In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

The Shit List

Jill

So a commenter in the Chris Brown thread just pointed out that Janet Jackson was apparently banned from the Grammys a few years ago because of her nip slip at the Super Bowl. Two which my response is twofold: (1) What the holy fuck; and (2) Aren’t you SO GLAD that the term “nip slip” has left the general lexicon? Me too.

But really, Grammys? An extra half-inch of titty is “HELLO NO!” but a dude beats the shit out of his girlfriend and the Grammys are the victim?

Anyway, Chris Brown is the worst, but the worst thing about people who are the worst? There are so many other people who are also the worst that I didn’t even know about. And as soon as you write about someone who is The Worst, someone else is like, “Well what about X person who is equally terrible or maybe even WORSE? Why aren’t you writing about them?” To which I say, well, it was the Grammys and Chris Brown was right there on stage and so therefore it was timely, but there’s no reason to exclude mention of other Worsts. Some of them we’ve covered. Like Charlie Sheen. And Mel Gibson. And Roman Polanski. And Woody Allen.

But damn there are worsts I didn’t even know where worsts until today. Like Michael Fassbener? I don’t even really know who he is, but fuck him. And apparently I’m the only person on earth who didn’t know about this Sean Penn business, maybe because I was like four when it happened, or maybe because the entertainment industry just sweeps these things under the rug and looks the other way. And I’m sure there are so many other people who are equally The Worst. So let’s make a list, yeah?

273 thoughts on The Shit List

  1. Sean Connery- Saying a wife needs to be slapped around a little

    Terrence Howard — For Domestic Abuse of his ex-wife in 2009 – Of which included stalking, assaulting, harassment, etc… But got off…

    Only to name two. The list is long

  3. I want to put Glen Campbell on the list, for breaking out Tanya Tucker’s two front teeth back in the day. Hell, between him and Chris Brown, last night was just full of evidence that there’s nothing men can do that is too much for the Grammys.

  4. Terrence Howard — For Domestic Abuse of his ex-wife in 2009 – Of which included stalking, assaulting, harassment, etc… But got off…

    Oh no… I had no idea. 🙁

    Fuck them for-fucking-ever for banning Janet Jackson at all. What the fuck. The shit that rained down on her over that was such stupid, racist, sexist bullshit. RARRGH. I had forgotten and now I’m riled again.

    Gee, I wonder what Janet Jackson and Rihanna have in common that leads people to shame them for every bloody little thing.

  5. As mentioned in the other thread – Axl Rose.. Both Erin Everly and Stephanie Seymour named hiM as an abusive douchefuck, plus he wrote the lyrics for One In A Million, so yeah’ he’s a huge fuckwad. (trigger warning on that link for racist/homophobic lyrics)

  8. I was hugely disappointed to find out that Isaac Brock (of Modest Mouse fame) was accused of rape. Twice.

    What? That is seriously fucking disappointing.

  10. Nicholas Cage – April 2011 accused of Domestic Violence

    the heavily intoxicated actor engaged in a violent argument with his wife, Alice Kim, in a tattoo parlor and then on the street, during which he allegedly pushed her, punched a few cars and dared police to arrest him in a scene that could have come from his Oscar-winning 1995 film “Leaving Las Vegas.”
    http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1662158/nicolas-cage-domestic-violence-legal-problems.jhtml

    Sugar Ray Leonard – Reportedly beat his wife frequently

    Wesley Snipes – Reportedly beat his ex-girlfriend– IIRC–

    Tommy Lee — Need I say more

    Alex Baldwin

  11. Joe DiMaggio – beat the shit out of Marilyn Monroe after she filmed the subway grating scene in Seven-Year Itch, calling her a “whore.” Apparently he had not been aware that she was a movie star whose fame and earning power depended on her sex appeal before he married her–oh, no, sorry, my mistake, he’s just a woman-abusing douchebag.

    Mariano Rivera – named as one of the Yankee players who repeatedly harassed and played cruel homophobic practical jokes on a gay clubhouse employee.

    I’m sure I’ll think of more, unfortunately, over the next few days.

  13. Anjelica Huston – backed up Roman Polanski, and noted that his 13-year-old victim had been so “sullen” and untalkative when he brought her back to Jack Nicholson’s house.

    Ike Turner – I don’t really need to elaborate, do I?

    Phil Spector – nor on him, right?

    Sonny Bono – or him?

  14. Ugh, I didn’t even know about half of these guys! Except, oddly enough, I did hear about Isaac Brock, and the indie music press did do its best to bury that story. Depressing.

    Mel Gibson, though. He really is The Worst.

  16. But really, Grammys? An extra half-inch of titty is “HELLO NO!” but a dude beats the shit out of his girlfriend and the Grammys are the victim?

    God, that is fucking horrifying. I wish I had something more eloquent to say, but… ugh. I think one of the grossest parts of our entertainment culture is the idea that seeing someone naked is horrifying and scarring and think of the children! but scenes of murder, torture, rape (unless nudity is involved, then it’s off limits again) and abuse are ‘eh, whatever.’ I’m not particularly puritanical- bad feminist confession, Pulp Fiction is one of my all-time favorite movies- but the double standard says something nasty about our priorities.

    This particular bit of hypocrisy seems to me like a natural extension of the idea that sex or nudity are horrifying, but violence of all kinds is normal, just applied to real life instead of television.

    Tiger Beatdown has the details on Brock.

    So I don’t know anything about Tiger Beatdown and googling/searching their site didn’t help (I seriously looked), but I really, really hope that it’s not referring to Tiger Woods, because that would be not OK at all. I mean, if they’re condemning double standards and domestic violence while endorsing Elin Nordegren, that puts them on roughly the same moral playing field as the Grammys.

  17. Tiger Beatdown is a send-up of the long-standing teen/tween heart-throb magazine, Tiger Beat, and that name long predates Tiger Woods’s coming to prominence.

  18. Mike Tyson. Jim Brown. James Brown. Charlie Sheen. Bing Crosby, who apparently beat his children mercilessly. Sinatra, supposedly. John Lennon, with his first wife and maybe Yoko. OJ Simpson, obviously. A million others.

  20. Thanks EG! I am a pop culture ignoramus (I learned who Whitney Houston was today, to the amusement of all).

  21. Happy to help, Justamblingalong! If you never were a teenage girl (I’m not sure whether or not you were), there’s probably no reason that you’d ever have heard of that magazine anyway…

    I was going to invoke John Lennon as well, and then didn’t have the heart to. Thanks for doing it, Donna. I never knew about James Brown. I wish I still didn’t.

  22. Sorry, I liked the rhyme and didn’t want to use “wardrobe malfunction.”

    Also it’s Fassbender, there is a typo up there. He was Magneto in “X-Men: First Class” and was also in “Inglourios Basterds.”

    Others:
    Gary Oldman – beat his wife with a phone while holding one of their children

    Sean Bean – had several drunken fights with his ex-wife

    Mark Wahlberg – attacked two men while shouting racial slurs

    Christian Bale – assault charges pressed by mother and sister

    Johnny Depp – felt that Polanski was “too old” to be prosecuted and felt the charges were “shady.” Unlike his comments comparing photoshoots to rape, he never apologized.

    Jeremy Irons – thinks sexual harassment is a compliment and that lawsuits about it are silly

    Jonathan Rhys-Meyers – repeatedly screamed racial slurs on a plane

    Bill Murray – beat his wife, told her she was “lucky he didn’t kill her”

    And then there’s Sean Penn, Nic Cage, Mel Gibson, Russell Crowe, Alec Baldwin, Mickey Rourke, Matthew Fox, and Michael Richards.

    While digging through my Tumblr notes to find this list, I saw multiple people saying that what Chris Brown did “wasn’t as bad as” what happened with Janet Jackson because “it wasn’t done on stage.” Just…eugh.

  23. Julian Assange from Wikileaks for raping a woman in Sweden. Kobe Bryant for raping a woman in 2003. Hermain Cain, obviously. Bill Clinton, for numerous incidents of sexual harrassment and probably raping Juanita Broddrick in 1978. Bob Packwood, longtime Republican senator from my home state of Oregon for sexually harrassing or assaulting at least 10 women before the Senate Ethics Committee unanimously recommended he be expelled from the Senate, prompting him to resign (the closest thing to justice that ever happens to these sorts of powerful, sexist douchebags, and even then it happens rarely).

  24. Bela Lugosi was a vicious abuser.

    Paul McCartney was also alleged to have abused his wives.

    Picasso was apparently also a major woman-beater.

  25. I am really having a hard time thinking about how I am going to deal with living in this world where we still KNOW all of these names and all these men are still making money. How radical do we have to get? To I have withdraw from pop culture and celeb culture? The past few days have been really draining, yall.

  26. And these are just the guys we know about.

    If I were a celebrity (especially a dude celebrity), I would be pretty effing pissed about how much this shitty behaviour was reflecting badly on everyone. But the inevitable response every time from all quarters is either “no comment” or apologism. I get that celebrities probably all have serious issues about privacy and don’t want to burn bridges and screw their careers, but christ I would like to see someone speak up every once in a while when this shit goes down and then not immediately backtrack in the face of backlash.

    Any one have any links like that? I’m coming up dry. Well, except maybe Ebert – that dude speaks his mind and usually speaks it damn well.

  27. Don’t want to be a bug in the ointment, and it is a good thing to be aware of and not excuse people who are violent and sexist and racist and apologist, but I do want to make sure we’re being careful to be clear about the purpose of this “Shit List”: This should not be just to spread negativity for its own sake, to hate individuals who once had a rumor written about them on TMZ (which I think we can agree might not be the BBC in terms of journalistic integrity). We are not in most cases directly familiar with any of these individuals or (usually) the circumstances in question, and it’s pretty irrational to say that we “hate” someone because someone once said that that person did something horrible. What matters is how the public reacts to that celebrity and that accusation, because it indicates something about how seriously people in general actually take these distressing actions. The tweets about Chris Brown after the Grammys were horrific; the policy the Grammys has towards Janet Jackson vs. Chris Brown is equally disgusting. What’s awful about this “Shit List” is less the things that these men are said to have done or did do – which, if all 100% true, are definitely very very shitty – but the blase attitude that media outlets and the public at large have towards accusations or confirmed incidences of terrible acts that fall into a general suite of “racism,” “sexism,” “violence against women,” etc.

    Just want to be clear, because it’s easy to get into a vicious circle of negativity for its own sake.

  28. With all due respect Miriam, when a woman comes forward and says a man beat her or raped her, I will believe her, unless there is some incredibly compelling reason not to (basically the only reason I can think of is if she has a long, recorded history of lying and deception). Yeah, if it’s just something from a gossip site with no source that’s likely bullshit. But all the things I cited in my post, and most of the things people here have cited, are based off women who came forward and said “this guy beat me,” “this guy raped me.” Just because these guys are celebrities don’t make the accusations any less credible. Rape and domestic violence accusations are almost always truthful.

  29. This should not be just to spread negativity for its own sake

    Why not? What’s wrong with spending some time admitting and fully exploring exactly how much the world sucks?

    To I have withdraw from pop culture and celeb culture?

    I don’t see why. It wouldn’t help anything and it would just isolate you and deprive you of at least a few cultural works that might be meaningful to you.

  34. @LotusBen Julian Assange’s trial is still going on so he is still an “alleged” rapist for now as far as we know.

    But for what it’s worth, i’ve actually had interactions with the guy on more than a few occasions, and he was kinda a shady fuck when it came to women. But a claim and suspicion alone does not the truth make so, I offer that in aims of keeping the shit list accurate.

    also some mild contributions…

    – Many people don’t know that Lorena Bobbitt was beaten, raped and sodomized repeatedly by her husband BEFORE she chopped his dick off.
    – I haven’t seen OJ Simpson on this list yet (even forgoing the controversy with the murder trial, dude was for sure guilty of OTHER DV offenses)
    – I’m kinda surprised nobody has brought up R Kelly yet
    – Amy Winehouse publicly admitted to beating her husband while drunk or on drugs several times
    – Darryl Strawberry beat his wife and pointed a gun in her face

    … and for those of you “shocked” about James Brown… the man got famous for a song called “This is a Man’s World” for fucks sake, comon folks 😉

  35. In Janet jackson’s case it goes beyond race and gender. I think her last name has a lot to do with it also.

  37. And Eminem, for producing a record that contained nine songs that talk about killing women (The Marshall Mathers LP), and for abusing a mock-up doll of his ex-wife Kim on stage with her in the audience (she attempted suicide after the show).

  38. We are not in most cases directly familiar with any of these individuals or (usually) the circumstances in question, and it’s pretty irrational to say that we “hate” someone because someone once said that that person did something horrible.

    Respectfully, I think you’re missing the point. There are a huge range of accusations and allegations represented here, and yes, they run the gamut from vague, nebulous rumors to people who were actually convicted and imprisoned for rape, but the point isn’t to launch a crusade against everyone on this page (though if people want to, I won’t stand in their way); the point is that there are an unbelievable number of powerful, famous men who are getting away with awful crimes against women. I mean, I agree with you that some of the accusations which were mentioned here seem more gossip-magish than others, but just from a cold-hearted statistics point of view, that still means a vast, vast number of assaults and rapes are being committed by people who are subsequently uncritically accepted by our pop culture.

    With all due respect Miriam, when a woman comes forward and says a man beat her or raped her, I will believe her, unless there is some incredibly compelling reason not to (basically the only reason I can think of is if she has a long, recorded history of lying and deception).

    I will always believe my friends, male or female, if they tell me they have been assaulted. I will typically not make any judgements about someone I don’t know accusing someone else I don’t know, because I typically don’t have the evidence in front of me, and because guessing right doesn’t do very much good, while guessing wrong would make me feel like crap (this is an emotional, not a logical, decision on my part). I also know from experience that the type of sexual crimes which get enough media exposure to reach me tend to be tied to other narratives about race/gender/wealth/class.

    Rape and domestic violence accusations are almost always truthful.

    To be more precise, all the studies that I am aware of which were scientifically designed and executed by reputable institutions put the number of false accusations (not unfounded accusations, which is a much broader category MRAs love to cite) somewhere between 2.2% and 8.4%. There’s been almost zero methodologically solid research in this field, though.

  39. I think Michael Jackson deserves a spot on the shit list, too. Whether you agree or disagree, I shouldn’t have to explain why.

