For many Okinawa locals, the arrest of a US soldier accused of robbing and killing a woman in a hotel room has reignited decades of frustration over crimes involving US military personnel there.
“Nothing has changed since I was a child. How many times are we going to repeat the same thing, create more victims, cause their families to suffer, and ultimately, cause the people of Okinawa to grieve?”
“I know we shouldn’t get used to terrible things like this, but because they keep happening, I’ve stopped being surprised,” she told the BBC.
Okinawa hosts the largest US military presence in Japan. It is home to several US military bases and tens of thousands of American troops.
US Marine Lance Corporal Devin Jacob Ballard, 20, was arrested by Japanese police on Sunday. Police say an investigation is underway and that Ballard is in Japanese custody because the alleged crime was unrelated to official military duties.
Whether a US service member is acting in the performance of official duty or not can determine which country has primary jurisdiction. When Japan has jurisdiction, but the suspect is under US custody, they can retain custody until Japan brings charges.
The Okinawa prefectural police say 39-year-old Anna Yagi was found dead early 3 October in a hotel room in Naha.
Security footage allegedly shows a man believed to be the suspect entering the hotel with the woman and leaving alone with her belongings. Local media citing police have reported that Yagi appeared to have been strangled with a cord.
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi registered an official protest with Washington. But residents like Sato feel that’s far from enough.
“I am deeply disappointed by the same kinds of government comments we have been hearing for decades — that they will protest or that they take the matter seriously.”
“I want Prime Minister Takaichi to call President Trump directly, someone with whom she has been emphasizing as having a close relationship with, and discuss concrete measures to prevent this from happening yet again,” she said.
Following news of the suspected murder, people in Japan have been voicing anger with some 100 people protesting in both Naha and Tokyo. Others took to social media expressing their outrage and demanding justice with one user saying: “Enough is enough.”
Over the past few years, a number of accidents and crimes have led to growing local opposition to the US presence on the island.
The 2016 rape and murder of a 20-year-old local woman saw tens of thousands of protesters demonstrate against the heavy US presence there. A former US marine subsequently received a life sentence for the crime.
The US currently has about 55,000 military personnel stationed in Japan, with the heaviest concentration based on the tropical island prefecture. Okinawa is one of the country’s smallest prefectures by size, but 70% of the land used exclusively by the US military in Japan is located there.
In 1972, Okinawa prefecture was returned to Japanese control after United States forces occupied the islands at the end of the Second World War. Since then, there have been 6,409 arrests for criminal offenses related to US military personnel, according to Okinawa Prefectural Government.
Locals say the significant US presence has stirred resentment over a number of issues from crimes including rapes, assaults, and drunk-driving accidents to local disturbances such as noise and aircraft crashes.

The U.S. Air Force has removed all of its bombers from a U.K. air base following a security incident that led to the arrest of five British men and one U.K.-Iranian national last month, a Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to CBS News on Sunday.
All U.S. bombers deployed to RAF Fairford have been returned to their home stations in the United States, the spokesperson said. The Wall Street Journal was first to report on the bombers’ return.
“U.S. Air Force bombers routinely operate around the world to support global force readiness and operational requirements,” the Pentagon spokesperson’s statement said. “The Airmen that operate America’s bomber force, including B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s, remain ready to deliver precision global strike capabilities – including through operations that launch and recover from the continental United States – anywhere, anytime.”
On Sept. 27, five men, all British nationals in their 20s and from London, were arrested on suspicion of explosives and terror offenses close to the RAF Fairford air base, which has been used by American bombers to strike Iran. Police say they found a quantity of an accelerant — gasoline — in three vans linked to the five suspects, but no explosives.
The suspects have since been released on bail.
A dual U.K.-Iranian national was also later arrested on suspicion of plotting a terror attack. The 25-year-old man was taken into custody in London on Thursday, and on Saturday, Counter Terrorism Policing announced he had been released on bail.
The British government believes Iran “played a part” in the incident at the air base, U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said last week.
“There are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford, but of course it remains an ongoing, complex and serious police investigation, and of course we are working closely with our colleagues in the United States of America,” the prime minister told the BBC.

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NPR Ukraine producers Polina Lytvynova and Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this story.
When the Fox News Channel hosted hundreds of advertisers and industry executives at the ornate Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan two years ago, the network centered attention on a tragic yet heroic figure: the war correspondent Benjamin Hall.
“From Ukraine to the Middle East, and here at home, the dedicated journalists of Fox News are trying to inform Americans, even in the most perilous of circumstances,” Hall proclaimed.
Hall knows peril all too well. In the first weeks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a strike by Russian forces hit the car in which Hall’s team had been traveling outside Kyiv.
Hall had nearly died. He lost his right leg below the knee, most of his left foot and part of an eye.
Two years after the attack, Hall stood center stage on prostheses, in a suit that ended just above his knees. He entered to a standing ovation.
“These stories, they need eyes on the ground,” Hall said. “They need a human perspective. They need us to bear witness.”
But at what cost?
Though gravely injured, Hall was the lucky one. The strike killed all four people who traveled with Hall that day:
The two Ukrainian soldiers who served as guides. Pierre Zakrzewski, a beloved Fox war videographer. And Oleksandra Kuvshynova, known as Sasha. The 24-year-old Ukrainian had just joined the team as a producer and interpreter.
Fox has described the deaths as tragic and honored the fallen. Yet two multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the network blame it for what happened.
One of those lawsuits has been filed by Kuvshynova’s parents, who also squarely blame Hall. In their first joint interview about the tragedy, they tell NPR they are speaking out to honor their daughter’s life and document what they contend is the injustice of her death.
Two high-risk security advisers who worked for Fox News in Ukraine bolster the family’s claims. In separate interviews with NPR about what happened, they say Fox News and its star correspondent ignored repeated and urgent warnings to stay away from the danger zone outside the city limits of Kyiv.
“If you took Benji out of the equation, this never would have happened,” Aaron King, one of those security advisers, said. The other adviser, Shane Thomson, has joined the Kuvshynovs’ lawsuit, alleging Fox scapegoated him for the tragedy.
This story is based on 15 interviews and a review of hundreds of pages of legal documents, as well as Fox’s own broadcasts. Fox News, citing the ongoing litigation, declined NPR’s repeated and detailed requests for interviews with Fox officials, news executives and lawyers. The network also did not make Hall available for interviews for this story. It additionally declined to respond to specific questions raised for this story.
Yet one of the most revealing witnesses to Hall’s character is Hall himself. He wrote a memoir, published a year after the attack, in which he acknowledged increasingly embracing risk as his career and ambitions progressed. The same year, he also presented his story in a Fox documentary.
Fox and its founder, Rupert Murdoch, have faced controversies, scandals and litigation before. Often, accusations center on the network’s right-wing ideology, Murdoch’s own political agenda or their relentless pursuit of profits.
This is different.
Two words define the underlying allegations in the Kuvshynovs’ wrongful death lawsuit against Fox and Hall: ambition and negligence.
Fox calls the deaths tragic but rejects responsibility
Covering any armed conflict by definition involves peril. Hazards are often ambiguous; the boundaries of battle zones are fluid. Combat journalists for many news organizations, including NPR, have been killed.
But the Kuvshynovs and their legal team say what happened to their daughter was preventable — and foreseen. “This was a very avoidable danger that they were specifically warned about, as to [the] exact time and place that they could not go,” charges Stephen Humphreys, a lawyer for the Kuvshynovs and Thomson.
In court statements in the Kuvshynovs’ suit, Fox acknowledges the tragedy of the deaths of Kuvshynova and Zakrzewski. But the network counters the plaintiffs’ claims on technical and legal grounds.
In declining comment for this story, Fox pointed NPR to a statement released in March 2024, when the lawsuit was filed.
“While we understand the grief and continue to mourn the loss of both Pierre Zakrzewski and Sasha Kuvshynova, we will respectfully defend against the inaccurate claims within this lawsuit,” Fox said.
“The safety of our journalists has always been our number one priority and we are immensely grateful to the Fox News journalists who have covered the war in Ukraine and we remain committed to reporting from the region,” the statement continues.
Hall: “I learned that I could control my fear”
It wasn’t clear that Hall would get to Kyiv in early 2022.
A dual British-U.S. citizen, Hall was inspired by his globe-trotting family’s past. He wrote in his memoir that at the outset of World War II, his dad’s family was in the Philippines. Japanese forces took Hall’s grandfather prisoner and executed his grandmother and other relatives. U.S. troops rescued Hall’s father, then just a boy.
In chronicling combat, Hall wrote, “I saw a lot of death, had guns pressed against my head, dreamed horrific dreams — all of it an echo of what my father endured in Manila.”
In his 20s, Hall pinged from one hot spot to another, freelancing for outlets like Vice and Esquire, and Fox.
The first time Hall saw a man die was in Misrata, Libya, in 2011. He had a choice, he recounted in the memoir, titled Saved: He could turn away or, perhaps, “invade the dignity of those moments in order to ‘get the story.'”
“I did not have the time to consider all the moral angles. I could either keep filming, or stop filming, and I chose to keep filming,” Hall wrote. He added that he had just escaped being killed too.
Back in London, Hall registered that he had undergone a profound transformation. “I learned that I could control my fear, even bury it, and keep moving forward into danger,” Hall wrote. “I learned that the hellishness of Misrata was not enough to stop me from going to combat zones.
“And I learned that my normal civilized life would never be the same again. No — this was who I was now.”
Years later, his colleague Trey Yingst would call Hall “the gold standard” for war zone reporting for the network.
But there was at least one early red flag. In a sworn affidavit for the Kuvshynovs’ lawsuit, former Fox News international producer Phil Ittner said he had previously lodged a formal internal complaint that Hall’s behavior in Syria had placed colleagues in danger.
“Ben Hall was addicted to the adrenaline rush of taking risks,” Ittner wrote in the affidavit. “I worried that he put his career promotion ahead of the safety of the crew working with him.” He called for Hall to be pulled from the field. Instead, Ittner wrote in the affidavit, Fox never responded. No known consequences ensued. (In its legal filings, Fox responded that Ittner has no knowledge of events in Ukraine as he had been forced out of the network three years earlier.)
In 2015, Hall promised his girlfriend, Alicia Meller, that he would find a safer path as they started a family. They soon married. He also took a full-time job in Fox’s London bureau, which still entailed covering conflict and strife. But in 2021, Hall moved to Washington, D.C., to cover the U.S. State Department.
“I made that final decision to pull back from the front lines,” Hall wrote. “It was much harder than I imagined it would be to make this professional change in my life; the pull of distant wars never weakened or went away. But I understood new paths were opening for me.”
That new path lasted roughly four months.
On Feb. 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine. Hall got a call from a Fox News executive: Would he go overseas and cover the war? As he wrote, “I understood my obligations to Alicia and my family, and I knew I had to stop putting myself in dangerous situations.”
Still, off he went.
From D.C. to Lviv
Four days after the Russians invaded, Hall arrived in the city of Lviv. It was an arduous drive from Poland; he was swimming against the tide as long columns of motorists were fleeing Ukraine.
He started reporting and hosting a show that aired nightly on Fox. The major action, however, was hundreds of miles to the east.
Fox had established news coverage from Kyiv with a team of journalists; now it was pulling producers out as the risk increased. Only a skeleton crew remained.
Yet Fox summoned all its journalists in Lviv for a Zoom call, Hall wrote in Saved. Executives hoped to send another correspondent to Kyiv.
“All of us wanted to go, including me,” Hall wrote. He was the one invited.
Hall’s wife urged him not to go, he wrote. He assured her he’d be fine.
Fox had a team of high-risk security contractors to keep its journalists safe. Such security advisers typically have military backgrounds. They provide guidance, muscle and medical aid. They can also serve as a brake on journalists who put their hunger for a story ahead of their own well-being.
Aaron King was one of Fox’s high-risk security advisers. He says that like Hall’s wife — and like another Fox safety contractor — he told Hall not to go to Kyiv.
“It wasn’t in his best interest to go down there,” King said. “And I asked him what he believed that he would achieve that other teams haven’t already achieved at this point in time.”
King says it was like all battle zone assignments — balancing the risks versus the possible reward.
“He kind of processed what I’d spoken to him about, for about 10 seconds, kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Ah, I’ll go anyway,'” King said. “And that was the last I seen of Benjamin.”
In his book, Hall presented the pull to Kyiv as inescapable.
“I could not say no to the offer to go to Kyiv and continue anchoring the show from there,” he wrote in Saved. “It was, in a way, the culmination of all that I had worked on and all the risks I’d taken before. It was the big one, the war that might change the world—change the course of history. This was who I was and what I had prepared to do.”
Sasha Kuvshynova: A life filled with promise
Among the people Hall would encounter once he arrived in Kyiv was Sasha Kuvshynova, Fox’s new Gen Z fixer.
Her Facebook page bears a motto in English: “if you never try you will never know.”
Her other social media accounts brim with life too: music and film festivals, her photographic shoots, travel to Tuscany, pictures of her as a child, her cat, Zephyr. She posted about her pride that her father, trained as a physicist, taught her math.
Her accounts turned grim starting in February 2022, after the invasion by Russia. After a Russian strike on the primary television tower in Kyiv, she posted on Instagram: “Glory to Ukraine!”
Kuvshynova’s mother, Iryna Mamaysur, and her father, Andriy Kuvshynov, spoke with pride laced with sorrow during hourslong interviews by video conference from NPR’s Kyiv bureau, sometimes interrupted by air raid sirens. Their words were interpreted by two NPR Ukrainian producers present.
Kuvshynova’s parents say she was remarkable from her youngest years. (Under Ukrainian naming conventions, Kuvshynova took the surname of her father, with an added “a” to reflect her gender.) She learned to read by 3, mastered English by 11 and showed flair as an interpreter early on, her mother said.
As a teen, Kuvshynova briefly aided foreign reporters during the popular uprising in 2014 against Ukraine’s then pro-Russian president, who ultimately fled.
That’s when she met Zakrzewski, the Fox video journalist, and discovered how to blend her interests into a single passion: to tell Ukraine’s story.
When Fox approached her in early 2022 to aid its reporting on the coming war, she embraced the offer eagerly.
“I will tell you that I was very glad,” her father said. “I thought that getting into such a level of a global, vital company [would be a good experience]. Fascinating material, interesting people.”
“She was excited,” her mother recalled. “She said, ‘I have already found my profession.'”
From Lviv to Kyiv
Hall arrived in the Ukrainian capital on March 2.
The Fox crew stayed at the InterContinental Kyiv, a luxury hotel in the historical heart of the Ukrainian capital. Other networks holed up there too. He encountered the familiar faces of Yingst and Zakrzewski, a crackerjack visual journalist with a big heart, a mischievous streak and a salt-and-pepper walrus mustache.
Kuvshynova had also moved into the hotel. As a “fixer” for Fox, she was in touch with people in the Ukrainian military and the government and scouted possible sites and scenes to film. She knew the language, and she knew her way around. It was home.
Kuvshynova would send her parents reassuring texts frequently. She let them know, for example, when she had returned from outings near battle zones.
“She said, ‘Mom, don’t worry. We have security on these crews who are very experienced,'” said her mother, Iryna Mamaysur.
And she joked, given the protective gear they all wore, that she was “a very fashionable lady who outfits our team.”
Toward the end of each day, the team would hold what it called “evening prayers,” based on a British military practice. The crew would break down its intentions for the next day and map out the logistics with Fox producers and security consultants. Senior producers in London and Jerusalem and even executives in New York City would participate in the call.
A senior network executive or security official was supposed to sign off on each assignment, particularly if it involved going near the front, Thomson, the security adviser, wrote in his sworn affidavit.
Thomson also alleged in the affidavit that the staff — “overstressed and overworked” before Hall’s arrival — began “working to the point of exhaustion.” The presence of an additional correspondent put an additional burden on Kuvshynova in particular, he alleged.
Initially, Hall wrote, he continued to host the live show from a hotel room balcony in the freezing winter morning.
But he wanted to do more.
“You’ve got to try and get the pictures”
Even in a war zone — especially in a war zone — television news stories are based on one thing.
“Inevitably, you’ve got to try and get the pictures,” said Jon Williams, who oversaw international coverage at the BBC and ABC News and later led the Irish public broadcaster RTÉ.
“What’s happening on the streets of Tehran or in Dubai or in Doha, when you can see buildings going up in flames — you have the images. You can tell the story. And there is a compelling reason to try and get the images.”
In recent decades, there have been more armed conflicts to cover. And press groups and media outlets have put a far-greater emphasis on journalists’ safety and careful planning of assignments. Many reporters, including those at NPR, are required to go through what’s called “hostile environment training” before heading off to cover conflict.
Williams heads up the Rory Peck Trust, which provides funds and training to aid the security of freelance journalists who are reporting in perilous zones. It also provides support for families of those reporters who are injured or killed in such circumstances.
Williams said the danger of combat reporting can never be eliminated. Shortly after the attack on the Fox crew in 2022, CNN’s Ben Wedeman and his colleagues were almost struck while filming a report in Bucha, a northwest suburb of Kyiv.
“In these vast open spaces, the Russians seem far away,” Wedeman narrated. “They’re not.”
In 2022 alone — the year of the incident — 28 journalists were killed in conflict zones around the world, according to UNESCO.
Broadly speaking, Williams offered this caution: “When correspondents or crews begin not to recognize the risks that they’re facing and become too comfortable with risk, then it’s time to take them out.”
A fateful assignment
In her last publicly available Facebook post, Kuvshynova paid homage to people fleeing Kyiv on planks beneath the remains of a bombed-out bridge on the city’s northwest side. She posted in Ukrainian and English.
Irpin. Evacuation of the civilians. March 5, 2022.
Under the sound of shelling, soldiers and volunteers are helping to move thousands of people under the blown-up (by Russians) bridge.
“We have been here for three hours, since the morning. Fortunately, the night was finally quiet” holding back tears [a] local tells me.
The evacuation of the population lasts [a] 3rd day. About 200 tanks and armored personnel carriers of the occupiers have been accumulated near Irpin.
Russian troops blew up an evacuation train that was going to pick up people. The railway tracks were also blown up.
Currently, the Zhytomyr highway, Bucha – Irpin – [H]ostomel, Makariv and the north of Vyshhorod district remain the most dangerous in the Kyiv region.
That area northwest of Kyiv would be where Kuvshynova lost her life.
On March 12, high-risk security adviser Shane Thomson set out with Fox’s Trey Yingst toward that same area but stopped short of it at a checkpoint in the northwest suburbs.
They were near Ukrainian forces and a string of foxholes, with other soldiers a kilometer ahead of them engaging with the Russians, he says.
“We were semi-safe,” Thomson recalls.
And then they weren’t.
“The trigger point for me was close fire,” Thomson says. “We had mortars coming over. We took cover, and then we evacuated back.”
Despite the dangers, a number of TV networks had already aired dramatic footage from that region. Fox wanted more images of those refugees fleeing Irpin, a northwest Kyiv suburb, and Thomson says he understood why.
“Just behind them, you got a shot of the city, where it’s a, it’s smoke. They can hear gunfire. They can hear explosions. They wanted the atmospherics at the time,” Thomson told NPR.
But the risks were real. A British Army veteran serving with Ukrainian troops, Dale Sutton, had texted the high-risk advisers that it was too dangerous to bring journalists to Irpin, Thomson told NPR, a key claim in his affidavit. Russian forces were in the area; some even pretended to be news crews.
Sutton affirmed Thomson’s account in an interview with NPR. “It’s an absolute no-go area. It’s beyond hot,” Sutton recalled telling Thomson and King. “You’ve got no business being here.”
Thomson alleges in his lawsuit that tensions mounted between Fox’s journalists and their security advisers. King, who consulted with them from Lviv, told NPR the same thing. (NPR could not reach Duncan “Jock” Gordon, a third Fox security contractor who was present in Kyiv, for comment, despite numerous attempts.)
At evening prayers, Thomson told NPR, he vetoed the proposed trip toward Irpin. He alleges Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott was on the call. Fox says that he has no evidence that Scott directed the movements of the network’s team in Ukraine.
The next day, March 13, Russians scattered across the area. They overtook the nearby town of Bucha and half of Irpin. There, they shot dead the American documentarian Brent Renaud and wounded his colleague. The mayor of Irpin issued a public warning to journalists: Stay out. It’s too dangerous.
Given all that, the message at evening prayers on the night of the 13th was clear-cut, according to the plaintiffs’ filings: Stay within Kyiv city limits. In his affidavit, Thomson said the nearby suburbs were out of bounds.
“There was no way we were going there,” Thomson told NPR. “No way. Not after the credible intel, what we had and everything what we had before. It was all on point. There’s nothing, no gray areas.”
It’s not clear exactly how the team hatched its alternative plan. According to Thomson, Kuvshynova proposed filming footage at the perimeter line that Ukrainian defense forces were building in Kyiv along the highway to Irpin.
“This represented a sort of a compromise with the pressure to go to Irpin … without leaving the Kyiv city limits or going outside established defense positions,” Thomson said in his sworn affidavit.
In the interviews and the lawsuit, the Kuvshynovs and Thomson allege that this outing occurred at Hall’s direction, and they say they believe it occurred with the support of Fox executives tracking events from New York.
In her lawsuit filed in the U.K., Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, similarly alleges that it was clear by March 13 that Irpin was not safe and that Fox failed to heed or recognize the warning signs. She says it was the network’s job to exercise care for her husband’s safety.
In his own court filing in the Kuvshynov case, Hall says Zakrzewski would have been responsible for communicating with Fox about security and logistical concerns for March 14. Hall adds that he does not know of anyone in New York being consulted on March 14.
The assignment was simple, Hall wrote in his memoir: “Pierre and I decided to visit the defensive trenches being dug in Kyiv and find a story there.”
What happened on March 14
The next day, Zakrzewski, Hall and Kuvshynova boarded a white van at the hotel. They planned to travel up the highway to a checkpoint set up by Ukrainian forces just inside the city limits.
In Saved, Hall recounts a careful approach:
“Pierre and I knew how we would cover the elaborate trench systems the Ukrainians were building within Kyiv as a defense against Russian military units like the Wagner Group, ruthless mercenaries dispatched by Putin to fight his wars across the globe,” Hall wrote. “Our explicit intention was to avoid the front lines, stay clear of active fighting, remain within the city’s borders, and only report on the trenches inside Kyiv.”
Security adviser Jock Gordon was with them. Thomson stayed behind. By Thomson’s account in his affidavit, the initial driver assigned to drive the crew refused, citing the danger. The team pulled in a replacement.
They were escorted by two Ukrainian soldiers in a separate car. In Saved, Hall wrote that those soldiers had been arranged by a Ukrainian army press liaison at Kuvshynova’s request. Her parents’ lawsuit contends the military did not sign off on the work; the soldiers were freelancing as security guards to make some extra money on the side.
When they arrived at the trenches, the team could see Ukrainian soldiers conducting target practice, but they weren’t allowed to film.
“I tried to negotiate with the soldiers through Sasha, but they were adamant,” Hall wrote in his memoir. “Our plan to report on the strategic trench system was not going to happen.”
But they didn’t have to go back empty-handed. Their escorts — the two troops — suggested they continue on to the nearby suburb of Horenka, Hall said in a court filing last year. The village “had been recently destroyed by Russian forces, where [the same Ukrainian soldiers escorting the Fox team] had taken a crew from the New York Times only the day before,” Hall wrote.
The area was, Hall wrote in Saved, “abandoned except for some Ukrainian troops. The Russian forces, we understood, would be at least thirty miles away and not pushing in our direction.”
A crucial dispute
In a footnote in a recent legal filing, Fox’s attorneys wrote that “the gist of that statement was that Hall believed it was safer than it actually was and that he — and the Ukrainian soldiers who drove the team out — was wrong. That is certainly true.”
The Kuvshynovs and Thomson reject that. Their attorneys argued that the reasonable conclusion is that Hall’s claim was “at all times, patently and knowingly false.”
And their lawsuit against Fox and Hall alleges one more thing about that trip up the highway.
The white van the journalists traveled in had the word “press” in big letters on its hood and sides — a possible target for Russian forces. The two Ukrainian soldiers wanted everyone to go in their smaller car. But there were only three seats available.
According to the lawsuit, Hall said the Fox team should leave behind Gordon — the security consultant charged with keeping them safe that day — in favor of Kuvshynova, the only one who could speak Ukrainian.
“According to Jock,” a February 2026 court filing for the Kuvshynovs states, “before he was left behind, the security adviser gave Ben Hall specific instructions not to go anywhere else, not to go to any location that had not been vetted with a proper security analysis, or go beyond the [checkpoint] inside the Kyiv city limits where the crew intended to film.” (NPR could not reach Gordon for comment.)
Thomson says Gordon urged Zakrzewski to turn on a livestream that would display his location to Fox colleagues in New York and London. An image shared in a Fox WhatsApp group chat that day, referred to in court filings and reviewed by NPR, shows Zakrzewski had done just that as the team traveled in the soldiers’ car, past the checkpoint and the city limits and into Kyiv’s contested northwest suburbs.
An attack “out of nowhere”
How far they pushed is a matter of contention in the litigation. Regardless, when the team finished getting footage of destruction, it turned back toward Kyiv.
The attack came on a suburban stretch of road near some light industrial warehouses, including an auto repair shop.
“The first missile came out of nowhere, lands about 30 feet in front of us. Immediately, Pierre shouts, ‘Reverse the car! Reverse the car!'” Hall told Fox’s Sean Hannity in March 2023. “The car got stuck. We couldn’t go back, and Pierre shouted, ‘Get out of the car! Everyone, get out of the car!’ And the next second, the second bomb hits right in front of the left of the car. And that one, I went black.”
“I was in a dark place. I couldn’t feel or see. I’d taken shrapnel in the eye and the matchbox-sized shrapnel in my neck. And I was — I was out. I was out dead,” Hall told Hannity.
In his memoir, Hall credited two people with convincing him to get out of the car before yet another attack would destroy it: Zakrzewski, who Hall said flung the car door open and ordered him to get out, and his young daughter Honor, whose disembodied voice he heard urging him on: Daddy, you’ve got to get out of the car. Hall, by his account, dragged himself to a nearby vehicle and a soldier with Ukrainian special forces got out and pulled him to safety.
Zakrzewski “escaped the car but suffered a penetrating wound to his left upper leg from which he bled to death at the side of the road,” according to his widow’s lawsuit.
Kuvshynova and the two soldiers never made it out of the car.
The search
Later that day, with no trace of the team, Thomson and Gordon — the two security advisers in Kyiv — began a desperate search. They checked with Ukrainian military and civil authorities, hospitals and morgues. Journalists and security consultants for competing news outlets pitched in too.
Finally, Thomson said, a doctor called, asking him whether one of the missing was British. His patient was severely wounded and had a U.K. passport. It was Hall.
Doctors in Kyiv amputated Hall’s right leg, but he needed far more intensive care — and soon. He was spirited out of Kyiv with maneuvers right out of a spy novel.
They included a special rescue squad from the private group Save Our Allies operating amid curfews, a voyage out of the war zone on the train of the prime minister of Poland and an airlift to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.
Fox News chief national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin secured the approval of then-U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin for the airlift.
But what about the others? To find Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova, Thomson again enlisted security contractors for other news organizations. They spoke to sources in Ukrainian military and intelligence agencies. The international journalists in Kyiv pulled together, with CNN’s Clarissa Ward aiding Fox’s Yingst in the search, according to people at both networks. All came up short.
“We tried to locate their [geolocating] devices, satellite phones, their iPhones, and we just couldn’t do it,” Thomson recalled. The last point identified was the site where they were struck.
Finally, a call came from the Kyiv city morgue. He rushed there to identify Zakrzewski. Fox ordered Thomson to drive the body to Poland.
In his affidavit, Thomson said it was an onerous, dangerous and emotionally crushing burden.
In Poland, Thomson met Ross-Stanton, Zakrzewski’s widow. Fox employees also were there. They signaled him not to answer questions, Thomson said in the affidavit, effectively ordering him “to hide the truth from my friend’s grieving widow.” They toasted Zakrzewski, a citizen of France and Ireland, with a bottle of Irish whiskey over his coffin, Ross-Stanton says.
A family’s unease turns to grief
The Kuvshynovs’ lawsuit against Fox and Hall can be divided into two parts: what happened that led to their daughter’s death, and how they say they were treated afterward.
They began to worry when they didn’t get the usual reassuring message from her after her trip up the highway. Fox has not addressed what it did in the days immediately following Sasha Kuvshynova’s death.
According to the Kuvshynovs’ allegations, there are many things the network did not do.
Fox executives didn’t immediately call to tell them what it knew and what it did not.
They didn’t send someone who spoke Ukrainian to serve as an interpreter and guide them through the terrible hours and days that followed.
They didn’t offer immediate comfort and condolences to demonstrate how much Kuvshynova was valued as a colleague.
“We were not informed about anything about the search for Sasha, about any investigations,” her father, Andriy Kuvshynov, told NPR. “They didn’t tell us. And it’s not clear if they knew that — what had happened — why they didn’t tell us.”
In fact, Kuvshynova’s parents said, no one reached out on the day of the attack.
The next day, they said, they got a call from someone on Fox’s team in Kyiv encouraging them to pick up their daughter’s belongings.
Kuvshynov told NPR he took that as an ominous turn. He didn’t go. The man called back, but still the father didn’t go.
The next day, Kuvshynova’s boyfriend — Sviatoslav Yurash — brought them her suitcase from the InterContinental.
It was Yurash, a member of parliament, who told them their daughter had been killed, Kuvshynov said in his sworn statement. (Yurash backed up the broad strokes of this account in his interview with NPR.)
The two men bundled into a car to retrace the path of the news team. They first were stopped at the checkpoint where the Fox crew had intended to film the trenches.
A Ukrainian army post commander there said he had seen the Fox team and had warned Hall not to go farther, according to Kuvshynov’s statement. The journalists had proceeded anyway.
Kuvshynov said he and Yurash continued, retracing the Fox team’s path up the highway. At the southern tip of Hostomel, on the boundary line of Irpin, the two men came upon “the burned wreck” of the car, Kuvshynov said in his affidavit.
Hall wrote in his court declaration that the strike occurred in Horenka, which is closer to Kyiv than Hostomel. His accounts in the memoir, on television and in his declaration make no mention of Hostomel.
Regardless, “Everything there was ruined, destroyed — that is, erased from the face of the earth,” Kuvshynov told NPR. His daughter’s body wasn’t there.
The following day — 48 hours after the deadly strike — the Kuvshynovs were told their daughter was at the morgue, Kuvshynov wrote in his affidavit. He said they could identify her only from her clothes “as the body had turned to ashes.” They refused to accept it as the truth for weeks, until DNA tests confirmed the results.
In the ensuing days, Yurash’s social media posts mourned Kuvshynova’s death and railed at the Russians.
“She was murdered,” he wrote in English. “Couldn’t help but come. Couldn’t help but search. Couldn’t help but find. Couldn’t help but hate like never hated before. Justice will be had.”
An offer from Fox
On March 17, the day after Kuvshynov viewed his daughter’s remains at the morgue, a Fox News human resources executive sent him an offer to pay her wages and benefits, funeral expenses and “an additional cash sum meant to approximate life insurance proceeds that would have been payable had she been a full-time employee,” Fox’s legal team wrote in court filings.
Considering Kuvshynova was not a permanent employee, the payment was meant “as a show of sympathy and goodwill,” the network said. Indeed, Fox’s court filings state it paid the family more than what was contractually required.
Kuvshynov said his daughter had not been paid by Fox at all at the time of her death. He figured, Kuvshynov said in his affidavit, that he was simply agreeing to receive standard compensation for her work.
“I did not know the extent Fox was at fault,” Kuvshynov wrote in his affidavit. “I did not intend or contemplate that the payment offered by Fox three days after Sasha was killed, and one day after we were officially informed of her death, covered any such wrongdoing by Fox.”
He said he never would have agreed to that. His wife, he said, had taken to bed, bereaved and unaware that Fox had sought this resolution.
A week later, Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott sent a condolence note by email to the Kuvshynovs in English and Ukrainian.
“There can be no pain greater for a parent, than losing a child. I know Sasha was an absolutely exceptional young woman,” Scott wrote. “I’ve heard from so many of our reporters and producers about how talented she was, and how much she impressed them with her work and her passion.”
“Please know that we will not forget your daughter or her sacrifice,” Scott concluded. “We will honor Sasha in our work, celebrate her in our thoughts, and remember her in our prayers.”
On the same day, Fox posted a tribute to Kuvshynova on its website.
On March 27, Fox sent the paperwork. Kuvshynov signed the document the next day — exactly two weeks after his daughter’s death. In its court filings, Fox argued that it cannot be held legally responsible because Kuvshynov signed that document: “The valid contract is the beginning and the end of the case.”
Fox’s legal team also argued it had no legal duty to disclose any facts to the Kuvshynovs and therefore did not commit fraud in presenting the settlement.
According to the Kuvshynovs, Hall called them once. The gulf was too great: The mourning Ukrainians could not understand what the grief-choked reporter was saying in English.
Hall returned to Kyiv in November 2023 with Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox News’ parent company. He is the network’s controlling owner, along with his father, Rupert.
Hall had secured a one-on-one interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who awarded Hall the Order of Merit, III class, for his “outstanding personal contribution to strengthening … support for Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity.” Hall also met his rescuers to thank them.
Hall and Murdoch did not contact the Kuvshynovs during their visit. (A corporate spokesperson declined all comment on Murdoch’s behalf.)
Kuvshynov said he learned of the details of Kuvshynova’s death only from Thomson, the security consultant, and Humphreys, the lawyer — not Fox. (Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Humphreys has frequented Kyiv, documenting potential Russian war crimes and teaching courses at law schools there. Humphreys said that’s how he came across the case.)
They filed suit in March 2024.
Shane Thomson, the high-risk security adviser who warned Hall, Zakrzewski and Kuvshynova not to go beyond the Kyiv city limits, joined the grieving parents in their lawsuit against Fox and Hall.
He says after the attack, some Fox employees insinuated that Thomson abused alcohol — he denies drinking — and that led to the deaths and debacle. He said in his affidavit that SEPAR, the security consulting firm that had hired him to work for Fox, fired him several months after the attack without telling him why. (SEPAR did not return NPR’s calls and emails seeking comment.)
He blames Fox for his loss of a subsequent job. And he told NPR he was so distraught he later tried to take his own life.
Former Fox security consultant Aaron King affirmed this and said Thomson did not abuse alcohol.
In court documents, Fox’s legal team noted that Thomson does not have concrete examples of specific claims being made about him. And the network argued it cannot be responsible for what is said unofficially about Thomson.
Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, last year filed a parallel civil lawsuit in London, where the couple lived, alleging that Fox did not properly secure the news crew’s safety. Ross-Stanton told NPR that she cannot discuss the incident because of the litigation. (She first expressed her concerns in an interview published in a November 2022 story by Jeremy Barr, then of The Washington Post.) According to the Post, she was seeking more than $11 million in compensation for the failure to protect Zakrzewski from harm and to insure him adequately.
A long shot
The lawsuit on behalf of the Kuvshynovs and Thomson raises questions of what evidence is relevant and whether U.S. law applies to an incident in a war zone thousands of miles away.
The suit alleges that Fox’s actions rise to the level of corporate negligence under the Ukrainian civil code. The company argues that its New York-based executives cannot be held to account under Ukrainian law — in part because, it says, a key element of the relevant law didn’t even exist until a year after the incident.
The odds that the Kuvshynovs will win their lawsuit appear long. They are up against a media empire. And the case has experienced setbacks.
In December, Judge Mary V. Rosado dropped Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott as defendants from the case. Rosado also dismissed HarperCollins, the Murdoch-owned publisher that issued Hall’s memoir, Saved: A War Reporter’s Mission to Make It Home. The judge additionally rejected two of the counts filed by Thomson.
But some of his counts remain, including accusations of tortious interference and infliction of emotional distress. And Rosado ruled that the case can proceed to the discovery phase. That means the Kuvshynovs’ legal team can review Fox News’ internal correspondence, footage, materials and other evidence.
In stark terms, the judge rejected Fox’s argument for dismissal.
In her order, Rosado said it would be “a grave injustice” to deny the Kuvshynovs the ability to investigate whether Fox was telling them the truth. She noted that they were not represented by an attorney when they signed the agreement with Fox.
“The circumstances under which Kuvshynova died were allegedly misrepresented to the Kuvshynovs, who, given the circumstances of grieving the loss of a daughter while navigating a calamitous invasion by a large nuclear-armed country, did not have the ability to investigate whether the Fox Defendants’ representation of events was accurate,” Rosado continued.
And the Kuvshynovs’ lawyer, Humphreys, believes he has an unimpeachable source to use against Fox and Hall: Hall’s own words. While his memoir’s publisher is no longer on the hook, the Kuvshynovs’ attorney is still using the book to help make their case.
On first encounter, Humphreys seems an unlikely choice to take on topflight white-shoe defense firms hired by the United States’ most profitable news channel. He has represented clients against the University of Georgia — the campus from which he earned his law degree — and against the state’s larger public university system.
Yet Humphreys is not unfamiliar with the corridors of power. He once worked in Washington, D.C., as an aide and speechwriter to then-U.S. Sen. Wyche Fowler, who remembers Humphreys as quick to try to right perceived injustices.
“He is persistent and he is tenacious,” Fowler says now.
Fox is appealing Judge Rosado’s ruling. It is also seeking to have Thomson’s remaining allegations thrown out. (A new judge is overseeing the case since Rosado’s retirement this year.)
As life moves on, ghosts remain
The suit against Fox filed by Zakrzewski’s widow, Michelle Ross-Stanton, is still winding its way through the British legal system. While she said she cannot comment on her case, Ross-Stanton told NPR that she held a celebration for what would have been Zakrzewski’s 60th birthday in August.
Ross-Stanton — a veteran reporter herself — is aiding the French National Anti-Terrorism Prosecutor’s Office with research and investigation. The office has initiated a formal judicial investigation of war crimes in the fatal strike, working with Irish and Ukrainian authorities.
In Ukraine, the prosecutor general’s office told NPR that national police are still conducting a pretrial investigation into the deaths of Kuvshynova and Zakrzewski in advance of possible criminal proceedings against Russian forces.
The day after Kuvshynova died, her former boyfriend, Yurash, signed papers to join the Ukrainian armed forces, he said. He is now an army sergeant while remaining in parliament. In the intervening years, Yurash has married and had a baby. He has commissioned a sculpture in Kuvshynova’s honor.
Weeks after her death, another friend of Kuvshynova, Oleksii Horbach, paid tribute in an online memorial.
“I asked her repeatedly, ‘Why, Oleksandra, do you have to do this?'” Horbach said, in remarks interpreted by NPR. “And she told me once, ‘It is impossible to climb any peak without risk.’ That’s why she wanted to be a war correspondent, to be useful, to be in the center of events.”
Kuvshynova’s mission — to tell the world about what was happening to her country — remains admirable, her friends say.
But her parents argue that those she worked for, and trusted, failed to protect her.
“Fox treated us shamefully because they didn’t consider us and didn’t respect us,” said Kuvshynova’s mother, Iryna Mamaysur. “Something went wrong.”
“This world has lost Oleksandra Kuvshynova — a musician, a poet, an athlete, a photographer and the best daughter. It lost my love.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Rubio said “I think it ties us to the reality here, and that is we are dealing with elements in the world, and in the case of Iran, for example, who have openly threatened to attack American interests globally”.
A major incident was declared at the weekend after “suspicious vehicles” were seen near the RAF base in Gloucestershire, which has been used by US forces to carry out strikes against Iran.
On Monday Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor, head of Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP), said officers are considering all angles, including that “this may be activity committed by proxies, or individuals either knowingly or unknowingly, working on behalf of a foreign state”.
In his comments to Fox News, Rubio said: “What could have happened in the UK over the weekend is a very serious situation.” He added: “There’s a lot more news that’ll come out on this in the days to come, but there’s only so much I can say right now at this point about it.”
In recent months, US bombers have taken off from the base for the Middle East, after the UK approved a US request to use it for what the government calls defensive strikes on Iran.
According to CTP, the five men – aged between 23 and 25 and from London – remain under investigation, and their release is “subject to stringent conditions on their movement and contact with others”.
Speaking at the White House earlier on Monday, Donald Trump said “I will tell you, I would have said ‘Don’t let them have bail’. I’m surprised that they released them. I wouldn’t have done that.”
Residents of the nearby village of Whelford have been told they can move home. One local told the BBC most people had returned home, but had been told by police to stay inside and not take any photos.
“I haven’t gone home as I want to wait until I know more about what the hell happened, as it feels super dodge to me,” she said.

Back in 2024, the Los Angeles Times called Taylor Swift “patient zero for emotional contagion,” which may have inspired her lyrics from this single off Life of a Showgirl: The Encore, out Sept. 25, 2026.
But it turns out “Patient Zero”—which features Dakota Johnson and Colin Farrell in the music video—is about Taylor bonding with a woman over a mutual ex, beginning with, “If you wanna party with somebody who might know / About the devil on his shoulder under his halo / When the toxins take their hold, you’d rather die than let it go / But if you’re sick of him, I got you, I was patient zero.”
If an ex having a halo (or lack thereof) sounds familiar, she also touched on that theme in “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)” from Tortured Poets, which seemingly alluded to her ex Matty Healy. Taylor sang at the time, “He had a halo of the highest grade/ He just hadn’t met me yet.”
Now that Taylor is happily married, she is imparting wisdom on her ex’s new partner in “Patient Zero.”
“Take it from somebody who lost his games but won the race / Take it from someone who said all of this to his face,” she says. “Someone who knows she’s more than just the chase / Someone who had him and walked away.”
So, who could she be singing about? It could have been inspired by her girls’ night out with Sophie Turner shortly after the actress’ 2023 split with Joe Jonas, who Taylor dated in 2008. (He is also believed to have inspired Fearless’ “Forever & Always” and “Mr. Perfectly Fine.”)
The love song is a clear nod to her husband Travis Kelce’s roots as a native of Cleveland Heights, Ohio. The pair have already spent time there, as Travis reportedly purchased a $5.35 million lakefront property in the area in March 2026.
Similar to Tortured Poet’s “But Daddy I Love Him,” Taylor is clapping back at anyone questioning their relationship in “Cleveland!”
“And now I guess there’s / Something we all can agree on / But my baby likes what he likes,” she sings. “He already took me to Cleveland / And showed me The Heights, so hate all you like / This is the love of my life.”
Beyond defending their romance, Taylor also fires back at critics of her career and fashion sense by quoting some frequent disses she’s heard.
“She’s not as hot as she was, but she was only a four / She was never a girls’ girl, she was just a— / And with all of that money, why’s she dressed like trash? / When she smiles, it’s annoying, and have you seen her / Stumbling clumsily? / Would you even call that dancing?”
Forget the lavender haze. Instead, “Pink Clouding” expresses regret over how Taylor handled a past breakup: “Years later, I still wonder how to tell you sorry / I didn’t wanna let you down / So I left you up there on a, pink cloud.”
The self-reflection has fans speculating that she could be writing about Tom Hiddleston (post-“Getaway Car”) or Taylor Lautner (post-“Back to December”), who she’s been on good terms with in recent years.
However, she also refers to meeting her lover during a challenging time in her life, possibly alluding to her ex Joe Alwyn, who she grew close with during her reputation era.
“Ripped all my orchids from the vine / You met me at a cursed time /
I told you I was fine,” she sings, reminiscent of “I once was poison ivy, but now, I’m your daisy” from 2017’s “Don’t Blame Me.”
During her relationship with Joe, she frequently expressed worry about thrusting him into a life of fame and scrutiny (like in folklore’s “Peace”) and “Pink Clouding” plays on similar themes.
“I hope / You realized my kind of trouble wasn’t worth it,” the lyrics read. “And the way I treated you, you never deserved it / And I swear to God, to this day / I wake up scared that I left scars on a good person.”
The opening song on Taylor’s The Life of a Showgirl references the character Ophelia from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who faces a tragic fate.
According to the song’s lyrics, Taylor “might’ve drowned in the melancholy” if she hadn’t been saved by her true love.
“I heard you calling / On the megaphone,” Taylor sings. “You wanna see me all alone.”
The lyrics appear to be a nod to Travis calling Taylor out on his New Heights podcast for not meeting him at her Eras Tour, which is how their romance began.
“I swore loyalty to me, myself and I,” the lyrics continue. “Right before you lit my sky up.”
Before meeting Travis, Taylor was fresh off a breakup from Matty Healy, having declared herself one of the “independent girlies” in July 2023.
But after Travis went to her concert in Kansas City that same month, sparks began to fly.
Now, Taylor’s fiancé is even in on her Easter egg game, teasing “The Fate of Ophelia” lyrics on Instagram back in July. (Had some adventures this offseason,” he captioned pics with Taylor, adding, “Kept it [100].”)
How does that connect to Taylor’s song? Well, as the lyrics go, “You dug me out of my grave and saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia / Keep it one hundred.”
In upbeat “Opalite,” which Travis previously revealed as his favorite Showgirl song, Taylor references their love story.
After weathering her fair share of lightning strikes in relationships, now Taylor’s sky is calm, it’s opalite, with Travis.
“I had written down the word opalite because I learned that it’s actually a manmade opal,” she revealed on Capital radio. “Travis’ birthstone is opal, so that I’ve always fixed on that, I’ve always loved that stone.”
As for the meaning behind the synthetic glass gemstone? “I thought it was a cool metaphor that it’s a manmade opal and happiness can also be manmade, too.”
However, it’s not without some bite, as Swifties think Taylor shaded Travis’ ex Kayla Nicole in the lyrics by hinting the NFL player felt kind of like a prop in her social media pics.
“You couldn’t understand it / Why you felt alone,” she sings, seemingly to him. “You were in it for real / She was in her phone.”
The song goes on, “You were just a pose / And don’t we try to love love / And give it all we got / You finally left the table / And what a simple thought / You’re starving ’til you’re not.”
While Taylor, Max Martin and Shellback are credited as Showgirl writers, the late George Michael receives a posthumous credit on “Father Figure” because the song includes an interpolation of George’s 1987 track of the same name.
George’s team even gave their stamp of approval, writing on Instagram Oct. 2, “Thank you @taylorswift for including George in such a special moment.”
Fans speculate that the first half of the song is written from the perspective of Big Machine Records’ Scott Borchetta, who sold Taylor’s masters to Scooter Braun, before switching to Taylor’s perspective on her reclaiming them.
Taylor herself admitted that the song was “written in character.”
“That was a fun one to write,” she said on BBC 1 Radio. “It’s a very different way of using the idea of a father figure to king of talk about power, power structures, and the flipping of the power dynamics.”
Plus, she’s “pretty proud” of a specific NSFW line about making deals with the devil because “my d–k’s bigger.”
Track six on Showgirl tells a story of regret over a romance that didn’t quite get off the ground. The lyrics are filled with nostalgia, “Have fun, it’s prom / Wilted corsage dangles from my wrist / Over his shoulder I catch a glimpse / And see…You looking at me / And it was not an invitation / But as the 50 Cent song played / Should’ve kissed you anyway.”
Taylor’s longtime best friend Abigail Anderson (of “Fifteen” fame) gets a nod in these heartbreaking lyrics of loss: “When I left school, I lost track of you / Abigail called me with the bad news / Goodbye, and we’ll never know why.”
Fans think the tragic song was written about her late school friend Jeff Lang, who died in 2010 and is believed to have inspired her prior song “Forever Winter.”
“I didn’t know / You were breakin’ down / I’d fall to pieces on the floor / If you weren’t around,” she sings on the Red era song released from the vault in 2021. “Too young to know it gets better / I’ll be summer sun for you forever / Forever winter if you go.”
“Actually Romantic” is not actually about a romance, per se. Rather, it’s a response to an unnamed person who, according to the lyrics, has spent a lot of time talking about Taylor.
“High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me,” Taylor sings. “Wrote me a song saying it makes you sick to see my face / Some people might be offended / But it’s actually sweet.”
While Taylor rarely reveals who a song is written about, many fans on social media believe it was inspired by Charli XCX, who opened for Taylor on her Reputation Tour and is friends with Taylor’s ex Matty and his fiancée Gabbriette Bechtel.
When Charli—who is married to Matty’s The 1975 bandmate George Daniel—released brat in June 2024, there was speculation that her song “Sympathy is a Knife” threw shade at Taylor. However, two months later, Taylor seemed to put rumors to rest by sharing her praise for Charli.
“I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011,” Taylor told New York magazine in an article published Aug. 26. “Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”
Another easter egg it could be about Charli? The Spotify cover image shows Taylor holding an apple, the title of Charli’s 2024 viral song.
E! News has reached out to reps for comment on the speculation and has not heard back.
In track 10, Taylor is taking someone under her wing after they’ve been canceled, something she too has experienced.
“Come with me, when they see us they’ll run,” she advises. “Something wicked this way comes / Good thing I like my friends cancelled / I like ’em cloaked in Gucci and in scandal.”
Fans have speculated the track may nod to her controversial friendships with Brittany Mahomes or Blake Lively.
For the singer, she shared it’s rooted in her empathy after experiencing her own public downfall, likely referring to the Kim Kardashian and Kanye West feud of 2016.
“Having had my own experiences with mass judgment and being at the center of many dramatic, scandalous moments in my career, where people were all weighing in at once or at least it felt like that,” she told Amazon Music, “having had those experiences, it makes me move through the world a little bit differently.”
Taylor continued, “And when other people go through it, you find yourself thinking about how they’re probably gonna get smarter because of this. If they can get through it, if they can be tough enough, they can actually learn some things through this process.”
“Cancelled!” is ultimately about “how I don’t just naturally cast people aside just because other people decide they don’t like them. I make my own decisions about people based on how they treat me within my life and their actions.”
For her final act, Taylor teamed up with friend Sabrina Carpenter.
The lyrics tie together with “Elizabeth Taylor,” giving a glimpse behind-the-scenes of a showgirl. While it may seem glamorous, there’s always a price to pay, and the seasoned showgirl has to let the budding star know.
And the lyrics paint a picture, “She said, ‘I’d sell my soul to have a taste of a magnificent life, that’s all mine’ / But that’s not what showgirls get / They leave us for dead.”
In the end, after learning about the life of a showgirl, they join together for a final bow, “That’s our show / We love you so much, goodnight!”
“It’s a song about meeting one of your idols and instead of being what you thought they would be, they warn you against following in their footsteps, because they just want to be honest with you about how hard this industry is,” she told Magic radio. “And you do it anyway.”