The Uncomfortable Truth About Child Abuse in Hollywood

During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them. Starting in the mid-1990s, actors such as Amanda Bynes, Kenan Thompson, and Ariana Grande became household names, as popular children’s shows including All That, Drake & Josh, and Zoey 101 helped propel Nickelodeon to astronomical ratings. For nearly two decades, the network dominated not just kids’ programming, but the entire cable-TV landscape.

A new docuseries argues that at least some of this success came at a great cost. Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV explores troubling allegations of child abuse and other inappropriate on-set behavior during this run at Nickelodeon. The documentary builds on a 2022 Business Insider investigation into programs led by the prolific producer Dan Schneider, and on details from a memoir published earlier that year by the former child star Jennette McCurdy. (McCurdy, who doesn’t identify Schneider by name in her book but describes an abusive showrunner widely believed to be him, was not involved with the documentary.) Over its five episodes, the series offers an important record of how the adults working on these shows—and Hollywood as a whole—repeatedly failed to protect young actors. But Quiet on Set also, perhaps unintentionally, ends up creating a frustratingly tidy narrative that elides some crucial complexities of abuse.

The series spends its first two episodes painting a picture of the toxic environment that Schneider allegedly cultivated for adults and children alike. Two former Amanda Show writers say that Schneider harassed female employees; former All That actors recall their discomfort performing sketches full of racial stereotypes and sexual innuendo. Several interview subjects described a culture of deference to Schneider, one in which they felt afraid to raise their concerns.

In a video response to the series, Schneider apologized for requesting massages from female staffers, said that he wished he could go back and change “how I treat people,” and conceded that he would be willing to cut any upsetting jokes from his shows that are streaming. (At the end of every Quiet on Set episode, a title card relays Nickelodeon’s response to the producers’ questions: The network said it “investigates all formal complaints as part of our commitment to fostering a safe and professional workplace … We have adopted numerous safeguards over the years to help ensure we are living up to our own high standards and the expectations of our audience.”)

[Read: What tween TV teaches kids]

Quiet on Set shows how the culture of silence created work environments that endangered young performers. The documentary covers multiple harrowing cases of child sexual abuse perpetrated by individuals who worked in close proximity to Nickelodeon’s underage actors. Jason Handy, a production assistant on All That and The Amanda Show, was arrested for lewd acts with children in 2003 and later pleaded no contest to two of the felony counts and one misdemeanor charge. He was sentenced to six years in prison and later arrested on new sex-abuse charges in 2014. In the documentary, the Business Insider journalist Kate Taylor reads stomach-churning quotes from Handy’s journal, before revealing that another Nickelodeon crew member was arrested just four months after him: Brian Peck, a dialogue coach and an occasional actor on All That, was charged with 11 counts of child sexual abuse. After pleading no contest, Peck was convicted of two of the counts against him and sentenced to 16 months in prison.

The documentary’s most shocking revelation is that the unnamed victim in Peck’s case is now an adult who wants to tell his story: The Drake & Josh star Drake Bell, speaking publicly about the abuse for the first time, explains how Peck integrated himself into Bell’s life after the two met at an Amanda Show table read. “In hindsight, I should’ve been able to see,” Bell says. “But as a kid, you have no clue.” Bell’s chronicle of the abuse is wrenching, in no small part because it underscores how adults failed to keep him and the other children in Nickelodeon’s studios safe from predators.

Quiet on Set argues that Peck’s on-set behavior fits within a larger pattern on Schneider’s shows: boundary-crossing behind the scenes and inappropriate sexual innuendo on the air. In a clip from an old All That episode, a celebrity guest complains of hunger, and Peck’s recurring character, known as “Pickle Boy,” hands him a pickle to eat through a hole in the dressing-room door. The camera zooms in to capture that visual, which clearly evokes a pornographic trope. One former All That actor recalls that, during downtime, Peck would play video games with the children; another reads an old note in which Peck thanked her for walking on his back. The former child actors repeatedly emphasize that although other grown-ups were present on set for many questionable incidents, no one from Nickelodeon ever stepped in. (In his video statement, Schneider says that he didn’t hire Peck and was devastated to hear the allegations of abuse.)

