On July 12, RadarOnline.com released a recording, allegedly of famed filmmaker Mel Gibson and his former mistress, Oksana Grigorieva, in which Gibson is heard spewing profanity at the mother of his eighth child. The celebrity gossip website has continued to incrementally release recordings that were recorded by Grigorieva over a protracted period of time.
With the latest tape having been released on July 26, the tally of tapes is now at seven, with no one but the celebrity gossip website and those involved knowing what the total count will be.
The tapes that have been released thus far were recorded over a period of about one month in January and February of this year by Grigorieva, after the couple’s relationship hit the skids. Besides copious amounts of profanity, the tapes include Gibson allegedly employing racist slurs and threats. At one point the Braveheart star screams that he has the ability to put his Russian pianist co-parent in “a rose garden” — I guess that is supposed to mean that he can put her under the roses. The tapes are now part of an investigation into domestic abuse by Gibson, as well as an investigation into allegations of extortion that have been levied against Grigorieva. There are also rumors that the tapes were edited. Exactly who was responsible for the leakage of the tapes to RadarOnline is still a matter of speculation. Somewhere in the mix is a custody battle over their nine-month-old daughter, Lucia. In short, it’s a mess and, regardless of the legal outcome, things do not look good for Gibson.
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In early July, Gibson’s longtime agent, Ed Limato, known for being one of Gibson’s few friends in Hollywood, died. Gibson’s agency, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, announced that they would no longer represent Gibson. It is no secret that WMEE head honcho, Ari Emanuel, has had it out for The Passion Of The Christ director since Gibson’s 2006 drunken rant in which he stated that Jews are responsible for all wars.
As the Gibson-Grigorieva affair devolves into an epic tit for tat tailor-made for the tabloids, the entirety of the media, it seems, can now be classified as “the tabloids.” Everyone has something to say about the erstwhile couple’s implosion, from Fox News to The Huffington Post. Even California Governor and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger jumped into the fray, albeit jokingly, when he compared the seemingly unending flow of bad news concerning Gibson with the recent unending flow of oil into the Gulf.
There are undoubtedly many who will dismiss the Gibson fiasco as mere celebrity gossip. They are correct in assuming that this is, ultimately, a private matter between all those involved and the proper authorities. However, the fact that Mel Gibson is known in Hollywood for his conservative views cannot be ignored. As such, liberal pundits everywhere are wasting no time in seizing this opportunity to engage in ad hominem attacks against any sort of viewpoint that is anathema to the Left. Gibson, it seems, represents everything that is the Right, at least as the Left sees it.
The atheist and British, liberal banner-bearer Christopher Hitchens is a good example of just how badly the Left’s flaccid logic is exposed through their unzipped intellectual fly concerning Gibson’s latest fall. Writing for Slate.com, Hitchens uses the occasion to unleash a diatribe against the Catholic Church because he is sure that Gibson’s hate-filled rants are owing mainly to his Catholicism.
This sort of lazy cheap shot against a very complex system of thought, based on the actions of a single person that subscribes to it, is indicative of how many are abusing the situation. On The Huffington Post, Jonathan Kim manages to use Gibson as a sort of prefiguring of what he believes is likely to happen with the Tea Party. Of all things to use Gibsongate as a hatchet on, the Tea Party may not be the least likely, but considering that Gibson has no affiliations with the group nor has he ever mentioned them, the comparison comes off as desperate, made by someone glaringly eager to not allow the actor’s possible downfall to go to waste. Damian Thompson, writing for the Telegraph, while alleging that Gibson is not even Catholic, documents two more instances of pathetic cheap shots at Catholicism, the worst of which uses profanity, the second being a mean-spirited and unnuanced attack on the priesthood.
We must not forget that what Mel Gibson says in the tapes and the way he allegedly treated Grigorieva is despicable and indefensible, regardless of the reasons, but what intellectual hacks of Hitchens’ ilk will never admit is that most of us, liberal or conservative, Christian or atheist, have all indulged in prejudicial, infantile language either in the comfort of like-minded company or in extreme anger — witness the ongoing leftist "JournoList scandal," wherein a whole slew of famous liberals acts in a similar manner. It is certainly no stretch of the imagination to think that Hitchens and Kim have done the same. The only difference is that most of us have not been taped doing it.
Perhaps the most level-headed comment thus far on Gibson’s most recent fiasco came from, of all places, actor/writer/director Sylvester Stallone. When asked for his thoughts on Gibsongate in an interview with Access Hollywood, the Rocky star stated, “I just hope that the court of, let’s say, fairness just hears it out…. You don’t know anything about anybody until you take a walk in his shoes.”
Photo of Mel Gibson: AP Images
