Magician David Copperfield is facing allegations of drugging women before sexual encounters, groping women during live performances, and behaving inappropriately with women who were significantly younger than him — including under 18 — in a new investigative piece in The Guardian.
The story contains allegations from 16 women, spanning four decades, from the 1980s to 2014. Over half of those women said they were under 18 at the time of the alleged incidents, with the two youngest victims claiming they were 15 at the time (though there was no evidence to suggest Copperfield was aware of their ages when they met).
One of those 15-year-olds, identified as Carla (not her real name), said Copperfield “groomed” her for more than two years after he gave her his phone number following a 1991 show. The magician allegedly called her at home often and sent her cards and gifts, including one, which Carla received when she was 16, that said: “In 2 years I will be back.”
He was huge in the 80’s and 90’s amd did some big scale acts like disappearing a whole bridge and stuff like that.
One of the most convincing tricks he pulled off was transporting two people from the stage to what looked like a believable beach. Totally fooled me (but I was a kid when I watched it).
Edit: I started to figure out that something was amiss soon after, because every single one of the supposedly “random” people he invited on stage to do his tricks with (usually by throwing plastic balls into the audience) wore incredibly “inoffensive” and poorly fitted clothes. At some point, I was able to spot which people he would end up picking from a mile away even before he had done so.
I never understood those. It’s always camera trickery and mirrors. At least with the stage performances there are real people in the room with a full field of vision.
I saw a Penn Jillette interview a long time ago where he explained that quite a few other magicians fake their recorded stage performances. They’ll perform a simpler trick, get the audience reactions, and then use camera trickery to make the trick look far more impressive for TV. This was in the context of him claiming that he absolutely doesn’t do that.
For what it’s worth, he claimed he never used camera tricks in his specials.
Of course, he’s under no obligation to tell the truth.
When he says camera trickery he means that he doesn’t edit anything. when I say camera trickery I mean that the camera must be at a certain angle for the trick to work. If he has a mirror for example and the camera moves a step to the right, the mirror is suddenly not aligned properly to my field of view and the illusion doesn’t work.
The hobbits in Lord of the Rings is an excellent example. Nothing is edited in the shots but it relies on a very specific focal length in the camera and carefully planned forced perspective. It’s impressive and a technical feat but it not “magic” like card tricks are magic.