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Kevin Spacey cleared of sexually assaulting four men
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I don't know anything about this, and I wish the article went into a lot more detail about the accusations and why they were found not credible, especially since there were so many from separate people.
Like, did they find some evidence against the accusers, like happened with the Michael Jackson cases iirc, or did they just decide the accusers didn't present enough evidence or witnesses to be believed?
Spacey might well be innocent, of course. I just worry because society is often disinclined to take male sexual assault victims seriously, and I feel like if the alleged victims were female the press would (since "Me Too") at least give them a little more coverage than this? This article feels like it has a "the accused is found not guilty, and everyone knows that sexual assault cases are always decided correctly, so he is 100% innocent and we can all wash our hands of this" vibe, but meanwhile Bill Crosby walks free, so I can't personally trust it with so little information.
Especially not when it's about a rich, powerful man with a huge fanbase, aka exactly the type of person nobody wants to believe would be a predator (and maybe he isn't! But I need more info here, darn it!)
Ah well. I'll google more later I guess.
At least it doesn't seem to have turned into a media hellscape circus like what happened to Amber Heard.
I concur. It feels like Spacey is gonna just have his name cleared now for reasons we know not, but Marilyn Manson (for example) will forever be seen as a vile monster even though Evan Rachel Wood and Illma Gore are very clearly insane and creating this situation out of thin air
(Little about me to go with my divisive comment; I'm a victim of childhood SA, I believed ERW for a full year on principle before looking into the evidence, at which time it became inescapably obvious that she's a psychopath who's doing the absolute most with absolutely nothing based on reality behind it)
You should probably avoid this language when talking about SA, even if you're referring to people you believe are lying about being victims of SA. I don't know enough about the above individuals to weigh in on whether they are trustworthy or not, and I'm betting most people running across this comment also don't have the level of knowledge necessary to parse this message without getting tripped up by the language you're using which may be especially triggering if they are also victims of SA.
They forged an FBI document using a real agent's name in order to SWAT his house (the actual agent whose name they used has publicly stated that she had nothing to do with this case and never wrote that document), gave ERW's ex the agent's name with a fake number as the only contact to discuss custody of their son after illegally absconding to Tennessee with him under the pretense of being threatened by MM, filled said toddler child's head with so much fear of MM that he began drawing pictures of "the evil man" who is the reason he's not allowed to see his father anymore, gave several women a checklist of abuses to create a cohesive story and told them that a) just because they don't remember it happening doesn't mean it didn't and b) they're hurting the other women's chance for justice if they don't agree that it happened to them, just for a few examples. I think I'm using those words perfectly appropriately.
Claiming that someone is lying about SA without listing evidence could in and of itself be triggering, discussing SA at all could be triggering, one would assume that entering a thread about SA could be triggering. I'm not sure I agree that referring to these two as psychologically unhinged would be more triggering than any of the other content of this thread, or more specifically any of the rest of the content of my post accusing them of making it up. Incidentally, I'm using the term psychopath literally, not colloquially;
I just don't agree with your sentiment. I understand the points you're making are accurate reflections of history (modern and otherwise) but I don't agree that it's necessary to avoid labelling people when critiquing their behavior, regarding women or otherwise. Also "unable to learn from experience" is not analogous to "treatment is impossible", which I assume is where you got the assumption that I was saying that from.
Edit: I see that the person originally responding to me in this discussion is a mod, so if they'd like to clarify that they explicitly want me not to use the words I have in the way I have here then that's fine, but that's not what happened here as yet, so yea. These are my feelings on the subject. I understand yours, but I don't agree. I think what you're suggesting casts a far wider net over the issue than is necessary. I think she's a genuinely dangerous person with clear patterns of harmful pathological behavior and I don't think it's wrong or detrimental to all women to discuss it. I'm transmasc nonbinary, autistic comorbid with ADHD and chronic treatment resistant depression, and a whole host of other stigmatized and marginalized things as well, and I don't think it necessarily harms the entire conversation of mental illness as a whole to point out that people can do bad things in conjunction with or because of their mental illnesses, I think it's disingenuous to act like that's not an aspect of mental illness at all just because people can ignorantly group all neurodivergence together. I feel like your perspective is more about circling the wagons to control the attack, which I understand, but I think it limits potential discussion without providing any actual meaningful benefit to the communities involved.
We can have discussion without resorting to armchair labels and namecalling towards people we think we know because they're celebrities. You have no idea whether or not she's a dangerous person. You only think you do. What is objectively dangerous is trying to convince others that she's an insane psychopath because that's your personal opinion. I'm disappointed that a fellow SA survivor wouldn't realize this, and I hope you genuinely reflect on your opinion.
🙄 it's gross that you hold your view in such high objective regard that you think it's your place to admonish me for not agreeing with you
Also I do know she's dangerous, not least of all because she's (as recorded in public court documents regarding custody of her child) actively discussing the details of an alleged series of assaults with her young child to the point where he's terrified of entering LA to see his own father and spends time drawing scary pictures of him.
yeah i guess i did extrapolate that point out further than you meant it. my bad. i think that labeling people isn't really the point that i find aggravating, though. its applying clinical labels to people who don't necessarily have those clinical conditions. like, is psychopathy really what's going on here? can people really know that observing from afar? i don't think so, and i think its at least a little bit irresponsible to make those sorts of claims about people because they do bad things. there is nothing intrinsically pathological about causing harm to other people. like, the fact that you seem to think you can identify "clear patterns of harmful pathological behavior" is mostly the thrust of my resistance. it certainly is harmful behavior, and it may very well be pathological, but frankly neither you or i are well positioned to make judgements about the mental health of strangers, in the same way we aught not assume people have a specific physical illness.
i think its probably good to point out that people can do bad things because of their mental illness, but we don't have enough information to just say she has this specific mental illness because she did bad things. its kinda like speculating on the sexuality of public figures, or at least those two ideas feel similar in my brain.
