Is there a sex offender in your neighborhood? There’s a pretty good chance the answer is yes. According to Family Watchdog, there are four “offense against children” offenders and two rapists living within a few blocks from my home. The US Department of Justice National Sex Offender Registry lists twenty names in my zip code alone, including two women.
Now what? Does any of that information make me safer when I come home past the park late at night? Does it protect my two young daughters?
It didn’t protect Tonia Carmichael, whose body, along with those of ten other women, was found in the home Anthony Sowell earlier this week.
Sowell had been charged with a rape in 1989 and served five years for the lesser charge of attempted rape. He was, like Jaycee Dugard’s accused captor and rapist Phillip Garrido, a registered sex offender. He was, like Garrido, known to his neighbors.
Yesterday a report by California’s Office the Inspector General David R. Shaw cited over a dozen incidents of failure on the part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, including claims Phillip Garrido repeatedly violated his parole. The report charges that that the Department failed to adequately classify and supervise Garrido, to obtain key information from federal parole authorities, to train parole agents to conduct parolee home visits, and, crucially, “to investigate the presence of a 12-year-old female during a home visit.” Garrido, who served eleven years in jail for the abduction and rape of Katherine Calloway Hall, was not classified as a sexually violent predator.
In addition to his supervision from the Department of Corrections, Garrido and his wife were visited by the police in 2006, after complaints from neighbors charging that the couple had people living in their yard. Officers visited the home but never entered it, and Garrido’s parole officer was never notified of the complaint.
In a rundown neighborhood of Cleveland, meanwhile, residents are claiming police did little to respond to their complaints about Anthony Sowell. Last December, a woman filed a report accusing him of assault and attempted rape. Two weeks ago, a neighbor called the police after finding Sowell standing over a bruised and beaten woman in the bushes near his home. The witness claims police never interviewed him about what happened. The incident is all the more chilling because on September 22, another woman accused him of choking her and raping her in his home. According to the New York Times, “it took several weeks to assign an officer to the case and to obtain a search warrant.” So to review: a woman accused a convicted and registered sex offender of rape, and it took Cleveland police 45 days to arrest him, during which time they received another assault complaint about him.
All fifty states and the District of Columbia are mandated to have a publicly accessible registry of sex offenders, and there are an estimated 600,000 registered sex offenders in the United States. The whereabouts of approximately 100,000 of them is considered unknown. But even those familiar to the system can, like Garrido and Sowell, fly for years under the radar.
There are other flaws in the registry as well. A registered sex offender isn’t automatically a guilty sex offender. And while databases make it easy to access names and locations, they come up short on the details of the offenses themselves. Sex offender criteria can include consensual sex between teens and even public urination. Under the Adam Walsh Child Protection Act signed by George Bush in 2006, offenders as young as fourteen can be required to register for a minimum of fifteen years. Meanwhile, of course, there are uncounted violent sex abusers who have never been arrested or convicted of anything.
All which suggests a complicated, deeply flawed system – one that imperfectly lumps innocent and non-violent offenders in among rapists and kidnappers, a system that pits the right of privacy against the need for public safety, a system so strained that predators who are nothing short of monstrous have managed to thrive within it.
It's reassuring to believe that someone who has done very bad things doesn’t get to slip quietly into your neighborhood or mine, and that that knowledge acts as a deterrent to them. But I don’t know for sure. Most of the recidivism studies out there are based on information from the mid-nineties, before tougher registry laws and online databases. So I can buy a sex offender app for my iPhone. I can look up my local offenders on any number of online registries. I can go all "Little Children" and, if I wish, plaster my streets with the details I find there. But a registered offender in the neighborhood isn’t automatically a threat. And when there's a real threat, as Phillip Garrido's neighbors in Antioch California and Anthony Sowell's in Cleveland Ohio have learned, knowing he’s there doesn't automatically make any difference in stopping him.
It's that time of year. Pants are a little tighter, jowls are little droopier, and there's a high concentration of your mom's famous tollhouse cookies in your bloodstream. Time to start making some new fitness resolutions.
