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October 5, 2007
Here's a Controversial Thought
Like a lot of my fellow Americans, I have been following the case of Louise Ogborn with the sickest kind of fascination. Hers was a story repeated dozens of times across a decade as a caller posing as a police officer convinced her manager at the McDonalds at which she worked to subject her to a strip search and increasingly vicious attacks and insults that eventually crossed into, well, frankly, blatant sexual assault (the manager's fiance is serving five years for, at the caller's direction, ordering Louise to give him a blow job). She complied with all of it.
Today, she received a multi-million dollar jury award against McDonalds. To my utter astonishment, the jury awarded her manager a million as well. Beyond incredibly, the man almost certainly behind this hoax was acquitted! So apparently only McDonalds and the fiance were responsible. My inability to wrap myself around this notion and growing disgust with blog posts like this compel me to write. We must re-establish contact with the mother ship. The survival of responsible civilization depends on it. A few thoughts:
1. McDonalds played their defense cards very poorly. In my mind the plaintiffs simply did not persuasively prove their point (that McDonalds has substantive responsibility outside of the plaintiffs own appalling lack of judgment). McDonalds did in fact warn managers about the scam in a phone message (the denials of her manager and others at their branch of McDonalds notwithstanding, it is clear that they were sent the voice mail; if they chose to ignore it that is on them and not McDonalds). The manager in behaving the way she did clearly violated established McDonalds policy; had she not done that the worst phase of the attack would not have occurred. Etc. etc.McDonalds would have done well simply to make this point. Instead, their lawyers left their trenches to launch an affirmative counter attack on the plaintiffs, which I think was a mistake because it elicited jury sympathy for these two women without substantively strengthening McDonalds already strong logical position.
2. I have heard that the guy behind this scam is retarded, and so couldn't have done it. Bullshit: this is his greatest con yet. He is clearly guilty: he purchased the phone cards used in the scam and has offered zero evidence himself that he was acting as someone else's agent in doing so. And everything outside of his "aaahm uh dumb crackah from Panamaaah cituh" routine fits a chilling profile. He is clearly a power junkie. Behind all of this, I suspect, is a highly intelligent anti-social personality type with all sorts of sexual psychoses involving women. I bet he has studied things like the Milgram experiments and is a brilliant casual student of human behavior and vulnerability. It was a real defeat for our legal system that he was able successfully to subject it to his last and best con.
3. There is no way that the fiance can be criminally responsible and the two plaintiffs were simply victims with no meaningful responsibility themselves. The manager is clearly deceitful in recounting the events (on tonight's "20/20" she is very obviously caught in several lies regarding her own behavior in this) and there's a reason for that:she showed no less moral complicity than her fiance did. She made a series of decisions which allowed this to happen and failed to show the minimum judgment we should demand from an adult with, for instance, the right to vote. She was as active a participant in events as her fiance and showed minimum moral aptitude. The fact that he actually received the blow job should be immaterial: if his culpability is clear then, at the least, the manager is also a criminal conspirator in the act.
(That was a lot of "minimums" for one paragraph, but it has been that kind of case. This one was truly dialed in from the outskirts of reality.)
4. Does anyone think it is at all strange that a jury has financially rewarded two women (particularly the manager but also, to a lesser extent, Luoise) for, essentially, demonstrating that they had the ideal psychological profile for your run-of-the-mill SS Stormtrooper? Many explanations have been suggested for the compliant behavior of Louise and the manager (innocence, cultural norms respecting authority, low intelligence, etc.) and,as a practical trial matter, McDonalds may have erred by attacking Louise. But am I the only one who feels that one element of her susceptibility to this hoax was a certain kind of moral cowardice on the part of Louise herself? If Louise would allow this to be done to herself, imagine what this guy would have gotten her to do to others. I bet he could have convinced her to set a puppy on fire. I would even bet that a real policeman, present in the flesh, could, with a sufficiently charismatic performance, get Louise to slit a baby's throat. And at some point that says a lot more about her than McDonalds.
I suspect that, at the level of actually carrying out the dastardly deeds, it was people like Louise who made Hitler possible: they had no moral courage or compass, and were simply following orders. Germany at the time (and the US today) simply did not have enough genuine sociopaths to meet all of the Nazi manpower needs. They closed the gap with millions of weak sheep like Louise and her manager.
