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Tag: rumors
We’re All Making The Woody Allen Scandal Worse

We’re All Making The Woody Allen Scandal Worse

My absolute favorite tabloid newspaper headline ever appeared in something called the Weekly World News: “3-Breasted Gal Joins Clinton as His New Intern.” I still have a copy somewhere. Supposedly, the former president hired the “three-bosomed bombshell” after Hillary got caught cuddling with a space alien.

Alas, the more colorful supermarket tabloids are on the way out, victims of the Internet age, along with theoretically more serious publications like Vanity Fair and TheNew York Times. Titillating gossip about the sexual sins of movie stars, TV celebrities, athletes and politicians has been replaced by impassioned brawls about their moral fitness on social media.

Woody Allen, genius or pervert? Mia Farrow, mother of the century or virago? Dylan Farrow, victim then or victim now? And by whom? Almost everybody’s got an opinion, and it says here that nobody knows what they’re talking about. Sometimes it appears that the hardest words in the English language must be “I don’t know.”

Slate’s legal affairs correspondent Dahlia Lithwick put it best: “in the Court of Public Opinion there are no rules of evidence, no burdens of proof, no cross-examinations, and no standards of admissibility. There are no questions and also no answers….[it’s] what we used to call villagers with flaming torches. It has no rules, no arbiter, no mechanism at all for separating truth from lies.”

Journalism 101: Anybody can say anything about anybody else. That doesn’t mean it belongs in TheNew York Times. I question the professional ethics of Nicholas Kristof’s using his column to intervene in a friend’s brutal family dispute where he admittedly has no idea what happened. It’s a 20-year-old charge that was investigated and dropped. There’s no new evidence. The statute of limitations has run out. Other than revenge, what’s the point?

It’s an online rite of Dionysian celebrity sacrifice; a 21st-century pagan ritual, although not without its entertainment value. Previous to the Internet, who’d have known how many seers, augurs, necromancers and mind-readers live among us? Innocent or guilty? Let’s get out the Ouija board, throw the I-Ching, and fetch the dunking stool from the barn. Bind the witch and throw him in the pond. If he floats, we’ll hang him.

Comment lines can be amazing. Show me an entry beginning “As a board certified child psychiatrist,” and it’s 20 to 1 what’s coming: a few hundred words of factually-challenged speculation followed by an online diagnosis and a guilty verdict. Have Woody Allen’s films featured “a steady theme of a male protagonists finding love with a younger woman?” (Unlike, of course, Clint Eastwood’s.)

Very well then, he must be a pedophile.

News flash, frigid gentlewomen of the jury: ALL straight men find 19 year-old women desirable. They just don’t want to make fools of themselves.

I once knew a business tycoon in his fifties who dated a teenager. What on earth did they talk about, asked an incredulous friend?

“High school football,” he said.

None of which makes it OK to run off with your lover’s adopted daughter at any age. Out in the boondocks where I live, people get shot for that stuff.

In the abstract, there’s undeniable truth on both sides. The sexual victimization of children is far more common than many wish to believe, and victims are too often silenced. However, purely false or imaginary abuse charges have become the tactical nuclear weapons of divorce and custody fights everywhere. If Mia Farrow expected to win new converts, she should have left out the bit about Frank Sinatra fathering Woody Allen’s legal son—the one he’s been paying child support to all along.

Floated in Vanity Fair, the story generated headlines, but not credibility. And no, that’s not “mansplaining,” “slut-shaming,” or any of the other cant terms used to silence skeptics. Even in the Court of Public Opinion, it’s inadvisable to admit falsifying something so elemental. Could Farrow really imagine that would lend support to her allegations against the creep?

Or would it merely strengthen the conclusions of the investigators at the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of the Yale-New Haven Hospital? “Dylan’s statements were not true but were made up by an emotionally vulnerable child who was caught up in a disturbed family,” or “that [she] was coached or influenced by her mother.”

“Disturbed family” is putting it gently. I wouldn’t let those two adopt a kitten. To me, the most affecting part of the whole thing was Kristof’s description of the now 28-year-old woman “curled up in a ball on her bed, crying hysterically” when she heard of Woody Allen being given a Golden Globe award. Somebody should give her Elizabeth Smart’s terrific book on healing from sexual trauma. Whatever happened to Dylan at age 7, obsessive dwelling on it has done her incalculable harm.

