It's nice that Wendy Williams is coming forward with these receipts.

I totally believe her that all of this happened.

It's interesting to me that during Harvey Weinstein's downfall, she didn't believe that Harvey had a network that did all the same things to people. 

I distinctly remember watching Wendy's show one time when she was going to discuss something about #MeToo back in 2019.  I recall being so disgusted I couldn't watch the whole piece.

Her take on it was that she thought #MeToo was bullshit, because she's a hot woman, and in all her years in show business, nobody had ever pressured her to do anything.  So Wendy called bullshit on the predominantly white actresses who came forward during the onrush after Harvey Weinstein got busted.  That was Wendy's logic:  she's been in showbiz a long time, and nobody ever demanded her piping hot snooch, so meh.  Her whole audience cheered. Yes!  #MeToo is fake!  I clicked away.

So on the one hand, I absolutely believe all of the above about the dick pig behaviors described.  I'm glad she kept records.  And I'm scrubbing my cat box with her salty, racist, rape-trolling tears. 

The depth and breadth of her cowardice, the lack of her shame, the complete absence of integrity or self-awareness on the part of Wendy Williams, none of that surprises me.  The sort of POS you need to be to come forward and precisely describe a Weinstein-like coercion mechanism aimed at sexual abuse survivors in show business, after having pissed all over that idea six years ago on your show?  LOL!  Oh, Wendy. 

I guess her brain started turning to oatmeal long ago, bless her heart.  Good thing she kept receipts.

Okay, here is the fashion opinion nobody would ever come to this blog for.

So I've never earned any money to speak of, despite working my butt off since I was 17.  I've never spent one second even thinking about owning a Birkin before.  But I am aware that it's a whole thing, and some people are outraged that you can't just walk into an Hermes store and buy one.  

At 2:06 in the above-linked video, there's a young lady who has found a knockoff Birkin at a brick and mortar Walmart.  They were available for a few days for under $100, until everyone lost their minds and bought them like locusts.  At this point you can't even order one on the Walmart app anymore, which all of the handbag bloggers had been sharing how to do.  Hermes has put its foot down.  You can still buy pre-owned Hermes bags on the Walmart app for many thousands, if you're insane.  Those will almost certainly be fakes, and you won't be able to tell.

And I have to say, Hermes didn't put its foot down when every Tom, Dick, and Harry came out with a bag that looks almost exactly like the Birkin.  Because they all did.  It really is a great bag.  But that's why there are so many other places you can get one that looks almost exactly like that, at very high quality and much lower price point.  So I wish everyone would just stop being silly.  Buy a really nice leather bag from them for a few hundred instead.

I have very mixed feelings about this.  I would feel differently about it had it been any other design house.

But as I understand it, Hermes has no marketing department.  They don't advertise.  They aren't looking for you as a customer, lady with crazy colored hair and caterpillar eyelashes, standing in a Walmart.  Not trying to be mean or to judge. 

But Hermes is a very old business, a saddle maker, who bench-makes bespoke bags for people who can routinely afford such things without asking the price.  That's their narrative, where they're coming from.  Start out with French horse owners, and go from there.  They're not trying to have ladies at Walmart twist themselves into financial pretzels to get a Birkin.  They really aren't reaching out to expand their customer base all the way to you.  The prosthetic/orthotic place in my town has that same relationship with me:  not trying to have me as a customer, and I'm not mad about it.  Right?  Same with Bass Pro Shop.  You can just be okay.  Not every store is for everybody.

Back in the early 1970s, my mom met a woman, let's call her Honey.  They both played the piano.  And my mom glommed onto rich people every chance she got.

Honey's husband, Hal, was a stockbroker.  He would go everywhere in a chauffeur driven limousine.  He would show up sometimes at my school and pick me up in his limo.  And because it was the '70s, they would allow that.  The nuns would be like, sure, no problem, she can get into that random limousine instead of walking home and being unsupervised like usual.  Hal would take me out to a steak house where everybody knew him.

When they bought an apartment in Water Tower Place, they actually bought two apartments and combined them.   And I remember them discussing in passing that  it was upstairs from her favorite store: Hermes.  I believe she was showing my mother the scarf he had bought there for her that day, because her husband was super adorable like that.

When I said (age 11 or 12), "Oh, Hermes?" and pronounced it to rhyme with "herpes," because I had only ridden past there on the bus and of course wouldn't dream of trying to walk inside there, Honey was super nice about not laughing out loud.  She actually kicked Hal so he wouldn't riff on me too hard.  Because he was the biggest goofball of all.

