Gold-plated hypocrisy
In February, awellington man named Lewis Scott was convicted of rape and unlawful sexual connection. It was the second time he had been found guilty of the same offences. After the first trial, in 2017, his convictions were overturned and a new trial was ordered.
He was sentenced last month to six years in jail.
The rape happened after the victim went to Scott’s home in 2007 for what she thought was going to be a business meeting. The court heard that the offence involved considerable force.
Note the year: 2007. She didn’t lay a complaint at the time because she felt ashamed and embarrassed. It wasn’t until 2014, when she read that Scott had been convicted of raping another woman, that she summoned the courage to go to the police.
That’s right, Scott had previous form. His other victim had been raped in a room at the back of his shop.
I remember that shop and I remember Scott, although I never met him.
An African-american and a Vietnam War veteran, he cut a flamboyant, exotic figure in Muldoon-era Wellington. He wrote poetry and wore colourful kaftans.
His shop, Kwanzaa, sold goods from African countries and became a gathering place for Wellington’s African community. The media loved him. It was perhaps small wonder that he was welcomed in Wellington’s Left-leaning, arty circles. He would have been seen as a refugee from heartless capitalism. Not only had he personally experienced the racism of America’s Deep South, but his social cachet would have been reinforced by the fact that young black men like him had been used as cannon fodder in an unpopular war. But Scott was not the person he seemed. We now know he was a secret rapist.
He would hardly have been the first charismatic male to take advantage of women – possibly impressionable women – who came within his orbit. Were there other victims too ashamed and embarrassed to accuse him publicly? It can’t be ruled out.
I wonder, too, what Scott’s old friends make of him now. Do they reproach themselves for not seeing through him? Or do they excuse his behaviour by blaming it on a dehumanising upbringing in a cruel and uncaring society?
It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case, because history is littered with manipulative men who take advantage of gullible hangers-on. In fact I was reminded of Scott while reading last week about the recent death of Ira Einhorn. Einhorn was a leading light in the American counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s.
But Einhorn was also a murderer who killed his girlfriend and stuffed her body into a trunk in his apartment after she tried to leave him because she was fed up with his infidelities and controlling ways. Einhorn, in other words, was a deeply unpleasant human being and a goldplated hypocrite.
He managed to elude justice for more than two decades, living in Ireland and France and surrounding himself with admiring acolytes who helped him to stay out of reach of the law.
Sadly, there has never been a shortage of people prepared to be conned by such charlatans, and willing to make excuses for them.obviously there’s a vast difference between Ira Einhorn and Lewis Scott. For a start, the latter is not a killer.
But the two cases appear to have certain factors in common. Both show how easily people with guile, audacity and a conscience deficit can deceive those whose shiny-eyed idealism gets in the way of their ability to see beyond the charismatic facade to the person beneath.
One thing can be said with certainty. There will be more Ira Einhorns and Lewis Scotts, and there will be many more victims.