-Lou Lumenick of NYpost.com recapped the Anne Helen Petersen Buzzfeed piece and stated that though he’s not gonna say he doesn’t believe that Loretta Young was raped by Gable, he questions why Young’s official biographer never mentioned the rape and what were 85-year-old Young’s MOTIVES for speaking about the rape after she spent sixty years trying to cover it up. (Erm . . . maybe because she was still haunted by it and that shit rarely leaves you ???)
-Lumenick interviewed a few film historian friends and Gable biographer Robert Matzen was all, “So this sophisticated woman has to ask for the definition of date rape? This new story makes her sound sort of like an idiot. Loretta was no idiot. She was a Hollywood survivor capable of engineering the whole adoption thing, and she also steadfastly denied Gable’s paternity through the course of her like." (A woman is an idiot for not knowing the definition of date rape even though most people don’t understand consent?)
- Matzen also believes that Young said Gable raped her because she was concerned about her legacy. (WTF)
- Matzen also believes that Young said Gable raped her because she was concerned about her legacy. (WTF)
- Another film historian and “Girl 27” writer David Stenn was all, “It’s entirely conceivable that Loretta Young’s version is true. It’s also possible that her Catholic guilt caused her to reframe the narrative decades later. It speaks to the tragic and unjust attitudes of the era. Not only did Loretta have the shame of premarital sex, but [she] had the burden of pregnancy. Judy told me her mother told her, “’You are my mortal sin.’”(These historians are pointing fingers at everything except for Gable. “Gable couldn’t possibly be a rapist! Young was just too Catholic!”)
- Stenn was also all Gable raping Young was acceptable back in the 1930s. And: “If the story is true, there’s something deeply poignant about her only understanding what happened many decades later. It shines a light on an ugly period of Hollywood and its treatment of women.”
- Stenn was also all Gable raping Young was acceptable back in the 1930s. And: “If the story is true, there’s something deeply poignant about her only understanding what happened many decades later. It shines a light on an ugly period of Hollywood and its treatment of women.”
- Lumenick then quotes Young describing the gentle and tender way Gable treated women, then questions whether or not Young was putting on a show for the cameras. After allowing his film historian friends to do the dirty work, Lumenick ends with, “Or, more important, was Young still in denial about an ugly reality in her distant past? We’ll never know for sure.”