Here’s the latest comedy/news stint from Bill Maher’s “Real Time” show, a “New Rule” segment called “Freak-end update”, referring of course to Diddy’s “Freak offs,” his drug-fueled sex orgies often involving prostitutes. Diddy is very likely to be convicted (you’ve seen the tape, right?), and it will be a huge come-down from his status as music king to living in a cell sans sex and drugs.
Maher’s new rule is this: “If you’ve being abused, you gotta leave right away.” He understands why abused women and loath to report it, and will even send affectionate messages to their abusers, but Maher adds that we must understand these dynamics and not let them soften our attitudes towards abuse. He then recounts how laws and attitudes are changing to punish abusers more seriously, and advises abused women to go to the police immediately rather than just telling a few friends or writing about it in a journal.
This is far more serious than most of Maher’s other bits, but he feels strongly about it. Yet he still manages to eke out a few laughs.
While I am aware Diddy’s trial is all over the news, I have no idea who he is. I don’t really care. My question is, why is it taking up so much media space?
‘Diddy’ gets 1.34 billion hits in Google. It look like he is pretty well known. ‘Clinton’ only get 677 million hits in Google.
OK his claim to ‘fame’ is clickbait?
No, Sean Combs’s claim to fame is his music: he was a musician (a rapper) and a record producer. That is why this is getting so much attention. Why don’t you just google him?
Like I said I don’t care. If Sean Combs was an accountant would we be subjected to the media circus?
The answer to my question seems to be “because he is famous”. I suppose my point is the traditional news media is behaving like the papparazi.
It’s quite simple really. He’s enormously wealthy, influential and powerful. Such people draw the attention of the masses and of the media. You and I may not care much, but that’s immaterial now, isn’t it?
This applies to any unequal power relationship. If things are being done to you that you don’t like, or if you’re being made to do things you don’t like, then you’re being abused and if possible, get out or find help getting out.
This seems like obvious advice, but it’s startling how many people don’t follow it.
As a fan and seeker of Beauty Truth and Integrity ( the real Holy Trinity ) it is sobering indeed to consider the popularity of this singer/rapper/whatever. Or how many seasons Duck Dynasty ran versus the new version of Cosmos. But this speaks volumes about our current state of affairs. And not volumes of hope, that’s for sure.
This was an infuriating and tone-deaf take. I was in an abusive relationship for YEARS. Fear and love-bombing and gaslighting after the abuse kept me in. He also got me doing substances (to my great shame), and my dependence on that was also a factor, and with Cassie. We had a hypersexual relationship, and I would feel shame after each encounter, but then I would gaslight myself into thinking it was fine because I didn’t want to lose him, I would send sexy texts.
I don’t think it was that tone-deaf, as Maher seems to understand the reasons why women won’t report such behavior. His point, I believe, was that if the person is to be stopped from repeating that behavior, it has to be reported to the police ASAP. Of course people are ashamed to make reports to the cops, but that’s the one sure way to begin the process of stopping an abuser. It is, of course, the abused person’s choice what they want to do, but as we’ve learned from Diddy, once an abuser, always an abuser, and to different people.
I’m with you on this. I think Maher’s take shows a real lack of understanding and empathy.
I was a teacher for 20 years, and in that time two students told me they were being sexually abused by a family member. Here’s what I think I learned from a fairly up close view of these two situations: it’s very, very scary to tell someone that you’re being abused. What I saw in both cases: almost no one believed them. Not only did almost no one believe them, almost everyone around them attacked them – viciously – for making the accusation.
So, Bill Maher, you can talk about society’s response having changed for the better, but the response of those close to those being abused may not be anywhere near as helpful.
The abusers in both cases had lots of people who were willing to rush to their defense.
Of the very few who did believe them, many of those folks were very quick to say, well, I would have reported the abuse immediately! So the shaming of the victims came from all sides.
And I’m not even getting into the history of those who were abused, and the family backstory that contributed to their falling into these kinds of abusive relationships.
My impression is, it’s really easy to tell a victim of abuse what to do when you’ve never been in that situation yourself.
I really hope you’re doing well now, “I can’t use my normal username for this one, too embarassing,” and that you got the support you need and deserve.
What did you do when the students confided in you?
Was it effective from the point of view of the victims?
In both cases I got Child Protective Services involved, and both victims were removed from the situations where they were being abused.
Did that make everything all better? Nope – see my comment above. In fact, both were subject to so much vitriol from family that both victims went through periods where they cursed me for alerting the authorities. I don’t mention that to elicit sympathy for me, but to give you an idea of the pain the victims experienced because of being ostracized by family and friends.
And all this happened after the “Me Too” movement. The social circles these young women lived in weren’t the virtue signaling, “believe the accuser” denizens of social media.