In making many of these stories public for the first time, Quiet on Set is the latest project to expose the ways in which Hollywood enables child sexual abuse—and to call for industry reforms. The former actors speaking in the new series echo many of the sentiments expressed in Dear Hollywood, an incisive podcast by the former Disney Channel ingénue Alyson Stoner. Three years ago, Stoner wrote about a phenomenon they called the “toddler-to-trainwreck pipeline,” describing it as a profitable system that has continued apace since the 19th century by “censoring the harm happening behind the scenes, manicuring aspirational lifestyles and outcomes, and then watching young lives tragically implode.” In their writing and on their podcast, Stoner presents disturbing personal testimony and discusses issues that child stars face, such as the prevalence of eating disorders, fractured family dynamics, and the psychological toll of fame. Stoner also offers concrete steps the industry should take, such as requiring a qualified, third-party mental-health professional on every set.

Last week, Quiet on Set, which was originally billed as a four-part series, released a bonus fifth episode that explores tangible solutions. Shane Lyons, a former All That cast member, said that the first place to start would be updating the law “so that no individual who is a convicted child molester can ever get on a Hollywood set again.” That may sound like an obvious fix. But the California law that details protections for children in the entertainment industry, and which mandates background checks for many professionals who work with child actors, has a major loophole: It doesn’t apply if a parent or guardian is always present with their child on set.

[Read: Don’t judge I’m Glad My Mom Died by its title]

The show makes the limits of this provision—and the stakes of leaving it unchanged—incredibly clear. Even if the onus is on parents to protect their kids, abusers frequently conceal their predatory actions from other adults. What’s more, parents who try to advocate for their kids can end up ostracized, putting their children’s career (and self-esteem) on the line.

The docuseries creates a startling and horrifying picture of how Hollywood’s systemic flaws have long put children at risk. But Quiet on Set also has its shortcomings. The series isn’t always careful with its depictions of alleged victims or of former child stars, especially those who chose not to participate in the project. Amanda Bynes was a key part of Nickelodeon’s rise, but the documentary’s commentary about her closeness to Schneider and her later mental-health struggles sometimes registers as cursory speculation without Bynes there to speak for herself.

[Read: The hard lessons of Amanda Bynes’s comeback]

Parts of Bell’s story are similarly under-contextualized, despite the actor’s heavy involvement in the series: Quiet on Set publicizes the names of several industry figures who wrote letters of support for Peck after his conviction. (These letters were previously sealed, along with other court documents.) Excerpts from some of the 41 letters show just how much backing Peck had in Hollywood, but in its eagerness to implicate others, the series overlooks how Peck may have wielded authority over some of the signatories.

Throughout the series, Peck is described as a master manipulator, someone who infiltrated Bell’s life when the actor was a teenager partly by earning his mother’s trust. But the documentary never meaningfully addresses the fact that some of the performers who wrote letters of support for Peck had met the much older dialogue coach while they, too, were teens. This doesn’t necessarily absolve them of criticism. But the series could have examined how such unequal dynamics can influence young people’s behavior in an ecosystem as insular as children’s programming, and considered the possibility that Peck’s manipulation extended further. Even including the detail of the letter signers’ ages along with this commentary would have provided valuable information to viewers attempting to make sense of the case and how it was perceived at the time.

In the weeks since the documentary began airing, former Nickelodeon fans have criticized many Hollywood figures, including former child actors, for having shown support for Peck. And some of the network’s former actors have faced backlash for simply not speaking up—whether in solidarity with Bell or to publicly share their own negative experiences. In last week’s bonus fifth episode of Quiet on Set, Bell asked that fans be more compassionate toward his mom and reiterated an earlier request for fans to “take it a little easy” on his former co-star Josh Peck (who is no relation to Brian Peck).

In another unfortunate misstep, Quiet on Set avoids wrestling with the full reality of Bell’s life after Peck’s abuse. In 2021, Bell himself pleaded guilty to felony attempted child endangerment and a misdemeanor charge of disseminating matter harmful to juveniles in a case involving a 15-year-old girl, when Bell was 31. The documentary largely brushes past this, allowing Bell to obfuscate the details of these allegations by conflating the case with his other “self-destructive behavior” and suggesting that the media have spread “misinformation” about him.

