When All Is Lost, Men Plead Himpathy

I told myself I wouldn’t write about this, but here I am writing about another man who is only sorry because he got caught.

There are quite the roll call of men that I have written about in the last few months. Remember P Diddy? Remember Dave Grohl? I even wrote about Gregg Wallace once before:

And here Gregg is gracing my White Ink pages again because he has decided to take a road well-trodden for men, and it is this: when all seems lost, when you have screwed up to such a degree that your career is reduced to kindling, there is one sure thing that will take the heat off before all your bridges are well and truly burnt and that is pleading for himpathy.

This term was coined by the writer Kate Manne and is described as the excessive sympathy that is reserved solely for men who have usually got themselves into ‘a bit of a scrape’ by means of sexual predation and/or misogynistic behaviour.

And let’s have a recap of just what a scrape Gregg Wallace got himself in. For those who don’t know, Gregg Wallace is a former barrow boy (don’t forget this as it will form part of his defence, m’lud) turned BBC presenter. Along with his mate John Torode, Wallace has been presenting MasterChef for twenty years. He also has his own food range, a newspaper column, and of course, he has written a book. Although I should pause to say here that he didn’t write that book himself, my friend did it for him, but we shall come to that. All this it to say that he was onto a nice little earner until some horrid women decided to ruin it all for him when they separately came forward with multiple allegations that he had behaved inappropriately towards them. These accusers range from contestants on his TV show to his own celebrity peers. And the allegations range from cracking sexually explicit jokes in the workplace to inappropriate touching or even flashing. Of course Wallace denies all this, though not the sock he stuck on his dick when he flashed a female colleague – he admits that though maintains said female colleague still finds even the memory of it hilarious. We shall have to take Gregg’s word for it.

When these stories broke at the end of last year, Wallace came out and denied them all saying that these were simply allegations from a number of ‘women of a certain age’. You know the type, the ones who have put up with this inappropriate shit from men their entire lives and now they find themselves tiring of it and the confidence of age means they are ready to speak out to prevent it happening to younger women. You know, those women.

The allegations were mounting and then my friend, his ghostwriter, gave an interview to BBC’s Newsnight documenting what it had been like to work for him for months as she penned his book and just how inappropriate he had been. I sat in that interview with her, squeezed into a tiny London hotel room with two cameramen and a presenter, I saw just what it took out of her to share what had happened to her and I knew she was only doing it to support the other women who had come forward.

The pic I snapped during the recording of that Newsnight interview

In these types of situation, it is common for other women (or indeed men) to say, ‘well this can’t be true because he never behaved inappropriately to me’, an irrelevant and totally unhelpful testimony suggesting that unless these men are doing it to everyone then they’re basically doing it to no-one.

Wallace was stripped of the show he had been co-presenting for twenty years and reruns were taken off our screens. The worst thing for poor old Gregg was his new meal range received a rather sad little launch in the middle of all this.

Oh Gregg tried to hit back, he tried for the sympathy vote then, bless him. But he couldn’t really get it off the ground as more and more women spoke out about what it was like to cross paths with him — not very pleasant at all by all accounts. And the rest of us said, ‘well, no surprises there’.

But this weekend the Daily Mail published his first interview, and the first paragraph starts by saying that his 80-year-old mum died in her sleep of a fatal heart attack ‘as her son was overwhelmed by a tsunami of lurid allegations of inappropriate behaviour.’

I’m sorry to hear his mum died, and Gregg’s clear suggestion that these women coming forward are responsible is only — thankfully — ‘subtly’ hinted at in this first paragraph, but you know, they also start with this ‘tsunami of allegations’ because that is what it was. This wasn’t just one woman, it was many. And are we meant to believe they are all wrong and Gregg is right? How many of these accused men have you heard before hold up their hands and say ‘it was a fair cop, guv’? None. Instead, what they do is flick through a list of all the other excuses in that well-thumbed book that make them the victim rather than the women accusing them. But the incredible thing about this two or three thousand word interview, and what makes it so farcical is that Gregg has pretty much used all of those excuses in the book.

So I thought we could play a game of ‘man-is-only-sorry-cos-he-got-caught bingo’, so dabbers at the ready, eyes down, here we go:

• talk about his mum’s recent death — dab!

• say his poor old mum was upset cos people were ‘picking on’ her boy — dab!

• mention mum up in heaven looking down on her son and his recovery from said people picking on him — dab!

• pepper the piece with loving photos of his wife in a super conservative dress and court shoes looking suitably demure but standing by her man — dab!

Picture credit Daily Mail/Murray Sanders

• mention mum again (God rest her soul) and how she never believed what those horrid people said about her boy anyway — dab!

• include the fact that he worked with 4,000 contestants over the twenty year period and only two had complained before — dab!

• mention his lack of sleep and use emotive words such as ‘isolation’ and ‘abandonment’ — dab!

• describe him close to tears/voice cracking throughout the interview — dab!

• keep repeating throughout how he was being ‘attacked’ by these nasty women — dab!

• mention the stress gave him chest pains (although don’t go as far as saying the words ‘heart attack’, just suggest them) which worried his devoted young wife — dab!

• describe what happened to him as a ‘nightmare’ and then intimate it was so bad he couldn’t have sex with his own wife (which now that image is in our heads it is enough to give us all nightmares) — dab!

• describe him as a family man as no family man in history has ever been capable of harming another woman at the same time as being married to one — dab!

• mention his kids again as they’re always good for being used as human shields — dab!

• do mention the lewd allegation of him being at work and putting the sock on his knob for lolz and then have him admit to that but say the woman he flashed really loved it — dab!

