Today’s Moron: Rosie DiManno
October 5, 2009
If you’ve lived in Canada over the past 25 or 3o years, you have read at least one piece by Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno. I’ve read a lot of them. I’ve liked one or two. I particularly liked the piece she did the time she violated Olympic security, snuck into the athlete’s village residences, and wrote about what was going on behind the scenes. I thought that was funny and demonstrated an interesting disregard for the rules. Mostly, though, I have found her work a little too tabloid-based for me. And now she’s proven it.
Rosie never plays it safe. She is paid a serious amount of money to write a handful of columns a week, and she’s given free reign to Be Rosie. She’s one of the few Canadian “personality” journalists whose byline is a brand of its own.
She picked up a lot of new readers today when The Star published her take on the suicide of accused child molester David Dewees. After acknowledging that the paper erred in reporting charges against Dewees, Rosie goes on to point out that since libel laws don’t apply to dead people, she’s free to decide that he was, in fact, guilty, and she goes on to pillory him in paragraph after paragraph of assumption, non-libelous libel and sloppy, self-rightous writing.
The outrage is ripping through the Internet. The fact is, David Dewees was accused of a crime. This does not make him guilty. We know that many men are accused of these crimes unjustly, and we know that we have a court system that analyzes the evidence before passing judgment. We also know that newspapers have to be very careful about reporting these things; this is where the word “alleged” comes into play. This is basic journalism. And while it doesn’t apply to dead people, and Rosie is right about that, there’s still a thing called decency. She ignored that today.
Maybe David Dewees did it. Maybe he didn’t. The world will never know for sure, and neither will Rosie DiManno, despite what she tells you. She has, with one piece of writing, kicked print journalism in the balls and sent its already teetering reputation down into Fox News territory. I’m a print journalist with more than 20 years in the ink, and what she wrote made me grit my teeth and shake my head. It will take a long time to recover from her stunt.
It gets worse. The news aggregator site reddit.com picked up DiManno’s column, and within a few hours almost 1,000 people had chimed in with their comments. Most of these are typical reddit slams, loaded with childish attacks, but some of them include some well-written letters to DiManno pointing out their concerns. These writers are repeating what they say are responses they got when they e-mailed Rosie to complain. Some of them posted screenshots of their correspondences. Others just quoted Rosie’s responses to them:
“Oh great, the pedophile constituency heard from.”
And another:
“Ah yes, the pro-pedophilia constituency heard from. Your email is being forward to police.”
She sticks to a theme there, and in many others: if you are upset about her assumption of a dead man’s guilt, you must be in favour of pedophilia. Cheap, nasty and amateurish, it avoids the issue people are pointing out in their complaints. It’s the kind of response I would expect from college newspaper hacks, not from a writer for the country’s largest newspaper.
by Ray Collingham
So much can be said about the circumstances surrounding Mr. David Dewees’ suicide. Was he guilty and felt depressed over his actions or was he innocent and could not face his peers, family, friends and students after the media labelled him a sex offender?
Should ones identity be made public when faced with an allegation of a sexual crime? On one hand, yes, the public should be made aware that if there is a previously convicted sexual predator out on bail or roaming the streets, as a parent I am sure you would want to be informed. On the other hand, what about those people who are not guilty and have never been previously charged. False accusations are real and are becoming more frequent as people realize that nothing happens to you after falsely accusing someone. Once accused of a sexual crime you are stigmatized, possibly for life. Contrary to Canadian law, you are immediately labelled and at least, suspected of being guilty. The realism that you might be innocent rarely crosses your mind as you read titles in the newspaper like “accused pedophile” or “Acclaimed Sex offender”. But the truth is that false allegations are very real and are extremely destructive to the person accused and to his/her family members and friends.
When I was arrested in July of 2007, my name and picture were publicized throughout the Canadian news. I was front page news in many cities. Headlines with words such as ‘pedophile’, ‘sex offender’, and ‘child predator’ have all been associated with my name and my picture. I had no history of sexual assault, I had no complaints of sexual misconduct, there was no reason to make my identity known. The police will tell you that the public needs to know if there was other ‘victims’. They needed to inform the public so other children, if any, could come forward.
Having said that, there is a time and a place for everything. The time to make some one’s identity known to the public, in some circumstances, should only be made if there is an admission of guilt or the court have found the accused guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Once this decision is made, only then should pictures and names become available. Then the time for other victims may come forward.
Publishing an accused person’s identity, when there is no history and only one complainant, is an injustice, not only to the accused but to the accused person’s family, friends and peers. My family was devastated. I was ‘fired’ publicly. The organizations I was involved in all suspended my memberships publicly. Facing everyone I knew was very difficult. I was embarrassed, humiliated and depressed. I lost my career, as did my partner. I lost my life savings, everything I owned. I lost the innocence I had with working with children. My actions were/are almost always analyzed. Did I stare to long, where was I looking, should I hug my nephew, how long should I hug him, it was terrible.
I was acquitted in July 2009. I thought after my acquittal I would feel some sort of mental relief, in some aspects I do. The uncertainty of not knowing whether or not I was going to be spending the next few years in prison was relieving, but the feelings of wondering what people still really think, the feelings of mistrusting people and their motives all remain. The after math psychologically has had a tremendous effect on not only myself, but all of the people closest to me.
For Mr. Dewees, we will never know if he is innocent or guilty. But if we believe in our system of justice he must remain innocent. It is his family that will now have to face all the feelings of humiliation and the wonderment of what happened or didn’t happen.
Did David Dewees commit suicide because his identity was made public? Could he face his students, his co-workers and friends, knowing the stigma attached to being accused of a sexual crime? We will never know but I can sure tell you I had thought about ending it all. Following through with it may be a different story, but I can sympathize with Mr. Dewees in his feelings.
Our laws need to reflect the sensitivity of sexual crimes against children and the person accused. Guilty or innocent, this crime is life altering. Society has a role in protecting the innocent against further injustices.
I read that story the other day and was stunned. I was going to write about it myself. Glad you did.
In my “Writing for Print Journalism” class, we were given a handful of facts about a robbery, and asked to write a story from them. One of the facts was that it was the clerk’s first day on the job, and that he had heard nothing as the burglars stole an undisclosed amount of merchandise through an unlocked back door.
We were given ten minutes to sort out what we had been given, determine “what is the story” and write it.
After the “pencils down” point, the professor asked if any of us had speculated on the guilt of the clerk. A few people raised their hands. We proceeded to get the most intense lecture I have ever received on topics such as journalistic pride, our place as reporters, and not assigning guilt or innocence in our writing.
I’m still only in uni for my Mass Comm degree, but this pains me to see.
The wacky thing is the editors put the article in the “News” section and not the “Opinion” section. It’s clearly an opinion piece and at first I was giving it a slide. Then I saw in what section it was placed. DiManno’s a kook but the Star editors should be getting the brunt of the flack.
Fox News wouldn’t stoop to hiring you. They only bother with real talent. Next please.