“Justice” in Canada Night

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve been as upset as I am tonight about the case of David Frost.  I find it difficult to get myself together enough to write about it, but I’m going to try.

In a post on Tuesday, I commented on this story at The Star, reporting on the trial of Frost, who is charged with four counts of sexual exploitation with respect to two young men who were on a Quebec hockey team he coached.  Let’s do just a little background on David Frost.

In 2004, NHL hockey player Mike Danton was arrested by FBI agents in the US on charges of conspiring to have Frost killed.  Danton pled guilty to the charges.  The reasons behind Danton’s attempt to have his former hockey coach killed were never revealed.

The CBC’s Fifth Estate later obtained tapes of conversations [listen to the tapes or read transcripts here]between Mike Danton, serving a jail sentence, and David Frost which indicated the control that Frost continued to have over the hockey player.  A Fifth Estate documentary told the tale of their relationship, beginning when Danton was ten-years old and  playing hockey in Brampton, Ontario:

It was there that Frost first began to exert his control over the young hockey player; control that continued throughout Mike’s hockey career, from the minor leagues in Toronto, through teams in the Ontario Hockey League and eventually to the National Hockey League. Frost’s influence was continual and unrelenting.  

In the fifth estate documentary “Frost Bite”, Bob McKeown delves deeper into the jailhouse conversations between Mike Danton and David Frost. The program reveals new details of the intricate and troubling relationship between the St. Louis Blues player and his agent, especially the importance of Danton’s sex life as a possible influence in the murder plot.

Since Danton’s incarceration, Frost has been his media representative and his chief defender – he controls access to Danton, who has had no contact with his family for years. 

In 2006, Frost was arrested by the Ontario Provincial Police on twelve charges of sexual exploitation involving four boys and three girls.  The charges with respect to the girls were eventually dropped because s. 153(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada allows for such charges only when the person charged is in a position of trust with respect to the victims – that is, a teacher, coach etc.  The young women were sixteen at the time of the behaviour in question and thus were able to consent to sexual contact.  They were girlfriends of several of the young men, hockey players on Frost’s team, and had been involved in “threesomes” with their boyfriends and Frost.  Charges were also dropped with respect to two of the boys.

That left four charges pending with respect to two young men.  First problem.  It seems absurd on the face of it to acknowledge the possibility of exploitation between the coach and his players and not between the coach and these young women.  But that’s what the Code says.  The law needs to be changed to take account of situations like this, where an adult uses his power and authority, even “second-hand”, to obtain access to young women for the purposes of sexual exploitation.  That was the subject of my post, as far as it went, on Tuesday.

For the last several days, two young women have testified as witnesses in the case.  On Monday, “Kristy” testified that she had been involved in “three-way” sex with her boyfriend and Frost when she was sixteen.  On Tuesday, the second woman, “Jennifer”, testified:

The woman, now 28, speaking today at Frost’s ongoing trial for sexual exploitation, said that Frost had a threesome with her and her teenage hockey player boyfriend while Frost was coaching the Quinte Hawks in Deseronto in 1996.

[...]

The woman told court the three-way sexual encounters involving her boyfriend and Frost happened many times.

During the woman’s emotional testimony, she said she and her boyfriend often fought because she didn’t want to have sex with Frost anymore.

She testified that even years later, when her boyfriend was playing hockey in the U.S., Frost would be there when she visited and told them he didn’t want them to have sex if he wasn’t involved.

Here’s where it all gets even more lovely.  There is a publication ban in place with respect to the young men involved both because of the nature of the charges and because they were minors at the time of the alleged offenses.  The Crown applied for a ban with respect to the young woman, but The Globe and Mail argued that the ban ought not to apply to the young women because they are not “victims”.  Subsequently, the judge decided not to grant the ban where they are concerned.

The Globe in its wisdom has decided not to print the last names of these women.  Not so with other media.  Thank you Globe and Mail.  Freedom of the press is safe because of you, even if these young women are not.  What’s more important anyway?  [oh I'm so mad I can only snark]

I’m sorry to say, this story goes on.  And on.  And only gets worse.

Frost’s lawyer is Marie Heinen.  Frost is creepy, pervy slimy and it’s always great for a guy like him to have a woman lawyer.  How does she sleep?  I’ll never understand.  It’s the position of the defense that none of this “three-way sex party” stuff ever happened.  With anyone.  At all.  So of course, the cross examination involves the proposition that these young women have fabricated the whole thing.  That, in itself, is not unusual.  To agree that it happened at all is to admit guilt to the offense, by definition.  The question is, or was, how does it make sense to argue this if you have two young men, the complainants” in the case, saying that it did and their position is corroborated by two female witnesses?

