I appreciate the question. I understand we're all limited by time. I know I can be pretty verbose, and I know there's so much more to this than we can possibly get to in this setting.
I've written about it, and I've thought a lot about this question, about celebrity culture and the excuses people make for behaviour by certain individuals. I think one of the reasons for this is that people have an identity investment in some of the men who do these horrible things. People don't want to think that the person they respect, admire, or appreciate on the basketball court, the music they love to listen to, or the movies they love to see somehow are implicated in abusive behaviour, if they're a fan of this person. There's a built-in mechanism of denial, they don't even want to deal with this. They don't even want to think about this because it's going to make them think differently about something they enjoy. They want to root for this team, and if they think this guy's a rapist, they're going to have a hard time rooting for this team.
It's much easier to blame the victim. It's much easier to say she's just making it up. These women are just trying to exploit these men for money or something. That's much easier than saying they can't keep going to these games. They can't keep listening to this song, because every time they hear this song, they think of this guy as an abuser. I think people have a built-in mechanism, a denial mechanism, that is defensive at base, and it's hard to get beyond this.
By the way, one of the reasons for the idea of “the other” is “the other is the one who commits the violence”. Somebody who's different—a culture that's different from us, an individual who's crazy or different from us—is comforting to people. If we take in that a large percentage of the abuse is perpetrated by guys who are average, normal guys, or in some cases charismatic celebrities, then it really disrupts our world view. What does that mean about our society if some of the people we admire are acting in these ways? I think it's very disconcerting for people.
I know in Canada just recently—I won't name the person but the famous radio individual—