First Published November 1, 2014
**Revised March 16, 2018
Our immediate voice is what matters. And this was a public matter: of safety, security, and justice.
We are seeing a movement amongst women and men, and just as we have seen social media used to rally political movements, we are witnessing an empowering rise of once marginalized voices, shamed voices, and needed discussions.
I, like so many other Canadians, was captured and immobilized by the events of the week surrounding Jian Ghomeshi. I too experienced various stages of emotional response as details unfolded: confusion and pity to his initial Facebook post, as its craft was likely intended to illicit; suspicion and doubt with some further thought, for CBC would surely need to have damn good cause to drop someone who came to represent a highly successful brand with such an iconic, progressive, voice, and who moved with the pulse of the cultural and arts scene of Canada as he did.
Through Twitter, I was lead to Carla Ciconne’s article on XOJane about a C-list celeb she called “Keith”, where her intuitive creep radar rang completely authentic and swayed my suspicions of foul play even more.
Anger and disgust followed with the Toronto Star’s report of the allegation of the three women they had interviewed, which, for me prompted an evening of (admittedly excessive) online scouring to consolidate what I felt in my heart was scratching the surface of something so pernicious, so vile.
With powerful momentum, the story’s fissures were rapidly being filled, as an eery Twitter account from April uncovered disturbing acts of violence from an angry and hurt anonymous female voice, while other women put their live voices or names to the growing list of female victims caught momentarily in Ghomeshi’s aggressive cyclone.
Many of the voices we heard from have personal links to Ghomeshi, beyond the collective cerebral connection created from his radio presence. Some of these voices exposed an inner circle of awareness, one that in retrospect, likely has some of its members re-evaluating why such pervasive undertones were given shelter, protected in the form of covert whispers in a dark, subset of a creative, intellectual community. But now these voices, like so many others, have been given a platform.
I too have a connection to Jian, albeit a distant association that dates back to high school. I attended Thornlea Secondary School in some of the same years Jian did, as well as York University, in the era of Moxy Fruvous. Along with a couple other alumni celebrities who emerged from “Club Thornlea” (a nickname it was given for its highly liberal teachers, the autonomy it afforded its students, and the open drug smoking that took place on or near its property in lieu of attending class), Jian was proudly homegrown. (Back then, he called himself Jean). A couple years older than me, he was popular, charismatic, and highly involved. He piloted and directed the coveted Fashion Show, that brought together on one runway the various and opposing styles and cliques that inhabited the school in the mid-eighties. From a younger, awe-inspired perspective of a high school girl, he was quite simply the epitome of cool.
He would manage to stay entrenched in this image of coolness as he built his public persona over the past three decades, a persona so incongruous with the real Jian that many ardent fans and followers were resistant to accepting the unmasked truth.
Ironically, only days before his firing from CBC, I played his band’s old song, “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors” to my grade 12 English class, to kick start our Canadian literature book club unit (in it, references to Canadian authors abound). Asked by one of my students how I know all this “strange, old music”, I shared a brief anecdote of my slim connection to the now highly successful Jian, and laughed when not one of them had heard of him or his radio show. I suspect that has since changed.
The more glorious irony is that Ghomeshi’s own under-estimation of the power of the online world, which he attempted to manipulate to his own advantage, led to his exposure and ultimately the demise of a pristine image. It paved a path that became repeatedly traversed, its worn groove giving it safety and comfort for its passengers. Once started, it quickly and effectively put an end to a dangerous man’s acts of violence and betrayal against women.
The empowerment gained through access to an online voice is not only something that women of sexual violation need celebrate alone, but male victims as well. The misuse and abuse of power was central to the case of Sheldon Kennedy, who exposed his ex-coach Graham James, where sexual abuse had been ongoing a decade prior to its revelation in 1996. Named “Man of the Year” in 1989 for his prominent role as a hockey coach (an award he returned in 2012), Kennedy described James as “god-like”, having complete control over his career. The power dynamic for some of the women who have come forward in the Ghomeshi case (and subsequently in the #MeToo Movement**) seems to have been similar.
What’s more, this case proves that our court system and our major news outlets, do not and should not maintain exclusive rights to exposing truth, a weighty burden that has left both institutions riddled with faults and weaknesses.
The ‘Opinion Pages’, at one time reserved for members of an elite community, and vetted by inherent bias and prejudice, are now far more than a double-paged spread, and seem, in fact, to have no boundaries at all.
To some, this is scary.
Boundless voices suggest chaos. The notion of presumption of innocence is no longer afforded protection from public discourse. Christie Blatchford has ominously labelled the phenomenon as “mob-like”, suggesting a condescending discomfort with the real democratization of a pluralistic society, and an equally exaggerated faith in the criminal justice system.
Will all voices be reasonable, shed light or add validity to a topic or issue? Absolutely not. We need to be savvy and acutely critical of our brave, new media world. We need to navigate cautiously, knowing that change attracts fear, resistance, and anger. Our voices can work in conjunction with the judicial system, which itself needs to adjust to our new reality, not the other way around. To be truly egalitarian, that system needs to look beyond its veiled pedestal, tune in, modify its protocols, and ultimately better serve the greater good.
** Parenthesis added 2018
Randi Solomon 