Break Ups, Celebrities, Opinion
Mel Gibson Polling Higher As Oksana Grigorieva Backlash Begins
Elisabeth Dickson :: Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 3:45 pm
Oksana Grigorieva, Mel Gibson‘s ex-girlfriend and owner of the dubious distinction of being the first link that comes up when you Google “cunt bitch golddigger cunt whore,” is now being investigated by LAPD detectives for an attempted extortion plot, said a spokesperson Wednesday.
For many, the news of Grigorieva’s attempted extortion plot have turned the tables in Gibson’s favor. The accusations of blackmail against Grigorieva have led to a rush of support for the actor, with 63% of those polled in a CBS News survey believing that Gibson was “set up” and a slew of LA Times commenters referring to her as a Russian gold digger.” Cue the finger-pointing and victim-blaming: the backlash against Mel Gibson’s ex-girlfriend has officially begun.
Authorities believe that Grigorieva, who is currently fighting Gibson for custody of their eight-month old daughter, may have attempted to extort money from Gibson by threatening to release taped recordings of his angry phone calls, which feature Gibson threatening to put the mother of his child “in a fucking rose garden” and expressing his desire for her “to get raped by a pack of n—ers.”
Now, I’d like to preface my defense of Grigorieva by saying that while no one deserves to be physically or verbally abused, the blackmail charges against her appear to have some merit.
There are reports that the two engaged in talks of a $15 million settlement, and the LAPD cites a text message sent by Grigorieva claiming that she released the tapes because Gibson “backed out of [their] agreement.”
Indeed, if Mel Gibson wasn’t the richest, best-looking alcoholic on the planet, this dispute would merely be considered an awful custody battle between two awful people, and hoards of assholes on the Internet would have no reason to take sides (and no reason to turn vitriolic quotes from this dispute into a kitten meme).
But because Mel Gibson is famous, and because his ex-girlfriend exposed his abusive behavior to the world instead of taking it directly to the police, everyone feels compelled to take sides over something that has nothing to do with us; and somewhere along the way, we decided to take the wrong side.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that women with breast implants deserve to be called “Vegas whores,” and that saying you hope your loved one “gets raped by a pack of n—ers” is totally justifiable if you’re saying it out of “righteous rage” within the comfort of your $22 million Malibu estate. At some point within the past few weeks, our sense of outrage was buried in the fucking rose garden along with Oksana Grigorieva’s credibility, and the reasons for this dramatic shift in public opinion are not that easy to pinpoint.
You can attribute the backlash against Grigorieva to sexism, xenophobia or a combination of the two—a universal distrust of women who look and speak like Bond girl villains. While I think this is true to a certain extent, what really cemented our casting of Grigorieva in the role of conniving Russian slut is much less complicated than misogyny or prejudice. What really put us back on Team Mel, for the second fucking time around, is that we liked Braveheart. A lot. Or, at least, we like Braveheart a lot more than we like knowing that the guy who made Braveheart is a hatemongering asshole.
Every once in a while, we as a nation decide to reward a select group of exceptional individuals with our collective affection; we as a nation pull a Sally Field and decide that we really, really like these people. And we get really, really pissed off when these individuals prove us wrong by doing things that we don’t like.
This is why people who like Chinatown but dislike child rape can invoke the arbitrary nature of statutory rape laws in their defense of a man who likes fucking semi-conscious thirteen-year olds up the ass. This is why people who like seeing their favorite football team win and dislike animal cruelty can call for the head of the jury that put an athlete in jail because he liked torturing dogs and watching them tear each other to pieces.
Hearing someone we really like use the n-word shocks us, but watching him banter with Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon 2? That takes our breath away.
We may never know exactly what happened within the walls of the Gibson estate, but in the end, the power of our collective like will exceed the powers of the LA judicial system, and Mel Gibson will probably not go to jail for domestic abuse.
He’ll go to rehab (again), then to Oprah, then probably to Elton John’s Oscar party. He’ll complete the celebrity circle jerk of atonement, and after an extended period of self-reflection he might even make more films (and be on the receiving end of more blow jobs – after all, he “deserves it.”)
Oksana’s fate is more nebulous – we’ll have to wait on TMZ to report the results of the LAPD investigation before we can predict the release date of her own reality show.
But even if she uses her infamy for good, as a spokesperson for domestic violence or a fundraiser for battered women’s shelters, to many of us (and Google), she’ll always be the cunt bitch golddigger cunt whore from the Mel Gibson rants. And we’ll never like a cunt bitch golddigger cunt whore as much as we liked the guy in Braveheart.
I have to make a statement - I don’t agree that it’s just because we like Mel Gibson (which I do)… it’s because I honestly believe that this whole thing is a fantasy trip created by a conniving bullshit artist who has a history of doing this to men. She just picked the wrong one to do it to this time. Sorry, but she IS a bitch golddiger whore - and a psycho one at that.
Posted by: peskybarb July 23rd, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Very well written, but I wouldn’t put Mel in the same category as the child-raper and the dog-torturer (because I want those two imprisoned, period.) I’d put him with Sean Penn… someone whose crimes of passion we don’t approve of, but don’t rise to the level of eradicating the good they still have to offer.
I suspect that the child-raper and the dog-torturer were excused because neither have ever indicated a dislike of the progressive political views that most of Hollywood embraces. If Mel is never forgiven and the others were, what it really tells you is that the only thing Hollywood never forgives is being nonPC.
Posted by: Einah Teb July 23rd, 2010 at 3:10 pm