In This Week's Issue

For Immediate Release: April 24, 2017 IN THIS WEEK’S ISSUE What, Exactly, Did Steve Bannon Do in the Movie Industry? In the May 1, 2017, issue of The New Yorker, in “A Hollywood Story” (p. 34), Connie Bruck investigates Steve Bannon’s Hol- lywood years, before he joined the worlds of media and politics, and speaks with many people who interacted with him during that period of dubious dealings, unsuccessful business ventures, and erratic, sometimes violent behavior that preceded his hold over the nativist wing of the Trump White House. Bannon moved to Los Angeles in 1987, to help Goldman Sachs ex- pand its presence in the entertainment business. He became passionate and knowledgeable about film, and boasted about his connections, his production credits, and his background in mergers and acquisitions. “He was a Republican, but not overly dogmatic, and he tried not to let his political beliefs get in the way of his work,” Bruck writes. Last November, when Bannon was named Donald Trump’s chief White House strategist, many articles highlighted an ex- traordinary fact about his Hollywood career: he had negotiated a profit participation in “Seinfeld” in 1993, two years before the show went into syndication. Forbes reported that, if Bannon had a one-per-cent share in the profits, “he would have made about $32.6 million since 1998,” and said that “Bannon’s steady ‘Seinfeld’ income” was supporting his career as a conservative propagandist. Larry David, the show’s head writer and executive producer, told Bruck, “I don’t think I ever heard of him until he surfaced with the Trump campaign and I had no idea that he was profiting from the work of industrious Jews!” It is possible that Bannon’s deal was capped and paid out not long after the show went into syndication, in the fall of 1995. But, since that early period, neither CBS nor Castle Rock Entertainment nor Warner Bros. has records of payments to Bannon, if the records are as they were described to Bruck. Bruck’s reporting reveals instances of Bannon’s physical and verbal outbursts, sometimes directed toward women. Bannon’s sec- ond ex-wife had a particularly violent altercation with him, in 1996, that resulted in a 911 call. According to the police officer’s report, after the woman threatened to divorce Bannon, “[She] said she spit at him, and [he] reached up to her, from the driv- er’s seat of his car, and grabbed her left wrist. He pulled her down, as if he was trying to pull [her] into the car, over the door. [She] said Mr. Bannon grabbed at her neck, also pulling her into the car. She said that she started to fight back, striking his face so he would let go of her.” She ran into the house, telling him that she was calling 911. She said later, in a sworn divorce filing, that he screamed, “Crazy fucking cunt!” She complained to the officer about her sore neck, and he wrote, “I saw red marks on her left wrist and the right side of her neck.” Bannon was charged with spousal abuse, simple battery, and dissuad- ing a witness. His ex-wife later said that his lawyer told her that, if Bannon went to jail, “I would have no money and no way to support the children.” Bannon, she said, told her that, if she went to court, “he and his attorney would make sure that I would be the one who was guilty.” (Bannon’s lawyer denies intimidating Bannon’s wife, and Bannon declined to comment.) Bruck also quotes from a tape of Bannon, recorded without his knowledge, making crude remarks about a woman scientist, Abigail Alling, whom he encountered in the nineties. After a disagreement between the two, Bannon said to a colleague, in reference to Alling’s comments on the matter, “I am going to ram it down her fucking throat.” He went on, “I think she is a self-cen- tered, deluded young woman, and she is about to get a reality check, and I am going to deliver it to her. I am not going to have a twenty-nine-year-old bimbo criticize the people at this place for running something.” He also said, “But she’s going to pay. She’s going to pay. When this is over, she’s finished.” Later, at a pretrial interview, Ban- non was asked if he had made some of those remarks. Unaware of the tape, he claimed he had not. “I’ve never referred to Ms. Alling as a bimbo,” he said. (Bannon declined to comment.) In another instance, James Ulmer, an entertainment journalist who was profiling Bannon in 2005, recalled speaking with Bannon about the 2008 election. Ulmer was taken aback, he said, when Bannon began talking about Hillary Clinton’s likely campaign for the Presidency in the next election. According to Ulmer’s memory of the conversation, Bannon