Short of a confession, in these vexing and vicious cases of “he said/she said,” the next best thing for determining guilt has to be a preponderance of evidence. And short of evidence—because the predator often takes care not to leave any—we have to settle for, and let ourselves be convinced by, a preponderance of accusations.
And that’s exactly what’s come to bear against former CBC broadcaster Jian Ghomeshi, creator and until very recently the on-air icon of CBC-Radio’s flagship show, Q. When he was first publicly accused a couple of weeks ago of sexual abuse and predation, he was able to leverage doubt, leavened with his own flat denials, and to hide behind his victims’ very anonymity. He also, not surprisingly, played the ‘jilted lover’ card, in a painful-to-read multi-thousand word Facebook-posted diatribe, wherein you’re apt to learn much more than you ever wanted to know about Jian Ghomeshi’s sex life (although that’s becoming a widely reported-on subject, media-wide).
But the denials, and those self-serving counter-allegations, start to dissipate in effectiveness when the accusations come in floods, and even more so when some of the accusers step up and name themselves.
The result is a conclusion that’s unlikely to ever be reached in a court of law, but it’s real and inescapable nonetheless: Jian Ghomeshi is a serial abuser and a sexual predator.
And that’s a strange and quite uncomfortable conclusion to reach about anyone—especially when you consider that there are so many, too many, people for whom that description is apt. But most of them are faceless. Jian Ghomeshi isn’t.
To be sure, he’s far more famous in Canada than he is here. But I was well aware of him, if not his personal life nor anything about his pre-Q career, far before his name became so stained. I was a regular listener, and an admitted admirer of his skills as an interviewer. I’d said more than once that some of the best interviews I’d ever heard, I’d heard on Q.
All of which raises an uncomfortably familiar question: What is the relationship between celebrity and the presumption of guilt? The question becomes more acute, and much more uncomfortable, in these cases of sexual villainy, where the truth lies somewhere between the word of the celebrity and his accuser. We’ve seen this before, with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski, and in each of those cases, as with the earliest moments of the Ghomeshi mess, we saw a tendency to believe the celebrity, and in some reprehensible way, to indict the accuser.
Why? Because celebrity itself is a shield.
I don’t know what this is, but it’s as widespread and as regrettable as a disease—and as much as it pains me to say it, I’m just as susceptible to it as anyone. I didn’t want to believe what I first heard about Jian Ghomeshi, and the only reason I can think of for that is the faint praise I offered above: I think he was talented at the art of interviewing. For that dumb, simple reason, I was willing to give him more than his fair share of the benefit of doubt. All that brought me back from that ledge was the flood and history of allegations (apparently Ghomeshi’s reputation was so well known that the University of Toronto wouldn’t place interns on his show).
In this all too uncommon case, there’s been a semblance of justice. Doesn’t seem to be any criminal proceedings in the offing, but Jian Ghomeshi has been fired by CBC, and his reputation is (deservedly) in the toilet. His nature has been caught out, and he’s been irrevocably tarnished by his own deeds. He can never escape that.
And likewise, we can never escape the fact that if so many of his victims hadn’t been brave enough to speak out, he’d still be getting away with it. He’d be safe under the protection of our sick culture of celebrity worship.
Someday, somehow, we’ve got to come to grips with the truth that the universe of celebrities is like any other population of human beings: some undoubtedly decent, maybe even saintly; the vast majority of them are probably as situationally ethical, sometimes good / sometimes bad, as the rest of us. And some of them, statistically, are simply monsters. We’ve got to recognize that, accept it, and deal with it.
Until we do, people as bad as Jian Ghomeshi, or people even worse, are going to bask in public glory even as they wallow in private depravity…and we’ll all be their unwitting yet willing accomplices.
