Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

Back in the day, this permanent A+ list musician had to pay a lot of money to several women who accused him of filming them in various states of undress without them being aware.

Those settlements were made public.

The settlements which were not made public were those he made with parents of teens he sexually assaulted. Sometimes they were not even in their teens.

The musician said it was just “the cost of doing business.”

He always picked tweens/teens from poor backgrounds.

They were most susceptible to his charm and 90% of the time never told anyone what he had done to them.

When he did get called out, often it was because he impregnated one of the tweens/teens.

He would give the family $1,000 or sometimes a new car and they would go away happy.

I bet there must be a hundred people out there that are his direct offspring, if not more.

This was not a one time a week thing.

He did this dozens of times a week and would often take a handful of them on the road with him when he toured.

Chuck Berry

Singer, musician, sex offender: let’s remember the whole Chuck Berry

When Chuck Berry died last weekend the obituaries spoke as one – he was an extraordinary talent who had lived an extraordinary life – and everyone from Barack Obama to Mick Jagger rushed to tweet their unqualified admiration. Yet one detail was notably muted in the many articles about him: that he was a multiple sex offender.

In 1959 Berry was arrested for taking a 14-year-old girl, Janice Escalanti, across state lines for “immoral purposes”, a crime for which he eventually served two years in prison. But that was almost 60 years ago, some might say: different time, different morals! Well, kinda. That he was then accused of installing a video camera in the ladies’ toilet of his Missouri restaurant is less easy to jazz hands away, given that it happened in the not wildly distant year of 1989. After tapes from this camera were found in Berry’s home, he was given a suspended sentence and settled a class action with 59 women.

I am not someone who thinks an artist’s personal flaws – for want of a better phrase – damn their professional output. My eyes roll hard when I hear someone say they “just can’t watch Woody Allen movies any more”, because I believe it is perfectly possible to separate the artist and the art. But I am always intrigued about which artists get a free pass about this stuff, and who doesn’t.

Woody Allen is now 81, and when he dies his various sex scandals – leaving his partner for her adopted daughter, being accused by another daughter of sexually molesting her – will be mentioned, if not in the first line, then certainly in the first paragraph of his obituaries. Allen was never charged, let alone jailed, and has always denied the allegations; but it is impossible to imagine politicians tweeting such unhesitant praise when he goes. Similarly, Roman Polanski’s entire life has been shaped by his decision in 1977 to sexually assault 13-year-old Samantha Gailey; this, too, will be acknowledged early on in the tributes. The New York Times obituary of Berry, by contrast, didn’t mention the Escalanti case until the 23rd paragraph; the so-called “potty camera” scandal was entirely absent. Instead, the news coverage of his death leaned on soothingly euphemistic terms like “legal troubles” and “colourful life”.

While everyone knows Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old cousin, no sensible soul today says people shouldn’t listen to Great Balls Of Fire – not in the way that Gary Glitter or even Michael Jackson’s music has been deemed problematic in liberal circles. Had Operation Yewtree decided to investigate every high-profile musician accused of sleeping with underage girls, including (Britain, you are not going to thank me for this) David Bowie, they would have run out of police officers by the end of day one. Allegations that John Peel had sex with an underage girl have in no way impeded his status as one of Britain’s great late national heroes. – Source

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