The whole interview with Chris Boyce is on the CBC website.
There’s one clear discrepancy between his account and that of other people. He says he asked people who worked with Ghomeshi if they had anything more to report, and to tell him about it. The Fifth Estate people (see what I mean about awkward?) polled all those people to ask if Boyce had asked them that and every single one said no, there was nothing like that at all.
So…yes, it’s all too reminiscent of the way the JREF and DJ Grothe and even James Randi dealt with reports of sexual harassment and even rape. Silencing and lies.
And it’s in the same cause – the protection of popular Star men, and the organization’s ability to profit from the popularity of the Star men.
It’s all too familiar.
It’s all too familiar, but with one big difference: charges were filed and this guy got arrested. Part of me thinks it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the kink element, but I hope I’m wrong. And that the next predator gets arrested, too.
I remember reading his FB post about this and thinking, “he sounds just like Michael Shermer and (on more minor charges) Lance Armstrong.”
Yup, I remember the same thing.
One odd thing about the Fifth Estate episode is that they don’t mention his first FB post, the one where he tried to get out in front of the mess by saying it was all consensual. They mention only the one he wrote after the mess had become public.
A really troubling aspect of the Cosby case has come up (reported in the daily beast) One of the tabloids was going to do an expose on the accusations against Cosby, but apparently Cosby and his publicist managed to get them to substitute, instead, a personal interview. In other words the journalists (I want to put that in scare quotes but it’s not really right) quashed the story in return for access. File that under “patterns of abuse”…
I think the significant thing about Boyce’s narrative is that he stresses how, back in the spring, Ghomeshi “looked him in the eye” and said he was innocent, that anything he might hear is just a woman lying. Boyce says “I believed him, this person I knew for ten years.” When things started to escalate and the producers brought Brown’s email summary of the allegations to Boyce (including the stuff about the possibility of things happening in the workplace), he tells everyone he did an investigation. The same “investigation” that none of the actual people working there knew anything about. Why? It’s obvious Boyce is lying, but why? I don’t think at that point it was about covering for a man he suspected was guilty. If that were the case, better to find out what fire there might be behind all that smoke (especially if anything illegal had occurred on CBC property–you don’t want employees suing the fucking Mother Corp for fostering a hostile work environment that allowed someone to be sexually assaulted on the job). The only answer is that *even then* Boyce still believed Jian Ghomeshi. He took the action of a person who believed any accusations were the lies of lying bitches. “I’m not the police.” Yet another familiar gem. The only thing that (may have) changed his mind? The video/pictures that Ghomeshi himself presented. That, Boyce calls “evidence”. The testimony of the women? Not so much.
That kind of threw me. When I saw “Secrets and Lies” tied to the name “Chris Boyce,” the first thing I thought of was the American spy. Otherwise known as the “Falcon” in “The Falcon and the Snowman.”