During a segment on CNN’s Newsroom Thursday, host Carol Costello pushed back against author Susan Patton’s attempts to both blame the victims of sexual abuse and frame the issue of rape and sexual violence as nothing more than failed hook ups. Patton, who wrote the horrid book ‘Marry Smart,’ spent the entire segment insisting she wasn’t “victim blaming” when that was exactly what she was doing. Thankfully, Costello wouldn’t allow Patton to spew her rape apologies and false narratives as Costello threw the truth in Patton’s face and made her look like the bumbling idiot she is.
The interview immediately started off on rocky footing as Patton made the claim that rape used to be about a man forcing himself on a woman, but we are now “identifying as rape what is really a clumsy hook up melodrama.” This took Costello aback, though it appears she wasn’t really shocked by Patton’s statement, considering Patton’s history and the apparent conversation the two of them had prior to the segment. From that point on, Costello didn’t allow Patton to glibly toss around generalizations regarding sexual abuse, instead forcing Patton to defend her indefensible positions.
Below is video of the segment, courtesy of Media Matters:
Patton has created sort of an anti-feminist cottage industry of late. She’s found a welcome home at Fox News, where she’s regularly been brought on to morally sermonize young women about the need to dress and act properly so they can eventually marry a good earning professional man and have babies. With the Rolling Stone campus rape story making headlines, she is now being sought out for opinions on sexual violence, which she of course thinks is completely overstated and is really just a bunch of women falsely crying rape because of “regrettable sex.”
While CNN has often been accused of being “Fox-lite,” it still isn’t quite the ideological haven for the extreme wingnuts and off-the-rocker crazies that Fox News is. Therefore, when a victim-blamer who wants to take America back to the 1950s appears on a non-Fox news show, she may not get the friendly reception she’s been accustomed to at the other studio. In this instance, Costello pushed her and threw legitimate facts and statistics in her face at every opportunity, forcing Patton to become flustered and visibly uncomfortable. When Patton tried to bring up women who falsely accuse men of rape, Costello countered with the fact that the rate of women falsely accusing rape is only 4.9%. (This appears to be the rate as measured by the UK. The FBI has it between 2% and 8%, but those numbers are from the late 1990s.)
All in all, it was good to see someone who was obviously being a rape apologist get confronted and repudiated on the air. Patton is a horrendous person who is trying to cash in on her disgustingly awful philosophy for young women. Costello helped expose her as an ignorant fraud and, hopefully, she’ll see her media appearances fall by the wayside.
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