The looksmaxxing streamer faces criminal charges over an alleged 2025 sexual assault, adding to a growing list of legal troubles.

Billy Eff is the Content Director for Rolling Stone Canada. An award-winning journalist and columnist, he has previously contributed to outlets including VICE and Urbania. A passionate advocate for underground music and a musician himself, he has conducted several hundred interviews with artists and industry professionals across a wide range of styles and genres over the past 15 years. He is based in Montréal, Québec.

Internet personality Clavicular, the right-wing streamer who turned “looksmaxxing” into a lucrative online persona, is facing criminal charges in Massachusetts stemming from an alleged sexual assault in 2025.

The 20-year-old content creator, whose real name is Braden Eric Peters, was charged with rape, drugging a person for sexual intercourse and providing alcohol to someone under 21, according to Massachusetts court records. The alleged incident took place on May 23, 2025, on Cape Cod, at the streamer's parents' house. Peters is scheduled to be arraigned Oct. 14.

Peters’ representative has pushed back on coverage of the case, saying the streamer had not been formally served and accusing outlets of exaggerating the status of the proceedings. Peters has denied the allegations.

The charges arrive months after another legal dispute involving Peters and influencer Aleksandra Vasilevna Mendoza, who filed a civil lawsuit in Florida alleging battery, fraud and emotional distress. Mendoza alleged that Peters provided her with alcohol while she was underage and later had non-consensual sex with her while she was intoxicated. She also alleged that he injected her with Aqualyx, a fat-dissolving substance, without her consent. Peters’ attorney has denied the allegations and said they remain unproven.

It's been a wild year of legal problems for Peters. In March, he was arrested in Florida after authorities accused him of instigating a fight between two women at a short-term rental and subsequently posting footage of the altercation online. Prosecutors dropped those battery-related charges in July, citing insufficient evidence to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt. In April, he suffered an apparent overdose while livestreaming in Florida.

Peters also faced a firearm charge after a March livestream from the Everglades appeared to show him shooting at an apparently dead alligator. He pleaded no contest in May and received six months of probation, 20 hours of community service and mandatory firearms and wildlife-safety courses.

As anticipation builds for what's gearing up to be one of the most important releases in entertainment this decade, Rockstar Games is giving the music of Grand Theft Auto VI its very own release.

The company announced Thursday that Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, a 34-track collection of original songs created in partnership with Atlantic Records, will arrive November 19, the same day the highly anticipated game launches.

Six tracks have already been released, offering the first look at the unusually broad roster Rockstar has assembled for the project. The lineup includes Yung Lean with Future and Metro Boomin on "That's It," Travis Scott on "RHYNO," Morgan Wallen on "Last Thing You Need," Rauw Alejandro on "Macacoa 2000" and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards on "Bright Lights, Big City."

The album also features an unexpected collaboration on "Sexy Magic," which brings together CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, PinkPantheress, Fred again.. and French electronic producer Etienne de Crécy. Travis Scott's "RHYNO" is produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, the Daft Punk co-founder.

Rockstar says the 34 songs were created to capture the energy of Vice City and Leonida, the fictional Florida-inspired setting of GTA VI. The remaining 28 tracks have not yet been revealed.

Importantly, the album does not appear to represent the entirety of the game's musical universe. Rockstar says more information is still coming about GTA VI's dynamic score and what it calls the "next evolution" of in-game radio. How the 34 original songs will be incorporated into the game has not yet been fully detailed. We also do not know whether the songs we heard in the Netflix exclusive trailer will be featured in the actual game.

The album will be released digitally on November 19, with CD and vinyl editions also available. A limited-edition vinyl set will feature transparent magenta records filled with blue liquid and exclusive artwork.

Has the internet made keeping up with the ever-evolving glossary of new phrases feel borderline impossible? Don’t worry, Merriam-Webster is here to help.

