Entertainment
Column: What the sexual assault charges against Sean Combs, the Alexander brothers and others reveal
When I first heard the phrase “rape culture” years ago, it sounded so dystopian that I wanted to believe it was an exaggeration.
But then came shocking revelations from all corners: the Catholic Church sex scandal, the Boy Scout sex scandal, the Fox News sex scandals, the Bill Cosby sex scandal and the numerous revelations of the #MeToo movement.
Any doubt about the existence of rape culture simply crumples under the weight of reality.
“I don’t always use that term because it is too vague,” said Wayne State University social psychologist Antonia Abbey, whose research focuses on male sexual violence and aggression against women. “I will use ‘patriarchy’ or ‘misogyny,’ the idea that throughout history, men have had power over women and children.”
Because of #MeToo, and all the firings, resignations, civil lawsuits and criminal charges the movement produced, it really did seem possible for a moment that we were on the verge of a true cultural shift. Maybe men of power and privilege would finally understand that women are not objects to be used for their subjugation and pleasure and would, you know, keep their hands off.
If a recent series of bombshell criminal charges against rich, powerful, famous men prove true, this view was far too optimistic.
Last week, a federal indictment charged three brothers associated with the high-flying world of luxury Manhattan and Miami real estate with drugging and raping dozens of women. If even half of what’s in the indictment is accurate, it would make it painfully clear that a subset of privileged, narcissistic men still believe women exist for their domination and gratification. And perhaps nothing will ever change that.
The Alexander brothers — twins Alon and Oren and their brother, Tal — are accused of a veritable crime wave. For more than a decade, according to Manhattan U.S. Atty. Damian Williams, the brothers “alone and together” repeatedly and violently sexually assaulted and raped women after drugging them with cocaine, mushrooms, GHB and other substances. Lawyers for the brothers have said they are innocent of the charges.
Alon Alexander, top, and his twin brother, Oren, bottom, in court in Miami.
(Matias J. Ocner / Associated Press)
“Our investigation is far from over,” Williams said in a statement announcing the sex trafficking indictment. He urged any other victims to come forward.
The recent accusations against music entrepreneur Sean “Diddy” Combs are also mind-boggling. Williams announced in September that a federal grand jury had returned a three-count indictment of Combs alleging crimes so heinous that a judge has refused three requests to free him on bail. He remains in a jail cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn awaiting trial.
The indictment accuses Combs of running a criminal enterprise for the last 15 years in which many women, and some men, were systematically drugged, sexually assaulted, punched, kicked and threatened. A lawsuit filed last week accused another music titan, Jay-Z, of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl at a 2000 MTV Video Music Awards after-party in Combs’ presence. Jay-Z has vigorously denied the charges, and a lawyer for Combs has said he has “never sexually assaulted anyone.”
Sean Combs at a gala before the 2020 Grammy Awards in Beverly Hills.
(Mark Von Holden / Invision / Associated Press)
From 2008 through this year, the grand jury alleged, Combs and his staff organized a number of what they called “freak-offs” in which sex workers were hired to have sex with victims who were often drugged to make them compliant. Combs videotaped the encounters and used the tapes as collateral “to ensure the continued obedience and silence of the victims,” according to the indictment.
American celebrities aren’t the only recent subjects of such charges. There’s also the grotesque case of Dominique Pelicot, the Frenchman who admitted drugging his wife, Gisele, and allowing dozens of men to rape her in their home. President-elect Donald Trump has been found liable for sexual assault, and several members of his inner circle have also been implicated in allegations of sexual misconduct, some of which have been vehemently disputed.
Rape culture, Abbey said, “doesn’t disappear in a generation or two, just like racist beliefs don’t disappear.” It wasn’t even very long ago, she noted, that the last states to eliminate a marital exception for rape did so. (Oklahoma and North Carolina finally outlawed marital rape in 1993, though loopholes still exist.)
