Can we really be surprised when rich and powerful men are accused of sexual abuse?
There’s nothing new but the details about what the Times journalists uncovered about Russell Brand in their investigative report published this weekend. We’ve been through this so many times, the story finally uncovered of a rich or powerful or celebrated man being accused of sexual abuse for years or decades. Russell Brand says all of his relationships were absolutely always consensual.
That’s the first piece of the familiar story – that they got away with it for years because one of the forms inequality takes is inequality of voice – the voice with which you say what’s happened, the voice that’s listened to and believed and respected, the voice that determines what happens.
Another utterly familiar bit is all the people claiming there’s something suspicious about victims not reporting “until now”, a complaint always launched with strategic obliviousness to how often women reporting sexual harassment, rape, domestic violence and other abuse set themselves up for more abuse. From Anita Hill testifying about Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment in 1991 to Christine Blasey Ford reporting long-ago assaults by Brett Kavanaugh to Amber Heard even hinting at domestic violence in her marriage, women who speak up too often get punished. Blasey Ford had to go into hiding because of death threats.
“Why didn’t they report?” say people who are exactly why they don’t report: because of people like them looking to attack and discredit victims when they do. And because abuse charges have to be reported to the police, who are often incompetent, biased, corrupt or abusers themselves. Police have sky-high incidents of domestic violence in many places and there’s enough evidence of police racism to give non-white victims good reason to doubt the police are there to help. In London, Sarah Everard was abducted while walking home one night in March 2021, by a Metropolitan police officer looking for any woman convenient to rape and murder.
Women who gathered to protest that horrific rape and murder were roughed up by the same police force and some were arrested. In 2016 an Oklahoma policeman who preyed on Black women was sentenced to 263 years for raping 13 known victims, though at least he was apprehended only six months into his crimes. A New Orleans policeman pleaded guilty last year to grooming and sexually abusing the 14-year-old rape victim he was supposed to help. Too many domestic violence homicides take place after police ignored victims’ pleas for help and warnings they were facing murder. The police are too often part of the problem, not the solution.
Furthermore those few rape cases that make it to court often result in exposure, danger, shaming and months to years of torment in the legal system for victims, as is made clear in accounts such as Chanel Miller’s scorchingly brilliant memoir of her long ordeal after the Stanford swimmer sexually assaulted her. That case resulted in a sentence so light many watchers were outraged and a recall drive was launched against the judge. A tiny percentage of these cases result in convictions, and that too has been so widely discussed in recent years that those who don’t acknowledge it have likewise chosen willful ignorance. A lot of men who have been found guilty of sexual abuse or domestic violence, the rapper Chris Brown among them, are still getting lucrative contracts to perform and promote products. So it’s not hard to understand why Brand’s alleged victims didn’t report earlier.
But there is a lot of evidence that insiders in the fields in which Brand worked knew about the allegations, that women warned each other against him, and that too is an old story we’ve heard again and again. One of the most chilling parts of the Times account is of the 16-year-old who says she got sexually involved with Brand and says he eventually sexually assaulted and abused her; on one occasion, she reportedly said, the taxi driver knew the address she was going to and begged her not to go in. If this is true, even the taxi driver knew.
The Brand story surfaced at the same time as another celebrity rape story, or rather the story of how Ashton Kutcher wrote a letter to the judge praising his fellow TV star Danny Masterson after he’d been convicted of raping two women. It’s worth remembering Masterson got away with rape for two decades before the consequences came, though one of the victims reported the assault in 2004, she says in her victim statement.
More and more I see rape as an act demonstrating the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness to stop, to exert jurisdiction over her own body, to have her words, including “no”, mean something, and that powerlessness continues after when she’s disbelieved or threatened or forced into an NDA. That power and powerlessness are eroticized in the mainstream as well as porn and are what boys are taught to aspire to by the virulent online subculture of creeps like Andrew Tate (who rushed to Brand’s defense, but being defended by Tate – currently facing charges of rape, human trafficking, and sexually exploiting women in Romania – in such matters is an indictment in itself).
“I can honestly say that no matter where we were, or who we were with, I never saw my friend be anything other than the guy I have described,” Kutcher declared, and lots of people on social media repeated Kutcher’s delusion, that the person they see –even if it’s just the person onstage or in the movie – is the whole person and there are no other sides or secrets. One of the most obvious things in the world is that abusers are usually strategic: wife-beaters generally don’t beat their wives in front of people who’d stop them or send them to jail; child molesters are extraordinarily crafty in isolating their victims, hiding their crimes and terrorizing those victims out of speaking up; rapists mostly work at both hiding their crimes and picking victims they think they can get away with raping. You have to be an idiot not to know that too many people treat the powerless one way and the powerful another way, and a lot of powerful and privileged people are that idiot.
