Reply #184: Yes, I'd agree. You do NOT exploit someone like that. You just don't. [View All]

[calimary]

If you really love them, you don't make a sideshow out of them just to win a point. You don't blow something up into a circus, calling in every looney and media whore in Christendom to hog the spotlight, and announce there will be no more interviews, only to turn directly around and plant yourself in front of more microphones and cameras, and hang around where you know they are and where you know they'll be looking to photograph and seek comment from you. You don't announce you will seek no further redress in the courts and then turn directly around and do that very thing, bringing the same demand again and again and again, over and over and over to the same courts that already have reviewed all the evidence (including all four-and-some hours of that videotape) and ruled against you. You don't whip people up into a frenzy and make inflamatory statements that were designed (and probably fed you, with coaching) to provoke. Further, you don't throw in wild and cruel accusations that your daughter may have been beaten or abused at the last moment, when that should have been on the record at the beginning of this.

Fifteen years ago, in 1990, there was PLENTY of sensitivity in society, and the media, in the courts, and in law enforcement, about spousal battery, and it would have been brought up. Evidence of it would have been detected when she was initially taken to the hospital or examined by paramedics. I was working at a radio station in 1978 in which I was assigned a week-long series on rape. I had to interview all kinds of people, from victims to rape crisis hotline people, counselors, therapists, and law enforcement. There was SUBSTANTIAL awareness of, and procedures and policies for, what you do with a female victim and how you handle her and what you look for when an attack or a suspected attack or suspected foul play may have occurred. The fact that the Schindlers and friends were throwing this in at the beyond-eleventh hour showed they were merely grasping at straws. It was ridiculous, offensive, and appalling.

Certainly Michael Schiavo's no saint. But he sure burned off a lot of purgatory time with what the Schindlers and their friends, Barnum and Bailey and Company, put him through.