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Corpse Fuckers, Inc.
Paul LaRosa and his Lace Curtain
By Richard Leader
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Self-avowed antifeminists are losers even in the eyes of other
men. They are seen as desperate souls, unable to maintain the control
over their own lives—and families—that other males seem
to manage without resorting to sappy group-therapy sessions and
pseudo-politicking, all under the guise of men’s or father’s
rights. Patriarchy is a union shop by birth; sending away for a
membership card is just tacky. These men are unable to comprehend
why their whining is so often excluded from the mainstream media.
They see a vast radical feminist conspiracy of editors and publishers
arrayed against them, utterly unwilling to promote a male point-of-view.
In their myopia they miss the obvious fact that men as a class benefit
far more from the elevation of that particular viewpoint into “objectivity”
itself, the addition of “male” in that case would only
serve as a liability—to all but a select few losers, anyway,
men obsessed with cloning feminist philosophy into their own doppelganger-movement.
This conspiracy was even given a name: the Lace Curtain. A funhouse
mirror interpretation of the Glass Ceiling, the designation was
popularized by antifeminist notables such as Warren Farrell, a man
who once wrote on the benefits of incest for Penthouse
magazine.
The media abhors markedly antifeminist material not for its content
but for its pathetic display of vulnerability: for all of its bluster
there remains a musky scent of fear and anxiety. Thus it is men
who are ignorant of their misogyny, secure enough in their privileged
positions of “nice guys,” who are able to perpetrate
some of the most virulent coups when it comes to spreading patriarchal
propaganda. One such man is Paul LaRosa. A 16 year veteran of the
New York Daily News, he moved on in 1990 to CBS News, working
as a producer for the show 48 Hours. It was through his
position there that LaRosa was able to insinuate himself into the
life and death of Crystal Judson, a woman fatally wounded by her
husband, David
Brame, before he turned the gun on himself.
David Brame was the police chief of Tacoma, Washington. A local
celebrity, he received national attention during the hunt for the
Beltway Sniper, John Mohammed, who once resided near Tacoma before
his campaign of terror on the East Coast. Brame will now be forever
known for his own violent actions in a strip mall parking lot on
April 26, 2003. Though the ways in which he had long abused his
wife were not altogether dissimilar to those employed by other men
who demand absolute dominion over their partners, his position of
power over other men required an intense spotlight in the
aftermath of his crime.
Some of these findings were predictable—Brame was a ruthless
man in the midst of a messy divorce—while others were startling:
his police administration resembled a mob-style dictatorship of
backroom deals, where friends were promoted and enemies of his own
creation were drummed into early retirement. He used his hand-picked
subordinates as leverage against his wife during their divorce proceedings.
Not only were several of his assistant chiefs guilty of intimidating
Judson, one perhaps helping him attempt to frame her as the abusive
partner, a police chaplain even dismissed her complaints during
a therapy session that Brame had been trying to force her into a
sexual threesome with an equally unwilling female officer.
48 Hours Mystery, according to their website,
covered the case on June 9th of 2003, months after local news had
time to digest the story into more manageable chunks: the CBS footage
focused primarily on a third-party, John Hathaway, a Tacoma bowling
lane attendant and rabble-rouser who operates an online journal.
He received a copy of Brame and Judson’s divorce papers from
an anonymous source and published accounts of the abuse allegations
on his website; this was perhaps the spark that ignited the tragic
sequence of events. Paul LaRosa became fascinated with the hard-boiled
detective image that his CBS had helped Hathaway cultivate (the
aired segment included a patently ridiculous film-noir clip of him
smoking as he typed, trench coat and fedora included) and their
careers melded into an oddly symbiotic relationship, albeit one
manufactured for LaRosa’s ultimate advantage. He would later
appropriate Hathaway’s “Tacoma Confidential” moniker
for a book of the same name.
