Michael Gira fans: thoughts on the Larkin Grimm accusations?
 

I'm really in a bit of a quandary about this whole thing. I don't want to ignore it and say nothing, but I also don't want to advertise certain "loaded" words because at this point this is all unsubstantiated, and the situation itself is convoluted and weird as hell.

But the truth is that Michael Gira is being accused of ... stuff... by Larkin Grimm, and after reading everyone's two cents on the matter, I have no idea how to feel about any of this.

It's one hell of a bizarre story. I don't want to imply a bias, but I'm a lifelong Swans fan and that's probably something most of you know about me by now. That doesn't mean I believe Gira or his wife over Larkin. Doesn't mean the opposite. I don't have enough information to form a well informed opinion, so I hope people will just read it for themselves if they haven't already.

Read about it on Stereogum

Maybe we should be talking about this. Maybe that's the last thing we should be doing. I really don't know.

I'm really looking forward to some drama around this story.

first of all, can you ever trust an indie folkie acoustic twee singer? the answer is no. gira is innocent. case closed.

Hah.

but seriously.

i dont believe her.

i believe giras wife.

when she said "people thought michael and i had a love affair, and in a way maybe we did" - you just know that this is narcissistic self promotion.

But he's such an intense artist. I bet he read Alice Miller's ''The Drama of Being a Child'' and never recovered.

Yeah, it's all a bit fishy and weird. And it happened so long ago. But I'm a male Swans fan, so my first impulse was to question myself.

Also, I can't imagine Gira saying, "I'm gonna make you a star, trust me."
That's a total bias of mine, based on my limited interactions with him and my impression of him as an artist, but... yeah, just can't see it.

nope.

Who knows what the hell is going on.

The bit where the wife claims to have "proof" brings up an interesting question: why not reveal this proof and end the whole thing?

Frankly, this is depressing, especially since a link somewhere or other alerted me to the Kesha vs Dr Luke thing, which I didn't know anything about.

I think every man should be castrated. We can surgically extract jizz whenever we need a few more people.

cos they are actively consulting with lawyers.

larkin isn't, she's just coming up with ways to gain attention now that she left yale and her shitty indie folk career is dying.

the truth will out and maybe finally the evil of indie folk will be defeated.

This is why smart men keep their their dicks in their pants. Whatever is the truth, sounds to me like could have been prevented by keeping the working relationship professional. Keep sex out of professional relationship or friendships.

We also shouldn't be quick to condemn anyone in this, whether her or him
We don't know. What we do know is there is a fair accusation worth investigating.

N: What was the writing and recording process like for Parplar, and how did it differ from your process of creating previous work?

LG: First of all I wrote the songs before recording them,which I had never done before. Then I welcomed a notorious pervert to have his way with my songs, and he ended up just wanting to help me make them as beautiful as they were inside my head. I didn’t fight with Michael Gira nearly as much as I expected to. He is a psychic, seeing deeply into my own personal vision, and he was very respectful and helpful and useful. We did a lot of surrendering. We said yes to everything. We did it quickly and we didn’t question ourselves. There was total confidence and joy in the making of this album. It practically created itself.

Making this record was different from the others also in that I
invited a man to balance my feminine energy somewhat and banish the
radioactive pink unicorns from my ovaries. Michael thinks I became a
woman in the process of making this record, like I was a little girl
before. He is partially right, but I wasn’t a child, I was an alien
and genderless creature. Now I am a Femme Fatale. Watch out.

Exactly. It's not a far-fetched idea to see Michael Gira forcing himself on some girl. After all, he is an artiste with strong views of himself and narcissistic drive.

Dead_b: people can be weird, self-absorbed, dress goofy and be worried about their career and still be telling the truth. Not saying she is, but the arguments you're putting forth are making me uncomfortable.

im sure gira feels way more uncomfortable knowing that he's being falsely accused of rape

also dont draw universals from what i say about this one case.

burden of proof lies with the accuser

No universal blame. You clearly don't like this one individual person.

And yeah, I'm sure Gira isn't having fun. Next to child molestation or being a Creed fan, I can't think of a worse accusation to make against someone.

in recent years rich white feminists have been fighting to redefine the notion of consent so that its something the women can decide, arbitrarily, anytime whatsoever after the act of sex.

they do this for power and money and out of their own fucked up pathologies.

it's not surprising that these women who are at the pinnacle of access to contraception, easy divorce and abortion would resort to this. she went to yale, her career is failing. notice the dripping entitlement from every word she wrote. she literally says its giras fault people dont like her and she doesnt have the career she wants. she literally says that.

this is our fucked up world of gender studies and 24/7 smartphone hd bukkake. rich men use women as disposable commodities and rich women use and destroy men for their own narcissism or for money.

people are used as commodities and masturbatory prothesis because THAT'S WHAT WE ARE until the rich can literally create bodies and body parts from machines. the human waste ie. us is to be eliminated as a threat.

all of this shit will continue until reproduction is severed from the body completely and narcissism replaces the sexual relationship. its already happening.

-

its so obvious she's talking shit and was not perturbed in the slightest about the bumbling consensual moment where gira saw sense and decided not to fuck the crazy pussy who was obviously enticing him and using him. i so do not believe a word of what she says. even if i did like her music i still wouldn't believe her

also, im sorry but did any of you read jennifer giras story of being an actual rape victim and not immeadiately think the chances of someone like her defending michael like that if there was ANY doubt in her mind are pretty fuckin low?