The famed dictionary added 1,400 new words to its dictionary on Wednesday, many focused on internet-first phases and trends. “The new entries reflect words and meanings that have demonstrated widespread use over time, offering a window into the world today,” Merriam-Webster said in a statement, calling the adds a “glow-up” to the dictionary’s historic lexicon.

The new batch of words focus on the worlds of food, social media culture, technology, fashion, and community. These include everything from “shapewear,” “looksmaxxing,” “meme coin,” “parasocial,” “promposal,” “vibe coding,” “cuffing season,” “Sunday scaries,” “crashout,” and “California sober.” Other additions are “Rickroll,” “compute,” “yacht rock,” “whack-a-mole,” and “uncanny valley.”

Merriam-Webster has a long established history of updating its dictionary to include modern phrases and terms introduced and used in pop culture and digital spaces. According to their public guidelines, dictionary editors pick the new additions by using three criteria: frequent use, widespread use, and meaningful use.

With the new words including major additions from the technology and communication worlds, Merriam-Webster might be providing some clues to its word of the year. The frontrunners for the annual tradition haven’t been announced yet, but the winners in years past were “slop,” “polarization,” and “authentic.”

“New words like hashtag and selfie get a lot of attention, but many of the new words we add are new meanings of words that are already staples in our language: think of the recent meanings of mouse and cookie that have nothing to do with rodents or baked goods,” the company says on its website. “The Internet-specific senses of lurk and browse built upon the existing meanings of those terms. A verb that we use every day, access, was first entered in the Collegiate Dictionary in 1973, and a specific reference to computers was added in 1993. These words may not make headlines, but they’re just as important as words that are newly coined.”

The following article appeared in the Oct. 25, 2001, issue of Rolling Stone.

The first thing I saw in the parking lot across Liberty Street from the South Tower was luggage. Burned luggage. A couple of cars were on fire. Half a block east, a man who’d been working out in a South Tower fitness club was walking barefoot over shards of glass, wearing only a white towel around his waist; he still had shaving cream on the left side of his face. Bits of glass were falling to the ground like hail. I ventured a block south, away from the towers, and that’s when I started seeing body parts. At first, just scattered lumps of mangled flesh dotting the road and its sidewalks, then a leg near the gutter. Someone mentioned a severed head over by a fire hydrant. Hunks of metal — some silver and the size of a fist, others green and as big as toasters — were strewn for blocks south of the buildings. Shoes were everywhere.

“Oh, Jesus,” I heard someone say. “They’re jumping.” Every few moments a body would fall from the North Tower, from about ninety floors up. The jumpers all seemed to come from the floors that were engulfed in flames. Sometimes they jumped in — one just after the other. They were up so high, it took ten to twelve seconds for each of them to hit the ground. I counted.

What must have been going through their minds, to choose certain death? Was it a decision between one death and another? Or maybe it wasn’t a decision at all, their bodies involuntarily recoiling from the heat, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove.

Moments later, a low metallic whine, quickly followed by a high-pitched whoosh, came out of the south. I looked up to see the white belly of an airplane much closer than it should have been. The South Tower of the Trade Center seemed to suck the plane into itself. For an instant it looked like there would be no trauma to the building — it was as if the plane just slipped through a mail slot in the side of the tower, or simply vanished. But then a fireball ballooned out of the top of the building just five blocks from where we stood.

People were running south down the West Side Highway toward Battery Park — the southern tip, the end, of Manhattan — and west toward the Hudson River. I ran with the crowd that veered toward the river, looking back over my shoulder at the new gash in the Trade Center. Once relatively safe among the tree-lined avenues of Battery Park City, people hugged each other and some cried.