Tacoma Confidential is Paul LaRosa’s dramatization
of the Brame case. An average example of the “true crime”
genre, it often reads like near-plagiarized newspaper articles drawn
into narrative form. While all the factual heavy lifting had been
done for LaRosa, given the impressive and politically savvy reporting
that had already been done by The News Tribune and the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer—treating the events with a
rare intelligence—LaRosa somehow found it necessary to manufacture
his own take on the story. While most of the book is cobbled together
from the research of other writers, he did arrive at a few unique
components.
Beyond the aforementioned attempt to demonstrate the critical—if
momentary—importance of his new associate, John Hathaway,
as that would bolster his future utility as an exploitable resource,
LaRosa also heavily interviewed the Brame family in order to sell
his own version as the most “balanced” and objective
take on the subject. Crystal Judson’s family was not approached
in the same way: LaRosa saw her side as being adequately covered,
albeit impersonally, by the press. Thus, like any typical men’s
rights advocate, he viewed the mainstream media’s position
as catering to the woman’s point of view and saw it as a personal
challenge to go out and broadcast the “other” side of
the story.
The end result of that effort is that the fictionalized David Brame
of Tacoma Confidential is used as a mouthpiece for rude
and unsympathetic invective that, if accurate and not completely
fabricated by LaRosa, could only have been drawn from Judson’s
in-laws. While the Brame family is likely unhappy with how their
angry words were used to color David, being that most of them hold
to this day that Judson was the abusive partner and are not shy
about expressing that notion (Eugene Brame, David’s father,
once reminded an audience at a domestic violence symposium that
men too can be abused), one has to wonder what the social value
is of a book discussing unknowable things about the dead, using
them as pawns to trade insults among the living. Does the reading
public need to know which Judson family member David Brame saw as
“overweight” and “pathetic” or who he nicknamed
“the barnacle?” This is the only addition the $7.99
narrative has over the freely-accessible accounts of journalists.
The true crime genre is a glutted market filled with fantasy novels
masquerading as real happenings. They compete against so-called
“instant” books that are put together within a matter
of weeks, or even days, to capitalize on the latest celebrity scandal
before interest wanes. Paul LaRosa, while competent, is hardly a
Truman Capote or even a John Berendt (Midnight in the Garden
of Good and Evil). He lacked a vehicle for inserting himself
into the plot, a convention that many in the industry abhor despite
its ability to move merchandise, and he published far too late to
meet the instant-criterion—although he did set himself up
as a fixture in Tacoma giving endless interviews and signings in
order to make the most out of local appeal.
Thus it was necessary for him to go another route in an attempt
to make Tacoma Confidential stand out on store shelves
crowded with similar material: a controversy was needed and LaRosa
worked to create one the best that he could, alleging that Crystal
Judson was the one responsible for the gun going off, killing both
herself and her husband. This theory can be hard to tease out within
the pages of Tacoma Confidential itself (although the habitually
rabid treatment afforded to Crystal Judson throughout the text paves
the way for it, often treating her like a self-absorbed cartoon
character) as the narrative structure implodes for the actual shooting.
As Paul LaRosa admits that the knowledge of what happened in that
car died with its occupants, he breaks from using the voices of
the couple to a chorus of bystanders; at that point one might as
well put the book down and pull out the newspaper account.
He is only a bit more forthright in an extended epilogue. The chapter
is titled “Questions and Fallout,” hinting that there
just might be a scandal that he alone can expose, and LaRosa states
that one of the principal eyewitnesses, Rod Baker, believes Judson
to be responsible for the gun going off, perhaps in an attempt to
stop Brame from taking his own life. Further, evidence that Glock
pistols are prone to misfiring at “inopportune times”
is presented as both authoritative and germane to the scenario.
Yet this section is disclaimed heavily: LaRosa refuses to take ownership
of his hypothesis, using Rod Baker as a puppet in the same way as
he did Judson, Brame, and the entire cast of Tacoma Confidential.
He writes that the “police don’t put much stock in Baker’s
theory,” working to distance himself from it in every way
possible, at one point arguing that he “thought Baker’s
theory was far-fetched” before launching full speed into lingering
doubts he himself now has about the official report.