So when I hear people being butthurt about how they can't get an appointment to try and buy this Birkin, it just seems kind of weird to me.  Like chasing after a guy who will never be interested in you.  The more you chase, the less he wants you.

Because I promise you Hal could've bought anything in the store.  He didn't need an appointment. He may have had to wait for certain things sometimes, because that's the kind of merchandise they produce at Hermes.  It's truly not a crap factory -- like a lot of the "luxury" houses really are nowadays.  Hermes does have more to sell than they admit.  But they don't just keep having more and more and more produced to meet the demand, unlike the other ones.

Hal was their customer, the exact person they were in business for.  Every time he walked in there, I promise you they knew exactly how he took his coffee, and they fixed him one and had it ready.  They loved him.  Because his wife loved that place.  And so he'd pass by there whenever he had a chance.  And he didn't have to ask the price of anything.  He DGAF.  It was all a big lark to him. 

Hal was their customer, the exact sort of person they were in business for.  His wife was exactly who they wanted to see their scarves on, stepping out of that limo in that camel cashmere trenchcoat.  They don't want to see their bag being worn with those nails at Walmart.  Just my guess, from having gone past Hermes a million times and looked in their tiny little display window each time.  They had a giant marble wall in the most expensive retail space in Chicago, with exactly one square foot of display window.  The lady in the linked video doesn't have the Hermes vibe that I remember from their Chicago store.

So for me, I feel like these Walmart Birkin people should really continue to just buy fake Louis Vuitton and Chanel from Canal Street or the internet, really.  Those people often have equal of better quality, in terms of craftsmanship, than the real deal when you're talking about basic design houses.  I was looking at bags from some of the biggest names, from their official websites, recently.  And some of the things I saw convinced me to never buy anything from them -- as if I could.  But the quality of the beading and embroidery and particular was deal-breaking.  You can get exact knockoffs that will look very close to the real deal, last a long time, for only a few hundred bucks.

If I had a few thousand dollars to spend on a bag, instead of an ultraluxury whatever, I'd get this, maybe. 

But why be silly and buy a plastic Birkin from Walmart?  If you love that bag, why not buy this?  Or this one, which almost looks exactly like a Birkin? Just save up and buy any one of a number of lovely, structured, well-made, leather bags that are very similar and will last a long time.  Don't buy fake plastic crap.  Spend like $500 and buy a high quality Birkin dupe or replica.  Polene will hook you up with something lovely.

Don't be mad at Hermes.  They have been in business for a really long time.  They have always had a very small, very spendy clientele.  They're not the ones out here trying to bankrupt the brokes.  They didn't ask for this.  There are some very fugazi designers out there who totally deserve to get Walmarted.  It isn't Hermes.

Two different Oklahoma City officers were arrested, about six months apart, for very similar charges.

Both were domestic violence incidents. 

Officer Kitchens is said to have physically and sexually assaulted and threatened a woman with a gun in a car.

Officer Stark is said to have done all kinds of crazy things to another woman above and beyond allegedly raping and threatening her with a gun, including running over her foot with a patrol car, strangling her, and spitting gum in her hair.

I wish everyone a good day in court.

Both of these cases got me thinking about how stupid the whole "Believe Women" meme is.  It's all just so wrong-headed and doomed to fail.  Because it's another way of saying, "Women Aren't Liars."  And it isn't so much that they think we're lying.  It's that we have definitions of what's okay, what they're entitled to.  The whole gray area is like 80% of the world or more.

And even then it's just stupid.  It shouldn't be "Believe Women," because then men have all the choices, of whether to hold themselves accountable for their sexual violence or not.  Of course they're going to choose no.  Instead of "Believe Women," it should be "Men Are Liars"  Because that's why "Believe Women" fails:  Assume the woman is lying is a default setting.  Saying "Believe women" is asking people to work uphill in a passive way.  You're dealing with the fact that one of them is a liar, while leaving that fact unspoken.

Let's call it like it is.  Who lies about sex, men or women?  Men do.  Especially when they've raped somebody.  It's common sense.   And the more entitled they feel to the behavior, the more convincing their denials will be.

The person who doesn't want to face criminal charges always says, "I din do nuffin" at least ten times.  Watch every bodycam video.

Apparently the thing that gets police officers like Daniel Holtzclaw -- and now Liam King -- in trouble is their sheer sense of entitlement to sexual violence.  They're comfortable talking about their behavior when asked, as if they aren't trained in criminal investigation.  Right?  It suggests they either (a) don't believe it's a problem in the first place, or (b) assume that the other cops don't believe it's a problem.  Both Holtzclaw and King seem to fully expect their ridiculous stories to get an, "Okey doke!" from the lady IA detective.

