Manipulative men and gullible women

(First published in the Manawatu Standard and on Stuff.co.nz, May 13.)

In February this year, a Wellington man named Lewis Scott was convicted of rape and unlawful sexual connection.

It was the second time he had been found guilty of the same offences. After the first trial, in 2017, his convictions were overturned and a new trial was ordered. He was sentenced last month to six years in jail.

The victim alleged the rape happened after she went to Scott’s home in 2007 for what she thought was going to be a business meeting. The court heard that the offence involved considerable force.

Note the year: 2007. She didn’t lay a complaint at the time because she felt ashamed and embarrassed. It wasn’t until 2014, when she read that Scott had been convicted of raping another woman, that she summoned the courage to go to the police.

That’s right: Scott had previous form. His other victim had been raped in a room at the back of his shop. 

I remember that shop and I remember Scott, although I never met him. Lots of people knew about him because from the time he arrived in Wellington in the mid-1970s, he was something of a media darling.

An African-American and a Vietnam War veteran, he cut a flamboyant, exotic figure in grey, Muldoon-era Wellington. He wrote poetry and wore colourful kaftans. His shop, Kwanzaa, sold goods from African countries and became a gathering place for Wellington’s African community. In 2009 Scott organised a big party to celebrate President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

The media loved him. As recently as 2013, Scott was the subject of an admiring - you might almost say fawning - interview on Radio New Zealand.

It was perhaps small wonder that he was welcomed in Wellington’s arty, left-leaning circles. He would have been seen as a refugee from heartless capitalism.

Not only had he personally experienced the racism of the Deep South, where he grew up, but his social cachet would have been reinforced by the fact that young black men like him had been used as cannon fodder in an unpopular war. In the eyes of those who became his friends, he would have been almost as much a victim as the Vietnamese themselves.

But Scott was not the person he seemed. We now know he was a secret rapist. He would hardly have been the first charismatic male to take advantage of women – possibly impressionable women – who came within his orbit. 

Were there other victims too ashamed and embarrassed to accuse him publicly? It can’t be ruled out.

I wonder, too, what Scott’s old friends make of him now. Do they reproach themselves for not seeing through him? Or do they excuse his behaviour by blaming it on a dehumanising upbringing in a harsh, racist society?

It wouldn’t surprise me if that were the case, because history is littered with manipulative men who take advantage of gullible hangers-on. In fact I was reminded of Scott while reading last week about the recent death of Ira Einhorn.

Einhorn was a hippie activist and  leading light in the American counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 70s. He campaigned against the Vietnam War and later jetted around the world commanding enormous fees as a speaker on environmental issues.

He was friendly with other key counter-culture figures, including the poet Allen Ginsberg and the radical activists Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. But Einhorn was also a murderer who killed his girlfriend and stuffed her body into a trunk in his apartment after she tried to leave him because she was fed up with his infidelities and controlling ways. Other former girlfriends later testified that he turned violent when they ended their relationships with him.

Einhorn, in other words, was a deeply unpleasant human being and a gold-plated hypocrite. Like many frauds and phoneys who preach a gospel of liberation, he was a supreme egotist and an exploiter. He managed to elude justice for more than two decades, living in Ireland and France and surrounding himself with admiring acolytes who helped him to stay out of reach of the law.

Sadly, there has never been a shortage of people prepared to be conned by such charlatans, and willing to make excuses for them. As an obituary in The Times noted, the help Einhorn received from influential friends highlighted the moral confusions of the hippie era.

Obviously there’s a vast difference between Ira Einhorn and Lewis Scott. For a start, the latter is not a killer.

But the two cases appear to have certain factors in common. Both show how easily people with guile, audacity and a conscience deficit can deceive those whose shiny-eyed idealism gets in the way of their ability to see beyond the charismatic façade to the person beneath.

One thing can be said with certainty. There will be more Ira Einhorns and Lewis Scotts, and there will be many more victims.