Despite the milquetoast apologetics, LaRosa goes on to say “But
what if everything we think we know about this now infamous shooting
is slightly askew? Here the word ‘slightly’ carries
enormous consequences.” What he believes those consequences
to be is never supplied in the text. Instead, LaRosa saved such
musings for radio interviews and television appearances where he
would give a conspiratorial wink, doing whatever he could to broach
the subject of the controversy of his own creation. At times, Crystal
Judson was a hero, trying to save her devastated husband from committing
suicide. On other occasions she was a villain, a woman vengefully
stalking David Brame, a man who just wanted to spend a quiet morning
alone with his children. Either scenario suits LaRosa just fine:
it seems evident that he could care less what actually happened
as long as his own personality is inseparable from the events themselves.
One might call it retroactive-gonzo.
It is apparent that Paul LaRosa believes himself up against the
Lace Curtain, even if he is unaware of the esoteric antifeminist
term, preferring to see himself as a hero bravely standing up to
the more standard notion of “political correctness.”
That the world so eagerly puts blame on the back of the man involved,
odious as he admits David Brame was in many respects, is something
that he sees as a personal affront. It absolutely galls LaRosa that
a more “balanced” interpretation of the events is neglected,
that people are unwilling to accept the off chance that this “David
Brame Case,” the one he has staked his writing career on,
might have been an accidental-shooting in which the female partner
was complicit.
For him, it is not about the truth, which he acknowledges is unknowable
in its final details, but about public opinion and some sort of
bias against men when it comes to domestic violence, even if he
was too cowardly to point it out in his Tacoma Confidential.
While he often defends his accidental-shooting conjecture as “speculation,”
and has explicated at length to his detractors that his “true
crime” story is nonetheless fiction (“I wrote the story
as I saw it, filtered through my brain and judgement”), his
Herculean struggle against the forces of Political Correctness falls
apart when one considers that he was too craven to write the “accident”
into the narrative itself and, until very recently, set Rod Baker
up to take the fall were the theory to backfire. He was either not
sufficiently serious about his position to actually include it in
his own book or he did not, perhaps out of fear, write the story
“as he saw it.” LaRosa is simultaneously positioning
himself as a victor over the nonexistent Lace Curtain and as a victim
of it, depending upon whichever role is more expedient at a given
moment.
One of Paul LaRosa’s detractors is the moderator of a discussion
group hosted by Yahoo: going by the online screen-name of “Cloud
Writer,” she is dedicated to harvesting information on police
officers who abuse their intimate partners. Prior to publication,
LaRosa used the group to mine information on Brame for his book.
Although the case is only one of scores, if not hundreds, covered
by the group, Cloud Writer herself lives in the Tacoma area and
took special interest in it, at one point being retained by lawyers
serving the Judson family for the knowledge she had accumulated
on the case. After Tacoma Confidential was released she
found herself dumbfounded by the ways in which LaRosa had twisted
the official story whenever it was convenient to his own gender
politics; particularly his “theory” on the shooting.
On January 4, 2005, an online post by a third-party recommending
the book appeared on message boards operated by Court TV; Cloud
Writer swiftly intervened with her own response to the book and
LaRosa followed suit, hoping to defend himself.
The debate between Cloud Writer and Paul LaRosa on the Court TV
forum persisted nearly four months. While LaRosa was initially optimistic
about his chances, it quickly became apparent that he was in over
his head: at first he acted as if she were hysterical (“be
calm, cloud.....deep breaths”) hoping to discredit her as
some sort of fringe lunatic. Before long, he would move on to ignoring
her in order to address potential buyers directly, increasing his
font size exponentially, perhaps hoping that his repeated messages
of “READ THE BOOK....DECIDE FOR YOURSELF!” and long
form press releases about signings would—through sheer volume—drown
out Cloud Writer’s pointed questions. Finally, he found himself
responding to her once again, if only to sustain the conceit that
he is the more balanced and objective party: to work towards that,
he began mentioning her by name incessantly, attaching “bought
and paid” as an epithet to every instance, referring to her
past association with the Judson’s attorneys.
