Ain’t love grand

“Happy Monday!” he gushed to me in an early morning tweet. He told me that he wanted a family and that I was “the one”. He was smitten with me. His eyes lit up when he saw me. He couldn’t keep his hands off me.

Those memories were recounted by women who dated Jian Ghomeshi, some of whom he allegedly beat up and some of whom he didn’t. He certainly didn’t marry any of them.

One of them recalled a bizarre, hot and cold relationship with Ghomeshi. She concluded, “Jian was grooming me for the same violence he inflicted on other women. I think he was pursuing and encouraging me because of the existing power imbalance, creating a level of emotional intensity as a preface to his “big reveal” so that I would ether acquiesce or never tell. He trained me to feel sorry for him, to feel guilty about not giving enough of myself to him, to believe I was special to him.”

Some insight might be gleaned from research on pedophiles. In a 2012 New Yorker article, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about how child molesters ingratiate themselves into communities, create a persona that makes sexual abuse seem unlikely, get access to a large pool of potential victims, and then start the selection process. Gladwell writes about “standard child-molester tradecraft”:

The successful pedophile does not select his targets arbitrarily. He culls them from a larger pool, testing and probing until he finds the most vulnerable. Clay, for example, first put himself in a place with easy access to children—an elementary school. Then he worked his way through his class. He began by simply asking boys if they wanted to stay after school. “Those who could not do so without parental permission were screened out,” van Dam writes. Children with vigilant parents are too risky. Those who remained were then caressed on the back, first over the shirt and then, if there was no objection from the child, under the shirt. “The child’s response was evaluated by waiting to see what was reported to the parents,” she goes on. “Parents inquiring about this behavior were told by Mr. Clay that he had simply been checking their child for signs of chicken pox. Those children were not targeted further.” The rest were “selected for more contact,” gradually moving below the belt and then to the genitals. ... The child molester’s key strategy is one of escalation, desensitizing the target with an ever-expanding touch.

Ghomeshi, so cool in some ways, was remarkably uncool in others. Were the overly-strong cologne, the creepy grab-hand way he first approached women, the corny pickup lines, the early hair pulling, all part of a cull? Was there method in his uncoolness? The alleged assaults have occurred for over a decade without anyone reporting Ghomeshi to the police, so it seems he was doing something right.

To grossly paraphrase Gladwell, "When monsters roam free, we assume that their victims ought to have reported them. But that might be wishful thinking. A sexual predator is someone adept not just at preying on women but at manipulating, intimidating, deceiving, and charming them."