And the worm turns.  Today, the two ostensible male victims, former Ontario Junior hockey players, came to court and said none of it ever happened, the charges are ridiculous and the coach did nothing wrong at all, ever, never mind committing these criminal offenses.

Now I have to pause to, literally, weep.  Here we have two young women literally hung out to dry, their reputations smashed, all in the cause of seeing David Frost put to rights by the court for what he did to these two young men and the alleged victims wouldn’t even say he did anything wrong.  Not only that, they took some nasty, macho, misgynist swipes at their former girlfriends while they were doing it.

The testimony from the two young men yesterday was alternately galling and heartless.

For instance, the first to take the witness box seriously described his forays into two-on-one sex as “like a bonding thing, with friends and teammates.” He appeared oblivious to the fact that in the stereotypical male fantasy, threesomes traditionally involve not two men and a woman, but two women and a man.

He later attended a Canadian university on a hockey scholarship and said that after leaving the junior game, he had had threesomes and foursomes. “I had up to five and six guys with one woman,” he said quietly.

The second young man was asked by Mr. Tse if he had not once upon a time, as the judge has heard, pronounced his girl Jennifer as gorgeous. “I wouldn’t say that,” the young man replied coolly. “I was 16. It worked.”

“What worked?” Mr. Tse asked.

“She worked,” the young man smirked. “Ever heard the expression ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’?” He said she was pointed out to him as a likely sexual plaything by a player who “had been with her” previously.   [here]

 

 

 

Given that one player disputed an incident that several other people witnessed and that resulted in assault charges against Mr. Frost, to which he pled guilty, the credibility of these players is, uh, questionable to say the least:

Arguably, the most revealing moment may have come when Mr. Tse was questioning the second player about an incident in which Mr. Frost physically assaulted one of his teammates, this in a game before an arena full of fans. No fewer than four other witnesses, including other former players and the team’s former trainer, have testified they saw the assault, and Mr. Frost in fact later pleaded guilty to it.

But this player said he never saw such a thing, and furiously told Mr. Tse [the Crown], “I also recall our whole team rallying around that and marching into the police station in Deseronto … everyone rallied around and not one player saw that assault. And no one spoke about it, if they did.” [here]

In the article I’ve been quoting here, Christie Blatchford points out the harm done to the young women who were witnesses in this case and to the game of hockey in Canada:

In the process, they inflicted incalculable damage to the national game – painting it at the junior and college levels as an amoral sexual playground – and casually, in one instance rather cheerfully, tried to obliterate the reputations of their former girlfriends.

Apart from the obvious, wtf is wrong here?  I am left wondering why the Crown proceeded with this case.  There are no complainants.  These young men refused to meet with the Crown before coming to court, they refused to come to court until Frost’s lawyer had ensured that their identity would be protected by a publication ban and they testified for the defense.  It’s not as if the Crown wasn’t aware of those facts.

If this was a case where the alleged victims were young women, this case would have gone absolutely nowhere.  There’s been a lot of pressure on the O.P.P. and the Attorney General’s Office to do something about Frost for four years, since Mike Danton’s arrest.  After all, he appeared to be endangering the morals of our stalwart heroes, our young male warriors, our hockey players for gawd sakes – human beings who are inestimably more valuable than any young woman could ever be.  The Crown Attorney’s Office wanted Frost and they wanted him badly enough to attempt to get a conviction in a case where there just wasn’t ever much hope.  Perhaps they were willing to risk it simply to prove to the people of Ontario that they tried, or perhaps they knew it would be clear enough to observers just what’s going on here that the success of the case didn’t/doesn’t really matter.

But look who paid.  There’s not a Crown Attorney in this godforsaken country that wouldn’t know what was going to happen to these young women.  It’s difficult enough to protect female complainants in cases such as these, never mind witnesses.  Jennifer and Kristy never had a prayer.  As for the publication ban, that one was a toss-up, but it certainly couldn’t or ought not to have been promised to them.  And I hope to gawd it wasn’t.

