The Runaways - classic or dud?

Joan Jett has released a formal statement.

Anyone who truly knows me understands that if I was aware of a friend or bandmate being violated, I would not stand by while it happened. For a group of young teenagers thrust into 70s rock stardom there were relationships that were bizarre, but I was not aware of this incident. Obviously Jackie’s story is extremely upsetting and although we haven’t spoken in decades, I wish her peace and healing.

http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/840-journalist-jason-cherkis-discusses-his-investigation-into-kim-fowley-rape-allegations/

Wow, I was just coming here to post that!

also https://populismblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/statement-on-the-lost-girls

From McDonnell's piece:

Although I did not know him at all, I attempted to help him as a colleague. In return, he exploited my research in his article and has repeatedly attacked me online.

What has he been saying about McDonnell?

Regardless, this is totally depressing and sad.

Him = Jason Cherkis, the author of the HP piece.

From his PF interview, it sounds like he had to lie/obfuscate often to avoid revealing the true subject of the article - tricky, but a little understandable since doing it clean, the victim would've been outed before the article came out

a problem for me is cognitively is that this man has always been awful, has never made much effort to disguise it ... and just existed in the world raping girls on tables or wherever because... he had power?
And the Cosby thing keeps biting my heels as i think this all through. Because he was outwardly pleasant and beloved yet behaved equally horribly but under a veil of secrecy and pay offs. because he had some sort of power.
The victims outnumber these fucking asshole garbagepeople. how can their collective voices and confessions and testimony *not* be more powerful than the perceived power of their abusers. They should be pariahs for their weakness long before this level if damage is done

i dunno that line of thinking is such a rabbithole of whyyyyyyyyyy it makes me so sad and crazy

and then theres this:

the runaways had power. have power. all collectively they are like a face melting blitzkrieg of attitude and power and brilliance. but as i think it all through in the middle of the night i'm tempted to tease out what the nature of that power and where it came from and i dont WANT to. i dont want to attribute THEIR power to him. to believe that they are the "result" of his violent evil alchemy. i dont think i believe that and i cant but i know that that is what this story will now start leading people to believe even more than they did before

braindumping. i dunno. its late i should maybe just go to sleep

hugs

Etymology of the word punk is not a coincidence.

i just burst into tears

this is really fucking with me on a deep level.

sorry for livejournaling all over this thing :/

a problem for me is cognitively is that this man has always been awful, has never made much effort to disguise it ...

You'll have heard of Jimmy Savile?

Really disturbing story. Whoever mentioned how the new "openness " of the sexual revolution was clearly exploited by the worst kind of men is otm.

The rush to condemn Joan Jett (not in this thread) is weird to me. She was a child back in those days.

<3 Vegemite
Great posts

Yes VG valuable contributions all around and thank you.

Kim Fowley exploited The Runaways power. He did not give them his.

can we have more women posting itt pls

― A Smedley Adoption (get bent), Friday, July 10, 2015 4:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you don't even have to be an ally or a "good" feminist, just post

― A Smedley Adoption (get bent), Friday, July 10, 2015 4:10 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

with all due respect women are not obligated to post in this thread just because some dude wants them to

get bent is not a dude

The rush to condemn Joan Jett (not in this thread) is weird to me. She was a child back in those days.

― Treeship, Saturday, July 11, 2015 1:44 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

plus she says she wasn't there and didn't know about it. which contradicts jackie fox's story. so there are more than one story.

I have no idea who anyone is unless they use their real names; kim fowley was a creep and the story is horrifying and that's really all I have to say about this

Yeah, I'm not a dude. I was responding specifically to the lack of non-dude voices in this thread, and per my follow-up post I wasn't even asking for people to say the "right" things or speak up on anyone's behalf, I was just requesting the presence of other voices, for women to say "Hi, I'm here."

I mean, it would be helpful for dudes to recognize that they are vastly outnumbering women on a thread about women's experience, and that the toxic, draining environment of "women's experience" itself makes women want to retreat from engaging at all. But presence helps. Warm bodies help. I really do envy white cishet men* for their total confidence in every situation and their feeling that their perspective Must Be Heard.

*a general thought, not an assumption about people posting here, although statistically I think this is true

it'd be great if more women, or just general non-white straight dudes, posted here. i dunno what can be done about that, other than people encouraging friends to come check out the board? but i dunno, if the participation in a thread has the same demographic slant as the board in general, how do you control that, should you, etc. if guys want to post in a thread about rape and are not expressing offensive views or shouting down others, is that worse than if they don't care enough to post at all?

Awful lot assuming going on about people being men/ white/ straight.

DID YOU EVEN READ MY ASTERISK

You know what, I'm out. This is too much work.

(xp) It was in reply to some dude's post, not yours.

yeah i never assume anyone is anything because what's the point

Pfork article has been taken down?

some dude AND get bent posting in the same thread?

The link works - it's a quirk of the ILX board software to take out the last / at the end of the link. Just copy and paste the whole line

yeah, apologies, I was a bit hasty there, sorry for assuming you're a dude -- I'm just so used to dudes talking to other dudes about how more non-dudes should talk to them and then badgering said non-dudes into talking to them

Cherie posted on FB saying she'll take a polygraph to prove she didnt stand idly by

It is heartbreaking and infuriating that the takeaway of Jackie's story is WHY DIDNT CHERIE & JOAN DO SOMEHING. How much more wrongheaded can this possibly get?