told him, in graphic terms, that he and others were pre- paring to destroy Hillary in 2008. A source close to Bannon says that this conversation never took place, and that Bannon never met Ulmer in person. Bannon didn’t find much success in traditional Hollywood films. After meeting David Bossie, a longtime opponent of Bill and Hillary Clinton and the president and chair- man of the conservative nonprofit Citizens United, he became involved in political MARK ULRIKSEN documentaries. In 2010, after releasing three documentaries with Citizens United, Bannon became a fixture at Tea Party ral- lies and conventions across the country. He also started appearing regularly on Fox News. During this time, Bannon went through “a visible transformation,” a friend said. “In his days in business, he dressed like an investment banker from Connect- icut—shirt and jacket, tie or not, boring men’s shoes, a short, conventional men’s haircut. But he couldn’t show up at the Tea Party dressed like that. He started dressing more casually. There was this other side of him—he was from the South, he could be in a sports bar in West Virginia, and he would be accepted.” The friend continued, “He never fit in in the world of investment banking—he was this gauche Irish kid. Never fit in in the Hollywood world—his politics were much too conservative. Never fit in in the mainstream Republican world—he wasn’t uptight like them. But then he got embraced by the Tea Party world. He really started playing that role, and he came into his own.” Bruck writes, “Many who did have dealings with Bannon were unwilling to be interviewed. Others would not speak for at- tribution, saying that they feared what he might do with the instruments of government—one spoke of a possible I.R.S. audit.” One colleague recalled that Bannon seemed out of place in Hollywood: “The business runs on talent relationships. He had this real will-to-power vibe that was so off-putting. He came on so strong, and in a way that I couldn’t imagine he would be successful with creative people.” Barry Diller told Bruck, “I never heard of him, prior to Trumpism. And no one I know knew him in his so-called Hollywood period.” After Fifty-Two Years of Civil War, Former Guerrillas Seek a Return to Society In “Out of the Jungle” (p. 28), Jon Lee Anderson reports from Colombia, and sits down with the guerrilla commander Car- los Antonio Lozada, who helped end the FARC’s fifty-two-year insurrection. As the deadline for disarmament approaches, he speaks with Lozada, with Colombia’s President, Juan Manuel Santos, and with former guerrillas about the possibilities and challenges of reintegrating former guerrillas into society. More than fifty years ago, Colombia’s two major political parties agreed to alternate terms of power, in a coalition called the National Front. All those outside the Front were effectively shut out, and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia—the FARC—was founded in the early sixties to carry out a war against the state. Against his parents’ wishes, Lozada dropped out of school and headed for the countryside to join the guerrillas, in 1978. Because he has spent decades shuttling between jungle outposts and Colombia’s urban power centers, he is a crucial leader for the FARC as it tries to reëngage with the world. By the terms of the peace treaty, some seven thousand FARC fighters will sub- mit to a process of transitional justice. In exchange for full confessions and reparations to victims, those who committed war crimes will receive “restorative sanctions,” which offer the possibility of community work rather than prison. The FARC will be- come a political party, and, before long, former guerrillas will be able to run for public office. After decades of fighting for Marx- ist ideas, Lozada is now trying to devise “economic projects that, in coöperative form, can help sustain the group.” Most of the combatants have been living as fugitives in their own country, and now they have to contemplate returning to towns and fam- ilies they have not seen in years. But many Colombians despise the FARC, and it will be difficult to persuade employees to hire ex-guerrillas—especially when jobs are already scarce. Drug trafficking could provide the only available work for former fighters. “It’s a problem,” Lozada said. “Unless they have a very strong ideological understanding, some will be vulnerable to the ap- peal of the narco world.” Anderson asked young guerrillas waiting to be reintegrated into Colombian society what they wanted to do with their lives when peace came.

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