A: If you're looking for hot reading material, the popular social media site Reddit's always got plenty to offer — but one story in particular today has all the makings of a must-read. Sex! Crime! Death! Mystery! The world's most powerful man! And that's just the headline: The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush, by Jackson Thoreau.
Granted, the premise here is a bit, ahem, far-fetched: that George W. Bush and FBI agents may have drugged and raped a Houston woman, Margie Schoedinger, in 2002; and that the woman's purported suicide in 2003 may have been state-sanctioned murder. Nonetheless, the story was an immediate hit with Redditors, who voted it up near the top of the front page within a few hours of its being posted late last night.
I suspect that a major part of the story's popularity has less to do with President Bush drugging and raping women, per se, than it does the entirely plausible accusation that the media has failed us. As Jackson Thoreau (a pseudonym, btw) writes in his conclusion:
For all I know, maybe Schoedinger did kill herself. Maybe she dreamed up a lot of this stuff. But I don't know, am I "deranged" to think it's weird that in this mass-media, detailed-information age, so few people are even asking any questions about how a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the president could be dead less than a year later?
It seems like a reasonable question. Unfortunately,
it turns out there are a few teeny little details Thoreau neglected to mention...The author makes a big deal out of the fact that only one other reporter,
LeaAnne Klentzman of the
Fort Bend Star, covered Schoedinger's original lawsuit. So why doesn't he include
Klentzman's story among his links?
Is it maybe because — in his effort to convince you that his theories are totally plausible — he was hoping you won't notice that Schoedinger apparently suffered from a mental disorder not unlike paranoid schizophrenia?
Here are some of the other claims made by Schoedinger, revealed in Klentzman's piece, which Thoreau conveniently glosses over:
- George W. Bush raped her several times in her home in a suburb of Houston, beginning in Oct., 2000 — a few weeks before the election. Just to make sure this point is clear: In the heat of campaigning against Al Gore — a period during which he was being followed by reporters and camera men at all times — Bush was making secret trips to the Houston, for the purpose of raping this woman. He would continue to make secret rape trips, apparently even after he became President.
- The alleged victim did not actually remember any interactions with Bush during the period that he was raping her. In fact, she did not even know that she was being raped; she didn't find that out until later, when an unnamed FBI agent revealed to her that it was part of a large conspiracy organized by a racist organization (Schoedinger was black).
- The FBI agent also revealed to her that Bush was spying on her, and also continually raping her. And that the people who traveled with Bush, who were apparently also FBI agents, were also raping her. Thoreau does mention that, although he leaves out the detail that Bush and the FBI agents also may have raped her husband (but apparently he was drugged too, so he couldn't know for sure whether or not he had been repeatedly raped). The alleged victim was not sure how many times she had been raped, obviously, given than she didn't even know she was being raped until the FBI agent revealed it to her.
- "Section VII of the lawsuit states; 'Whether or not Plaintiff's husband was raped remains in question, as Plaintiff was drugged after she was raped and her husband was drugged before her rape. Plaintiff can only state that these men purported to be FBI agents raping her for the purpose of covering for how many times they had drugged her and allowed the Defendant to rape her in the same manner.'" Sorry, I was unable to figure out what any of that meant.
- The FBI and local police department refused to take any actions to protect the alleged victim. The police department, however, "conducted a background investigation into Plaintiff's past activities. In the end, this investigation yielded the following information: Plaintiff had seven dates, (which became seven lovers), had told no lies, committed no crimes, gotten 2 traffic tickets and dated George W. Bush as a minor." Why the police would have revealed such information to Schoedinger — or why their internal investigations are recorded in the form of brief nursery rhymes — remains unclear.
Gosh, all of that stuff seems kinda pertinent, doesn't it? Maybe Thoreau was going to mention it, but he forgot. Or maybe Thoreau is just part of the cover-up himself!!!
Still, before you get up on your high horse about how journalists are
afraid to reveal the truth, Mr. Thoreau, maybe you should try to avoid being such a shitty journalist.
Back to Thoreau's original essay (riding high with 141 points, as of this writing, and still among Reddit's top stories):
But I remember being puzzled by Schoedinger's attitude after hanging up the phone. I wondered that if she had made up such a wild story, why she didn't come up with something a little less outlandish, in which people couldn't necessarily dismiss her as a kook...
Besides Pravda and Internet ezines - one of whom referred to Schoedinger as "deranged" - I haven't seen stories on this strange death of a woman who filed a rape lawsuit against the U.S. president and wound up dead nine months later. I can't say I'm surprised. Or even angry. I don't know what the hell to think. All I know is I was one of the last - if not the last - reporters to speak to Schoedinger, and she didn't sound "deranged" to me in July 2003. She sounded like someone who had gone through something weird and was trying to sort it out. She sounded like someone who wanted the truth to come out.
The truth? I'm beginning to suspect Jackson Thoreau can't handle the truth.
(And look, I don't mean to make light of this poor woman's mental illness. The fact that she was suffering from delusions clearly wasn't her fault, and isn't something to laugh about, especially considering she ended up taking her own life. But trying to suggest that those delusions deserve to be top news — and attempting to politicize her death as an assassination — is entirely laughable. Or, no, cryable maybe. I can't decide.)
(Anyway, maybe you should shut up about George Bush being a rapist and instead focus on how he's a shitty president who has done nothing positive for health care — or, say, for the treatment of the mentally ill.)
Redditors, I should note, are generally a discerning lot (and less susceptible to propaganda and yellow journalism than their peers at Digg). So I'll forgive them for this lil' misstep.
And hey, perhaps it's not so surprising if the story is striking a chord, at this particular moment in American history. Strip away the specific accusations, and consider the underlying themes fueling the article itself:
- Blanket distrust of governmental authority.
- Loss of faith in a justice system corrupted.
- Disgust for the mainstream media, and its distorted sense of perspective.
- A nightmarish characterization of a president whose dangerous actions seem completely disconnected from a sense of rationality or consequence — and who will go to any lengths, no matter how destructive or criminal, to hide his own misdeeds.
- A world defined by lies, selfishness, cowardice and disregard for human life.
If those concepts sound familiar, it's probably because they're your inner monologue.
Actually, it might only be thousands of young nerds, or hundreds, or twelve, but they are extremely persistent and outspoken — by which I mean paranoid and annoying — and have perhaps been effective over the past few months in spreading their message — by which I mean drilling it into everyone's face.
