islamists printing and handing out books that advocate wife beating, subjugation of women telling them they need a man's permission to have a job and leave the home does not make the national news.
http://newsish.com/p/1034098-james-deen-rape-allegations-reasonable-doubt-broken-media
The controversy surrounding the rape and sexual abuse accusations against adult film star James Deen continues. After accounts from eight different women - or ten, depending on how and whom you count - Deen has broken his near-silence in an interview to The Daily Beast. More recently, writer Brett Easton Ellis, a friend of Deen's, spoke out in his defense in a Hollywood Reporter interview which was quickly decried by feminists as a "misogynist rant" and as "mansplaining" by a "rape apologist." Meanwhile, on Time.com, feminist writer Laurie Penny hails the cultural shift toward believing and supporting women like the ones accusing Deen.
When I first wrote about the case in the New York Observer, I thought Deen's guilt was very probable (while allowing for some possibility of a "bandwagon effect," or of complicated experiences being reinterpreted in a new light). My concern was more with the "believe the survivors" mentality, the rush to bypass due process, and the idea that conviction in the "court of public opinion" - with devastating consequences to a person's career and life - can be based on faith rather than proof.
Since then, a few things have come to my attention that don't exactly exonerate Dean but, at the very least, cast doubt on some of the accusations. What's also troubling is that information which is publicly available, including in the social media, has been entirely erased from the mainstream media narrative of the story.
Here are a few things the media haven't told us:
Porn actress Kora Peters's account of victimization by Deen is called into question by social media and video records.
Here is Peters's story as told to The Daily Beast:
It was supposed to be a regular boy/girl sex scene (anal was one of her "no's"), but her co-star apparently had other plans. "James [Deen] kept trying to get inside my ass but I kept pushing him away, so he choked me, then he slammed my face down into the couch and forced himself in my ass anyway," says Peters. "The crew all high-fived him and told him what a great job he did getting an anal scene for the price of a boy/girl scene." ... Ever since that scarring incident, Peters says she's avoided Deen and hasn't worked with him since.
Yet Deen's website has a behind-the-scenes video with Peters (which I will not link since it contains hardcore porn, but which can be easily found by googling) in which, about 5 minutes into the 9-minute clip, they briefly have anal sex and Peters laughingly tells Deen, "This is the second time you got my ass ... and the only [unintelligible] that ever got it. And I actually had on my thing, 'no anal.'" This, at the very least, seems to contradict Peters's claim that she "avoided Deen" and did not work with him after the incident in which he forced anal intercourse on her. It also raises major questions about Peters's claims of coercion.
In 2012 and 2014, Peters also tweeted at Deen to banter about his being "the only man in porn" to have done anal-sex scenes with her. Those tweets have apparently been deleted from her account but are preserved in screenshots whose authenticity she does not dispute in a recent Twitter exchange.
I contacted Peters on Twitter to ask about these apparent inconsistencies. In a direct-message exchange on December 14, she told me that she did agree to anal sex with Deen for the video on his site - but before the alleged sexual assault, which occurred some time later while making a film for "a large company." As for Peters' reference on the video to "the second time," she says, "James and I had to do the SAME scene twice for his site. We stopped [because] I cried & they couldn't use the footage." She also wrote, "I tried to cozy up to James on social media to buy the raw footage but he wanted an insane amount of $$ for it & only wanted to send me the edited version." (In his Daily Beast interview, Dean says that the video for his site was shot after the anal sex scene in the movie.)
When I asked Peters a follow-up question about the chronology of the video and the alleged on-set rape, she indicated she wanted to end the conversation and retire for the night. (She was traveling overseas and in a different time zone.) A few minutes later, she messaged me to send screenshots of tweets by Deen as proof that "he's not a nice guy"; in those tweets, Deen jokes about sex and violence, admits that "I do say some f***ed up s**t to people while I'm having sex with them," and tells someone, "I'm sorry but I just don't care about you or our conflicting definitions of morality." I tried, yet again, to ask Peters about the timeline for the video and the alleged assault. She replied, "Totally done answering questions and being interrogated on vacation."
Is Peters's explanation of these apparent inconsistencies plausible? Perhaps, though it is worth noting that the Daily Beast article says the on-set violation occurred "early on in her career." Meanwhile, Peters's December 3 response to the tweet with the screenshots of her 2012 and 2014 tweets to Deen offers a still different scenario: "
ecause after that I put anal on my no list. That's why I NEVER filmed another anal scene."
At the very least, all this seems highly relevant to the story.
Another alleged Deen victim, Amber Rayne, apparently does not regard her experience with Deen as sexual assault.
Rayne, who considers herself a friend of Deen's, told her story to The Daily Beast for a December 2 article. According to her account, partly corroborated in a forum post by the late porn film director Chico Wang, Deen got aggressive with her during an anal sex scene after she verbally goaded him, causing her to bleed and, later, to require stitches. Rayne told The Beast that she eventually agreed to work with Deen again and had a very good experience, and that she had blamed the initial fiasco on his immaturity and inexperience at the time. She also appeared to say that she had reconsidered this in view of the new accusations against him.