But about five minutes later, a sharp cracking sound momentarily replaced the shrill squeal of sirens, and the top half of the South Tower imploded, bringing the entire thing down. It was the most frightened I’ve ever been. Screaming and sprinting south toward Battery Park, we all flew from the dark cloud that was slowly funneling toward us. At that moment, I believed two things about this cloud. One, that it was made not just of ash and soot, but of metal, glass and concrete; and two, that soon this shrapnel would be whizzing by — and perhaps through — my head. A woman next to me turned to run. Her black bag came off her shoulder and a CD holder went flying, sending bright silver discs clattering across the ground. An older man to my right tripped and took a face-first dive across the pavement, glasses flying off his face.

In the seconds, minutes and hours following the World Trade Center attacks, hundreds — maybe thousands — of ordinary people would find their best selves and become heroes. And then there were the rest of us, running hard, wanting only to live and to talk to someone we loved, even if it meant leaving an old guy lying in the street, glasses gone, a cloud of death and destruction creeping up on him.

I’d always wondered what I’d do in a life-or-death situation. Until that moment, I’d believed I’d do the right thing, would always help the helpless, most likely without regard for my own well-being. All across lower Manhattan at that moment, people were making similar decisions, so many of them so much more critical than mine. September 11th, 2001, at 9:45 a.m. was not my finest moment. As I turned back to help, I saw two younger guys scoop the fallen man up, and we all continued running south.

After about three blocks, I hid for a moment behind a large Dumpster on the west side of the street. But when I looked back toward the towers, I could see that my Dumpster was no match for the cloud, and I took off again. I ran the last few blocks into Battery Park, where the cloud finally did catch up with the thousands of us fleeing it. I could see only a few feet in front of me, and so I followed the silhouettes I could make out. Because Battery Park is the tip of the island, it wasn’t much of a surprise that the crowd would wind up dead-ending at the water. When it happened, the people in the front panicked. So they turned around, screamed, and ran back toward us in a stampede. We had nowhere to go — there were thousands of people behind us and hundreds coming back the other way.

As the crowd doubled back on itself, I jumped over a wrought-iron fence and landed in a flower bed. I stayed down for a second, thinking I’d wait out the panic low to the ground. But then I felt other people jumping the fence and landing near me. Thinking I was about to be trampled, I got up and ran behind a nearby tree. In a minute or two the panic subdued, and I hopped back over the fence and onto a park path. But now the air was heavier with debris and there was no clear path out of the park. I took off my tie and wrapped it around my face. People were coughing and stumbling. Some were crying, others screaming. It was difficult to breathe or even keep my eyes open.

Soon, there was another wave of calm and quiet, and the ash that fell from the sky and settled on the grass and trees gave the park the peaceful feel of a light evening snowfall. Eventually, I found a path that led me out to the east side of the Battery area, and I followed a crowd to the FDR. Thousands participated in the exodus up the highway and into Brooklyn. It was now just past ten, and we looked like refugees. In a way, we were. My tie wasn’t doing much good against the ash, so I took off my shirt and tied it around my head. We walked in the falling gray dust for fifteen minutes, still hacking, and rubbing our eyes. Then the cloud broke, and, covered in soot, we were in the sunlight again. There wasn’t a lot of talking. Some walked in groups, desperately trying to stay together. Others walked alone, crying out the names of friends, co-workers or loved ones from whom they’d been separated.

At 10:25, as I was getting ready to cross the bridge, another cracking sound came out of the west. We looked behind us and to the left to see the remaining tower collapse. Soon, that ash reached the Manhattan foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge was closed. Three hours later, I was finally back in my apartment in Brooklyn. It was nearly one o’clock. There was a thin layer of ash all over my kitchen from the blast. I made my phone calls and cried with my fiancée. Then I called some friends who’d left messages, checking on me. I called my friend Sully in Boston, and we went through the list of names of our friends who worked in the financial district. I was one of the last to be accounted for. When we’d gotten through most of the names — Sims, Kane, T-Bone, Molloy — Sully said, “It’s not all good news. Beazo called his wife from high up in the second building to say he was OK, but she hasn’t heard from him since it fell.” Beazo — Tom Brennan to those he didn’t go to high school or college with – still hasn’t been heard from.