It's not just that her behavior is harmful, it's that she's creating a whole false reality around it and controlling multiple narratives from every possible perspective. She created/co-opted a movement to go along with the Manson allegations, she moved across the country with her son to reinforce her narrative and used that as a way to hurt her ex husband, she used her power in the role of a child's mother to create a world in which there was a monster they must run away from at all costs to where the kid couldn't even play outside in Tennessee because of the monster in LA... And whenever she's confronted with the idea that what she's done is harmful to anybody she rewrites or reinforces the narrative that she's doing it for the right reasons and deflects any responsibility or awareness that she's done anything wrong (for example, when it looked like she was going to lose custody she suddenly decided it was in the child's best interest to go live with the father in LA, the very city she ran from in order to protect the very child she was taking away from LA).
I'm not saying everybody who hurts somebody is "pathological" or "psychotic". I'm saying ERW specifically exhibits a lack of capacity for empathy, a total lack of self awareness or awareness of the effects of her behavior, and has no concern or even acceptance of those effects as reality when confronted with them, and what she does and how she is is characteristic of ASPD.
Yes that was the point of my comment being mod flagged. You've added additional context which helps but this probably isn't the right venue for a conversation on the specifics of someone's legal case and state of mind.
Oh I just assumed every post you make has that cuz you're a mod, and I didn't notice till later; when I did notice, I didn't take your phrasing re: "probably" as a demand but a suggestion. Either way, point taken, thanks for letting me have a discussion anyways.
Yea sadly the UI isn't great and there's a bunch of different apps and everything is new. There's badges for mod and admin, and then there's a way to speak as a mod. So if you see all 3, that's an admin speaking "officially".
In general if someone's asking for you to change your behavior- mod, admin, or even a regular user, you should probably take their suggestion if it's reasonable to do so and not asked from a place of intolerance. It helps to demonstrate to the other person that you're responding in good faith because you're willing to accommodate their needs.
It's sort of hard to know what happened in more detail without really good-quality reporting from in the courtroom, that might inform as to why the jury found the way they did. We know that the judge issued a majority instruction, a not very uncommon process where, if the jury deliberates for too long, the judge tells them that a ruling can now be accepted with one or two dissenters. I don't think the jury says what the vote was, just that it was enough, so it could have been unanimous, we don't know. In the US journalists often try to track down jury members and interview them to get those kinds of details but jurors don't always want the media circus around them and I don't know if that's common practice in the UK.
The dropped charges were apparently alternative counts covering the same crime as the other charges and were probably dropped for that reason, although it's interesting that no reporters seem to have really given a reason why. I don't know enough about the UK legal opinion to give much of a guess as to why except that I see the crown prosecution manual does discourage using alternative counts (of a lower crime) in rape cases. Some context in, of all things, Yahoo News, suggests the judge may have been concerned that the alternative counts were making things more complicated for the jury. In the US, some states prohibit charging the same crime as multiple alternative counts for this reason, or have a special procedure for the jury to make it easier, it's sort of a known issue that it's hard for a jury to come to a verdict when they're having to choose guilty/innocent for multiple counts of different exact allegations over one event.
The outcome is dissatisfying, but it's sort of the outcome the criminal justice system is designed to produce. All the jury found is that there was not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Spacey was guilty. There could still be evidence making it most likely that Spacey was guilty, but criminal prosecutions require the higher standard because of the severe impacts of criminal charges. The crown prosecution service put out a statement that they accept the ruling and were just doing their job, which in the US would look more like a prosecutor trying to save face over pursuing what wasn't the strongest case, but I have no idea about the UK, it might be totally routine to make a statement like that.
The Spacey thing is interesting if you like to follow the legal details. The US cases against him (criminal and civil) were both dropped after the accuser stopped cooperating with the prosecution, at one point pleading the fifth when testifying. That tends to be taken as a sign that the accuser was lying about at least something substantial, thus the prosecutor dropping the charges, but that wasn't determined by the court or anything. It's possible, although maybe not so likely, that the accuser was acting in good faith and lost interest in pursuing the case for some other reason. That's probably more likely when a celebrity is involved, these celebrity prosecutions are all the more complex when it comes to people's motivations.
The whole culture around sexual harassment/assault allegations has changed a lot over recent years (since "MeToo" if you will), for the better in many ways, but I think there's still a lot of unsettled issues. It seems like in celebrity cases it's a lot more likely that "hangers on" will show up with claims that are maybe not untrue but at least stretch the truth. At the same time we obviously have to take accusers very seriously or we risk ignoring criminality because the accused is a popular celebrity. The justice system produces a lot of these unclear outcomes where maybe there were multiple accusers and things look really sketchy for the accused, but it's not clear enough for a prosecution. That situation has always ended up going to the court of public opinion for a final verdict, but in the case of a big celebrity like Spacey that's sort of a huge deal. Will studios keep working with Spacey? I suspect the answer is yes, because he's a huge celebrity, not because of anything about the merits of the case against him. In corporate environments the company will sometimes hire a private investigator to make a decision about the accusation and fire based on that (this is in the US where there are no employment protections), which kind of has its own sketchiness, but the media industry isn't known for caring that much.