These oversights undermine the docuseries’ attempts to rigorously confront the pernicious nature of abuse, and instead present viewers with clearly delineated camps of good and evil, perpetrator and victim. This flawed framing has also left Bell’s accuser vulnerable to heightened public scrutiny: After the series premiered, fans began creating TikTok videos discussing the 2021 case. There, and on other social-media platforms, some people shared the accuser’s real name or suggested that she had been lying. People also harassed Bell’s former girlfriend, who in 2020 accused the actor of physical and emotional abuse during their relationship—allegations that Bell has flatly denied as “offensive and defamatory.” Just last week, Bell insisted that he was innocent in the 2021 case (despite already having pleaded guilty) while speaking about Quiet on Set on a podcast, which further emboldened these fans.

Many of these more recent updates couldn’t possibly have been accounted for in a documentary that had already finished filming. But the bonus episode—a coda of sorts—offered a chance for Quiet on Set to reckon with the sad fact that it’s not uncommon for abuse victims to become offenders in adulthood. True intervention requires understanding abuse in ways that aren’t binary, and the show would have benefited tremendously from asking a mental-health expert to talk about these cycles. Protecting children in Hollywood and beyond is a collective effort, one that demands seriously engaging with even the most uncomfortable truths. Quiet on Set marks one important step in that direction, but there’s so much more left to do.

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Your Fast Food Is Already Automated

Moments after receiving my lunch order, the robots whirred to life. A clawlike contraption lurched forward, like a bird pecking at feed, to snatch dishes holding a faux-chicken cutlet and potatoes, then inserted them onto a metal track that snakes through a 650-degree-Fahrenheit oven. Seven minutes, some automatic food dispensers, and two conveyor belts later (with a healthy assist from human hands), my meal was sitting on a shelf of mint-green cubbies. It was a vegan fried-chicken sandwich, a cucumber salad, crispy potatoes, and a smattering of other sides.

This is Kernel, a fast-casual venture that opened its first store, in Manhattan, this February. Its founder, Steve Ells, kicked off the lunch-bowl boom when he started Chipotle in 1993. Now, he told me during my visit, he is betting that machines will trigger a “reinvention of how a fast-food or fast-casual restaurant can run.” Robots, he prophesied, will bring faster and more accurate service at lower overhead costs. Plenty of chains have tested out semi-automated cooking, with mixed success—including deep-frying robots at Jack in the Box and robotic bowl assembly at Sweetgreen and Chipotle. But Kernel has been built from the ground up for robots. Just three employees are needed in the restaurant at any time, compared with the dozen required for a typical fast-casual restaurant. Soon many more people may be eating robot-prepared vegan chicken: Ells has raised $36 million and hopes to expand quickly, starting with several more locations throughout New York City this year.

But robots may represent less of a fast-food revolution than the obvious next step in its evolution. For more than a century, technology has made fast food more efficient—and, in particular, more automated. That’s what turned McDonald’s into a giant 60 years ago. Such restaurants can be considered “sort of mini-factories,” Dave Henkes, a food-industry analyst at Technomic, told me, and have always used “automation to drive speed and convenience.” And, like the simpler cooking technology before them, today’s robots are speeding up humans’ work without fully replacing them. For now, Kernel is no different.

[Read: A robot’s nightmare is a burrito full of guac]

Kernel’s entirely vegan menu is limited (Ells prefers “focused”), but everything looked and tasted like it came from fine dining. That is no coincidence: Kernel’s chief culinary officer, Andrew Black, was a sous-chef at Eleven Madison Park, a three-Michelin-star restaurant with a $365 tasting menu, located a block away from Kernel. While I ate, he and Ells gave passionate spiels about each item: The marinated beets, a surprise best seller, are topped with quinoa, green hummus, and a seed crunch to make the dish nutritionally complete. For the crispy potatoes, Black specially selected a spud variety for its sugar, starch, and water content, and they’re then cooked three times—steamed, fried, baked—to achieve a shattering crunch and pillowy interior. Black and his staff dredge and fry every piece of “chicken” by hand; as I bit into my sandwich, Ells mused that they should try swapping imitation meat for a block of tofu.

