#SESAME-GATE: A flowchart for the Kevin Clash Elmo sex scandal

The Kevin Clash/Elmo scandal, and its many furry tentacles, all broken down in one handy flowchart by Hilary Sargent.

Click here for the full chart: JPEG, PDF.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: elmo • Kevin Clash • lgbt • muppets • scandal • sesame street

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I agree with the sentiment on the chart- that there’s a whole bunch of “facts” that don’t have anything to do with it, and will just serve the 24 hour news cycle’s need for content, any content, regardless of how much they have to inflate it to make it count.

Clash was on NPR’s “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” a few weeks ago for the “Not my Job” segment, not long before this story broke. He was quite amusing and his ability to jump in and out of character, freaking out the host, was one of the funniest things I’ve heard in some time. It’ll be very disappointing if these accusations prove true.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefan_e_jones/ Stefan Jones

I really enjoyed the Kevin Clash bio-pic; by the end I’d gotten over most of my Elmo-hating and had a lot of respect for Clash’s talent.

Which makes the current situation really aggravating. True or not, I don’t see a way for Clash’s career to recover from this.

If he really was chatting up teens . . . WAY dork move.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  I have my doubts that there’s anything to this, as the first accuser recanting his accusation, saying that yeah, they did it, but he was of legal age (TMZ says that he was paid off; The Smoking Gun casts doubt on that), and then recanting his original recantation, made me wonder if he had actually had an encounter with Clash as a young man of legal age, and decided to claim that it had happened a few years earlier in an attempted (maybe successful) cash grab, and that the second guy is a copycat. There is a certain sort of superficially pretty, very vain young man who, even on casual acquaintance, will almost inevitably claim to have had sex with one or more celebrities (even better if it’s on the downlow) or knows someone who has. Both of these guys fit the stereotype perfectly.
  - http://vincenzoravina.tumblr.com/ Vincenzo Ravina
    
    I really hope your theories are correct.