The week's news about the sexual conduct of politically powerful men gives me a queasy feeling of déjà vu.
As the French agonize over whether Dominique Strauss-Kahn's star power quashed past allegations, I can respond cynically: Yes, that probably happened. But we should not automatically assume that timelier reporting about Strauss-Kahn's alleged sexually aggressive behavior (including an alleged violent incident in 2002) would have slowed the 62-year old Socialist's march towards the French presidency.
I speak from experience.
Eight years ago I was dragged scowling and complaining into an investigation of allegations that Arnold Schwarzenegger -- the leading candidate for governor of California -- had sexually harassed and molested women, including those who worked on his movies.
A team of reporters for the Los Angeles Times, where I then worked, had been pursuing the story for weeks and were about to publish a first piece. With the election days away, I was pulled in. At the time I was deep into an investigative project about a troubled Los Angeles hospital that had a history of harming or even killing its patients. Digging into The Terminator's salacious back story seemed a tawdry detour.
But the orders came from on high. They needed someone adept at persuading reluctant sources to share traumatic or humiliating experiences. So out I went crisscrossing Southern California in search of women groped by the Republican candidate for governor. Some declined to speak. Others brusquely said nothing had ever happened.
But several reluctantly began to describe behavior that appeared to cross every imaginable line. As I interviewed these women, I came to believe in the importance of the story. They were strong, professional, independent people, women like me: competent and assertive.
Their experiences with Schwarzenegger were double humiliations. First they suffered through the acts themselves: demeaning -- often public -- groping, unwanted, invasive kisses, crude, belittling comments.
Far worse, they felt forced by circumstance to let Schwarzenegger behave badly -- like an over-indulged toddler, as one woman put it. A complaint against the bigger-than-life moneymaker could tank their careers. Not a single woman felt anyone would have taken their side or chastised the star.
The abuse of power -- and the judgments underlying it -- were relevant facts for Californians preparing to cast a historic vote. (As was Hollywood's repeated willingness to look the other way, but that is another story).
So in urging women to go public with their accounts, I was arguing something I truly believed, which was that their stories would be of use to voters.
I went to the door of a woman in Orange County who supposedly had conceived a child with Schwarzenegger. She became teary-eyed the moment I identified myself as a reporter, repeatedly and emphatically denying that Schwarzenegger had fathered her son. Soon after, a British tabloid published her name and said she had a "love child" with the actor. We were never able to confirm this. (The 2003 story resurfaced this week when Schwarzenegger admitted he had fathered a child with a member of his household staff more than 10 years ago. The LA Times, which broke the story, described the mother as a staff member who recently retired. This does not appear to be the woman I interviewed, a former flight attendant on a charter plane.)
Ultimately, several women agreed to recount their experiences with Schwarzenegger, courageously diving into the maw of a nasty political campaign.
Three days before the election, Linnea Harwell, who had become the manager of an Atlanta art museum, described how Schwarzenegger regularly stripped naked in front of her on the 1988 Santa Fe, N.M. set of the movie Twins.
Once, Harwell recalled, he pulled her down on a bed while he was wearing only underwear and let her go only when someone called her on her walkie talkie. "He was laughing like it was all a big joke," she said then. "Well it wasn't. It was scary."
Unless his wife, Maria Shriver, was on the set, Harwell said, Schwarzenegger made rude comments without caring who heard. She recalled wondering, "Why does he think he could get away with it? But he could."
Carla Baron, a stand-in on the same movie set, said the actor and his buddy had sandwiched her between them, then forced his tongue down her throat. Another woman haltingly told me how Schwarzenegger pinned her against him and spanked her.
Schwarzenegger denied that the alleged events on the Twins set had occurred, but issued a general apology. "I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful," he said. His wife stood by him.
Election Day arrived and Schwarzenegger was elected by a wide margin. The Los Angeles Times was castigated for smearing Schwarzenegger close to the election. Ten thousand readers canceled their subscriptions. I received a string of vicious calls and emails. The women were branded as liars desperate for a share of fame.
One of the women called me in tears. I'd cajoled her into revealing her humiliations -- and here was yet another. The voters, like Hollywood, ignored the star's troubling behavior. I was devastated and angry, too -- and guilty for wasting their courage.