    Michael Lohan should be on here, too (he has numerous Domestic Assault charges filed against him. I suppose being Father of the Year helps, too.) As to whether or not he can even be considered a celebrity is up for debate.

  40. Let’s not forget Elvis Presley, Kelsey Grammar, and Rob Lowe (and that last one kills me, because Sam Seaborne is who I grew up wanting to be).

  41. Miles Davis beat up Cicely Tyson.

    Janet Jackson didn’t lay a hand on anybody—and Timberlake might have done it deliberately. It’s okay to beat up a woman but if the kids see a nipple, lock the doors!

  44. ***TRIGGER WARNING FOR SEXUAL ASSAULT***

    Hi dead. . .I thought someone might call me on that. You’re right: Julian Assange is still officially under investigation. In fact, none of the people I mentioned in my comment have been convicted of any crime toward women, and the same goes for most of the people who have been mentioned on this thread. But that doesn’t mean these assholes aren’t rapists or abusers. The court system doesn’t create reality. Reality exists out there. I guess none of us can really be certain about something unless we experienced it firsthand. But personally, I have far more faith in what rape and domestic violence survivors say happened to them than what a patriarchal court system ultimately determines through its messed up and unjust procedures. So as far as I’m concerned, Julian Assange is a rapist. I would only amend my original comment in the interest of greater accuracy by saying that he actually raped two women in Sweden in August 2010, one while she was asleep, another by pinning her down and using his greater strength to force her to have sex with him after she revoked consent. So I’m not surprised you were skeeved out by a guy who’s willing to rape two different women within the course of a week.

    Justamblingalong. . .fair enough. Every individual obviously makes different determinations regarding where they’ll believe something and where they’ll suspend judgment. That’s interesting about the studies. I’d be curious to learn more. . .do you have any links?

  45. Whoopi Goldberg defended Mel Gibson, didn’t she?
    Welcome to the shit list, Whoopi, choose your friends more wisely.

    Don’t forget about the people that supported Polanski at some point or another:
    Salman Rushdie, Milan Kundera, Neil Jordan, Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert, Mike Nichols, Diane von Furstenberg, Paul Auster, Pedro Almodovar, Wes Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Monica Bellucci, Stephen Frears, Tilda Swinton, Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Demme, John Landis, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Wim Wenders, among others.

    The list is getting longer and longer, Mr. McCarthy.

  46. Speaking of Whoopi Goldberg and Polanski, she also said that what Polanski did wasn’t “rape rape” (whatever that means) in the course of a convulted and disgusting justification of him on the View back in 2009.

  47. Ugh.. ( I’m saying that a lot in this thread) I just remembered reading that Dave Foley owes a shit-ton in back child support to his kids, support he wasn’t paying even when he was making stupid amounts of money doing Newsradio.

    Really, Dave foley? Et tu?

  48. That’s interesting about the studies. I’d be curious to learn more. . .do you have any links?

    A couple things to note with these studies. First of all, they’re incredibly hard to do well, and a decent number come back saying things like “between 1.5 and 87 percent of rapes accusation we examined were false.” That’s actually a finding from a study done in the early 2000s. Secondly, the assumptions that get made vary widely; in some cheap, poorly done studies, they just count scenarios in which an accuser is eventually convicted of filing a false police report, and in more rigorous studies, they examine individual trials which resulted in a non-guilty verdict for evidence like (for one real-world example) a video tape shown of the accuser in a different city when the alleged assault took place. Even there, though, as you can imagine the standard for what is definitive and what is merely strongly suggestive is controversial, political, and varies widely.

    That said, the best study I’m aware of was conducted by David Lasik in 2005, which found a false reporting rate of about 6%.

    http://vaw.sagepub.com/content/16/12/1318.full.pdf+html

    One final note: this study is pretty clear that it establishes a floor. In other words, in about 6% of cases, they could definitively prove that the allegation was false. The 8.2/8.5/9.1% figures that get used sometimes are all based on taking that 5.9% and then attempting to apply various statistical models based on other crimes to see how many of the accusations that couldn’t be proven false, likely were false anyways. And for a better explanation of that, I need to turn things over to someone with a stronger background in statistics- my knowledge of this is all from a legal angle, not a mathematical one.

  49. Great news but way off topic: Assoc Press just reported that Anoka-Hennepin junked their pro-bullying anti-diversity suicidal school policy in favor of a new policy and guidelines which encourage discussion of any controversial social subject.
    Back on topic: A music industry which lionizes violence, misogyny, and such bands as Skrewdriver, obviously will reward violence against women. They’re suffering dropping sales, piracy which may or may not be protest-based, and can’t or won’t understand that half of their market consists of females, most nonviolent. Give them the buggy-whip treatment and boycott them and their sponsors.

  51. Sports is entertainment, and if there’s anywhere rape and abuse gets swept under the rug, it’s in sports. Since I know boxing history probably as well as anyone here, here’s the list of fighters that come to mind:

    Former Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis (beat Lena Horne).
    Former Middleweight Champion Carlos Monzon (murdered one partner by throwing her off a balcony, beat his other wife and several girlfriends, possibly the worst human being in boxing history).
    Former Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson.
    Current pound-for-pound contender and multidivision championFloyd Mayweather Jr. (dishonorable mention to several other Mayweathers; I’m fond of saying that the Gary, Indiana police department has a whole precinct just for domestic violence calls at Mayweather households). Notably, Mayweather jr. blasted Diego Coralles for his partner abuse.
    Former Lightweight and Superfeatherweight Champion Diego Corralles, who spent about a year in prison for beating a partner.
    Former multidivision chamption Oscar De La Hoya, who allegedly was so aggressive with two sex workers that they locked themselves into a room in his hotel suite until he calmed down. I have a backchannel that alerted me to red flags about him years ago.

    I’m sure I’m missing plenty.

  52. Arnold Schwarzenegger. I’m not aware of any domestic stories, but his history of assaulting women is well-documented. Oh excuse me, I mean “groping” because that’s totally not as bad and it lets us make funny nicknames for him too.

    Dennis Rodman also has a long history of DV.

    To throw something positive into this thread, Patrick Stewart has been fairly outspoken about violence against women, having grown up in a home where his father abused his mother. Here is one article he wrote in defense of women’s shelters.

  53. Ted Nugent, for just being a ginormous asshole but more importantly for being appointed legal guardian of a teenage girl so that he could have sex with her. Also, for being a deadbeat dad. The dude is spectacularly disgusting for a whole lot of reasons.

  54. being appointed legal guardian of a teenage girl so that he could have sex with her.

    Holy fuck, what? That does not make it OK or even legal! What the fuck? Words fail me. They actually fail me, and that does not happen often.

  55. I believe that the issue with Julian Assange is that he does not deny the statements that his accusers have made; he simply argues that those statements do not describe rape. He has made the defense (or his lawyers have) that it is not rape to have sex with a woman without a condom if she consented to sex contingent upon a condom, and it is not rape to have sex with a sleeping woman if she engaged in consensual sex with him earlier in the evening.

    So we can actually make the determination for ourselves as to whether Julian Assange raped someone. The question isn’t, do 12 people and a judge agree that it’s okay to have sex with someone without a condom when they consented on the stipulation that a condom be used, and that it’s okay to have sex with someone who is sleeping just because you had sex with them earlier in the evening. The question is, do we think so? Because I think that people who put a lot of thought and research into issues of consent are more likely to have a clear concept of what’s actually wrong than people who just got picked up off the street for jury duty, or a judge, many of whom are older men who got their ideas about what’s sexually okay during the 1970’s.

    I think that having sex with a person without a condom, when they said that they were willing to have sex but only with a condom, is rape.

    I think pinning someone down who is struggling and forcing them into sex is rape.

    I think having sex with a sleeping person is not necessarily rape *if* there is a long-term relationship *and* the sleeping person has previously made it clear, while awake, that they enjoy being woken up by sexual activity… but if either of those two statements aren’t true, it’s rape. (BTW, this is not a hypothetical ‘but what if she really wanted to be forced’ type thing. At the risk of TMI, let me just say that the phenomenon of enthusiastically consenting to and enjoying it when your partner wakes you up via initiating sexual activity is a real thing, and I know this from personal experience, and I’m shutting up now.)

    Also, I believe that if a person consented to a sexual act, the likelihood that they would later on claim they had not, and that it was rape, is very, very low, and if the person is politically aligned with the one they accuse, is friends with them, and did voluntarily have sex with them, the likelihood is almost zero. In other words, “but she willingly had sex with me before” should not be a defense against rape charges; it should be self-incrimination. If she willingly had sex with you before, and admits it, and yet *this* time she says you raped her, how can you possibly imagine she has a motive to lie? She liked you enough to willingly have sex, she admits it so she’s not ashamed of having sex with you, so why’s she charging you with rape? The most logical explanation is, “because you raped her, dipshit.” And the favorite bugaboo of the Left, “conspiracy!”, is bullshit in this case because these women were on Assange’s side, and believed in Wikileaks’ work.

    So I’m pretty sure that I can say, with no doubt in my heart, “Julian Assange raped two women.” He admits it. He just doesn’t admit that what he did was rape. But because, unlike Julian Assange, I do not think that vaginas are morally equivalent to embarrassing state secrets, as something that it is okay to steal or trick away from the people controlling access to them, but are rather human body parts belonging to humans with the human right of bodily integrity and autonomy, *I* understand that the things Assange admits to are rape, and if a bozo who was hired as a judge doesn’t agree with me, that doesn’t change what I understand to be true and correct.

    As for shitty men, I’m surprised no one has mentioned Dominique Strauss-Kahn yet. Or Norman Mailer. Congressman Mark Foley was shitty to young men he had power over, not young women, but making explicit sexual innuendo and overtures to employees when you are a congressperson and they are a page and they are highly uncomfortable with it is wrong regardless of the gender of the target. Congressman Anthony Weiner is an especially disappointing asshole, as is Eliot Spitzer, because they were doing good work and fighting the good fight before they decided to be utterly shitty to women (or, possibly, before they got caught, as it’s possible they were *always* being shitty to women but being more discreet about it.)

    BTW, my mother, who spent half her childhood in New York City and has a huge network of relatives all over Connecticut and downstate New York, knew someone who knew George W. Bush as a teenager, and she says that her friend was raped by W and the family covered it up. Given what an utterly shitty general human being W is, what we know for a fact his family has covered up for him or bailed him out of, and the general principle of “women don’t lie about this shit unless they have an excellent motive for doing so”, I believe it. I’ll admit, though, that friend-of-my-mom third-hand testimony is absolutely useless in any legal sense, so my belief that W is a rapist does have to be qualified with “probably, based on hearsay I have been privy to, but this cannot be legally proven.” Whereas Julian Assange admits to being a rapist, he just disagrees with me that it’s rape to violate a human being’s right to control her level of health risk by having sex with her that can make her sick or pregnant, against her will.

  56. Oh, hey, let’s not forget that the Polanski mass apologia has a precedent in Norman Mailer. Didn’t he FUCKING STAB HIS WIFE ADELE in front of fifty people at a party, only to be accepted with open arms by basically the entire political left, not excluding Steinem, from the 1960s through the 1990s?

  58. And a big questionmark over William Burroughs.

    TW for extreme IPV

    The official version, the one to get him out of trouble with the law, was that he shot his wife by accident while cleaning his pistor or some such shit. The semi-official version, which amounts to recklessness, is that they were doing a “William Tell” stunt where he shot a glass off her head — wild stupidity, if true. But is it true, or did he just plain shoot his wife?

  59. @ Shelly: Steven Tyler did the same thing in the ’70s, “adopting” a teenage girl, and when she became pregnant he coerced her into having an abortion. According to her account, he expressed regret only when he discovered the child would have been a boy. (WARNING: That link goes into some disturbing detail about the relationship and the abortion.)

  60. I was about to say Miles Davis. He abused many women and, IIRC, said as much, and without shame, in his autobiography. Jackson Browne belongs on the list, as does Sugar Ray Leonard.

  61. EG,

    Yeah. If I recall correctly, his rationale was that at least she wouldn’t be out screwing around with other guys and catching STDs.

  62. Pete Townsend of the Who -He used his credit card to get into a kiddie porn site, there was suspicion that although he is a child advocate he went and viewed the site, he is on the UK sexual offender list.

    Richard Hatch – Survivor – He beat his live in partner

  63. Patrick Stewart has been fairly outspoken about violence against women, having grown up in a home where his father abused his mother.

    I remember watching a recorded speech where he owned up to engaging in verbal abuse himself, and expressed contrition. AFAIK, he never begged for/demanded release from responsibility for what he did, unlike some celebs or faux feminist men I could name. He admitted what he did was wrong, was his responsibility, and is clearly making efforts to end the acceptance of such behaviour by society.

    Aside from the X-Men and Star Trek flicks starring him I have, I think I may have to nuke my entire DVD collection in the microwave. Wake me when the celebs flapping their lips about various social and environmental causes start to talk about the abusers in their midst.

  64. Bill Wyman, who started “dating” Mandy Smith while she was only 13, and he was 47. They began fucking the following year. In his memoir, he wrote that although she was only 13, she was “already a woman,” which I can only assume meant she had developed large breasts, because no 13-year-old is a woman. He married her six years later, and they divorced 3 years after that while, if memory serves, she was in the hospital recovering from the anorexia from which she had suffered for years. Because he is a total asshole.

  65. EG,

    Yeah. If I recall correctly, his rationale was that at least she wouldn’t be out screwing around with other guys and catching STDs.

    Oh, well then. He was practically doing her a favor. I mean, you could never catch an STD by having sex with a famous pop/rock/country star who tours a lot and has groupies. It was all about her health. Obviously. Except OH MY GOD NO WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE, YOU TOO, STEVEN TYLER.

  67. I had no idea that Michael Fassbender is an abuser. I liked him in the latest version of Jane Eyre but breaking your girlfriend’s nose? That’s just effed up. Sadly, I know about a lot of the others. What’s really sad is that all of the men (maybe with the exception of Gibson) are still readily accepted in their various fields and also by the public and the media. Just goes to show how much violence against women is still accepted by society.

  69. This is a really informative (and depressingly surprising — I had no idea about many of these men) post. Can I suggest a follow up that similarly crowd sources the names of famous dudes who have been outspoken about combatting IPV and sexual assault? Patrick Stewart, as mentioned, has been great on that front, but it would be a nice palate cleanser (and attempt to restore our collective faith in humanity) to recognize some of the famous men who have been good allies in this area.

