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What can Steven Jackson do now?
By Bryan Burwell
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/10/2010
Fame is not all it's cracked up to be. Not when all your private peccadilloes and all the uncomfortable details of your personal life become fodder for the public's hearty voyeuristic appetites. This is the distasteful side of fame, and there's nothing Steven Jackson can do to turn back the clock and make it all go away.
It's been barely two weeks since he was accused of physically abusing his former girlfriend, and now the Las Vegas police have decided that there is insufficient evidence to bring charges against the Rams' star running back. So now what? What exactly is Jackson supposed to do about his damaged reputation now that the Vegas police have closed the case and the district attorney's office determined that there was a lack of evidence to proceed with the accusations that were hurled at him by Supriya Harris?
Is there some place he can go to erase the bad images that some people immediately formed about him based on nothing more than the unsubstantiated accusations of Harris? You've seen the Internet chat rooms calling him all sorts of ugly names the minute the accusations leaked out on TMZ. Everyone leaping to the conclusion that he must have done something, even now insisting that he is just another powerful man blessed with an abundance of fame and fortune who used his celebrity to get away with ... well ... it had to be something, right?
Jackson will never get those people back on his side no matter how many times they read the news reports that announced the undisputed fact that the police said they lacked evidence in their investigation to go after Jackson.
So where does he go to get his reputation back?
But that's not how fame works anymore.
Modern fame takes no prisoners. Contemporary celebrity is a lovely and intoxicating game just as long as you are inside the velvet ropes lapping in all the goodies. But there is a backlash to this game, and it ain't pretty. Associate with the wrong crowd, spend too much time with people who have less to lose than you do, make just one fateful step in the wrong direction, and the repercussions won't be pretty and they can last a lifetime.
There are a lot of unhappy endings to this story, and one of the biggest is the damage that has been done to Jackson's reputation. The Vegas police may have exonerated him, but in this TMZ-obsessed world, there will always be another opportunity to prosecute him in the court of gossip and innuendo.
This is how the fame game works now. Jackson may think he's done with this, but this ugly fight isn't over until TMZ says it's over.
This is how it used to work. Allegations like this would never see the printed page until police actually filed charges against someone. If the police believed there was enough credible evidence out there, then and only then would it be treated as news.
But the rules have changed. Tabloids have tossed innuendo into the mainstream, and it's way past time for athletes to catch on to that unsettling rule change. Your reputation is for sale, and you aren't necessarily the one who is conducting the auction anymore.
The wink-and-a-smile, "boys will be boys" tolerance of the past has been ditched. If you're going to behave badly, someone is going to blow your cover. If you're acting like a clown, someone's going to either take your photo or shoot a video, then blast it on the Internet. If you're a thug or a phony, you will eventually get exposed.
And that's just if you're lucky.
If your luck runs out, you could end up in jail, or in court, or in the tabloids battling to scrub all the muck off your damaged image. If you have any skeletons, someone is going to find them, and if the price is right, they're going to sell them to the highest bidder.
And those are just the penalties if you're guilty as sin. The cost is even greater if you're just plain stupid or a naïve innocent who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging with the wrong people who can only look at you and hear the sound CHA-CHING ringing in their larcenous heads.
Sooner or later, everyone who lives inside that bubble better get smart and figure out this modern reality, and accept that the cost for not understanding can be the erosion of a reputation that will never be fully restored.
By Bryan Burwell
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
02/10/2010
Fame is not all it's cracked up to be. Not when all your private peccadilloes and all the uncomfortable details of your personal life become fodder for the public's hearty voyeuristic appetites. This is the distasteful side of fame, and there's nothing Steven Jackson can do to turn back the clock and make it all go away.
It's been barely two weeks since he was accused of physically abusing his former girlfriend, and now the Las Vegas police have decided that there is insufficient evidence to bring charges against the Rams' star running back. So now what? What exactly is Jackson supposed to do about his damaged reputation now that the Vegas police have closed the case and the district attorney's office determined that there was a lack of evidence to proceed with the accusations that were hurled at him by Supriya Harris?
Is there some place he can go to erase the bad images that some people immediately formed about him based on nothing more than the unsubstantiated accusations of Harris? You've seen the Internet chat rooms calling him all sorts of ugly names the minute the accusations leaked out on TMZ. Everyone leaping to the conclusion that he must have done something, even now insisting that he is just another powerful man blessed with an abundance of fame and fortune who used his celebrity to get away with ... well ... it had to be something, right?
Jackson will never get those people back on his side no matter how many times they read the news reports that announced the undisputed fact that the police said they lacked evidence in their investigation to go after Jackson.
So where does he go to get his reputation back?
But that's not how fame works anymore.
Modern fame takes no prisoners. Contemporary celebrity is a lovely and intoxicating game just as long as you are inside the velvet ropes lapping in all the goodies. But there is a backlash to this game, and it ain't pretty. Associate with the wrong crowd, spend too much time with people who have less to lose than you do, make just one fateful step in the wrong direction, and the repercussions won't be pretty and they can last a lifetime.
There are a lot of unhappy endings to this story, and one of the biggest is the damage that has been done to Jackson's reputation. The Vegas police may have exonerated him, but in this TMZ-obsessed world, there will always be another opportunity to prosecute him in the court of gossip and innuendo.
This is how the fame game works now. Jackson may think he's done with this, but this ugly fight isn't over until TMZ says it's over.
This is how it used to work. Allegations like this would never see the printed page until police actually filed charges against someone. If the police believed there was enough credible evidence out there, then and only then would it be treated as news.
But the rules have changed. Tabloids have tossed innuendo into the mainstream, and it's way past time for athletes to catch on to that unsettling rule change. Your reputation is for sale, and you aren't necessarily the one who is conducting the auction anymore.
The wink-and-a-smile, "boys will be boys" tolerance of the past has been ditched. If you're going to behave badly, someone is going to blow your cover. If you're acting like a clown, someone's going to either take your photo or shoot a video, then blast it on the Internet. If you're a thug or a phony, you will eventually get exposed.
And that's just if you're lucky.
If your luck runs out, you could end up in jail, or in court, or in the tabloids battling to scrub all the muck off your damaged image. If you have any skeletons, someone is going to find them, and if the price is right, they're going to sell them to the highest bidder.
And those are just the penalties if you're guilty as sin. The cost is even greater if you're just plain stupid or a naïve innocent who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time, hanging with the wrong people who can only look at you and hear the sound CHA-CHING ringing in their larcenous heads.
Sooner or later, everyone who lives inside that bubble better get smart and figure out this modern reality, and accept that the cost for not understanding can be the erosion of a reputation that will never be fully restored.
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