I can’t help but feel that I know what they’re feeling.  I can’t help but feel revulsion for the puling, cowardly ex-boyfriends, princes of our national game.  And tonight, I can’t help but feel hatred toward that game and the machismo saturated system it has engendered.  It has to be said that the underlying motive for these young men’s lie is not just misogyny, but also homophobia.  The alleged threesomes, after all, involved two men and one woman.  In the past, there has been speculation at a level much greater than a whisper that David Frost and Mike Danton were lovers.  And that, as Christie Blatchford notes, is speculation that the macho boys will never admit:

… any young male in hockey who was sexually taken advantage of by, or involved with, another male would be too ashamed and alarmed at the prospect of the dread spectre of gayness that he would deny it with his dying breath.  [here]

This is wrong at so many levels that I just can’t leave it alone.  I’m not sure what can be done, but I’m going to mobilize my little feminist army to find out.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  In the meantime, if any of you have ideas, please let me know in comments or by e-mail.  You’ll find my address on the “About” page of this blog.

Sleep the sleep of righteous warriors.

David Frost

UPDATE:  Great article on this case by Laura Robinson on Saturday in the Winnipeg Free Press.  Robinson, a former member of Canada’s national cycling team, wrote Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Game in 1998.

If there was a huge hue and cry from men on this issue, from hockey fans, from hockey DADS, from male players, something might happen that would change the face of the sport and make it into something I can respect.  Hockey was a central part of my childhood, even though they wouldn’t let me play – my sisters would both have made GREAT hockey players.  I did idolize – and idealize – those guys.  I can tell you lots of good stories about them and what they do off the ice.  But I’m angry with the sport, with many of those who run it and coach in it, and with players like those described in this story, who are adults now – 28 or 29 years old – and who don’t have the courage to stand up for women.  And ultimately, for themselves.

Write letters to the Winnipeg Free Press and to Laura Robinson.  I’m going to gather some other addresses were you can direct your letters.

UPDATE:  Christie Blatchford on the acquittal (surprise!) of David Frost – note that some commenters blame the judge for the acquittal.  You can’t find someone guilty if the complainants won’t testify for the Crown!

ZOMG Fetus!

Surely this represents the zenith of fetus fetishism – a fetus waving an American flag and apparently sitting ontop of a revolver, clearly voting McCain/Palin, because how else would a red-blooded American fetus vote?  And it needs a gun to do it!  Whoa, over the top!  Wonder if the fetus is going trick-or-treating?

via Feminist Law Professors

Olden Halloween

Halloween #31

stevechasmer

HalloWEEN!

Ghost Villanelle

We never saw the ghost, though he was there–
we knew from the raindrops tapping on the eaves.
We never saw him, and we didn’t care.

Each day, new sunshine tumbled through the air;
evenings, the moonlight rustled in dark leaves.
We never saw the ghost, though: he was there,

if ever, when the wind tousled our hair
and prickled goosebumps up and down thin sleeves;
we never saw him. And we didn’t care

to step outside our room at night, or dare
click off the nightlight: call it fear of thieves.
We never saw the ghost, though he was there

in sunlit dustmotes drifting anywhere,
in light-and-shadow, such as the moon weaves.
We never saw him, though, and didn’t care,

until at last we saw him everywhere.
We told nobody. Everyone believes
we never saw the ghost (if he was there),
we never saw him and we didn’t care.

Dan Lechay

Palin Porn

From Cara at AlterNet:

Via Sociological Images — a truly great blog I discovered recently — comes this story about a Sarah Palin lookalike contest held at Vegas strip club (oh, sorry, “gentleman’s club”). Lots of bikinis, sexualized use of guns and sexism abound. You can view more photographs of the event here.

The saddest thing is that it’s not the most offensive display of sexualized misogyny that has been directed a Palin. The sex doll came close, but I’d say that award goes “Naylin’ Paylin,” the Larry Flint pornographic film starring yet another Palin lookalike, the existence of which all of us should have seen coming. 

There are two problems with both the porn film and this strip club contest, and neither one of them is about porn and stripping in general. The first issue is consent. Sarah Palin did not consent to having her image used in this way. Portraying her sexually like this without her consent is a violation — and contrary to what many people apparently think, existing as a woman in public is not the same as consenting to use of your body as public property. This isn’t satire or parody; it’s just sexist and degrading. 

Which brings us to the next issue. The entire reason that anyone gets to hide behind the parody and “all in good fun” arguments is precisely because portraying Sarah Palin sexually is intended to be mocking towards her. It’s taking a powerful woman and working to make her non-threatening by turning her into a sexual object. And it’s the very opposite side of the coin as calling Hillary Clinton ugly and denying her sexuality. Both reinforce the ideas that women exist to sexually pleasure men, and that sexuality is the only power we have (or should be allowed). Whether revoking or affirming that “power,” the result is an attempt to render the woman inferior and powerless.