Simply put, Kernel is a group of excellent chefs equipped with the world’s most high-tech toaster oven. All the food is cooked by chefs at a central kitchen about 10 minutes away, delivered hourly by a bicycle courier, and heated by a robot. That off-site preparation, Ells told me, provides at least 80 percent of the menu’s quality. The food then has to be assembled by still three other people. Human one, the “replenisher,” loads the hourly delivery of prepared food onto a shelf that the robotic arm can reach. The “assembler” puts together every sandwich and side, and a third person, the “bundler,” bags each order and places it in a cubby.

A wall of green cubbies at Kernel next to a bowl of roasted carrots
Courtesy of Kernel

The setup is “extraordinarily fast, accurate, and predictable,” Ells told me, nothing less than a “paradigm shift.” Employees barely have to move their feet. But a robot that heats and moves around your food is just the next iteration in the pursuit of speed and standardization. The restaurant with the strongest claim to inventing fast food may be White Castle, which, in 1921, “did something that was unusual for the time—they tried to standardize their operations from restaurant to restaurant,” David Hogan, a fast-food historian at Heidelberg University, in Ohio, and the author of Selling ’em by the Sack: White Castle and the Creation of American Food, told me. Cooking procedures were precise and uniform; cooking implements were manufactured in a single location; even the physical buildings came out of a central factory.

The playbook hasn’t substantively changed since. Before buying McDonald’s and launching its global success, Ray Kroc sold the chain automatic milkshake mixers. What first captivated him about the restaurant, he wrote in his 1977 memoir, was how “each step in producing the limited menu was stripped down to its essence and accomplished with a minimum of effort.” That year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a study noting that fast-food chains had “introduced principles of industrial engineering” to restaurants. In particular, “the off-premise preparation of foods” and improved “cooking devices,” such as microwaves and convection ovens, reduced preparation time and added uniformity. Restaurants today use specialized equipment, extensive training manuals, and various trackers to ensure speed and consistency. Sweetgreen has an app that instructs employees exactly how to heat and prepare food, and McDonald’s cooks beef patties for precisely 42 seconds. If anything, Kernel’s off-site kitchen is conceptually closer to the centrally prepared, frozen patties and fries served by fast-food burger joints of old than the chicken grilled on-site at a Chipotle.

[Read: Too many Americans are missing out on the best kitchen gadget]

To the extent that Kernel is a reinvention, Ells hasn’t invented a new paradigm so much as found another. Sweetgreen already acts like a tech company, and Domino’s has touted itself as one. Now Ells talks about his robot-assisted process as an “operating system.” What may one day distinguish Kernel’s automation is that the space is designed for robots from inception. So far, other chains have retrofitted human kitchens with robots, which creates confusion and disaster, Stanislav Ivanov, who studies robotics and restaurants at Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management, told me. Robots malfunction, and even when they don’t, bulky machines interfere with equipment, stations, and a floor plan designed for human movement. In 2018, an early burger-flipping robot that was tested at a CaliBurger in Pasadena was temporarily decommissioned because it couldn’t be incorporated into the human workflow.

Kernel is, at least in theory, built for “the technology that we know is coming,” Ells said. The equipment is all mobile and can be swapped or calibrated for newer gadgets (permanent counters, ovens, and stovetops, for instance, are unnecessary because robots don’t care if workstations are waist-height). Drones could bring prepared food from the central kitchen to restaurants, and robots might assemble burgers in their entirety. Efficient robots and a vegan menu, he said, will continue to reduce the restaurant’s carbon footprint. Gesturing to the “bundler” who bagged all the food, Ells said, “Instead of Carlos, imagine a robot arm.” (Carlos kept bundling without so much as a flinch.)

With automation, of course, comes the risk of disappearing jobs. Kernel and other restaurants are experimenting with robots not only in pursuit of efficiency, but because the industry is facing a chronic labor shortage. The low pay doesn’t help, and the jobs are also exhausting as well as, at times, hazardous. Deep-frying, for instance, is extremely dangerous, which is why one of the most popular cooking robots in the industry simply runs the fry station. Fast-food chains pursuing automation are trying to reduce head count, especially as some states raise their minimum wages. But for now, Henkes said, robots have typically led restaurants to redeploy people to different positions. Ells claimed that Kernel’s existing employees, who are currently paid $25 an hour, will eventually be moved to more front-of-house jobs, helping guests and monitoring the robots.