McDonalds simply does not have the greatest, or even a significant, responsibility for this. Not in a society that plans to endure. Interestingly, my confidence in that prospect is not completely shattered by this: the poorly educated, probably below average intelligence, maintenance man at Louise's McDonalds brought this scam to a halt. He saw the moral outrageousness of the callers orders, regardless of the smoothness and authenticity of delivery. I suspect his decision to terminate the ordeal did not hinge on whether he believed the caller was actually a policeman. Probably he was as unsure as the rest of them (the scammer behind this was very good at what he did). Above all he stopped it because he knew it was wrong, regardless of whether it had official sanction. You see, he possesses a quality that has little to do with intelligence and that they just can't teach you in school.
These women may have fallen for the core deception behind scam (ie believed the caller was actually a police officer) because they are, frankly, dumb. But that's not why they took the next step.
Posted by dag at October 5, 2007 10:32 PM
Comments
I wrote a very long comment just now, and then deleted all of it. The reason I deleted it was that I am a Christian, who remembered that we are to "put the best construction on everything". This means that we are not to slander a person, but instead, we are to think the best of that person. I have my opinions as to just who was and was not a part of the scam, and my husband seemed to think the participants were farther reaching that meets the eye. All I want to say on the subject is that there is a saying, "The truth will out". Simply stated, if anyone is guilty, eventually the facts will present themselves. No matter how a person tries to cover a lie, someone eventually spills the beans. I also believe God puts it on the hearts of certain people to feel that the facts just don't seem to add up, and they will not rest until the truth "outs" and justice is served.
Posted by: Debbie at October 6, 2007 3:09 PM
My wife asked me about this case when I got out of the shower this morning. Having not seen the 20/20 profile, I had no idea what she was talking about. Now that I've had the opportunity to do a little research on this, I am floored (on many levels).
First, I'm floored that the perpetrator would go to such levels to inflict this kind of abuse on people. I'm also floored that the manager of this McDonald's would fall for it, even involving the fiancee. I'm floored that the fiancee took the blow job without even thinking about the ramifications on his own relationship.
Forget about the victim for a minute, if someone just "ordered" you on the phone to have an employee give you a blow job, wouldn't you balk at it? How would I go about forcing myself on another woman? How would I go about harassing an employee? How would I got about skirting my fiancee? All this assumes I believe the caller to be absolutely genuine.
I've served in the Israeli military, where let's just say some of the officer corps don't look upon Arabs the same way they look upon Israelis. If I had received an order to do something like this to an Arab woman, I would have told the commanding officer exactly what I thought of him (this allegory is not too far fetched, either. It happens many times a day in Israel).
Finally, I'm floored that the jury, twelve supposedly independent people, voted to hold the manager's fiancee blameless in all this, while simultaneously acquitting the person behind all of this. It just proves that these people are not my "peers" and if I'm ever on trial, I would want to ensure that the people judging me are not just toothless people incapable of forming their own thoughts and opinions.
We are truly in the shadow of our twelfth eagle...
Posted by: The Good Rabbi at October 6, 2007 5:19 PM
Thanks for the link to my 'disgusting' post. I had a few thoughts about some assumptions you've made. This was not a criminal trial but a civil trial. The reason the phone caller was found not guilty at his trial last year was because the defense convinced the jury that Louise was a willing partner in the hoax call. At that trial McDonald's lied and claimed that this was the only hoax strip search they had ever heard of and refused to cooperate with law enforcement. They covered up 10 years of strip searches and assaults and lawsuits against them.
The other issue that people are confused about is the length of time this took. From the initial search of Louise's purse to the time she was allowed to get back dressed was nearly four hours. The only thing Louise agreed to was a search of her purse. She never consented to anything else willingly and by the time Walter was brought in by Donna, Louise was in survival mode.
I do agree with you that Donna should not receive any money. However, in return to a no contest plea at her criminal trial, Donna agreed to testify on Louise's behalf against McDonald's.
