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A literally incredible turn of events in the Jonathan Majors case.
His accuser, no doubt taking note from her many predecessors, had attempted a tamed rewrite of her accusations, reducing battery and restraint to Majors having “pushed her into a taxi” and “pulled her middle finger.”
Predictably, the NYPD soon thereafter uncovered solid evidence that she was, in fact, not only the perpetrator of the abuse, but a kleptomaniac to boot, taking souvenirs from Majors’ apartment after he had enjoyed her
services as a (ahem) “dancer”* movement coaching.One wonders if, among the few patches of the populace where the light of this truth will break through, there might be a few unexpected corners noticing (weaponized term intentionally deployed) this cascade of catty copyists. But the chances of even a hundred more such cases causing so much as a hint of open skepticism in the Dominant Cultural Ideology? Methinks the lady doth be wonderful too much.
*@ecgtheow rightly points out that this is the rare tabloid case where The New York Times is obligated to use a favorite euphemism for its literal definition.
Cash/Fame grabs in some form or another have been directed against celebrities for a long time and are par for the course. I'm pretty sure there are high-end ultra discreet escort services that are recommended amongst the celeb crowd. It's really only when you go slumming that you end up with these problems I would guess.
I usually take the side of the celebrity in most of these sorts of accusations, but if someone doesn't learn there lesson and consistently gets involved in say.. domestic violence allegations, then there might be a bit of substance to the story.
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I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?
Of course not, and colleges never pair star athletes with their sluttiest "tutors" in the hopes that nature will take its course and they won't have officially, technically booked a hooker.
I've never heard of that. Is that actually common?
If you've heard of an athlete, and they went to college, this happened.
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Usually they just set up a meeting with an alumni booster, who then books the hooker.
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Wouldn't say so much tutors, but recruiting tours with this kind of stuff are very common.
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You're right; that's a misleading sentence. I've edited it.
I was genuinely asking, she might still be a sex-workers I don't know how Hollywood works. I do think it's probably a lower probability if she has a specified role then if she's a nonspecific dancer though.
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Paywalled article so I didn't read.
If you regularly dabble with "dancers" and sometimes invite a "dancer" into your place, you're assuming a certain degree of risk. "Dancers" will take your money and belongings; water is wet.
Is this whole thing a grade-school short story?
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Majors has a longstanding reputation, it’s not like Ansel Elgort or something where it genuinely was just one person saying stupid shit about him. His college classmates said and say very similar things, for example.
Where people are cancelled and then not uncancelled for spurious allegations, it’s usually for this reason (Chris Avellone was in a similar place in the games business). Everybody in the business knows they’re a scumbag, regardless of the veracity of the one claim a would-be victim makes public.
No director or executive is going to hire somebody where three months into production on a $200m picture another set of similar allegations everybody thinks are waiting in the wings might come out.
Avellone won a 7 figure settlement in a defamation suit against his accusers. That's not exactly encouraging, really.
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They seem to be holding on to Ezra Miller as The Flash despite his (their?) recent colourful history. Now, given that the movie seems to be flopping financially, it may be less likely to produce a sequel, but the studio (at least in public) was not dropping him or even quietly shoving him out the door while recasting went on, unlike Henry Cavill.
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People (especially women being egged on by their friends) have easily-altered memories when they are either 1) socially pressured or 2) socially incentivized to reinterpret events they barely recall and barely care about outside of group status. Majors’ accusers, like many cascades of catty copyists before them, all suddenly remembered him being a very bad boy the second they saw another woman gain social status and the potential for a financial windfall from doing so. Majors’ “long-standing reputation” did not exist at all until our
“dancer”* movement coach decided to create it, after which many women who had most likely bragged to their friends about having once known him (probably some, to be fair, in the biblical sense) turned toward the other endzone and joined the dogpile.*see top post
I heard stories about Majors 3+ years ago from people who had been at college with him. I think they had little reason to lie in the way you suggest since he was at the time a hot new star being praised by Obama and everyone else for The Last Black Man in San Francisco. I have to say it would be quite interesting if conservatives went all-in defending a black guy from sexual assault allegations by largely white women.
The twitterati are not representative and most conservatives are genuinely not very racist.