  71. mh@#48 – sickening apologism indeed. A rich celebrity uses his wealth to engage in public acts of philanthropy, hence increasing his chances of obtaining a presidential pardon for his sex crime.

    I rarely criticize other lawyers, but I’ll make an exception this case.

  72. JFK, Ted Kennedy, Brett Favre, Mark Chmura, Doug Hutchinson, Anthony Weiner, Henry Miller, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt, Gene Simmons

  74. Gahhh! Since it wasn’t explicitly stated @48 and 68, Jimmy Carter, for pardoning someone for “indiscretions” with a 14 year old.

    Oh, and Nabokov.

  75. can we add “internets celebriteh”? i would want to submit “im gonna videotape me shooting your laptop and post it on the internet because im tired of my 16yo daughter’s immature attitude” dad. apparently, the police did come by his house after they were alerted and shook his hand.

    i dont know about you, but the using the destruction of property to control behaviour is a sign of an abusive personality.

  77. Hey guys, I have an idea: How about pairing a Shit List with an Awesome List – famous men who stand up for women’s rights and stand against a culture of misogyny? I kind of need a tonic for all this depressing stuff. Positive reinforcement FTW!

    I’ll start. How about:

    Jon Hamm: http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/hollywood_feminist_of_the_day_jon_hamm

    Alan Alda: “Alda’s prominence in the enormously successful M*A*S*H gave him a platform to speak out on political topics, and he has been a strong and vocal supporter of women’s rights and the feminist movement.[5] He co-chaired, with former First Lady Betty Ford, the ERA Countdown campaign. In 1976, The Boston Globe dubbed him “the quintessential Honorary Woman: a feminist icon” for his activism on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment. As a liberal and often progressive activist, he has been a target for some political and social conservatives.”

    Eddie Vedder, who is apparently extremely pro-choice

  79. As a long time Steven Tyler fan, I’m so so so sad. Ugh. Ironic when you think of ‘Janie’s got a gun’. Jesus, it makes me sick.

    Also, James Taylor for beating the s*&^ out of Carly Simon.

    BUT….

    Yay for Jon Hamm, Patrick Steward, Alan Alda and Eddie Vedder. Let’s keep THIS list going.

  80. I am so glad Matt Damon isn’t on this list. He is one of the few really good ones, I think. I hope. I will be crushed if someone corrects me.

  81. @LotusBen

    “I have far more faith in what rape and domestic violence survivors say happened to them than what a patriarchal court system ultimately determines through its messed up and unjust procedures. ”

    well, that’s a great sentiment but in all truthfulness until the claims are proven they aren’t survivors are they? they’re alleged survivors.

    I mean I’m not saying the legal system is the perfect beacon of truth in the universe but if were going to say that anybody who has ever been accused violence against women IS guilty of committing it simply because they were accused then I belong on this list cus I’ve been accused of molesting a woman I was never in the same room with.

  83. I guess if we are adding men who neglect their children and don’t pay child support: Steve Jobs

    At around age 21 he impregnated his 16 or 17 yo girlfriend. He denied he was the father and claimed sterility. The mother of his child and his daughter lived on welfare for awhile. He did eventually reconcile with his daughter.

  85. well, that’s a great sentiment but in all truthfulness until the claims are proven they aren’t survivors are they? they’re alleged survivors.

    No. Whether or not a DA is able to meet the legal burden of proof has nothing to do with whether or not they’re survivors. They’re survivors if they’ve survived sexual assault or abuse. A legal verdict isn’t a speech-act. Something either happened or it didn’t. And, like Ben, I place far more trust in the veracity of women who have the courage to come forward about their experiences than I do in a legal system created by and operating in a misogynist, patriarchal culture.

    I mean I’m not saying the legal system is the perfect beacon of truth in the universe but if were going to say that anybody who has ever been accused violence against women IS guilty of committing it simply because they were accused then I belong on this list cus I’ve been accused of molesting a woman I was never in the same room with.

    That’s very sad for you, but it is not my problem, and nor is it Ben’s. Your protestation of innocence does not alter the stats about false accusations; it does not alter the ongoing vilification of survivors of sexual violence; it does not alter the systemic inadequacy if not downright hostility of our legal system to survivors of sexual violence. Not shockingly, many men claim they are innocent of sexual violence–it’s a thing criminals say. If I went around believing it every time, I’d be a fool.

  86. dead, you’ve got this story you want to tell, and we all have no way of checking it. You want us to believe you, but you can’t prove it. If you’re telling the truth, then take that feeling and multiply that experience times millions, because that’s how many rape and sexual assault and intimate partner violence survivors want to tell their story, but can’t prove it and run into a wall of disbelief and denial.

    When there’s a fair way of adjudicating such claims, when it is possible to have some faith that the survivors who come forward will be listened to and true stories won’t routinely be disbelieved and stonewalled, then I’ll stop taking on faith the allegations that most survivors make. Until then, the assertions of survivors are usually going to have more weight with me that the assertions of accused abusers. They just are. That’s where I stand, and no amount of dialogue is going to back me off of that position.

  87. Well dead, not much in this life can be conclusively proved once and for all. Any opinion or belief we hold could be revised in the future depending on how things unfold. In the meantime, we all make judgments about what sources seem credible. I trust my own experience above all else. On the other hand, I put very little trust in the legal system. People who say they are survivors of abuse seem much more credible to me. So, in general, I’ll disregard what perpetrators or the courts say when it conflicts with what survivors say. Your mileage may vary.

  89. can we add “internets celebriteh”? i would want to submit “im gonna videotape me shooting your laptop and post it on the internet because im tired of my 16yo daughter’s immature attitude” dad. apparently, the police did come by his house after they were alerted and shook his hand.

    i dont know about you, but the using the destruction of property to control behaviour is a sign of an abusive personality.

    I fucking hate attention-seeking internet culture so fucking much. Anybody who did this without the privilege of pale skin and a penis would be rightly repudiated for being a crazy, narcissistic crybaby throwing a giant tantrum. This is the result of people’s addiction to craptastic TV wherein the only entertainment value is the constant pushing of the envelope re: extreme and thoughtless behaviour. Fuck everyone.

    Yep, this is gonna be another one of those days…

  91. dead, sweetie, WE’RE NOT IN COURT. Presumption of innocence to the point of double-think is for the jury, not bystanders.

    I am so fucking sick of apologists trying to police everyone’s language to this fake-legal standard. “Oh, can’t say [hushed tone]rapist[/hushed tone], you might RUIN A MAN’S LIFE.”

    Because when there’s a man’s welfare at stake, all other considerations fall by the wayside. If a man’s reputation might be smirched, silence must be enforced. At all costs.

    I call bullshit. We need to start telling our stories with the names unchanged. (This woman is a hero: http://blog.nerdchic.net/archives/418/) We need to start making *a bad reputation* the minimum price of assaulting women.

    Because the status quo you’re trying to preserve, dead, where we keep their secrets, and hedge the truth with weakeners and weasel-words, lets rapists keep hurting more women, consequence-free.

    Note: All y’all who aren’t up for going first with naming the guy who raped you in public? Yeah, me either. But I desperately want to start shifting the Overton Window in that direction. I want naming names to be a possibility. I want it to be a consequence *they* have to fear when they’re planning their evenings.

  92. igglanova. . .I watched that video on YouTube too and wrote the dad a nasty comment. If there’s one thing I hate most of all in this world, it’s abusive and controlling parents. I love the dad’s sense of proportion, too. It’s bad for his daughter to swear on Facebook, but destroying a laptop with bullets when he just spent 6 hours repairing it makes perfect sense. I would like to take a big shit right on his stupid cowboy hat.

  93. Justamblingalong: thanks for the info; I will check that study out.

    Alara: great takedown of Julian Assange. Makes me sick how many people on the Left give him a pass.

  94. After heading over to Jezebel and reading the Steven Tyler story, I saw this little tweet from Adam Scott. And I love him even more now. Seriously, does anyone else do “sardonic” as well?

  96. I completely agree with all those who pointed out that a survivor is a survivor, as a matter of FACT, regardless of whether their abuser/attacker is ever convicted or ever even charged in a court of law.

    I never told anyone, let alone made any formal complaint (I was 11, for God’s sake, when it started) about the doctor who sexually abused me repeatedly over a period of years, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

    And now that he’s finally dead and I don’t have to be afraid of him anymore — I admit that I felt relieved, even after all those decades — I guess I can say who he was, and put him on my own personal shit list, at least:

    http://www.pelhamweekly.com/obit.php?sid=3406

    A pillar of his profession, his community, and his church. And if it turns out that anyone reading this is his grandchild or great-grandchild, I’m sorry, but it happened, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I still wonder what happened to all the photographs.

    (I was one of the patients at his famous clinic for children with physical development issues; see the reference to that clinic at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448091/: “One of the variously abnormal persons I had examined by the end of 1960 was a 10-year-old girl who, only because of her unusually small stature, was being followed in Reginald Archibald’s clinic in the Institute’s small research hospital, having been referred to him from The New York Hospital just across 68th Street.” Sexual abuse entirely aside, his solution to my own issues was the administration of heavy doses of testosterone on a daily basis for several years, which I found traumatic in and of itself; even at 11, I wished I were being given estrogen instead!)

  97. I hope that whoever named Vladimir Nabokov had a reason for doing so other than his authorship of Lolita. Because if that’s the reason, he doesn’t belong. I understand that the subject matter makes it impossible for some people to read, but Humbert Humbert is supposed to be a monster, revealed by his own words, and anyone who thinks that Nabokov shared the narrator’s views is seriously misreading the book.

  98. Ugh. A couple of the comments on the Jez link hurt my soul…

    But it just makes me sad that many people seem to cling to one action of his and deem it unforgivable. What makes us the ultimate judges on right and wrong?

  99. @igglanova

    Has he really been attention seeking? He has outright refused to go on TV/Radio interviews and has answered two or three email questions.

  100. If we’re naming Polanski apologists like Whoopi Goldberg and Bernard-Henri Levy (who also, of course, vigorously defended Strauss-Kahn), I’m afraid we have to add Kate Winslet and Jodie Foster to the list. I’ve always greatly admired both (although Jodie Foster’s defense of Mel Gibson doesn’t sit well with me either), and I’m very disappointed.

    But I’m not necessarily going to condemn or boycott every single person who merely signed one of the pro-Polanski petitions, especially early on when it’s conceivable that they just signed believing he was innocent (without looking into the facts, and without ever actively speaking out in his defense), and especially if — like I always did — they empathized with him because of his truly horrific childhood in the midst of the Holocaust, and what happened to his wife. For that reason, and given her own family background, and given the fact that she is one of the few self-identified feminists I know of in Hollywood, when Natalie Portman was being roundly condemned at the time of her Oscar nomination, I didn’t join in.

  101. Oh, and in case anyone is worried about letting my comment (#96) out of moderation, because I name the man who sexually abused me when I was a child: he finally died about five years ago, and you can’t libel the dead.

  102. Donna, what a creep. To think he lived till 97, his big lie intact. And photographs, God. I’m so sorry that happened to you. I think I’ll put Reginald Archibald on my shit list also. I admire you for coming forward.

    Fuck him for the testosterone too.

  105. well, that’s a great sentiment but in all truthfulness until the claims are proven they aren’t survivors are they? they’re alleged survivors.

    So if you’re the victim of a hit and run where you are hit by a car and seriously injured but the cops never manage to find who did it, you’re only an “alleged” survivor because no one was successfully prosecuted?

  106. I was hugely disappointed to find out that Isaac Brock (of Modest Mouse fame) was accused of rape. Twice.

    Ugh, what?

  108. btw, that is only one of FOUR publicized incidents for Meggett, consistent with the research that shows that most rapes are committed by a relatively small percentage of the population who are serial rapists with an average of six victims each. How many victims does Meggett have who have not come forward?

  109. @DonnaL about Nobakov; iirc, the idea was supposedly knicked from an earlier (unpublished?) German book anyway. But I agree that it doesn’t make him a monster.
    Your doctor, on the other hand, clearly was, and I don’t think there’s anyone here who needs a judge or jury to confirm your story or allow them to express sympathy.

  110. He’s only a borderline celebrity, but sports announcer Marv Albert was welcomed back to NBC less than two years after after he plead guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge. The prosecution dropped the charge related to his allegedly forcing his victim to perform oral sex on him.

  111. I was hugely disappointed to find out that Isaac Brock (of Modest Mouse fame) was accused of rape. Twice.

    I know about the one in 1999, what was the second?

  112. Also, and I think it is on-topic, can anyone think of a white celebrity convicted of the rape of an adult woman? If someone were to say, “it is impossible to successfully prosecute a famous white man for rape,” is there a counterexample?

  113. Yes, can we please get a cite on Nabokov? As DonnaL said, Lolita does not count, painfully literal people.

  114. In other words, in about 6% of cases, they could definitively prove that the allegation was false.

    False, meaning the alleged victim was not actually raped, or false, meaning that the victim was raped but misidentified the perpetrator? I’ve seen a lot of stats that lump “unfounded” and “false” together, when the former just means there was not enough to proceed with the case in the legal system.

    And how does 6 percent of false claims compare to false reporting of other crimes, especially other crimes where a lot hangs on the alleged victim’s word: assault, theft (insurance fraud cases often involve false reports of theft), child abuse?

  115. Um, yeah, no, Jennifer. Have you actually *read* Lolita? She’s given infinitely more personhood and oh, I don’t know, humanity than Humbert Humbert. AFAIK, Nabokov was a decent human being–the worst I’ve heard is that he may have cheated on Vera at some point.

  116. Here is my question! What do you do with this information? Where do you, fellow Feministeing feminists, draw the line when it comes to bad people making art that you like? Is it a matter of “That art is just so good,” or “That asshole is dead,” or “I will enjoy this art without giving that asshole money,” or “I will be aware of this artist’s woman-hating douchebaggery and thoughtfully enjoy his art anyway,” or the “fuck it I like it” rule, or something else?

  117. Those 6% probably include cases where the police just decided off the top of their head that they didn’t like the victim. Police have all the power in the world to ruin a woman’s life, and there’s a high proportion of conservative viewpoints (with all that implies) plus domestic violence offenders in police forces.

  118. @simeon
    thnx, luckily my experience was social and not legal. Loosing an entire social group sucked but I suspect the woman who accused me was a victim in the past so I guess if I can serve as a target for her blind rage I’m doing a survivor some good at some level.