We still live in a world where women seemingly cannot be seen as sexual and at the same time be taken seriously. We still live in a world where sexuality itself is seen as degrading to women. That is the purpose of these types of exercises — to debase Palin by reminding everyone that she (presumably) has a vagina and is therefore only good for fucking. I truly believe that if sex was not still viewed as inherently degrading to women, we wouldn’t be seeing these sorts of displays at all.

Read the whole thing here

Edited to repair a link

Congo Falls Apart (More)

Congo Update:

Congo rebels agreed Thursday to open humanitarian corridors near besieged Goma, but aid agencies warned of a “catastrophe” as terrified residents recounted tales of rape, looting and murder.

Rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, whose forces are on the edge of the eastern city, vowed in a letter to the United Nations mission in Kinshasa to allow “humanitarian organisations access to those in need who are behind our lines.”

Few people remained on the streets of Goma, where shops, schools and offices were closed as residents lived in fear of out-of-control remnants of the Congolese army, many of them drunk.

An AFP reporter was shown the bodies of seven civilians, including two women. All were killed overnight by Congolese soldiers on a looting binge, said landlord Jospeh Ndakola.

“Soldiers burst in here in the evening and stayed until four o’clock in the morning,” he said. “They looted all my tenants’ belongings, making them carry their things to their vehicles, and then they came back in to murder them.”

There were also reports from local residents that two women had been raped overnight on the outskirts of Goma in an area called Mosho.

“There is firing here, there are soldiers who are going from door to door to pillage our possessions,” resident Janine Kanyere told AFP by telephone from Goma’s Birere district.

“They are four homes away from me, I am frightened, I do not know what I am going to do,” she said.

Nkunda’s forces have captured several key towns in eastern Congo, sparking a mass exodus from the countryside and risking what UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called a humanitarian crisis of “catastrophic dimensions.”

Aid agencies said at least 30,000 internal refugees were trapped between the rebels and UN forces blocking their access to Goma.

UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic said thousands of people in Nord-Kivu were streaming into neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda.

Around 8,000 people have crossed into Uganda, where they were being housed in schools, churches and other public buildings, while about 1,200 people have entered Rwanda.

The UN refugee agency said Wednesday 45,000 had fled a camp outside the city, panicked by a rushed withdrawal of government forces.

Most headed towards Goma, where officials said the population was fleeing amid scenes of chaos, alarmed by the influx of refugees.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described the situation as “catastrophic”, while Human Rights Watch called on international leaders to respond before it was too late.

“International leaders who successfully intervened before should act quickly to prevent the crisis in North Kivu from reaching catastrophic proportions,” said senior Congo researcher Anneke Van Woudenberg.

Earlier, Nkunda warned UN forces blocking the way to the refugee-swollen city that they would open fire if the UN tried to halt their advance.

Around 800 peacekeepers from the UN’s MONUC force are the only obstacle to a complete rebel takeover of the city.

Agence France Presse

Ah, sorry Congo, the world is too busy watching America make a President.

The ’60s Were GOOD!

Gary Leupp at Counterpunch:

Three years after McCain was shot down over Hanoi while on that bombing mission, [Bill] Ayers by his own admission participated in a bombing of a New York City police station, and went on to bomb the Capitol and Pentagon in the next two years. Each action came in response to a specific escalation of the Vietnam War. There were no casualties, and Ayers was never convicted of a crime. He denies that the bombings were acts of terrorism and points out instead that the war in Vietnam was a war of terror. (During this time, by the way, the 11 to 13 year old Obama was living in Indonesia and Hawai’i.)

Bill Ayers like many of his generation was a follower of Martin Luther King before joining the SDS then some of its spin-offs which (like many in the New Left) parted company with the doctrinaire non-violence they perceived as ineffectual. But consider his background. While studying at the University of Michigan in 1965, he joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor pizzeria’s policy of refusing service to African-Americans. (18 years later, when I studied at UM, such racist exclusion was unimaginable. How the world had changed because of people like Ayers!) He participated in a draft board sit-in, punished by 10 days in jail. He worked in progressive childhood education. These are the kind of rebellious activities that enraged the white supremicists (then far more respectable and mainstream than now), the kneejerk anticommunists, the reactionaries terrified by rock ‘n roll and the youth counterculture. But what’s there to damn here, for those who aren’t misled by a washed-up generation of racist uptight bigots?

