THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Can the victim of abuse be an enabler?

Shelden Kennedy and Theo Fleury were long-time NHL players. Fleury especially is about as borderline to a Hall of Famer as there is.  Fleury was often in the league’s substance abuse program.  Kennedy and Fleury were child victims of their junior hockey coach, Graham James, in the 1980s.  James was especially predatory in that he would trade for them, or otherwise make sure he was their coach, as they moved up the ranks. 

One might think that reaching the NHL would free them from his grasp.  But:

December 1994
Graham James calls Fleury and asks him to become partners in bringing WHL team to Calgary (Calgary Hitmen). Fleury invests $125,000. Sheldon Kennedy also invests $1,000 in the team.

I’m not going to pretend to know what that means, especially since two years later, the bombshell arrived:

Late summer 1996
Sheldon Kennedy contacts the Calgary police to formally charge Graham James with sexual abuse. Word soon leaks to the media that Graham is being investigated.

Who knows exactly what kind of silent or torturous hell a child victim of abuse goes through into adulthood, what kind of peace they have to make, what kind of re-opening of wounds they have to confront. 

What does it mean for Fleury and Kennedy to invest in a junior team, to be owned by their abuser?  Well, long-time Montreal Gazette journalist decided to GO THERE:

Nobody should question Fleury’s decision to remain silent. What should be questioned is Fleury’s continuing role in James’s life. At the time of Kennedy’s revelations, James was the coach of the Calgary Hitmen. He was one of the co-owners of the junior team in the Western Hockey League. One of the other owners was Theoren Fleury. Here was someone who had suffered abuse at the hands of Graham James. Here was someone who knew that James had abused other players. Here was someone who was exposing other children to the same sexual predator.

Fleury has been through enough counselling to know there’s a word for someone who acts in this fashion - enabler.
...
A TSN promo for the coming world junior championship spotlights Fleury. A better choice would have been his teammate on the 1988 gold-medal team - Sheldon Kennedy.

He followed that up with an explanation of what he wrote.

The journalist’s article was highly insensitive.  In order to make the claims he did, specifically that Fleury was an enabler to a monster, the journalist needed some expert opinion as to why victims still associate themselves with their abusers, of why they get more entangled, even when they have a clear way out, and in Fleury’s and Kennedy’s case, seemed to have been completely out… until they were brought back in.

The journalist basically failed to make his case.  He spouted a summary opinion with no evidence.  This was a clear-case of a b-llsh!t article as there is. 

It’s the kind of thing that Bill O’Reilly (the king of b-llsh!tters) has said when talking about a kid that never freed himself from the sexual abuse of his kidnapper, even when he was able to hang out with friends and go to school.  (It happened within the last two years, maybe even last year.)

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Can I make the case that since the Montreal Gazette PAID Pat Hickey, that they too are enablers of crappy articles?  It’s one thing to give someone a platform, and quite another to pay for it.  And while the Gazette doesn’t need to agree with Hickey’s opinion, they at least have to hold him to SOME standard for his opinion.  In this case, there was no standard, other than a good writing style.