Everything New Is Old Again
by Cindy Layton
Sports Illustrated ran a story about an incident involving Houston Astros Assistant General Manager Brandon Taubman. After the team won the American League Pennant, witnesses observed him walk into the locker room and address three female reporters, shouting “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so (expletive) glad we got Osuna!”
“Osuna” is Roberto Osuna, a pitcher signed by the Astros after he served a 75-game suspension from Major League Baseball for “violating the league’s domestic violence policy.” (Doesn’t that sound better than saying he was arrested for assaulting the mother of his child?)
Taubman shouted this repeatedly, despite his knowledge that one of the reporters wore a wrist band promoting domestic violence awareness. When Stephanie Apstein, writer for Sports Illustrated and a witness to his tirade, wrote about the incident, the Astros responded by criticizing her reporting as an “attempt to fabricate a story where one does not exist.”
In my blog post “Up Against the Wall: Journalist Edition” I write about the prevalence of women threatened in their role as journalists. This story, however, is the bases-loaded of domestic violence (Osuna), harassment (Taubman) and sexism (Astros).
The Astros bet that backlash from signing Osuna would be offset by a PR campaign that included donations to women’s domestic violence programs. Apstein’s article not only called out Taubman’s threatening behavior toward the journalists, it drew renewed attention to the team’s decision to prioritize acquiring pitching at a bargain price over issues of women’s safety. It blew a hole in the Astro’s plan for everyone to forget they employed an abuser.
And then, as if the Astros just couldn’t get off the ride, management issued a statement that disputed Apstein’s reporting and her integrity, claiming the article was “misleading and irresponsible.” As Forest Gump says, “Stupid is as stupid does.”
After wallowing in this trifecta of hypocrisy the Astros agreed to cooperate in MLB’s investigation of the incident, finding Taubman lied to management, firing him, and issuing apologies to Apstein, SI, the other reporters, and all individuals who were offended by Taubman. We’re good now, right?
Except –there’s still Osuna.
This story seized hold of my attention because, in my current project I’m writing about a society that exists in the near-future. Would it be optimistic to believe things will have changed one hundred years from now? The way the Astros handled the situation, from the time they signed Osuna to the PR-inspired apology (the oft-used anyone who may have been offended) reeked of how deeply entrenched domestic violence, and our acceptance of it, really is. It makes it easier to believe that certain things are so timeless they never go out of style. Like violence against women and girls.
So, as I write fiction about women and their experiences I feel a sense of responsibility to get this right. We exist on a continuum that ranges from never experiencing, at one end, to unceasing abuse at the other. The question is where does the line skew, now and one hundred years from now?
Statistics show nearly twenty-five percent of women will experience some form of assault. While that’s shocking, it doesn’t measure the number of women who alter their day to avoid harassment, who make choices with fingers crossed, hoping they won’t have to make a run for it, who navigate a shifting domain between frigidity and promiscuity. Ask your mother, ask your sister, how the expectation of abuse wears on their psyche, how it embeds fear of even the potential for victimization. How the fact of Roberto Osuna shadows their world every day.
When events from real life so dramatically and comprehensively illustrate the point it’s hard not to find it predictive of the future, where the past resides as prologue.
Read Stephanie Apstein’s article in Sports Illustrated
Fascinating article from Jo Baker in Crime Reads about the issue of Writing Violence Against Women in the Age of #MeToo.