For her part, Cloud Writer pointed out that as Paul LaRosa was
incapable of getting even the most basic of facts right (the first
page of Tacoma Confidential states that Tacoma is north
of Gig Harbor, where the shooting occurred, when it is actually
to the southeast), it seemed unlikely that he could be trusted with
a theory that contradicted what all the convened experts had to
say on the matter. While arguing against his initial points, before
he moved into his more puerile antics, she also supplied context
for his motives and that of his primary resources. Jane Brazell,
David Brame’s sister, the same that LaRosa used to prove that
Brame was not predisposed towards violence on the day of the shooting
(“It was just about as normal as it could be. He was sad but
he wasn’t angry, just kind of down”) had forwarded her
own accusatory history of Crystal Judson’s relationship with
her brother to a variety of antifeminist websites. Among them were
John Hay’s Sleazereport.com and DVmen.org, a men’s rights
website that hilariously accuses “many radical feminists”
of hijacking their email address to send virus-riddled spam messages
in order to tarnish the site’s good reputation.
When LaRosa asked in the epilogue of Tacoma Confidential,
“But what if everything we think we know about this now infamous
shooting is slightly askew? Here the word ‘slightly’
carries enormous consequences,” it seems safe to assume that
the enormous consequences are a judgment against a world ready to
indict the male partner for domestic violence—if the official
report could be proven only “slightly askew” it would
be vindication for a gender that he believes is seen as guilty until
proven innocent. Antifeminist groups prefer to see violence as a
“dance” that occurs between codependents who each give
as well as they get; thus they typically presume near equal numbers
of victims and perpetrators across gender lines. This is the exact
same sort of balance that Paul LaRosa strives for in his book.
Cloud Writer also pointed out evidence that Paul LaRosa is highly
sympathetic to men’s rights fantasies of persecution, looking
to reviews of other authors he had published on Amazon.com. (Incidentally,
the first Amazon review listed for Tacoma Confidential
is a glossy, sycophantic rave by John Hathaway, who is eager to
sustain their public relationship, unbalanced as it is.) In a review
of While I Was Gone by Sue Miller, LaRosa takes unusual
pleasure in the discomfort of the mother figure, writing “For
once, the family does not get along totally. Her daughters argue
with Jo, consider her too old for words and generally treat her
like dirt. Called me perverse but that I loved.” For Lisa
Zeidner’s Layover, he demands, “Could a man
have gotten away with this type of book???”
What bothered me about this book is that it is TOTALLY a woman’s
book and seemingly perfectly acceptable to women readers. As
I read through the story of a woman coming to grips with the
death of her child and the one-time lapse into adultery of her
husband (truly, it was a single event in the book), I began
to question the entire premise of the book. I began to wonder
if the book could have been written (or succeeded) had the main
character been a man coming to terms with his child’s
death and his wife’s single lapse into adultery. Would
readers, especially female readers, have accepted a male character
who decides, after these life changing events, to leave his
wife and go off on a sleazy adventure where he sleeps with a
mother and daughter? It’s laughable. The reviewers would
have killed this book had the writer and main character been
a man. Why then do we accept it because it’s written and
told from a female perspective? I don’t. I wonder if anyone
else had this reaction.
Despite his gender angst, Paul LaRosa seems to have little trouble
wearing drag to promote Tacoma Confidential: Cloud Writer
caught him in several online venues writing under a feminine identity,
yet still using his standard email address, trying to drum up interest
in the book. Laura C. or Laura Cone, his alter ego, posted messages
at the newsgroup alt.true-crime (via Google) and at an EZboard.com
forum devoted to “true crime/murder.” Both accounts
were similar, presenting as a female friend of the author, and yet
in both instances LaRosa was too spineless to even include his precious
theory about the accidental-shooting. In the first he refers to
the case as a “horrific murder-suicide” and in the latter
he only manages a noncommittal stance on Brame, “who had a
breakdown and many secrets that ended in disaster.”