Both victims’ lives did get better, with many bumps along the way.
You did the right thing of course, Ken. As a teacher you had a legal obligation to notify CPS on top of your moral duty. I wonder if the students, being immature and narcissistic, thought they were entitled to your confidence, which they weren’t, and retaliated against you for setting something in motion that they no longer controlled. No good deed goes unpunished but you did all that you can do, so thanks.
You can see why someone who didn’t have a legal obligation to get involved, wouldn’t.
I have not been following this trial at all. But I am familiar with the long story of women staying with abusers. While I am an admirer of Maher, in this case he is saying the exact thing, pointless and victim-blaming, that has been said to such victims forever: why didn’t you just leave? I admit I am no different, it is what immediately pops into my head as well. But then I stop to think that the situation is more complex than just assuming the person is a weakling and a fool. A person who has been abused is first scouted out as a potential victim. Less egregious behavior is tolerated and then escalates. The victim is treated as an object and they lose whatever sense of humanity they had over time with repeated abuse. Let us please try to have compassion and understand that these entanglements are not as simple as “why didn’t you just leave.”
Agree! Maher may understand intellectually what goes on in such relationships–therefore the reasonable admonition to get out–but, as a man, he has no emotional or psychological concept of what it is like to be threatened with death by one’s significant other–or death of one’s children or pets. A friend of mine has worked with women who did escape, normally after long periods of abuse, in shelters. What they have gone through is something Maher cannot possibly comprehend other than intellectually. Yes, women today are taken more seriously when they press such charges, but that is not the whole story. Even then they can be subjected to harassment, threats, and sometimes murder when the perps refuse to follow PFA orders.
Agreed. It’s like telling an addict to “just say no.”
I kept trying to find a way to express my reaction, but this and comments above are so much more insightful. I can only add that I did not care for this episode. The pattern of alternating between deeply shattering situations with dark humor jokes … that seemed very jarring to me.
The U.S. Federal Government has charged Mr. Coombs with racketeering, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution (according to the NYT article hyperlinked as “Freak offs”.) I predict he will be acquitted of all these charges:
1) Rap just is a racket, an enormously popular and lucrative misogynistic racket, but unless there’s more guns, “hoes”, fraud, and extortion involved than usual, nothing to see here. I’m assuming the sex tape just gives more evidence about what goes on at a “drug-fueled sex party often with prostitutes” aka a Freak Off than the police normally see.
2) and 3) Male prostitutes who accept money, expenses, and free drugs to travel across state lines for gigs to screw a rap star’s hot girlfriend are being “trafficked” or even “transported”? I don’t think so. (The male jurors will all be thinking, “Lucky sods! And they got paid for it!”)
If that’s all the feds have got, the tearful testimony of Cassie doesn’t seem to add much to the evidence for those charges. If she was claiming that he (or his prostitutes) were forcing her to have sex against her consent (or that her given consent wasn’t valid because she was intoxicated) then I can see that her testimony would be relevant to a state charge of rape. But he’s not on trial for rape, nor for “abuse”. “Abuse” all by itself not further defined is not a crime anyway, not against an independent adult. You can allege it (and define it) in a lawsuit as a basis for demanding compensation as one of the other characters in Mr. Maher’s segment alleges, but that’s not a federal case. The feds have charged him only with running drug-fueled sex parties with prostitutes. Cassie is only a witness that the parties were indeed drug-fueled and involved prostitutes.
So I don’t see what the point of Mr. Maher’s “New Rule” is here. He seems to be conflating “abuse” and rape. If a woman stays in an abusive relationship (however she defines it) for years that is for her to decide and not for us to judge. But if she thinks she was raped (or assaulted), then she needs to go to the police immediately if she wants the guy to go to jail. The longer she ruminates and journals and talks to her friends about it, “processing it”, the more doubt creeps into the jury’s mind — stoked by the lawyer acting vigorously for a man facing a long prison term — that what she is describing is shame and remorse after the charm and the bling wore off, not absence of consent before the fact. And this doubt that the witness is telling the truth about her consent could cause a truly guilty man to go free. (Mind you his defence will cost an ordinary man his life savings and his reputation, so there is that.)
I think this is what Mr. Maher is getting at, artlessly. It’s not that an abused woman is shirking her duty (to whom?) if she doesn’t escape or come forward but that if she wants to help the state get a rape conviction, she needs to without delay, and be forthright about it. But that’s all beside the point of the Coombs trial. Perhaps Mr. Maher just had something he wanted to get off his chest and the trial triggered him.
Katie Rophie once wrote “You can change your mind before, you can even change your mind during, but you can’t change your mind after. “