{"id":8256,"date":"2018-09-26T09:49:58","date_gmt":"2018-09-26T07:49:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=8256"},"modified":"2018-09-26T09:59:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-26T07:59:14","slug":"padma-lakshmi-and-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/8256\/","title":{"rendered":"Padma Lakshmi and Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the BBC<\/a>, who report this on their front page purely because it’s anti-Trump:<\/p>\n

\n

US television host Padma Lakshmi has explained why she kept silent after allegedly being raped as a teenager.<\/p>\n

In a piece for the New York Times,\u00a0Ms Lakshmi, 48, says she was raped by a man\u00a0over 30 years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Okay.<\/p>\n

But she said she began to feel the alleged attack was her fault, and that she understands why women might not disclose sexual assaults.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s what happened according to the BBC:<\/p>\n

The Top Chef host says she dated the man while still a teen.<\/p>\n

In her account, she said they went to his apartment where she fell asleep, and woke up with him on top of her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article has been stealth-edited. The earlier version made clear she was 16 years old, her boyfriend 23, and the incident occurred on New Year’s eve after they’d been partying all night. Indeed, when you read the account<\/a> she gave to the New York Times<\/em>, this is the case. So why did the BBC change it? Perhaps because including such details will make people ask, “What the hell were you doing in his apartment?”<\/p>\n

She explains how she started to feel it was her fault: “We had no language in the 1980s for date rape. I imagined that adults would say: ‘What the hell were you doing in his apartment?'”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ahem.<\/p>\n

“I didn’t report it. Not to my mother, not to my friends and certainly not to the police.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did your mother know you were dating a 23 year old man you’d met in a shopping mall? Apparently yes:<\/p>\n

When we went out, he would park the car and come in and sit on our couch\u00a0<\/strong>and talk to my mother.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m curious as to the ethnicity of her alleged attacker. Was he an all-American white boy who liked baseball and waffles, or was he another Indian (perhaps of the right caste) who would feel quite comfortable talking to her mother? Now 23 isn’t old, but 16 fails the “half age plus 7”\u00a0 rule<\/a>. I’d guess there was a strong cultural element to all this we’re not being told.\u00a0Wikipedia<\/a> gives us a clue:<\/p>\n

Lakshmi grew up shuttling between her grandparents in Chennai and her mother in New York.<\/sup><\/sup><\/sup>\u00a0She was sexually assaulted as a small girl. She wrote in the\u00a0New York Times, “When I was 7 years old, my stepfather\u2019s relative touched me between my legs and put my hand on his erect penis. Shortly after I told my mother and stepfather, they sent me to India for a year to live with my grandparents. The lesson was: If you speak up, you will be cast out.”\u00a0<\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So she’d been raised in a household with an absent father where family members sexually abused her, and the prevailing culture forced her into silence. That she ended up in bed aged 16 with an older man is therefore unsurprising: I expect the entire relationship was a giant cry for help.<\/p>\n

The entire purpose of this article is to counter Trump’s questioning why Christine Blasey Ford didn’t report her alleged assault to the police at the time. From where I’m standing, it answers the question rather well: many of these rapes we’re hearing about from decades before may not have been rapes, and the women involved seriously messed up in the head. It’s indicative of the progressive mindset that the bad people in this article are the white patriarchs Trump and Kavanaugh, while Lakshmi’s Indian family who sexually abused her and then forced her into silence get a free pass.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the BBC, who report this on their front page purely because it’s anti-Trump: US television host Padma Lakshmi has explained why she kept silent after allegedly being raped as a teenager. In a piece for the New York Times,\u00a0Ms … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[87,27,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8256"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8256"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8261,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8256\/revisions\/8261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}