Taylor Swift excused from jury duty because she knew defendant was trouble
Also in Tattle: Andrea Tantaros, C-SPAN and Pokemon Go
TATTLE HAS something else in common with Taylor Swift, aside from the adoration of millions and our long legs.
Jury duty.
We got called to City Hall on Friday.
Taylor got called to Nashville's 2nd Avenue criminal courthouse Monday and she was ready to serve - no I'm too famous and too busy and too important letter from Team Swift.
Sure Taylor arrived with extra security - it must have been a drag in line behind her gun-toting guards at the metal detector - but she was humble during the voir dire process. According to the Tennessean newspaper, when prosecutors asked her about her profession, she replied, "I am a songwriter."
Swift posed for pictures, signed autographs, made numerous social-media feeds and ended up being dimissed about 1 p.m.
People magazine reported that according to a very plugged-in anonymous courthouse witness, Swift "was part of the panel of prospective jurors on a case with charges of aggravated kidnapping, aggravated rape and aggravated domestic assault. Therefore, the judge excused Ms. Swift because of her pending sexual assault case against Mr. Mueller."
Last fall, Swift counter-sued radio host David Mueller, for allegedly groping her during a meet-and-greet in 2013. Mueller had filed suit first claiming that false accusations of said groping caused him to get fired.
Truth or dare
The Washington Post reports that former Fox News personality Andrea Tantaros (The Five, Outnumbered), who's suing the network and its former honcho Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, has challenged her former bosses and colleagues to submit to lie-detector tests.
Tantaros acknowledged Monday the bold move was a bid to win public opinion. She said she'd take a lie-detector test if the Fox men (and some women) would also.
Fox News did not respond.
Fox news, however, did ask the New York State Supreme Court, where Tantaros filed her suit, to move the dispute to private arbitration. Fox claims that Tantaros' employment agreement requires that her disputes be settled there.
Of course, the big company wants arbitration. It's much easier to ignore the ruling and force Tantaros, should she win in an arbitration ruling, to spend lots of money to sue Fox in federal court to get that ruling upheld.
The network made the same argument about arbitration last month in response to Gretchen Carlson's similar sexual-harassment suit.
Since that case cost Ailes his job, maybe Fox's lawyers should try a new strategy.
TATTBITS
* As our political landscape gets nastier, even C-SPAN is being forced to add a three-second delay to weed out bad language on its call-in shows.
According to the Washington Post, over the years there has been an uptick in expletives and racist and anti-Semitic talk.
"In a single week in 2012, C-SPAN received at least three calls from people speculating about the size of Mitt Romney's penis," the Washington Post wrote.
At that time C-SPAN pondered a six-inch delay.
C-SPAN co-president Susan Swain said: "It was just an accumulation. We wearied of subjecting the whole of our audience to the crude language of a few individuals."
* Attention, Pokemon creatures: You soon may be expelled from the schools of France.
Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, said Monday that the makers of the "Pokemon Go" smartphone game should stop beaming their most avidly hunted Pokemon figures into real-life schools.
She told a Paris news conference that she intends to meet with representatives of game-maker Niantic to explain that the game entices nonstudents to wander into children's schools. She sees the quest for rare, or "legendary," characters as posing the greatest security risk of unwanted walk-ins by strangers.
She says principals already can apply online to remove their school from the game map.
Has anyone thought that maybe the game could entice hooky-playing children to show up at school?
- Daily News wire services
contributed to this report.