Or did we say frescolutions?
In today's installment of "things for which we blame Jared Fogle" a woman named Christine Dougherty has become the face – and body – of Taco Bell's "Drive Through Diet" campaign.
Right off the bat, let's just say that we're skeptical of a "diet" that involves eating burritos in your car. We further have our doubts when there's a disclosure that "Drive-Thru Diet is a not a weight-loss program." And were I Taco Bell, I wouldn't go bragging about having a whole seven items on the menu that contain fewer than nine grams of fat. (Which, by the way, does not qualify any of them as low fat.)
But we credit Christine, whoever she is, for losing 54 pounds over a sensible two-year period instead going all gimmicky and "Biggest Loser" on us. And we admire her for working within her weaknesses. "I didn’t want to cut out my fast food," she says in the online ad, "so I started choosing Fresco items from the Drive-Thru Diet menu and making other sensible choices."
Good on you, Christine, and thanks for the caveats, because it's a safe bet that nobody's going to get into a bikini like the one you sport on the Taco Bell page simply by switching to the lower-calorie options on a fast food menu. A far likelier scenario is that those "other sensible choices," along with, dare we say, exercise and an efficient metabolism had a bigger role in the transformation.
We're all for taking those little steps that can lead to big changes. And we applaud fast food chains for offering fresher, lower-fat options. But we call bullshit on rounding up seven menu items and calling it a "diet," and we'd like to know a little more about this Christine lady before we trust her lifestyle advice. Want to get healthier in 2010? Think outside the bun – and then think some more.
It's notoriously difficult for actresses of a certain age to get work in Hollywood, but CNN's Breeanna Hare notes that if you're an older white woman who looks suitably patrician, opportunities abound in the "boozy grandma" role that seems to be featured in every other TV show these days. Veteran actresses Kelly Bishop, Holland Taylor, Caroline Lagerfelt and Jessica Walter have all recently played such three-martini matriarchs — I'd add Susan Sullivan, currently working out her elbow on "Castle," to that list — and now Susan Sarandon has brought the type to the big screen in "The Lovely Bones."
And at this point, it is a type. Says Hare, "It's a role that's virtually paint-by-numbers — drunk grandmothers are nearly always wealthy, white and cruelly witty, with poor parenting skills," but in the hands of such talented performers, the outspoken, cocktail-fueled older woman is still extremely watchable — which really ought to make us wonder what they could do with other roles. For all the talk of Meryl Streep rocking Hollywood's socks off this year (and believe me, I'm as thrilled about that as any other female moviegoer who's not invested in Edward vs. Jacob), let us not forget that she's Meryl Freakin' Streep. Is her recent wave of success really going to help other women her age to open movies and land the cover of Vanity Fair? TVGuide.com senior editor Mickey O'Connor provides the reality check: "Maybe it's become, play a drunk grandmother and you get to work past the age of 60." Even if you're Susan Sarandon, let alone an award-winning actress (Bishop has a Tony, and Taylor an Emmy, for instance) who's spent decades stuck in "Hey, it's that guy!" territory.
I suppose the boozy grandma is better than the dotty — or nonexistent — older woman character, in that she at least has a discernible personality, opinions and enough brains to produce just the right clever, cutting remark on the spot. But does she have to be a functional alcoholic for the audience to accept those things? Does a woman over 60 — or 50, even — have to be snobby and self-absorbed to be interesting? As cookie-cutter types go, "wealthy, white, witty and wasted" does at least offer an actress something to do, but given the talent and résumés of some of these performers, "wasted" is exactly the right word.
The early morning call was for a "domestic abuse" situation. "My husband had me with a knife," the woman said. "I'm scared for my life, and he threatened me." And when the 911 operator asked for her husband's name, she broke into sobs and said, "Charlie Sheen."
The early Christmas morning call that Sheen's wife, Brooke Mueller, placed to Aspen authorities has been released, and it is as sad and scary a few minutes of audio as you'll likely hear today.