• describe it all as ‘miscommunications’ and wonder how he could possibly have fallen out with Rod Stewart’s wife when he’s such a big fan and he’s seen him in concert three times (nonsensical!) — dab!

• mention that during the investigation he just happened to be diagnosed as ‘profoundly autistic’ and how despite being a successful celebrity for two decades and going to Buckingham Palace to collect an honour this all means he doesn’t understand how to behave socially — dab!

• mention again about being working-class because everyone who is working-class is a rock, solid, diamond geezer who would never hurt a fly (ahem, the Kray twins) — dab!

• describe him as a ‘history buff’ cos geeks never hurt anyone (see also Woody Allen) — dab!

• mention his autistic, non-verbal child (and drop in again his own recent diagnosis for good measure and the fact he’s always said to his wife he thought his kid’s autism came from ‘her side’) — dab!

(Reader, by now I am getting quite exhausted of this particular game of bingo and I know you must be too but I must warn you we’re not quite finished yet)

• mention how another old lady (his mother-in-law) has also been upset by these women and their nasty allegations — dab!

• describe how kind he was when his mother-in-law lost her husband to lung cancer a few years ago and he suggested they put a hospital bed in the telly room during the last days of his illness — dab!

• mention another disciplinary he faced at the BBC but tell it in his words so that it sounds like a real miscarriage of justice — dab!

• explain how he is actually ‘scared’ of young people and refused to even go for a drink with them for fear of saying the wrong thing — dab!

• mention a generation of ‘snowflakes’ just to ram it home a bit — dab!

• and if all else fails say that he was near the brink of suicide and was checking his own life insurance policy (which presumably when he realised would be null and void if he committed suicide meant he didn’t feel so bad after all) — dab!

So much dabbing of your bingo pen and yet this is nothing compare to Gregg dabbing the tears from his cheeks during this ‘extremely moving’ interview (I’m afraid, even for you, I could not bring myself to watch the accompanying video). Tears for himself, I hasten to add.

If you can believe it, there were more – more and more and more excuses about why Gregg is the real victim here and why he is telling the truth and all these other women are lying.

But this is a very, very common practice. I have written about it before, it is called DARVO — Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim Offender. It is the strategy used by all men who get accused of wrongdoing and they use it because it works. But the problem is that once you see it at play, you cannot unsee it, and there is no article that I have read which is such an obvious example of it as this one published by the Daily Mail.

The only thing that was missing was mention of any of these women — the victims. There is no mention of my friend, his ghostwriter, whose allegations were strong enough that she had a whole Newsnight programme devoted to her story of working with him at length, a story which was checked out by the Newsnight team, a story for which she had to provide contemporaneous evidence.

No, it was all about poor Gregg, and all the reasons why he deserves our sympathy, and when a man who has hoist himself with his own petard has to face the consequences of his actions, there really is no room for anyone else’s feelings. It is all about his feelings in the same way as when he is alleged to have behaved inappropriately it was only ever about his feelings then too. Only that time it would have been about what made Gregg feel good, now we turn our attention to what makes Gregg feel bad. But it’s still Gregg.

And this is the giveaway, the very fact that they allow us to see just how far they will take their victimhood — to the point that they will describe suicidal ideation. This is very serious indeed, and I am sorry for any person who has felt this way, but really Gregg? Most people who have genuinely felt this way do not want it splashed all over the papers, and I have to say, I called it back in November, I said at some point he would say this is what he had contemplated. If it was himpathy that he was after, then this is what it needed to come down to, because once he uses that mental health card, he really should be untouchable.

Today, I see other newspapers are leading with this as their headlines too. It’s ironic isn’t it, because if women so much as cry during an interview they are accused of being manipulative, yet men who are accused of crimes against them can cry, men can talk about mental health, and suicide and it’s brave, not weak.

And that’s not to say I don’t think men should talk about these things — I absolutely do. But not when it’s just in service to getting back on the telly. That’s when it’s a cheap shot. And this entire interview is a cheap shot. This apparent ‘profound austism’ diagnosis of his is a cheap shot. And it cheapens it for all the people who are genuinely austistic and not going around being (allegedly) inappropriate with women. It cheapens all the experiences of people who have really been on the brink of death, and it uses them and makes a mockery of them, which really is beyond the pale.

But I have good news for Gregg and he doesn’t have to pay me for an expensive private diagnosis. He suffers from nothing more painful than male entitlement. Entitlement to stick his knob in a sock and flash his colleagues because he wanted attention, entitlement to tell inappropriate jokes and or comment on women’s physicality.

You’re not disabled Gregg, you’re just entitled. And guess what the cure for that is, a dose of sobering reality, which is what you’re experiencing now for perhaps the first time in your life. Take the medicine Gregg, it might not taste nice but it’s the only chance of getting better.

Gregg will keep playing the victim card as long as we let him, and if he wasn’t following such a well-worn path of self-pity, we might be inclined to believe him.

Being a privileged white man ‘of a certain age’ to coin his own phrase, he is used to shaping the narrative, used to having the last word, used to his one voice being enough to silence a whole chatter of female ones. ‘There, that should do it’, he’ll be thinking over his Cornflakes this morning as he flicks through the pages of the Daily Mail.

But the thing is, the rest of us have moved on even if you haven’t, Gregg. Men like you, the ones who came before you, have helped us see you clearly now because you’ve all followed the exact same playbook.

And guess what, you have achieved your aim, we do pity you. We pity the fact you can’t stare fully at that reflection of yours in the mirror, we pity the fact they you can’t see yourself as we do, we pity the fact that because of this, you will probably carry on sticking your foot in it for the rest of your life.

So you’ve won, you have our full sympathy, just not in the way you intended.