    @LotusBen, @iiii, @Thomas MacAulay Millar, @EG
    No problem, I just wanted to clear up weather the context of this list was legal or social, I didn’t wish to try and convince you of what you should believe.

    Every system, legal or social, has people who fall through the cracks of the rules, I just got unlucky and ended up one of them. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to make a society where the cracks are as small as possible and as of present, survivors of actual abuse are falling through a much bigger crack than I.

  120. That’s why I don’t watch the bullshit awards shows anymore. But honestly, is anyone surprised that Chris Brown got the VIP treatment after they welcomed an incestuous child molester like Woody Allen with open arms?

  121. dead, I couldn’t give two shits about the opinion of PETA. They are a bunch of raging misogynists themselves.

    And why are rape and sexual assault the only crimes which require such a high level of proof for the public? I have heard people declaim, upon hearing someone was arrested and found not guilty for any sundry crime you can think of, “He must have been guilty of something or he wouldn’t have been arrested! I would have found him guilty anyway!”

    1. Orson Scott Card

      I hate his politics and homophobia etc now that I know about them, but I had no idea he’d committed interpersonal violence on anybody – details?

  125. Humphrey Bogart broke his wife’s jaw (not Lauren Bacall, the one before that).

    Chet Baker. Watch Let’s Get Lost for some deeply disturbing history, some of which is told as amusing anecdote.

  126. Wait, were we only doing perpetrators of violence, I thought this was a general shit list. If not, then nah, not Card. All I got on him is the general asshole stuff.

  127. I am having a reaction to this thread that I find somewhat disturbing: I find myself wanting to explain or excuse away some of these people (Oldman and Lowe especially). My automatic reaction seems to be “well…there must be more to the story, because people I like cannot have done THAT.” Does anyone else have this kind of reaction? I think for me its partly because I do not know what to DO with this information: Rob Lowe is on Parks and Rec, my current favorite show, and Gary Oldman is SIRIUS BLACK for fucks sake.

  128. vanessa –

    I think that’s a pretty normal reaction to have, at least initially. It’s not necessarily rational, but then, personal emotional reactions rarely are – and I think that when a celebrity you are particularly fond of/someone whose work you really admire/etc. turns out to have done shitty things, it can kind of feel like a bit of a personal betrayal, silly as it seems.

    (I know I’ve certainly had, “Butbutbut nooooooo!” reactions in response to some of the names that have come up in this thread. )

    For me, then, I guess it becomes more about being aware of that reaction; being conscious of how it fits into a larger social context of victim-blaming and DV apologia, and examining it critically in that light.

    tl;dr I think there is a meaningful difference between, “I really want this person not to have done this,” and, “I really want this person not to have done this, therefore they didn’t do it/it was okay that they did it, and also fuck you.” As long as you’re not leaping to the latter, I don’t think there’s anything Wrong and Terrible and Evil about feeling conflicted and upset at first.

  129. The other day when I noticed my mom watching Tuck Everlasting, I got nostalgic and I did a where-are-they-now googling on Jonathan Jackson and Scott Bairstow, and was disgusted to learn this about Scott Bairstow. And the “but, but, I’m an actor, I’ll lose work!” shit was just too much.

    The worst thing I could find about Jonathan Jackson is that he supported Mike Huckabee during the previous presidential election.

  130. Crap. Trigger warning on the Scott Bairstow article people. Sorry I didn’t write that in the post with the link.

  131. Those 6% probably include cases where the police just decided off the top of their head that they didn’t like the victim. Police have all the power in the world to ruin a woman’s life, and there’s a high proportion of conservative viewpoints (with all that implies) plus domestic violence offenders in police forces.

    No, ginmar. Just… no. Please, I’d really appreciate it if you actually read the post before talking about how awful it is. Studies which used the methodology you so eloquently described (or, to be more precise, just asked police officers whether they thought the report was false) came up with false reporting numbers in the range of forty percent, which is horrifying for entirely different reasons.

    Studies by the FBI and DOJ, which tend to do exactly what Katya mentioned and lump ‘unfounded’ and ‘false’ together, have found “false” reporting rates ranging from 8-15% (8% in 2009, 15% in 1996).

    The study I cited, which was done extremely rigorously (and, if it matters, was run by an extraordinarily well respected feminist scholar on rape prevention) found that in about six percent of cases studied, there was definitive evidence that the person accused of rape didn’t commit that crime (Katya- so that could very well include cases in which the accuser was raped, and identified the wrong person). They then extrapolated from that number in subsequent studies to find that a total about about 8.1% of people accused of rape didn’t commit that rape, which, as Katya pointed out, is entirely different from saying that in 8.1% of rape cases nobody was raped.

    And how does 6 percent of false claims compare to false reporting of other crimes, especially other crimes where a lot hangs on the alleged victim’s word: assault, theft (insurance fraud cases often involve false reports of theft), child abuse?

    Ok, so I don’t know of any studies that use the very rigorous methodology that they used to reach the 6% figure above and , but what I can give you is the ‘unfounded’ numbers the FBI uses. Assuming the relationship between ‘false’ and ‘unfounded’ remains true across crimes, you might be able to make some inferences (this assumption could be wildly false, though). Please note that the FBI calculates these numbers in incredibly problematic ways, and I’m posting them because the ratios between the numbers might say something useful, not the percentages themselves:

    Rape: 8%
    Murder: 3.2%
    Larceny: 16.2%
    Assault: 5.5%

    I couldn’t find any data on child abuse or insurance fraud specifically, unfortunately.

  132. Seems funny to me but a recent case of a young women who went to the police to file rape charges, only to be convicted of false reporting, only to find out that the man who raped her not only raped her but other victims – Oh yeah, she had to pay for filing a false claim –

    Sure — Yeah, because women lie all the time, because they have nothing to worry about..

    I am so sick and tired of people trying to say that women are liars, and can’t be believed, because the guy is a “nice” guy.

    SO I am sure your “false claim” statistics are really accurate, we can ask the young women who report but who are harassed by the police and the system.

  133. I’m not the Miriam up there. I’m The Other Miriam.

    Here is my question! What do you do with this information? Where do you, fellow Feministeing feminists, draw the line when it comes to bad people making art that you like? Is it a matter of “That art is just so good,” or “That asshole is dead,” or “I will enjoy this art without giving that asshole money,” or “I will be aware of this artist’s woman-hating douchebaggery and thoughtfully enjoy his art anyway,” or the “fuck it I like it” rule, or something else?

    I draw a couple of lines. I usually can’t watch depictions of sexual violence because they are triggering. If I can avoid it, I will avoid paying for any entertainment that features a known abuser. I don’t deny myself the experience of the art necessarily — you have to know it to understand it to critique it — but I find that my experience is usually colored by the knowledge that the artist is a gross person.

  134. What do you do with this information? Where do you, fellow Feministeing feminists, draw the line when it comes to bad people making art that you like? Is it a matter of “That art is just so good,” or “That asshole is dead,” or “I will enjoy this art without giving that asshole money,” or “I will be aware of this artist’s woman-hating douchebaggery and thoughtfully enjoy his art anyway,” or the “fuck it I like it” rule, or something else?

    I imagine there are some people who claim to be purists, but I’m of the opinion that it’s impossible to completely avoid supporting these people in some way.

    For some people, there is a line you can cross. I will never knowingly watch anything involving Roman Polanski. I don’t listen to any Chris Brown songs anymore. For me, personally, it’s because I’m so pissed at society’s epic failures with these two. (Charlie Sheen is kind of another one, but I hate grouping him in with the other two because I wouldn’t like his work regardless – talentless buttface).

    In contrast, I do watch Parks and Rec. I think it’s probably the most feminist comedy on TV right now. But, Rob Lowe is on it. It’s more important to me to support the show than it is to slightly fuck over Rob Lowe.

    I dunno. I don’t think there’s a hard line for what consumption is and isn’t feminist. But I think you’re an asshole if you claim to be a feminist and can’t listen to people criticize your choices. For instance, if someone told me I suck for watching Parks and Rec bc of Rob Lowe – that’s fair. My choices need not be everybody’s.

  135. Sure — Yeah, because women lie all the time, because they have nothing to worry about..

    That is completely unfair. I post a study, at the request of someone else, which incidentally proved that the false reporting rate is lower than most people believe, and you see that as claiming ‘all women lie all the time?’

    SO I am sure your “false claim” statistics are really accurate, we can ask the young women who report but who are harassed by the police and the system.

    …what are you even claiming? That the false reporting rate is lower than this methodologically rigorous peer reviewed article claimed? That’s fine, show me your evidence and I’ll listen.

    Or maybe you’re just a trollish asshole who can’t be bothered to think beyond the “hurrr, someone brings facts to the discussion clearly they are evil” mentality found more typically in climate-change deniers and fundamentalist Christians who think Noah forgot to save the dinosaurs.

  136. To clarify further: Ben wrote that almost all rape accusations are true. I mentioned a statistic in support of this fact. He said he’d be interested to see the study, which I then presented. Please, I’d be really interested to learn where you found something sinister in that.

  139. Justamblingalong

    Sure- Yes, as we know statistics are never wrong. Women always lie about rape, all the time in fact, it’s what is used against women all the time. So, no, I don’t believe the figures on “false rape” charges – Because in most of those cases like the young women who reported rape, and who was raped, was not only not believed but she was charged with false accusations and was forced to repay, then we find out that not only was she right, but the man who raped her was a serial rapists.

    Yes, I do think that false rape is even lower than the “reported” statistics. I don’t think women get their jollies out of reporting false rape claims. I think it’s very hard for women to go to a police station and file rape claims –

  140. Awww, now this is a fun game:
    Fatty Arbuckle (read: black dahlia)
    Ashton Kutcher (raises a ton of money to fight sex trafficking, but cheats on his wife)
    John Edwards
    KOBE!!!!!!!! Omg, top of my list.
    Everyone mentioned Polanski, but no one included Jack Nicholson who also was accused of rape and domestic violence
    The New York Post for publishing that news anchor’s victim’s picture
    Corey Feldman is supposedly going public with industry abuses he suffered as a child
    Did anyone mention Michael Lohan?
    I want to say that Evan Rachael Wood was underage when she and Marilyn Manson hooked up
    Shia LaBoef

  141. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Edwards and Kutcher cheated on their wives? So what?

    I mean, that makes them jerks, but deserving of being put in the same category as rapists and wife-beaters? It’s not that cheating isn’t in the same league; it’s that cheating is an entirely different game.

    And I’m not turning up anything on Nicholson having been accused of rape or domestic violence–my googling is just getting me results about Polanski and his character in The Shining. Nicholson seems like a total sleazebag to me, and of course he housed Polanski, but again…sleazebag is not the same thing as rapist.

  142. Yes, I do think that false rape is even lower than the “reported” statistics. I don’t think women get their jollies out of reporting false rape claims.

    Show me where I said this.

    Yes, as we know statistics are never wrong.

    You’re being an asshole.

    Women always lie about rape, all the time in fact,

    Right, because 6% = all the time. Assholery, again.

    So, no, I don’t believe the figures on “false rape” charges – Because in most of those cases like the young women who reported rape, and who was raped, was not only not believed but she was charged with false accusations and was forced to repay, then we find out that not only was she right, but the man who raped her was a serial rapists.

    Which figures? The ones in the Journal of Violence Against Women link? If not, what fault did you find with the study?

    I’m really confused, because your post is so divorced from the reality of what I wrote. Did you read the study? It’s based not on what the police think, but on times when there was direct, conclusive evidence someone accused of rape didn’t commit the crime- for example, a video of them in a different city at the time.

    To put it even more simply: the study I posted is directly refuting the FBI’s claimed number of false accusations, and demonstrating the real number is much lower. If you think that the number is lower still, then show me some statistical evidence and make an argument. The story you told is tragic, but the study wouldn’t have counted that as a false accusation, which you’d have known if you’d read my post.

    Let’s be honest. You didn’t read the post (#48), you just saw someone mention false rape accusations and thought it would be fun to get indignant. In other words, troll.

  143. @igglanova

    Has he really been attention seeking? He has outright refused to go on TV/Radio interviews and has answered two or three email questions.

    K, this was a while back. But so fuckin’ what if he won’t do interviews? Posting your daughter’s punishment on Youtube for all to see is an attention-seeking act in itself. There is no charitable reading of that behaviour. Am I supposed to hand the man a cookie for not milking the situation for all it’s worth? If this wasn’t about attention, he would have shot his daughter’s laptop without a camera standing by.

    (I kind of can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. Just contemplating such an absurd and infantile reaction as shooting a computer makes me pull a muscle in my eyeball from rolling it so hard.)

  145. Fatty Arbuckle (read: black dahlia)

    I don’t know what the part about black dahlia means (is that a particular book? I think a fair number of books have been written about the Black Dahlia murder case), but my understanding was that most scholars who have looked at the evidence concluded that Arbuckle was wrongly accused. Not that nothing happened to his accuser, but that she may have been injured accidentally, or may have been attacked by someone other than Arbuckle. (She was extremely intoxicated at the time of her injuries.)

    But perhaps that’s wrong. I know it’s a bitterly contested case, and it may not be possible to know exactly what happened at this point.

  146. Miku, there were apparently some similar plot elements in an obscure German short story with the same title, published in 1916, but that doesn’t remotely rise to the level of plagiarism. Like Shakespeare and Joyce, Nabokov took inspiration for his plots from many sources. There’s an interesting article about the sources of Lolita, and the many literary references in it — including, apparently, to Poe’s poem Annabel Lee — in this article: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:62V_qcE4y_QJ:www.connotations.de/pdf/articles/luxemburg01413.pdf+nabokov+lolita+original+source&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESi12D99lXlsvTIbaEeEKP-j5U1aXsSa_RSmg2XurPx9phMIi7Pmg2azIwp7oWToZB_jR1YgX9S4-qSGOOtwtHEufBWpzrWV8Ip33jVLvse4QjJKw4F5OdNdhqSYN4pgfveRZ48U&sig=AHIEtbTx53Vf16JPudKmePTUE_fLTz9Hmg

    And, of course, none of it makes Nabokov a pedophile.

  147. Fatty Arbuckle (read: black dahlia)

    No, the murder of the “Black Dahlia” (Elizabeth Short) was something else entirely that happened more than 20 years after the Fatty Arbuckle case and her case is still unsolved. The woman in the Arbuckle case was the unfortunately named starlet Virginia Rappe.

