Ghomeshi’s accusers have a way of ‘triggering’, too
Not proper spokespeople for sexual assault
Int he past couple of weeks, two of Jian Ghomeshi’s former acc users have been interviewed by what’s now called the mainstream media.
In one instance, Lucy DeCoutere was quoted as part of a Toronto Star story on how the landscape has and hasn’t changed since the Ghomeshi trial.
The piece was published on the one- year anniversary of Ghomeshi’s acquittal on three counts of sexual assault and one of choking in connection with three women.
DeCoutere’s remarks are what they are.
In essence, she said that the cost of coming forward to testify in court was “too expensive for no payback,” but applauded women who do report and testify.
What I found astonishing was not that she was in the current vernacular “speaking out” — dear God, she has rarely stopped — but that in the seven paragraphs in which she was quoted and described, nowhere did the reporter allude to the fact that she’d been wholly discredited in the courtroom.
Rather, as “the case’s most high- profile complainant,” she was said to have “spent a lot of time thinking about alternative ways for sexual assault survivors to seek justice outside the criminal court system.”
( If only she had spent some of that time thinking about what it means to take an oath.)
In any case, the inference to be taken from the story was clear.
The reader was meant to believe DeCoutere is an authority on such matters — on the perils of reporting and going public, on the criminal justice system’s ability to deal with sexual violence, etc.
Then Monday, Ghomeshi surfaced in public again for the first time in three years with a video podcast called The Ideation Project ( he went quiet after he posted an ill- advised neque mea culpa on Facebook, telling his fans why the CBC had fired him, confessing that he engaged in consensual rough sex and blaming a former girlfriend).
In general, the public reaction appears to have been mixed and even somewhat muted, but Monday evening Global News ran an exclusive interview with Linda Redgrave.
She was for a time known as complainant No. 1, but later asked the court to remove the publication ban on her name and identity.
She’d been alerted to the Ghomeshi podcast by another reporter, and told Global, “I found it very triggering … re-experiencing the trial in my head, re- experi- encing the trauma. I wasn’t ready for it.”
The online version of the story reported that Redgrave’s testimony “was ultimately discounted by ( Ontario Court Judge) William Horkins, who said … he had found several inconsistencies and areas of concern with her statements to police, media and the court.”
While that is somewhat mitigating, again, the implicit suggestion — “’ Just too soon’: Jian Ghomeshi accuser speaks out after news of podcast” was the online headline — was that Redgrave is something of an expert on the subject.
But what Horkins actually said about Redgrave was this: “Under cross- examination, the value of her evidence suffered irreparable damage. Defence counsel’s questioning revealed inconsistencies and incongruous and deceptive conduct.
“L. R. has been exposed as a witness willing to withhold relevant information from the police, from the Crown and from the Court. It is clear that she deliberately breached her oath to tell the truth.”
And if Redgrave is “triggered” by news of Ghomeshi, she must be positively flattened by other painful reminders of the trial — the sight of a VW Beetle for instance ( central to her first claim of sexual assault was t hat i t happened in his bright yellow VW Bug, a type of car he didn’t own at the time), pictures of women in bikinis (she sent one such to Ghomeshi after the alleged assaults and contrary to her staunch insistence in testimony that she couldn’t even hear his voice without being traumatized).
That’s the other problem with these stories: They have wholly adopted the jargon of the #IBelieve movement. Victims are routinely described in the press now as “survivors,” though that is completely at odds with the presumption of innocence, and words such as “triggered” are routinely repeated as though they have broad meaning.
But the significant issue is this: DeCoutere and Redgrave revealed themselves at trial to be at best unreliable and at worst to be complete strangers to the truth.
Lest we forget, within 24 hours of allegedly being choked by Ghomeshi, DeCoutere emailed him to say, in part, “You kicked my ass last night and that makes me want to f-- k your brains out, tonight.”
She failed to tell the police or prosecutor about this note, or any of a myriad of others, or the handwritten love letter she sent him — all after the purported assault and in defiance of her protestation that she certainly didn’t want a romantic relationship with him.
Ought they be the go- to sources for comment upon sex assault cases or the way courts deal with them? They are not authorities. They are not experts. They are not spokespeople for victims of sexual assault.
And if they’re going to be quoted, given the information overload of our world and the public’s ever-shrinking attention span, reporters owe it to readers and viewers to present them warts and all.