What does Heather Mallick think of rape accusations? It depends
Julian Assange, the Australian hacker who runs WikiLeaks, is accused of rape in Sweden.
This has not caused some of Assange’s defenders to change their opinion of him.
Instead, it has caused them to change their opinion of rape accusations.
Heather Mallick is one such supporter. She’s a columnist for the Toronto Star and a feminist — just ask her. But she’s also a harsh critic of America and the war on terror, just like Assange.
So she’s made a choice about which is more important to her.
On Tuesday, she trivialized the rape accusations, saying Assange’s accuser is just mad that he “didn’t phone her after she slept with him. Here’s what you do with a guy like that. You marry him and keep raising the subject for 21 years. Priceless.”
Alas, there are two women in Sweden who accuse Assange of rape, so Mallick’s advice could only work for one of them.
And Assange really isn’t the marrying type — a former cult member, a rootless fugitive who sleeps in a different bed every night.
Naomi Wolf, a leading U.S. feminist, has also put her anti-war beliefs ahead of her feminism. She says the rape charges against Assange are the work of “international dating police.”
That’s what Assange’s supporters have been spinning for a month. But last week several newspapers, including The Guardian, which has a close working relationship with WikiLeaks, published the police complaints filed by the Swedish women.
One woman says Assange forced her to remove her clothing, ripped her necklace, forced her legs apart and was “violent.” She thought he tore his condom on purpose, and refused to get an AIDS test when she demanded one.
The second woman said she woke up in the morning to find Assange having unprotected sex with her. She, too, demanded an AIDS test. Assange refused.
Wolf made her dismissive remarks before these police reports were publicized. But Mallick doesn’t have that excuse.
We’ve seen this woman-on-woman cannibalism before. Wolf and other feminists took the 1990s off when Bill Clinton was in the White House. Despite a parade of victims from Paula Jones to Monica Lewinsky, America’s feminists decided they’d forgive a sexual predator as president if he was a Democrat — the same way they did for Teddy Kennedy ever since Chappaquiddick.
And then there’s Roman Polanski, the Hollywood filmmaker. Polanski drugged and repeatedly raped a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson’s house in the 1970s. The girl testified that she repeatedly begged Polanski to stop, and was afraid of him, but that he forced himself on her. As he raped her again and again, she continued to say “no,” but he didn’t give a damn.
But Polanski makes movies, and he’s an impeccable liberal. So feminists rush to his rescue, too. Whoopi Goldberg told America “it wasn’t ‘rape-rape’. It was something else.” Got it? A 13-year-old girl who is drugged and repeatedly raped isn’t really raped if it’s a great artist doing the raping.
A philandering president who preys on secretaries and interns isn’t a bully or a sexual harasser, if he’s a liberal.
And an allegedly violent man accused of forcing himself on women in Sweden is a great catch to the Toronto Star, if he published thousands of classified national security documents including the private social security numbers of U.S. soldiers, the names and locations of Afghan human-rights activists secretly co-operating with the U.S. army, and revealed covert anti-terrorism missions in Yemen.
The charges against Julian Assange are not that he was a bad date, or that he didn’t call women back. It’s that he is a rapist. If those charges are false, you’d think he’d want to get back to Sweden as soon as possible to clear things up, not fight extradition there like his life depended on it.
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