  148. In addition to adopting an underage girl to have sex with and to raise his children, Ted Nugent may have sexually abused Courtney Love when she was 12 years old (I don’t have a good link for this because the ones I see are gross and misogynistic)…

  149. You can add a certain dog abusing football quarterback to your shit list. I guess I have to be careful for legal reasons since he hasn’t been formally accused of anything – but I went to college with the guy and I can say with certainty that dog fighting was the LEAST of his crimes.

  150. I am having a reaction to this thread that I find somewhat disturbing: I find myself wanting to explain or excuse away some of these people (Oldman and Lowe especially). My automatic reaction seems to be “well…there must be more to the story, because people I like cannot have done THAT.” Does anyone else have this kind of reaction? I think for me its partly because I do not know what to DO with this information: Rob Lowe is on Parks and Rec, my current favorite show, and Gary Oldman is SIRIUS BLACK for fucks sake.

    Yeah, I’m getting some of that too. Sean Bean? Terry Gilliam? Gary Oldman? It’s part of the attachment you develop for entertainers, even though they are not their characters/movies. It’s possible to enjoy something while acknowledging the bad that the people involved may have done.

    I’m not going to go burn my copy of Rosemary’s Baby or Brazil, but I’m also not going to tell people that Polanski is a great artist and is being victimized by the system.

    Here is my question! What do you do with this information? Where do you, fellow Feministeing feminists, draw the line when it comes to bad people making art that you like? Is it a matter of “That art is just so good,” or “That asshole is dead,” or “I will enjoy this art without giving that asshole money,” or “I will be aware of this artist’s woman-hating douchebaggery and thoughtfully enjoy his art anyway,” or the “fuck it I like it” rule, or something else?

    I believe this is a personal decision, as long as you are not shaming or attacking others for theirs. I draw the line at giving money to assholes. For example, I can buy a Lovecraft collection guilt-free since the racist asshole has been dead for years and his works are in the public domain. On the other hand, Marion Zimmer Bradley is also dead, but I would never buy her works because the person who manages her estate has a long history of ignoring Bradley’s aiding and abetting of her husband’s sexual abuse of children.

    For others, their personal character has tainted them so much that I can’t stand to watch anything with them in it (Gibson, Cruise). That’s a personal thing, though, not something I expect others to abide by.

    I really cannot stand the people who go “but it’s art! they’re hot! it was a long time ago! so you should stfu.” Once you start arguing that abuse and violence can be “cancelled out” somehow, you’ve taken it too far.

  151. Justamblingalong, don’t patronize me. You’re apparently annoyed that I find the 6% rate too high, but your own report touches on the rampant sexism in both the British and American police culture. I don’t know what your problem is with criticizing the police, but Witchwolf is in fact citing a recent case where a woman was charged, tried, convicted, named, shamed, and fined for filing a false rape report—-and then her photo turned up on the SD card in the camera of the serial rapist the cops finally caught, months after he raped her, thereby allowing him at least a couple more months to rape more women. Meanwhile, the original victim was raped and yet exposed publicly as a rape victim. That case only came to light because it was so horrible.

    False accusations are not and never have been a problem. The real problem is falsely accusing women of them—-and the incredibly vengeful attitude toward women who dare file a rape report, period. That attitude is shared by cops as well. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/05/29/inside-the-nypd-s-special-victims-division.html

    This is from a piece about the famous NYC sex crimes unit, which is almost all men, and at least some of them have this attitude:

    Does a woman who claims to have been raped ask for a female detective? That’s taken as a sign of possible deception. “I am betting nine out of 10 times, when a woman asks for a female detective the story is going to be untrue,” says Lamboy. The operative theory is that women who are lying think female cops will be more receptive to their stories.

    If I were raped and walked into a room full of guys with that attitude, it wouldn’t take long to sense it. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in saying that if I had to talk to a guy about something like a rape, I just would not do it. I’d ask for a woman. And this guy is betting that women who do so are lying.

  152. @DonnaL I was surprised I didn’t get more of that wrong since it was just some obscure thing I learned ages ago. I didn’t accuse him of plagiarism, though, just “idea knicking”, I guess. That may be a tad too strong an accusation itself, but I don’t figure it’s even that big a problem in the end, so common as it is. (Appropriation aside, of course.)

    @Justamblingalong I think you’re taking the criticism a bit too personally, and you end up looking like the asshole (not that I think you are one). I’m not saying you are more or less right than WitchWolf, I’m just pointing this stuff out as a bystander without a horse in the race.

  153. Could we dial back the defences of Nabokov here? Have you read how much of the book’s promotion and advertising, including the dust jacket, speaks of it as a “romance”, and similar? The guy was a prominent enough writer to have nixed that pitch, if he chose. He may not have been a paedophile, but he certainly gifted a whole new vocabulary to those who were and those who enable them. How do you think Polanski’s victim was described in the press at the time? Is there a statement anywhere from Nabokov denouncing that use of his work?

  154. @justamblingalong
    That study was looking at only 136 cases of sexual assaults at a single university. Of these they classified as false 8 cases. It is a small study and a non-representative sample, so I would not want to extrapolate too much from these figures.

    For this kind of study which looks at the number of definitely false allegations (establishing a “floor”), I think there are better studies to look at. I would suggest
    “Kelly, Lovett, and Regan, 2005” – result: 2.5%
    “Heenan & Murray, 2006” – result: 2.1%
    Both of those were referenced in the report and were larger studies on more representative samples

    As an aside I wonder if I am the first critic on this thread who actually read the report.

  155. On the other hand, Marion Zimmer Bradley is also dead, but I would never buy her works because the person who manages her estate has a long history of ignoring Bradley’s aiding and abetting of her husband’s sexual abuse of children.

    I’ve managed to miss this. I mean the aiding and abetting sexual abuse, not the criticism of the estate manager. Would be interested in sources. (I could google, but wouldn’t necc turn up the same sources you’re thinking of.)

  156. How do you think Polanski’s victim was described in the press at the time? Is there a statement anywhere from Nabokov denouncing that use of his work?

    It doesn’t seem fair to blame Nobokov for failing to condemn the way Polanski’s rape was reported, at least in the dates on wikipedia are correct.

    Wiki on Polanski:

    In 1977, after a photo shoot in Los Angeles, Polanski was arrested for the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl and pleaded guilty to the charge of unlawful sex with a minor.

    Wiki on Nobokov:

    Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov… 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1899c – 2 July 1977)

  157. Could we dial back the defences of Nabokov here? Have you read how much of the book’s promotion and advertising, including the dust jacket, speaks of it as a “romance”, and similar? The guy was a prominent enough writer to have nixed that pitch, if he chose. He may not have been a paedophile, but he certainly gifted a whole new vocabulary to those who were and those who enable them. How do you think Polanski’s victim was described in the press at the time? Is there a statement anywhere from Nabokov denouncing that use of his work?

    So, first the minor quibbles.

    Polanski was arrested in March ’77 and fled the country in February ’78. Nabokov died in July ’77. He’d been living in Switzerland for years at that point, and I have no idea what his health was like in the final months of his life. I’m sure he kept somewhat abreast of U.S. news after moving to Switzerland, but it’s quite possible he was not aware of the Polanski situation specifically, or that the term “Lolita” was being applied to it.

    Are we talking about, like, original edition dust jackets, or what? There have been plenty of editions that have come out since his death; obviously, if you buy a new copy today, what you’re getting is a version whose marketing he had no control over.

    Now, the major objections.

    As for the cultural expansion/warping of the term “Lolita,” the only comment I know of from him was that he was probably responsible for parents not naming their children that anymore. (No idea if parents ever did name their children “Lolita”; possibly he was just joking.) I don’t know why he should have been expected to respond to and denounce misinterpretations of his work. It’s clear in the book that Lolita isn’t specially attractive or seductive (contra the way the term is commonly employed in popular media), but rather it’s a quirk of Humbert’s sick nature that draws him to her specifically. The comments he made about the overall novel and the character of Humbert show that he saw the character as a monster and the character’s actions as evil and completely unjustified.

    Basically, I don’t see how it’s fair to lump him in with rapists and abusers just because he wrote a work of staggering genius about a terrible subject, a work that was later interpreted in foolish and shallow ways contrary to authorial intention. Indeed, I don’t think it’s actually reasonable to charge him with any sort of moral failing for producing a wonderful, tragic book that may have incidentally been used to justify real child sexual abuse (again completely contrary to his manifest intention).

  158. I think in the case of Gary Oldman, his problems with domestic violence were tied to his alcoholism, and he’s expressed genuine remorse for what he’s done. Same with Sean Penn. While I’m not making excuses for their actions, alcohol and illegal substance abuse can turn an otherwise decent person into an unstable violent asshole, so I’m more inclined to forgive people when they’ve been under the influence – except in the case of Charlie Sheen and Mel Gibson, who are repeat offenders.

    Chris Brown, however, is just an arrogant little shit who thinks the world needs to apologize to him for calling him on his obnoxious behavior. If domestic violence is acceptable and a pierced boob isn’t then I don’t want to live on this planet anymore…

  159. So now writers are responsible for how other people interpret and market their work? Bullshit. Writers have almost nothing to do with how their work is marketed–especially writers who apparently never learned to use the telephone themselves (really, Nabokov?). Given that he fucking well died the year Polanski raped that poor girl, having been hospitalized and then released a few months before, he might have had a few things of his own on his mind, don’t you think?

    But sure, if when I’m elderly, ill, and near death, some asshole I have nothing to do with rapes someone and the press uses a bone-headed misinterpretation of my work to attack the victim, I’ll make denouncing that my first priority, particularly because rape victims were accorded so much respect by the press prior to Lolita.

  160. Mandolin, there’s a transcript of police interviews with Lisa Waters here. Waters says that she never reported Bradley’s husband’s child abuse because she “was brought up to believe that other people’s sex lives were none of my business.”

    The same website has interviews with MZB as well. It’s all stomach-churningly awful.

  161. Trigger warning for adults being horrible sexual abusers of children:

    As a note, MZB’s daughter also told Lisa Waters that her mother herself had sexually abused her and her father had raped her, and Waters’s response was to ask the father if it was true. He denied it, and as far as she was concerned, that was the end of the matter. MZB’s response to Waters’s asking her if it was true that she had groped her daughter’s breasts was “children that age don’t have erogenous zones” (untrue and beside the point). The son also told Waters that his mother had molested him, and she declined to follow up on that at all, because “it was clear it was in the past.”

    That’s just their own kids, there. Not the many others.

  162. Bingo you outted me Justamblingalong I am not only an asshole, a troll, but I can’t read either. YIppy that is so nice to hear.

    With headlines like this — NYPD Forced to Apologize Publicly to Rape Victim for Downgrading Her Attack

    or with articles about Police sexually assaulting and raping women

    http://www.incite-national.org/media/docs/7715_toolkitrev-sexualassault.pdf

    Yeah, we are supposed to believe that police have a real interest in find the truth.

    Or when there are news articles like this:

    Concerned that police departments nationwide fail to fully investigate rapes, a congressional committee scheduled an examination of the issue at a hearing spurred partly by a Baltimore Sun examination of the systemic underreporting of sex crimes.

    So, yeah, I don’t believe those statistics.

    So this troll and asshole will remain unconvinced — Been called worse, been called better – but honestly, still don’t care what you think.

  163. @EG: Kutcher is on my shit list because he is SO emotional about the exploitation of women (and rightfully so), but he turns right around and exploits them and publicly humiliates wife. In my opinion, and *my* shit list, he deserves at the very least, a cold shoulder.
    Further, dude, John Edwards did so much more than simply cheat on his wife. You know it, I know it, his now dead wife knows it, his illegitimate daughter whom he denied parenting knows it, and his once-loyal campaign contributors are becoming financially aware of it. Creep through and through.

    @Annaleigh: you’re right, good call! My point with FA, is just that the women in that industry basically were promised acting work, but were essentially forced to sleep with the “right” folks to get ahead. When something went wrong, however, those dalliances (totally wrong word choice) were used against their character and while that persists, even in the history books, it seems like indiscretions for men are merely seen as gossip and not worth recording in a book, bio, or wiki. (I’m totally on a rambling tangent here, clearly) I guess it bugs me that Angelina will always be seen first as a home-wrecker, whereas nobody ever brings up Kobe’s rape and infidelity whenever the Lakers make the playoffs. Gross, gross, gross.

    Jack Nicholson, fyi, was accused of providing the Polanski victim narcotics and providing him the house to do it in. there was talk that he knew the girl and her young friends and that he had sex parties with them. Also, he was rumored to have assaulted at least one of his wives. I’ll look for links to both.

  164. DollHeart

    While I’m not making excuses for their actions, alcohol and illegal substance abuse can turn an otherwise decent person into an unstable violent asshole, so I’m more inclined to forgive people when they’ve been under the influence

    Neither alcohol nor illegal substances will change the personality of the person abusing them. It will allow people to act in a way that they have thought about or will think about – The “substance” doesn’t make them do anything that they don’t want to do, just allows them to do it, by removing inhibitions. So a drunk asshole is an asshole when they are sober, but has the ability to control their actions. Alcohol is an excuse for them to do the things they really want to do.

  165. Further, dude, John Edwards did so much more than simply cheat on his wife. You know it, I know it…

    Actually, I don’t. I never heard anything about sexual violence from him. I mean, yeah, he cheated and lied and he was a shitty dad, but if those are qualifications for “the worst,” then the worst is just average, run of the mill jerkdom, relatively common among women as well, and that for me is an entirely different category than rapists.

    I did know that Polanski raped the girl at Nicholson’s house, but I didn’t know he was actively involved. Thanks for the info.

  167. I’m not sure I agree about alcohol, actually. To some extent, sure, but EVERYONE thinks about doing horrible things, and just because people lose their inhibitions doesn’t mean that they are inherently bad people. It means that they have a disease, which addiction is. Not to say that it is an excuse–people who are abusers when drunk/high should of course be prosecuted–but I don’t agree that people who do bad things with intoxicated are bad people.

  170. I’m not sure I agree about alcohol, actually. To some extent, sure, but EVERYONE thinks about doing horrible things, and just because people lose their inhibitions doesn’t mean that they are inherently bad people.

    I am with WitchWolf on this. Losing your inhibitions just mean that you show your true face to the world. In vino veritas and all that…

    It means that they have a disease, which addiction is.

