Ohio prosecutors say they may seek the death penalty against Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man charged with the kidnap and rape of three women he brutalized for a decade while reportedly inducing abortions in at least one of the captives. Another of the captives carried a child to term, delivering the now 6-year-old girl in a plastic kiddie pool, police said. The three women (missing since 2002) were held in captivity—incredibly—for a whole decade until one of them managed to finally escape in the last week.
From Castro himself, as well as his mother, we’re hearing all the usual nonsense spewed out by our cultural institutions and elites on a daily basis.
Castro is calling himself a ‘sex addict,’ implying that because of his illness he was unable to do anything other than what he did.
His mother is asking for ‘forgiveness’ for her son.
They have learned the lessons of our warped cultural leaders — religious and secular — all too well. The platitudes come like clockwork.
But a completely different attitude is coming, amazingly enough, from the defendant’s daughter, Angie Gregg.
In an interview with CNN, Castro’s daughter stated, ‘He is dead to me ‘ There will be no visits; there will be no phone calls,” she said. “He can never be Daddy again. I have no sympathy for the man.”
Does she forgive her father? Her reply: “I wonder this whole time, how he could be so good to us, but he (allegedly) took young women, little girls, someone else’s babies, away from these families and over the years never felt enough guilt to just give up and let them free.”
To forgive someone, the person has to be sorry. It’s not enough to regret that you were caught or exposed. There’s no way of knowing if Castro is truly sorry. However, most of what we know about criminal minds (see Stanton Samenow’s ‘Inside the Criminal Mind’) tells us that he feels regret over being caught, not remorse.
Criminal psychology and sex addiction are not the same thing. Some sex addicts are criminal mentalities, but most are not. Predators and initiators of force will hide behind psychiatric labels and Christian demands to “forgive” because they know these things work with most people.
Christian apologists, psychotherapist twits and psychiatric excuse-makers will mostly agree (at least in public) with Castro that he has an ‘illness’ and could not have done other than what he did. Then how do we explain the fact that the vast majority of people with sexual addictions or compulsions would never hurt a fly? They may be their own worst enemies, but on their worst day they’d never inflict ten years of imprisonment, forced pregnancies and literal torture on three innocent victims of kidnapping.
Castro’s daughter is right on the money. Her perspective and attitude are credible, laudable and in her own best psychological interest. Her father is a monster. Despite the fact he generally treated her well (although he regularly assaulted her late mother), her goal is to distance herself from him, not wallow with him in the excuse-making and rationalizing to come.
Peculiarities she noticed about her father over the years started falling into place in a new, grim light, and they are making her feel “horrified,” she said.
“This was going on right under my nose,’ she told CNN.
At times, he would disappear from dinner and give no explanation for his absence, she said. The music was usually turned up loud, but Gregg thought this to be fitting since Castro was a musician.
Once she asked if she could go upstairs to see her childhood bedroom. Castro coaxed her out of the idea, telling her, “Oh, honey, there’s so much junk up there. You don’t want to go up there,” she said.
Is it too much to ask a man with sexual fantasies or other compulsions to confine them to his imagination, and to leave other people out of it? Should he have no responsibility for his calculated decisions—however irrational, still calculated—to sustain his secrecy and steal a decade of his victims’ lives, a decade they’ll never have back?
Everywhere you look, you find evidence of Castro’s conscious, deliberate and chosen actions, according to his daughter.
“He was adamant in the fact that he wanted to leave home early morning and he had to be back by evening,” she said. Her family often made travel plans with Castro that they then had to cancel because of her father’s obsession with his own four walls.
“We don’t have monster in our blood,” she said. “To go to the vigils, to show these girls the footage of their parents’ pleas for their return, to rape, starve and beat innocent human beings … I am disgusted.”
I share her disgust. My disgust is for my own profession, and others in our society who will excuse, minimize or distort a treacherous predator’s culpability for unrestrained evil. Keep in mind: If one of the kidnapped victims had not broken free, it would still all be going on this moment.
Angie Gregg has the right attitude. The best thing she can do is separate herself, mentally and physically, from her father.
Their blood relationship means nothing against the contrast between her own values and his criminal evasions. She’ll never be happy when she thinks about her father and what he has done, but she’ll only make matters worse if she tries to have some kind of relationship with him.
Aside from torturing innocent people, he betrayed her as well. Some things are unforgivable, and it’s better to honor that awful truth than to wallow in the religiously generated, pseudo-scientific psychiatric psychobabble that will be heaped upon her and the victims’ families in the months and years ahead.
I applaud Angie Gregg for her unusual courage in speaking the truth out loud. I hope she does the right thing, and the healthy thing, by holding her position.
Sources: ‘He is dead to me,’ daughter of Ohio suspect says in CNN exclusive By Laurie Segall, Erica Fink and Ben Brumfield CNN.com, 5/10/13
Ariel Castro, Cleveland Kidnap Suspect, May Face Death Penalty, abcnews.com 5/10/13
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