The chief financial officer of troubled Bed Bath & Beyond has been identified as the man who jumped to his death from the iconic new Tribeca skyscraper known as the “Jenga Building,” The Post has learned.
Gustavo Arnal, 52, who was also an executive vice president for the struggling home goods retailer, plunged from the 18th floor of 56 Leonard Street on Friday, police sources said.
The 60-story building is best known for its purposely misaligned apartments stacked atop each other, resembling the popular game “Jenga.”
Messages left with Bed Bath & Bed and Arnal’s family Saturday were not immediately returned.
On Aug. 16, Arnal sold 42,513 shares in company stock for a little over a $1 million, according to MarketBeat.com.
Arnal joined the company in 2020. The company has been struggling financially as of lately.Robert Miller
Arnal joined Bed Bath & Beyond in 2020. He previously worked as chief financial officer for cosmetics giant Avon based out of London and had a 20-year career working overseas leading Procter & Gamble.
In 2021, he made more than $2.9 million via Bed Bath & Beyond, including $775,000 in salary and the rest in stock awards, according to InsiderTrades.com.
Bed Bath & Beyond has recently been facing turbulence.
Shares in the Union, New Jersey-based business lost nearly a quarter of their value Wednesday, after the company announced a restructuring that includes store closures, layoffs and a possible stock offering.
The company said it has obtained more than $500 million in new financing and was reducing 20% of its workforce. It plans to close about 150 namesake stores but will keep its buybuy BABY chain.
56 Leonard Street is a luxury building, home to many celebrities.
In mid-August, shareholder activist Ryan Cohen, the billionaire co-founder of online pet-products retailer Chewy Inc., sold his shares in Bed Bath & Beyond after taking on a 10% stake just months before and pledging to make big changes.
The “Jenga Building” features 19-foot ceilings, double-height windows, white oak and stone floors, a gas fireplace, a chef’s kitchen and three terraces totaling 1,252 square feet with panoramic water and city skyline views.
It is also a celebrity-packed home to the mega-wealthy, including singer Frank Ocean.
Additional reporting by Larry Celona and Steven Vago
Earlier this year, the company took the unusual public stance of speaking out against Russia’s war in Ukraine, calling for sympathy for the victims, and for the end of the conflict.
Lukoil’s chairman Ravil Maganov died this week after falling out of the window of a hospital in Moscow, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
Lukoil confirmed the death on Thursday in a statement published on its website.
Maganov “passed away following a severe illness,” Lukoil said, making no mention of a fall. “Maganov immensely contributed to the development of not only the company, but of the entire Russian oil and gas sector.”
Another top Lukoil manager, Alexander Subbotin, was found dead near Moscow in May after reportedly visiting a shaman, TASS reported. Russia’s State News Agency quoted an official as saying authorities were called to an unconscious man suffering from a heart failure. TASS reported the police opened a criminal investigation into the case.
Links with Gazprom
In the first of the deaths reported this year, a top executive at Gazprom was found dead in his cottage in the village of Leninsky near Leningrad on January 30, 2022, according to Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti.
RIA reported that a suicide note was found at the scene and that the investigators were investigating the death as a suicide. Russian national broadcaster RenTv has identified the man as Leonid Shulman, the head of transport at Gazprom Invest.
Just a month after that, another top executive at Gazprom was found dead in the same village. Alexander Tyulakov was discovered dead in his garage on February 25, according to Novaya Gazeta, an independent Russian newspaper. Novaya Gazeta reported he died by suicide.
CNN’s calls to Gazprom have not been returned.
CNN has asked Russia’s Investigative Committee for comment on the two cases but has not received a response.
Two more Russian businessmen with links to Gazprom died in apparent murder-suicide incidents in April.
One of them, Vladislav Avayev, the former vice-president of Gazprombank, was found dead with his wife and daughter in his Moscow apartment on April 18, according to TASS.
Citing a source in law enforcement, TASS claimed authorities were investigating the Avayevs’ deaths as a murder-suicide.
Yulia Ivanova, a representative of the Investigative Committee for Moscow, was quoted by Tass as saying that a relative discovered the Avayevs’ bodies after being told by the family driver and the nanny that they could not contact them on the phone or get into the apartment, since the door was closed from the inside.
Igor Volobuev, a former VP of Gazprombank who recently left Russia for Ukraine, told CNN that he did not believe Avayev killed himself.
“His job was to deal with private banking, that means dealing with VIP clients. He was in charge of very large amounts of money. So, did he kill himself? I don’t think so. I think he knew something and that he posed some sort of risk,” Volobuev told CNN in April.
Russia’s Investigative Committee did not respond to CNN’s request for comment on this case.
Just a day later, on April 19, Sergey Protosenya, a former executive at the gas producer Novatek, which is partially owned by Gazprom, was found dead at his home in Lloret de Mar, a Mediterranean resort near Barcelona.
The bodies of his wife and daughter, showing signs of having suffered violence, were found inside the family’s luxury home, an official source close to the investigation told CNN last week, while the body of Protosenya was found in the garden outside, according to the source.
Son questions initial findings
Catalan police in the province of Girona, where the town of Lloret de Mar is located, told CNN on Friday that they have since completed their investigation into the case and sent the findings to a court.
The police force said its conclusion was that the deaths were a double murder and subsequent suicide.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in April, Protosenya’s son questioned that version of events, suggesting instead that his father was murdered.
“The Catalan police have taken statements from the son. Other hypotheses have been ruled out. Also ruled out was a triple homicide,” the police’s press official told CNN at that time. “That this was the work of the Russian mafia? Well, no,” the official added.
Novatek, Protosenya’s former employer, said he was “a wonderful person and a wonderful family man.”
“Unfortunately, there have been speculations on this topic in the media, but we are convinced that these speculations are not related to reality. We hope that the law enforcement agencies of Spain will conduct a thorough and objective investigation and sort out what happened, ” the company said in a statement.
