gitana1
Verified Attorney
- Joined
- May 31, 2005
- Messages
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I have only seen maybe one post that attempted to "scrub him clean and roll him in sugar". Other than that, none of us who believe he is an innocent victim (which is hardly close to "everyone", in fact, it appears we are the minority right now), are stating he is a choir boy or was perfect or didn't have faults.
But for me, it is quite clear that he was not the "player" and he was not the user in the "relationship". He didn't call her up. He didn't seek her out. He didn't lie to her to get in her pants. He didn't make false promises. Give me one shred of evidence that any of that happened. Where is the evidence? That kind of conduct would constitute the conduct of a user, in my book. But I have seen zero indication that any of that happened.
Instead, he told her he wasn't serious, he didn't hide that he was dating other people and he told her how he felt about her. In fact, while he did engage in sex with her despite his feelings about her, his statements indicate that he was the one who felt used and that he was angry about it: "I was nothing more than a dildo with a heartbeat for you."
No, instead of pursuing her, lying to her, making false promises to score, etc., he made the mistake of not saying no when she haunted him, came over unannounced or uninvited, took her clothes off and got into his bed. It makes him guilty of poor judgment and going against the tenets of his faith. But that's it, as far as I'm concerned.
And yet I keep seeing these posts practically blaming him for what happened: He was equally at fault in the "relationship". He was playing a dangerous game with a fragile minded person. He who plays with fire is going to get burned. His actions resulted in an "unpleasant crime" - not horrific, not gruesome, just "unpleasant" as if that is the expected result when two creeps get together and use one another. He was a sociopath. Etc.
This baffles me and I find it horrid. I feel that many people are unaware of what a psychopath is like and how they are able to ensnare and captivate their victims.
I am also dead certain that if the roles were reversed, no one would be accusing her of being a user or player and no one would be calling her a sociopath or equally guilty in the "relationship." I firmly believe that if the roles were reversed, almost everyone would be calling her the innocent victim of a hideously frightening psychopathic monster. The only difference in the two scenarios is gender and it is quite clear to me that societal attitudes about gender and crime are to blame: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/men-women-prison-sentence-length-gender-gap_n_1874742.html
I just don't think that's right. But, we see it all the time. A man molests his students and he goes to prison. A women does so and nothing happens to her. A man stalks a woman to death, viciously murdering her at the end of his reign of terror and he is given the death penalty. A woman does so and people bend over backwards to find some kind of justification, some kind of fault on the part of the victim. The murderess is not given the death penalty. People blame the victim and assert that the crime is not horrible enough to be worthy of capital punishment.
I just don't think that's right. (And I'm not debating capital punishment which I am actually against, really). It's just not right to give women the benefit of the doubt by virtue of the fact of their sex alone and it is not right to imbue men with depravity and evil by virtue of the fact of their sex alone. And frankly, that's what I think is going on here to a large degree, at least subconsciously. I don't like it.
Men can be victims too. They can be imperfect and still be the innocent victims of sinister and twisted women. They can be faultless except in their judgment and be the victim of a horrific, gruesome, crime. It happens.
I think it happened here, to Travis, who was not a choir boy, who was not perfect but who did not, due to his poor conduct in sleeping with a mad women who flung herself at him, even though he wanted nothing more from her, bring his own murder on himself. He did not cause what happened to him to happen. He did not deserve to die. He is a victim. Period. The victim of a predatory and frightening monster who is very, very cunning and very, very good at fooling people into thinking it's not all her fault, that she was at least somewhat compelled to do the evil things she did because her victims were evil themselves. She's a con and a snake and IMO, her trickery and deceit is still working to some degree, even right here at websleuths.
And that scares me, because if there are sleuthers who have the subconscious sense that Travis kind of asked for it, I can only imagine what a jury might do.