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I had a conversation about the Majors accusations a few months ago, with some hyper-progressive and movie-obsessed friends. One of them, a black guy who recently broke into Hollywood himself by landing a decent-sized role on a new TV series, seemed utterly shattered by the situation. (I’ll call him Desmond from here on in.) He is strongly invested in the success and public image of black male celebrities, and though he can generally be counted on to ostentatiously take the wokest imaginable position on any given topic, he seemed to be feigning exasperation as a way to avoid having to express a definitive opinion on the veracity of the accusations. Meanwhile, my other friends - one female, and one physically male but spiritually an AWFL in every way - took Majors’ guilt as an absolute given, and were utterly stunned when I expressed even the slightest amount of doubt. (As you all can probably imagine, I generally do not reveal even a microscopic fraction of my actual worldview to any of my IRL friends.)
I brought up several recent examples of accusations, made against notable public figures, which had turned out to be totally fabricated by vindictive, insane, and/or greedy women. I drew special attention to the case of a star college athlete, with whom all of us are familiar, who, right after being drafted into the NFL, had his career completely exploded by a rape accusation which later turned out to be false. Of course, all three of them had piled on invective at that man when the accusations came out, certain he was guilty and gleefully celebrating his downfall. I reminded them of this, and also lamented that Marvel had so quickly jumped the gun on distancing themselves from Majors, given that they had previously erred in prematurely jettisoning James Gunn as a result of flimsy and overblown accusations made during a period of social hysteria.
Desmond seemed quietly relieved to have been presented with an “out” to be able to safely express some level of skepticism toward the accusations, while the two goodwhites were adamant about pushing ahead with certainty about Majors’ guilt. They gave me some paper-thin justifications for why the Majors situation is different from the examples I’d brought up. The progressive coalition has done a ton of work, in the decades since the OJ Simpson trial, to desperately paper over the faultlines between the sensibilities of black men - who are naturally inclined to treat criminal allegations against prominent black male celebrities with severe skepticism - and those of white female liberals - who are deeply invested in the narrative of pervasive sexual impropriety committed by (racially-unspecified) powerful men.
Interestingly, this same faultline around the issue of whether or not to believe accusations against black male celebrities exists on the Dissident Right. Many DR commenters were eager to point-and-laugh at yet another apparent example of black male sexual misbehavior; other commenters pushed back, expressing doubts of the “bitches always be lyin’” variety. Personally, I fell into the latter camp; I’ve just seen too many of these sexual misconduct/abuse allegations against rich and powerful men turn out to be nonsense. The fact that Majors is black could credibly be used to slightly adjust one’s priors toward assuming his guilt, but I just didn’t feel that it was remotely enough to overcome my instinctive mistrust toward these kinds of situations.
I am interested to see what kind of interesting discourse will take place in progressive spaces now that the accusations appear to have been debunked. Will there be articles titled “America needs to have an uncomfortable conversation about why we were so ready to believe Jonathan Majors, a black man, was guilty” competing with articles about how “Why is America so ready to let Jonathan Majors, a rich male sexual abuser off the hook?” Whose umbrage will be taken more seriously? Will anyone learn anything at all from this?
Porque no los dos? In such cases, I'm open to "she's trying a cash grab" and "he's a bit slimy" when it comes to celebs. Some people, yeah, you'll go "come off it, he/she is not that type of person" but others it'll be "okay, I could see this happening".
Oh certainly, my larger take during that conversation was “Everyone in Hollywood is a scumbag, I’m sure Jonathan Majors is involved in all sorts of grimy shit, and I wasn’t going to watch his stupid movies either way.” It’s obviously tawdry that a man with his level of resources and opportunities, someone who had the pinnacle of career success at his fingertips, threw it all away because he couldn’t restrain himself from getting involved in shameful affairs with loose women. (Many such cases.) I just don’t think he’s guilty of the particularly lurid allegations that were leveled against him. Not like I’m invested in this because “Phew, now I can be a Jonathan Majors fan again.” I hadn’t even heard of the guy before the allegations came out, because due to my intimate experiences with them, I fucking hate actors.
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The "Porque no los dos?" position amounts to washing your hands of the facts of the matter and treating both positions as equally valid. Which is equivalent to supporting the least-just position. Majors may or may not be a bit slimy, but he apparently not only didn't do what he was accused of, but was wronged himself (besides the false accusation) by the woman in question. Taking the position that the consequences he suffered as a result of these false accusations are OK because "he's a bit slimy" is not some middle high ground, but siding with injustice.
