It’s Monday morning, tax day, crummy weather, and lots of work to do, so I’m not going to make things worse by posting here the photo that the New York Times splayed across the front of its Sunday Styles section yesterday, and that made me (and probably many of you) go ICK! EWWWW! EWWWW EWWWW EWWWW! At the very least, the photo, which depicts disgraced “fashion designer” Anand Jon in the company of two very, very young-looking models somewhere out on the party circuit, is the kind of woozy tableau that reminds you that the lower rungs of the fashion and celebrity world are saturated in vulgarity and creepiness whether or not actual crimes are committed. Of course, given the multiplying legal charges of rape and molestation that Jon now faces, the photo’s prominent placement, beneath the headline “The Designer Who Liked Models” and accompanying a spare-no-tawdry-detail article by Hollywood correspondent Sharon Waxman, makes for quite the indictment in the court of public opinion. It does so, in fact, to an extent that made me uncomfortable, though I’ll go out on a limb and say that this brother is clearly a grade-A, bona fide creep and I’d be highly surprised, given what’s coming out, if he was cleared of all charges.
Meanwhile the article has raised hackles in other quarters, as I discovered while checking our news page to see if anyone had posted it. Indeed: an anonymous tipster linked the story as “NY times ignorant report,” quoting this line from the piece: “Mr. Jon is well known in his native India, and national newspapers like The Hindustan Times and Calcutta Times follow every development with interest,” and commenting in response:
Actually he is unknown in India.The is no newspaper called Calcutta Times. And this Jon story has never appeared in The Telegraph. Indian media has not any given attention to Anand Jon.
Now the “Calcutta Times” thing tripped me up too; I chalked it up to shoddy Googling by Waxman to make a point that, while tangential to the story, might give it some extra oomph. I maintain that view, especially upon finding that “Calcutta Times” is the name of the Times of India’s Calcutta supplement (similar to those it runs in other cities); Waxman must have just grabbed something that ran there to support her claim.
But of course, the tipster had to go and assert that the Jon story has not even despoiled the virginal eyes of the Indian newspaper reading public, and that, of course, is a load of bollocks. In fact, the very Telegraph, which the tipster claims has never run a story on Jon, did exactly that on March 14, with a piece by K. P. Nayar that begins as follows:
Washington, March 14: Anand Jon, whose Indian-American success story is the stuff of dreams, is in a Los Angeles jail, arrested on rape charges.
So even if Waxman’s technique was shoddy, you can hardly fault her for claiming that Indians are paying attention to the case given this kind of treatment.
Anyway, this is inside baseball, and I would like to explain for the benefit of any mainstream media or bloggers coming here to find the “official” desi reaction to the latest developments in the Jon case, that the point I’ve just raised is totally tangential to the case itself, and that as far as I know, reaction among American desis remains the same combination of “innocent until proven guilty… I guess” and “EEEEWWWW ICK ICK ICK” that it’s been from the beginning.
Meanwhile, Brother Jon and his crew aren’t above using a bit of Ho-rientalism in service of his defense. Here’s Jon’s attorney on why the story of one of the victims can’t be right:
“Why would she change into pajamas?” asked Mr. Richards, Mr. Jon’s lawyer. “Why didn’t she leave when she sees there’s no bed for her? Why didn’t she punch him in the face?” He noted that there were no signs of physical trauma. “My client is 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds. He’s a thin Gandhi-type guy. He can’t overpower anybody. Any girl would kick his butt. It’s not even a close call. That’s what’s so silly about this.”
The preposterous insertion of the Gandhi reference has already made Gawker, by the way. And this is the same attorney who, earlier in the story, is quoted offering the universal blame-the-victim line: “You can’t fault a man if women throw themselves at him.”
And there’s the story of how Jon picked up a teenager on MySpace (his preferred hunting ground, apparently), offered her a chance to model, and flew to Dallas to meet her parents:
Mr. Jon told the girl’s parents, the father said, “I treasure the feminine being. I got all this spirituality from my grandmother and my mom.”
Needless to say, there’s nothing spiritual about what happens next. Still, we learn that Jon embraces many religions: on one occasion, his sister/enabler Sanjana, “who works with him and by all accounts does much to soften her brother’s cruder edges,” says he’s unavailable to talk because it’s Passover, and he’s “in temple.” And the description of a possibly coerced sexual encounter with an aspiring model ends as follows: “Afterward she went to clean up. Mr. Jon sat and meditated.”
