[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by wingmaker

http://www.nothinginwinnipeg.com/201...ow-about-jian/

This is an outstanding piece of writing and everyone should take the time to read it. ESPECIALLY if you were one of those people who, earlier in this thread, were criticizing Ghomeshi's alleged victims for choosing to remain anonymous and not going to the police with their accusations.

For this reason alone, I believe the women who have come forward to the Toronto Star and the CBC, if anonymous, and said that he hurt them. That he abused them. That he did horrible things to them without their consent. “So why no police charges?” Green Party leader Elizabeth May said, though she apologized and took it back soon after. She wasn’t the only one asking that, though. It was one of the most common questions of the day.

Yeah, well. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if I was harassed, assaulted, if I was flat-out raped, I would not go to the police. Not unless I wore clear scars from it, not unless I was bloodied or scraped. Even then, only if it was a stranger. Only if it was someone who slipped out of the darkness and had no other power over me. Someone who, if and when my name filtered out, couldn’t take my work and friends away from me.

God, we ask so much of victims. On one side, we tell them that the price of our belief it to spend a lifetime chained publicly to an incident they usually want desperately to escape; we tell them that the price of our belief is that they make their name public, or take it to police. If they pay that price, we don’t believe them anyway. Instead, we simply charge them with trying to make hay.

No, I wouldn’t make my name public, and I wouldn’t go to police. I would never want to watch those prying eyes turn on me, inventing for themselves a fiction of the “jilted,” vindictive woman that Jian Ghomeshi pre-emptively declared at least three of his ex-partners to be.

People bought that, you know. Hook, line and sinker.