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Source Sean Penn goes by a number of honorifics: actor, journalist, philanthropist, activist, humanitarian. At scattered points throughout his career, however, reporters and biographers have branded him with a much less noble title: wife beater. Since the late Eighties, numerous media outlets have alleged, with varying degrees of specificity and confidence, that Penn is guilty of assaulting—in some versions, torturing—his ex-wife of four years, Madonna. But are these accounts actually true? The questions surrounding these allegations, which center on a mysterious altercation between the ex-couple at their Malibu home in late 1988, are now receiving a wave of fresh attention thanks to a $10 million defamation lawsuit Penn filed against Lee Daniels, the creator of Empire, in late September. According to the suit, Daniels “falsely asserted and/or implied that Penn is guilty of ongoing, continuous violence against women.†In the same papers, Penn’s lawyers took pains to clarify that he “has never been arrested, much less convicted, for domestic violence.†Considering the established facts of the case and legal precedent, it is unlikely that Penn will be able to prove in court that Daniels knowingly defamed him. (The allegedly defamatory speech consisted of Daniels’ oblique comparison, during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, between Penn and the actor Terrence Howard, who has been repeatedly accused of beating up women.) But prevailing against Daniels does not appear to be the primary aim of Penn’s lawsuit. Instead, the actor seems to be treating the case as a publicity campaign to revise the predominant narrative about his behavior toward women in general and Madonna in particular. This strategy has already produced immense dividends for Penn’s public image, most recently in the form of a sworn affidavit, signed by Madonna Louise Ciccone on October 7 and filed in court last week, in which the singer wrote, “Sean has never struck me, ‘tied me up,’ or physically assaulted me, and any report to the contrary is completely outrageous, malicious, reckless, and false.†It’s not immediately clear how the Supreme Court of New York County will weigh Madonna’s declaration, given that she signed it after Daniels compared Penn to Howard. Nor is it clear how effective Penn’s strategy will be in the long run. After all, his attempt to prosecute Lee Daniels’ speech will require the court, and the public, to confront the most vexing mystery of the underlying lawsuit: If Sean Penn never struck Madonna, never bound her, never assaulted her—as she now claims—then why, for the past 27 years, have so many people come to believe he did? It is a matter of record, of course, that Penn possesses violent tendencies. The actor’s history of assaulting men—a film extra, a paparazzo, a friend of Madonna’s—is rather well-documented. But it is also a matter of record, if you consider mainstream news outlets the “record,†that those violent tendencies extended to Madonna. Indeed, attorneys for Daniels recently submitted 18 separate exhibits (including copies of six articles, scans for three different Madonna biographies, and a reproduction of a Google search for “Sean Penn domestic violenceâ€), which give the clear impression, separately or combined, that Penn has a history of domestic violence. Some of the headlines from those exhibits are damning. Here’s one fromThe Daily Beast: Another from BuzzFeed: And The Daily Mail: A closer scrutiny of these exhibits, however, raises a curious epistemological problem: Where exactly did these accounts of Penn’s violence come from? The Daily Beast piece, which was published earlier this year, is an instructive example. It noted two major allegations: 1) Penn “hi[t Madonna] across the head with a baseball bat†in June 1987, and 2) Penn bound Madonna with a lamp cord before he “smacked and roughed [Madonna] up†for nine hours in December 1989. For the first allegation, The Daily Beast cited a February 2013 Washington Post article titled “No more free passes to famous men who abuse women,†whose author stated: “Once, Madonna was hospitalized after Penn struck her with a baseball bat. He was charged with domestic assault in 1988 and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.†To support this claim, thePost article linked to an un-bylined News.com.au listicle from 2009. That pieces describes Madonna as a “famous victi[m] of domestic violence†and claims Penn “was charged with domestic assault†sometime in the Eighties. It names no sources, and mentions nothing of a baseball bat. It’s not clear, then, how The Washington Post verified the general claim of domestic assault, or the particular weapon Penn used against Madonna.1 For the second allegation, The Daily Beast linked to the aforementionedDaily Mail piece, which came out in March 2009 and largely supported The Daily Beast’s assertion. It even noted that, “In June 1987, Madonna went to the Cedars Sinai hospital [in Los Angeles] for an X-ray after Penn apparently hit her across the head with a baseball bat.†It also quoted a law enforcement agent named “Bill McSweeny†who apparently encountered Madonna after an altercation with Penn: “I hardly recognised her as Madonna. She was weeping, her lip was bleeding and she had obviously been struck.†The Mail piece, though apparently definitive, is strangely written. It leaves unclear how exactly the piece’s authors were able to confirm any of their article’s claims. How did they know, for example, that Madonna went to the hospital for an X-ray after Penn struck her with a baseball bat? Did the facility confirm the singer’s admittance? And did they speak directly with the law enforcement agent who describe Madonna’s bloodied lip? Or did they speak to someone else?2 These flaws are particularly troublesome because nearly every contemporary account of Penn’s alleged domestic violence relies, either directly or indirectly, upon the same Mail article. Confirming or denying the various allegations against Penn therefore entails getting to the bottom of the Mail’s sourcing. It’s unlikely, after all, that its claims came out of nowhere. But where exactly did they come from? What sources did they rely upon? And were those sources credible? Sean Penn has confirmed in multiple interviews that Madonna summoned the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to their home on Malibu’s Carbon Mesa Road on the night of December 28, 1988. (Not 1989, as numerous outlets—and Madonna’s own affidavit—have mistakenly noted.) Beyond that, however, the details of that night are still fairly murky. It’s unclear, for example, whether or not Penn was actually arrested. (In Gawker’s original post about his defamation lawsuit against Lee Daniels, we claimed he was in fact arrested, but as we noted in our correction, the available evidence isn’t at all definitive one way or the other.) And Madonna, for her part, has never publicly addressed why exactly she asked the L.A. Sheriff to intervene. Making matters even murkier is how the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deals with older police records. When we asked the agency for the related incident report, a sheriff named Jim McDonnell told us that documents dated before 1992 “have been purged from our system in accordance with our retention schedule and are no longer available.†He later explained that the agency does not even keep track of which records have been purged. The lack of an official record makes it difficult, but not impossible, to grapple with the many questions surrounding that night in Malibu. Following Penn’s lawsuit, we began combing through hundreds of reports regarding the alleged incident that have appeared over the past 27 years—including newspaper articles, magazine essays, several books, and various archives in New York and England—to see how many of them can be answered. January 1989 Read the rest at Gawker

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Yes, you are.

I will never forget sitting in the movie theater watching T.O.D. for the first time, and my shock when, 5 minutes after the movie started, it was already over. I must have just been transfixed and hypnotized the entire time. Somebody find those 200 hours so I can have a 10 minute movie experience!