Coroner’s ruling
Mikhail Watford, a Ukrainian-born Russian oil and gas billionaire, was found dead in his home in Surrey, England on February 28.
Surrey Police told CNN it did not believe there were any suspicious circumstances.
Another Russian businessman, Vasily Melnikov, was found dead alongside his family in Nizhny Novgorod in late March, according to the Russian newspaper Kommersant.
Melnikov owned MedStom, a medical supplies company. According to Russia’s Investigative Committee, a 43-year-old man, his wife, 41, and two children aged four and 10 were found stabbed to death on March 23.
The committee did not name Melnikov, but the ages of the dead and the location of the incident match the Kommersant report.
The regional branch of the investigative committee has not updated the status of its investigation and did not return CNN’s request for comment. At the time of the incident, in March, it said there “were no signs of unauthorized entry into the apartment,” and that “knives were found and seized.”
“[Investigators] are considering several versions of what happened, including the murder of the children and wife by the head of the family, followed by self-inflicted death,” the committee said.
How to get help: In the United States, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide also can provide contact information for crisis centers around the world.
CNN’s Uliana Pavlova, Anna Chernova, Frederik Pleitgen, Chris Liakos, Julia Horowitz, Zahid Mahmood and Al Goodman contributed reporting.
“My world had crumbled,” said Shia LaBeouf of a time in his life not too long ago which involved car crashes, court-ordered rehab, emotional outbursts — including the disruption of Broadway’s Cabaret starring Emma Stone — as well as out-and-out violent episodes and a lawsuit by his Honey Boy co-star FKA Twigs accusing the actor of sexual battery and assault. That case goes to trial in April.
Included in that long list of life lessons was his dismissal from Olivia Wilde’s buzzy Don’t Worry Darling. Wilde spoke about the decision for the first time in an interview this week with Variety.
“I say this as someone who is such an admirer of his work,” she said. “His process was not conducive to the ethos that I demand in my productions. He has a process that, in some ways, seems to require a combative energy, and I don’t personally believe that is conducive to the best performances.”
LaBeouf has since admitted in an interview that he felt a need for friction and conflict to drive his performances. It also nearly drove him out of the industry.
“At this point I’m nuclear,” LaBeouf remembered about that time in the interview.”Nobody wants to talk to me, including my mother. My manager’s not calling. The agent’s not calling. I’m not connected to the business any more.”
At the time, he intimated, he was ready to commit suicide.
“I had a gun on the table. I was outta here,” he said in the aforementioned YouTube interview with Word on Fire Catholic Ministries’ Bishop Robert Barron. “I didn’t want to be alive anymore when all this happened. Shame like I had never experienced before — the kind of shame that you forget how to breathe. You don’t know where to go. You can’t go outside and get like a, a taco.”
LaBeouf said that his life had been saved, that he had gotten to the other side of that dark period as a result of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, which itself was prompted by research to play the titular character in Abel Ferrera’s upcoming film about the controversial 20th-Century monk, Padre Pio. The film is world premiering in competition in Venice via the fest’s parallel sidebar Giornate degli Autori.
The actor revealed the genesis of the project was meeting Ferrara in a Zoom meeting for a “spiritual program” to which they both ascribe.
“I’m in this spiritual program. We have meetings. And another person who was in these meetings was Abel Ferrera.”
The actor continued, “He wrote me in the chat box, ‘You know about Padre Pio?’”
LaBeouf says the result is he’s been able to let go of what he calls “Old Me” and see that “my life had led to serious infliction of pain and damage on other people.”
He even says of the person he calls “the woman who accused me of all this” that, while “I wanted to go on Twitter and write all these things…I wanted to justify all this and explain. Now I see that…The woman saved my life. She was, for me, a saint in my life. She saved my life.”
If going bald was not disheartening enough for some people, the FDA is now requiring that labels for the hair-loss pill Propecia include a warning about “suicidal ideation and behavior.”
But it comes too late for the family of Stephen Kenney, a police officer from Doraville, Ga.
“We saw the changes [the drug] caused. Steve went from optimistic to morose,” Kathlene Kenney said of her son, who took his own life in 2014, at age 42. “How many people like us had to read suicide notes from their sons, saying they are sorry for putting us through this? Steve blamed himself for being vain.”
Stephen had been taking Propecia for four years; in 2013, three years after stopping, he participated in a Baylor University study about the side effects of the drug — and, according to his parents, recognized them in himself.
“There was insomnia, fatigue, sexual dysfunction and numbness in the pelvic region. Doctors doing the study at Baylor said that his problems were fenasteride-related,” said his dad, Bob Kenney, referring to the generic name for the drug.
Stephen Kenney took Propecia for four years and developed side effects, including insomnia, fatigue and erectile dysfunction, that, according to his family, doctors attributed to the drug. Robin Rayne for NY Post
Finasteride’s original intended use was to treat an enlarged prostate by blocking the production of 5-alpha reductase, a male enzyme that also contributes to male pattern baldness. Blocking it limits the hormone DHT and reduces hair loss.
While Merck has stated that Propecia has been safely prescribed in millions of instances, some deal with brutal downsides — including depression, erectile dysfunction and a loss of sex drive, and thoughts of self-harm.
“Suicidal thoughts kicked in at around the five-month point,” one IT worker, in his 50s and living on the East Coast, told The Post. He took generic finasteride for 11 months before giving up on the dream of youthful hair. “Side effects began with erectile dysfunction, then I had brain-fog and memory loss. Suicidal thoughts followed.
A police officer from Doraville, Ga., Stephen Kenney committed suicide in 2014.Robin Rayne for NY Post
“I might have done it by jumping off a bridge,” said the man, who asked that his name be withheld due to self-consciousness. “I scoped out all the big bridges in the country. The Golden Gate is nice, but I need something closer to home. It’s a bridge in my time zone.”
Almost seven years after he stopped taking it, the IT worker said, he still has a problem with ED and continues to think about killing himself.
