Thanks for your input, Rudolf

Trigger warnings (a discussion of the trial the infamous Fritzl incest case in Austria)

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, Josef Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, who has argued his client was trying only to create a second family, maintained he was “not a monster”

“If you only lock up your daughter to have sex with her, you’re not going to have any children, you’re not going to get schoolbooks (for them) or a Christmas tree,” he said.

“If it was just rape, sexual lust, then he wouldn’t have wanted children, or he could have used contraception. Or if he just didn’t care and had the children, he could have just got rid of them.

” As a monster I’d kill all of them downstairs”.

Apparently, in the land according to Rudolf, Fritzl was “only” trying to create a second family. With his daughter. Against her consent. By locking her up in the dungeon and telling her mother she’d gone missing. And raping her. And raping her. And raping her. Oh well then. Let’s invite him over for drinks, shall we?

Look fuckwit (and hey, I work in a law firm, I know a defence lawyer has to talk some shit) let’s get a few things straight.

Rape IS NOT the same as sexual lust. LUST is fine. LUST leads to sex, or wanking. Rape involves forcing another person to hold still while you get off ‘on them’ – and on their fear, pain, humiliation and discomfort.

Fucking your underage daughter kept captive in your basement is NOT sex, it is RAPE.

Yes, he COULD have used contraception. That would have been preferable. While this woman now loves and cares for her children, I’ve no doubt whatsoever that she would far prefer NOT to have borne the children of her father. Not using contraception makes what he did to her WORSE, not better, and it does NOTHING to mitigate his guilt over rape, incest, sequestration, slavery and coercion and says nothing about the charges of murder.

He could ‘just have got rid of them’. That the man has a bizarrely warped sense of familial ties is not in question. That he didn’t kill all the children (though he does stand accused of killing one) does NOTHING to mitigate his guilt as charged with rape, incest, slavery and coercion and tells us nothing about the charge of murder for the child he’s accused of murdering. The man CLEARLY does not operate by a logic any of us recognise as functional.

“As a monster I’d kill all of them downstairs”. Well thanks for the insight into you fuckwit, but YOU are not on trial, and HE is, so what YOU would do is of little to no relevance here. AGAIN you’re assuming that only MONSTERS rape, only MONSTERS commit incest. This IS a monstrous case. But ‘monsters’ come in all forms, and really I’d guess that their sheer unpredicability adds to their horror. Not only does Rudolf tell us what he’d do as a monster, but what monsters do/would do/what their motivations are. We have all kinds of ‘monsters’ in society if you want to use this terminology, so I really think that uppity lawyers should avoid talking shit about What Monsters Do as if there’s ANY basis for these assertions.

ALSO he’s not CHARGED with being a ‘monster’ so whether he’s a *monster* or *just a man*, a man who felt he owned his daughter in every sense of the word, a man who wanted to rape his daughter, a man who planned it by decking out the basement for JUST SUCH A PURPOSE, a man who then raped his young daughter, kept her captive in his basement, lied to her mother and said she’d run away, watched her produce *his* children, stole some of them from her and then used threats to those children that remained with her in order to keep his daughter ‘in line’ essentially DOES NOT MATTER in relation to the charges he’s facing and all this monster talk is a nice distraction, a little sleight of hand to distract us from the POINT, from the CHARGES, from WHAT THIS MAN DID TO HIS FAMILY.