Childhood abuse has become the all-purpose excuse for various brands of criminal behavior, from murder to loitering. Usually, although not always, the culprit is some long dead step-father or uncle. It's best, from the defendant's point of view, to be able to blame someone who's no longer around to contest your version of events.
One of the odd things about the typical abuse excuse is that it seems to make no difference how many decades it's been since the "abuse," or the lack of any particular causal connection to the crime. It's never all that clear how your uncle's alcoholic fits created your "compulsion" to embezzle a few thousand from your employer to put a deck on the house.
I suppose it was just a matter of time before the abuse excuse seeped beyond criminal defense work, but I have to confess I was caught off guard by this latest item from pop culture. It seems that childhood abuse caused some TV personality to discover -- in rehab, naturally -- that his father's mistreatment of him 35 years before made him cheat on his movie star wife.
MSNBC reports:
Jesse James says childhood abuse led him to cheat on Oscar-winning wife Sandra Bullock with numerous women.
"I grew up with a huge amount of shame and fear and abandonment on my shoulders from a very young age and I think, you know, the way my mind rationalized [cheating], 'Well, you know, I might as well do whatever I can to, like, run her off cause she is going to find out what I am anyway and leave me anyway,'" the biker, 41, said in a "Nightline" interview that aired Tuesday...
Raised by his single father, James said his dad "beat my ass pretty good a bunch of times ... I just remember, like, clinched teeth, strained-neck look on his face. My whole childhood, I never had a chance to be a kid ... I was always scared."
So because he had a bully of a father when he was six, he had to cat around on his movie star wife 35 years later. Right.
Well, it's been going around in the defense bar forever. Why shouldn't it make "Nightline?"
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