On the tape, Mueller, who tested with a blood alcohol level of 0.13 when she met with police, sounds disoriented and repeatedly says, "I need to file this." The statement the couple gave the police sheds even more depressing light on the events, which seem to have erupted when Mueller threatened to divorce Sheen and take their 9-month-old twin sons. In their statements, both parties admitted yelling and slapping each other on the arms. But Sheen, who said that he had been having marital problems lately and that his wife "abuses alcohol," denied pulling a folding knife on her, though he did produce one for the police from his bag. It was, oddly, open and locked. Mueller, meanwhile, claimed he told her, "You better be in fear. If you tell anybody, I'll kill you. I have ex-police I can hire who know how to get the job done, and they won't leave any trace." Police also noted the appearance of red marks on her neck, which she said occurred while Sheen was holding her down with the knife to her throat.
Mueller's statements are remarkably consistent with Sheen's ex-wife Denise Richards' accounts of the actor's behavior, including an incident where he told her "I hope you fucking die, bitch. You are fucking with the wrong guy," and threatened to have her killed. Sheen also served two years' probation for a 1996 assault on then-girlfriend Brittany Ashland. In 1995, he settled a case out of court with a woman who claimed he'd hit her when she refused to have sex with him. And in 1990, in an incident deemed an accident, he shot his fiance Kelly Preston in the arm.
Child Protective Services is now apparently investigating the case, and for now, Sheen is remaining conspicuously mum to the press. That's fine, because we don't lack for punditry on the subject of Sheen's and Mueller's behavior and possible poor judgment.
But the surprising element in all of this is how relatively unscathed Sheen seems to be so far. A CNN report this morning put it best: "Scandals Don't Faze Charlie Sheen's Career."
Which raises the question, Why the hell not? CBS aired his sitcom "Two and a Half Men" — for which he earns a reported $825,000 an episode — last night as usual and has issued no statement on the events of Christmas. Hanes, with whom he has an endorsement deal, has likewise not distanced itself from its client.
Sheen's certainly not the first actor with a historic fondness for controlled substances and ladies of the town. So grudging props that he's managed to parlay that very public bad-boy reputation into a lucrative on-screen career. Oh, that Charlie! He's the philandering rake from that sitcom! And hey, the scandalous publicity just sent the ratings through the roof.
Here's the thing, though: Are you fucking kidding me?
There's naughty and there's shoving women around, hitting them, verbally abusing them, and threatening to kill them. Repeatedly. Over years and years and years. It doesn't matter if you've had an on-and-off relationship with sobriety. It doesn't matter if the women in question are hookers or porn stars or sexy actresses or college students. It doesn’t even matter if they're drunk. For what it's worth, you don't go pulling any of that on men either, though that doesn't seem to be an issue for Sheen.
So while you can get fired from a hit TV show shortly after making a homophobic remark, and you can lose your beauty pageant crown after posing topless, you can also, apparently, make a career of abusing women and be the highest-paid actor on television.
Air a public service announcement in which a woman speaks soberly about the grave risk of breast cancer and male viewers are all: Zzzzzzzzz. But have a male celebrity winkingly pretend to be a gynecologist, lecture his "bromigos" on the importance of breast cancer screenings and perform a mammogram on his own man-boob, and men just might perk up and wipe the slobber from their chins. At least, such is the wisdom of the Men for Women Now campaign, which produced that very spot starring stoner-dude comedian Jack Black — and, as Danielle Friedman points out today in the Daily Beast, it's just one of a handful of recent PSAs about women's health issues to feature and target men. But while she celebrates them for successfully getting out the message, I think they've failed miserably.
