Magician David Copperfield is facing allegations of drugging women before sexual encounters, groping women during live performances, and behaving inappropriately with women who were significantly younger than him — including under 18 — in a new investigative piece in The Guardian.
The story contains allegations from 16 women, spanning four decades, from the 1980s to 2014. Over half of those women said they were under 18 at the time of the alleged incidents, with the two youngest victims claiming they were 15 at the time (though there was no evidence to suggest Copperfield was aware of their ages when they met).
One of those 15-year-olds, identified as Carla (not her real name), said Copperfield “groomed” her for more than two years after he gave her his phone number following a 1991 show. The magician allegedly called her at home often and sent her cards and gifts, including one, which Carla received when she was 16, that said: “In 2 years I will be back.”
And then - poof! - all the evidence disappears!
I’m starting to wonder, do you have to be willing to rape women to become famous or does fame make you a rapist? It seems like half of the celebrity sphere has some form of allegation against them.
A lot of us have random thoughts of lust over people around, but many of us shake them off before they even form because they are inappropriate or just untimely. None becomes an obsession or anything, and we rarely even remeber them. But when you are a rockstar your ego is so boosted you start to act on them and many other impulses because you can and you are always right. That’s a feedback loop of doing something on a whim and feeling yourself even more powerful after facing no consequencies. Unless you have a strict moral compass, it’s easy to get corrupted into a human animal that enjoys it’s way to depravity.
My completely uncorroborated gut feeling is that it’s because each celebrity caught doing horrible shit causes a massive media frenzy, so even if (and I don’t know if this is true) the numbers of horrible people are proportional to the overall population, there’s a bias because each one is named and shamed unlike non-celebrities.