People over 50 remember that period very well, and many much younger people view it with envy and fascination. After all, today’s youth listen to the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, considering them their own. (We in the ’60s rarely listened to the music of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.) College students flock to courses on the ’60s, viewing that decade as one of turmoil, excitement, and progressive change. The verdict’s in: the war was wrong, segregation and all racism was wrong, sexism and homophobia were wrong—and the limited social progress as we’ve seen since the ’60s is largely rooted in the tireless efforts of the activists of that decade.  The ’60s were good!

Read the whole thing here

h/t wood s lot

Friendly Fire

For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age Fifteen

 

There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half-hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble at our feet.

 

So don’t gentle it, please.

 

We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.

 

But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying—friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?

 

Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed
under the bridge.

 

Naomi Shahib Nye

via 3 quarks daily

Sarah Knows What She’s Saying

From anil dash, blogging about how culture is made:

What’s striking to me this election season, though, is that Sarah Palin has chosen to abuse her command of language so obviously without suffering any serious criticism for it thus far.

The crux of the issue is simple:

1. Sarah Palin has unequivocally associated Barack Obama with the idea of terrorism and specifically with “terrorists”.
2. Republican President George Bush has defined in our National Security Strategy, and the Republican Party’s platform affirms, that we may identify and strike at terrorists before they have committed any defined acts of aggression against American citizens.
3. George Bush has made clear, by stating before a joint session of Congress that “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”
4. Palin has used deliberate choice of language to avoid these connections being highlighted by the media, while increasing the likelihood that the target audience for her message will be incited by her statements.

Through these arguments, it becomes clear that Sarah Palin’s assertions are designed not to prove that Obama is unqualified for the office of the Presidency of the United States. Rather, she appears to be attempting to convince a substantial portion of her supporters that Obama supports terrorism against the United States and thus should be, at the very least, incarcerated as an enemy combatant (which we are doing to American citizens already) or at worst, assassinated for supporting terror. She has done this knowing full well that she can retain plausible deniability thanks to the ambiguity of her statements as they’ll be interpreted by the media, by her detractors, and by her more reasonable supporters.

[...]

… the most dramatic technique in Sarah Palin’s speeches is the use of vernacular to mask the seriousness of an assertion. Sarah Palin cloaks her ideas in “straight talk” to avoid them being subject to fact-checking that would happen if she were to use standard english to make the same points.

Put simply, if Palin says “Barack Obama consorts with terrorists”, she is making the assertion that he supports acts of violence against American citizens and the media will refute this obviously false assertion. If, instead, Palin says he “pals around with terrorists”, she’s used code-switching to mask the seriousness of the charge, obfuscating her meaning enough to get away with making an assertion that inevitably calls for the imprisonment or even assassination of a political opponent.

Reporters wrongly see a term like “palling” as imprecise, when compared to a word like “consorting”.

But these words are not imprecise to their intended audience. They are, in fact, clearer than using legalistic terms like “consorting”. They amplify the urgency of the statements, and increase the sense for Palin’s audience that they’re on the same page with her, speaking a language too “plain”, too full of “straight talk”, for the press to understand. And they’re right. Palin has consistently pitted herself against the media, depicting them as hostile and foreign to her campaign, and thus making it even less likely they’d take her less formal-sounding charges seriously.

On top of this, by deliberately omitting the word “domestic” as a descriptor of “terrorist” after its initial mention in her speeches, Palin has amplified the recurring theme of “otherness” that the McCain campaign and its surrogates have pinned on Obama. There is an unequivocal attempt to assign a commonality of purpose and intent between Obama, his supporters and campaigners, and terrorists who would attack Americans.

[..]

I believe the vast majority of supporters of the campaign of John McCain are honorable, honest, well-intentioned and sincere Americans who want what’s best for this country. And I believe that all of us, regardless of party affiliation or political support, deserve better than someone who cynically twists language to inflame and incite the very worst elements of our culture. That’s why it’s important to point out the danger of these actions.

Sarah Palin’s conduct has gone far past the bounds of decency, and far past even the most dangerous efforts of any previous candidate for such high office. This is an inexcusable, unforgivable, and unacceptable transgression and my belief is that she should be removed from consideration for the office of Vice President for her dangerous, unethical and unamerican display of irresponsibility.

This is a fascinating and important piece of writing – read the whole thing here

via wood s lot

Rockin’ Women

I need to break out of the downward roll I’m on so I’m playin’ Joss Stone and Melissa Etheridge singing Janis’ “Cry Baby” and “Piece of My Heart” – WOW!  Melissa did this show just after finishing chemotherapy for breast cancer.  STRONG WOMEN!  Keepin’ on.