As it turns out, when I was watching that tower fall, I was watching my friend die. His wife was at home, in their brand-new house in Westchester County, amid their still boxed-up life. She’d already turned off the TV when Beazo’s building collapsed. Their seventeen-month-old daughter is too young to have seen the images of her father’s death, but someday — maybe on a distant anniversary of September 11th when each network commemorates the tragedy — I’m sure she’ll be able to see it, along with her little brother or sister who is due in two months.

I hung up with Sully and turned on the television to see what I had seen. Places where I once ate lunch or shopped for a sweater or bought stamps were now buried under piles of concrete and metal, as were thousands of people – some of whom I probably rode the subway with every day. One of whom was my friend.

Since then, I’ve been freakishly fine, given what I’d seen. Maybe it’s because I realize how lucky I was — my experience was like Christmas morning compared to what other people went through. Maybe it’s because I lack the imagination, or the will, to realize the scope of what I’d seen. But sadness works in bizarre ways. The second night after the attack, I sat in front of the news, alone with my eighth or ninth beer, and I listened to a report about NFL officials considering a postponement of the second week of games. I thought about what a nice gesture that would be, and I cried and cried.

The Great Outdoors Comedy Festival has postponed its debut, just days before John Mulaney was scheduled to headline the Mississauga, Ontario event.

The festival was set to take over Erindale Park from September 11 to 13, with Mulaney, Hasan Minhaj, Ronny Chieng, Jeff Arcuri and many others on the bill. Instead, organizers announced yesterday that the entire weekend would be postponed, without providing a specific reason.

“After careful consideration,” the festival said, it decided postponing the event was the best way to deliver the “best possible festival.” Organizers say they are now exploring new dates and will contact ticket holders directly.

The announcement comes after a series of lineup changes in the weeks leading up to the festival. Nick Kroll and Mike Birbiglia were among the comedians originally scheduled to appear alongside Mulaney, while the festival’s published lineup was later revised.

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Mulaney, who has in the past had to cancel many shows in the GTHA, made clear Wednesday that the decision did not come from him. “It was not my decision,” he told Ontario fans, confirming that the festival producers had decided not to proceed with the weekend. He added that he intends to perform in the region soon.

The festival has not yet announced a reason for the postponing, replacement dates or a refund policy. For now, the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival is offering few answers beyond “stay tuned.”

“When things fall apart, men isolate and withdraw from the world more,” says Ronson.

“This story crashed unannounced into my life,” Jon Ronson tells me. It’s a lazy summer afternoon in the hamlet where he lives in upstate New York, and the journalist and author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, and The Psychopath Test is explaining the genesis of his latest book. He describes a night, almost exactly three years ago, when he slept through a series of texts that came in from his adult son. The messages told a disconcerting story: His son’s friend, a woman, had connected with a man on Tinder, who invited her to come over to his castle in a rural part of Connecticut and bring some friends. According to his son’s description, Ronson says, the structure was a “vast, newly-built castle, ostentatious even by Gothic castle standards. Like, Count Dracula would think this is a bit much.” There were turrets, and a drawbridge, but in the grand ballroom, there was no sign of a party. “There’s a couple of other young people looking awkward and wondering what the hell is going on, but nobody knows what’s happening. Everyone’s confused.”

When the middle-aged castle owner emerged, he introduced himself as Chris Mark. The assembled twentysomethings asked him what was going on, and he told them they were there to take part in his new reality show, 101 Princesses. “He said, ‘I’m the king. I’m looking for my queen, and I have 101 princesses to choose from.” He sent the women down to the basement, where they could find princess costumes to wear. “They went with it, I guess out of unease, awkwardness,” Ronson says. “A videographer appears. They start filming. It becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that this isn’t a real reality show. One reason being that the videographer kept cutting up [a slab of] meat for the castle owner. Just for him. No meat was offered to anyone else.”

