In a world where I feel like every day, we’re waking up to some chaotic tragedy born of strategic cruelty— this one feels EXTRAordinarily cruel.

This young man had everything to live for and was doing everything the right way. He was only 20 years old. A JROTC lieutenant. An aspiring doctor. Not the “worst of the worst”. Not a gangster. Not a criminal.

Yet he was treated like one.

It’s hard to put into words how humiliating and dehumanizing it must be to have an ankle monitor placed on you at 20 years old. Your life is just starting.

The degradation just kept getting louder and louder for this young man. Until one day, being the only student not given a uniform because of his ankle monitor…Well, that was one humiliation ritual too far.

And his father got the worst call of his life.

This administration has worked so diligently and relentlessly to come up with ways to intimidate and disrespect the most marginalized human beings among us. Shock gloves. No due process. Foul conditions at these “detention” centers. It is absolutely heartbreaking to watch. We’ve seen unimaginable cruelty from young children having to represent themselves in immigration court to people being denied access to loved ones at the end of their lives.

But Pierre’s case somehow feels like notched up cruelty…because it was designed to humiliate. It was designed to ostracize. Designed to steal dreams.

Human beings and their dignity is not a political topic. I refuse to believe that. But the way this administration has villainized and “othered” certain people in the name of “securing borders” has gone way beyond the pale and in my opinion is a huge distraction to avoid talking about the things that are really plaguing American families.

Immigrants to this country have largely brought so much flavor and family love to so many different communities. To try to destroy divide and turn people against them is the most tired trick in the political playbook -not to mention it goes directly upstream of what true Christianity is supposed to mean.

Remember “they’re eating the dogs they’re eating the cats”??? That vile lie was deliberately designed to preemptively dehumanize Haitians so that when things like this happen, you think less of them. That they’re not worthy.

Pierre was worthy.

He was someone’s sweet son.

His dreams mattered.

His dignity mattered.

No matter what this government stripped away from him that broke this young man’s soul and erased his bright future…We will continue to add him to the list of names we will not stop saying:

Pierre. Damas. Bel. 🇭🇹 💔

While it’s true that for all eight decades of her life Dolly touched so many hearts across many generations and so many people from all walks of life—it was how she stood 10 toes down for the most marginalized and vulnerable communities —that really exalted her to a category that very few white women reach.

We have a saying in the black community that we don’t play about certain things. And certain people.

While we are naturally going to stand up for our own there are certain people outside our culture that hold a collective place in our hearts that is indescribably etched in stone.

Dolly is high on that list. Why? Because we felt like we could trust her. We felt like she always saw us. She never looked down at us. Even though she was chronically self deprecating and joked about all her plastic surgery, there wasn’t an inauthentic or plastic part of who she was.

We felt like when it came time to do the right thing and be on the right side of history, Dolly didn’t waiver. She stood up for children. She stood up for the LGBTQ community and people of color who are being relentlessly scapegoated, targeted and vilified.

And she stood up effortlessly. None of it felt forced or performative. It just felt like exactly who she authentically was. And…when scores of people were dying of Covid, she invested in the vaccine to help save lives. When people went at her for that she stood on business and never doubted that she was doing the right thing. (And it ended that pandemic.😷 Go argue with your momma about it!)

Dolly’s anthemic “Go To Hell” which has become a viral rally cry is a perfect example of her expressing herself full throated and with her whole chest (she would appreciate that one😜) and it has been embraced by many people to express themselves about ugliness of war, dishonesty, discrimination, cruelty and social injustice. She was straight cussing Satan out to his face!

No wonder we don’t play about her!

I’ve been seeing memes go around about White women that Black people don’t play about. A newly added “member” is Ms Rachel. Much like Dolly she is standing firmly in the gap that white women haven’t collectively stood in a long time. 92% of Black Women voted against the regime responsible for much of the pain and chaos America’s experiencing right now. In many ways, we felt let down by the majority of white women who did not. Their voices were just not loud enough and clearly their votes reflected that. (Even though we’d had four years of evidence that this was probably not gonna be a good thing for many people. Now…here we are… in “Quiet Piggy” Hell 🤦🏽‍♀️)

So…seeing the Dollys and Ms Rachels speak out and use their platform and their wealth while braving the wrath of so much hate is beyond admirable…And feels like a fresh breeze of hope.

Dolly was universally cherished.

But to be mourned just as passionately at a black barbershop in Detroit as in a whiskey bar in Tennessee?….