What is boils down to is the fact that you blame Louise's 'moral cowardice' for her resultant beating and rape. I guess in your mind any victim who doesn't fight deserves what they get. To me, the moral cowards are those that bow to corporate power and money and refuse to support individual rights. McDonald's did all that they could for three and half years to destroy Louise and she refused to cave in to their attacks on her friends and family. If you take the time to read for yourself with an open mind, you may cast a different spin on this case.
Sincerely,
The disgusting blogger
Posted by: Brian at October 7, 2007 5:14 PM
Brian,
You are correct about the criminal trial strategy but, in fact, an element (I suspect a crucial one) of the accused scammer's defensive tactics was to try, at every stage, to be portrayed as dumb and hence incapable of perpetrating the scam. It is my understanding that his lawyer took every opportunity he could to paint his client that way.
Second, viz "I guess in your mind any victim who doesn't fight deserves what they get": the only problem with that is that she did not need to fight. She needed only to not comply.* Victims are people forced into something, not people who simply lacked the will not to consent. In fact, the most amazing the thing about this case is that the caller did not exactly hold anything truly substantive by way of threat over her head. His entire shtick is on conditioning people like Louise and her manager by building up to the moral outrages slowly, in a series of somewhat reasonable steps. Louise complied with all of it (and your emphasis on four hours strengthens my points, not yours).
(I bet that's pretty much what Hitler did. Few people go from cold turkey to killing Jews. They have to be eased into it. But I think it only works on a minority of our population: at some point most people balk at taking the next step. Similarly, at some point most rapists have to use force or serious threat.)
Furthermore, I am not saying she deserved what she got from the caller (who deserves serious punishment for an exceptionally vicious, gratuitous fraud: I am far more outraged that he got what he got from our legal system than that Louise and her manager got what they got), only that does not deserve $5m from McDonald's either.
Viz "To me, the moral cowards are those that bow to corporate power and money and refuse to support individual rights. McDonald's did all that they could for three and half years to destroy Louise and she refused to cave in to their attacks on her friends and family.": she was suing them for hundreds of millions of dollars! When you play on that level, people defend themselves and hard. That isn't about McDonalds being some dark and evil corporation: they have the right to defend themselves. McDonald's has no culpability here (neither you nor anyone else I have heard from have offered a single persuasive argument otherwise and have generally offered nothing but tired appeals to a kind of meaningless French Revolutionary justice). McDonald's *did* warn its managers about this scam (as with their documented breach of other McDonald's policies caught on tape, the managers at Louise's McDonald's testimony to the contrary is simply more evidence of what poor workers they really were). For that reason, liability on the restaurant side should stop with Louise's manager. None of McDonald's actions since Louise's ordeal are germane to their culpability at the time of her ordeal.
I find your willingness to support a complete abrogation of individual responsibility (people seem to forget that individual rights are only half of the social contract that makes a society like ours viable) in the case as chilling as I think you probably regard my defense of the "evil powers that be". The difference is that only one of us has offered logical, rather than purely emotional, arguments for their position. Ultimate responsibility for this lies the least at McDonald's feet.
Prove otherwise.
I don't need to know the facts of this case better, and you have not told me anything I was not already aware of. The differences in our position are ultimately about values (I would argue that mine built America and yours are tearing it down, but I have an odd suspicion you take a different view).
The Good Rabbi is right: we are in the shadow of our twelfth eagle.
-DAG
*And Louise herself said as much on "20/20". She offered all kinds of descriptions of her mental state ("didn't know if I'd survive", "was so scared I couldn't do anything", "couldn't run or do anything without me cellphone") but the the trouble is that, no matter sympathetic one tries to be with these arguments (and the reporter was clearly struggling to do so), each of them involves a stunning loss of proportionality on Louise's part. When the reporter probed her further on each such excuse, she in fact kept returning to the same point: she obeys authority. You may think that I'm splitting hairs here, but I would say, first, that I have measured twice and cut once and, second, that, thanks to a jury in Kentucky, its $5m worth of hairs that I'm splitting, which kind of makes the task worth it.
Posted by: dag at October 7, 2007 11:19 PM
By the way, anticipating an objection (that I am also being callous to those in abusive long-term relationships), I'd like to point out that Louise and her manager had no emotional attachment to the caller, and he had had no time to slowly emotionally wear them down.
Posted by: Peter at October 8, 2007 11:07 AM