Alicia
Machado told the truth about Trump, and the backlash is terrifying
Lucia Graves
The
former Miss Universe has been smeared for speaking out. Gossip about
a woman’s past must have no bearing on how we judge the man who
attacked her
Friday 30 September
2016 17.20 BST
The story of Alicia
Machado is many things but as it pertains to the presidential
election, it is a story about the time Donald Trump smeared a woman
and riled up a media circus to spread the gossip. That was back in
the 1990s and mostly fodder for tabloids. Now it’s happening all
over again – only as part of a presidential campaign.
In the first
candidates’ debate this week, Hillary Clinton invoked her
opponent’s high-profile fat-shaming of Machado after she was
crowned Miss Universe in 1996, comments that pushed her into a
downward spiral of eating disorders for five years.
Until recently Trump
wasn’t denying any of it – when the New York Times first asked
Trump to respond to her story, he replied simply: “To that, I will
plead guilty.” But on Wednesday, his campaign released talking
points claiming the story was “totally baseless and
unsubstantiated” and that Machado was merely attempting to “gain
notoriety at the expense of Mr Trump’s name and reputation”.
The irony of course
is that we can verify Machado’s story not in spite of Trump but
because of him. It was he who made sure her weight-gain and his
treatment of her was documented around the world; what’s changed is
simply public perception.
Former
Miss Universe Alicia Machado on Trump: ‘I know what he can do’
Back in May, Slate’s
Jessica Winter published a roundup of the media’s cruel and
inappropriate coverage from the time, much of which laughed right
along with Trump: “No one could accuse Alicia Machado of being the
size of the universe,” wrote a CNN correspondent at the time. “But
as her universe expanded, so did she.” And while the media may have
since advanced on the subject of fat-shaming – it’s no longer
acceptable to write about young women’s weight that way – we’re
still falling for Trump’s sensationalized media circuses.
This time the line
of attack, pushed most aggressively by surrogates and rightwing news
outlets, defames Machado as a porn star and murder accomplice, who
once threatened to kill a judge and posed topless for Playboy, among
other things. The latest assault came from Trump himself on Friday.
He called her “disgusting” on Twitter and asked followers to
“check out sex tape and past”. Even if the worst of this is true,
it doesn’t invalidate anything she said about Trump.
The real headline
should be “Woman Who Speaks Truth About Presidential Candidate
Endures Second Character Assassination”. The sequence is familiar
by now: throughout history, women who speak out against powerful men
– as Machado did, for instance, in the New York Times earlier this
year – have been subject to a backlash. They’re slut-shamed or
cast as crazy, as the Anita Hill movie, Confirmation, recently
reminded us.
Instead the Daily
Caller went with “Porn Star Campaigns For Hillary Clinton,” while
the Daily Mail landed upon “Miss Universe ‘fat-shamed’ by
Donald Trump was accused of threatening to kill a judge and being an
accomplice to a MURDER bid in her native Venezuela,” noting that it
was “unknown if [the] Clinton campaign vetted Machado”. Alex
Jones’s conspiracy-theory-mongering site also speculated luridly
about the father of Machado’s daughter’s past.
First off, the
Clinton campaign confirmed to the Guardian that she is not being paid
by them. She’s a volunteer.
The pornography
charge appears to be false. The website Snopes, which specializes in
debunking online hoaxes, writes that the anal sex clip that turns up
on free porn sites under Machado’s name appears to be from the 2004
feature Apprentass 4, which stars another woman. Machado did pose on
the cover of Playboy – twice in fact. But if it’s going to be
used to smear her character, perhaps it’s relevant to note that so
has Donald Trump? The difference is Trump kept his shirt on, but even
that was probably only in deference to the preferences of the
audience. And speculation relating to her seven-year-old daughter
should not be a journalistic enterprise at any respectable media
organization.
The most substantive
charge is that in 1998 a 21-year-old Machado was accused of driving a
getaway car after her boyfriend shot his brother-in-law. This is from
the Economist’s report at the time:
The male lead in
this complex plot is Miss Machado’s rugged boyfriend, Juan Rafael
Rodriguez Reggeti. He had a sister, who, eight months pregnant,
jumped off a fifth-floor balcony. He, allegedly, blaming her husband
for the suicide, sought revenge by firing two shots at him just after
the funeral. The husband was hit but survived. Mr Rodriguez fled in a
car driven, say the police, by Miss Machado.
The investigating
judge, Maximiliano Fuenmayor, issued an arrest warrant for Mr
Rodriguez. But Miss Machado, who claimed she was ill at home at the
time, seemed to be in the clear, for the moment anyway. It was a
short moment. Within hours, Mr Fuenmayor had a telephone call from
her. He says she threatened to ruin his career and have him killed.
She admits she rang, but says it was merely to thank him for his
unbiased pursuit of justice.
The accusations went
nowhere and she never faced charges. The report that she drove a
getaway car was dropped almost 20 years ago due to lack of evidence.
More recently, they did not prevent her from obtaining US citizenship
in August, a process involving a background check and clearance.
Interestingly Corey
Lewandowski, the Trump operator who dredged up the allegations, was
charged with battery as recently as this year. And unlike, Machado,
who has only volunteered, the former campaign manager was, until
Thursday, still on Trump’s payroll.
Machado’s role in
the debate has also spawned claims that a profile I wrote was
orchestrated with the Clinton campaign.
To be clear: it was
not. I never communicated with the Clinton campaign around this story
except to ask for a comment on Monday afternoon, as Politico
explained.
Given a chance to
respond to the personal accusations about her, Machado – whose
English is imperfect – did not debunk them as forcefully as she
might have (though again, she has been denying them for almost 20
years now). Instead she said something different, and something which
has been largely misconstrued. After dismissing the reports as
“speculation” born of her celebrity in Latin America she waxed
indignant: “He can say whatever he wants to say, I don’t care,”
she said. “You know, I have my past. Of course, everybody has a
past. I’m not a saint girl. But that is not the point now.”
Trump’s campaign
has latched on to this as evidence of her guilt. But perhaps there’s
been something lost in translation. Trump said at the debate that
she’s “no Mother Teresa” and here she’s echoing Trump’s
implicitly sexist line from the debate. Mother Teresa is an actual
saint – she shouldn’t have to be.
Let’s assume for a
moment that the worst is true and she threatened a judge as a
21-year-old: it doesn’t make Trump look any better.
You shouldn’t have
to be Mother Teresa to not be fat-shamed before millions of people.
And Michael Brown being “no angel”, as the New York Times put it
recently, shouldn’t have been relevant in a case about being killed
by police, as Black Lives Matter tried to teach us.
These instances
aren’t equivalent, but the point is people who lack power because
they are women or minorities, or both, too often aren’t given the
basic human dignities the rest of us take for granted.
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