However, later on the day the article appeared, Rayne stated on Twitter that she was not sexually assaulted: "I was in a scene that was unnecessarily brutal and left me injured... It was an isolated incident." She added that she only spoke out to "stop rumors." Rayne reiterated this the next day in a Twitter exchange with CNN.com's Emanuella Grinberg while declining an interview. "I was not raped. People were assuming that I was amongst those who were. I was involved 9 years ago in a scene that became unnecessarily rough and out of control due to lack of maturity and I was injured and out of work. I was not raped and did not want to be involved in this debacle. I only said something to debunk the rumor," Rayne wrote in a string of tweets.
Shortly after the first accusation against Deen was made on Twitter by his ex-girlfriend and fellow adult performer Stoya, feminist comedian, YouTube personality and activist Gaby Dunn told several people in Twitter direct messages that she knew for a fact Stoya was lying but would not say so publicly because she is "a firm believer in believing victims."
After her messages were leaked, Dunn tweeted some screenshots of them to quell the rumors. She later deleted those tweets, but they were saved in screenshots reported as authentic by Vocativ and not disputed by Dunn.
Whether Dunn actually knows something that undercuts Stoya's claim is impossible to tell, especially when she isn't talking. But Dunn's astounding message shows how horrific the "believe the victims" ideology is:
I think women should be believe when they make accusations. I just happen to know this is the rare 1 percent of situations in which this is false. But more than that, I don't want to contribute to a culture where people accuse women of lying about sexual assault. I understand why people believe Stoya and they should believe sex workers can be raped. They should believe women. It has a larger impact on all victims to say she is lying so I won't do it publicly. The damage is done to him. But I don't want there to be more damage to real victims by disparaging Stoya.
In other words: someone who believes she has knowledge that a man is falsely accused of rape (this was before any of the other accusations against Deen) is refusing to say so publicly because people "should believe women." This is dangerous zealotry, profoundly bigoted and utterly destructive to individual rights.
Another Deen accuser, porn actress Nicki Blue, has substantially changed her story (she claims that it was initially misreported) to say that some of the non-consensual acts of which she accused Deen may have been committed by other participants in a drunken sex party. Blue now says that "Princess Donna," a porn-industry executive and film director, was an active participant in group sexual activity that started out as "fun" but later turned abusive and frightening. Graphic photos linked in the article that gives her new account shows a woman penetrating Blue with the bottle while Deen stands over her.
Does any of this prove Deen is innocent? No, of course not. We should certainly keep in mind that the behind-the-scenes video of Deen and Peters on Deen's site, in which Peters seems cheerful, relaxed, and affectionate toward Deen, has been edited at Deen's discretion. What's more, some of the tactics used in Deen's defense are dubious and likely to backfire. Thus, Ellis seems to suggest that the very idea of people claiming rape or sexual abuse "in the porn world" or "at BDSM invite-only parties" is absurd, which comes dangerously close to saying that sex workers cannot be raped and that a person who attends a BDSM party forfeits the right to say no to a particular activity. Ellis also claims that Deen has text messages proving Stoya had threatened to accuse him of rape while they were going through a tumultuous breakup. I have no idea if Deen has authorized Ellis to talk about this. But without evidence to back up such an explosive claim, this is just another unproven accusation.
But it is also worth noting that Ellis is not, as Hollywood Reporter claims, the first person other than Deen himself to speak out in Deen's defense. Adult performer, sex educator, and Huffington Post contributor Casey Calvert wrote a blogpost in support of Deen on December 5. Calvert, who has worked with Deen and says she is eager to work with him again, made it clear that she feels she is "not allowed" to say what she really knows and believes. Another adult performer who has worked with him, Asphyxia Noir, also defended Deen on her Tumblr blog.
Both Calvert and Noir say that it's extremely common in porn and BDSM for lines to be crossed. Of course that doesn't mean abuse and rape are an acceptable part of that scene. But we can also recognize that in a constantly sexualized environment, particularly one where physical roughness and even consensual violence are part of the repertoire, things can get out of hand, boundaries can get pushed, a welcome activity can quickly turn unwelcome or be retroactively reframed as unwelcome. (Nicki Blue's account, for instance, sounds like the story of an inexperienced young woman who wandered into a wild sex party and ended up feeling scared and helpless when things got wilder than she expected.) Both Calvert and Noir acknowledge that Deen is capable of behaving badly; Calvert notes that directors have not only allowed but encouraged him to be extra rough. Both also stress that being a jerk at times is quite different from being a rapist or an abuser.
Frankly, Deen's career is not of great concern to me. What concerns me is a social climate in which "believing victims" and "supporting women" is elevated to a dogma that, at least in some people's minds, warrants supporting an accusation that you believe to be false. A climate in which people get attacked and bullied into silence for speaking in support of Deen and even Aurora Snow, the Daily Beast writer who had written about Deen's accusers, gets grief on Twitter for allowing Deen to tell his side. A climate in which facts that raise questions about the accusers' credibility get left out of the mainstream media narrative.
For the sake of the cultural climate, I sincerely hope that someone in this case takes legal action, whether it's one or more of Deen's accusers filling a criminal complaint or a civil lawsuit, or Deen suing for defamation. This story needs evidence to either corroborate or refute the charges. Sexual assault allegations need to be heard and taken seriously - which also means they should be investigated. But "Believe the victims!" is the slogan of a cult that needs to be stopped.