If, as LaRosa insisted many times on the Court TV website, he was
writing what he truly believed had happened on that day and not
out of financial opportunism, it seems peculiar that he would neglect
the cornerstone of his own polemic during his stealth-marketing
fiasco. Instead, I would again argue that his own position is mercurial
and lacks any real conviction: his capitulation to the standard
notion of the shooting acknowledges that the true crime genre is
dominated by female readers—as all genres of literature are
today, women being the literate gender, something that might explain
why a man who brags of several Emmy awards can be reduced to an
adolescent thug with a big font size when faced with informed opposition.
One could also argue that he assumed the presence of a Lace Curtain—perhaps
believing the bulk of his audience would be uninterested in a book
where the female partner played a part in the violence—and
that he surrendered to his imagination of it willingly, hoping to
sell his book. That would likely be overstating it, however: an
even more cynical reading of LaRosa’s behavior might conclude
that his theory, right or wrong, is utterly irrelevant to that segment
of the market, allowing him to freely omit it. Instead, his pet
hypothesis is designed to separate him from the multitudes of female
authors in the true crime genre and place him, as a male,
with its masculine figureheads.
By “cracking” the case, particularly the meager—yet
macho—aspects he offered on the technical workings of Glock
pistols and in the making of his own personality inseparable from
the narrative in some way, he found a way to elevate himself above
those competing women and assume, or at least imagine, a place at
the table with the Truman Capotes of the genre. Thus going on at
length about what really happened, what might be “slightly
askew,” is something that is only necessary when dealing with
his peers, critics and other writers; potential readers, as subordinates,
are not worth the trouble and the standard “horrific murder-suicide”
description works as well as any other.
Men who cite the Lace Curtain or the even more banal specter of
Political Correctness, as LaRosa does, do so to conceal both their
own power and that of their male peers. In the case of LaRosa, his
invocation of it expresses fear of a world where women’s voices
count more than his own (as he feels some sort of kinship with David
Brame who was convicted by both the police and the media for a crime
which left no surviving witnesses) despite the reality of the opposite
holding true. But moreover, it also serves to disguise his disdain
for female authors, less balanced than himself, who can “get
away with” making men into villains. His conception of their
inferiority is sublimated into his every complaint about Political
Correctness and is the force behind every reminder to others of
his own dedication to fairness.
The final twist of the debate at Court TV came with the public
release of police statements made by Rod Baker, the man paraded
in Tacoma Confidential as the originator of the accidental-shooting
theory. His initial statement on April 26, 2003 was brief and indicated
that he did not see the shooting but was under the “impression”
that the successive firings of the gun were too rapid for it to
be a deliberate murder and suicide. The rationalization behind his
interpretation, how he “felt,” was later revealed in
a follow-up interview, on April 15, 2004, where he ended the discussion
by informing the detectives of Paul LaRosa’s growing interest
in his testimony. Strangely, Baker arrives at a single possibility
for what might have happened based on both prurient and humane fantasies.
First, as Crystal Judson was only shot once (“I’ve
never shot anyone, and I don’t want to, but if you’re
going to shoot someone and want to kill them wouldn’t you
shoot them twice?”) and did not die immediately, he believes
that her death was not the desired outcome. Conversely, he feels
a deep need to redeem “Mr. Brame” (Baker always refers
to him as such, Crystal existing as mere “Crystal”)
for the benefit of the couple’s children—a need so strong
that he mused in the interview that God Himself must have placed
him there as a witness that day in order that the kids might be
spared the shame of believing their father to be an “animal.”
Allowing them that dignity, in his estimation, is more important
than the law or even the truth. He first met the children while
attending Judson’s funeral, his wife a worker at the church,
though he would later share his belief about the accidental nature
of the shooting with the Brame side of the family who were eager
to hear more and arranged a meeting with him. Rod Baker’s
irritation grew as he discovered that the Judson’s were not
accepting holiday cards the Brames sent to their grandchildren.