I am dumbfounded by how little empathy these ppl (whoever they are) have.

Sigh. Punch a wall. Yell. Repeat.

Wtf

The blog post by the queens of noise author was interesting and helpful. Has anyone read her book?

It is heartbreaking and infuriating that the takeaway of Jackie's story is WHY DIDNT CHERIE & JOAN DO SOMEHING. How much more wrongheaded can this possibly get?

^^^ 100 percent this.

xpost I havent but Im going to now thanks to her post

it's not so much "why didn't they do something" but more confusion at how Joan Jett has been defending and sticking up for this guy this entire time. also, he's dead now, so he can't he crucified...

no, that is what's being said. even the lost girls article throws shade at them for standing by

Yeah "why did all these bystanders standby" question is pretty central to the article.

how about we have a brief intermission

http://youtu.be/TixNXWFREvk

I love these photos

http://www.legendaryrockinterviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Runaways-Beach.jpg

http://cache4.asset-cache.net/gc/97589832-rock-band-the-runaways-pose-for-a-portrait-on-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=9QMziWNtBI6whP66vhs4oU16y81CFA%2BdPkqwESTK8MiE3LlZItV3P2yEC7EtSwEvn8Rj%2BATNANuUuJbxyYA62g%3D%3D

But mostly this

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/474x/22/5e/af/225eaff977bb045b633b8bb5eaf390f1.jpg

I kinda wonder how kim would have reacted to this had he still been alive. I sort've doubt he would've denied it.

xps from the comments on the article and those i've seen elsewhere, most people seemed to excuse Joan and Cherie for them being teenagers, afraid, not knowing what to do, possible victims of abuse themselves, and so on. by the same token, they were critical of Jett's actions as an adult

that part about Currie writing the story for her memoir - but changing the details so that Jackie was a bystander and not the rape victim, leading to Jackie having to deny the story happened at all in 2000 - is one of the weirdest, saddest details to me. and now Currie is now denying it happened too? even with the the other witnesses in the story? i don't get it.

It is heartbreaking and infuriating that the takeaway of Jackie's story is WHY DIDNT CHERIE & JOAN DO SOMEHING.

this. your posts have been great on this threas vg and much appreciated

ty

I can't really account for why this fired me up over all the other horrors in the world. I guess mainly because so much of my ideas about my self and who i want/wanted to be are tied up in this band.

Reading Jackie's story... I just have zero critical distance. Reading that article for the first time was like reading a confessional from a friend, it was a weird feeling.

I guess this one is just really personal somehow. They aren't just a band to me. This is way more. Coming here to talk right now is not just to pull apart facts and who did what when, but to console myself & try to seek a bit of empathy and likemindedness & comfort. Or something.

:)

I kinda wonder how kim would have reacted to this had he still been alive. I sort've doubt he would've denied it.

― Οὖτις, Sunday, 12 July 2015 02:08 (14 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really?

What, if Jackie had gone to him and looked him in the eye and said.. whatever..

You sure Kim wouldn't have said "It never happened" ?

I know, deathbed confessionals, it just doesn't sound like him.

Yeah if nothing else he seems like the kind of shit that would get a kick out of gaslighting his victims

A few things occur to me about this (full disclosure: I'm a straight white guy):

Unless I'm remembering wrong, the article not only says Jett was watching idly by but also pressured others (Jackie? I'm not sure) to not pursue anything against Kim. To me, that's in some ways the more damaging accusation – probably similarly explained by her being young, confused and scared but also indicative of her being maybe a bit more concerned that Jackie could drive her gravy train off the rails than about Jackie's safety, health or well being. 

To try to understand how Kim was viewed, I read a bunch of the obits from January before all this came down. At the time of death his reputation was basically for being an abusive semi-genius eccentric. One piece suggested that perhaps in another era Kim would have been diagnosed with Aspergers. Another, an interview with Cherie about her reconciliation w Kim promoting the release of her first album in 30 years, quotes her saying that as time had gone by she came to excuse a lot of Kim's behavior on the grounds that he had endured a lot of abuse as a kid and that, upon reflection, "he was actually trying to protect us."

Most of which sounds ludicrous and apologist at best in the wake of the Jackie rape story. But it also helps flesh out, in addition to VG's excellent posts and commentary about the dark side of the sexual revolution, how these kinds of horrible acts of violence could not only happen but happen more or less unquestioned when virtually everyone present knew it was deeply wrong. 

It's a tragic story. A complicated one in some ways, tho in other ways not at all. I'm struck by how on one hand this is a story about dependency, innocence, abuse and celebrity entitlement in the 70s ... and how on the other it's really yet another story of violence against women that at times feel depressingly like they'll always be with us. At the same time, I can only hope that today people would not only know a situation like this was wrong but have the strength and support to stop it from happening. Or better yet, resist enabling dangerous guys like this from the get go. 

He always struck me as a Phil Spector sort. That is, a so called eccentric dogged by such infamy that he seemed capable of even the things people didn't explicitly know about.