Letter from Los Angeles: The Digital Dirt

How TMZ gets the videos and photos that celebrities want to hide.

Nicholas Schmidle

IN THE EARLY-MORNING hours of February 15, 2014, Ray Rice and his fiancée, Janay Palmer, stepped into an elevator at the Revel hotel and casino, in Atlantic City. Palmer and Rice, a running back for the Baltimore Ravens, were arguing as the doors slid shut. When the elevator arrived in the lobby, Palmer was lying unconscious, face down, on the floor. According to a former security supervisor at the Revel, nearly eighteen hundred cameras streamed video to a pair of monitoring rooms on the mezzanine floor. After guards responded to the incident in the lobby, several surveillance officers gathered and wondered aloud if a tape of Rice and Palmer could be sold to TMZ—the Web site that, since its inception, in 2005, has taken a merciless approach to celebrity news. At around…

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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 22, 2016

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