Meanwhile, regardless of good intentions, we feuding voyeurs and sadists are only making everything worse.

Photo: edavidove via Flickr

Did Gay Rumors Propel Perry’s Evangelical Outreach?

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a reputation for hard-right positions on social issues, especially gay rights — and a public record to match. But with rumors emerging from Texas political circles (on both sides of the aisle) that Perry himself is gay, the Republican front-runner’s aggressive pitch to the evangelical community may be seen as an attempt to discredit those rumors — or distract attention from their possible substance.

While speaking to evangelicals last weekend, the long-married Perry was asked whether anything embarrassing about his personal life could emerge over the course of a campaign. Both that loaded question and his reply — “I can assure you that there is nothing in my life that will embarrass you if you decide to support me for president” — sounded to some like code for a more direct exchange about which team Perry is on, so to speak.

Perry’s anti-gay policies and rhetoric are quite consistent — back in 2003, he voiced vehement disagreement with the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that overturned the state’s archaic sodomy laws. Like many conservative politicians who bray their hostility, however, Perry is suspected in the Texas gay community of overcompensating for his own insecurities.

John Aravosis, a leading gay blogger, stated those suspicions bluntly on his website, Americablog, by recalling the case of former Bush political aide and Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman, who spent years denying and evading questions about his sexual orientation.

What [Perry] means is, “I’m not gay.” But he didn’t want to say that, and the press reporting on the story, from the Texas Tribune to Politico, didn’t want to tell you that that was what Perry was talking about.

Gotta say, the coyness involved, all around, reminds me of the way former GOP party chair Ken Mehlman, and the media, used to coyly deal with rumors about him being gay. And we all know how that turned out (Ken is now openly gay).

GOP Missouri Politician’s Creepy Obsession With A Stripper

It’s an age-old story: Politician meets stripper, stripper talks to media, politician denies entire thing. Now, a prominent Tea Party member is finding himself in boiling water over his sketchy relations with a former Penthouse Pet and stripper.

Missouri Lt. Governor Peter Kinder, who plans to run for governor in 2012, is scrambling to denounce rumors that he behaved inappropriately with Tammy Chapman while she was a stripper.

According to Chapman’s interview with the Riverfront Times, Kinder was obsessed with her 16 years ago while she was working at the Diamond Cabaret in Sauget, Illinois. The rising politician became a regular, visiting Chapman twice a week and bringing her letters and baked goods — evidently following the adage that the way to a stripper’s heart is through her stomach. Despite Kinder’s “sweet” attempts to woo Chapman, the stripper refused to attend political functions with him in his hometown, Cape Girardeau. But soon the politician’s infatuation took a turn for the sleazy:

“He became very aggressive with me,” she says. “I couldn’t tolerate what he was making me do.”

Chapman alleges that while she gave the state senator private dances, he would grab her by the shoulders and aggressively try to force her head into his lap. “He’d pull me down to his groin — really, really hard, to the point that it hurt me,” she says. Alarmed by his conduct and the letters he was writing, she told him not to come in any more. “I was willing to give up the money he gave me,” she says simply.

Even then, he’d visit. “He would show up and sit there and just ogle me,” Chapman recalls.

The visits and brownies eventually died off, and Chapman didn’t see Kinder for years. Most recently, the pair ran into each other at Verlin’s Bar and Grill — a joint known for its “pantsless parties.” Even though the two had long since ceased regular contact, Kinder invited Chapman to move into his apartment, which is paid for by his campaign committee. Chapman, who is a lesbian, declined. She says she’s been speaking to the media because she is disgusted that Kinder “uses his political business card to get women.”

Kinder responded to the reports with a statement released via his campaign, saying, “Like most people I am not proud of every place I have been, but this woman’s bizarre story is not true.”

But meanwhile, Missouri Republicans are raising eyebrows and questioning whether someone with such a tumultuous personal past is the ideal gubernatorial candidate.

True, Chapman was never married, so this isn’t another case of infidelity. But that doesn’t make the story any less creepy.

Aspiring politicians should take note: Think with the head on your shoulders, and keep your hands to yourself. Also, remember that you can’t woo a stripper with brownies.