Sex, Lies and a Complicit Media

With a startling specificity of language, Schwarzenegger fondly recounted one several-guys-and-one-lone-gal orgy: “Bodybuilders party a lot, and once, in Gold’s — the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train — there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together.”

Asked by the interviewer if this had been a “gangbang,” Schwarzenegger said, “Yes, but not everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys.”

Allred said of his description: “I am disgusted, appalled, revolted, sickened, disturbed and troubled.” On Labor Day, in a luncheon speech to the National Foundation of Women Legislators meeting in Las Vegas, she read from a letter she sent to Schwarzenegger demanding it is “imperative” that he stop his “evasive and simply unacceptable answers about this serious issue. The comments attributed to you appear to both condone and make light of the victimization of a woman. A group sexual assault of a woman is no joke and no laughing matter. It is reprehensible, repulsive and injurious to women.” Added Allred, “Sexually targeting women for ‘relief’ is the act of bullies and men who have no regard or concern for women or girls and the long-lasting harm that such conduct may inflict on them. If you were involved in such behavior we call on you to take full responsibility for your actions.”

Although two local stations covered Allred’s speech — one CBS affiliate, the other Fox — the feed has not shown up in Los Angeles or on any national broadcast. Yet major news was made when Fox TV bounced Frenchie Davis as an American Idol contestant because she once posed nude for an Internet porn site. Talk about a major disconnect.

But the Oui interview wasn’t a she-accuses, he-denies allegation like Juanita Broderick vs. Bill Clinton. This was a he-bragged-about-what-he-did situation. No one may ever know what really happened until the woman involved is heard from. Yet it’s also clear that no one will get any clarity on the subject courtesy of Schwarzenegger.

And no one supporting Schwarzenegger has yet to explain that March 2001 Premiere magazine article which recounts more recent moviemaking allegations of groping and fondling by Schwarzenegger, including one claiming that “Arnold went up to the woman, put his hands inside her blouse, and proceeded to pull her breasts out of her bra.” According to the article, the woman ran off and became hysterical, but refused to press charges for fear of losing her job. “Stories of his boorish behavior can no longer be routinely erased,” the magazine said. “Then again, he’d make a helluva politician.” A lawyer for Schwarzenegger denied the accusations but never sued.

Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court recently confirmed what most Democrats had been saying during the Clinton scandals: that people’s sex lives are their own personal business. But sex as a political sniper is disarmed only as long as the sex is consensual and all parties are willing participants. As for this self-described gangbang: In the eye of the beholder, was Schwarzenegger a youthful sexual hijinxer or craven sexual predator? Or, put into Hollywood parlance, was this a scene out of American Pie or The Accused?

Even in the sexually liberated 1970s, the term gangbang had then, still has and will always conjure up an image of an act of sexual aggression. And the description of several heavily muscled men at one time having a sexual encounter with a single woman, where words like jump and took are used to describe it, suggests roughness even if the woman found it pleasurable. Even in terms of contemporary morality when attitudes careen from politically correct feminism to Howard Stern’s she’s-asking-to-be-treated-like-a-ho humor, it’s a rare set of circumstances to equate a gangbang to a “party,” as Arnold does.

At first, Schwarzenegger had only this to say about the article: It was not the type of interview he would give today. “I never lived ‰ my life to be a politician. I never lived my life to be the governor of California,” and so forth. By Friday, he developed amnesia overnight, claiming at a public appearance that he had no recollection of who, what, where, when. When that didn’t fly, Schwarzenegger tried to give the impression that the sex talk was a publicity stunt.

The Oui question-and-answer interview, which took place when Schwarzenegger was 29 years old and already a minor celebrity (having appeared in two movies, Stay Hungry and Pumping Iron, the documentary about the 1975 Mr. Olympia contest, which Schwarzenegger won), first came to light on the Internet last Wednesday. By evening, some of California’s TV newscasts made general references to Schwarzenegger’s “graphic” description of his “wild” past without fleshing out the lurid details.

Last Friday, the author of the Oui interview, Peter Manso, told Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now! show that Schwarzenegger’s attitude back then was “to put it bluntly, women are hunks of meat, no more, no less.” It was clear in a 1981 Penthouseinterview that Schwarzenegger, then dating Maria Shriver, had become more politically correct. But he still expressed a belief that “I was introduced to sex in the right way, so I didn’t develop any hang-ups about it” — this, after describing “a very pleasurable scene” of serial group sex where, in his native Austria, he joined a group of fellow bodybuilders who “said that women were really just there to have sex with, and at 15 I believed them. On Sundays, they went out to train at a lake near town, took their weights and some female companions,” and had “very free and open sex” during which “nobody knew who belonged to whom.”