While he’s avoided discussing his suicidal thoughts with therapists — for fear of being put on a 72-hour hold for his own safety — he did tell his son what he experienced.
“We saw the changes [the drug] caused. Steve went from optimistic to morose,” Kathlene Kenney said of her husband Rob’s son.Robin Rayne for NY Post
“One of my sons started losing hair in his 20s,” he said. “He wanted to have a hair transplant and the doctor told him to take finasteride beforehand. He mentioned it to me, not knowing what I’m going through, and I had to tell him everything. Can you believe how embarrassing that is? But I had to protect him — and he did not take one [pill].”
A spokesperson for Merck, the company that introduced finasteride for preventing hair loss, marketed as Propecia, told The Post, “As the innovator of Propecia, Merck continues to stand behind its safety and efficacy when used according to the label. Since the approval of Propecia by the FDA in 1997, millions of men and their doctors worldwide have determined that Propecia is an appropriate treatment.”
According to a 2020-published study conducted by Michael S. Irwig, who specializes in endocrinology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, “Men under the age of 40 who use finasteride for alopecia are at risk for suicide if they develop persistent sexual adverse effects and insomnia.” However, the study of six suicide victims added, “Further research is needed to establish whether finasteride has a causal relationship to suicide.”
“Our feeling toward the drug company is not good. It’s pathetic that a company could put out a drug like this,” Kathlene said.Robin Rayne for NY Post
The new warning came about due to petitioning from the patient advocacy group Post-Finasteride Syndrome Foundation, which tried, unsuccessfully, to have Propecia taken off the market.
In a statement to Reuters, Merck said that “the scientific evidence does not support a causal link between Propecia and suicide or suicidal ideation and these terms should not be included in the labeling” for the drug. “Merck works continuously with regulators to ensure that potential safety signals are carefully analyzed and, if appropriate, included in the label for Propecia.”
“They still market it and promote it to be safe,” Dave, a 38-year-old healthcare worker in the Seattle area, told The Post. “You think the side effects won’t happen to you and, if they do, you can quit and they will go away. But they don’t, and I am still pissed off.”
Dave said that, within a month of taking finasteride, he experienced insomnia, tinnitus, panic attacks, blurred vision and erectile dysfunction.
At his lowest point, he scrawled a sort of suicide note on the prescription label of his finasteride: “This s–t ruined my life. Ask for unlisted side-effects.”
A spokesperson for drugmaker Merck said: “As the innovator of Propecia, Merck continues to stand behind its safety and efficacy when used according to the label.”REUTERS
He did not take the medicine long enough to experience hair growth, dropping it at the advice of doctors.
“Things spiraled when I feared my side effects might be permanent,” he said, explaining that this happened about four months after stopping. “I would lay in bed and not be able to sleep. That was when I started to feel suicidal. I engaged in self-harm. I was hitting myself in the legs and face — though I tried to avoid my face. I had to be out in public and did not want to look crazy.”
Dave estimates that he spent $15,000 on potential treatments. He recently began rounds of shockwave therapy, which uses low-intensity shockwaves to increase blood flow to the penis. Augmented with generic Cialis, Dave said, “It is countering the ED. Suicidal ideation is being resolved with relief from the sexual side effects. I remember crying in my room and thinking that if this does not work, I am dead. Shockwave therapy saved my life.”
Dave, a 38-year-old healthcare worker in the Seattle area, said that, at his lowest point, he scribbled a sort of suicide note on this bottle of Propecia.
Unfortunately, Stephen Kenney, who took Propecia from 2006 until 2010, did not have that moment of turn-around.
“Steve was a policeman and a workout addict; suddenly, during his first year of taking Propecia, he started getting vertigo and dizziness when he ran,” dad Bob told The Post.
When he also developed erectile dysfunction and depression, mom Kathlene said, “Steve feared that he would not be able to get married and not be able to have children. He started to wonder if he would be able to keep working.”
According to Stephen Kenney’s parents, he “feared that he would not be able to get married and not be able to have children.”Robin Rayne for NY Post
He sought treatment from physicians and psychiatrists, who prescribed medication including valium, to no avail. “He was failing physically and emotionally,” Bob said. “After a while, he had this hopeless veneer. I kept trying to break through, telling him that things would get better. But Steve, who supervised eight detectives, thought he would eventually become wheelchair-bound or end up in a hospital bed, needing to be taken care of.”
On September 8, 2014, the Kenneys received a phone call from their older son Mike, who had moved to Georgia from Chicago to take a teaching job and to help out his brother.
“That morning, Steve did not show up for a gun-training session,” remembered Bob. “Steve did not seem to be awake. So Mike went into house, entered the bathroom and saw Steve on the floor. He hanged himself from the doorknob.”
Thinking back on it, Kathlene said, “Our feeling toward the drug company is not good. It’s pathetic that a company could put out a drug like this.”
Though the suicide happened eight years ago, she added, the scars on her heart remain fresh. “We’re always thinking, what Steve would be feeling, what he would be doing, if he would have avoided this medication.”
Troubled actress Anne Heche’s life has been beset with pain and heartache, even before her fiery car crash in California on Friday.
On August 5, Heche was involved in multiple car crashes, first slamming into a garage at an apartment building, then careering into a home in her blue Mini Cooper leaving her ‘severely burned’ and ‘intubated’ in a Los Angeles hospital.
Before the star was born, her sister, Cynthia, died from a heart defect at two months old. Things steadily went from bad to worse.
Her family constantly moved as their father struggled to provide for the family. Born in Ohio, Heche and her transient family would move to southern New Jersey, back to Ohio and finally to Chicago during her adolescence.
In 1983, her father, Donald, became one of the first people in the United States to be diagnosed with AIDS, which was how his family came to learn that the Baptist minister and choir director had been living a secret homosexual life.
According to Heche, her father never admitted to being gay. He died from the disease at the age of 45.