In the run-up to the holidays, CBS produced spots starring actors Chris Beetem and Josh Pais urging men to give the gift "even Santa can't deliver" to the special woman in their life: a Pap smear. The message wasn't for men to talk to the women in their life about how Pap smears can save lives, but to just go ahead and call up her gynecologist and make the appointment for her. The takeaway: "Save her life by getting her in stirrups, stat!" The timing of these PSAs was awfully poor, considering the guidelines for Pap smears were recently revised to suggest that women have them less frequently than previously advised in order to avoid unnecessary harm. More importantly, can you imagine the reaction to a PSA urging women to go ahead and secretly schedule a much-feared prostate exam for their husband as a "gift"? It would be seen as a controlling gesture, not a considerate one. Of course, the caring thing to do is spread the word about disease detection and prevention, to help inform personal medical decisions, which is kind of the point of PSAs, right? But, again: Zzzzzzzzz.
At least the Pap smear spots clearly had women's health in mind — as opposed to say, their breasts. Broadsheet readers might recall Canada's Rethink Breast Cancer ad, which featured a pair of bouncing bikini-clad breasts and beseeched viewers to "save the boobs." It was a fun and sexy approach, but also one that assumes the plight of nice knockers will stir men into action faster than the living, breathing, thinking and feeling human being carrying them. Gents, there is equal opportunity for offense here.
On a similarly fratty note, Men for Women Now — which almost sounds caveman-like, right? — has enlisted all manner of male stars to talk about boobs in online videos. The thinking behind these spots seems to be that saying "boobs" enough just might make men give a shit about breast cancer. Again, here's an assumption that is offensive not only to women but perhaps especially to men. Kevin Connolly of "Entourage" delivers the following sales pitch for the group's Facebook application: "Really, what is Facebook all about — faces? Ha-ha! I don't think so. It's about boobs. Ladies go there to show 'em off. Guys go there to check 'em out. I mean, really, when you think about it, it should be called 'Boob-book.'"
Another spot features Bob Saget, who has turned his squeaky-clean image as the dad on "Full House" into a comedy routine in which he acts as filthy and unfatherly as possible. "I save breasts," he tells the camera with a straight face. "I keep them in a chest, which is kinda redundant, at the end of my bed, and sometimes I'll spray Pledge on them to keep them lemony fresh." He continues on with his particularly desperate brand of creep-out humor: "I give Pap smears door-to-door. It's just me, you can let me in. I'm a dad on TV — there's nothing to worry about."
The creator of Men for Women Now, Noreen Fraser, tells the Daily Beast that "men are kind of marginalized when it come to women’s cancers." She asks: "Why shouldn’t men stand up for women's cancers?" I absolutely agree. By all means, men should be encouraged to learn more about diseases that threaten women and share what they know with the ladies in their life. I just don't see salivating over boobs and telling jokes about breast-collecting psychos as very effective consciousness raising. That isn't to say there aren't men out there who can only be persuaded to care or even think about women's health by a pair of jiggling jugs or sexual innuendo. But, frankly, I think I'm better off without those guys thinking about the state of my breasts or cervix.
The Washington Post's Anne Kornblut, who covered both Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin extensively during the 2008 campaign, has written a book, "Notes from the Cracked Ceiling," on what she's learned from and about women in politics — and, as the subtitle says, "What It Will Take for a Woman to Win" the presidency. I look forward to reading the whole thing, but here's what I've learned from the excerpts and related items currently running in the Post: We still haven't had enough women in politics at all, let alone at the national level, to draw many firm conclusions.
Take Kornblut's tips for "How to shatter the 'highest, hardest' glass ceiling," which include: Beat breast cancer. No, really. Surely, it's a tongue-in-cheek strategy suggestion, but given the number of female politicians who have successfully leveraged their triumph over the disease to improve their image — Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire, Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell — it might just be one of the best. By contrast, only Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have provided evidence that advice like "Don't take women — especially young women — for granted" is sound.
