Georgia Theater Manager Arrested for Sexual Battery of Teen Employee

I have so much to catch up on after being ill.  And unfortunately, a lot of the backlog also makes me feel ill.

A lot of things about this story really disturb me.  Really there's only one bright spot:  the father.  I'll review the video again, going point by point with what bothers me about this.

  1.  Indian manager tried KISSING 17-year employee.  Why is the manager's nationality/race in the title? What does that have to do with anything?  Problematic.  Especially since this incident happened in Georgia, deep in the heart of pitting rape survivors against people of other races, just for the mirth and merriment.

2.  A 17-year employee is someone who has worked there for 17 years.  This is a 17-year-OLD employee, a teenager, unlike the manager in his 50s.  Why am I picking that little nit?  Well, because this whole story is being covered on a gaming channel.  It's being seen as infotainment for boys whose minds work at that level now.  I'm not sure that's a good thing.  I'm not sure they'd be on the girl's side at all if (a) there were no videotape,  (b) the manager were white or black, or (c) he was a really popular singer or sportsballer.  Or even a high-school sportsballer, like from Steubenville.  For example, the video opens with a witness giving a statement, and the gamer overtalks him with "Don't mind my massive pimple that I just popped!"  because really, we have our priorities totally straight when talking about sexual violence in America.

3.  Look how effortless the lies and victim-blaming are from the manager.  "I told her to clean the break room.  Twenty minutes later I had to go looking for her.  I found her playing on her phone. So I "charged" her.  I told her you had 20 minutes to clean the floor and table and it's not done.  Then she asked to go to the bathroom, so I said okay.  Then her father came and "charged" me."  He claims he completed the mopping she hadn't done after she went to the bathroom after doing nothing for 20 minutes.  He seems entirely baffled about why her father showed up like a crazy man.  This girl is completely nuts!

4.  The first question the police have for him is if there are cameras in the break room where the alleged incident occurred.  He makes them ask three times.  He's stalling.  Because of course there are.  And he has just lied his whole face off.  The manager confirms repeatedly that there are no cameras in there.  When the other employees say there is, and the cops go in there and see a camera, he says it's been broken for years.  I'm mentioning this part of it, because it demonstrates how very heavily this manager is relying on HE-SAID, SHE-SAID, the staple diet of rape culture.  America and the world have been running on that forever.  As long as he can fall back on HE-SAID, SHE SAID, he knows he can do whatever TF he wants.  Because of the very next question the cops had for him:

5. "How long has she been working here? Have there ever been any issues between you guys?"  Now.  I understand that he's doing an investigation, and he has to ask questions.  But that line of reasoning, where it's equally likely that this middle-aged man grabbed a teenage girl, or this teenage girl tried to frame her innocent manager who never did anything, is frankly fucking ridiculous.  It just makes my teeth hurt, how one is as common as cockroaches, and the other is more of a Faberge egg, that takes a lot of time and effort to create, you don't really see that often, and is fairly easy to spot.  Ask yourself why she would suddenly run out of her work shift and call her dad to come beat her manager's ass, for what possible reason?  Him being a horny turd and lacking impulse control is a fairly obvious reason.  Women are presumed lying and hysterical, overreacting to the little nothings that men do.  "Boys will be boys."

6. The manager, being an alleged asshole, is definitely smelling what the cop is stepping in.  And he knows how to capitalize on the momentum.  "I'm a respectful person.  I'm almost 60 years old.  I'm not going to touch the girls!" he says with a light chuckle.  He apparently hasn't been in the country long enough to know all the dog-whistle catchphrases we traditionally use to discredit rape survivors in this country, especially as a man of color in Georgia.  The police move to questioning other employees.  They say there is in fact a camera in the break room.

7.  Meanwhile, at 5:46 we see that the police have left the suspect manager to his own devices for some reason.  He has gone to the tape room and immediately pulled up the section of tape that he just told the police didn't exist. He was charged with tampering with evidence.

8.  When being arrested, after watching a video that shows him allegedly putting his hands on her waist, lifting up her face, then moving his face toward hers as if to kiss her -- exactly as the employee complained of -- the manager's question is, "What I have done?"  He's utterly baffled.  They all are.  No rapist ever thinks they did anything wrong.  Since time immemorial, women have been chattel property of men.  They get to do whatever they want with our bodies.  And for some of them that notion is really stubborn.

It is kind of horrible to hear the police notifying his wife that he's being arrested.  Because you know what?  She's an Indian wife.  That was probably an arranged marriage.  She's stuck with that jerk.  This is all her problem now. She has to support their family on her income now. 

At the end of the day, I guess what bothers me the most is what a horrible mess all of this would have been without the video.  Because nobody would have believed the girl or given a fuck about her but her father. 

If she's white and it's in Georgia, depending what year it is and what color the manager is, who her father is, it could have gone a number of different ways.  All of that would be political only.  That's how sexual assault works in America.

Now we're at a point in the post #MeToo world where this is virtue signaling infotainment for gamer boys, as long as the demographics all hit the right notes and there's the right amount of audio-visual material for their streams.  But these are the same people who make Reddit such a sewer and acquit Andrew Mitchell twice when they sit on juries.  None of them will ever read this blog or any of my books lol