One of Abbey’s recent studies, published in the journal Psychology of Violence, found that up to 30% of men admit using coercive techniques against women who clearly did not want to have sex. “That’s part of this idea of rape culture,” she told me, “just the fact that the line between seduction and coercion is blurry, and people think, ‘If I can get away with it, it’s OK.’ If we didn’t have a society that condoned it, it would be rarer.”
It’s easy to see how a victim could be ensnared by a more powerful perpetrator under such circumstances.
“Someone famous and powerful pays attention to you — what a boost for your ego,” said Abbey, while emphasizing that she does not blame sexual assault victims. “A record deal! Come live at my place! For many, it seems like a dream come true, a ticket to the top.”
What exactly is it going to take to end rape culture? At this dark moment, I am at a loss.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
Movie Reviews
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Entertainment
Universal Music invests $80 million in Bollywood production company
Universal Music Group is investing $80 million for a stake in one of India’s biggest Bollywood production companies, Excel Entertainment Pvt.
Universal Music India, a division of Universal Music Group, will acquire a 30% equity interest in the Mumbai-based movie studio. In the deal, announced Monday, the companies will work together on forthcoming films, series, music and emerging formats.
While getting involved in India’s local film industry, Universal Music will also now receive global distribution rights for all future original soundtracks attached to projects produced or owned by Excel. There are also future plans for the companies to launch an Excel-linked music label that will allow UMG and Universal Music India artists to appear in various Excel titles.
The investment underscores the rapid growth in the Indian entertainment industry.
India is the 15th-largest recorded-music market globally.
Founded by producers Ritesh Sidhwani and Farhan Akhtar in 1999, Excel is responsible for making over 40 different films and scripted shows. Its most popular titles include “Dil Chahta Hai,” “Don” and “Talaash.” The company is currently valued at approximately $290 million.
“India’s entertainment landscape continues to grow from strength to strength, and this is the perfect moment to build meaningful global collaborations,” said Sidhwani and Akhtar in a joint statement. “Together, we aim to take culturally rooted stories to the world.”
Universal Music Group, with its corporate headquarters in the Netherlands and another office in Santa Monica, was founded in 1996. The music giant behind artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish is valued at roughly $48 billion on the U.S. stock market, with shares selling around $25.80.
Movie Reviews
UNTIL DAWN Review
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot of UNTIL DAWN puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Strong humanist worldview that twists the concept of modern psychology into a supernatural hellscape with unexplained time loops and reoccurring nightmarish horror filled with excessive violence and gore, but with unexplained pagan supernatural elements (such as a storm circling a house, the appearance of more buildings, the time loop itself, and many more), the time loop perverts the laws of mortality and implies that the consequences of violence, murder, suicide, etc., don’t apply, the psychologist controlling the time loop discusses the situation with modern psychology in vague circles meant to confuse and disorient the nature of the reality in which the victims are trapped, religion or God is not explicitly discussed, but there’s an unexplained cross in front of a house that isn’t explained and a character references the belief that a possessed person cannot become possessed through contact but rather weakness of faith, and some occult content where one woman is a self-described psychic and is into “woo-woo” stuff as another character describes it, she tries to amplify her psychic abilities with help from the others by holding hands and meditation, and she often has strong feelings and seems to have a sense the others do not have, but no worship or symbols are shown, plus a girl dating a guy is said to have previously dated a girl as well as other men;
Foul Language:
At least 101 obscenities (including 62 “f” words), two strong profanities mentioning the name of Jesus, and four light profanities;
Violence:
Very severe violence and gratuitous blood and gore throughout including but not limited to dead bodies, monsters, scarred masked psychopath, stabbing, beating, and people spontaneously exploding;
Sex:
No sex shown, but a person puts on a VHS tape and a pornographic movie is heard playing briefly but not shown, and a woman is said to date a lot of people and one time dated another woman;
Nudity:
No nudity;
Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;
Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
No smoking or drugs; and,
Miscellaneous Immorality:
A psychologist is a callous antagonist whose motives are relatively unknown beyond having a morbid curiosity that led to awful experiments and playing games with other people, he purposely keeps people trapped for no known reason other than his sick and twisted observations that end in gruesome murder and unnecessary torture.