    No. Being a “mean drunk” is not synonymous with being an addict. In my experience most alcoholics are not violent.

  172. FYI, Nabokov didn’t have a ton of control over the original marketing. First of all, before Lolita he wasn’t that prominent. Second, he spent several years fighting to get the book published at all/save it from the censors (banned in France, England). Third, like Anon21 mentioned, this is a guy who wasn’t so competent at daily life. So. Yeah, not dialing that one back so much. If you want to critique how the later biographical depictions of his marriage idealize the stereotype of a brilliant woman who martyrs herself to be her even MORE brilliant husband’s glorified secretary, I’m with you.

  173. While the discussion kind of veered from criminal behavior to more asshole behavior, it hit me how little it takes for women to end up on the public’s shit list. Usually it’s either addiction, personal problems, immoral behavior or a combination of the three. Just off the top of my head I thought of these examples:

    Whitney Houston – being shit on even in death over drug abuse, personal problems and “wasting her talent”
    M.I.A. – that finger’s going to have repercussions for awhile.
    Lindsey Lohan – bad girl, drug problems.
    Britney Spears – similar to above with a messy personal life.
    Courtney Love – drug problems, acting like every other male rocker around her.
    Rosie O’Donnell – ditched her “nicest” label to become more politically active (and paid dearly for it).
    Martha Stewart – basically being Donald Trump while female.
    Winona Ryder – arrested and prosecuted for shoplifting.

    Double standard doesn’t even seem like enough to describe this phenomenon.

  174. Yeah, we are supposed to believe that police have a real interest in find the truth.

    Or when there are news articles like this:

    Concerned that police departments nationwide fail to fully investigate rapes, a congressional committee scheduled an examination of the issue at a hearing spurred partly by a Baltimore Sun examination of the systemic underreporting of sex crimes.

    WhiteWitch,

    The problem is not that the case you cited is not true. It’s not that it’s not a problem. It’s that in the study you’re discussing, the case would have been a total and utter non-sequitor, because it would not have been coded as a false report. It’s like responding to someone who’s worried about a study showing global warming is a problem by saying “yeah, but sometimes it’s just really hot outside so maybe they did the study on a hot day, which is why they think global warming is real.” Bringing it up proves you either didn’t read the study you are criticizing, or are willing to be purposefully misleading about it to try to score rhetorical points. So yeah, actually, I would say you are one of those three things.

  175. The thing that is gross about a lot of the examples above (in S.H.’s post) listed above is that I’m willing to bet that with many of them.. ie, Lohan, Spears, wouldn’t have gotten to the point they did WITHOUT the help of the media waiting to pounce on them for fucking up.

    But yeah.. the dudes screw up, then get to announce ‘triumphant comebacks’ (unless you’re Gary Glitter, apparently). If you’re a woman though, screw up and you’re marked for life.

  176. @Justamblingalong I think you’re taking the criticism a bit too personally, and you end up looking like the asshole (not that I think you are one). I’m not saying you are more or less right than WitchWolf, I’m just pointing this stuff out as a bystander without a horse in the race.

    Miku- The reason I’m taking it personally is because WhiteWitch claimed I was saying that “all women lie” and that rape isn’t a real problem, because I cited a statistic in support of the idea that most rape accusation are true. WW then went on to lie about the study (or simply be ignorant about it do to not reading it). If someone wants to make a critique about the study itself, the way Matlun did, that’s one thing- I think it’s a better study than Matlun does but I also understand why zhe objects to certain parts- but being untruthful about what I wrote while snidely calling me a rape apologist is pretty like going to piss me off.

  177. I really cannot stand the people who go “but it’s art! they’re hot! it was a long time ago! so you should stfu.” Once you start arguing that abuse and violence can be “cancelled out” somehow, you’ve taken it too far.

    @ Chataya–I agree. There’s a huge difference between acknowledging the problematic aspects of the people who made, say, a movie, or even the movie itself, and deciding to enjoy it anyway vs. ignoring or denying that there are any problems at all. If I only watched TV that was totally unproblematic, I would never get to watch TV.

    I draw a couple of lines. I usually can’t watch depictions of sexual violence because they are triggering. If I can avoid it, I will avoid paying for any entertainment that features a known abuser.

    @ Other Miriam–Those are some of my rules too.

  179. Could we dial back the defences of Nabokov here?

    No. Even if you broaden your question about whether he “denounced” inappropriate uses and interpretations of Lolita to the entire period between its publication and his death, just how many times was he required to explain the “unreliable” narrator and the the fact that Humbert Humbert did not equal Vladimir Nabokov?

    I have a copy (which I brought into work with me), of a paperback edition of Strong Opinions, a collection of Nabokov interviews, articles and essays originally published in 1973. And it certainly contains enough statements explaining the difference between himself and Humbert to satisfy any reasonable person.

    There’s no index, but I did find the following just leafing through it.

    p. 15: “[Lolita] was my most difficult book — the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, from my own emotional life . . . .”

    p. 18: (With specific reference to Pale Fire): “Of course there is a certain type of critic who when reviewing a work of fiction keeps dotting all the i’s with the author’s head. Recently one anonymous clown, writing on Pale Fire in a New York book review, mistook all the declarations of the invented commentator in the book for my own.”

    p. 19: “Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade — demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out. Actually, I’m a mild old gentleman who loathes cruelty.”

    p. 2: Responding to those who purported to “discover[] telltale affinities between Humbert’s boyhood romance on the Riviera and my own recollections about little Colette, with whom I built damp sand castles in Biarritz when I was ten. Somber Humbert was, of course, thirteen and in the throes of a pretty extravagant sexual excitement, whereas my own romance with Colette had no trace of erotic desire and indeed was perfectly commonplace and normal. And, of course, at nine and ten years of age, in that set, in those times, we knew nothing whatsoever about [the so-called facts of life.]”

    p. 47: (the comment referred to above): “I am probably responsible for the odd fact that people don’t seem to name their daughters Lolita anymore. I have heard of young female poodles being given that name since 1956, but of no human beings.”

    p. 217: His comment on the casting of the title role, before the movie was made: “to make a real twelve-year old girl play such a part would be sinful and immoral.”

    I’m sure if I carefully looked through every page, and looked for statements outside this particular collection, I’d find many more. I really don’t think it was his responsibility to denounce the cover art of every edition of his book (none of which, I suspect, depicted a child anywhere near the age of the character as of the beginning of the book. It’s been a while since I’ve read it, but I do seem to recall that the older she got, the less attractive Humbert found her. And I don’t recall any suggestion in the book that she ever “consented” to what happened in any meaningful sense of that word.)

  180. Seriously, by all accounts, Nabokov was a nice person. If he ever actually did anything seriously wrong, everyone would know about it because it would be taken as proof that their discomfort with “Lolita” is rooted in the book itself and not in their inability to understand that fiction isn’t meant to be taken literally.

  181. Just got tweeted that I may have been wrong about the Dave Foley child support thing.. have been sent a link to check out.

    I actually would really like to be proven wrong on this.

  182. Pingback: Rapper Too Short Makes ‘Rape’ Training Video, Liz Trotta Shoulder Shrugs, But We’ll Let CBS & The Grammys Have the Last Word Regarding Chris Brown « Acts of Faith In Love & Life

  183. None of these break my heart, because I believe that all famous people will, if I know enough about them, fail me in ways I cannot forgive. I admire things people do, but I have no heroes.

    George Orwell tried to rape his childhood sweetheart, Jacintha Bidducom:

    “But Venables’s postscript changes all that. Venables is the Buddicoms’ first cousin, and was left the copyright to Eric & Us, as well as 57 crates of family letters. From these she made the shocking discovery that, in 1921, Eric had tried to rape Jacintha. Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was “this” rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell.”

    If one has read Orwell’s lesser known works, it’s not hard to conclude that he had a severe NiceGuyTM problem and major issues with women. See, e.g. Burmese Days and Keep The Aspidistra Flying. Nor surprising, perhaps, that Hitchens was so enamored of him.

    Orwell, Mailer, Assange …

  184. I don’t see why there’s the hate for Woody Allen. The guy cheated on his girlfriend with her daughter, that’s gotta be awkward for everyone, but they were adults and they’ve now been married for two decades. I don’t think he deserves to be lumped in with rapists and wifebeaters.

  186. ^

    And that’s even if you don’t believe Mia Farrow’s accusation that he molested his own daughter when she was 7 or 8.

  187. Mark Wahlberg – attacked two men while shouting racial slurs

    One of the men, a Vietnamese immigrant, was blinded in one eye when Wahlberg hit him with a board and knocked him out. According to wiki: “He said the right thing to do would be to try to find the blinded man and make amends, and admitted he has not done so, but added that he was no longer burdened by guilt”

  188. I don’t see why there’s the hate for Woody Allen. The guy cheated on his girlfriend with her daughter, that’s gotta be awkward for everyone, but they were adults and they’ve now been married for two decades. I don’t think he deserves to be lumped in with rapists and wifebeaters.

    He seduced his step daughter at best, coerced her at worst. It may not be physically incestuous, but is certainly is mentally and emotionally incestuous.

  189. ^I concur with EG, Donna, and Joe. Allen is gross

    that’s gotta be awkward for everyone, but they were adults and they’ve now been married for two decades.

    Right, because it’s totally unreasonable to suppose that Woody groomed Soon-Yi (who he first met as a 10 year old when he first started dating Farrow) in the 11 years prior to their relationship “officially” beginning. Obviously no pedophile has ever manipulated a vulnerable youngster before, and surely there’s no way that the effects of such manipulation could last for decades.

    (Sarcasm mode is off).

    When I combine the fact Allen was 45 when he first met 10 year old Soon-Yi with Allen’s support of Polanski and the aforementioned accusation Farrow made against Woody regarding another child, Allen pretty much has the words “classic example of a fucking pedophile” stamped on his forehead as far as I’m concerned.

  190. Members of Madonna’s camp say that Guy Ritchie was violent towards her as well. It was thought to be bad enough that when she fell off her horse, there was initial disbelief that the horse was the real cause of her 8 broken bones.

  191. Winona Ryder – arrested and prosecuted for shoplifting.

    Double standard doesn’t even seem like enough to describe this phenomenon.

    S.H.,

    Winona Ryder?

    I’ve seen people arrested and thrown in jail for stealing a pack of cigarettes.

    Last year, I saw a homeless man arrested at a 7 Eleven for trying to sneak a burrito out in his pocket.

    Ryder is rich and she took jewelry worth thousands. Stars get a pass?

  192. I didn’t see anyone mention Dr. Dre yet. He beat the crap out of Dee Barnes for hurting his feelings. He also produced the only song I know of that itself qualifies as spousal abuse*, Eminem’s “Kim” (named for Eminem’s wife, if all I knew about Eminem’s life was that one song I’d still have no trouble understanding why Kim tried to commit suicide).

    *In my opinion, if not the law’s opinion.

  193. @188, I’m not questioning the conviction for the crime, I’m questioning the ostracization after the fact. I never said should get a pass but I do consider hers a lesser crime than beating the shit out of and/or raping somone (which is why I put it in italics).

  194. None of these break my heart, because I believe that all famous people will, if I know enough about them, fail me in ways I cannot forgive. I admire things people do, but I have no heroes.

    This is the worst part of growing up. Ghandi, MLK, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela- all people who have done really awful things.

  195. So the lik I was given didn’t disprove the support arrears but does make the Dave foley child support situation a more nuanced than a simple deadbeat dad issue.

    Before the income tables were implemented, family court judges in Canada coul award support based arbitrarily on what the judge nd custodial parent felt the non-custodial parent should be able to pay, without opportunity for revisitation. Later support payments were based on a percentage of the non-custodial parents income, plus there may be provisions for extracurriculars and such. Apparently efforts are being made paying off on the arrears.

  196. Martha Stewart – basically being Donald Trump while female.

    Donald Trump, AFAIK, has not engaged in insider trading. Nobody was pissed at her for being a shitty business person who is high off her own hype (Donald-Trump-while-woman) – but pretending that a list of convicted insider traders isn’t predominantly rich white dudes is ridiculous. Further, criminal penalties for her crime range up to 20 years in prison. She spent five months there.

  197. Goody —

    Justamblingalong — love it!

    This Troll Asshole (Maybe this should become my screen name!) would like to correct some mistakes in comments.

    The name is WitchWolf not WhiteWitch — Although WhiteWitch is a very cool name, it’s just not mine – Let’s see who has the itty-bity- reading problem.

    1) I never said it was a “lie” — I said that I doubt that the numbers are as high as 6% because of all the reporting bull that is around rape, and how the police don’t have a great track record at recording, investigating, involved in abuse (whether it’s rape, sexual assault, or harrashing women– ) This is very different from telling you that you are lying – You are not lying, so, I am not sure where the fuzzy logic you came up with that I am calling you a liar. I am not. I am disputing the statistics that you are using, I am not calling “YOU” into question unless of course you are responsible for the statistics behind the study.

    2) You have called me a troll and a Asshole — Time and time again, calling me such things doesn’t support your comments at all. I find it amusing and a little bit childish. But if you need to continue to call me a Toll and Asshole please do so, if you makes feel better, because again, I just really don’t care.

    3)

    The reason I’m taking it personally is because WhiteWitch claimed I was saying that “all women lie” and that rape isn’t a real problem, because I cited a statistic in support of the idea that most rape accusation are true.

    uh-ha – when did I say that – I just stated the fact that I didn’t agree with the statistics and went on stating why I didn’t agree with them. I never said that you were saying that “all women lie” —

    What I did say from #132 (Notice I didn’t use you by name – I was talking in general about the statistics not you… If you felt like you were being targeted by me, it’s on you.. NOT me.

    Seems funny to me but a recent case of a young women who went to the police to file rape charges, only to be convicted of false reporting, only to find out that the man who raped her not only raped her but other victims – Oh yeah, she had to pay for filing a false claim –

    Sure — Yeah, because women lie all the time, because they have nothing to worry about..

    I am so sick and tired of people trying to say that women are liars, and can’t be believed, because the guy is a “nice” guy.

    SO I am sure your “false claim” statistics are really accurate, we can ask the young women who report but who are harassed by the police and the system.
    .

    If you noticed that I didn’t point you out, I talked about a case where a women was convicted of false rape charges and had to pay, only to find out that she was a victim of a serial rapist.

