67: Honoring Truth: The Jian Ghomeshi Verdict

67

Honoring Truth

The Jian Ghomeshi Verdict

A Freudian slip inspired today’s spiritual musing…

I sent an email to my neighbor, who was in Florida for the remainder of the winter, in response to his objectionable comment on the Jian Ghomeshi trial (the disgraced former CBC Radio host was charged and acquitted on four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance by chocking, charges that my neighbor found “ridiculous”), but when I checked my email the following day I noticed that I had made a Freudian slip in my email to my neighbor in the sunny state and promptly sent him another to correct myself:

Sorry, Freudian slip… I wrote that Jian was found guilty but not exonerated when I meant that he was found not guilty but not exonerated.  I guess that shows my unconscious bias. Incidentally, I owe our neighbor up the street a breakfast; we bet on Ghomeshi’s trial, I that he would be found guilty and Dave that he would get off. Dave won the bet and I owe him breakfast. But in all honesty, I honor the judge’s decision and got a good insight into our justice system and am immensely proud of how it works; but what would have happened had the complainants honored their oath to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Funny, how one’s shadow comes out to sabotage our lives like it sabotaged the lives of the three complainants in the Ghomeshi trial…

I was a lifelong fan of the CBC Radio show that Jian Ghomeshi cleverly usurped from Shelagh Rogers, who inherited it from the famous Peter Gzowski who inherited it from the stage actor/broadcaster Don Harron, but over time I began to hate the show because of my growing antipathy for Jian Ghomeshi’s personality, which I wrote about in a spiritual musing (“What’s in a Name? The Jian Ghomeshi Scandal”) that I posted on my blog on December 13, 2014, and as shameless as it may be to admit, I was hoping that he would be found guilty on all counts; which, no doubt, was the reason for my Freudian slip in the email.

A Freudian slip is an unintentional error revealing subconscious feelings, and my feelings about Jian Ghomeshi were that he was guilty as sin on all charges (he openly admitted on social media after he got sacked from the CBC that he was into “rough sex” and that his private life was no one’s business but his own), but he was found not guilty.

I followed the trial closely and listened to all the professional commentary, and when I heard Justice William B. Horkins’s ruling acquitting the disgraced former CBC host of all charges, I was not surprised but disappointed. I did take solace in the judge’s ruling though, because it did not exonerate Ghomeshi of all the charges, only acquitted him.

 “My conclusion that the evidence in this case raises a reasonable doubt is not the same as deciding in a positive way that these events never happened,” wrote Justice Horkins in his 25-page ruling. “At the end of this trial, a reasonable doubt exists because it is impossible to determine, with any acceptable degree of certainty or comfort, what is true and what is false.” And reasonable doubt was raised because the three complainants did not take their oath to tell the truth seriously, which Justice Horkins concluded tainted their testimony.

Curiously enough, as synchronicity would have it whenever I’m called upon to write a spiritual musing, on the evening of the Jian Ghomeshi verdict I was watching a movie on TV called Flipped, directed by Rob Reiner, about an obsessively shy boy who had a strong crush on the girl next door but who lacked the courage to be truthful with her and always ended up in a pickle, and the boy’s grandfather said something to him which was highlighted in that magical way when the silent voice of synchronicity speaks to me: “It’s about honesty, son. Sometimes a little honesty at the beginning can save a lot of grief down the road.”

I can’t begin to imagine the humiliation that the complainants in the Ghomeshi trial must have felt after Justice Horkins publically castigated them for not honoring their oath to tell the whole truth (they failed to disclose that they had contact with Jian Ghomeshi after he allegedly assaulted them sexually and that they had online contact with each other before the trial), which might have turned the tide of the trial had they been forthright; but because they wanted to “sink the prick… ‘cause he’s a f—king piece of s—t’” they tainted their testimony by trying to manipulate and steer the trial in their willful deception by “playing chicken” with the judicial system, as Jian Ghomeshi’s defense lawyer Marie Henein put it, and they got themselves into a pickle; which is what I meant in my email to my neighbor in Florida about one’s shadow coming out to sabotage their life as it did with the complainants who tried to be clever with their testimony; but this needs some explanation, because not everyone is familiar with the concept of the shadow side of our personality…

The shadow is a term created by the Swiss Psychologist C. G. Jung. “By shadow I mean the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and contents of the personal unconscious,” wrote Jung in his essay “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” and in the introduction to their book Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature, co-editors Connie Zweig and Jeremiah Abrams wrote: “The shadow is the awful thing that needs redemption, and the suffering redeemer who can provide it.”

This was the basic theme of my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, in which I attempted to illustrate how my literary mentor Ernest Hemingway’s shadow had a nasty habit (especially when he was drinking) of coming out to sabotage his life while at the same time illustrating how my hero C. G. Jung successful integrated his shadow into his personality thus making him a whole person instead of a divided one like Hemingway, and had the three complainants in the Ghomeshi trial been a little more ethically disciplined and a little less shadow afflicted they might have avoided the grief that they invited by letting the negative shadow side of their personality come out to taint their testimony which created enough reasonable doubt for Justice Horkins to acquit Ghomeshi and reprove the complainants: a great day for justice, a sad commentary on human nature.

***