That’s we don’t play about you status.

Rest in peace to a real one. 🙏🏽🤍🕊️

I recently gave my unsolicited emotional opinion about Hayden Panettiere’s mother and was surprised to see my thoughts go viral. I was speaking from the gut, in shock, watching a statement that felt so inappropriately cold I couldn’t stay quiet. But since it traveled further than I ever intended (a friend on vacation in Greece told me he saw it on a Greek site today 🤦🏽‍♀️) I feel like I owe people the fuller story - not just what I said, but why it hit me the way it did.

In her first public words after her daughter’s death, Lesley Vogel talked about how hard this industry is on young people, about talent and struggle and lost paths. What struck me most was what wasn’t there. Not once did I hear her call Hayden her daughter. No warmth, no softness, nothing that sounded like a mother grieving a child… just the language of someone assessing a career. More IMDB than bereaved mother. When she said Hayden “had talent in so many departments,” it landed like a casting director’s notes, not a mother’s heartbreak. And I kept thinking: ma’am, at eleven months old, Hayden did not drive herself to auditions.

That choice was made for her.

My mother, Dolores Robinson, managed my career for thirty years. She wasn’t a parent who backed into the job because her cute camera ready kid kept landing auditions. I was not her only client as she was already a well-established talent manager, for more than a decade before I ever got 21 Jump Street, the role that put me on the map. And granted I was in my 20s and a college graduate when my break came. Not a child.

But I still relate in many ways.

My mom fled a bad marriage in 1974 with no money, moved us from Philadelphia to LA, and built a show business career out of nothing. Got a job as an agent’s receptionist where she met her future first client LeVar Burton fresh off the smash miniseries Roots. She would go on to manage iconic talent like Martin Sheen, Pierce Brosnan, Powers Boothe, Wesley Snipes, Martin Sheen, Rosie Perez, Michael Clarke Duncan, Jason Patric and so many others. She built a whole booming business! (For this, she just received her star on the Palm Springs Walk of Fame for it — a well-earned, overdue recognition.)

I say all that because I think it's part of why we survived what came next. When a parent starts managing you as a baby and that's the only relationship you've ever known with them, the whole thing can curdle into something purely transactional and every conversation shadowed by business, every piece of advice hard to separate from a client note. I believe that's what happened with Hayden.

My mother had a strong identity and a career before she started managing me, which I believe gave us more to stand on when it came time to pull the two apart.

And I did need to pull them apart. There came a point where I told her, plainly: I just want you to be my mom now. Not my manager. Not my advisor. My mom. It did not go over well. She was in her seventies, still sharp, still convinced she had more to give professionally, and not remotely ready to let go. It caused a real rift… one of the hardest conversations of my life, and the fallout lasted a long time. Too long.

But we healed it.

I understand, maybe better than most, how genuinely hard it is to separate a mom from a manager especially when they’ve been the same person your whole life like in Hayden’s case.

I understand the complexity of finances, loyalty, resentment and love that gets tangled up in an arrangement like that. So I don’t say any of this without some empathy for how complicated Lesley Vogel’s relationship with her daughter must have become.

But understanding the difficulty of that relationship is different from overlooking how she chose to speak about it in the days right after losing her child. This was her second child she’s lost in 3 years! And in that moment, she chose the language of an industry insider instead of a mother. I was hoping, we all were-honestly, for a softer part of her to come through- grief, remorse, tenderness, anything. I think we were hoping she would say something to help us grieve her daughter. Instead it felt like she used the opportunity to shift blame , and Hayden, an adult who publicly bravely shared responsibility for her own struggles, was spoken about like a project that hadn’t panned out.

That’s what triggered me. Not just sympathy for Hayden, but seeing the pain of watching a mom/manager relationship fail to become, even at the end, just a mom.

It’s a blessing that I got the ending my mother and I both needed. It took work. At ninety, she is still one of the sharpest, funniest, shrewdest women I know, (And she would want me to add cutest 🤣 IYKYK ) and we are closer now than we’ve been in years. Not everyone gets that. I wish, for Hayden’s sake, that her mother had found her way there …even now that she’s gone.

And I’m not writing this to pile on the grief of this family. I’m writing it because reason her words affected me profoundly me and I always feel that context matters.

Happy Heavenly Birthday, Hayden. You were somebody’s little girl long before you were anybody’s talent. 🤍🙏🏽💔