Charlie Sheen makes me want to vomit. Really. The man has displayed, from what I've seen, little to no acting ability in the many years of his storied career, yet has managed to land the highest-paying TV contract in America, evade arrest god only knows how many times, be outed for drug use and apparently repeated abuse against women, and he continues to float on the top of the scum pond that is America's celebrity heap.
Capri Anderson went on Good Morning America yesterday to talk about her ordeal last month, during which she alleges that Sheen, drunk and coked-up, tried to choke her, verbally abused her, and threw hard objects are until she sought refuge in the Plaza Hotel suite bathroom and waited for the police to arrive. She was to be paid $3,500 for attending a dinner with Sheen, she says, but even after the night turned ugly and she was led away, dazed and terrified by one of the richest and most powerful men in Hollywood, she never received payment or so much as an apology. (She denies, btw, the allegations of Sheen's lawyer that she was to be paid $12,000 for sex that night; I'd say that Mr. Sheen's lawyer is unfamiliar with the prices that adult entertainers who also escort require for sexual favors. Granted, I don't know what those numbers look like, but $12,000 seems a bit steep, no? Maybe I'm wrong? Anyone?)
Adding to the trauma of that night and her harrowing experience at the hands of a man who seems at this point to literally be so famous he can do no wrong in the eyes of the public, Anderson has endured a month of public taunting from a media that can't seem to imagine that she's not a plain and simple prostitute, much less the fact that her career in the adult entertainment industry doesn't automatically disqualify every statement that comes out of her mouth. After all, she does have sex for money, and ON CAMERA most of the time! She couldn't possibly be telling the truth about her frightening experiences, even though the room had been trashed by a similarly trashed Sheen by the time the police arrived to find the woman hiding in the bathroom. A woman who has sex on camera, the logic seems to go, couldn't possibly be upset by being choked and threatened by a drug-fueled madman. She must see it all the time in, ha ha, wink wink nudge nudge, her line of work.
Sheen's manager summed up the reasons we shouldn't believe Anderson succinctly: "This is a woman who, for the right amount of money, sleeps with strangers." Well, obviously she couldn't manage to tell the truth about that night then, could she? After all, people who have willing sex with strangers (which I'm sure Mr. Sheen, in all his glory, has never done, much less after having paid a stranger to engage in the act with him) don't know how to tell the truth.
It is simply mind-boggling to me that after having endured this kind of incredulity from the media and the public in general, that when Capri Anderson decided to publicly stand up for herself in the face of one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, who undeniably had terrified her enough to make her flee to the bathroom and allegedly physically assaulted her, as well, she had to deal with this.
The commentator, despite the fact that Ms. Anderson is visibly choked up by retelling her terrifying tale, hounds her about whether she was to be paid for sex and says that, if that were true, it would "say something about" her. He demands to know why she told the police she was fine instead of telling them she'd been choked and threatened--but her reasonable defense that she was shaken up and embarrassed that she was in her underwear obviously can't hold true for someone who has sex for money. But, the commentator berates, she hasn't pressed criminal charges! She must be lying!
Never mind that she went through a terrifying experience of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of a man she hardly knew, but knew enough to fear. Never mind that she wasn't expecting this to happen when she went to the hotel because nobody should expect that kind of insanity to happen. Never mind that she was understandably shaken and intimidated when the police arrived, and very likely confused for weeks afterward about what to do. No doubt she's been told by many people to leave it alone: after all, he's the big, bad Charlie motherfuckin' Sheen, and she's just little old porn star Capri Anderson. What kind of chance does she have to take him down?
...the sad truth is that she probably has very little chance of winning a criminal case against him. She probably can't afford lawyers nearly as smooth, and she obviously has no support from the public, much less the media, which is far more concerned with printing the words "ESCORT" and "PORN STAR" in large print headlines than in reporting what the out-of-his-gourd actor did to that escort/porn star. I say good for her! She may not have much of a chance, but Capri Anderson deserves any paltry pennies she gets for granting interviews to media outlets about her experience and any damages she's awarded. She deserves, at the very least, from our seemingly very small bag of human kindness, to be heard. Kudos to her for being willing to stand up and say that what happened was wrong, regardless of her career choice. Bully to Ms. Anderson for raising her voice against the incredibly still-deafening cacophony of voices saying that sex workers don't have rights. Whether she was acting in a sex worker capacity that night or not is almost irrelevant to me: she was there because she chose to be, and what happened to her could not possibly be justified, even if she were there to have sex with him, even for far less than the rumored $12,000. Nobody deserves to be treated like that, by the lowest scum or the highest scumbag in Hollywood. You've got balls of thunder, Ms. Anderson. My hat's off to you, and I hope you get his sorry ass thrown in the kind of prison where he can learn how, "For the right amount of money," having sex with someone can be well worth it.
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