If you feel inclined to ask yourself “Can Chris Brown’s career survive?” — as far too many people these days seem to — you really, really need to sit down and get your priorities in check.
And if you can’t manage to do that much? At least shut the fuck up so that you don’t say horrifying things like this, which indicate that poor Chris Brown messed up by not proactively “framing” his brutal assault in a sympathetic manner:
Killeen said Brown’s representatives may have erred by waiting a week before issuing a statement.
“By then everybody had an idea and a vision as to what happened,” she said. “Unfortunately if you don’t speak and frame the issue, state what happened, state the facts that you know, someone else is going to do it for you and you lose your position of being proactive and owning the story.”
That is all.
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frame the issue?!?
I’d say in what way could you sympathetically frame the issue of bashing your girlfriend’s face in, but then I’ve seen the media (and most celebrity’s) response and it looks like they already did the work for him.
C’mon now, Ali, Rihanna got in the way of his fist, poor man. She probably planned it. You know how women are.
Words fail.
I really wish the mainstream media would educate itself about domestic violence, so they can quit generating foot-in-mouth headlines like “Can [The Man's] Career Survive?” and “Rihanna: A Role Model?” (Why is Rihanna’s role model-readiness even an issue?)
It’s bad enough listening to that crap from family, neighbors, and people on the street, but then again people on the street don’t control the global network of news and information. Do better, CNN!
Team Rihanna!!! woohoo!!
I hope his career doesn’t survive this, if he is actually guilty. I certainly won’t be buying any more of his stuff if he’s convicted.
Team Anti-Domestic Violence.
jenny –
I think your comment is a little problematic because I don’t see this as an issue where people can be divided into “teams.” There’s not Rihanna’s side and Chris’ side. He assaulted her. This is a human rights issue, not some high school breakup. Nobody deserves to be abused. This really shouldn’t be such a divisive issue.
Also, I am interested – what credible sources have you found that lead you to think that Chris might not be guilty. From what I have seen so far, he is guilty.
Dear Cara,
Agreed.
Yours sincerely, Everyone with half a brain.
It isn’t a human rights issue, it’s a criminal law issue. I think I know what you mean in mentioning rights but I think we need to press law enforcement to see “domestic” assault for exactly what it is – male violence – and not as some kind of “special case”. Aso, I don’t think Jenny was saying that she thought Chris Brown might not be guilty.
What I wish is that, after the decades of educating that women have done, people weren’t still asking the same damn questions about “why women stay”? Maybe especially in this case, where so many people have expressed doubts about what happened.
erred by waiting a week? ERRED by waiting A WEEK? I know where the “err” was, and it sure as hell was not in his waiting a week. I wish people would stop thinking that every issue brought out into the public is a tug of war in which the team pulling the hardest and fastest first has some sort of advantage. As if I would be so stupid as to even reconsider the fact that what he did was WRONG if he spoke his piece earlier.
I find the question kind of confusing from the start. Asking whether his career will survive his assault of an intimate partner is missing the point twice. The first way Jill covered nicely. The second, well…Brown, like so many before him, is a mediocre singer and a passably pretty face playing music any idiot with Autotune could play that was fed to him by execs who haven’t figured out that platinum albums don’t come from a couple of singles and a teenager’s stroke fantasy anymore. He’s a relic, an atavism. I wouldn’t have taken even money on his career surviving decade before he beat up his girlfriend.
Also, who gives a shit if his career survives? He beat up his girlfriend, he belongs in prison.
While I do sometimes suspect that Cara and I share a brain, this post was hers and not mine.
You know, it’s funny, but for all the GOP’s “OMG TERRORISTS” speeches, I am more afraid of dying from tainted food or domestic violence. When will we see the terrorists lurking here in America… the ones in our homes and in our work places?
“if he is actually guilty.”
Well shit. Maybe she just gone and beat up herself.
FFS
One might think he erred not by failing to release a statement, but rather by assaulting her. Boggles the mind.
As to the question of his career – of course he’ll survive. And really, he probably should, after serving his sentence once he’s convicted or pleads out. Joblessness shouldn’t be part of the sentence for most crimes (certain professional misconduct aside). That’s not why his career will survive, of course. We’re all too happy as a society to end the careers of pretty much anybody who gets tagged for a whole range of offenses. He’ll survive because he’s already famous, and ‘all’ he did was hit a woman. Besides, she provoked him, right?