Given Paul LaRosa’s willingness to discount Cloud Writer
because of her biases (being a survivor of domestic violence and
a past associate of the Judson family), it is fairly ironic that
his own star witness has certainly gravitated towards one side in
his quest to heal all wounds. Worse, it seems that LaRosa’s
theory is not based on an eyewitness account but on an assumption
made by a witness with his own agenda: in effect, the only “evidence”
for LaRosa’s theory is another theory. Cloud Writer called
him out on this at Court TV, giving him a near ultimatum to finally
stand on his own two feet and state what he thought had happened
the day of the shooting, in his own words, and not those of Rod
Baker. This he did. However, he did not do it there at Court TV,
at his home at CBS, in a book published by Signet, nor even in an
article for a newspaper or magazine that would be appropriate for
a professional of his standing: instead, he turned once again to
John Hathaway.
The April 17, 2003 issue of The New Takhoman consisted
of a 1,600 word essay by Paul LaRosa on how the “official”
Brame story might be wrong. It was the bravest he had been yet in
outlining his position, but even then his daring had limits—Hathaway’s
website is unglamorously hosted by Geocities.com and has no real
archive, every day its contents are replaced in their entirety,
usually never to be seen again. There are two extant copies of “a
few observations by Paul LaRosa on WHAT IF? The Strange Case of
David and Crystal Brame.” (The very name of dead woman has
become a political struggle between males vying for her ownership
and the choice in LaRosa’s title is no exception.) The first
copy available is a reposting of it Cloud Writer made at Court TV,
while the second was put up by LaRosa himself at an infrequently
trafficked promotional blog (or “plog”) for Tacoma
Confidential hosted by Amazon.com.
Though the “WHAT IF” manifesto was clearly designed
to silence local detractors, the parochial publishing of it—Hathaway
evidently still content with being the junior partner in a patriarchal
tag team—ensured that only the “biased” would
ever find their way to the information: mainstream critics and media
representatives could still pick and choose whether or not the “theory”
was relevant to their coverage of the book. (Most reviews chose
to ignore it.) LaRosa coming clean in this manner did not force
their hand one way or another. Tacoma Confidential is still
a text controlled by editors and lawyers and its own façade
of Political Correctness is intact.
In “WHAT IF,” he writes, “for nearly three years,
David Brame has been portrayed as an absolute monster for doing
something that is, by any measure, unspeakable. But what if he did
no such thing? What if the whole thing was a crazy accident? And
how and why did so many public officials sign off on it?”
Only the shooting was not the only monstrous or unspeakable act
that David Brame had ever been accused of: Paul LaRosa might concede
that Brame was likely a “sexually repressed rapist and misogynist,”
not to mention a “total son-of-a-bitch” (not the best
choice of words considering Tacoma Confidential’s
willingness to exploit bad blood between the surviving family members),
but he does not seem to really believe that Crystal Judson was a
victim of domestic violence. He might recount the time that David
held a gun to her head at home and said “accidents happen”—perhaps
something LaRosa interprets literally as ironic foreshadowing—because
it makes for a good story, as it was in the newspaper he likely
lifted it from, not because he actually believed it happened. In
“WHAT IF,” he surmises:
“There are those who worked closely with David who insist
that he was intimidated by her. It’s politically incorrect
to say that, of course. After all, he was an armed cop and he
was the chief but still... he had photos showing his bruises
and scratches that he said came at the hands of Crystal. She
had nothing like that and in fact had only called police once
in nearly 12 years of marriage and that was to complain that
he had left the house after an argument. No one has ever alleged
that they saw any physical marks on her that came from David
despite allegations that he choked her on four separate occasions.
It may be true that Crystal did not call police because she
feared reprisals from David but wouldn’t she then make
doubly sure those bruises from choking were documented with
photographs taken by family members?”
One could pick apart LaRosa’s historical revisionism (after
all, those who worked “closely” with David were all
hired by and owed their status to him; they are hardly objective
character witnesses), or his deliberate ignorance of the grim realities
faced by domestic violence victims cut off from help, but all of
that can be laid bare by the simple acknowledgement that LaRosa
himself profited by selling stories of Crystal Judson’s suffering
and that suffering itself was marketed as entertainment. The tale
of the gun and “accidents happen” was an example of
that suffering at its most abhorrent—and, to many, its most
entertaining. Yet after including that moment in his Tacoma
Confidential, after profiting from his decision to take advantage
of that moment, and after swearing up and down in the forums at
Court TV that he filled his book only with what he absolutely believed,
he has the nerve to say that it was Judson who intimidated and abused
her husband.
