Why All the Comedy Men Are So Awful
Richard Pryor was angry. It was 1972, and Pryor was in the south of France shooting a movie called Hit! with Billy Dee Williams. He brought his girlfriend Patricia Heitman along and, at one point during the trip, she allegedly walked in on Pryor in bed with a hooker. According to biographer Scott Saul, Pryor then invited Patricia to join in the action. When she declined, Pryor flew into a rage, expressing his displeasure by beating her, tearing her clothes off, and throwing her out of the room. Patricia, not one to be cowed, got back at him later by sprinkling rat poison in his socks and underwear.
It was hardly the first time Pryor had mistreated a woman (he once beat his first wife for serving him potatoes he didn’t like), and Patricia’s rat poison stunt would hardly deter him from it going forward. Back in LA, he would again rip off Patricia’s clothes and toss her out onto the street, naked. While she was locked out, desperate for clothing and shelter, he burned her coat in the fireplace. Later in life, Pryor confessed to beating women on air to Barbara Walters and explained himself thusly:
“They pissed me off. I'm sorry to say that. I know emotionally inside of me, because I was weak. That's really the reason. I was weak.”
In a way, Pryor got lucky because even as he confessed to his monstrousness in public, the bulk of his career came at a time when such transgressions were, unforgivably, easily shrugged off by the media and powerbrokers alike. He was still revered, rarely shamed by anyone outside of himself. Perhaps the public regret he expressed to Walters was enough to merit some measure of forgiveness, and perhaps people also took into hard consideration the fact that Pryor himself was abused as a child, at the hands of both a boy who molested him in an alleyway, and his own grandmother, a Peoria madam who would beat him regularly when Pryor’s father wasn’t around to do the job himself.
https://www.gq.com/story/all-the-bad-comedy-menThankful that it seems the times are finally changing and this sort of monstrous behavior will no longer be shrugged off.
= new reply since forum marked as read
