Yarrow Documents

I did a post last week on Peter Yarrow, folk-singer, anti-bullying activist, and ex-con. My point at the time was that there was a lot of smoke, but... In a country that obsesses over sex, celebrity, crime, and acts like a dog in a Gravy Train commercial when all three are present at once, I was sure that details of the alleged offense would be all over the internet. Especially since the complaints from parents were supposedly based on information that their kids found all over the internet. After failing to find salacious details, but finding plenty of people with a motive to imply that unspoken details were more salacious than they actually were, I challenged my readership to convince me that Yarrow had actually earned the negative reaction he was receiving.

I updated that post yesterday, because a reader who had actually read a more detailed description of the complaint, to which Yarrow pleaded guilty, informed me that it included Yarrow being manually stimulated by the 14 year old victim. Today, ThisWeek has posted a collection of clippings, including the news reports at the time, in pdf format. It starts with an extremely unflattering opinion column from a few years ago that nevertheless contains the actual words "so the singer is not exactly a sexual predator."

That was the standard I used at the end of my original post. I'm ambivalent at this point. If you're interested in the topic, I highly encourage you to read the clippings, and feel free to weigh in here.