The Asia Argento saga and #MeToo
My finger is not on the pulse of movies, and so I’d never heard of Asia Argento before the Weinstein scandal in which she was one of his earliest and most vocal accusers, a regular star of the #MeToo movement.
To very quickly summarize how I feel about that movement, (already expressed in some previous posts): sexual harassment and/or abuse is wrong, and threats to harm a career if someone tells about an assault are wrong—but I don’t believe the stories of any particular group of people on the basis of their membership in said group (for example, women), and I don’t think people should be tried in the court of gossip.
Argento was also briefly in the news in connection with Anthony Bourdain’s suicide, because she was his girlfriend.
A couple of days ago a bombshell dropped about Argento that made the #MeToo hashtag especially ironic, because Argento has also been accused of sexual abuse, this time of a minor in 2013 in the person of former child actor Jimmy Bennet, who was 17 at the time of the alleged sexual act. The age of consent in California is, surprisingly enough, 18, and that would make the act that allegedly occurred statutory rape.
Statutory rape is an odd crime in that it doesn’t matter whether the sex was consensual or not. But it’s really not odd if you realize that children by definition cannot give consent. Children are by definition presumed to not yet have the kind of judgment and maturity that would make consent meaningful and valid. Thus the law places the burden and responsibility on the adult.
The point at which a child attains that ability to give legal consent may seem arbitrary, especially when the act occurs close to the borderline of majority. But it’s no defense to say that the victim was almost 18, because “almost” doesn’t cut it.
It also seems odd to many people when a woman (Argento was 37 at the time) is the perpetrator because it is assumed that the boy (young man, whatever you want to call him) must have found it a very pleasant experience. But if true that the boy enjoys it (and it certainly isn’t always true), that’s irrelevant, as well.
Argento has alleged some contradictory things in connection with the accusations:
It led to an initial furious denial from the Italian actress, who claimed she “never had any sexual relationship” with Bennett.
But last night TMZ, the celebrity website, revealed text messages between Argento and a friend in which she admitted a sexual encounter, though she said the teenager “jumped me”.
Argento also claimed in the text messages that she did not know Bennett was a minor until she received a “shakedown” letter from his lawyer demanding money.
She reportedly wrote: “I had sex with him, it felt weird. I didn’t know he was a minor until the shakedown letter. The public know nothing, only what the NYT wrote. The shakedown letter. The horny kid jumped me.”
The actress added: “It (sic) wasn’t raped. but I was frozen. He was on top of me. After, he told me I had been his sexual fantasy since he was 12.”
Argento said in the text messages that she didn’t report the incident at the time because she “felt bad” for “this Hollywood failed child actor”.
Bennett has spoken out and said the 2013 incident was traumatic for him. Also, part of Argento’s tale is that the $350K payment made to Bennett to silence him was made by Bourdain, who talked her into it.
This story is complex. But it can be simplified down to this: Argento was the adult, and she needed to unfreeze herself and act like one, in order to make it clear to Bennett that this was not acceptable. If he had actually physically overpowered her in the face of that refusal, then it would have been Bennett who would have been guilty of non-statutory rape.
But Argento is not claiming that she was physically overpowered (despite the word “jumped”). And in fact we have little idea what actually happened between them, except that the two apparently had sex when Bennett was 17. That’s the problem with these MeToo accusations—the difficulty of sorting out competing stories—as Argento may be belatedly learning.
[NOTE: This business of a woman freezing, not knowing what to do, and/or general passivity is part of a great many of these assault stories. I wrote about the phenomenon in a previous post.]
“…sexual harassment and/or abuse is wrong, and threats to harm a career if someone tells about an assault are wrong—but I don’t believe the stories of any particular group of people on the basis of their membership in said group (for example, women), and I don’t think people should be tried in the court of gossip.” Neo
Here, here. You have succinctly stated exactly as I feel. I do not see the upside of this whole movement. It is yet another reason I do not desire to take in daily news reports (MSM)–which I gave up many, many years ago, and one of the reasons I check in here each day. You are an excellent buffer, Neo. If I choose to read (or think) about a current news story/issue, I do so via a voice of reason.
I first became aware of Asia when she starred in her father Dario Argento’s film TRAUMA, a bizarre but visually stylish horror movie in which she seemed to have an Eastern European accent of s
ome kind and played an anorexic teenager whose crazy mother was murdering people. Asia appeared topless at one point although she seemed rather young for such visuals.
Dario Argento is viewed as a master of a certain kind of bloody film known as giallo. His best films include SUSPIRIA, TENEBRAE, DEEP RED, and THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE. All of them share a level of absurdity you just have to forgive whilst abandoning yourself to the inventive visual craziness. The films are truly unique.
I thought Asia Argento was very good in TRAUMA, and I sought her out later on whenever she appeared. I didn’t much care for the mature actress or the garish material she ended up in or chose. I think she may have directed a film herself, but by this time I was avoiding anything she was in. She came across as somewhat demented, someone who believes she’s much smarter than she really is.