That same year, Heche’s 18-year-old brother, Nathan, crashed his car into a tree and was killed. That’s just scratching the surface of the actress’s tragic life.
The Heche family, left to right, Nancy, Abigail, Nathan, Donald and Anne Heche
In her 2001 memoir, ‘Call Me Crazy,’ Heche disclosed that her father was a closeted homosexual who sexually molested her and gave her genital herpes. ‘He raped me… he fondled me, he put me on all fours and had sex with me,’ she wrote.
Heche also said that she feared for her life as she was worried that he transmitted the disease to her.
‘I think my father was a sexual addict. I think he saw everybody as a sexual being. But I think at that time he was living a very flamboyant homosexual lifestyle,’ she told Larry King in a 2001 interview. ‘You know, at that time there were bath houses where the whole trick was how many can you do a night. You know, there is no question of what he was doing at that time.’
Anne Heche says her relationship with her mother was strained even before the actress went public about her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres
Heche pictured attempting to escape a gurney as firefighters bring her to safety following her fiery crash on August 5
Three months after her father died, Heche’s brother, Nathan, was killed in a car crash after apparently falling asleep at the wheel and crashing into a tree. He was 18.
Heche has said she believes he committed suicide. The Camden Courier-Post reported that Nathan was traveling along on a wet road when he careered into a tree.
Following her brother and father’s death, her mother moved the family to Chicago. In an appearance on ‘Hollywood Medium,’ Heche said: ‘His death is the reason I moved from New Jersey to Chicago.’
Medium Tyler Henry claimed to have connected with Nathan saying: ‘He’s proud that you’ve been able to talk about these things and discuss these things, because you’re doing it for him too. And he appreciates that.’
Her sister, Susan Bergman, published her own memoir about their childhood in 1994 titled ‘Anonymity.’ Bergman died in 2006 at the age of 48 following a battle with brain cancer.
In the 1990s, even prior to her sister’s fame, Susan Bergman, the eldest of the Heche family, wrote a book about their father’s secret life as a homosexual
In her book, Bergman spoke about her father’s clandestine life, saying the family found out he was a homosexual the same year he died. Bergman also said he was a talented musician but was ‘detached from reality,’ according to the Chicago Tribune.
Bergman was a well-known writer who lectured at New York University, Northwestern University and the University of Notre Dame.
She told the Tribune that her father was constantly chasing major business deals that often left the family destitute.
‘I think I, and my sisters, started looking around for a real father in some ways,’ she said.
Heche said in her book that during her 20s, she had romantic affairs with much older men such as comedian Steve Martin and Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsay Buckingham. In her book, Heche wrote about her thoughts of Martin saying: ‘Why couldn’t my father have been more like him?’
In 2019, Bergman’s widower, Jud Bergman, was killed at 62 alongside his second wife, Mary Miller-Bergman, when the taxi they were traveling in was hit by a drunk driver. During the crash, Bergman was thrown from the car and died instantly.
Heche’s has expanded on her sister’s portrait of their family life in interviews over the years.
In a 1998 interview, Heche told the Tampa Bay Times: ‘We never told the truth in our family – never told the truth about one thing.’
She went on: ‘We were poor, but we said we were rich. We were falling apart, but we said we were good Christians. We had a father who lived a double life, but we pretended that we were absolutely fine. We lived on the streets but said we didn’t. Everything we did was a lie. Denial, denial, denial.’
Speaking about her life in Chicago, Heche said: ‘My days were spent in school, my afternoons were spent working at Haagen-Dazs and other places and my evenings were spent holding my mother, who kept crying.’
She continued: ‘We lived in a one-room apartment. My mom tried to keep it together, but at night she would break down. I didn’t cry about their deaths until five years later when I moved out.’
Heche told the Advocate in a November 2001 interview saying: ‘My father was a schizophrenic. He lived two complete lives, one as a heterosexual man who directed the choir and had a family and one who went away. We didn’t know what he did until years later.’
Susan Bergam pictured on her sister’s Instagram page. Bergam died following a battle with brain cancer in 2005
Heche’s other sister, Abigail. She’s an Illinois-based jewelry designer. Heche said in an interview that she had rebuilt her relationship with her sister following a years long absence from each other’s lives
In a 1998 interview with Allure, Heche said her father lived as a strict religious choir leader while cruising gay bars at night.
She continued: ‘My father was doing things that are attributed to schizophrenia – big [business] deals, delusions of grandeur. Which I also had, so I know there’s a lot of connections with the insanity that I had with my father.’
Following an arrest in Fresno, California, when she was taken into custody for wandering on to private property in her underwear and began talking to children about taking them to heaven in a space ship, Heche described it as a ‘psychotic break’.
She told the Advocate: ‘I knew that I was sane. But I needed to go to a psychiatrist and a doctor and make my friends feel safe that I was sane.’
In response to Heche’s autobiography, her mother, Nancy, said: ‘I am trying to find a place for myself in this writing, a place where I as Anne’s mother do not feel violated or scandalized.’
Her sister, Susan, said she objected to not being consulted by Heche about her book.
Abigail Heche, a jewelry designer, said: ‘It is my opinion that my sister Anne truly believes, at this moment, what she has asserted about our father’s past behavior … [but] based on my experience and her own expressed doubts, I believe that her memories regarding our father are untrue.’
In order to cope with her alleged abuse, Heche said that she developed an alter-ego named Celestia. She told Barbara Walters in an interview about the persona saying: ‘I believed that I was from another planet. I think I was insane.’
Thanks to a role in a 2004 TV movie named ‘Gracie’s Choice,’ where Heche played an abusive alcoholic mother, she told the Los Angeles Times that she came to terms with the idea that her mother didn’t love her.
Heche’s mother, Nancy, lectured for years on the ‘evils’ of homosexuality following her husband’s death in 1983
Nancy Heche pictured with her daughter, Abigail. In addition to her mother, Heche said her sister remained distant from her relationship with Ellen was made public
Speaking about how her mother seemingly ignored the abuse she faced from her father, Heche said: ‘I always wondered if my mother was conscious – if you can treat children that way and still love them.’
