Institutionalized Sexual Abuse

The venerable British Broadcasting Corporation, the mother national broadcaster after which Canada's own Canadian Broadcasting Corporation patterned itself to reflect the Canadian experience with Canadian-based content for the purpose of connecting Canadians coast-to-coast with social, political, artistic, cultural content reflective of Canada, also incidentally gave the CBC a besmirched legacy to copy. In the sense that it was so married to the celebrities it had fostered on air that it chose to overlook their sinister, soul-destroying misconduct. The Corporation's dependence on the public acclaim for some of their key on-air personalities kept it from investigating rumours that some of its public lights were notorious for molesting children.

The sexual predation, in fact, was so widespread, and was so secretly in the realm of the kind of scandal that must be hushed -- taking an obvious page out of the Catholic Church's handbook of avoidance of criminalization of pederast-predators -- at risk of bringing infamy to the public entity -- that it chose to ignore what it knew, throwing the lives of children's stability away as simply tolerable sacrifices to the greater good of the public weal in protecting the reputations of their predators. While those predators continued to exercise their entitlements as celebrated public figures to prey on vulnerable children, the BBC management continued to avert their notice in the greater interest of the BBC.

And although its Canadian counterpart has not and likely would not have succumbed to a similar exercise of immoral and deliberate avoidance of responsibility, it too chose to overlook sexual misconduct on the part of one of its media darlings whose popularity was so widespread that it served to protect him from the merest hint of sexual impropriety. Even while those within the CBC were aware of his entitled predation, and chose to tolerate it. Muted complaints and concerns that were expressed by those exposed to Jian Ghomeshi, host of the iconic CBC program "Q", were casually shunted aside; in any event those underlings were anxious to graduate from their inferior status to more meaningful positions within the broadcaster. So while those in control of the program became aware of the man's unsavoury reputation, they looked away.

Rene Johnston / Toronto Star 

Jian Ghomeshi and lawyer Marie Henein leave court Thursday after Ghomeshi was cleared of all charges.

Until the time, finally, when rumours of rancid violence directed by a CBC-protected star toward women unfortunate enough to come into his orbit could no longer be ignored, once they spectacularly hit the outside news media with some journalistic probing. The charges that ensued as women, most choosing to remain anonymous with one exception, that of a well-known actress, resulted in a paroxysm of public aversion, and in one fell swoop Ghomeshi's public acclaim for his popular on-air cool, suavity dissipated.

The long-awaited trial in the wake of much public discourse and prurient interest in published details led to the man's metaphorical hanging, his career in tatters, his position with the CBC obliterated in infamy and apologies to the public. But the trial itself was an abysmal failure. Of the three women who agreed to testify, giving anecdotal evidence of their experience with Ghomeshi, none came out of their testimony having advanced the case. All, without exception, had resorted to shielding the evidentiary trail with details they preferred not to divulge. And when inconsistencies, outright prevarication and obvious collusion emerged, Jian Ghomeshi's trial lawyer, a skilled courtroom tactician, had a field day, revealing the obvious and many weaknesses in the Crown's case.

It was, then, of little surprise when the presiding justice felt he had no option but to dismiss the charges based on the testimony of women whose honest portrayal of the circumstances they found themselves in at the mercy of a sexual predator, was tainted and unreliable. Not that what they contended did not happen, but that their descriptions of the aftermath, as an example, were lacking. There were hints at a collusion between them in a vendetta against the man. And it was obvious that police did not probe adequately what they were being told, nor did the Crown ask those meaningful questions and give the kind of legal cautionary advice advice they should have, to the women who were their prized witnesses in a case that should have resulted in public opprobrium of sexual misconduct finding the man guilty on the basis of reliable evidence.

The old syndrome of female reaction to male violence was most certainly at play here, where abused women tend to cater to the very men who had abused them. Complicated by the social interactions where men of power and influence, and social 'cool', attract women with their insecurities, anxious to please and to restore relations despite abuse, in the hope of the situation miraculously ending to their advantage.