The innocent victim?

Actor Mel Gibson’s recent obscenity-laden outbreak of pustule of the mind has virtually ended his Hollywood career, for now. Everyone who has heard the audio released to the muckraking press by his former girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, is justifiably appalled by his inability to keep the lesser qualities of his mind in check. Frankly, Gibson in these recordings came off as borderline insane and pathetic, which his obvious intoxication could not excuse. This man hates; he has a powerful ego that is easily bruised; he has an irrational “victim” complex that has something close to zero credibility. I’ve listened to left-wing radio hosts, particularly female, have a field day with this story, commiserating with female callers about this verbal violence.

But I can condemn Gibson only so far, because he may have been, in between all that drunken obscenity, telling the truth about Grigorieva being a gold-digger and insensitive to his feelings. After all, Gibson’s wife of nearly thirty years claims never to have heard such outbreaks from him. There seems to be very little detailed information about Grigorieva’s past. The Russia-born woman was the daughter of musicians, and was trained as one, and seems to have had some minor success in the field, although nothing memorable enough to rate a footnote. She has been married three times (including to actor Timothy Dalton), but none of these marriages lasted more than a few years; there doesn’t seem to be any explanation for the briefness of them. One Hollywood observer, however, describes Grigorieva as “a familiar type in Hollywood, exemplifying the women (and quite a few men) who use a series of famous partners as stepping-stones to their own notoriety.” That is to say, someone who is a cynical user, who doesn’t enter into a relationship for the sake of a relationship, but to see how much benefit can be milked out of the prospective partner before going on to the next “relationship.” Gibson was probably the first of Grigorieva’s many “lovers” who decided in his own inimitable way to make plain his views on the matter.

Meanwhile, news reports are surfacing that suggest that Grigorieva made the audio tapes to either extort $10 million dollars from Gibson (which is his claim) in exchange for not releasing them to the public, or to blackball Gibson in their child custody battle (sounds like the kind of thing attorney Gloria Allred would have her claws all over). “Made” may be a more accurate description of the audio than people think. When I heard the audio in its entirety, I was struck not by Gibson’s nearly incoherent ranting, but by Grigorieva’s smug, arrogant and insensitive off-hand commentary, which if in fact were her actual responses, clearly only intensified Gibson’s agitated stat-of-mind. On the other hand, there seemed something somehow unreal about the proceedings. Something just didn’t fit. Gibson ran on and on virtually without pause; Grigorieva sounded as if she speaking into a microphone, inserting comments here and there onto a pre-recorded tape. Audio experts who have examined the tapes agree that the tapes seem to be the work of a barely competent cut-and-paste artist; perhaps it was Grigorieva herself, having knowledge of the music recording business. But real or fraud, Grigorieva may well face criminal charges over the release of the tapes, since recording conversations without the consent (let alone knowledge) of the other party is a felony in California.

There is also the photograph of Grigorieva with broken teeth, allegedly from the fist of Gibson while she was holding their eight-month-old daughter (get out the hankies). But the Los Angeles Times is reporting the possibility that the “wound” was self-inflicted. Grigorieva’s dentist reportedly found no evidence that a blow caused the tooth defects, and the lack of bruises or soft tissue damage to her face in the photo allegedly taken right after the alleged assault also calls into question the claim as well. Or maybe it was just poor dental hygiene habits.

What we have here is one of two possibilities: A bigoted blowhard who seizes on any opportunity to feel as if people are out to do him wrong—or a woman who happened to make the mistake of selecting as her next victim a guy who wasn’t quite the easy mark she thought. Perhaps it is both.

P.S. Stories like this are bound to change by the second. Grigorieva's dentist, probably after receiving missives from irate "victims' rights" advocates, is changing his story, although he still can't explain how someone with a fist the size of Gibson's could fit inside Grigorieva's mouth without touching any flesh (he first hypothesized that a blow to the temple had rattled her teeth). Gibson has gone on to claim that Grigorieva tried to extort $15 million from him, but in return, she refused to sign-off on an "agreement" that was more detailed than she liked. Apparently she wanted a deal like Rachel Uchitel's; keep quiet while extorting $10 million from Tiger Woods as the "deal" was being consumated, and then tell the whole world about it after it was consumated.