RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Enough has already been written about the outrageous behavior of the NYC cop and the movie-star governator – there’s little left to say except that one claims to be innocent of the charges and we’ll soon know whether a jury concurs.  Less has been said about the women – a housemaid and a young woman with an obvious alcohol problem.  The latter was so drunk on the night in question that the taxi driver had to call for police assistance to get her out of his cab in which she had already vomited.  Friends who were questioned admitted that she was known to be a heavy drinker – who knows whether police had been called to help her in the past?  I haven’t read anything pejorative about her repeated loss of responsibility for herself and how disturbing it is to be accusing someone of a very serious crime while admitting that you were too drunk to remember significant details of that night.  If she was raped, her drunkenness doesn’t diminish the heinousness of that assault.  But what if she wasn’t actually raped?  And what if a man who thought he was having consensual sex with a flirtatious, boozy, half-dressed woman spends many years in jail because of her blurred memory of what happened?  The policeman deserves to be fired for several violations of the Department code of behavior but that is separate from the question of his guilt as a rapist.  The law protects the identity of this young woman so that her reputation remains intact while the accused is splashed across newspaper headlines, t.v. news and the internet before his guilt has been established.

In the case of Arnold Schwarzenegger, he has admitted his culpability and apologized for it – neither of which in any way vitiates the selfishness and recklessness of his behavior.  But I haven’t heard any public comment about Mildred Baena, the housekeeper who bore the child of her employer but chose to stay on at her job, facing the betrayed wife every day of her employment while knowing that the wife had been kept in the dark.  You have to be a certain kind of sociopath to feel entitled to pick up your paycheck and bonuses for more than a decade without a sweeping sense of shame and discomfort.  Any woman with ten years of experience at the Schwarzenegger residence would have had no trouble getting another job in a minute, yet this woman felt comfortable staying on.  She deserves our opporobrium for her adultery and what can only be construed as her sadistic indifference to the employer she betrayed over such a long period of time.

In the matter of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, it remains to be seen what evidence exists beyond the accusation of the chambermaid;  let’s hope that such evidence justifies the NYC Police behavior in hauling him off a plane and a judge denying him bail.  This incident makes me wonder why, when everyone in the world seems to be conected to a cellphone, chambermaids aren’t given phones or walkie-talkies with panic buttons.  We ask young women to walk into the most intimate settings – bedrooms and bathrooms – virtually without protection.  Hotels spend a great deal of money on security for the guests but this is a shocking example of how the lack of security for the maid can also put the hotel guest in a compromising position.  Think of how dramatically this he-said/she-said incident would have changed if a security guard had been silently summoned to rescue the maid and witness the scene.

At the moment, we should keep in mind that our system of justice is predicated on a presumption of innocence.  We should also consider that two of the three women discussed deported themselves shamefully, while the third is still an uncorroborated narrator.  At the very least, it’s an indicator of our changing mores with increasing equality of opportunity for women – to behave as badly as men.