But a burger prepared, cooked, and served without a human touch is still more accurately described as speculation. Faster and more automated cooking technology may well be imminent, but humans will still be involved for years to come. Automated pizzaiolos, line cooks, and salad tossers have failed; successful robots typically target a specific task, such as plunging fries into boiling oil.

Just as the quality of Kernel’s food depends on human chefs, the quality of its automation will depend less on technology than on human vision and feedback. Each day, employees meet to discuss what worked and what didn’t, which will help iterate the technology: Dozens of bugs, including stalled production and locked cubbies, have been smoothed out. On the first day, the cubbies didn’t open; last month, a stray potato shut down Kernel’s production line. Kernel is building new tools, but relying on the same human logic that made White Castle, McDonald’s, and Chipotle successful. I came to the restaurant to witness fancy robots, but I would return simply for the faux-chicken sandwich and the cucumbers topped with cashews and chili jam. Kernel the restaurant is far more impressive than Kernel the tech company.

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The Trump Trial’s Extraordinary Opening

This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here.

The defendant nodded off a couple of times on Monday. And I have to confess, as a spectator in an overflow courtroom watching on closed-circuit television, so did I.

Legal proceedings can be like that. Mundane, even boring. That’s how the first couple of days of the trial in the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Indictment No. 71543–2023, felt much of the time. Ordinary—despite being so extraordinary. And, frankly, that was comforting. The ordinary mechanics of the criminal-litigation process were applied fairly, efficiently, and methodically to a defendant of unparalleled notoriety, one who has devoted himself to undermining the rule of law.

Certainly the setting was ordinary. When the Criminal Courts Building, at 100 Centre Street in Lower Manhattan, first opened in 1941, an architectural critic lamented that the Art Deco structure, a New Deal/Public Works Administration project, was “uncommunicative.” Eight decades later, it still has little to say. Raw and spartan, it’s a bit of a mystery to people who aren’t familiar with it (including me, a civil litigator who, despite having been admitted to the New York state bar some 35 years ago, practiced mostly in federal and Delaware courts). A pool reporter yesterday described the surroundings as “drab.”

Drab indeed, but busy—very busy. There’s never a want of bustle here, of the sort you would expect. As the former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann put it this week, 100 Centre is, “well, Dickensian—a beehive of activity with miscreants, state prosecutors, judges, defense lawyers, probation officers, court security [and] families—in dark, dingy halls and courtrooms.” It’s a bit like New York City as a whole: How it functions, with the volume it handles, never ceases to amaze.

And how the court manages to keep track of things, Lord only knows. In contrast with the federal courts or even New York’s civil courts, it has no electronic, publicly accessible docket. The Supreme Court of the State of New York for the County on New York, Criminal Term, is, as one courthouse reporter said last month, “stuck in the past.” It’s a tribunal “where the official record is a disorganized and incomplete mass of paper with no accounting of what’s inside.” The records come in brown accordion folders—Redwelds, lawyers call them—and what judges and clerks decide to put in them is the record, and what they don’t is not.

But somehow it works. Somehow the court manages to dispose of thousands of cases a year, involving all manner of defendants and offenses. A calendar emailed to journalists by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office listing the week’s anticipated court appearances gives you the flavor. It catalogs names seemingly of many ethnicities, with a couple of corporate entities to boot. A hodgepodge of alleged charges, including the violent and the corrupt: robbery, conspiracy, forgery, criminal mischief, identity theft, enterprise corruption, stalking, murder, attempted murder, sex trafficking, grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, possession of a forged instrument, offering a false statement for filing.

And the list contained three cases involving the crime of falsifying business records, one of which was set for trial on Monday, April 15, in Part 59, Courtroom 1530—People v. Trump.

Nothing on the calendar, other than the defendant’s readily recognizable name, would have told you there was anything special about the case. In that sense, it was ordinary. But the hubbub outside—a handful of protesters, multiple television cameras, and a long line for the press and other spectators—made clear that something somewhat special was afoot. An overflow courtroom down the hall from the main courtroom offered a closed-circuit television feed of the proceedings. Those who had lined up went through an extra set of security screeners and machines—mandated, we were told, by the United States Secret Service.