If the press had simply investigated and reported on the past allegations against Strauss-Kahn, would it have mattered?
Or did it take an arrest to change the course of French politics?
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Michael Shaw: Reading the Pictures: Arnold the Philanderer = Very Old News
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach: Why Powerful Men Can't Keep Their Pants On
Strauss-Kahn is accused of rape -- not sexual promiscuity.
We are talking about CRIMES, not lying and cheating.
W administration
F&F
s/he
MM's points
Pot calls kettle black?
Women were allegedly harassed by Schwarzenegger. Such harassment is against the law in California, not to mention repugnant to most voters. Yes, it is a matter of degree, but these women were handled, humiliated, and emotionally and physically put in jeopardy, and their pain is legitimate.
When a man put his hands on women at work in this way, the harassment becomes violence, even if he does not proceed to rape. It is not beyond imagination that a man who would casually and routinely harass women in this way would also rape.
If the women had spoken out, Schwarzenegger could have been prosecuted. It is too bad the women did not pursue their claims; California might have been spared eight years of terrible governance. Unfortunately, it is certain that the women would have been hounded by press and public, and their future employment would probably have been impacted, so it is understandable that they did not come forward.
I would take the issue a step further and ask, if such men get away with sexual illegalities, in what other ways are they skirting the law? What financial "dalliances" are they willing to commit?
Men like this believe their financial power gives them immunity -- because it often does.
They know who is cheating on their wives,
They know who are sexually harrassing staff,
They know who is gay and who isn't,
They know who are in solid releationships but are pretending to be single for the publicity
They know who the drug addicts are.
But the Publicists will say things like "Look, if you write any of this about "Person A" then you will never get another interview with Persons, B, C, D, and E who I also represent.
The only reason people like Tom Cruise and Lindsay Lohan started getting negative info put out aboutt hem is because
1. Tom Dumped his powerful publicist and replaced her with his sister. She didn't have the Juice to keep true stories from coming out.
2. Lohan got a letter sent to her from the producer of a movie. Once it was out she was fair game because there was nothing that could be done anymore.
In the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he has admitted his culpability and apologized for it - neither of which in any way vitiates the selfishness and recklessness of his behavior. He admitted his culpability because he must, and he apologized for it. . .why, exactly? But I haven’t heard any public comment about Mildred Baena, the housekeeper who bore the child of her employer but chose to stay on at her job, facing a betrayed wife every day of her employment while knowing that Maria Shriver had been kept in the dark. You have to be a certain kind of sociopath to feel entitled to pick up your paycheck and bonuses, for more than a decade, in such a context, without a sweeping sense of shame and discomfort. Any woman with ten years of experience at the Schwarzenegger residence would have had no trouble getting another job in a Hollywood minute, yet this woman felt comfortable staying on; indeed, she waited until Schwarzenegger already was governor (i.e., had more to lose and thus, presumably, she stood to gain more) before telling him. Accordingly, Mildred Baena deserves our opprobrium for her adultery, and what can only be construed as her sadistic indifference to the employer she betrayed over such a long period of time.
I think it was their way of making the best of things but they have probably all found out something further about Arnie's ways and it's boiled over now.
We don't know. What we do know is that she did NOT have the power here. He did.
It wasn't until i started blogging with progressives that I truly understood that there really is a deep streak of sexism that emerges regularly within this group's attitude. Inexplicable to me, still. I considered myself liberal for so many years, and I really never considered that there was a problem.
There is. And progressives truly need to address it and unearth why.
The rest are lower than dirt.
The Ahnold also fulfilled his role as the Terminator by ending with emotional violence the family (or is it 'families'?) that obviously loved and supported him. He reached back in time and turned butt-ugly those happy moments with his family.
Given his obviously outsized ego, will he next try to portray George Bailey in a remake of 'It's A Wonderful Life'? Let's hope not. He surely would turn that character into a replicant of Jason Voohees from 'Friday the 13th' and make Potterville look idyllic.
Yet, he is THE poster boy of the Republican governors.
Schwarzenegger