Ronson, who was also host of the hit porn-industry investigative audio project The Butterfly Effect, has made a career of letting his curiosity get the better of him. So, the next day, he went to the castle “to find out what the hell was going on,” he says. “And that’s how the book begins.”

The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men (out now from Riverhead Books), reads like an adventure story. Though much of it is framed around his interviews and interactions with Mark — the wealthy descendent of a Gilded Age baron — it opens up to a larger pursuit to understand the state of men, and how the breakdown of societal support, coupled with the rise of a technological state, has brought so many to the brink.

In the book, Ronson travels to the Midwest to visit a town built by Mark’s great grandfather in the 19th century, a recreation of a British village set under power plants and steel factories, where he talks to the man keeping its history alive. He charts the career path of an early YouTube star, Greg Chism, who went from being one of the first lawn-care influencers to chasing the algorithm by posting videos of his two young daughters. What starts as wholesome family content takes a left turn when he begins dressing up his daughters as babies, then donning a baby costume himself, before he’s ultimately all but run off the platform. Ronson includes chapters about Graham Linehan, the creator of huge British sitcoms like Father Ted and The IT Crowd, who became a prominent anti-transgender activist, and Armie Hammer, whose acting career crumbled after his cannibalism kink was revealed. Ultimately, Ronson develops descriptions of the different kinds of men who thrive online — the Vulnerable Man, the Doofus Man, the Manosphere Man, the Separatist Man, the Disinhibited Man — and what these modern archetypes communicate about the world we live in. And throughout it all, he comes back to his own unease about his place in the world. If a man doesn’t have purpose, what’s left?

Chris Mark is a fascinating character — he built this castle for his daughter, but then turned it into a sort of alternate-reality Playboy Mansion. At what point did you realize that his story was going to lead to your next book?The first thing I heard about the castle owner was that he was a big fan of Hugh Hefner. I thought, this is really funny. He’s trying to be Hugh Hefner at the worst moment in human history. I linked him with my feelings of unease, as well, about not having enough purpose. It felt like there were weird echoes there. I thought, this is a man out of time. He wants a world that’s no longer going to work for somebody like him, and maybe I should write a book about all these other things that men are no longer able to do that they used to be able to do.

One of the things you write about in the book is how people are reflexively dismissive of the problems of straight white men. What made you want to tackle this when you knew that there was going to be pushback?I think [of this] a little bit like my public-shaming book. People may not like the idea of the book, but then when they read it, they realize that their idea was wrong. Many times over my career, I’ve had this. Nobody wanted to read The Men Who Stare at Goats. The only book I’ve ever written which sold itself was The Psychopath Test — if you put “psychopath” in the title, you don’t have to do that much work. But what I do, I think, over and over again in my career, is look at how big changes that happen on high trickle down and impact the inner lives of people down here. But mostly, it was a book that crashed into my life, this big fucking castle that my son was lured to under false pretenses, and I just wanted to know what the hell was going on.

But let me add one more thing, and I think this applies equally to women as to men. One thing that I became really interested in is this: Structures and institutions collapse, and people feel cut adrift from society, and it does seem to be something that happens more to men than women. There’s more of a weakness in men, that when things fall apart, men isolate and withdraw from the world more. But I got really interested in that — like, what does a lack of purpose and structure do to people’s inner lives? And what’s filling the gap? And one thing that I found that’s filling the gap is content creation on YouTube.

Do you think, as these societal structures break down, the fact that men can’t live up to the preconceived notion of masculinity that they were fed as kids — being a provider, a protector — that’s part of what’s making them feel lonely?There’s a moment in the book when Greg Chism is the world’s greatest lawn-care influencer, but then his life spirals in the most bizarre ways. He starts to listen too much to the algorithms, and everything goes wrong. And it ends with him basically withdrawing from the world. But I ask him what his life’s like now, and he says, “Well, I wake up, I take my kids to school. I come home. I fall asleep. I wake up and I bring the kids back home from school.” I mean, what a terrible, depressing life. For me, it’s the erosion of structure which is causing so much horror in people’s lives.