When I heard she was starring in the film of the J.T. LeRoy monstrosity of a novel, I avoided it like the plague. This was where she met this kid she became involved with. The story (first alleged to be true, a memoir written by the child — who in fact did not exist) was of a maybe somewhat androgynous boy whose mother is a prostitute. The mother has him dress up as a sexy 12 or 13 year old and then become a prostitute his or herself. Lurid trash, supposedly true but entirely fake.
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS. A lot of people in the literary world were fooled for a long time.
Also often unappreciated in the arguments surrounding statutory rape is a basic legal principle: An act does not have to be 100% guaranteed to be harmful in all instances in order to be justly outlawed. It only has to be shown to have a statistical tendency towards unacceptable harm with sufficient frequency.
That said, if the money-hunting angle is reason enough to be skeptical of some women’s accusations, it’s reason enough to be skeptical here too. And I would bet that simply growing up as a child actor in Hollywood was more traumatizing than anything Mr. Bennett and Miss Argento got up to.
There are actually two documentaries about the J.T. LeRoy travesty. One of them is quite good. The other is an attempt by the author to perpetuate the fraud.
What an azzhole, he forced himself on her then exploited their age difference to shake her down for money. Asia is the real victim.
I note that the #MeToo movement has now moved over to the male side. Opera/Classical music fans, see the story in yesterday’s NYDailyNews and the New York Times today.
There’s also the strange case of the philosopher Avital Ronell, a lesbian, and her gay student, who now has a Ph.D and says she sexually harassed him. Some on the Right have published an unflattering photo of her and eagerly denounced her work. I read about the matter and had a hard time figuring out what harm had befallen him.
I’ve read some of her books and liked passages here and there a great deal. (She drifts into postmodern jargon and nonsense at times, sure.) So I’m not impartial. I don’t know what to think.
I suspect this contributed to Bourdain’s taking his own life.
My wife and I were taken by the sorrowfulness he exhibited during his last episode. It was bad enough that he found the West Virginian folk (the “deplorables” who “cling to their guns and bibles”) that are looked down upon by the East Coast (and Left Coast) to be good people who have no problem with interracial marriage. But the betrayal of #MEETOO that she who he fell madly in love with was a bitter pill to swallow.
So a potentially major reason Anthony Bourdain ended it was that her behavior pulled the brake chord on a decent life and put it on a course for a swan song in a senior years three ring circus full of elephant dung……………. with the public…
I saw a photo of Ms Asia Argento and her young “beau” canoodling” in bed. She did not look frozen. I think she had a yen for him for a long time and the feeling was mutual. If Mr. Bourdain argued for the payoff, as I have read, then he certainly had a reason to be despondent about his lover and future with her. I have had it up to here with all of Hollywood, movies and TV.
The drama of hollyweird should receive no attention as far as I am concerned. Lots of sadly damaged people and vicious predators in the entertainment world. Argento seems both damaged and a predator.
Parker is full on correct.
The “sadly damaged” and “vicious predators” are often the same person…
I don’t think Hollywood is alone in that…but they do seem to congregate there in large numbers.
About five years ago, in Spain, “gender violence” accusations became fashionable. All sorts of claims came out of the woodwork. It became clear that many (not all!) were using these accusations to exact revenge on or to extort men. Many men were losing their property, their careers, and their friends as result of false or questionable allegations.
To resolve this, Spain passed a law that said that making false accusations of this sort would result in jail time. The number of accusations went down by half.
I don’t where you read that, but it’s wrong.
Nobody knows whether number of accusations has increased or gone down, because that number is unknown: they’re rarely investigated.
There was no new law to solve this. The law already existed, but it wasn’t applied (not even investigated) when it was about a woman accusing of a sexual crime. Most of the time, it’s yet to be applied, but that’s changing.
The ‘gender violence’ law, which broke the equality under the law (the law was different depending of the gender), was never removed by the former conservative government.
Not only that: the new (leftist) government has passed a new rule that basically overrules judges that were taking politically incorrect decisions.
https://www.elespanol.com/espana/tribunales/20180814/alarma-juristas-decretazo-cambia-potestad-violencia-genero/329967918_0.html
The new ministry of justice about the a judge that gave a opposing vote in a (very) controversial sentence, saying that it’s necessary to reform the minds of judges.
https://www.abc.es/espana/abci-dolores-delgado-sobre-libertad-para-manada-hacen-falta-reformas-mentales-201806212120_video.html
If you wanna know about this situation in Spain, I HEAVILY RECOMMEND this youtube channel, which is probably the most popular and best political channel in Spain right now (and I’d say, in Spanish). And the guy is surprisingly good and well prepared when entering debates on philosophy.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW3iqZr2cQFYKdO9Kpa97Yw/videos
Today (August 24) there’s a link on Instapundit which leads to an article much more well-informed about Asia Argento than I have ever been. Also brings Anthony Bourdain and his suicide. Look for: “Asia Argento, your time is up.”