Everybody Knows
Today's news headlines are about Manafort, Gates, and Popodopolous, and I think the media aggregators are missing the story of the day (as far as I'm concerned): Anthony Rapp's report of Kevin Spacey attempting to seduce him in 1986, when Spacey was 26 years old and Rapp was 14 years old.
This is the lead story: of adults injuring minors, of crimes beyond statutes of limitations, on the inability to make the victim whole, of the inability to punish the rapists, on the stories everybody knows about and nobody investigates.
The fact that it is a very old story, a widely distributed story that everybody knows, a universal story across cultures, a story that treats vulnerability as consent, makes it no less the story of the day. Manafort is a pischer; Spacey is a monster.
Manafort, Gates, and Popodpolous are thieves and political hacks (by which I mean, con-men) and there is nothing new or even audascious in their crimes. Their apprehension is a bit of Kabuki theater; everybody knows that the prosecutor intends to get them to roll over on bigger fish as they work their way up the network. Everybody knows this is the first round in a long series.
But Spacey's crime is worse: he messed up a child's psyche, their balance, and installed a life-long trauma that can't be repaired. Even at 26, there was somebody less powerful that they might take advantage of, somebody they could shoot down at, relying on the victim's pragmatic silence, getting off on the power as much as the flesh. If this was Spacey at 26, imagine what he's grown into at 58.
And so Kevin Spacey takes a page from NJ Governor McGreevey's script and says: I am a gay American, and further wraps himself in the Recovery Movement and allows he may have done things under the influence that he can not recall, but if he did do something he's very sorry. And everybody knows what that's like.
A writer I respect, A.L., wrote this today, and I include it against the possibility that FB might lose it:
With Anthony Rapp’s brave revelation coming 30 years after the fact, the only consequences Kevin Spacey will face for what’s likely years and multiple acts of predation on young, perhaps criminally young, men will very likely be limited to the loss of his job.And the long and ugly history of gay men as predators tropes will be coming full force into play in the public response — and that is all Spacey’s doing by using this as an occasion to come out as gay rather than taking responsibility for engaging in a form of sexual aggression that isn’t limited to any orientation or created by alcohol consumption (his other excuse). He glibly threw the entire populace of gay men — including his own victim(s) — under the bus.
But truly the saddest thing is that there can’t be any true justice. There is no way to attach consequence to Spacey that will meaningfully affect him (barring someone having an actionable legal or criminal claim) and no way to make his victims whole. If Netflix cancels HoC rather than just sacking him (which he’d try to spin as anti-gay, I’ll wager anything) it’ll materially harm dozens of people.
We’re going to have to find some new way of dealing with allegations dating back many years. As more people are emboldened to come forward about the harm done to them by powerful people (or people who had some power over them at the time, in any case). How can we respond sensibly and proportionally to things that happened two or three decades ago, especially when a timely revelation might (*might*) have stopped or at least moderated someone’s ascendence to a position where they’re reaping ever-increasing benefits and/or ever-growing power which may have (probably) enabled them to harm more people.
We are in a mess.