Photo: dpa/Invision/Jordan Strauss
At 18, New Jersey native David Copperfield was once the youngest magician in the United States Magicians Association. In the ’80s he became a very famous television magician in all the silliness of the medium. Because “communal madness ceases to be madness and becomes magic,” as Novalis already knew without ever having turned on a television. First Copperfield made sports cars disappear, then airplanes and finally even the Great Wall of China. Critics accused him of a certain mechanics: the medium does the tricks, not the person.
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There was nothing original about it, it was just what was technically possible, consistently commercialized. Just as David Kotkin didn’t invent his stage name (a quote from Charles Dickens), he invented his television magic. Douglas Henning celebrated success with this in the 1970s. He came from the hippie movement and made tigers and elephants disappear. Then he became a yogi pilot, went to the guru in India and sold his ideas, rights and devices to Copperfield. He just had to improve on these tricks to win the Grammy 21 times. When he was in a relationship with Claudia Schiffer, one of the most famous models of her time, people wondered who benefited more. Today he lives on stage in Las Vegas, so to speak.
If everything is supposed to be possible on television, those who work there as stars often believe that this also applies to them. More than a dozen women are now accusing Copperfield of sexual assault and violence over several decades, as the Guardian reports. Some say they were under 18. Three women accuse Copperfield of drugging them. The Guardian relies on interviews with more than a hundred people and on police and court files. All the women say they met Copperfield through his work. And this work requires him to deny everything.
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