KRQE.com has more coverage.

In the above-linked video, Officer Liam King explains how he stopped a citizen, "Because I'm bored, it's a hot day."  This caused her to volunteer to open up her bra, according to him, even before he lied and told her he had cause to arrest her.  He says he later noticed his body cam wasn't on. -- whoopsie. 

This IA detective didn't give him the full Kim Davis.  She didn't let him keep on talking and talking.  She mentioned after only a few minutes that you can't just stop someone who hasn't committed a crime, turn off your body cam, put your fingers down the back of their pants, and have them lift their bra up.  Mr. King then terminated the interview.

Mr. King is currently on administrative leave and facing charges. 

Every once in a while I see something that makes the world feel survivable for me, like this video by Kidology.  Kudos to her for having an intact moral compass.

In the above-linked video, she discusses a few trends in true crime of which I was completely and blissfully unaware:

• Cookies and crime
• Makeup and crime
• Completely fake true crime

Of the above three, the only one I will endorse is the last.  I recommend everyone doing the first two immediately please switch to the last sort, thanks.

Apparently some people have started doing faceless AI-only YouTube channels that generate fake crimes and report them.  For example, a family where the stepfather kills the stepson because they're having a gay affair.  And none of that is true!  It's all just some nonsense generated by AI, including the names and photographs.  And the people who watch this shit don't bother to verify anything, because they DGAF.

I think that's fantastic.  That's called "crime stories," aka "fiction."  GO FOR IT!  Leave us real people who have been through violent trauma the fuck alone!  We're not TV characters, whose misery you can enjoy not giving a fuck about while you do your makeup.  Really, examine your life, bitch.  Shift over to actual fiction.  Draw boundaries.  Find some way to get attention and earn money that doesn't feast on another woman's corpse.

Because the first two, the "cookies and crime," and the "makeup and crime," those are the domains of the worst sort of people:  the women of rape culture.  This sort of true crime is for women who are completely immune to the actuality of rape as lived by real-life survivors.  These are the same ones who will reflexively say, "He-said, she-said," because none of it is really real to them until it happens to themselves personally. 

These are the pick-mes, the frenemies who won't have your back -- especially not if you get attacked by a celebrity or a sportsballer.  They think whatever happened to you was a TV plot.  Your makeup wasn't running artfully while you were crying, which distracted them, so they weren't listening to your words.   

And if your narrative as a survivor is even mildly inconvenient to their agenda, trust and believe, they will claim to be survivors in order to contradict you.  People who never again discuss rape or sexual violence, will say they're survivors that one time just to shut me the fuck up.  Not that they're lying.  They have nothing else to say about it, only claim the label that one time, to silence me.  Check their blogs forever, and it will never again come up.  This is who they are as human beings.  There is no fact-checking anywhere.  There is no credibility factoring.  Everybody just says BLAH BLAH BLAH and the loudest idiot wins.  America is an idiot of a country.  A corrupt and rapey one, too.

So whenever anything happens, they are also the first and loudest poppers-off.  Anybody mentions violence against women?  Well by cracky, they've got an opinion!  Why?  Because they've got a whole head full of stories from cookies/makeup and crime!  And so if I have anything to say that contradicts wherever they're coming from, well, I'm severely fucking outnumbered, aren't I?  Or even if I'm not contradicting them, I could never be heard over them.  Actually getting raped sets you back in the world, unlike being loud and narcissistic.  That gets you ahead.

I thank God for this young lady who made the Kidology video.  What a breath of fresh air, an occasional sane or self-aware young person, capable of human decency.

I will again point out that the actual problem is the lack of resolution, overall.  The problem is that in America, our law enforcement is very heavily skewed toward property crime.  Crimes against people aren't really prosecuted unless the person is someone important.  And women have never been equal to men under the US Constitution.  America has always been a male supremacy.

Now, the dynamics aren't quite the same here.  Holtzclaw was so incredibly cocky, sure he'd get away with it and that Jannie Ligons wouldn't be believed.  He didn't bother to come up with anything believable.  He didn't anticipate a grainy surveillance video, that would serve only to prove exactly how long they were together on the road.  And that was all they needed to convict him.  Because he couldn't explain it.

In this situation, Mr. Rosen has obviously stepped in it.  He's been the catalyst for a human death.  And now he's on a talk show with a friendly person enabling him to justify it.

