May 3, 2007--All the News That's XXX-Rated

We learn that “she was putting the finishing touches on a Halloween costume” when the doorbell rang. Then there was “pounding at the door.” As a women living alone and a cautious New Yorker, before opening the door, she looked “through the peephole, saw thick white smoke and a man in fill firefighting gear. . . . She allowed him in,” and the next thing she knew “she felt a gun at her head” and was ordered to “get down on the ground.”


“When she did, he tied her wrists with plastic handcuffs and put a chloroform-soaked rag over her mouth . . . [He] stripped her naked and tied her to the bed with a green nylon cord that was connected to her right hand and her left hand and leg. . . . He also taped her eyes and mouth with duct tape . . . [and] touched her breasts and tried to abuse her further . . .”

Though the NY Times is not prone to publishing articles that are so lurid--after all, the Paper of Record is not about All the News That’s XXX-Rated; it’s about fitness, what’s Fit to Print--nonetheless I am quoting from the Times itself, from a Metro section article about the alleged hideous rape and abuse of a 36-year-old woman by Peter Braunstein who gained access to her apartment by disguising himself as a fireman. (See article linked below.)

Do we really need all of this almost pornographic detail?

I suppose so since the article continues, “He rummaged through boxes of shoes in her closet, and put two pairs of high heels on her feet, a pair of lavender strapped sandals and another pair that she described as bronze colored . . . .”

So for those who are “into” dressing up we have her assembling her Halloween costume (blessedly we are not told what it was) and him in his own form of costume—the firefighter’s outfit. And for those “into” feet and high-heel shoes, we have . . . .

Enough.

Still, I have a few of questions beyond what is going on here in the Times (I know, I know, newspaper circulation is way down): First, would this be a less-reported story if the alleged rapist and victim were ethnically or religiously different? That’s an easy one. Second, isn’t this another example of the Times covering-the-coverage: rather than publishing pulpy stories based on its own reporting—something the NY Post is famous for—the Gray-Lady NY Times finds itself with no choice, “forced” to report on what everyone else is writing about, as if it’s some kind of social phenomenon.

And of course here I am doing the same thing—reporting on their covering the coverage. Shame on them . . . and shame on me.