    My comment afterwards a sarcastic remark about not believing women who go in for rape. I am also using it as a example of these “so” called false rape claims — I also brought in other indicators that Rape is not looked at seriously by PDS around the country, that the PDs have a habit lately of inflating numbers by dropping cases so they can be cleared out of the system

    So, unless you are the PD who are doing this type of thing, or you are the one who is collecting data, I am not attacking you.

    So, yeah, I am mocking the statistics, that I have read, and have done research on. If Justamblingalong wants to think that I am mocking “them” — then so be it, it’s on them, not me.

    *shrug*

  198. Mods– If my post in response to Justamblingalong for calling me a Troll Asshole is moderation – Then please put all of the postings by Justamblingalong who call me a Troll Asshole in moderation as well..

    Thanks

  199. Donald Trump, AFAIK, has not engaged in insider trading.

    Stewart was never convicted of insider trading. She was initially charged with securities fraud, obstruction of justice and lying to invstigators, and convicted of the obstruction charges as well as lying to investigators.

    but pretending that a list of convicted insider traders isn’t predominantly rich white dudes is ridiculous.

    again, she wasn’t convicted of that and also I never said anything close to that.

    Nobody was pissed at her for being a shitty business person who is high off her own hype

    That’s exactly why they were pissed off at her and that’s exactly why there was so much glee when she went to jail. Martha Stewart was universally hated well before that case even came to trial. Stories of her temper tantrums and mistreatment of her employees were commonplace (for just one example see “Martha Inc”, the book and film, both made well before her legal issues), while Trump made a career out of the tagline “your fired”. Trump was literally lauded for the exact same business behavior that Stewart allegedly exhibited. That double standard was illustrated pretty well when Stewart’s version of The Apprentice was resoundly rejected by the public (hence my comparison).

  200. I am also using it as a example of these “so” called false rape claims — I also brought in other indicators that Rape is not looked at seriously by PDS around the country, that the PDs have a habit lately of inflating numbers by dropping cases so they can be cleared out of the system

    I have explained many times why this is irrelevant to the study. You’re offended I call your willful ignorance trolling- what would you call it?

    uh-ha – when did I say that

    You sumarized my post as “all women lie about being raped, all the time.” You also said “I am so sick and tired of people trying to say that women are liars, and can’t be believed, because the guy is a “nice” guy,” again in direct response to my post.

    I’m not going to say this again, so please pay attention: There are tons of legitimate reasons to disagree with the study! Matlun identified some. But the study I cited has literally nothing to do with the types of (otherwise legitimate!) points you raised about the police not taking rape seriously enough or not believing survivors. Based on the utter disconnect between what the study did, and the problems you claimed it had, it’s extraordinarily obvious you didn’t read it. You just decided to accuse it of saying all women are liars (which is also absurd, since what it actually said was 6% of accusers either lied or misidentified their assailant, which is not the same thing) because you evidently enjoy making wild, demonstrably false attacks for no particular reason.

  201. One last attempt at explaining: It’s like if I tried to figure out how many jelly beans were in a bag by counting them each individually, and you criticized the number I got by saying “The company who makes the jelly bean bags might have overstated the number of jelly beans in the bag!” Your point is entirely true, and raises a legitimate concern about honesty- but is totally irrelevant as a criticism of the number I came up with.

  202. Justamblingalong

    LOL — Try to flip spin or dice it up all you want. I didn’t post anything negative against you – If you want to be faux outraged and go on the rage parade — Have fun –

    This has nothing against you… If you want to equate women who are discarded by the system as jelly beans, and your faux outrage as presenting miss information from the counting company – By all means — It doesn’t mean that the “count’ is still right. It means that the bean counters got it wrong.

    So please, be faux outraged, and be disingenuous all you want, call me a Troll Asshole all you want, but it still doesn’t change the facts that women, who go to the police who report rape are often (see the statistics and news headlines) dismissed, falsely convicted of false reporting, slut shamed, brushed under the rug, have their case down graded (see the NYPD article), and discounted. This is not a smoke screen, this isn’t anything else besides discounting women’s stories.

    If you want, faux rage on about how a poster on a forum was sarcastic about handling the fact that you presented, and be faux outraged that a poster on the forum was mocking the facts that come from the same system that have a bad history of believing women.

    If you want to pretend that I was attacking you , then sure, do that as well.

    I did read the study — and reading the study doesn’t mean, OMG, I can’t disagree with how the study was conducted, how women who are treated when they go to a male based organization to report a rape that was done by a man. In which the same organization who have their own issues about rape reporting, sexual mistreatment/rape/harassment.

    So don’t tell me that I needs to believes the statistics — Tell me that they iz perfect —

    Again –OMG it’s the internets and someone didn’t believe my facts…..LOL LOL LOL LOL …..

  203. Turns out we have a culture full of domestic abusers, rapists, pedophiles, etc

    Of course this is what we get under capitalism.

  204. To throw out another good one I hadn’t seen scanning through – Adam Horowitz of the Beastie Boys (also married to Kathleen Hanna) used the 1999 MTV video music awards to speak out against violence against women at concerts, specifically woodstock.

  205. @SH:

    Stewart was never convicted of insider trading.

    Hey, don’t go spoiling all the fun.
    Since when is being convicted a requirement for being on this shit(ty) list?

  206. Stewart was never convicted of insider trading.

    That’s irrelevant – what she did was insider trading, by definition. It’s like when we complain about people raping someone and then someone runs in to say “BUT THEY WEREN’T CONVICTED.” They still raped someone. She found out her stocks were going to tank before the information went public, she sold her shares, and avoided losing what she would have lost had she the same public information as all other traders. That is insider trading. Also, FYI, as far as I know, the associated crime is called “securities fraud.” No one goes to jail for “insider trading.” You’re arguing bullshit semantics.

    She committed a crime and most likely due to her celebrity, got a far lighter sentence than MOST convicted. She sucks and got all the bullshit she deserved. She’s NO WHERE near anyone else on your list. She did a shitty thing and paid for it. Good. That’s how society should work.

  209. Anon21: Minor quibble: Lolita was actually the titular character’s nickname. I think her real name was Dolores.

  210. Of course this is what we get under capitalism.

    Yes, of course. Because non-capitalist cultures are widely known for their respect for consent and their total denunciation of violence against women.

  211. She committed a crime and most likely due to her celebrity, got a far lighter sentence than MOST convicted.

    I just don’t buy that because even just looking at the others charged in this case, the guy who ran the ImClone company pled guilty and served seven years, but there was a truckload of charges on that guy including conspiracy and wire fraud on top of everything else. Stewart’s broker got the same sentence as her, even though his role was said to be far more involved (not only because he was the broker but also because he was instructing others to lie).

    We can argue back in forth if the conviction was merited. I don’t think it was, I don’t think it was fair, and I don’t think she did what she was accused of doing at least to the extent it was put forward (and the judge in the case said the same when he threw out the securities fraud charge). But that’s not why I put her on that list, I put her on that list for the general reaction to her existence and the way she ran her empire well before that shit even went down. The general view of Martha Stewart has always been that of a cold hearted and ruthless bitch while Trump was a savvy businessman who was celebrated for the exact same characteristics that were used to shit on Stewart and celebrate her downfall.

  212. What are you talking about? It is impossible for crime, violence, and environmental damage to exist in a Socialist state, except to the extent they’re inflicted by capitalist agents.

  214. @ PGP–

    Yep, right on. To briefly geek out, no one –except– Humbert called her Lolita. Dolores Haze (dolores=sadness, sorrowful) was her “real” name.

  215. Capitalism creates pedophila and rapists. Of course. Prior to the rise of capitalism, sexual violence and child abuse were completely non-existent.

    Capitalism! It’s like magic. The bad kind.

  216. Yep, right on. To briefly geek out, no one –except– Humbert called her Lolita. Dolores Haze (dolores=sadness, sorrowful) was her “real” name.

    Which makes it all the more confusing why Stanley Kubrick thought he’d just have Charlotte (Lo’s mother) call her “Lolita” in his “adaptation” of the novel. Just one minor problem in a movie full of them, but indicative of Kubrick’s basic contempt for the source material.

    God, that movie still makes me angry when I think about it. I guess we can’t put a guy on the list just for making an awful film out of an amazing book, huh?

  217. A family friend’s daughter is named Heloise, and her father used to call her LoLo or Lolita.

    (Am on the “How anyone can read that book and NOT think it is condemning Humbert amazes me” side.)

  218. Chava: Heh, thank you. I have a slight fever right now, so processing is impaired. My mind is a garbage heap of random access information. 🙂
    I didn’t know about Marion Zimmer Bradley’s history. I went right off her about ten years ago, after realizing that 1) she wasn’t a very good writer, 2) Mists of Avalon was 500 pages of sleaze.
    Donna: Definitions of crime vary by area, and it also depends on how serious the local lawn order is about sex crimes, pollution and violence. For instance, rape is, I believe, technically illegal in South Africa. However, very few men (if any) are ever prosecuted, so one could say that rape is not a crime. The US has the same problem; rape’s only a crime if someone gets caught in broad daylight doing it.
    Ditto drug crimes and murder in Mexico (no way to prosecute), incest in certain areas of the US,(possibly still technically legal) and the making/consumption of synthetic drugs in the whole of the US.
    Short version: The definition of a crime depends on who’s doing the defining. Thus, it’s entirely possible that there are no violent crimes or criminal pollution in socialist countries because they are not defined as ‘crimes.’

  219. I guess we can’t put a guy on the list just for making an awful film out of an amazing book, huh?

    I think we can link it to the misogyny that also made him feel he was justified in tormenting poor Shelly Duvall while filming The Shining. He was also an ass to Scatman Crothers, but Jack Nicholson tried to ameliorate the impact on Crothers. He didn’t do jack shit to help Duvall, though.

  220. Pablo Picasso was verbally, mentally and physically abusive.
    ‘Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told his mistress Françoise Gilot in 1943. Indeed, as they embarked on their nine-year affair, the 61-year-old artist warned the 21-year-old student: “For me there are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats”.

  221. (Am on the “How anyone can read that book and NOT think it is condemning Humbert amazes me” side.)

    Well, the vast majority of those who condemn the book has probably not read it, so this is less of a problem than you might think.

  223. What are you talking about? It is impossible for crime, violence, and environmental damage to exist in a Socialist state, except to the extent they’re inflicted by capitalist agents.

    I’m assuming this is sarcasm, yes?

  224. Nabokov on the name “Lolita,” from pp. 25-26 of the book Strong Opinions:

    I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is “L.” The suffix “-ita” has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy “L” and a long “o”. No, the first syllable should be as in “lollipop,” the “L” liquid and delicate, the “lee” not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in “Dolores.” My little girl’s heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname “Haze,” where Irish mists blend with a German bunny — I mean a small German hare.

    I guess, then, that her full name, Dolores Haze, meant something like “sad bunny.”

    And this is what he had to say on p. 26 about the name Humbert Humbert:

    The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, and I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble. Lends itself also to a number of puns. And the execrable diminutive “Hum” is on a par, socially and emotionally, with “Lo,” as her mother calls her.

    In case anyone has doubts as to what he thought of the character.

  225. I’m assuming this is sarcasm, yes?

    I’ll let you draw your own conclusion about that one, based on all my other comments here.

  229. TW for later descrip of doctor abuse

    Guilty on the uninformed naming of Nabokov–have not read the book and was just judging by the apparent misinterpretations. So, strike Nabokov and amend to “all those assholes who use the term “Lolita” as their reference for seductive underage trollops who are somewhere between equally and totally at fault in statutory rape cases, in their opinion” or something like that.

    Oh, and dead, while false accusations certainly suck, the fact that you were never in the room with the person should provide an adequate defense, yes? What do you propose as a mechanism to guide against such things? Do you understand that there is a lot of abuse that is never reported and a lot more that is reported but not taken seriously?

    DonnaL’s mention of her doctor reminded me of how medical professionals can get away with a lot on the pretext of an examination. I recall a pediatrician who roughly fingered my labia during a routine physical at age 5 or 6 in the presence of my mother (who is a nurse) and asked if I was “eating a lot of peanut butter.” I was disturbed but didn’t say anything. At 19 I was groped by a doctor during a physical for a job. He grabbed both of my breasts and squeezed them momentarily–not in a circular breast exam kind of way but in a groping kind of way. He had his nurse present in the office at the time. In my early 20s I saw a resident at University health services for a severe flu–he asked a lot of questions about my sex life and touched me in a lot of ways that didn’t seem appropriate for an upper respiratory visit. I talked to my trusted nurse practitioner about it–she thought it sounded inappropriate and referred me to the supervising physician (a woman) who praised the resident’s “thoroughness.” I read about a dentist in my state who was arrested after a patient under anaesthesia woke up with something other than his hands in her mouth–it turned out that in addition to whatever he was doing to sedated patients, the guy had been performing breast exams on patients for years and people had just thought it was normal. I tried googling “dentist breast exams” to find the story–I didn’t find the story from my state but several others popped up.

  230. Gah, Jennifer, that’s all so awful! I’m really sorry that happened to you. And you as well, Donna, that man was a fucking monster. I’m really glad you named him here.

    I had made it through the list completely unscathed, having been aware of all those on the shit list already (or at least not caring about the ones I wasn’t aware of) but Adama? Really? Shit.

    Thanks to everyone for defending Nabokov. It’s a massive pet peeve of mine when people misinterpret the novel and either assume Nabokov to be a pedophile or Delores to be the seducer (Vanity Fair called it “the only convincing love story of [the] century”). It was one of Nabokov’s great regrets in life, that people didn’t ‘get’ it, that she became a fantasy. I wrote about the ‘Lolita problem’ a while back (shameless self-promotion!) and now my blog gets at least 15 hits a day from people searching for Lolita fetish porn (the keyword searches are sickening). The only consolation I have is that maybe some of the perverts actually read the post and rethink their stance on preteen fetishes… Maybe?

  232. Christ, how have we all gone this long without naming the obvious?

    Clarence fucking Thomas. And it didn’t stop him getting a lifetime appointment to one of the highest offices in the country.

  233. Found another one for the shit list last night — Edward James Olmos, Battlestar Galactica, accused of sexual assault and child molestation. *Trigger warning* on those links (particularly the second one, pages 2+3 are graphic)

    Out of all the people listed here, this is the only one that broke my heart. Terry Gilliam came close, but Commander Adama?!