I've had very mixed feelings about all of the "To Catch a Predator" spin-offs that sprouted up after Chris Hansen stopped doing his iconic show.  On a visceral level, as a survivor, I do enjoy knowing that there are people out there making Telegram unsafe for these people.  Because clearly there are an army of them trading child porn.  And law enforcement isn't keeping up with it.  That's the sad and shitty reality that people like me have to live in day in, day out, cradle to grave.  There's a reason this vigilantism exists.   It's nice to see the organized, remorseless child predators being preyed upon. 

Then there's the rape kit backlog, and how much it sucks that even when people can and do report their attacks, the police won't even test it for 30 years, like that Abraham Pedrego bullshit in Tucson.  And then when they finally identify the guy, the cop will go on TV and be the victim, "Boo hoo how frustrating FOR ME, I can't arrest him."  Maybe don't leave a mountain of untested rape kits and you won't be such a sad clown. Kill me now. 

There's nothing to do after getting raped but march alone through a world full of assholes.

And unfortunately, many of the pedo hunters are among them.  For example, at one point I saw a video of some YouTuber showing up at a trailer park full of Registered Sex Offenders (RSOs), I believe in Florida.   It was well fenced-off from the road, like not the sort of place people wandered freely in and out from the sidewalk.  The manager had called to complain that these wankers were walking door-to-door trying to sell candy to the chomos that live there.

The police, when they arrived, were well familiar with the location and its residence.  They talked to the manager, who wanted the YouTube trolls criminally trespassed.  And I was 100% on his side about it.  I have no problem with that trailer park existing, in fact I appreciate both the park and its manager.  I'm glad that local law enforcement is right on top of that whole situation.  That, for me, was a best-case scenario:  keeping our men who can't behave around children very well supervised and away from children.   They're not going to be able to bring children in there unnoticed.  The manager was obviously diligent, and the cops.  A+ to them.  All of them were working in my best interests.

The YouTubers weren't there to do me any service as an abused child, quite the opposite.  They were there to disrupt a stable situation that affects vulnerable people.  They were there to self-serve and cause trouble.  They were there to use people like me as a for-profit trolling opportunity, full stop. 

The fact that Alex Rosen sometimes gets good results while also doing the above?  Meh.  He's a red cunt hair above the above-mentioned trolls, because he's not disrupting a stable situation.  He chose a slightly higher road.  But I, as a child trafficking survivor, feel equally exploited by him and his shenanigans.  He does this for clout, for the cheers of his bro pack.

I'm not an "ends justify the means" gal.   I believe that chomos are also human beings who need places to live in the world.  I'm not down for killing everybody we don't like, pushing them all to suicide for clicks.  He does this "not in my name."

I watched enough of the linked interview to come to the meat of it.  At one point, Rosen says, "It's my job."  And yes, it's his job in the same way it would be his job to change oil if he worked at Jiffy Lube or make pizza if he worked at Pizza Hut.  This is a for-profit undertaking that he has chosen to do.  He does it on the internet for clout.  He does this on the pretense of a moral high ground, which I will assert does not exist.  He does it presumably on behalf of "people like me," molested children.  And yet he's not one of us, is he?  He's a bro in a bro pack, white knighting.  If somebody gets trampled by the horse occasionally, too fucking bad.

I feel very exploited by Rosen's work.  It's manipulative, dishonest, bro-centric, and mean-spirited.  There is no moral high ground, that's a pretense.  He borrows his moral high ground from people like me, exploited children.  Look at the tone of the comments in the linked video.  "Alex took out the trash," basically.  This is not how I feel.  I don't want such people to be able to continue harming children.  And I'm not for dehumanization and escalating violence.  I would really like a better world with less violence and mental illness all around.

This is so alienating, I don't know if people can imagine.  The world is just a giant, swirling ball of rape culture.  Even the people who are presumably part of the solution -- and in some ways are part of the solution, as Rosen has created some solid, prosecutable cases -- are simultaneously very much part of the problem.  There's always somebody exploiting your suffering, getting paid to talk over you.  It's like lovely a club sandwich with just a light layer of dogshit on each slice of bread.

Let me give you another example of why I will not endorse Rosen in particular.  I recall one video where he confronted someone at work.  Keep in mind, each of these are people who have been chatting online with people they believe to be minors.  So this is activity their coworkers know nothing at all about.  Their coworkers believe it's a workday and there is work to be done.