But still, so much was ordinary—the stuff of the commencement of a criminal trial, housekeeping of the sort you’d see in virtually any court about to try a criminal case. That began promptly at 10:00 a.m. on Monday, when Judge Juan Merchan assumed the bench. There were loose ends for the judge to tie up, pending motions to decide. Merchan denied the defendant’s motion to recuse, reading, in even tones, an opinion from the bench. The motion was frivolous; the result unsurprising. And then the parties argued some motions in limine—pretrial efforts to exclude evidence.

For example, would the notorious Access Hollywood tape that rocked the 2016 presidential campaign be played for the jury?  The prosecution said it should be: An assistant district attorney said the tape would elucidate why the defendant and his campaign were so hell-bent, to the point of falsifying business records, on keeping additional instances of the defendant’s miscreant conduct with women out of the public eye. The defense, of course, argued that playing the tape would be prejudicial. After all, this wasn’t a case about sexual assault.

The judge allowed that the tape’s existence provided context for the business-records charges but ruled that actually showing the tape to the jury would be prejudicial. Instead, the jury would be given a transcript. And speaking of sexual assault, prosecutors tried to get in an excerpt from Trump’s deposition in the E. Jean Carroll sexual-assault and defamation cases in which Trump testified that he was a “star,” and that stars historically get to do to women what Trump said on the Access Hollywood tape that he liked to do to them. Judge Merchan rightly said no, he would not allow the jury to hear that. It would be too much, too beside the point of what this case (unlike the Carroll cases) is actually about.

But as unusual and colorful as the factual predicate for the evidentiary motions was, the argument wasn’t all that interesting. It was rather low-key, in fact. Perhaps that was because none of the proffered evidence was new. But it was also because the arguing of pretrial evidentiary motions, however crucial they may be (although these, frankly, weren’t), is seldom scintillating. I can’t imagine that Donald Trump and I were the only ones watching who dozed off.

Then came jury selection, which took the rest of Monday, all of yesterday, and will probably consume tomorrow and Friday as well. (The judge will be handling his other cases today.) That was a bit more interesting, but slow going at first. Again, the ordinary met the extraordinary. Ninety-six potential jurors were brought in. The judge provided an overview of the case in the broadest terms, describing the charges in a few sentences; explained what his role and what the jury’s would be; and read the names of the cast of characters (some would be witnesses, others would simply be mentioned, including—full disclosure—my ex-wife). Still, it was mundane. It was pretty much what a judge would say in any big case.  

And jury selection was a bit tedious; in a case like this, it simply has to be. Jurors were asked to give oral answers—some 42 of them, including a number with multiple subparts—to a written questionnaire. In substance: Where do you live? What do you do? What’s your educational background? What news sources do you read? What’s your experience with the legal system? Have you ever been to a Trump rally or followed him on social media? Have you belonged to any anti-Trump groups? And on and on and and on. But the most important inquiries came toward the end of the list: questions asking whether the prospective jurors could be fair. Occasionally the judge would interject, when an unusual or unclear answer was given. And once in a while there was a moment of levity: One woman—in response to a question about having relatives or close friends in the legal field—noted that she had once dated a lawyer. “It ended fine,” she volunteered, with a flatness of tone that betrayed no hint of nostalgia or loss.

This process took well over a day, and included brief follow-up questioning—“voir dire”—by the lawyers for both sides. But the judge did take a shortcut, one that saved a great deal of effort: After describing the case, but before proceeding to the individual-by-individual, question-by-question process, he asked the entire group the bottom-line question: Do any of you think you couldn’t judge the case fairly? Roughly two-thirds of this first batch of potential jurors said they couldn’t. That was extraordinary—a reflection of the fact that everyone knows who the defendant is, and that not many people lack a strong opinion about him.  

And during the lawyers’ voir dire, a few interesting moments did occur, mostly when Trump’s lawyers pulled out social-media posts that they claimed showed possible bias on the part of the remaining candidates in the jury pool. One man was stricken by the court for cause because he once posted that Trump should be locked up.  The Trump lawyers attempted, but failed, to get the court to strike a woman whose husband had posted some joking commentary about the former president. The judge’s response: That’s all you have? He allowed the juror to stay, and left it to counsel to decide whether to use their limited number of peremptory strikes.

In the end, for two days, the extraordinary intertwined with the ordinary, as it should in a case like this one. As one young woman from the Upper East Side, now to be known as Juror No. 2,  put it during the selection process, “No one is above the law.” Let’s hope that sentiment prevails.

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