This Boston Phoenix Photo Gets More Awkward with Age

This photo is a bit too real.

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There’s really no way the Boston Phoenix could have known that Douglas Rodrigues, the chef at Clio in the Back Bay, would get arrested and subsequently fired for allegedly stabbing a guy in the leg just days before their story about “Boston’s new culinary muscle” hit newsstands with this photo of Rodrigues looking like this:

The headline, which runs on the cover on print but accompanies the photo of Rodrigues on the web, makes things more awkward: “Fresh Blood,” it reads. (The Phoenix has prominently appended an update to their online version of the original piece.)

Rodrigues was, until this week, the newly promoted chef de cuisine at Clio. Sunday night, according to Back Bay Patch, officers arrived at The Crossroads bar to find a victim soaked with blood and slipping into unconsciousness. The reported cause of the stabbing makes it sound kind of accidental:

A witness told officers that she was talking to the suspect about how she should carry a knife for self-defense. The witness said that she did not know how to open a folding knife. The suspect then showed her how to open the knife and how to make a stabbing motion. While demonstrating the stabbing motion, the suspect stabbed the victim in the thigh, just above the knee. Officers arrested Douglas Rodrigues of 358 Commonwealth Avenue and charged him with assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon.

Those who works in magazines (like all of us here at Boston) worry constantly about this kind of thing—some crucial fact or news event changing a story between the time you send a publication to the printer and the time readers actually see it. The Phoenix, to their credit, reacted nimbly, reporting on the stabbing on their site by re-running the photo alongside the headline, “This is not the knife that ex-Clio chef Douglas Rodrigues allegedly used to stab a guy last weekend.” The Phoenix’s Carly Carioli even picked out the quotes in the story that read most awkwardly in retrospect. None of them are particularly cringe-inducing but Rodrigues did tell the reporter:

I’m kind of a live wire. I’m not consistent, and people can’t really read me most of the time. As soon as you think I’m some hard-ass prick, I’ll go soft on you.

Carioli reports that according to a Clio rep, Rodrigues’s firing did, in fact, have something to do with “the knife incident.” No kidding. [h/t Universal Hub]