Then there's the "Women Leadership Styles" piece (which notes that former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is "is pointing to her recent survival of breast cancer as evidence she is tough" in her campaign to unseat California Sen. Barbara Boxer), which identifies five models, including one ("The Businesswoman") that is admittedly "untested." Beyond that, the "Iron Lady" has a good track record internationally, but only Clinton and Madeleine Albright fall into that category in the U.S. We apparently favor "The Prosecutor" — e.g., Napolitano, Gregoire, Claire McCaskill, Amy Klobuchar, and Jennifer Granholm — although "The Young Mom" can sometimes be a crowd-pleaser. Reps. Wasserman Schultz, Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and Linda Sánchez have done all right with that, but then, the only female governor of Massachusetts, Jane Swift, might have been forced out because she gave birth while in office, and the other noteworthy figure in this category is Sarah Palin. On the upside, if Jane Swift waits until she's a bit older to try again, her maternal image could make her a fabulous "Grandmother in Pearls" — a love of children is evidently an asset as long as you're done raising them — à la Nancy Pelosi. Who, although she "is, after all, the most successful woman in American political history" is also the only woman working that particular model, making it not so much a "women leadership style" as "one woman's persona." And that's the whole list. (As Bitch Ph.D.'s M. Leblanc tweeted, "Women leaders, get them in ALL THE FLAVORS!!!")
So the path is clear for little girls who want to be politicians when they grow up: Become a successful prosecutor with young children and grandchildren simultaneously, and never let work interfere with your home life, or vice versa. Failing that, cultivate an image of toughness — and enough actual toughness to endure all the jokes about your either having testicles yourself or being inclined to remove other people's — or become CEO of a huge corporation and cross your fingers that that will work someday. Bonus points if you survive breast cancer. Oh, also, in the immortal words of Ani DiFranco (whom you probably shouldn't listen to unless you want to grow up to be some kind of commie, but still), "God help you if you are an ugly girl/'course too pretty is also your doom." If, like Clinton, you dare to have undereye bags in your 60s, you'll be savaged. If, like Pelosi, you have obvious work done to counter the criticism that you look too much like an actual aging woman, you'll be savaged for that, too. And if, like Granholm, you're younger and conventionally beautiful — hey, guess what! Also a problem! "Voters can find a woman attractive, but they don't necessarily think that translates into gravitas," writes Kornblut. Neither, apparently, do a Harvard law degree and experience as a prosecutor, at least until you fug yourself up in television ads. Says one of Granholm's advisors, "When we took it down a notch, people said, 'OK, she can be governor.'" God bless America.
And of course, there's Palin — an inescapable part of the conversation whether we're discussing beauty queen governors, female presidential contenders, moms of young children, the 2008 election or a laundry list of other issues. Her very omnipresence in articles and now books about women in politics only serves as a reminder of how few serious success stories there have been from which we can draw lessons for the future. Kornblut lumps her in with all the others in these short pieces, as though Palin's just one more highly accomplished woman butting her head into that glass ceiling, sidestepping the fact that — although she's taken her share of purely sexist criticism — the former Alaska governor's reputation suffers most because she distorts facts, presents ignorance as a virtue, translates the Constitution as saying that freedom of speech means freedom from criticism, et frickin' cetera. That this is one of the most visible women on the political stage — a fluke and a national embarrassment — is all the evidence necessary to prove that we still don't know jack about what it takes for a woman to succeed on merit at the highest levels. And when the number of successful female politicians is so pathetically small that even an expert on the subject is reduced to offering insights like, Umm, it probably helps to be an average-looking breast cancer survivor, and having kids is good except when it isn't, all that tells me is that we need to elect a hell of a lot more women before seeking patterns in their examples will be worth the trouble.
As our own Laura Miller said in "The Magician's Book," there are two kinds of readers: "those who liked 'Little Women' and those who preferred 'The Phantom Tollbooth.'" But whichever team you happen to play for, tonight, rather than curling up with another episode of "Two and a Half Men," why not watch "Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women" on PBS's "American Masters"?
In tandem with Harriet Risen's biography of the same name, director Nancy Porter's film looks to be a lively portrait of a woman who was uncommonly clever and ambitious in a time when women were rarely prized for being either. And though she's a beloved literary heroine to generations for the book her editor described simply as "a girl's story," Alcott, it turns out, was also a hash-smoking, free-thinking, pulp fiction-writing one-of-a-kind American icon. Imagine the fanstastic blog she'd have if she were alive today.
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