When confronted, the chomo immediately knows the jig is up.  They've been fixated on "Ashley," or "Kayla" or whoever for weeks by that time and usually think they're in a relationship.  It's a very satisfying moment, when you get to see a child predator have the extreme buzzkill of having their precious little 12-year-old Alyssa actually be this big fat beardy guy towering over them.  There's a reason Rosen's channel works.

So they get into a conversation, which Rosen wants to take elsewhere.  In this particular video it was in a store.  The guy is obviously uncomfortable.  The conversation is going on for a while.  Another coworker, such as a manager perhaps, comes over to try and intervene.  Rosen labels her "Karen."

And this is, IMO, him displaying his butthole.

Because you know what, dude?  She's at her job, and you're sidetracking an employee with something that looks weird, because it is weird.  You're trying to walk her coworker out of there in handcuffs.  She's doing her job.  She doesn't know he's a chomo. 

So cutting directly to name-calling her speaks to something about you.  It means you leap at the opportunity to silence a white woman -- as does your audience.  Because think about it.  Look through his other videos, and find one where he blasts men for saying anything, questioning him.  Look for one where he calls anyone else a race-based name.  No, demographic-based name-calling, that's special for "Karen."  So there's something different about white women than every other kind of person in Rosen's (and his audience's) eyes.  (Spoiler alert:  they're misogynists.)

The fact that he went directly to blasting her race and gender speaks volumes while he's white knighting in this particular way.  Right?  Like isn't almost every single one of his alleged perpetrators a Kevin?  And isn't almost every one of the intended victims a baby Karen?  So where in the fuck does he get off just immediately popping off with, "Karen," aka "Silence, white woman!"  Isn't that what calling someone "Karen" means, that this white woman needs to shut up and sit down?

Well, it's because that's what his demographic loves.  It's all a big wank for Kevins who imagine themselves on the right side of rape culture, when actually they're very much part of the problem.  Because I'm pretty sure this is how Alex Rosen makes his living.

For the record, true crime is something I invest money in when I have enough money to do so, in order to set the record straight on things that I feel are important.

Abraham Pedrego's DNA matches a series of rapes from 1989 and 1990.  And because they just got around to testing it now, he won't be charged.  Because the statute of limitations is up.  So he's been "MeToo'd," to misuse the phrase.  (I need to come back to my thoughts on that.)

Here's what the police man said from KOLD:

“'This case is particularly hard because these cases have remained unsolved for so long and going back and notifying the victims that we have identified the suspect but aren’t able to make an arrest does not feel like justice. It’s miserable,' Wilson said."

Pobrecito.  My heart really breaks for him.  Imagine how bad it would fuck with his head if he was the one who got raped!  For real. 

No, seriously, like I've always had to hide the fact that I got raped as if I were the one who committed all those crimes.  Because basically when the criminal doesn't get dealt with, that big ball of inconvenience about it just hangs in the air.  And a lot of people resent having to deal with or even know about it.  So all of that falls to the survivor.  It just does.  And the police man wants me to cry for him because he can't put this one guy in jail?  LOL  Unraped people are adorable, their pain threshold.  Next time maybe don't wait 30 years to test your rape kits.

What makes this kind of story so completely insufferable -- aside from how horrible it is for the survivors -- is listening to other people talk about it.  Because there's always at least a 50:1 ratio of unraped people to survivors.  They say 50 things, and we say maybe 1 -- maybe.  And if we do get to say anything at all, we usually get called liars and asked why we waited until now to come forward, or have our clothing choices questioned, or get attacked some other way.

Reddit is a perfect example of this.  If you looked at that linked thread, you'd imagine Reddit was a safe haven for women!  LOL  When actually it's completely horrible, an absolute misery pit of rape culture in every imaginable way.  A bigger or more horrible sausage festival probably does exist.  But Reddit is utterly shameful for its size and mainstreamness/depth of misogyny.

I couldn't follow the Ukraine war, for example.  I would ask the "good guys" on Reddit to please refrain from graphic rape descriptions, as it was retraumatizing for other survivors, and also reviolating of the original survivor.  And they simply refused to hear that, very angrily and aggressively so.

So all the white-knight fuckery, all the righteous indignation about how this one guy goes unpunished?  Oh, fuck off, the lot of you.  Any time I try to speak up as a rape survivor, they come for me with torches and pitchforks.  And I know I'm not the only one.  Just fuck all the fucking way off with it.  You, the whole big mob of you, let them all walk free every time.  Say hi to Tara Reade, whose complaints got no investigation whatsoever.  She, herself, got crucified and vilified in every imaginable way until she fled the country.