Monstrous lies about 10-year-old's abortion display 'sheer cowardice' | Opinion
Mike Freeman is USA Today's sports race and inequality editor.
I want to tell you a story about a little girl and how there are monsters in the world. But maybe not the monsters you're thinking of.
The girl is 10 and her story about being raped, and subsequently having to get an abortion, is the stuff of nightmares. President Joe Biden discussed the horrific case during a recent press conference.
"Just imagine being that little girl – 10 years old," Biden said angrily at the White House last week.
We could just stop here and the horrors of what happened to this girl would be enough to make you think human beings don’t deserve to rule this planet. But there are other monsters in this story.
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Biden’s remarks, unbelievably, became a flashpoint for right-wing media, which openly doubted that the girl was raped or even existed. The story became viral.
And it was true. All of it.
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The people who attacked a 10-year-old girl as a liar were wrong as a suspect was arrested and charged with rape. Gerson Fuentes, 27, appeared in an Ohio court on Wednesday. A police investigator testified Fuentes confessed to raping the girl at least twice.
There is that singular monster. But there are others.
Casting doubt on a little girl's horror
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, in an interview with the USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau, initially said that as more time passed the more likely the story of this little girl was a fabrication. GOP Rep. Jim Jordan called the story a lie in a tweet. Then in a moment of sheer cowardice deleted the tweet without explanation.
Clay Travis, a former sports guy whose controversial opinions used to focus on which coach the Tennessee Volunteers were going to hire, was also a conduit for the untruth that there was no girl.
“Everything Joe Biden said here appears to be a lie,” Travis tweeted. “Ohio allows abortion for raped children and, more importantly, there is zero evidence this actually happened.”
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The Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial casting doubt about the story, but soon after had to attach an editor’s note admitting the editorial was erroneous. The news organization later issued an entire separate article correcting its original editorial. Even the Washington Post got it wrong.
The monsters don't just come in one form. They morph into many different ones. Each causing its own type of horror. In these instances, using their considerable powers to cast doubt on a little girl's story
Save the babies but attack child victims? Yes, this is where we are.
The fact people doubted the veracity of the story says as much about our society as it does about the individuals. There's a mass crisis of child sexual assault and either people don't know this or, because the topic is so chilling, they decide to ignore it. According to the Columbus Dispatch, in the state of Ohio alone, in 2020, there were 52 abortions in children 15 or younger, accounting for 0.3% of the 20,605 abortions performed that year, the Ohio Department of Health said. There were 63 such procedures in 2019, 54 in 2018, 61 in 2017 and 76 in 2016.
That's one state. And those are the known cases.
And if your response is "it's only 0.3%," well, what exactly is an acceptable amount of child rape?
What happened to decency?
Nothing will happen to the people, the politicians, or news organizations, that said the story of the little girl wasn’t true. I wonder how much inward looking there will be from the extremist media ecosystem that created a whole new monster after the first one struck? Will there be soul searching or that long look in the mirror most of us take? Will there be that private conversation with a close friend or a loved one asking: What the hell did I do? Who am I?
It feels like the answer, in too many cases, will be no. There's too much money to be made by extremists who peddle lies and ugliness. Dollars apparently trump decency.
What makes a human being want to cast doubt about the rape of a little girl? Why would anyone feel the need to wake up one morning, eat their cereal, hit the treadmill, and then use such ugliness as their life currency? I don’t know.
What I do know is that when I first read this story, I couldn’t help but think of my little girl, just a year older. Her sweet face. Her brightness. How, in a different universe, my daughter and this girl are friends.
But you don’t even have to be a dad. You just need a pulse.
So, yes, this is a story about a little girl, but it’s also about some of us, and what we’ve become. Some of us are also the monsters.
And it’s terrifying.
Mike Freeman is USA Today's sports race and inequality editor.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rape of 10-year-old Ohio girl reveals monsters will exploit tragedy