If he didn't do it then he should not be punished. But in a "he said, she said" situation where I don't know either party and there are allegations about both sides being less than great, I'm not going to pick a side and jump on it - see Amber Heard versus Johnny Depp. If I don't know enough, I will entertain "maybe he is a slimeball" and "maybe she's a gold-digger" as potential explanations until more information to settle the question one way or the other comes out.
And it is possible "he's a slimeball, but he didn't do this" or "she's a gold-digger, but it did happen that way" are true.
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This comment made me realize that we really are moving to a world where, in order to decide whether some action is bad or not, you have to first figure out whether the victim is "good" or "bad". I noticed this a while back in prominent hacking cases. If the victim was sympathetic to the current political fashions, it's a horrible crime. If the victim, for any reason at all, might not be the most shining example of idealism, at best indifference, at worst "fuck 'em". For example, the discussion around the Ashley Madison hack wasn't, "Hacking is bad, end of story." It was, "Ha! Fuckin' cheaters get hacked. Plus, some of them were government employees, so extra fuck 'em!" "...Uh, hello! Some good, brave, possible minorities, might have good reasons to use a site like Ashley Madison. Maybe hacking is not so good." And so on.
There is likely some amount of pre-judging the alleged perpetrator, too, but I first noticed it in hacking crimes with mostly faceless/unknown perpetrators.
I guess, weirdly, I had previously thought, "Hacking/digital stuff is still a new area; we don't have developed norms yet; given that, there's going to be more 'who, whom' than normal, but once we flesh out some norms, we should head toward more consistency." And now, I, uh, probably think that less. Not sure it makes me more conflict theory-y, but at the very least, I feel more inclined to think that many other people are, in a deeply rooted way, more conflict theory-y than I had previously hoped.
Again, re: Ashley Madison, I'm both "hacking personal and private details is bad" and "wanting to play away if you're married/partnered, serves you right slimeball". If you want to be young, free and single and ready to mingle, get divorced or work it out with your spouse that you're opening your marriage. Trying to eat your cake and have it is the worst of both worlds. It's going to come out eventually, or your mistress/sugar baby will want to take things official and you'll either have a messy divorce or dump the side-piece and then she'll go to some social media site to cry over how she wasted years on your dumb ass.
Everyone is missing the best part of the Ashley Madison hack. There is effectively 0 chance of a married man initiating an affair with a woman on Ashley Madison as there are effectively 0 actual women on the site.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ashley-madison-almost-no-women-2015-8
The article links to two Gizmodo articles that go into more detail. The short version is there is a 333-1 male/female ratio of the accounts, and the majority of the female accounts are bots or are controlled by Ashley Madison staff.
"Ashley Madison is a site where tens of millions of men write mail, chat, and spend money for women who aren't there."
That's what makes the Schadenfreude even tastier. They're well-off enough to spend money looking to cheat with 'high class' young women, and they're being swindled. But they have no moral leg to stand on: wannabe cheaters being cheated by cheaters is poetic justice.
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Same with most of online dating. Completely cancerous gender ratio and thats before the well is poisoned by bots and bad actors.
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The destruction of universalism by postmodernism and class warfare (and its proxies) has some pretty huge downsides for society.
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I mean, it seems like ‘bitches be Lyin’ is a thing that happens in a breakup- I wouldn’t trust a guy’s ex claiming he misbehaved if the story had a hole or two, but what motivation does she really have to lie? Women aren’t just inherently evil- when they do bad things they have motivations behind them.
In a bad break-up, I don't trust any account of it that is not from a third-party neutral source. The parties involved have self-interest in portraying themselves as the victim and the other person as the bad guy; friends and families are picking sides, and so on.
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<.<
We are all inherently evil.
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Right, my skepticism about sexual abuse allegations isn’t generalized toward all women; specifically, it’s about women making allegations about rich and powerful public figures. In that scenario, the incentive to lie, and the rewards that can redound to a woman who successfully deploys such allegations, is too obvious to ignore.
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Of course, he's still fired.
has he been fired? they've taken him off promotional material but nothing official.
Maybe they're waiting to see how the dust settles before making a decision. There's probably all sorts of casting contingencies being developed at the same time.
It wouldn't surprise me if they hired some sort of investigation service to do the equivalent of 'opposition research' on their lead actors in situations like this (Edit: Make that before they're ever selected). Regardless of how this particular incident plays out in the courts, if I was a producer I would want to know if he's likely to do it again and implode a production worth millions.
Given most/all big productions are insured I imagine the insurance companies do this kind of investigation of the director and star cast.
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