One such petition, so typical of the petitions, articles and YouTube videos made in support of Cyntoia Brown, is the one started by “festa federica” of Italy. Addressed to Donald Trump, no less, it closed with 963 Change Dot Org signatures. Many have attracted considerably more.
According to our Italian correspondent:
“Imagine at the age of 16 being sex-trafficked by a pimp named ‘Cut-throat’.-After days of being repeatedly drugged and raped by different men you were purchased by a 43 year old child predator who took you to his house to use you for sex. You end up finding enough courage to fight back and shoot and kill him. You are arrested as result, tried and convicted as an adult sentenced to life in prison. This is the story of Cyntoia Brown. She will be eligible for parole when she is 69 years old.”
This is the well-worn sex trafficking narrative with presumed child sexual abuse thrown in. It is also a tissue of distortions and outright lies. The current media obsession with Brown can be traced to a celebrity known as Rihanna, and to a non-celebrity who will remain nameless.
Before examining what really happened when Brown murdered Johnny Allen, a few words about sex trafficking. Sex trafficking is the new narrative for the oldest profession. Traditionally, a prostitute was a “fallen woman”. In the 1970s, the odious Catherine McKinnon and other second wave feminists began equating prostitution with actual rape. Prostitutes and others working in the rapidly expanding sex industry fought back with the claim that “sex work is real work” and lobbied to both legalise and destigmatise it. Feminists and their allies have now come up with a fourth narrative: sex workers are victims; women have no agency when they are selling sex, and the bad men who buy it from them must be punished.
There is actually room here for both the sex work is real work narrative and the sex trafficking one; sex acts involving coercion or minors can rightly be proscribed by law, and whores can also make an honest living.
Cyntoia Brown was a denizen of Tennessee, where the age of consent is a whopping eighteen, so technically a man of forty-three who has sex with a sixteen year old is committing statutory rape. With that caveat, most people would not regard what happened between Allen and Brown as immoral, and neither should our Italian correspondent, because the age of consent in Italy is fourteen!
Brown’s supporters have drenched the media with sob stories about how she was allegedly raped by her boyfriend/pimp, a man known by the nom de guerre Kut-Throat (spelling varies). His real name is the rather less sinister Garion McGlothen. Some people proselytising this case have claimed Allen was her pimp and that he was known as Kut-Throat. There is really no excuse for such ignorance in the cyber-age.
Whatever the relationship between Brown and McGlothen, she was not a sex trafficking victim; she was a teenage prostitute. One can argue, indeed one should, that this is no life for a teenager, but it was a choice she made freely after running away from the home of her exemplary adoptive mother Ellenette Brown.
On that fatal August 2004 night, she was soliciting when Johnny Allen picked her up in his truck. The most reliable account of what happened next is detailed by the Court Of Criminal Appeals Of Tennessee in its March 11, 2014 judgment. Initially, Brown denied she was a prostitute, denied having sex with Allen, and claimed she went to his house simply to keep him company. She would later admit he propositioned her, she told him her price was $200, he offered $100, and they split the difference.
As far as anything this manipulative psychopath says can be believed, it is clear Allen wanted female company as much as if not more than sex. They did have sex, of that we can be certain, then while he was sleeping, Brown shot him in the back of the head, showered, stole money, and his truck. It would be difficult to imagine a more cruel act of murder against a total stranger who had showed her no harm, had invited her into his home, had paid her for her services, and might at a push have become her protector. And what kind of sex trafficked “victim” carries a revolver in her purse?
Brown was quickly arrested, and was taken to court wearing pigtails, which made her look thirteen whereas before she had clearly made herself up to look older. This and similar tactics are well known, and are best described as damselling.
She was rightly tried as an adult in a state where murder can be capital, although the death penalty is used very sparingly, and it was never on the table for her. She was advised not to testify, probably because her story about killing Allen in self-defence was a tissue of lies refuted by the forensic evidence. On her inevitable conviction, she received a tariff of fifty-one years.
In prison she was given every opportunity to better herself, which she has done, and now we are told she should be released because…
In addition to the lies of Brown herself and her amen corner, we are now told that she should not be held culpable or at least not that culpable due to her suffering from foetal alcohol syndrome. This is a very real condition which can have profound psychological effects as well as physical ones, but one which begs the question, if it led her to kill Johnny Allen then, will it lead her to kill someone else in the future?
In the United States, Governors may grant clemency to prisoners under certain conditions. Recently, the outgoing Governor of Tennessee granted clemency to no fewer than eleven prisoners. Thankfully, Brown was not one of them.
Will she be released one day? Very likely, but regardless of this, we should never forget who is the real victim here. Yes, a sixteen year old should not be judged by the same yardstick as an adult, but every sixteen year old with an IQ of 80, every twelve year old, knows and understands murder is wrong. Brown is said to have an IQ of 134. Whether or not that has been grossly inflated, she has still not faced up to her guilt, and until she does she deserves to remain incarcerated. If she wants to show true remorse she can begin by disavowing the lies that have been peddled about her victim on her behalf. Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
[The above article was first published on Medium, December 25, 2018].
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