She said that she did not feel that it was possible to still love your children and to allow them to suffer. Heche added: ‘It was a relief to me to finally come to terms with this question.’
In preparation for her role in the psychological thriller The Vanished, Heche said that she also used her real-life trauma as motivation: ‘The thing about mourning and loss is that you don’t have to do much research if you’ve experienced it on different levels, and I think we all have on different levels. This character, who loses her child, required a deep dive into the sorrow that I’ve been through in my life.’
She continued: ‘Unfortunately, there have been multiple deaths in my family. So in order to pull off playing this role, I couldn’t hold back how deep that loss goes.’
Heche has long claimed that she was black listed in the early 2000s in the fallout from her public lesbian romance with Elle DeGeneres.
She told the Guardian in 2000 about their relationship’s effect on her family life saying: ‘I was naive, hugely naive. I fell in love and I didn’t believe people would care. The Hollywood community and friends and family backed away.’
In the same interview, Heche said that her religious mother did not speak to her after the actress came out. She also said that the her two sisters remained distant from her.
In 1998, Heche told the Tampa Bay Times that her mother believed that her lesbian relationship was a ‘sin.’
While Nancy Heche told the Christian Broadcasting Network that she felt her daughter’s relationship with Ellen DeGeneres was ‘Like a betrayal of an unspoken vow: We will never have anything to do with homosexuals.’
In a separate interview, Nancy told AL.com in a 2009 that she felt as though she didn’t handle her daughter coming out in 1997 well. She said: ‘I’m sorry I didn’t know how to deal with it well. God was giving me an opportunity. We had good moments of trying to connect. All of us were learning how to handle it. We loved each other; how do you live out that when you disagree?’
It took firefighters more than hour to put out the blaze caused by Heche crashing into the home in the Mar Vista section of Los Angeles on Friday
During the interview, Nancy said that she was an ‘advocate’ for ‘showing love and respect to the gay community.’ In the same year as the interview, Nancy was speaking at multiple homophobic conferences across the country.
Nancy also said that she found out her husband was a homosexual from his doctor. She said: ‘We fail. We betray each other. It’s a sad story. God had to teach me a lot. We’re to act out of our healing, not out of our woundedness. I was hurt and felt betrayed.’
She also downplayed any tension between her and her daughter saying that they have a ‘typical mother-daughter relationship.’ She said: ‘We connect and we don’t connect. That’s pretty typical. I have a growing relationship, a loving relationship with her. I love her.’
Heche admitted in a 2011 interview with the Daily Telegraph that she had recently begun to rebuild her relationship with her sister following a 20-year feud. The ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ star said: ‘She came out to visit last week, and we’re having a wonderful time in our friendship as we’ve gotten closer. We’ve both put our stuff behind us.’
In that interview, Heche said that she was still estranged from her mother. Heche said that when she called her mother to confront her once, she hung up after her mother said: ‘Jesus loves you, Anne.’
Heche said: ‘Forgiveness is a funny word for me. I’m OK with my mother living her life the way she wants to live it, and I’m OK with her not participating in my life the way I want to live it.’
In 2015, Nancy Heche conceded: ‘[Anne has] stopped talking to me. She made the decision to cut off communication.’
Wildfires and heatwaves wreaking havoc across swathes of the globe show humanity facing “collective suicide”, the UN secretary general has warned, as governments around the world scramble to protect people from the impacts of extreme heat.
António Guterres told ministers from 40 countries meeting to discuss the climate crisis on Monday: “Half of humanity is in the danger zone, from floods, droughts, extreme storms and wildfires. No nation is immune. Yet we continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction.”
He added: “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”
Wildfires raged at the weekend across Europe and north America. In south America, the Macchu Picchu archaeological site was threatened by fire. Extreme heat has broken records around the world in recent months, as heatwaves have struck India and south Asia, droughts have devastated parts of Africa, and unprecedented heatwaves at both poles simultaneously astonished scientists in March.
In the UK, an extreme heat warning was issued with the hottest temperatures ever recorded in the UK expected on Monday and highs above 40C forecast in some places.
Ministers meeting in Berlin for a two-day climate conference known as the Petersberg Climate Dialogue will discuss the extreme weather, as well as soaring prices for fossil fuels and food, and the impacts of the climate crisis. The meeting, convened annually for the last 13 years by the German government, marks one of the last opportunities to hammer out agreement among key countries before the Cop27 UN climate summit in Egypt this November.
Alok Sharma, who chaired the Cop26 UN climate summit in Glasgow last November, will be absent from the Berlin conference, though he will join several sessions virtually. He must stay in London to vote in the Conservative party leadership contest, which will determine who takes over as UK prime minister from Boris Johnson. The UK still holds the presidency of the UN talks until Egypt takes on the mantle, and Sharma’s absence raised eyebrows among some participants.
António Guterres: ‘We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.’ Photograph: Lev Radin/Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock
Prospects for Cop27 have dimmed considerably in recent months, as energy and food price rises have engulfed governments in an inflationary cost-of-living crisis, prompted in part by the gradual emergence from the Covid-19 pandemic, and exacerbated by the war in Ukraine.
At Cop26, countries agreed to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, but the commitments they made were still inadequate to do so. All countries agreed to come forward this year with improved national plans for greenhouse gas emissions, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
“,”caption”:”Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BST”,”isTracking”:false,”isMainMedia”:false,”source”:”The Guardian”,”sourceDomain”:”theguardian.com”}”>
Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every weekday morning at 7am BST
Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, who leads the EU bloc at the UN climate talks, dampened expectations for the conference in an interview with Guardian. “I don’t see that many new NDCs on the horizon, frankly,” he said, pointing to Australia, with its new government, as a rare exception.
Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister and the president of Cop27, will attend the Berlin talks this week, but his presence will be overshadowed by concerns over Egypt’s own recently submitted NDC. The plan disappointed many observers, who had hoped for much greater levels of ambition, to set an example to other emerging economies.
Guterres also sharply criticised the “multilateral development banks”, institutions including the World Bank that are funded by taxpayers in the rich world to provide assistance to poor countries.
He said they were not fit for purpose when it came to providing the funding needed for the climate crisis, and that they should be reformed.
He said: “As shareholders of multilateral development banks, developed countries must demand immediate delivery of the investments and assistance needed to expand renewable energy and build climate-resilience in developing countries. Demand that these banks become fit-for-purpose. Demand that they change their tired frameworks and policies to take more risk … Let’s show developing countries that they can rely on their partners.”
The “Hustlers” and “Crazy Rich Asians” actress, whose memoir will be released this fall, wrote that while she was “afraid of coming back on social media because [she] almost lost [her] life from it,” she wanted to share her story to start a wider conversation with Asian Americans about mental health.
After her ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat” was renewed for a sixth season in May 2019, Wu appeared distraught by the news, tweeting, “So upset right now that I’m literally crying. Ugh,” followed by expletives. She later said that she sent the tweets “on the heels of rough day & were ill timed (with) the news of the show.”
But the backlash was swift and severe, Wu said in her new statement on Twitter. Countless users, including some fellow actors, criticized her for seeming ungrateful about the success of her series, which was one of very few sitcoms with an all-Asian cast in central roles. When a fellow Asian actress messaged her and said she had “become a blight on the Asian American community,” Wu said she felt like she “didn’t deserve to live anymore.”
She survived her suicide attempt and paused her acting career to focus on her mental health over the last few years, she said. But she’s returning to social media now, she explained, “to share (her) story so that it might help someone with theirs.
“If we want to be seen, really seen … we need to let all of ourselves be seen, including the parts we’re scared of or ashamed of — parts that, however imperfect, require care and attention,” she wrote.
Wu has resumed acting, recently appearing in the Amazon Prime series “The Terminal List” alongside Chris Pratt, and she stars in the upcoming children’s film “Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile” with Javier Bardem.
Constance Wu has said that she attempted suicide after backlash to a series of “careless” tweets in 2019.
In a statement marking her first return to Twitter in nearly three years, the Hustlers actor announced her upcoming book, Making a Scene, and explained that she was “afraid of coming back on social media because I almost lost my life from it: 3 years ago, when I made careless tweets about the renewal of my TV show, it ignited outrage and internet shaming that got pretty severe.”
At the time, Wu reacted in frustration to ABC’s renewal of the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, in which she starred. She tweeted: “So upset right now that I’m literally crying. Ugh. Fuck” and “Fucking hell.” When another user congratulated her, calling the renewal “great news”, Wu replied, “No it’s not.”
Wu later clarified that her comments were posted during a “rough day” and that her disappointment was due to having to pull out of a passion project. She added in a statement that her role on Fresh Off the Boat had become “easy and pleasant” and she was looking for new challenges.
“I felt awful about what I’d said,” Wu wrote in Thursday’s statement, “and when a few DMs from a fellow Asian actress told me I’d become a blight on the Asian American community, I started feeling like I didn’t even deserve to live anymore. That I was a disgrace to AsAms, and they’d be better off without me. Looking back, it’s surreal that a few DMs convinced me to end my own life, but that’s what happened. Luckily, a friend found me and rushed me to the ER.”
“It was a scary moment that made me reassess a lot in my life,” Wu said of her suicide attempt. “For the next few years, I put my career aside to focus on my mental health.”
After a handful of small or voice roles, Wu recently starred with Chris Pratt in the Amazon action series The Terminal List and will next be seen on the big screen in the kids adventure Lyle Lyle Crocodile.
“AsAms don’t talk about mental health enough,” she wrote. While we’re quick to celebrate representation wins, there’s a lot of avoidance around the more uncomfortable issues within our community. Even my tweets became a subject so touchy that most of my AsAm colleagues decided that was the time to avoid me or ice me out. I’ll admit it hurt a lot, but it also made me realize how important it is to reach out and care for people who are going through a hard time.”
Wu concluded her statement that after “a little break from Hollywood and a lot of therapy,” she felt “OK enough” to venture back on to social media. “And even though I’m scared, I’ve decided that I owe it to the me-of-3-years-ago to be brave and share my story so that it might help someone with theirs.”
Mark Fleischman, the owner of legendary Midtown nightclub Studio 54, died by assisted suicide in Switzerland, a report said. He was 82.
Fleischman was unable to walk and his speech was impaired after getting sick in 2016. Doctors couldn’t diagnose his condition.
“I can’t walk, my speech is f–ked up, and I can’t do anything for myself,” he told The Post last month.
“My wife helps me get into bed and I can’t dress or put on my shoes. I am taking a gentle way out. It is the easiest way out for me.”
Mark Fleischman, who owned nightclub Studio 54, died by assistant suicide. Adam Scull-PHOTOlink/MediaPunchCrowds wait outside Manhattan’s renowned disco Studio 54 at 254 West 54th Street.Sygma via Getty Images
Owning Studio 54, Fleischman partied with the likes of Andy Warhol, Calvin Klein, Halston, Liza Minelli and Cher. The lifestyle may have taken a toll on the business owner.
“I liked to be high. So I would do drugs and drink. Possibly, this [health condition] is because I drank a lot and did drugs,” he told The Post.
After suffering for years, Fleischman decided to travel to Switzerland and take his final drug: a lethal dose of barbiturates.
Fleischman’s speech had been impaired in 2016.Polaris
Former business partner, Daniel Fitzgerald told BBC News that Fleischman died.
Fleischman worked with the nonprofit Dignitas, which launched in 1998 and is devoted to helping people commit suicide when their health is failing. Dignitas members reviewed his medical records and had conversations with him.
