I’m surprised we are hearing from Ghomeshi. I know there’s the stupid version of redemption, where the long process of seeking to correct and atone for ones actions – a rare and special thing, not for everyone, as it’s been called in fiction – is somehow realized in the form of waiting a news cycle. I wish that were surprising, but it’s not.
But I thought part of the reason he fell so fast in public opinion was that instead of receiving the blind support of fans, it came out he despised them, privately joking about how they made him sick and were like bugs. Any sensible person should care more about abuse, to be sure, but that left nobody willing to pull for his public image. Who, exactly, is left with any interest in rehabilitating it?
I think there’s a racial element. White men are at little risk of false accusations or of false identification. Black men are at greater risk, and the occupant sometimes wants to execute the falsely accused.
That, and… I’m not sure how many actual fans he ever really had. The CBC had anointed him as their cool cultural interview guy and promoted him as a star, but I know a lot of people who hate-listened to Q. They listened because of the topics and the guests, but they didn’t like Ghomeshi. At all.
(Me, I’d been warned in no uncertain terms he was a creep back when he was in Moxy Früvous, so I never had the stomach to listen.)
Not long before the rape investigation news broke, Q had an episode about campus rape. They found this conservative American woman (sorry, I purged her name, but probably she was promoting her book about it), where she blamed any and all campus rape victims for their own assault.
The backlash was so bad Q had a special episode the following week where Ghomeshi and his producer took turns reading e-mails out loud and apologising.
So yeah, fewer fans than one might think, and a listening audience already in a bad mood when the news hit.
ETA: ohhh yeah, and then there was that blog post by that journalist who had the creepy surprise date with him. (Surprise in that she thought it was a case of them platonically going to a concert together, and he got handsy-feely and kinda ruined her night.)
The original article she wrote (and linked to in that thread) was very good. Really filled a huge gap in understanding the issue, at least for me. It’s good to have something to point to when someone I’m stuck interacting with says “false rape charge” every time there’s news coverage about yet another sexual assault scandal.
What extra annoys me is how often he goes on about racism. I’m sure he’s encountered it, but it has fuck all to do with his own actions. I know racists have come out to troll on him since the accusations, but he doesn’t seem to understand that loads of people sincerely don’t care where his family is from originally. He’s Canadian, and that makes him our problem.
There’s something similar with the “inventor of email” Shiva Ayyadurai. If you doubt his claims that he, and he alone, should be regarded as the one true inventor of email, then you’re racist. No matter what the facts say.
I wanna go “yay!”, but let’s face it – the guy’s in jail because he revenge porned rich and famous people, not because he distributed nude photos of people he’d obtained through hacking.
If you read Lundy Bancroft’s work on abuse, even the most dedicated of his abuser students would just use their new found tools of therapy to abuse women, so he gave up on helping abusers and turned to helping the women they abused (and yeah, it was pretty much always men who were abusers according to him). So, good luck getting these guys to turn. They will probably just become more devious at it and pat themselves on the back for being such good guys.
On Sunday, Ford noticed that — even before her name became public — Whelan appeared to be seeking information about her.
That morning, Ford alerted an associate via email that Whelan had looked at her LinkedIn page, according to the email, which was reviewed by The Post. LinkedIn allows some subscribers to see who views their pages. Ford sent the email about 90 minutes after The Post shared her name with a White House spokesman and hours before her identity was revealed in a story posted on its website.