Alright. The Marxist in me is with you. But what about this:


I'm just curious. Is there a long list of false accusations against high-profile targets? Just asking.

thats a typo

btw, im not coming out on one side of the other.

a system where male courts and judges and patriarchy in general can silence and dismiss women is not good. niether is the opposite.

noone is happy about being a mortal sexuated being and we never will be

Look, she can be a total bitch, have had a consenting sexual relationship and still also have been raped. Gira admitted to sex. If she is lying, keeping his dick in his pants would have solved the problem. However, if she is not? Hence why the accusations are fair. After all, consenting adults have sex everyday, are having consenting sex right now, without any such rape accusations. So that any accusations are made at all to a degree warrants fair suspicion. Innocent until proven guilty doesn't negate reasonable suspicion either.

they aint fair because they aint true. zero reason to believe her and she did not go to the authorities and get dna evidence at the time. she waits until now, when there's no way to definitively prove it, to make the accusations. she's a fucking LIAR.

How do you know that? Why are their zero reasons to believe her exactly?

Again, people have sex everyday without being accused of rape, we then should take any accusations seriously until they are proven otherwise. Again innocent until proven guilty doesn't negate the reality of reasonable suspicion.

Woah. I didn't mean to align myself with what DB is saying. No offense, but I think you're being a little flippant and extreme about this. My first impulse was to share the article with some Swans fans, then I thought, "fuck this, no way this is true. I'd be messing things up for Gira by telling anyone else about this."

But then I thought that I almost had to bring it up somewhere. I really shouldn't be making any decisions or claims about innocence or truth. I shouldn't definitely not be pushing aside allegations of rape just because I happen to like the music that the accused person makes. That's why I posted it here. This board didn't talk about the Tracy Fuchs allegations... I wanted to bring it up but didn't, because it makes me uncomfortable as hell. I think we should probably be talking about this because it's out there now, for better or worse.

my reasons are already given.

Frankly those weren't very good at all.

you have no reasons to believe her since there is absolutely no way to possibly prove she isn't lying unless gira admitted it.

and she has no means to prove her claim.

and if it really happened she could have but didn't.

so are we supposed to accept her claim and let gira endlessly defend himself? bankrupt himself in court
or just pay her to stop talking about it?

hardly fair. read his wifes posts though.

goodnight.

The wife has yet to put forward any of these proofs she mentioned aside from an emotionally driven red herring falacy that because her own experience with sexual assault was more violent in nature that somehow what might have happened in this instance was not rape.

Further all you have doneis attack the character of the accuser and taken sides with the accused based entirely on the accused own testimony. And by the way, notice how the accused already changed his story once.

The point remains valid, that there even is an accusation in the first place warrants the suspicion. The accused hasn't put anything more convincing than the accuser has so far which again makes this a fair question.

If this comes down entirely to a judgment call, hey, call me old school but a sure sign of knowing that a sexual act wasn't mutually consenting is when one of the people accuses of rape. #JustSaying

I also think this "proof" Gira's wife is alluding to is strange. Yes, why mention that you have proof without saying what that proof is?

That's a technique US cops use to scare people into confessing to things they haven't done. If you've got proof of something, use it or don't talk about it.

Also, I'm sure I don't need to point out that there's no way to prove that something didn't happen. Even if the entire thing was on film, anf Grimm was saying, "please have sex with me right now," it wouldn't prove that Gira never raped Grimm. It wouldn't even prove that he didn't raper her that very night. "Rape" is a term that is in constant flux and evolution. In many cases, women who are legitimately raped don't realize that they've been raped until they've had time to process the event. Often victims struggle with the admission that something no right happened. Sometimes they give consent and later claim they gave it but didn't want to, which complicates things even more. The incident becomes "clearer" in the mind of the victim after time.

But therein lies part of the problem. Memory is malleable. Memory never gets better or more reliable as time passes. Throw in the fact that she was blind drunk and it get even stickier.

She mentions having had therapy in the months and years following the event. Well, as much respect as I have for the field of psychology as a scientific endeavor, the clinical branch of it is flawed beyond belief. This is a well established fact. Even the most ethical and professional therapist can alter their patients' thought and memories and beliefs, because no mater how well trained a clinician may be, s/he is still human, and still brings their biases into the session. Those biases are then projected onto the memory and perspective of the patient, and all objectivity is lost.

It's fucked up that this conversation has become so convoluted. It should be simple. In a perfect world, if a woman said she was raped, nobody would question her, because in a perfect world people would be sane, people would have picturesque memories, and nobody would lie. Actually in a perfect world rape wouldn't be a thing. But that's neither here not there.

It's not a perfect world though. I believe people should tread carefully around accusations of sexual assault and rape unless the incident can be verified, because it's just going to bring a lot of hate to the front door of both the accuser and the accused. This should be done in private. With lawyers present.

Facebook needs to go away forever. It's done nothing good for anyone but the folks who have the Social Network soundtrack. And Zuckerberg, I guess. Kill it. It needs to die.

I know you didn't mean that exactly as you said it, or at least i hope you don't :confused:

Yeah, slander is not great by any means. But ... come on, now.

I'm not sure if this was supposed to make me laugh, but it did. :)

Yr suck ass business. Ha!

She can be a crazy loser and you can not believe her but she still could turn out to be right. Again the irony in this is folks here have attacked her and believed him for no reason other than just because. I will repeat it the last time, until truly proven otherwise the accusations are fair.

anyone else picture gira with a top hat, monocle and cane saying "I'M GONNA MAKE YOU A STAR, BABY!" top kek someone should make that into a meme

I guess people don't want to feel obligated to chuck out all their Swans records.