Allegation: Louis C.K. Is a Big Fat Sweaty Jerkoff

Rumors about his public masturbation in front of unwilling women have swirled for years -- I've been reading about it for a while -- and now Instapundit quotes the New York Times reporting on on-the-record witnesses.

As soon as they sat down in his room, still wrapped in their winter jackets and hats, Louis C.K. asked if he could take out his penis, the women said.

They thought it was a joke and laughed it off. "And then he really did it," Ms. Goodman said in an interview with The New York Times. "He proceeded to take all of his clothes off, and get completely naked, and started masturbating."

In 2003, Abby Schachner called Louis C.K. to invite him to one of her shows, and during the phone conversation, she said, she could hear him masturbating as they spoke. Another comedian, Rebecca Corry, said that while she was appearing with Louis C.K. on a television pilot in 2005, he asked if he could masturbate in front of her. She declined.

I'd like to offer this beleaguered progressive darling my thoughts and prayers.

Incidentally, I watched Mindhunter on Amazon Netflix. It's based loosely on the book Mindhunter by FBI Criminal Profiling pioneer John Douglas (and his co-author).

Two points made in the show:

1. There are a lot of psychopaths who are not killers, but rather accomplished members of society. They don't kill because they have "other leanings," but they still have psychopathic traits such as lack of remorse, skill at manipulation, and failure to imagine that other people's feelings actually matter.

2. A lot of "sex" psychopaths get off on isn't what you'd normally consider sex, because sex (as such) isn't really the end-game: the end-game is humiliation and domination. The sexual component, to the extent it exists, is just a means to this true end.

The show is pretty good, though I was frequently annoyed at the fact that it's fictionalized version of the book, and I didn't know what was real and what was fake. The main character isn't even called John Douglas; he's called "Holden Ford," though he's clearly doing the major things John Douglas did.

Here's something I wasn't sure was real: Were these guys really putting their limited understanding of criminal profiling to solve "lust murder" crimes even while just beginning their exploration into the completely new field? Was that just made up to satisfy the genre requirements of solving serial killer crimes? Were those cases actually after they'd developed the criminal profiling method?

Some stuff I know must be made up, like the sociologist character specializing in deviant psychology that "Holden Ford" is dating. A character who exists, conveniently enough, to make various psychological commentaries as "Holden Ford" does his research. Oh, and also to attempt kinky fetish-based sex with him right after he interviews a fetish-obsessed serial killer, to sort of show that normal people have these sorts of traits too.

Also, we've already kind of seen this. In a movie called "Manhunter," the first movie with Hannibal Lecter. They say that it's the head of the unit in those movies that's based on Douglas; but it seems that protagonist Will Graham is based on him too. Because this character "Holden Ford" also goes through the "getting too close to psychopaths" thing, and through the "beginning to exhibit psycopathic traits" himself thing.

Also, he gleans insights from a Hannnibal Lecter type (real world Coed Killer Ed Kemper) and has a weird, dangerous sorta-friendship with him.

Eh, it's okay. Worth a watch. Some of the dialogue is very stilted and the main actor takes some getting used to. He seems to be on the spectrum, though they don't say so, and though he seems to have some abilities that someone on the spectrum would be unlikely to have, like being able to read psychopaths quickly and figure out the right way to manipulate them into talking. (Strangely, he lacks the ability to read normal people and is frequently confused as to what people are thinking, or why they're reacting badly to his ideas.)

Overall though, pretty decent if you like criminal profiling.

BTW, Mindhunter wasn't a great book. I read it to get a sense of how criminal profiling worked. He was very vague, like he was trying to hide all the secrets of the field while just giving a tease about them. One of the few things I remember is the distinction between "organized" and "disorganized" killers (mentioned in the show, too).

He did have an interesting explanation of what's important in a murder, though. Basically, separate out the M.O. from the signature. The M.O. is all the stuff that has to be done, and is logically done, in furtherance of the crime. Binding a victim's wrists isn't all that telling, because, if kidnap/rape/murder is your aim, you just need to do that.

On the other hand, binding someone in a very specific way, say trussed up like a deer, isn't strictly necessary to the crime, so that isn't something the person has just done in furtherance of the crime, but a thing they emotionally need to do, not part of the sequence of acts needed to execute the crime, but part of the ritual of the act, part of the fantasy driving all this.

M.O. is driven by an intellectual/practical process, whereas ritual/signature is driven by emotional/psychological impulses. The latter tells you about the why of the crime.

That part was pretty interesting and something I only understood from the book, and not from the ten million criminal profiling books and movies I've read/watched.

Most of the rest of the book was really elliptical stuff where he'd tell you his conclusions about this or that case without explaining the reasoning that got him from the crime scene to the unsub profile.

posted by Ace at 04:16 PM

| Access Comments