BLAMING WOMEN FOR THE CRIMES OF MEN:
For a solid five minutes this week, I believed that an elderly woman in New York City had killed and decapitated another elderly woman. I believed it because it was in the papers. It was there in black and white. In the apartment of this ‘83-year-old Brooklyn woman’, the New York Times reported, cops found the decapitated head of Susan Leyden, a 68-year-old lady who had gone missing. Police became suspicious of the 83-year-old woman and so they ‘searched her apartment’, the BBC said, wherein they found ‘a human head’. A few days later, not far from this seemingly evil woman’s apartment, they also found Ms Leyden’s leg and torso. Grim. And surely unprecedented. When was the last time a very old woman was alleged to have killed and then gruesomely dismembered another woman?
Then it hit me. I got to the very final line of the BBC report and saw these words – this 83-year-old ‘now identifies as a transgender woman’. I got further into the NYT piece, too. Its headline may have said ‘She Killed Two Women. At 83, She Is Charged With Dismembering a Third’, but then came this killer line: ‘[she] was listed as male in earlier court records but now identifies as a woman.’ So it wasn’t a woman. It wasn’t an 83-year-old lady who somehow summoned up the wickedness and the power to allegedly kill and horrifically mutilate a 68-year-old woman. It was a man. The NYT’s headline was a flagrant lie. So was the BBC’s entire account of this ‘woman’, she, allegedly killing Ms Leyden and then brutalising her corpse. I had been told, in no uncertain terms, that a woman killed a woman, and it was completely untrue.
This is the horrifying story of Harvey Marcelin (the name should have been a giveaway), who has been charged with second-degree murder and concealment of a human corpse in relation to the death of Susan Leyden. Mr Marcelin has killed before. Women, of course. In 1963, he was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting to death his girlfriend in Harlem (‘she was convicted of first-degree murder’, the New York Times lies). In 1985, less than a year after he was released from jail, Mr Marcelin stabbed another woman to death (‘she pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter’ in that case, lies the NYT). And now he – he – is charged with murdering a third woman and scattering the poor lady’s body parts across Brooklyn. . . .
This case is horrifying for two reasons. First and foremost because a woman has been killed and dismembered. That is appalling and it is essential that justice is done. But it’s also horrifying because the media are refusing to tell us the truth about it.
Informing readers takes a back seat to tribal signaling.