So you think people are dealing with this by becoming content creators?It’s funny, I went to the cage fight at the White House [in July]. Everybody [in the press pool] was allowed to inspect the cage a couple of days earlier, so we all had to be at the White House at like half past five in the morning. Like 100 people were there, and we were all standing on the steps of the Eisenhower Building, and somebody from the UFC came up and yowled, “OK, everybody, content creators and videographers, step to the left, print journalists step to the right. And there was this vast exodus to the left. Like 98 percent of the people there were content creators, and the print line was like me [and a few other journalists]. And we were just laughing, like, “Oh, my God, we’re such redundant dinosaurs.” So that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about, like a huge shift from the old institutions that I grew up in, to the sort of post-institution era.

How do you think AI chatbot technology plays into accelerating this?It makes it so much worse. AI trawls the internet, sees how purposeless people feel, how lost, and comes in with a false idea of purpose. Like, “You’re the greatest mathematician on the planet,” or, “You’re creating the greatest reality show ever.” It’s so pernicious. It’s so evil. It’s like they’re swooping in to keep us engaged through sycophancy.

Going back to Greg Chism, the lawn-care influencer, one of the things that I found so stark in that story was how he kept changing his content to please the YouTube algorithm so he could get views. What did you find in reporting this book about people who are trying to contort themselves to the pleasure of the computer?His story has got to be one of the most extraordinary things that ever unfolded on YouTube. Like how he goes from lawn care through to all the stuff that happened after that, which is just nuts. Do you remember that novel, The Dice Man, by Luke Rhinehart? It’s about a character who decides to cede his life to the roll of a dice. Every decision he makes, he makes for the roll of a dice, and that’s what people are doing now on YouTube. If they give themselves over too much to the algorithm and the incentive structures, you end up doing more and more extreme things.

I think it’s partly because YouTube gained the reputation of being this wide-open country, like a post-institution utopia where men and women could thrive through grit and perseverance as an influencer, which is a very compelling idea. I grew up in a world of gatekeepers, and it was awful to have to beg people to give me a chance. It’s very compelling to have a world without that, that feels like it could be a true meritocracy where good people rise to the top. And good people do rise to the top. It’s not like it’s all an illusion. Greg Chism’s story and lots of other stories show that if you cede your life to the algorithm — and not just the algorithm, also what the viewers are encouraging you to do — it just leads to hell, and Greg’s story leads to hell in the most baroque and unexpected ways. But I think you could say the same thing about smaller stories, like anti-woke influencers, is a good example of another way that this manifests in sort of pernicious ways.

Another person you write about is your former friend, Graham Linehan, who went from being pretty universally beloved in Britain to becoming one of the country’s loudest anti-trans voices. He attacked you extensively online after you called him out for being a bully, too. Tell me about your decision to include such a personal story in this book.Well, it was very hard. I’ve been trying to write about Graham since 2020, and I’ve picked it up and put it down many times because I could just feel my stress levels rising. Because, you know, Graham’s story is, he became a gender-critical activist, and just made it his absolute identity. And he has his bêtes noires, and I’m one of them, and he’s posted about me thousands of times by now.

The Graham chapter was much longer, but it stressed me out so much. I cut it in half, but it’s like that scene in Poltergeist when you open the door in the bedroom and there’s all this furniture spinning violently around, and I think I’m a piece of furniture spinning violently around inside Graham’s head. I told him I thought he was acting like a bully back in 2019, and all these years later, he’s still going on about it. But I think there’s three or four reasons why I thought I should write about it. Firstly, the only reason to not write about it is fear, and I just don’t think, as journalists, we can be guided by fear.