I don’t think he’ll do any time. And if they get back together, his career will benefit. Hers will suffer. In DV situations no matter how it pans out, most of the time the abuser has the upper hand and gets away with it. And the entertainment media has always exonerated or even uplifted the abuser and denigrated the victim. But enough of us in America and elsewhere still read it and many of us including many young people buy into it.
I hope she leaves him because next time he could kill her. He’s been charged with threatening to do that already. And this probably wasn’t the first time he’d even done it because there were photos late last year where she was bruised. And if she hadn’t been famous, she would have been arrested along with Brown for just being on a street like 300 June. But she grew up in a house with abuse and it wouldn’t surprise me if Brown did as well.
She’s got to live her own life and make her own decisions and fight the dynamic of abuse including generational abuse. And unfortunately it can take 4-5 incidents of violence to get to that point if you survive, you might leave, which of course is a dangerous situation as one woman in L.A. found out when she was hosting a party and her ex-husband called up and said he was coming over to shoot her. She called the police and despite a TRO, they said they’d come when she called them to say he was there. He did show up and killed her and four other people in the house. So it’s an uphill battle.
Hopefully she’ll be rid of this guy before she gets to that point. But too many of young women still believe that their worth is defined by a guy no matter how abusive he is and that’s got to change too.
Kileen’s comments are actually by-the-numbers stuff for marketing/PR.
Which is why I will auction off my bodily organs on eBay before I ever take a job in PR.
Sorry about that Jill and Cara. I’ve got some kind of plague and through the sudafed haze I didn’t actually see who made the post.
I like the whole framing of the “did he really do it?” crowd. Apparently it’s supposed to be some perversion of the “innocent until proven guilty” legal doctrine. Yeah, right. Which is why when Winona was caught stealing everyone questioned if she did or didn’t. Or when Lindsay and Paris got in trouble with DUI, we all asked the questions plaguing us all, “did they really do it?”
The whole “innocent until proven guilty” crap is obviously something that the police and law have to abide by (which they do very imperfectly and selectively, IMO). The only time it’s ever extended to celebrities is cases in which a man is accused of hurting a woman, or god forbid, children. Chris Brown, O.J. Simpson, Roman Polanski… do I really need to go on?
COSIGN with Jenn above. For real.
The perception is more complicated than Chris Brown = Abuser and Rhianna = Victim. We know the stories of women imprisoned in abusive relationships for fear of leaving and without the resources to do so. This is not Rhianna’s situation: She must certainly be empowered enough through her fame and wealth to step away from this abuser and set an example of behavior for other abused women. Instead, she chose to return for what will certainly be more of the same (as media reports have indicated). She is a role model, perhaps not by choice but she is nonetheless. The public is watching her and by her action of returning to this unhealthy relationship she is victimizing other women as well. I feel no sympathy for her: Until she steps away from the abuse and gets help she is not worthy. He, on the other hand, also desperately needs help. (He also needs a healthy dose of whoop-ass and a dead musical career could help achieve that. Getting support and shout-outs from the likes of Kanye aren’t helping; In fact, they’re dangerous.)
By continuing the relationship with Chris Brown this is what Rhianna is telling the world: Chris Brown is so cool that she will be his girl regardless of beating. That it’s okay to stay in an abusive relationship. And unless we hear about her and/or him seeking counseling alone or together, their’s is a perfectly natural relationship.
The public tends not to sympathize with willful victims. I’d guess Rhianna has more to lose career-wise than Brown. Unfair it may be, but it’s the reality.
Thanks for reading.
she is not worthy
Well thanks for your insight there. Hey everybody, we can stop worrying about Rhianna now, she obviously brought this all on herself.
Lack of resources isn’t the only (or I’d guess even the biggest) reason why people get trapped in abusive relationships. There’s also that whole fear of being killed by the abuser if you leave thing to worry about. And considering the media and fan reaction to this even before it was learned (alledged? I don’t follow this except what’s posted on feminist blogs) that Rhianna got back together with Chris Brown, she’s already been deemed not worthy regardless of anything she’s done to better or worsen the situation.
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