This could be a question about Harvey Weinstein - it's not - but it's about so many of those who have abused others.
At the risk of coming across as prurient, or perhaps just over-inquisitive, I always want to know what the perp actually did in these cases. What Larry Nassar did was, he touched the breasts and private parts of young girls while examining them, including three who were younger than thirteen, and penetrated them with his finger, all against their will.
My question: Nassar was doing the stuff he was doing for twenty-five years. How’d he get away with it for so long?
Part of the answer, I’m sure, is the same as the answer to the same question in the matter of show business sexual harassment. In both cases there was a thing that the harassees wanted very, very badly —so badly that they, or in the case of younger victims, more likely their parents—might have considered that submitting to harassment or molestation was a price worth paying for that thing.
In the showbiz cases the thing wanted was a movie part; in Nassar’s case, a shot at competing in the Olympics.
And then this:
Nassar was convicted just last month in federal court on charges related to possessing, creating, and destroying child pornography. For that federal conviction he got a sixty-year sentence, of which under federal rules he will have to serve fifty-five years.
Obviously, this is a nasty creepy guy. There’s no making excuses for Larry Nassar. The news story does, though, tell us something about our strange times, and about the disturbing level of unreasoning feminized hysteria in society today. If you don’t know the etymology of the word “hysteria,” I’ll pause a moment while you look it up in your Funk & Wagnalls … okay.
First, the sentence. The state judge, name of Rosemarie Aquilina ../ gave Larry Nassar 40 to 175 years on the molestation charges. I’m not clear how that sentence is structured or how many years he is likely to serve, but it sure looks like decades.
And that, according to the judge, is after he’s served the sixty-year federal sentence.
Sixty plus 175 is 235. Two hundred and thirty-five years—longer than the entire history of our republic. You don’t have to be a fan of pedophilia to wonder if that isn’t disproportionate.
Two hundred and thirty-five years? For crimes in which no-one was killed, maimed, battered or disfigured, and nothing was stolen? How much time does your average murderer serve nowadays, or arsonist, or rapist—a rapist, I mean, who employs more than his finger?
Again, I’m not making excuses for Nassar. He’s a loathsome creep. He should certainly have been fired from his job, stripped of his medical license, and put on some federal register—I’m pretty sure there is one—to ensure that he could never again be alone with young girls anywhere in the U.S.A.
Jail time? Yes; if I were sentencing I’d give him five to ten on all the charges combined. But two hundred and thirty-five years? Come on.
Reading the news story and looking at the accompanying pictures, it’s clear that the courtroom was fogged up with estrogen vapours. The sentencing judge disgraced her profession, wrapping her sentence in a preening, gloating, vindictive diatribe. Here’s the low point.
[Clip, at 0m55s here: Our Constitution does not allow for cruel and unusual punishment. If it did, I have to say, I might allow what he did, to all of these beautiful souls, these young women in their childhood … I would allow someone, or many people, to do to him what he did to others.]
Hey, what do we hire judges for, if not to let loose with their violent vengeance fantasies on nationwide TV?
The judge’s theatricals were supported by a weeping, ululating Greek Chorus of women that Nassar had molested. They’d spent four days sobbing their way through victim impact statements in the courtroom.
Once again for emphasis: Larry Nassar is a disgusting pervert, if we’re still allowed to say “pervert,” and I’d have sent him down for five to ten with a clear conscience. I just don’t agree that what he did was as sensationally horrible as the court, and my New York Post, were making it out to be.
I know I’m a geezer and out of touch, but in my generation, unless you were spectacularly ugly, you didn’t make it through childhood and adolescence without an occasional pervert coming on at you. It’s not an uncommon thing in the world, and I’m dubious about the claims of permanent mental distress. That Greek chorus in the courtroom keening about their victimhood looked pretty healthy, when they removed their hankies from their eyes long enough for you to get a look at them.
But of course we are in a feminist moment, and keening about victimhood is what every red-blooded American girl is encouraged to do nowadays. I note that not only the judge but also the prosecuting attorneys were females; so was the judge in last month’s federal case.
