The Wi Spa and the strange decline of the liberal press
Not a hoax, but a cover-up.
In perhaps the clearest example of #ThisNeverHappens since Karen White, a serial sex offender has been charged with indecent assault over the Wi Spa incident.
As you may remember, in June, Wi Spa customer ‘Cubana Angel’ posted a viral video to social media from inside the Los Angeles spa in which she told a front desk employee that a man had exposed his penis in a female-only steam room to women and girls, only to be told that there was nothing staff could do because the man claimed to be transgender.
And who could forget the Wi Spa hipster, who told the woman she was “being a dick”?
This led to women protesting over the obvious safeguarding failures, and trans activists protesting that men should have full access to female-only spaces if they ID as women.
Now, New York Post writer Andy Ngo has revealed that Darren Agee Merager, 52, has been charged with five counts of indecent exposure over the incident. Ngo has disclosed additional details that are both shocking and entirely predictable at the same time.
It has emerged that four women and a female child have alleged that Merager was ‘partially erect’ when he exposed himself. Also, he is a tier-one registered sex offender with—among other felony convictions for sexual offences—two prior convictions of indecent exposure stemming from incidents in 2002 and 2003. In 2008, he was convicted for failing to register as a sex offender.
Incredibly, Darren is also currently facing six charges of indecent exposure over a women’s locker room incident at a swimming pool in 2018.
Following that arrest, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department issued an internal flyer that stated: “Merager claims to identify as female so he can access women’s locker rooms and showers.”
Here we have a serial sex offender, who the police less than three years ago said pretends to be a woman so he can access women’s and girls’ spaces in order to sexually abuse them, being allowed to enter a women’s spa - where he allegedly exposed himself to women and girls.
In July, on the basis that an unnamed source in an LGBT publication with an unnamed byline had said the police had failed to find witnesses (we now know that even this wasn’t true), a large tranche of the liberal press did everything they could to dismiss the story as a ‘transphobic hoax’.
Despite this laughably poor journalism, some celebrities ate it up.
Others indulged in a spot of victim-blaming.
Memorably, The Guardian tried to discredit the women who had reported the exposure, by broadcasting the same claim in two separate articles.
Andy Ngo got to speak to Merager, and was told by him “If you go into an area where you’re expected to be nude, there has to be an indecent exposure exemption.” Merager added that he may file lawsuits for discrimination against the women in the spa, saying they’re part of a state and society that “punishes transgender people”.
No doubt if he does, Patricia Arquette, Laurie Penny, Slate, The Daily Beast, Insider, The Independent, The Nation and The Guardian will be supporting him every step of the way.
This is the whole issue. There is a big enough proportion of men that cannot be trusted in women's spaces that all men have a duty to recognise that women have to have their own spaces in which men are not allowed. As I once saw somewhere - "How do you recognise a man who would be safe in a women's changing room? He doesn't want to be in one."
It does make me uncomfortable to regarded as being a potential risk by virtue of my genes, but the reality is that men have allowed other men to be abusers for so long that it is a miracle that any women want anything to do with us at all. We, as men, need to get a grip on this.
If this stupid movement enables this man to sue women for reporting the crime of indecent exposure and voyeurism, I may just blow a gasket. What the eff.