  234. Out of all the people listed here, this is the only one that broke my heart. Terry Gilliam came close, but Commander Adama?!

    Me too. He’s considered really important to the Mexican-American community, and so many people look up to him…I just have no words.

    Since some people are mentioning men who’ve worked against violence, I need to mention Mick Foley. The man is so wonderful he brings me to tears when I think about it.

  235. Out of all the people listed here, this is the only one that broke my heart. Terry Gilliam came close, but Commander Adama?!

    Apparently he was a big proponent for adding the rape scene in Battlestar Galactica too. And said that anyone disturbed by it was too frail and fragile to be watching TV or some such.

    What did Terry G. do though?

  236. Your reference to that rape scene reminded me of Hitchcock’s insistence on including a scene in Marnie in which Sean Connery rapes Tippi Hedren, in a way that’s pretty graphic for 1964.

    Evan Hunter, who wrote the screenplay for The Birds and was hired to write Marnie as well — he was most well-known for writing the book The Blackboard Jungle, and, as Ed McBain, writing the greatest-ever series of police procedurals, the 87th Precinct novels — recounted in a memoir what happened, as summarized in Wikipedia:

    Original screenwriter Evan Hunter was dismissed by Hitchcock when he refused to write the rape scene that featured in the original novel as he felt the audiences of the time would lose sympathy for the male lead. His replacement Jay Presson Allen told him that the rape scene was the only reason Hitchcock wanted to make the film

    I don’t think Hitchcock ever was accused of raping or assaulting anyone, but he certainly had his issues with women, and was supposedly rather obsessed with Grace Kelly and others.

  237. What did Terry G. do though?

    Supported Polanski, though I don’t know if the person who added him had meant anything else or had other info? But he’s on the *long* list of Polanski supporters.

    And Olmos? I tainted my best friend’s favorite show with that find, so I know what you mean.

  238. I don’t cut Natalie Portman any slack because she’s compared meat to rape, so she’s an apologist. Johnny Depp compared a photo session to rape, in addition to minimizing away Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Well, he can hire bodyguards for his daughters, I guess the peasants are fair game. Ewan MacGregor also said some shit about Polanski, but basically said he didn’t care; I can’t remember. So much awfulness.

  239. To take away from the shit list and add to the it list, French director Luc Besson, a long time friend of Polanski’s, publicly denounced him. I don’t remember the exact wording, in part because the interview Besson gave was in French, and my French is rusty. But he basically said that regardless of all the other good things Polanski has done, he assaulted a 13 year old child, and that’s simply not okay. Besson also pointed out that he (Besson) has a 13 year old daughter, and it would be the height of hypocrisy to excuse such behaviour just because it happened to someone ELSE’S daughter and not his own.

    It really made me want to go out and rent every movie Besson has ever made. Especially coming from a friend of Polanski’s (ex-friend by now, I’m guessing). I mean, yeah, he showed bad judgment becoming friends with the louse in the first place, but he may not have been aware of all the facts at the time.

  240. Re “Lolita,” just FYI about the naming thing: as a real-life Maria Dolores, I can confirm that “Lola” is the standard nickname given and “Lolita” the standard diminutive. It’s not just something that Nabokov made up. In Spain, especially the south, you’ll find a lot of Lolas, Lolis, Lolitas & Mari Lolis.

    As for etymology, “dolor” is the Latin (and Spanish) word for “pain” (could be either physical or psychological) & “dolores” is the plural.

  241. We need to include everyone who ever worked for/with PETA, of course.

    Aishwarya Rai, Alec Baldwin, Alicia Silverstone, Alyssa Milano, Anjelica Huston, Audrina Patridge, Ben Gibbard, Bethenny Frankel, Bill Oddie, Bryan Adams, Carrie Underwood, Casey Affleck, Charlize Theron, Charlotte Ross, Charo, Chris Knights, Chrissie Hynde, Christy Turlington, Chris Walla, Cindy Crawford, Common, Corey Feldman, Dave Navarro, Death Cab for Cutie, Dennis Rodman, Dita Von Teese, Eddie Vedder, Elisabetta Canalis, Elissa Sursara, Emily Deschanel, Emmylou Harris, Eva Mendes, Forest Whitaker, Gillian Anderson, Glenn Dorsey, Hannah Teter, Isabel Lucas, Jaimarie Bjorge, James Cromwell, Jamie Bamber, Jane Lynch, Jason McGerr
    Jessica Biel, Jillian Michaels, Joan Jett, Joaquin Phoenix, John Abraham, John Salley, Jorja Fox, Keanu Reeves, Kellan Lutz, Kelly Brook, Khloe Kardashian, Kim Basinger, Kimberly Wyatt, Kristen Bell, Kristen Johnston, Kristen Wiig, Kristin Cavallari, Kristoff St. John, Laura Vandervoort, Lea Michele, Martina Navratilova, Megan Park, Michael Stipe, Michael Vartan, Mickey Rourke, Missy Higgins,
    Moby, Monica Dogra, Morrissey, Natalie Portman, Nicholas Gonzalez, Nigel Barker, Olivia Munn, Owain Yeoman, Pamela Anderson, Paul McCartney, Perez Hilton, Peter Falk, Pink, Rahul Khanna, Ricky Gervais, Rise Against, Roger Daltrey, Roger Moore, Ron Artest, Rue McClanahan, Russell Simmons, Ryan Gosling, Sadie Frost, Sara Gilbert, Sarah Connor, Sean Kingston, Shanna Moakler, Shirley Manson, Sophie E llis-Bextor, Stella McCartney, Steve-O, Tim Gunn, Tommy Lee, Toni Collette, Trent Reznor, Vera Lynn, Vivienne Westwood, Woody Harrelson, Yvonne Strahovski, etc.

    Rape apologist, the lot of ’em!
    I noticed more than a few of them already are on the shit list.

    Bad luck for Eddie Vedder fans though.

  242. Everyone who ever worked with/for PETA seems a bit extreme to me, but each to her own.

    With great regret, Sigmund Freud. Great regret because he was so intelligent and such a compelling writer and had some great insights into many things. However, he decided his patients were deluded when several of them told him that their fathers had raped them, instead of realizing that their “hysteria,” or what we would now acknowledge as PTSD stemmed from that trauma; he created the absurd notion of penis envy; and he claimed that vaginal orgasms indicated a true maturity and acceptance of oneself as a woman, whereas clitoral orgasms meant one had never matured and secretly wanted to be a man, and, in the words of an older friend of mine, “that really fucked some of us up.”

    So as long we’re including people who did not commit acts of sexual violence or domestic battery themselves, we should acknowledge Freud, not least for the huge impact his most fucked-up theories has had on our culture.

  244. Rape apologist, the lot of ‘em!

    How are PETA folks rape apologists, exactly?

    I mean, I’m no vegetarian, but PETA are no worse than the million other organizations who take the ‘sex sells’ route.

  245. Also – anyone else noticed that the background image of this site only extends like half way down the page on long threads? I mean, what a mindfuck.

  246. One for the good list is Emma Thompson. She removed her name off the Polanski support petition after being challenged by a Shakesville reader to really think about what she was endorsing (in the words of Caitlin the Shakesville reader):

    Emma did not have much time between meetings, but she gave me all of the time that she had. I asked her why she had signed the petition, and she explained about how well she knows Polanski, how terrible his life has been, and how forgiving the survivor of the rape all those years ago now is. She said she thought the intentions of the judge were unclear, as were the intentions of those who arrested him recently. She told me that a lot of her friends had rung her up asking her to sign the petition, so there had been a certain amount of pressure. She said that she had already been thinking a lot about the petition, as others had expressed their dismay at her signing it.

    I handed her our petition and the comments. She read them both through thoroughly, and came back to me. She said, while she supported Polanski as a friend, a crime is a crime. I don’t know whether she had realised the extent of Polanski’s crime, but she is now fully aware. She will remove her name from the petition – in fact, she said she would call today and sort it out. Even though, she stressed, Polanski has had some truly terrible experiences in his lifetime, experiences that we couldn’t even imagine and which should not be taken out of the equation, she agreed that she could not put her name to a petition asking for his release.

    Yay, Emma Thompson!

  247. Look above at her previous comment, and you’ll see that Marcie is trolling. By making an unsupported assertion that everyone who’s ever been associated with PETA is a rape apologist, she’s trying to suggest, by analogy, that there’s inadequate proof for just about every name mentioned on this thread. I’m afraid, Marcie, that it doesn’t follow.

  250. I mean, I’m no vegetarian, but PETA are no worse than the million other organizations who take the ‘sex sells’ route.

    Nah, they’re much worse. Dressing up as Klansmen, trying to co-opt the murder of George Tiller, fat-shaming.

    ….did we all forget Hugo Schwyzer? or are we just refusing to acknowledge his existence?

    Or, you know, this thread is focused on mainstream celebrities and Schwyzer in no way qualifies as mainstream. But sure, imply everyone on this site is in the Schwyzer camp despite a 1000+ comment thread showing otherwise.

  251. Lewis Carrol was, as is now widely known, a pedophile (although there are some doubts on whether he actually physically raped any children).

    And my mind simply refuses to process Sean Connery, Rob Lowe and Bill Murray…

  252. Lewis Carrol was, as is now widely known, a pedophile

    I thought it was the other way around? That people have been speculating about him as a pedophile for 30-40 years, and in the last 10 or so there has been a fair amount of scholarship arguing that the evidence for this is thin?

  253. Lewis Carrol was, as is now widely known, a pedophile (although there are some doubts on whether he actually physically raped any children).

    Actually, there’s no reason to think he ever touched a girl inappropriately at all.

    Karoline Leach is arguing that the child-loving persona was concocted by an heir of his to make him seem more innocent and childlike; her ideas have been met with some laughter by a number of established Alice scholars. Personally, I think she’s cherry-picking her evidence to an extreme degree.

  254. Anyway, given that there’s no reason to think Carroll hurt anybody, and lots of evidence that he helped people, I don’t think he belongs here.

    John Ruskin, on the other hand, was a total creeper. I wouldn’t have let him anywhere near a child.

  255. Or, you know, this thread is focused on mainstream celebrities and Schwyzer in no way qualifies as mainstream. But sure, imply everyone on this site is in the Schwyzer camp despite a 1000+ comment thread showing otherwise.

    My comment had originally included my noting I liked the idea of ignoring him, but I cut that bit, assuming it was understood no one here supported him — Sorry for the misunderstanding though, I certainly never meant to imply anyone here *supports* him, quite the opposite — that everyone here would prefer never to hear of him again. And also…I didn’t realize this was mainstream celebrities only, as I kinda live under a rock and haven’t heard of half the people listed (but whatever, that’s my problem) — definitely mea culpa though.

    And Lewis Carrol?! I hope LC is right, or I’ll never look at Alice in Wonderland the same again…

  257. It seems a bit facile to say that since Lewis Carol chilled out with kids and wrote a kids book that he was obviously a pedo… I mean unless anyone has some inside information.

  258. @Juke, not a problem, glad it was just a simple misunderstanding, I’m kind of new to actually commenting here and don’t want to step on any toes in the process.

  259. It seems a bit facile to say that since Lewis Carol chilled out with kids and wrote a kids book that he was obviously a pedo… I mean unless anyone has some inside information.

    He seems to have been most comfortable around little girls, and there are numerous quotations from him attesting to that. He never pursued or seemed to desire an adult romantic/sexual relationship. His desire for the company of children was unusual even during an era known for its fetishization of children.

    That said, I don’t think that anybody would be looking twice at this if he had been a woman. I too like to spend a lot of time with children and I too tell them stories. I’m not a photographer, so I don’t bother photographing them, which was one of the things he–and many of them–liked best (much is often made of the photographs he took of nude children, and usually that much is stripped of the Victorian context that made such photographs acceptable specifically because children were considered “innocent,” as well as the numerous precautions Carroll took against putting the slightest pressure on any child to take them, and the fact that they were taken with full knowledge and consent of the parents, and the fact that we have at least one account from one of the little girls in question when she grew up in which she recounts it as a happy memory). I think the suspicion arises from the fact that in Western culture, men aren’t supposed to enjoy the company of children, so one that does is automatically suspicious.

  260. Oh, and on the heels of a longish comment currently in moderation, the only thing we know for certain is that every so often, he had thoughts that he found disturbing at night when he was trying to sleep. We know this because he wrote at one point that working out complex mathematical problems in one’s head was a good way of dealing with such thoughts. In other words, repress and sublimate! But we don’t really have any way of knowing what those thoughts concerned.

  261. Thank you, thank you, Jill, for finally saying farewell to Marley, who is definitely no angel. Let’s hope we never see his ghost. (Sorry, I know that’s pretty bad, but I couldn’t resist.)

  263. You know, I read ( not from a really reputable source ) that Carrol’s book was actually poking fun at unreal numbers and mathematical developments of the time. I think I might look further into that.

  264. At least from what I’ve read in New Scientist and elsewhere, many portions of Lewis Carroll’s writings were satires of then-new mathematical concepts. In particular the Duchess’s baby and the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Carroll (under his non-pseudionym) was himself a highly regarded mathematician.

    Other bits, like the Caucus Race, were more to do with politics at the time.
    Never seen anything to suggest he ever attacked anyone. He was certainly fascinated by a particular young girl, but fascinated =! attracted to =! abused.

  265. I feel much better now, thanks! I had Alice tainted with that for years (even though it’s still my favorite book)

  266. In general, for DV apologism, the entire cast of The View belongs on the Shit List today.

    More specifically, Whoopi and Sherri especially belong on the Shit List for using the “Only a Lad” defense on behalf of Chris Brown.

  271. Whoops, my Clinton comment was redundant. Sorry.

    I see Jerry Lee Lewis was mentioned as well. I assume that was for the sanctioned child abuse that was his third marriage and his possible role in the suspicious death of his fifth wife. How about Jerry Lee’s contemporaries, Chuck Berry and Elvis. Berry’s proclivity for teenagers is common knowledge, as are the cameras he put in the women’s bathroom of his restaurant. Presley somehow escaped the kind of reputation Berry and Lewis now have, but when Elvis got involved with Priscilla Wagner, she was fourteen and he was ten years older.

  272. Berry’s proclivity for teenagers is common knowledge, as are the cameras he put in the women’s bathroom of his restaurant.

    Yeah.. I get squicky whenever I hear Johhny B Good because of this. Ew.

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