Posted on 01/29/2007 7:12:21 AM PST by PercivalWalks
Police squad cars all across America bear the slogan, “There’s no excuse for domestic violence.” Yet there is one situation in which the media and the public seem to feel that domestic violence is sometimes excusable — when the perpetrator is a woman, and the victim is a man.
Imagine a woman trapped in a loveless marriage with a jealous, potentially violent husband whom she believes may be cheating on her. She stays in the marriage because she fears she could be separated from her children should they divorce, and finds understanding, companionship and passion in a relationship with a coworker. Her husband finds out about the affair and goes on a violent, jealous rampage, slaughtering her in front of her daughter as the daughter begs him not to kill her mother.
There would be no tears or excuses for the killer, and nobody would dare to proffer the fact that his wife had been cheating on him as a justification for the murder.
These are the facts of the Clara Harris case, with the genders reversed. Yet the reaction has been quite different.
The media on both the left and the right have poured derision upon the murder victim, referring to David Harris as a “rat,” a “lying, cheating scumbag” and Clara Harris’ “unfaithful dog of a husband.” Commentator Susan Estrich asked, “Who could blame [Clara] for getting into her Mercedes and running him over?” and seemed a little sad that the Harris County criminal trial jury did. Conservative talk show host Joseph Farah penned a column entitled “Free Clara Harris!” in which he wrote, “I’d give her a medal. … She did the right thing. That creep deserved what he got.”
Even the prosecutor in the murder trial, Mia Magness, expressed her disgust, saying that Clara, instead of killing David by her own hand, should have “[done] like every other woman … get his house, car, kids — make him wish he were dead.”
Lorna Mullens, the jury forewoman in the recently concluded wrongful death trial, expressed sympathy for Clara but said she decided that Clara was responsible for David's death because, after all, "She kept running over him. She could have stopped after she hit him the first time."
CBS portrayed Clara as a pitiable, betrayed wife in the 2004 movie Suburban Madness, and Oprah Winfrey sympathetically interviewed the sobbing Clara from prison in 2005. Of the 354 news stories covering the wrongful death trial that are indexed on Google News, 233 refer to David Harris as Clara Harris’ “cheating husband.” Not one mentions the phrase “domestic violence.”
The truth behind the Clara Harris case has come from the mouth of a child — David’s daughter, Lindsey. Only 16 years old at the time of the murder, Lindsey rode in the front seat with Clara and begged her not to kill her father. Lindsey has denounced the widespread media sympathy for Clara, saying:
“[Clara has appeared] in print and on television to persuade the viewers that she is actually the victim, but she is no victim. What she did was the ultimate act of selfishness, caring only about obtaining revenge and thinking not one bit about how her horrible act was going to affect me or my brothers, Brian and Bradley. Anyone who shared my ride in the car that evening, seeing my dad’s face as he was about to be hit, and experiencing the horrible feel of the car bumping over his body would understand that this murderess deserves no sympathy.”
Bobbi Bacha, vice president of Blue Moon Investigations, the private detective agency Clara had hired to spy on David, also conducted an investigation of Clara. Though the media have largely ignored it, in November 2002 Bacha presented the criminal court with several audio tapes on which witnesses claim that Clara was also having an affair before she killed David.
Lindsey says that Clara mistreated and neglected David, and that her father often confided in her how lonely he felt. Coupled with Clara’s temper and evident capacity for violence, David had ample reason to want to get out of the relationship. Instead of letting him go, Clara killed him.
While many see the Clara Harris case as one of love and betrayal, it is in fact a garden-variety domestic homicide. Clara Harris is no better than high-profile wife-killer Scott Peterson. Perhaps Clara is even worse — at least Peterson spared us the crocodile tears.
This article first appeared in the Houston Chronicle (1/27/07).
Mike McCormick is the Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, the world’s largest shared parenting organization. Their website is www.acfc.org.
Glenn Sacks' columns on men's and fathers' issues have appeared in dozens of America's largest newspapers. Glenn can be reached via his website at www.GlennSacks.com or via email at Glenn@GlennSacks.com.
good grief, Vast, did you write this? ; )
This reminds me of the freeper hysteria after that preacher in SC got gunned down by his wife. People here were falling all over themselves talking about how he must have been a child molester or otherwise deserved it. Incredible. So far, incidentally, I have not yet heard just what the dead guy did to deserve it.
IIRC, the preacher's wife got caught by one of those "Nigerian" scams and lost $15,000 of the family's savings. The husband went ape-shit (and rightly so) and berated his wife. He may have called her stupid.
So she shot him in the head while sleeping.
What do you mean if it were reversed? Clara's story is already a Lifetime (aka the PMS Channel) movie on the evils of men.
No, but the author raises some great points.
Yes, you are right.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/news/ap/0706/0301_winkler_killed_money.html
So, she loses a bunch of money through her stupidity. He gets mad. So she kills him. Unbeleivable. And not a peep from the idiots here who said that it was his fault b/c he was most likely a child molester.
What a bitch. I hope she fries.
Here's a quote from that story, apparently quoting a a court document from her:
Winkler said she and her husband had argued throughout the evening about several things, including family finances. The problems were "mostly my fault," she said, because she was in charge of keeping the family books.
"He had really been on me lately criticizing me for things _ the way I walk, I eat, everything. It was just building up to a point. I was tired of it. I guess I got to a point and snapped," Booth read to the court.
I guess she didn't like the big bad man on her case. Forget the fact that she was such an idiot to fall for a Nigerian scam. Forget the fact that he was trying to serve the Lord through his church and that he probably didn't have a lot for her to lose through her stupiditity. She just didn't feel like taking it anymore.
Actually, I doubt if he had been criticizing her, at all. I bet he did get mad that she fell for the Nigerian scam. And then she decided to kill him.
I repeat: what a bitch. I hope she fries.
(By the way, I was saying the same thing this story broke and freepers were rushing to say that the victim must have been a child molester).
"Deserved it"...that sounds eerily like, "She provoked me."
Glad to see David and Maddie were on the case.....
Evidence #28,435 that Farah is a complete nutcase with zero credibility.
In her case, the DA had to address the hubby's cheating to get through to the women on the jury who might be prone to buy the defense's argument that he actually deserved what he got: IIRC, in essence she said: "so what if he cheated, she should have done what every other self respecting Texas woman does in those circumstances & take him to the cleaners, not the morgue."
Clara ran over her husband multiple times with her stepdaughter in the front seat: she forced this girl to watch her own father being brutally murdered. Magness made it very clear: the victim may not have been an angel,no one is, but Clara Harris is not a victim. She's just another two-bit husband killer who shamelessly wears her betrayed widow's weeds to seek exculpation for her monstrous crime against her husband, her stepdaughter & her own two sons.
And it's largely because of Mia Magness' smart, aggressive prosecution on behalf of David Harris that the women on the jury were able to see through the barrage of pseudofeminist victimology with which they were being bombarded & convict, while the Oprah-fied purveyors of the 'abuse excuse' continue to insist to this day that justice was not served.
In fact, in order to get that conviction, the prosecutor in this case made most of the same points to the jury that the authors of this article are making here years later.She deserves some brownie points for that, I think.
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