“The more I think about it, the more I want to do it,” Fleischman said. “I am flying direct to Zurich from LA. There will be no last party.”
Mark Fleischman (left), new owner of Studio 54, in the DJ booth with Steve Rubell (right), the old owner, during the grand reopening party in 1981.Polaris
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts or are experiencing a mental health crisis and live in New York City, you can call 1-888-NYC-WELL for free and confidential crisis counseling. If you live outside the five boroughs, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 1-800-273-8255 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
Quintin Lamarr first began having thoughts of suicide when he was around 16 years old.
Now 26 and an advocate and volunteer with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, Lamarr told ABC News that about a year and a half of those suicidal thoughts culminated in a mental health crisis that led to his hospitalization. During that time, he said, he was dealing with continued grief over the death of his father along with more recent bullying he faced as a gay Black teenager growing up in Milwaukee.
He didn’t find the support he needed at school, he said, and as the only child of a single mother who was busy trying to provide for the household he ended up spending a lot of time alone.
“I just felt like I had no community. I had no love. I had no protective energy around me,” Lamarr said. “It just felt like ‘nobody wants me here.'”
His experience is shared, at least in part, by many other young Black people.
The suicide rate among Black youth has been increasing along with the number of suicide attempts and the severity of those attempts, according to the most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, released in 2019.
That report, tracking suicide trends among students ages 14-18 over the previous 10 years, found that of the 8.9% who reported attempting suicide, Black youth were among the populations with the highest rates of reporting attempts, accounting for 11.8%. By contrast, white youth accounted for 7.9% of those reported attempts and Hispanic youth accounted for 8.9%.
The study found there was an even greater difference in reported attempts by race among female students: Black female students accounted for 15.2% of those reporting attempts, white female students made up 9.4% of that population, and Hispanic female students accounted for 11.9%.
A separate report from the American Academy of Pediatrics tracking suicidal behavior in youth from 1991 to 2017 found that Black youth experienced significant increases in suicide attempts over that period. And among Black kids ages 5-12, the suicide rate was found to be twice that of their white counterparts in 2017
“What we’ve been seeing over time, and it’s been over a long period of time, is a significant increase in the number of Black boys dying by suicide,” said Dr. Tami D. Benton, psychiatrist-in-chief at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Quintin Lamarr said after a brief hospitalization and outpatient treatment, he learned how to handle his grief. Now he relishes the opportunity to help others going through similar mental health struggles.
Shawn McCray
Experts told ABC News the disproportionately rising rate has a variety of underlying causes, including lack of access to mental health care, lack of awareness around symptoms of mental illness, social stigma and medical and structural racism.
More broadly, experts said, Black children and teenagers deal with some of the same mental health stressors as other young people — including anxiety and depression — and see some of the same challenges in getting caregivers to recognize what is really going on.
“A lot of people are just now learning that the unfortunate reality for a lot of Black youth is that they are dying,” said Dr. Christine Crawford, associate medical director for NAMI. “And a lot of that has to do with the fact that mental health conditions are often underdiagnosed or are not adequately treated for the conditions that they have.”
Dr. Jeffery Greene, an adolescent medicine specialist at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said that while lack of access to care is a contributor, the growing Black youth suicide rate is “multifactorial.”
“Of course, just the stigma of being labeled as someone with depression or anxiety limits the ability to get patients in to see their provider,” Greene said. “The racial injustices in this country over the last few years becoming so overt has also contributed. And, honestly, my personal feeling is in talking to teenagers, it seems like there’s a feeling of lack of hope for the future.”
Racism plays a role
Crawford said the utilization of mental health services among Black youth is lower than among other groups. There are several reasons for this, Crawford said, including “clinician bias and racism,” which can get in the way of diagnosis and become a barrier to treatment.
Structural and systemic racism also play a role, Crawford explained, as Black youth are more likely to attend schools and live in communities that are under-resourced and unable to provide mental health support.
“We need to acknowledge the fact that racism does lead to some of this and contributes to some of the bias. But that’s a hard thing to talk about — a hard thing for people to accept,” Crawford said. “But once people acknowledge the fact that it has an impact on what it is we’re seeing in mental health with children, especially Black children, that’s the only way that we’re able to strive for change.”
“We have to recognize the problem in order to adequately solve it and address it,” she said.
Racism in daily life also presents complications, with a study from the CDC released earlier this year showing that reports of experiencing racism were higher among students with poor mental health.
“We do know that the trauma that is experienced by racism can certainly result in mental health symptoms,” Crawford said. “We do see that people who have experienced various forms of racism, such as microaggressions, such as discrimination, are more likely to experience pretty significant psychological distress.”
Lamarr, the advocate, said that the bullying he faced as a boy — not just for his race but his sexuality — contributed to his own struggles.
“I’ve always had insecurities about things, just because growing up — being dark-skinned, being flamboyant, living in my truth, being part of the LGBT community, you always are criticized,” Lamarr said. “There was always a sense that I was holding back or I wasn’t always fully myself.”
Importance of historical context
In addition to social factors influencing mental health struggles for Black youth, Crawford said, it is possible that their symptoms are dismissed by health care providers.
“There’s often a tendency, especially for some white clinicians, to automatically assume that a child is presenting a certain way because they’re Black and because they’ve experienced a lot of trauma. But all of that can be true and they can also be experiencing symptoms of depression,” Crawford said. “We need to make sure that we’re taking both things into account — some of the external environmental societal factors that may be exacerbating mood symptoms — and we also need to know that there are treatments that exist to provide support for depression.”
Crawford cites a history in psychiatry of dismissing Black people’s mental illness symptoms.
“We do know that depression was a condition that was not diagnosed in Black people because the field didn’t think that Black people’s minds were sophisticated enough to experience an abstract condition such as depression,” she said.
It’s important, Crawford said, “to appreciate this historical context and how we’re continuing to see the ramifications of all of that in the present day.”
