It’s too bad you weren’t there to explain that to her.
Apparently.
Here’s all the statements from the accusers, including Lucy DeCoutere from Trailer Park Boys.
To me they sound credible. While one such incidence could be construed as crossed signals on sex…all of them together sounds like a very scary guy.
A guy’s allowed to be in to BDSM. He is not allowed to impose it unwittingly on people he just met, or even people he’s been out with a few times. And he’s definitely not allowed to impose it on women who have said they are not interested, whether they come to his house or not.
Apparently he’s only into BDSM in so far as he is the dominant/abusive one. None of the allegations he imply that he has any interest on being on the receiving end.
I wonder how many times he’s watched American Psycho.
My bad for re-posting the Toronto Star link. I totally missed that this thread had 2 pages :-/
Isn’t that often the case?
Another article, from someone in music/media circles:
http://www.nothinginwinnipeg.com/2014/10/do-you-know-about-jian/
[Hijack]I love the look of that page.[/Hijack]
I will never, ever understand why some women do this.
A date is not a “relationship”. You have absolutely no obligation to see him again, let alone have sexytimes with him again, especially if you were *abused *during it.
Assuming, as seems likely, the stories are largely true - I suspect he was simply reasonably clever at choosing as partners women who he thought unlikely to protest or seek redress - and that’s why he got away with it for so long.
Some guy attempted to treat my wife like that (back in the day) on a date, there would be blood - figuratively and/or literally. ‘Put up with being abused, keep quiet about it, not go to the cops or anyone for fear of embarrasment or harrassment’ is simply not in her nature - whether he was a celebrity interviewer or not, makes no difference. But others are more meek, and presumably he sought them out.
Several of them were ambitious and in some aspect of the Canadian media industry, thus women he could conceivably damage professionally (like Cicconne). That’s probably not coincidental.
Think about Johns and hookers. No one thinks it’s okay for either party to get beaten and robbed. Nobody. But both parties know, going in, that they putting themselves in a situation where such could occur. How many of the Johns who DO get robbed or beaten, go to the cops, do you think? How about the hookers? What percentage of beating or assault do you figure they don’t report?
I’m going to conjecture that being a part of a kink relationship is somewhat similar. You would effectively be putting yourself at risk for being abused or assaulted, pretty clearly. Now, how likely do you really believe, that person is to report it?
And dating him a second time? How is it not self evident the he was selecting women like prey, selecting the weak and vulnerable. He has some star power, going for him too. He’s selecting women he recognizes as damaged and weak, I believe.
Yesterday, the Globe & Mail, one of Canada’s two national papers, did an article on the PR firm that Ghomeshi had hired: Navigator. They specialise in advising on crisis management and re-building reputations. Their motto is “When you can’t afford to lose”. They have an A-list of clients, including a former Prime Minister and a former Attorney General of Ontario.
That was yesterday.
Today, Navigator has dropped Ghomeshi as a client:
Forgot the link:
So give me some perspective here. How big is Ghomeshi in Canada? My familiarity with him in the US, as I mentioned, is through NPR and to me he is an “NPR celebrity” (if that), which is not much of a celebrity at all in the scheme of things (no offense to any NPR celebrities reading this or who happen to be members of this board, which I suspect is none, anyway. Just covering my bases.)
Hard to say. I know of him from his band days, when he was lead with Moxy Früvous. I’ve known that he had the CBC show, but I’ve never been a regular listener.
However, in news stories, the current Premier of Ontario, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada, and the current leader of the federal Green Party all have said they know him as a friend. (All of them are women, by the way, and two rushed to his defence as soon as he published his Facebook page. They’ve since back-pedaled. The leader of the Green Party in particular has been taking a lot of flak for her early statements.)
I’m inclined to assume that this means Ghomeshi lied to them about his situation. If you are a crisis management firm, potential clients probably take it for granted that you have worked for some nasty folks. However, you also really need your client to cooperate fully if you want to get anything done.
Canadian CBC celebrities get more exposure than NPR celebrities among a bigger cross-section of the public, being in a smaller pond and all that. I’d put him at about the same celebrity level as someone like Don Imus used to be in the U.S., before his own (quite different) scandal.
How big is Lucy DeCoutere?
(She is an actress on a show called Trailer Park Boys which, to ME, is the biggest thing to come out of Canadian entertainment in the past 10 years but I do not have my finger on the pulse of Canadian entertainment.)
Stateside, sexual assault rumors about Bill Cosby are returning to the media. I wonder if this will accelerate them.