Alex Da Silva, who up until this past season was So You Think You Can Dance's go-to salsa, mambo and Argentine tango choreographer, was arrested at his North Hollywood home this morning on a bunch of sex-crime charges involving four different women he tutored.
All told, the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office charged the 41-year-old dance instructor with eight felony counts: four counts of forcible rape, two counts of assault with intent to commit rape and two counts of sexual penetration by a foreign object.
Da Silva is currently being held on $6.2 million bail and, if convicted on the charges, could face life in prison.
According to Deputy District Attorney Rosa Alarcon, who works within the bureau's Sex Crimes Division, the alleged assaults were committed against women ages 20 to 26, all of whom are dancers, and all of whom met the choreographer through his self-taught instructional classes.
The incidents all took place between August 2002 and March 2009. Da Silva worked as a choreographer on So You Think You Can Dance between 2005 and 2008
No need for her castmates to do any digging! The outspoken Real Housewives of Atlanta star NeNe Leakes is coming right out with a revelation from her past: She was a stripper. And she’s not ashamed.
In her new memoir, Never Make the Same Mistake Twice, in stores now, the reality star opens up about her struggles with abusive relationships and the trials she endured. At one point, Leakes writes in a chapter called “What You Won’t Do, You’ll Do For Love,” she took a job as a stripper at an Atlanta club.
“Yes, I was a stripper, a woman who took her clothes off and danced for dollars,” she writes. “Let the judgment ensue. I mean, it’s easy enough to do, right?”
Leakes explains that she had just ended her relationship with the father of her eldest son, Brice, and she was living with her son and a roommate. “My son was in private school, his father wasn’t chipping in for pull-ups or food, I had no job and no money coming in, the rent was past due, and the super told me and my roommate that our condo owner was about to put us out,” she writes. “So I did what I had to do.”
After answering an ad in the newspaper, Leakes nabbed the job at “the most glamorous upscale gentlemen’s club in Georgia” on the spot – though she didn’t have any experience taking off her clothes or dancing in public.
Following a learning curve — and some very lurid details about her costumes and fellow dancers — the Atlanta Housewives star, who performed under the name “Silk,” writes that she came to feel comfortable and powerful on stage. “I felt powerful in front of those men,” she writes. “They were obviously there to see what I had, and I quickly realized that those men weren’t there to make me feel bad about myself.”
“Quite the contrary,” she continues. “They were there to make me feel good.”
Still, Leakes reveals that career as a dancer took a darker turn for a time. She quit the high-profile club after her family heard about her dancing and worked at a seedier establishment. “Men can do some really filthy things in the club,” she writes. “I can tell you this much.”
After quitting her job there, Leakes says she returned to another upscale establishment but eventually met her now-husband, Gregg, who persuaded her to stop dancing. “He was good to me,” she writes PHOENIX – About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday — the latest incident in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president.
Gun-rights advocates say they're exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and protest, while those who argue for more gun control say it could be a disaster waiting to happen.
Phoenix police said the gun-toters at Monday's event, including the man carrying an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder, didn't need permits. No crimes were committed, and no one was arrested.
The man with the rifle declined to be identified but told The Arizona Republic that he was carrying the assault weapon because he could. "In Arizona, I still have some freedoms," he said.
Phoenix police Detective J. Oliver, who monitored the man at the downtown protest, said police also wanted to make sure no one decided to harm him.
"Just by his presence and people seeing the rifle and people knowing the president was in town, it sparked a lot of emotions," Oliver said. "We were keeping peace on both ends."
Last week, during Obama's health care town hall in Portsmouth, N.H., a man carrying a sign reading "It is time to water the tree of liberty" stood outside with a pistol strapped to his leg.
"It's a political statement," he told The Boston Globe. "If you don't use your rights, then you lose your rights."
Police asked the man to move away from school property, but he was not arrested.
Fred Solop, a Northern Arizona University political scientist, said the incidents in New Hampshire and Arizona could signal the beginning of a disturbing trend.
"When you start to bring guns to political rallies, it does layer on another level of concern and significance," Solop said. "It actually becomes quite scary for many people. It creates a chilling effect in the ability of our society to carry on honest communication."
He said he's never heard of someone bringing an assault weapon near a presidential event. "The larger the gun, the more menacing the situation," he said.
Phoenix was Obama's last stop on a four-day tour of western states, including Montana and Colorado.
Authorities in Montana said they received no reports of anyone carrying firearms during Obama's health care town hall near Bozeman on Friday. About 1,000 people both for and against Obama converged at a protest area near the Gallatin Field Airport hangar where the event took place. One person accused of disorderly conduct was detained and released, according to the Gallatin Airport Authority.
Heather Benjamin of Denver's Mesa County sheriff's department, the lead agency during Obama's visit there, said no one was arrested.
Arizona is an "open-carry" state, which means anyone legally allowed to have a firearm can carry it in public as long as it's visible. Only someone carrying a concealed weapon is required to have a permit.
Paul Helmke, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said people should not be allowed to bring guns to events where Obama is.
"To me, this is craziness," he said. "When you bring a loaded gun, particularly a loaded assault rifle, to any political event, but particularly to one where the president is appearing, you're just making the situation dangerous for everyone."
He said people who bring guns to presidential events are distracting the Secret Service and law enforcement from protecting the president. "The more guns we see at more events like this, there's more potential for something tragic happening," he said.
Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan said armed demonstrators in open-carry states such as Arizona and New Hampshire have little impact on security plans for the president.
"In both cases, the subject was not entering our site or otherwise attempting to," Donovan said. "They were in a designated public viewing area. The main thing to know is that they would not have been allowed inside with a weapon Emagine Canton
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