Quintin Lamarr, now 26 and a mental health advocate and volunteer with the National Alliance on Mental Illness, spoke with ABC News about his struggles with his mental health and suicidal thoughts when he was younger.
Leslie Andrews
Depression can look different in kids
Age as well as race is a factor in mental health — indeed, the two can intersect. Symptoms of depression can present differently in children, including Black youth, than they do in adults.
Benton, the president-elect of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, explained that most frequently Black children are diagnosed with “externalizing disorders,” which are characterized by “acting-out behavior.”
“The assumption is not that Black youth can be depressed or suicidal. It’s that they tend to act out more than acting on themselves,” Benton said. “And that’s just not true.”
Sometimes depression in children is not recognized by parents because of differing presentation, Crawford explained, and there can be a misconception that depression stems solely from external problems and stressors.
“I try to remind my families, my caregivers, that depression — major depressive disorder — is a medical condition,” Crawford said. “It doesn’t necessarily have to be because something bad happened to you, and therefore you are depressed and therefore you are very sad and crying in the corner.”
She said for some people, and especially kids, they feel depressed because “it’s a biological condition.”
Crawford said that depression for this group may look more like irritability than sadness. Children with depression may also demonstrate quick mood fluctuation. Refusal to attend school, lack of interest in typical activities and excessive sleeping are other warning signs.
“These are symptoms of depression that can look different in kids [and] that are often misinterpreted as being something else by their caregiver,” Crawford said.
The pandemic effect
Since 2020, as America’s children have been feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting social isolation and disruptions, mental health has been even more of a concern for health care providers and experts.
“I’m seeing that the symptom presentation [of anxiety and depression] is certainly more severe. I’m seeing that there’s a 31% increase in emergency room visits for our youth,” Crawford said. “And that often is reflective of the fact that these kids are presenting in a state of crisis, and having thoughts of suicide is certainly a mental health-related emergency.”
As for access to care, Crawford said, “We’re all booked. The waitlist to see a psychiatrist is incredibly long. The same thing is true for our therapists or social workers.”
She said the growing demand for services has been encouraging because more people are reaching out for care. “But it’s also quite concerning, because there’s certainly not enough of us to meet this growing demand. There’s only 8,300 child psychiatrists in the entire country. And that’s not enough to meet this demand that has been just kind of amplified by the pandemic.”
Decreasing the stigma — and recognizing warning signs
Greene, the Seattle Children’s doctor, said he hopes efforts to decrease the stigma around mental health will enable more young people to access care and receive a diagnosis, if one needs to be made. An increase in identification of mental illness would also help, he says.
Lamarr’s own struggles as a teen resulted in his mom calling the police and having him admitted to a hospital.
Such a crisis can be any situation where a person’s behavior may cause them to harm themselves or others, according to NAMI. It may also present as someone being unable to care for themselves.
Warning signs can include the inability to perform daily tasks (like bathing or brushing teeth) as well as mood swings, isolation and abusive behavior to oneself and others, according to NAMI.
After Lamarr’s hospitalization, he told ABC News, things began turning around.
He spent three days in the hospital before starting outpatient treatment and an anger management class, and he eventually transferred to a new school program.
“I was 16 at the time and I remember thinking ‘I need to get out of here. I need to start over, start fresh, try again,'” he said.
Learning how to talk about his feelings during treatment was key, he said.
“It turns out sometimes all you need is just the outlet to let off steam or to just open up, or to just be honest or be candid or vent,” Lamarr said. “Sometimes when we have so much pent-up frustration or we have so much pent-up anger or we have so much grief or so much pent-up emotion, that we really don’t get to release. … We always are constantly trying to be strong — we break.”
“And that’s all it was for me to be honest,” he said. “It was just so much just pent up, so much going on, so much that I never really truly dealt with. I never knew how to deal with grief.”
Protective factors for Black youth
In addition to decreasing stigma and increasing access to care, Benton said there are protective factors for Black children that can help maintain mental health. Strong positive ethnic identity is one, she said.
There’s a lot of research to support that as a protective factor, Benton said, “If you’re Black, and you feel good about yourself, and you feel you identify your Blackness as a positive thing, it’s protective of all kinds of things.”
Other protective factors, she said, include support from families and communities, community engagement, strong school connectedness and focus on academics.
She also said that among Black youth, “church was a big factor. So people who were engaged in a church community and had that sense of connectedness tended to do better.”
Quintin Lamarr told ABC News that he struggled with bullying as a Black, gay teen growing up in Milwaukee.
Leslie Andrews
Mental health as public health
In terms of creating better mental health outcomes among Black youth, Benton said it’s about prevention and many of the determinants of future challenges are social.
“The reality is poverty, violence, poor schools, the absence of adequate mental health resources for people who need it — all of those factors contribute to what we’re seeing with kids right now,” Benton said.
The impact on young children, she said, primarily among minority groups and those who are growing up economically disadvantaged, is “disproportionate.”
“It will not likely be the case that we will decide we’re going to redistribute everybody’s wealth and nobody’s going to be poor anymore,” Benton said. “I don’t think that’s the solution — though that could be helpful.”
The major issue, Benton said, is making sure kids have access to adequate nutrition, a place to sleep without fear, regular pediatric healthcare, social-emotional learning in schools and engagement with nature.
“We all know that those environmental factors actually change the way that people feel and the way they think, and it contributes to emotional health. So I think addressing many of those social factors is really the key,” Benton said. “And you don’t need to do that at a psychiatrist or psychologist’s office. You can do that at home, at the Y, on a sports team — the people that are most effective in prevention are people at schools and people in the community.”
“More of a public health approach is what we need around mental health,” she added.
As for Lamarr, “It’s been a journey to get to the point where I really feel like I deserve to be here,” he said. “I’m here for a reason. I have a story to tell. I’ve made it out of the darkness. And now I can be a help, really, to other people.”
If you are struggling with thoughts of suicide or worried about a friend or loved one, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 [TALK] for free, confidential emotional support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
