Harsh Light on Two Men, but Glare Falls on Women
The New York Times notices something that women are already aware of:
A flotilla of TV news trucks was stationed outside a Bronx apartment building this week, as photographers scrambled to get a shot of the hotel cleaning woman who accused the managing director of the International Monetary Fund of sexually assaulting her. Inside, reporters fired questions at her neighbors: Was she good-looking? Did she pay her rent on time? What was her behavior like?
On the opposite coast, news trucks were idling outside the California home of Mildred Patricia Baena, who the world now knows to be the mother of the boy Arnold Schwarzenegger has admitted to fathering while she was his family’s housekeeper.
The harsh scrutiny of Ms. Baena started as soon as her Myspace photos flooded the Internet. She “would never appear on the cover of Maxim magazine,” wrote a blogger on Forbes.com. Several news outlets repeated a report from the gossip Web site TMZ that Ms. Baena had begun to “pursue Arnold” in the late 1990s.
Though the circumstances of such cases are sharply different, they nevertheless raise questions and concerns about where attention should be focused. But there is less hesitation to try to reveal every detail of the lives of the women involved, as if those details could somehow explain the headlines about the powerful figures.
[…]
For all the differences of the two cases — one involves allegations of sexual assault, the other does not — they raise similar questions about imbalances of power that continue in some ways after the accusations become public.
The International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was being held in isolation at Rikers Island. But he had high-powered lawyers and, like Mr. Schwarzenegger, highly placed friends and family to defend him. Mr. Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, issued statements insisting on their family’s right to privacy.
The women suddenly thrust into the spotlight must rely instead, at least initially, on neighbors to protect their privacy. In the Bronx, a man who said he was the hotel worker’s brother confessed to a reporter the day after he was quoted in newspapers that in fact, he was not.
The silence from the women inevitably is answered with storylines hastily pieced together.
More at link.