Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Innocent Until Proven Guilty

But it's hard to read this news story without saying: "Hmmm. Lots of victims who don't know each other telling the same story. A major talent from the entertainment industry. A very effective way to lure victims into his lair." From the June 24, 2009 Daily Mail:

The Oscar-winning composer behind 'You Light Up My Life' raped 11 women he lured to his apartment with the promise of a starring role in a movie, prosecutors said today.

The women read an online ad placed by director, Joseph Brooks, applied for the audition 'and thought this was their chance to become a big star,' prosecutor Lisa Friel said.

Instead, once the women were in Brooks' Manhattan apartment, he plied them with wine and forcibly raped them or used threats and coercive behavior to make them have sex with him, prosecutors said.

I just loved "You Light Up My Life," which was a spectacularly powerful romantic ballad (and a really stupid movie). If convicted, Brooks could become the poster boy for the disconnect between what you can write, and what you actually feel.

One of my longstanding complaints about the series Law and Order is that it has a very, very disproportionately white upper class criminal class--one that is utterly unrealistic, even in Manhattan. But an accurate criminal demographic would be depressing, most of the crimes wouldn't be very interesting, and the show would have been lambasted by liberals for its "racist" portrayal of crime. But here's a case that reads just like a Law and Order episode. I'm sure that we'll see a thinly fictionalized version within a year or two.

Another very troubling aspect to the news story:

Morgenthau said nine of the 11 women were from the Portland, Oregon, and Seattle areas and the others were from California and Florida. He said Brooks paid to fly 10 of the women, who did not know each other, to New York.

He said Brooks' scheme, which ran from at least 2005 to 2008, was enabled by his personal assistant, Shawni Lucier, who helped pick the victims, interviewed them, arranged their travel and made them feel comfortable.

He said that when the women's mothers called, Lucier, of Federal Way, Washington state, would assure them their daughters were fine.

When Brooks was ready to strike, he said, Lucier would leave the apartment 'knowing what the end result would be.'

One of the great disappointments is how often women play pivotal roles in facilitating rape, with no apparent sympathy for the victims. I remember some years ago a case from the Salinas, California area where two adult women, who were having trouble figuring how to make their monthly rent payment, picked up two young teenage girls who were hitchhiking, kidnapped them, and then charged a group of immigrant farm workers $25 each for the use of the girls. Utterly remorseless for their actions--but it paid the rent.