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.]
