Thomas George Paculis extortion try: Vultures circling over Paula Deen’s crisis?

Former Food Network star Paula Deen is fighting for her culinary empire after admitting to using the N-word. The FBI caught one alleged blackmailer on Friday who demanded $250,000.

|
Peter Kramer/NBC/AP
Celebrity chef Paula Deen appears on NBC News' "Today" show, with host Matt Lauer, Wednesday, June 26, 2013 in New York.

The FBI on Friday arrested an alleged blackmailer in New York, drawing a line on what’s become a national pile-on of former Food Network superstar Paula Deen after she admitted in an April deposition that she had used the word “nigger” in the past.

According to an FBI affidavit, Thomas George Paculis, a former restaurant owner in Ms. Deen’s hometown of Savannah, Ga., schemed to extort $250,000 from the silver-haired Southern icon in exchange for keeping mum about other potentially damaging allegations against her. Mr. Paculis, the FBI alleges, approached Ms. Deen’s lawyers five days after Deen’s use of the “N-word” became public.

He wrote that “the statements are true and damning enough …, [but] as always … there is a price for such confirmation.”

For now, the extortion attempt may be the least of Deen’s concerns.

Nine sponsors have bailed on Deen, who has tearfully apologized, while also criticizing people telling “hurtful lies” about her character. 

“I am so distressed that people I’ve never heard of are all of a sudden experts on who I am,” she told NBC’s Matt Lauer on June 26. "I is what I is, and I’m not changing,” she added, before asking viewers without sin to “please pick up that stone and throw it so hard at my head that it kills me.”

A national publisher also pulled the release of her new cookbook after the Food Network dropped her contract.

Maintaining she had only used the controversial word in the distant past, Deen also defended in the deposition a suggestion she made while planning a wedding in 2007, where she imagined a plantation-style affair complete with an all-black wait staff, acknowledging at the time that such a soiree would probably get her in trouble with the press.

The civil lawsuit in question alleges that Deen’s brother and business partner, Bubba Hiers, sexually harassed employees at Uncle Bubba’s Seafood and Oyster House, and that Deen, a co-owner, did nothing to stop it. The lawsuit is still ongoing, and no finding of guilt has been made.

To be sure, many of Deen’s fans flocked to her side, saying critics were wrong to paint her as a bigot and racist. But others said that Deen undermined herself by playing up the charms of Southern culture while failing to leave behind the uglier legacies of the former Confederacy.

In a defense of Deen, USA Today’s Rod Dreher suggests that the 60-something Deen “holds to a moonlight-and-magnolia romanticism that is common among white Southerners of her generation,” while admitting that, “Yes, it’s now in questionable taste, and, yes, it reveals an impoverished moral imagination.”

Deen’s own attempts at explaining her attitudes on race relations in the South have been at times awkward, but also suggest a more intellectual approach to how she views the legacy of racism and prejudice in the Deep South that shaped her.

In the fall of 2012, she told the New York Times’ Kim Severson that she believes race relations in the South are “pretty good,” but that “it will take a long time for [prejudice] to completely be gone … if it’ll ever be gone.” Then she added, “We’re all prejudiced against one thing or another. I think that black people feel the same prejudice that white people feel.”

Such statements have apparently invited more than public admonition, the blackmail arrest suggests.

In a letter to the plaintiff’s lawyer in the workplace harassment lawsuit, Paculis, according to the affidavit, tried to double up his hush money potential.

"I have pushed the opposing firm to [give] me an amount of money, in cash to never been heard of again and to never utter Paula Deen's name in public or private ever again. Now the burning question is: do you want in?”

Paculis is set to be arraigned in Savannah on July 16.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Thomas George Paculis extortion try: Vultures circling over Paula Deen’s crisis?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2013/0706/Thomas-George-Paculis-extortion-try-Vultures-circling-over-Paula-Deen-s-crisis
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe