M.L. Nestel joined Raw Story in 2023. An award-winning writer and editor, his work has been published in New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and The Guardian, among other titles. He also produces and writes for true-crime genre TV shows. Prior to that, he served on the Newsweek masthead as a senior writer, wrote as a correspondent at ABC News and held the titles of West Coast bureau chief and senior writer at The Daily Beast. Priors also include working as senior national correspondent at The Daily Mail and investigative reporter at all three NYC tabloids: The New York Post,The New York Daily News and Newsday. He traveled around the country as a national correspondent at The Daily. M.L. published hundreds of stories about underground music and cinema — most notably as a critic for Box Office Magazine and the New York editor at Soma Magazine. He also headed development at Fountainhead Films. M.L. splits his time between Los Angeles and New York.
A retired federal judge warns that Donald Trump may want to heed the expanded gag order or wind up laying his head in a New York lockup.
"The first thing you can do is to give a warning," said Shira Scheindlin, a former federal judge told CNN's Kaitlin Collins Monday night. "I think that's been covered."
On Monday, Justice Juan Merchan amended a gag order issued last week to include his own political strategist executive daughter at the behest of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, court records show.
"This pattern of attacking family members of presiding jurists and attorneys assigned to his cases serves no legitimate purpose,” Merchan wrote. “It merely injects fear in those assigned or called to participate in the proceedings that not only they, but their family members as well, are ‘fair game,’ for Defendant’s vitriol.”
Engoron warned about that same sanction after fining the 45th president twice for violating a gag order for disparaging his court clerk, noting, "I don’t want anybody killed.”
"But the third step, and it has to happen sometimes with contempt, is actually putting somebody in the cell until they understand and that the behavior is absolutely unacceptable," she said.
Scheindlin cautioned that such a move would be a very last resort given that the defendant in this case happens to be a former president who is also the presumptive Republican nominee to become the 47th president.
"Now, is that what anybody wants to do?" she asked rhetorically. "No, because that would only make him a martyr; so nobody really wants to put him in a cell."
Should Trump breach the gag order, then Merchan could pull that drastic lever. She said, "he has to know, I think that that is a real possibility — if he doesn't stop doing what the judges ordered, that he stopped doing."
Trump's also being handled with kid gloves in the case where he's charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to shield allegedly damning intel from adult film star Stormy Daniels.
"He's again, being treated differently than any other defendant because any other defendant would be incarcerated if they did not stop the behavior," she said. "But we've got a problem here... it's really hard to muzzle him with the threat of incarceration because as I said, that would only make him a martyr."
