Actress Kelly Bensimon Is Upset but…

…not about her little episode of domestic violence against her boyfriend, Nick Stefanov. She’s upset because she’s in court and doesn’t want her daughters exposed to the glare of media scrutiny which she calls “inappropriate.” Read the account here (The Huffington Post, 3/31/09). Remember, this is the star of a TV reality show who claims to be media-averse. Uh huh. What exactly do her daughters have to do with her domestic battery case?
If you thought she’d take responsibility for her violence toward Stefanov, you’d have been wrong. If you thought she’d take this opportunity to inveigh against the evil of domestic violence, or tell us “there’s no excuse for domestic violence,” you’d have been wrong on that one too. And check out what her attorney says. He refers to Stefanov as a “jilted moron.” How about that? Can’t you just hear Chris Brown’s attorney call Rihanna a moron? Yeah, right. How fast can a lawyer get fired? Our society’s double standards are showing. We talk about the evil of domestic violence, but it’s only when men do it to women. When women do it to men, it’s just one to be swept under the rug and out of sight as fast as possible. When a wife murders her husband, the press reports it, but seldom if ever calls it DV. Literally hundreds of studies show that women commit DV as much as men do, and men are about one-third of the victims who seek medical treatment. We’ve known this for at least 25 years, but to the press it’s like the crazy aunt in the attic – don’t let her be seen or people might start to look at the whole family in a new light. It’s amazing how tightly we cling to this particular illusion. Keeping women on their pedestals of purity and virtue is far more important to us than we ever thought.