. I wish things had obviously played out differently. I wish they'd been able to get there in time, but I wanted to give a huge bravo to her friends who literally fought a group of men to get inside that bathroom and get to her. There's also a new video come out where one of the girls chases one of the guys down the street of he just assaulted my friend, and a guy is recording her and apparently thinks it's hilarious. But my opinion still stands that if this is what frats are known for, they shouldn't exist. Greek life should be eradicated. If what we are expected to see is assaults of people or hazing people to death, then I don't care the tradition, I don't care the history, we should just retire those.