The suffering that had translated into so many real dollars for
him was, in his own mind, a fiction: so much for “true crime”
as a genre. Brame might be a “sexually repressed rapist”
(what that repression consisted of one can only wonder; perhaps
LaRosa thinks him entitled in some way to that threesome he infamously
desired), but evidently that alone is not a crime worthy of serious
censure according to LaRosa’s world view, where only the murder
was “unspeakable.” David Brame’s death works to
his advantage, there: being that he cannot “answer for”
his lesser crimes, he must ultimately be redeemed as not a monster
(LaRosa), nor an animal (Rod Baker), if he escapes responsibility
for the shooting itself. It is this redemption plan that undergirds
all of the suppositions contained within “WHAT IF.”
Paul LaRosa, for all of his self-contradictory stances, declares
himself some sort of rational skeptic standing up to Political Correctness,
human nature (people want to have someone to blame, something his
accidental-shooting scenario potentially robs them of), and even
the local government of Tacoma, Washington—incredulously asking
why it was that so many public officials signed off on the official
conclusions rendered by the police investigation. While there was
certainly some measure of opportunism in the wake of a an administrative
shakeup that cost many of Brame’s associates and accomplices
their jobs, men momentarily taking up the rallying cry against domestic
violence because it was the current hot button issue in the region,
it seems more than a bit farcical to wonder why it was that officials
did not feel free to ignore the police findings and go off in search
of their own conclusions. Indeed, if one were to assume some sort
of heinous motive behind their acceptance of the Brame case as a
murder-suicide and not an accidental-shooting, it might be that
they were simply trying to protect themselves: in life, even at
his worst, David Brame received career help from all sides. Building
a firewall around a few “worst offenders” was prudent
for those who believed themselves to be complicit in lesser capacities.
While LaRosa certainly discussed aspects of that in Tacoma
Confidential, because scandal makes for good sales, the point
of what makes it scandalous seems to elude him. The very subtitle
of the book reads, emphasis original, “a true story
of murder, suicide, and a
police chief’s secret life.” Glossing over
the fact that LaRosa’s all-important theory did not even make
the cover of his book, referring to a murder and suicide, he has
a need to view Brame’s actions as the result of a singular
character flaw and not the consequences of a patriarchal world of
entitlement that made his crimes possible. When promoting Tacoma
Confidential under the name Laura Cone, he wrote, “[Brame]
had a breakdown and many secrets that ended in disaster.”
In his Amazon.com blog he responded to a reader complimenting Tacoma
Confidential by saying “I was always struck by the question
of how someone as seemingly unstable as David Brame could rise to
the level of Police Chief. Shows that a lot of us have more than
one side.”
There seems to be little disagreement about David Brame’s
capacity for charm, but it was not charm that helped him overcome
a failed psychological exam as a recruit. It was not charm that
first stymied a rape accusation and later buried it under thick
layers of bureaucracy as if it had never existed. Nor was it charm
that ignored Crystal Judson’s complaints during “therapy”
or silenced the female officer he wanted to bring into their bedroom.
It was all people who did that—almost all of them men. Brame
did not live a secret life: his vices were hidden in plain sight,
overlooked and excused by those who should have known better, people
who would do anything to protect him, no matter what it might have
cost Judson in the end. Paul LaRosa wants this protection-racket
to continue for David Brame even in the afterlife.
LaRosa might believe that he is a lone soldier up against the forces
of Political Correctness but instead he is just one of the more
fortunate sons of immense army, a man who need not recognize that
his own actions and beliefs mesh so easily with that of his more
dissolute compatriots. Among antifeminists his own position is privileged
as he has managed to avoid—as of yet—that label, allowing
him to retain mainstream credibility that more fearful and desperate
men lack. LaRosa, however, is proof that the so-called Lace Curtain
is a fiction. The world is hungry for misogyny, even the feminine
reading public, it just requires a certain amount of sophistication,
patience, and compromise that fewer men than ever are able to harness
in sufficient amounts.
Tacoma Confidential, if nothing else, is a work of astounding
compromise. It is a book that does not live up to the author’s
desires. It is never explicit in what it seeks to accomplish, the
“theory” itself exiled from both its pages and its cover.
Even as it parrots, for the most part, the conventional history
of Crystal Judson’s abuse that LaRosa has shown himself not
to truly believe, it does whatever is possible to smear her through
the use of petty adjectives and pejorative verbs: a picture is painted
of a Judson that has her “stomping” around, “gobbling”
everything in sight, the kind of spoiled creature that even the
most privileged of white men feel safe despising.
LaRosa’s 48 Hours uses stories of such women being
raped and murdered as its bread and butter; this sexed-up coverage
of misogynist violence garners even more hatred for the demographic
on the chopping block, loathed for being too pretty, too popular,
or too white, facts again pointed out by the most privileged of
white men. (They take the most umbrage to what they have coined
as “The
Missing White Women Syndrome.”) In a March, 2006 media
panel convened in Tacoma, “Hysteria by Design? Good news,
bad news and the ‘chicken little’ syndrome,” LaRosa
even fielded a question asked by an audience member on why the “Brame
shootings” did not garner the same amount of attention as
Lacey Peterson or Natalee Holloway. He replied, between accusing
the media of a liberal bias and of using kid gloves when reporting
on Islam, that it was simply because Brame was dead and there was
not a trial to cover.
Nevertheless, the case did attract his interest: in his own words,
it was story of obsession, love, lust, and secret lives. And he
is right if you divorce all of those words from their accustomed
meanings. Instead, the obsession is LaRosa’s own, his quest
to rehabilitate Brame in order to strike a coup for men everywhere,
ever assailed by false accusations by beguiling women. Love is the
ideal of brotherhood that blinded John Hathaway to the fact that
he was being used at every juncture in their partnership. Lust is
LaRosa’s desire to be an author and not just a journalist
tucked away behind the scenes, Tacoma Confidential existing
as a vanity project where he delved into real people’s wounds
to satisfy a need of his own ego—though never straying far
from the safety of his television network roots, attaching himself
to a story also covered under their banner. And if his own status
as an antifeminist men’s rights champion was ever in doubt,
that secret, too, is out.
Paul LaRosa’s Tacoma Confidential promotes a profoundly
masculine point of view. In the words of Cloud Writer at Court TV,
“As far as your proof of objectivity by piping in that you
made David look bad too—no, David made David look bad, you
only had to work on smearing everything extending out from Crystal.
You needed balance, and the price was truth.” By turning a
blind eye to context, ignoring the fact of patriarchy, his need
to validate a vision of shared complicity in domestic violence overwhelmed
all other considerations. Even so, by smugly playing the part of
the nice guy, presuming to protect the innocents—the couple’s
children—repeatedly mentioning how he did not want to drag
them into the debate, he attempted to turn one man’s evil
into a family-tragedy where all were equal victims, including David
Brame. For presenting this maudlin fairytale that presumed to serve
all parties equally, LaRosa fancies himself the peacemaker and the
victor in his interactions at the Court TV forum.
In his narcissism, he wrote, “So far, this board has received
nearly 5,000 hits so you’ve done your part admirably,”
continuing later with, “keep it up Cloud, because I am one
of those people who truly believe all publicity is good publicty
[sic]. Thanks.” Paul LaRosa can have his publicity. This is
a public notice to his own family, his children, his future grandchildren
and their descendents about how their great-grandfather once raped
a woman, a dead woman; that he rooted around inside her for fame
and spare change, nevertheless finding both in short supply. This
is so they might someday think of him and wonder just what—exactly—was
it that made it worth becoming a corpse fucker?
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