Gravy Boat: My Week on the High Seas With Paula Deen and Friends
▻http://gawker.com/gravy-boat-my-week-on-the-high-seas-with-paula-deen-an-1522108382
I wanted to see who was willing to spend, at minimum, roughly $3,000 to support a downtrodden millionaire. I wanted to see if there were any black people.
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This week, the Wall Street Journal confirmed what Deen had referred to on the cruise with cryptic excitement as “a big announcement”: Paula Deen Ventures has received an investment of between $75 million and $100 million from a private-equity firm called Najafi Cos., and is in talks to return to television. According to its literature, Najafi Cos. frequently invests in industries that are “out of popular favor.”
In June of last year, Deen fell out of popular favor, becoming an overnight pariah after acknowledging in a deposition for a discrimination lawsuit that she had contemplated throwing an antebellum-style plantation wedding for her younger brother Bubba in 2007. More explosively, she admitted in the same deposition that she had used racist slurs 27 years ago. The suit was dismissed, but not before Deen had lost an estimated $12.5 million in earnings. Endorsement deals were dropped; contracts were allowed quietly to expire; partnerships were suspended “for now” (forever).