The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Love Children (Yep. I Said ‘Children,’ Which Is Plural)

Posted on | May 18, 2011 | 24 Comments

The first fallout of Tuesday’s big reveal: A 2003 story by the Daily Mail about Tanner Tousignant — teenage son of a former stewardess on Arnold’s private jet — suddenly seems a lot more credible.

However, when Gawker recycled the Tanner tale, the reporter on that old Daily Mail story said, “Nuh-uh. That’s the wrong love child. Must be another one.” So, the tabloids kept digging and — bingo!

Mildred Baena is the mother of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s love child, RadarOnline.com and Star magazine have learned exclusively in a joint investigation.
Baena, 50, worked as a housekeeper for Arnold, Radar and Star have learned.
Baena and Schwarzenegger, 63, conceived their illegitimate child more than a decade ago,behind the back of the Hollywood superstar’s wife and Kennedy heiress, Maria Shriver . . .

Old habits are hard to break, and shagging the help appears to have been an old habit of Arnold’s. One might profitably compare Schwarzenegger’s situation to that of IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

It’s not as if there were no warnings about Strauss-Kahn’s habits. And he is now reportedly prepared to assert that the hotel maid he is accused of raping is a liar, claiming that he had consensual sex with her, a claim that her lawyer angrily rejects:

The woman, 32, a widowed immigrant from Guinea who was granted asylum seven years ago, has not been publicly identified by the authorities in New York and has made no public statements about what prosecutors say was an attack by Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, a Frenchman, as she prepared to clean his hotel room on Saturday.
But her lawyer said she had been unable to return to her job at the Sofitel New York or to her home, as both had attracted swarms of international news media. In short, the case has been devastating, the lawyer, Jeffrey J. Shapiro, said in an interview . . .
“There is no question this was not consensual — she was assaulted and she had to escape from him, which is why when she finally got out of the room, she reported it to security immediately,” Mr. Shapiro said. “It doesn’t matter what Mr. Brafman says, and it doesn’t matter what the defendant says. Her story is her story, which she has told to everyone who asked her, and she is telling the truth. She has no agenda.”
Mr. Shapiro said his client “did not even know who this guy was” until she saw news accounts, adding, “She is a simple housekeeper who was going into a room to clean a room.”

Droit de Seigneur, indeed!

UPDATE: Why is it that Little Miss Attila can never resist the urge to scold me in public?

Are we sure we want to conflate rape with consensual sex?

There was no conflation. When I said that the two situations might be profitably compared, I knew exactly what similarities I had in mind:

When the boss does the help, consent becomes problematic, oui? This is the whole point of sexual harassment law, am I not correct? That the unequal power relationship is exploitative? As I say, old habits die hard: A man who becomes accustomed to shagging the help when he is young and attractive will not necessarily take ‘no’ for answer when the help stops saying ‘yes.’ Shagging the help is shagging the help, and is bad business under all circumstances.

(The links are to the specific Twitter messages; 140 characters being an insuperable difficulty to extended argument.) Permit me to say that my mind often functions in gestalt mode: I see a pattern in the dots and, this seeming obvious enough to me, I make the mistake of assuming that others see the same pattern. So I will merely point out the dots, without bothering to explain what I see as the connection, and this sometimes leads to confusion as to my meaning.

This is an acknowledged fault of mine. But as I have said before, just because you don’t know what I’m doing, don’t make the mistake of assuming that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Little Miss Attila’s scolding, however, is another one of those gestalt patterns. Exactly what it means, I’m not sure, but it is perhaps significant.

UPDATE II: Fox News had the Mildred Baena story on their Web site this morning, but didn’t mention it on air until 2:15 p.m. ET. And while the Arnold’s love-child baby-mama story is all over the We Smirch celebrity gossip aggregator, it seems no political blogger wants to go near that TMZ birth-certificate story.

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Category: California, Celebrities, Scandal, Sex

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