False Scandals, News Shame and Defaming

If you are giving a massage to a movie star and that person sexually assaults you, call the police and report it. Go ahead and file charges. Though it should be confidential, there is a danger someone will leak the police report, but at least you are taking it serious and doing what arguably must be done. If you have witnesses, be sure to take their names and contact information and have the police canvass them to back you up and there you have it - justice served. But that is not what we end up hearing about. Suppose there is a movie star whose work I enjoy and whom I respect who might belong to a church I consider flaky. This person is already a target. People want to ruin his career with a scandal either because he belongs to a church or because he is married to a woman and has an image and past history of dating women and denies assertions that he is gay. I personally don't care whether this individual or other celebrities may have a personal life outside the bounds of his marriage or fails to tour the country in a bus to lecture at high schools about how cool it is to be homosexual. There are actual, certified gays and lesbians or transsexuals doing that. Tom Hardy and David Bowie have talked about their respective bi backgrounds, and few straight guys can claim to be more cool or manly. (One small aside, though: It is for attributes OTHER THAN their gay activities that make such people cool; being gay itself is not quite the accomplishment as being a genius musician or a skilled and committed actor.) If a performer cultivates an image or self-identifies as straight, whether that person is 15 years old or 51, they should have their privacy and identity respected. Arguably the only person who has a say and a right to be outraged is the spouse. Certain bottom-feeding scandal-based publications or websites are leading the legitimate press by the nose into printing some of the most inflammatory garbage I've seen. Of course the headline and the lead paragraph is all about whatever accusations, and one has to read on to the end to find out how insubstantial it all is. Insubstantial enough that the vetted accusation is not worth spreading the article in the first place. You have an accuser who claims a sort of sexual assault occurred. That makes it a police matter. Instead, they went through the lawyer of the accused actor but didn't get the results they wanted. Is there any way to interpret that other than extortion or blackmail being attempted? And then the lawsuit apparently exposes the accusations to the press. Well, at this point the battle cannot end with any sort of settlement or placation of the accuser. Now possible damage is done to the image of the celebrity. It may be shrugged off and business as usual may proceed as it has in the past, or maybe tens of millions of dollars in earnings will be nixed or maybe a film already made will get a smaller release if the "cool" of the star is tarnished. These are issues the actor has to take into consideration anyway. The accuser should be treated as the extortionist he is, and legally obliterated. But what is worse is the air time and print space given to these stories by the so-called legitimate press who should know better. A site like Defamer is at least what it claims to be, in the business of defamation. That's not for me. The imdb.com is more of a go-to source for information that might be of interest to those who LIKE certain movie stars and who like movies, TV and music or other art forms. It seems clear that RadarOnline and TMZ for example do not appeal to people who like anything but merely those with chips on their shoulders and an ax to grind; they appeal to losers who want to reinforce the idea that even the winners are losers so it excuses their own failure. At least GLAAD has the constructive side that gives awards for positive people or works; this almost makes up for the aspect of their work that seems to personify the D in their name, Defamation. Should someone (however obscure or outside of hip culture) say anything less than presidential about gays or using the word for a British cigarette or saying gay to mean anything other than happy or homosexual in a positive way, this gets reported to GLAAD who function as a bullhorn to the media who fall over themselves ready for marching orders that smack of scandal. This has the result of the average person leaving comments under such an article that are full of hostility toward gays. Or at least toward their presumptuous media representatives. A movie star punching out bad guys is not responsible for gay teens who commit suicide. The culture that worships gossip and allows anonymous accusations to be pushed through to the public and which recklessly endanger an actor don't promote the idea of equality or that the gay teens of the US are okay. It is a form of bullying whether it comes from Defamer or its peer sites, leaving off the names of the accusers and their lawyers and easily slinging unchecked slander and libel upon the public figure and his/her lawyers as the only persons named. What that says is that it is not enough to tolerate gossip and move on with your life because it will hound you. Perhaps a movie star could afford to have an accuser/ extortionist shot. I am sure there are some fans who could be trusted with such a contract. Travolta and Cruise for example have both played hit men to great effect, in Pulp Fiction and Collateral respectively, so the issue is not entirely alien to them. Legally, I can't say whether I would condone that way of resolving a problem, but I would understand the imperative of it more than the need of certain groups to push, push, push celebrities into ending nosy speculation by "admitting" to whatever extent they would be rated on the Alfred Kinsey scale of gayness, a situation that would not be any sort of example to inspire anybody. It is just media and scum enabling another with hunt. Sickening. There is a disproportionate focus on Tom Cruise and John Travolta because they happen to promote Scientology and Scientology has an official stance on homosexuals that is very similar to the official stance of the Vatican or Islam on the topic; as two grown adults wit decades of work in the entertainment field, there is no reason to believe either one harbors hatred toward gays. They might be a little tired of their persecutors. And you can blame the persecutors when Travolta claims he said no to an appearance on Glee because he wouldn't have enough time to rehearse dancing (he has danced spontaneously on Inside the Actor's Studio and almost every talk show he has been on). He has played a gay vampire on SNL and he dressed in drag for Hairspray, so he doesn't seem handicapped by any attitude or phobia. Maybe he just thinks Glee is lame. And by that I don't mean to offend lame people who can't walk.