One year after her sister Melanie vanished without a trace, Clover and her friends look to find more information about her disappearance. Clues lead them to an abandoned mining town. This place of unimaginable horrors traps them all in a horrifying time loop where they will be murdered again and again.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances, but it has a strong humanist worldview overall with some occult elements is filled with gruesome violence, gore, lots of strong foul language, and a time loop that leads to an increasing amount of horrific murder and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
The movie begins with a woman named Melanie clawing her way through the dirt with an unknown monster chasing after her. Digging her way out, she looks up to a masked psychopath standing over her with a scythe. She begs him, “No! Please not again. I can’t!” He fatally stabs her without a thought. It cuts to the main title, and an hourglass is shown with a ticking clock sound and unsettling music.
Cut to a group pf people in a red car driving up a winding mountain, an obvious nod to THE SHINING. It’s been one year after Clover’s sister Melanie vanished without a trace. The group consists of Max, Nina, Megan, Abe, and Clover. Shortly after their mother died, Melanie had decided to start a new life in New York. Clover decided to stay, which created tension between the sisters before Melanie left.
Clover and her friends are looking for more information about her disappearance. Their last stop is the last place she was seen in a video message taken in front of a middle-of-nowhere gas station. Megan, a proclaimed psychic, wants to join hands outside and see if they can feel any mystical energy regarding Melanie. Their attempt is cut short when an RV blares its horn and almost hits them, scaring them all.
Clover goes inside the gas station for a cup of coffee while the others talk outside. Clover asks the man behind the register if he worked here last year. After confirming he’s been working there for years, she shows him a picture of Melanie from the video. He asks if she was missing and clarifies saying that Clover is not the first to come asking. When she asks if many people around here go missing, he says people “get in trouble” in Glore Valley. As their only lead, the group decides to go there and stick together.
Nervously driving to the valley in an increasingly dangerous storm, the group begins to question what they are doing. Suddenly the storm stops but is still raging behind them. They park in front of a house with a “Welcome Center” sign, with the storm circling around the area but leaving the house dry. Confused, they get out of the car and look around. Nina decides to see if there’s anyone inside so they can come up with a plan. Everyone goes in except Clover, who walks up to the strange rain wall.
Inside the house, they find a dated and dusty interior. The power and water don’t work, and they conclude that they are the first people to come there in years. There is a strange hourglass with a skull on the wall. Checking the guest book, Nina finds Melanie’s name signed multiple times, with increasingly shaky handwriting. In another room, Abe finds many missing posters with faces on a bulletin board and finds poster with Melanie’s face.
Outside, Clover thinks she sees a person in the rain. She also hears Melanie’s voice and runs after it. Concerned, Max calls after her and he pulls her back in. As Nina signs the guestbook, the sun suddenly sets and the clock starts ticking.
Inside the house now with the hourglass turned over, they try to understand what’s happening. The car is out in the rain now with someone revving the engine threateningly. Some of them go to the dark basement, where the lights don’t work. There is an eerie sense of dread as Abe goes to check out a noise, and Nina finds a scarred and masked psychopath standing in a room as the top half of Abe’s body falls to the ground.
Hearing the commotion upstairs, the others go to see what happened and Max spots the killer. They run to hide, and the apparently invincible psychopath horrifically stabs each of them as they try to fight back. The sand in the hourglass runs back, as each character returns to where they were when Nina originally signed the book (she now signs it a second time). They remember what had just taken place, and how they were all murdered. Clearly stuck in this time loop escape room situation, they will now have to figure out how to escape this terrifying hellscape as the situations get worse with every loop.
UNTIL DAWN is nicely shot and paced well, with believable performances. However, the movie has a strong humanist worldview featuring gruesome violence, lots of strong foul language, and excessive gore. The violence includes psychopathic killers, people spontaneously exploding, stabbings, kidnapping, demonic possession, and more. The frequent dying over and over in the plot puts the sanctity of life into question. It forces the characters to conduct abhorrent and unacceptable immoral actions for survival.
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