Secondly, I’ve often thought about Graham. So Graham, for people who don’t know, was a huge figure in British cultural life, maybe a good equivalent would be like Judd Apatow. He was this showrunner of some of the most beloved comedies in British history, and then he fell into this new world in this extraordinary way. I hope this doesn’t sound glib, but I’ve always thought there was like an epic quality to Graham’s story. It was like if Harold Pinter or Tom Stoppard was writing a play about Graham, it would be an incredible play.

But the main reason [I wrote about him] is that I really wanted to do something about disinhibited men. What I discovered was that, when men feel cut out, cut adrift from society, some fold in on themselves. Some adapt. Some lash out. Graham is somebody, and you see it in a lot of different places, who basically decided to just be completely disinhibited, to basically rip off his face, and just allow his head to run wild. It’s as if he’s just decided nothing matters anymore. I thought that felt so extraordinary, but also so resonant to the world we’re living in now of disinhibition.

Tell me about Marktown, the town in Northwest Indiana that was built by Chris Mark’s great grandfather, and modeled after a British village. What did you find when you went there?I really wanted to do something after the castle mystery, you know, exploded into my life, and I decided I wanted to broaden it out into other men, feeling that life was passing them by, and then I thought, well, I’d love to do something about deindustrialization, but how? And also, men who are withdrawing from the world and becoming recluses, but how? And then I discovered, just incredibly fortuitously, that the castle owner’s great-grandfather was a Gilded Age steel tycoon. That’s how he got his money to build his castle, and he had built a utopian theme town in East Chicago, Indiana, for his steelworkers to live in. And over the years, this utopian town, which at the beginning looked great, has completely crumbled into a world of recluses and hoarders. Marktown’s designed to be this lovely English village, like a Miss Marple-type village where some kind of Agatha Christie adventure would happen, but it’s completely surrounded by heavy industry. So it’s like Miss Markle being like scrunched up and thrown into the middle of Wall-E. And when you look at an aerial photograph of Marktown, you just can’t believe it. It’s like nothing on Earth. So yes, so very fortuitously, I got to tell that story of deindustrialization in a way that’s completely relevant to the castle story.

Toward the end of the book, you write a little bit about an interview you did with Armie Hammer after his “cannibalism” scandal broke.So the story is, I got a call. He was filming in New Orleans, and I knew some of the people involved in the film [called Wounds], and they invited me to New Orleans to visit the set. We had dinner with Armie Hammer and his wife and the various movie people, and Armie talked a lot about meat, how much he liked meat, and he was utterly delightful and charming, and it was a great night.

So then a couple of years later, it all happens, the whole cannibal stuff, and then a couple of months after that he contacts me, and I fly to interview him. He says I’m the first person ever to interview him [since the scandal], and he tells me the whole story. But I sit on it. I don’t know what to do with it because there’s some things where he’s definitely right, but then there’s other things where he hasn’t behaved well. Like he would sweep women off their feet and take them to Ojai, and then give them the time of their life, and then come back and drop them off, and completely forget about them. And I thought, I need time. Like I just, you know, this is a story that needs a lot of time. And [eventually] he gave the story to someone else. I felt slightly like one of the women that you take to Ojai. But you know what? I can’t blame him. I was taking way too long. So I have no ill feelings, but this interview was sitting on my computer for the next couple of years, and so I included a little bit of it because there were moments in our conversation which I think shed light on some of the motivations of the castle owner, and privilege, and people not being told that they can’t do things. I cut it down to its absolute minimum, to shed light on other stories in the book.

You’ve got a stage show of the book you’re taking on tour in the States and the U.K. Can you tell us about that?It’s called Enter the Castle. I always do pretty elaborate stage shows. I still do a show called Psychopath Now, based on my Psychopath Test book, where I have mystery guests, and I’ve done shows where I have a band onstage, performing with me as I’m doing the speaking. This time around, I’m using a lot of audio and video clips, and bringing the book to life as a series, almost like a live documentary that I’m narrating onstage. So I always make it ambitious.