You’ve got to hand it to Mel Gibson. When it comes to potentially career-ending outbursts of vile bigotry, there really is nobody better. As somebody posted on Twitter this week (there is increasingly little point in even trying to formulate this stuff yourself), ‘You’re a pretty hard-core ass when drunkenly yelling about Jews running banks and calling a lady cop “sugar tits” is your cute, lesser rant’.
We’ll come to that one in a moment. This time around, the star of many of my favourite films was taped, allegedly, having a go at his then girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva. Go out dressed like that, he basically said, and you are liable to ‘get raped by a pack of niggers’.
Which, do you reckon, is the most offensive bit? The n-word made the headlines, and ‘raped’ isn’t great either, in context. For my money, though, it’s the rather more subtle ‘pack’ bit that does a lot of the work, racistly speaking. Mind you, it’s worth noting that this was not solely a racist statement. You see, what Gibson is saying to his other half here (allegedly, allegedly) is that even given that black people are sub-human molesters who roam like dogs, if she goes out like that, and they rape her, it won’t be their fault. It’ll be hers. Because of her clothes. Misogyny, in other words, and at no extra cost. Awesome stuff.
Gibson has racist form. The ‘cute, lesser rant’ mentioned above took place in 2006, when he was arrested for driving under the influence. The story goes that he called a female arresting officer ‘Sugar Tits’, before asking her male partner if he was Jewish and saying ‘the f***ing Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world’.
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