Vanity Fair featured an intimate profile of Al Sharpton this week that delved into the reverend’s looks, lifestyle, and love of President Barack Obama.
Here are six excerpts that were too close for comfort.
1) It’s early morning, and sunlight streams through the floor-to-ceiling windows of Al Sharpton’s sleek Upper West Side living room. Sharpton is on the phone, pacing back and forth in his navy-blue velour slippers. His girlfriend of six years, Aisha McShaw, a 37-year-old fashion designer and consultant, is in the back room. She drops in to say hello, resplendent in an orange pantsuit by Kimora Lee Simmons.
2) For the sermon, Sharpton wore dark-blue clerical robes over his suit, and, as he stood on the raised, intricately carved limestone pulpit, looking down at the congregation, he seemed, for Al Sharpton, restrained, a little uncomfortable.
3) It’s all so peaceful—the light streaming into his study, the television off, the phones silent. Sharpton, in an open-necked blue shirt, without his buttoned-up suit jacket and silk tie, looks relaxed and calm. Which in itself is striking. There was a time when he seemed engulfed by rage—or at least the theater of rage.
4) Obama had southern-fried chicken and collard greens; Sharpton drank tea—he had already embarked on his austere diet. (Two pieces of whole-wheat toast for breakfast and dinner; salad, two hard-boiled eggs, and a banana for lunch.)
5) It is late November and Sharpton is seated at his giant mahogany desk at NAN’s corporate headquarters. His head is resting against a blue blanket folded over the back of his chair, the blanket given to guests at Obama’s second inauguration.
6) What keeps Sharpton up at night is a great fear, he says, that everything it took so much sweat and blood and sacrifice to achieve will be taken away. First he worries about an America without Barack Obama."
The article was inspired by The New Republic's dive into a similarly strange 2013 profile of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin by New York Magazine.