“Victims of sexual abuse have been historically silenced, and the character statement I submitted is yet another painful instance of questioning victims who are brave enough to share their experiences,” Kutcher wrote in a letter resigning under pressure because of his previous letter, from the board of a non-profit addressing child trafficking. “This is precisely what we have all worked to reverse over the last decade,” he continued except that on this occasion he was apparently working to perpetuate it instead. So were a lot of others. They still are.
So we just bypass the legal system altogether and go for trial by media; accusation equals guilt? Not one suggestion how to improve the system.
The alleged victims don't seem all the powerless to me in this case; anonymous claims of past crimes are believed implicitly and actions taken based on those claims without any evidence other than the claims themselves (the only evidence that has been provided is one accuser had a record of going to a rape crisis centre, but I haven't seen details of that other than it happened).
The powerful get away with all kinds of shit the powerless don't. It's odd this is the only kind of case where they get annoyed enough to take up their pens....no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party...So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin.
Re: Rebecca Solnit (supposed source of the term 'mansplaining') goes to bat for trial by media
The awful 'Alice' has been 'femisplaining' again... she does it so well and how brave she sounds, alone against the massed phalanx of the patriarchy!
This time her... agenda, sorry, that can't be correct can it? No, 'Alias' is arguing for a fundamental and massive change to the laws about the age of consent. She calls it 'staggerd'. I'd call it... staggering, that is the logic and implications.
According to this sage-like woman, there should be be age categories, or bands, for 'appropriate' sexual relations between men and women, girls and boys and all, I suppose the rest of the gender alphabet soup? Who the #### decides what's 'appropriate' or not. My wife told me she has sex when she was 14 with a twenty year old guitar player. Even at that age she could roll massive joints.
'Alice' in wonderland? i
Re: Rebecca Solnit (supposed source of the term 'mansplaining') goes to bat for trial by media
What is 'femisplaining'? It's when a pious and dogmatic feminist, says something incredibly stupid, but still expects people, risking excommunication from polite, lefty/liberal society, to take them... seriously.
Re: Rebecca Solnit (supposed source of the term 'mansplaining') goes to bat for trial by media
'We’ve been through this so many times, the story finally uncovered of a rich or powerful or celebrated man being accused of sexual abuse for years or decades.' - Oh, so because it sounds a bit like other times when men turned out to be guilty, that means that Brand too must be guilty? I hope Solnit has never been on a jury.
Nice orwellian touch that..replace 'patronising' with 'mansplaining' and you subtly move the dividing line from from where it should be..between the social patrons and everyone else, and and place the line right down the middle of the workers.
By odd coincidence id politics always seems to draw the battle lines in the middle of workers..
I think you put that very well....nm
Posted by Keith-264 on September 20, 2023, 7:30 pm, in reply to "Re: Mansplaining"
nmClio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Good observation. nm
Posted by Ken Waldron on September 20, 2023, 8:22 pm, in reply to "Re: Mansplaining"
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Excellent one. Nm
Posted by Shyaku on September 23, 2023, 4:26 am, in reply to "Re: Mansplaining"
..
Blumenthal educating a shitlib on the Brand baloney
Huh, v weird line of questioning from BJG, a distraction from the main point and she wouldn't let it go. Don't know if she was playing devil's advocate but usually I would expect better. Obviously demonetisation has a chilling, censorious effect even if content isn't outright deleted. Probably Brand has many other sources of income, but with 65m viewers (if I remember rightly) that's going to be a big hit, and clearly unjust when based on allegations untested in a court of law. Then she kept trying to get Max to say what would be appropriate intervention from a social media platform if allegations were proven. WTF? Why would anyone want to give them that kind of power? They should only be able to intervene in straightforward cases of criminality - in the content itself, not what happens offline - otherwise it's none of their f*ing business! Gray is enabling the thought police with this kind of approach. Thankfully Blumenthal got back on track and made the main important points.
Blumenthal made the point that “he will lose listeners if he is demonetized” but I did not really understand this point and he did not seem to elaborate.
God, Blumenthal is articulate, and the female presenter is excellent also. Nm
on September 20, 2023, 2:46 pm