Arnold Schwarzenegger
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Claims to fame: Republican Governor of California; alleged adulterer; alleged statutory rapist; fornicator; serial groper; misogynist; pot smoker; steroid abuser; Nazi apologist; megalomaniac; bad actor
Moral apex: There isn’t just one. So let’s start with the minor offenses, and work our way up to the big ones…
Drugs:
There’s the pot-smoking…
“Yes, grass and hash — no hard drugs. But the point is that I do what I feel like doing. I’m not on a health kick.”
— Arnold to Oui magazine, 1977
And there’s the anabolic-steroid abuse…
“I will not speak for my colleagues, but I will write of my experience with tissue-building drugs. Yes, I have used them, but no, they didn’t make me what I am. Anabolic steroids were helpful to me in maintaining muscle size while on a strict diet in preparation for a contest. I did not use them for muscle growth, but rather for muscle maintenance when cutting up.”
— “Arnold: Developing a Mr Universe Physique,” 1977
Groping:
As of late 2003, 15 women…
…had come forward to say that Arnold Schwarzenegger fondled, spanked or touched them in incidents they said took place as recently as 2000 and as long ago as 1979.In all, 15 women have now accused the Republican candidate for governor of grabbing or groping them. On the campaign trail Saturday, Schwarzenegger denounced as a “puke campaign” news reports that he has behaved abusively toward women.
The women who agreed Saturday to tell their stories publicly are:
A 51-year-old woman who said Schwarzenegger pinned her to his chest and spanked her shortly after she met him at a West Los Angeles post-production studio in 2000.
Tamee Smith, 46, who said Schwarzenegger followed her into a bathroom on a studio lot and grabbed her breast during work on the movie Predator in 1986.
Jan Prinzmetal, 50, who said Schwarzenegger reached under her skirt and grabbed her bare buttocks outside a Venice gym in the mid-1980s.
Elizabeth Rothner, 45, who said Schwarzenegger lifted her sweatshirt at a popular Santa Monica bar in 1979, exposing her bare breasts before a crowd.
— Los Angeles Times, October 5, 2003
And then there’s Anna Richardson, and Joy Browne, and Rhonda Miller, and Colette Brooks, and… Oh, heavens, we could write a book on Arnold’s unwelcome advances. But you get the idea.
Gang orgies:
“Bodybuilders party a lot, and once in Gold’s — the gym in Venice, California, where all the top guys train — there was a black girl who came out naked. Everybody jumped on her and took her upstairs, where we all got together… but not everybody, just the guys who can fuck in front of other guys. Not everybody can do that. Some think that they don’t have a big-enough cock, so they can’t get a hard-on.”
— Arnold to Oui magazine, 1977
Alleged adultery and alleged statutory rape:
We don’t want to get sued, so go Google Arnold along with “Gigi Goyette,” and make up your own mind.
Posing nude in gay men’s (and other) magazines:
“It all went well until I asked a question that obviously upset him. It was about a nude picture of him a colleague said she had seen in a German magazine. Arnold, his smile now gone, said he was devoted to making bodybuilding a legitimate sport and would never cheapen its, or his, image by posing in the nude. Chastened, I asked a few more quick questions, then ended the interview. …
“Back at the paper, I told my colleague that Schwarzenegger denied the nude photo story. To prove she was telling the truth, she brought the magazine to work the next day. There he was, smiling that gap-toothed smile, full-frontally naked as a jaybird. It wasn’t a snapshot, but what looked like a studio pose. It was later published in America in Spy Magazine — along with Arnold’s jokey explanation of it.”
— Patrick MacDonald, recalling a
1976 interview with Schwarzenegger
Seattle Union Record, November 22, 2000
What’s worse than drug use, sexual assault, and general misogyny:
Being a Nazi apologist. One of Arnold’s close, personal friends was the late Kurt Waldheim — and Arnold doesn’t deny the fact, nor apologize for it.
As Timothy Noah of Slate wrote, “A little refresher course may be in order. Kurt Waldheim, a widely esteemed former secretary general of the United Nations, was running for president of Austria in March 1986 when it came to light that he had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II. Waldheim… had been an intelligence officer in Germany’s Army Group E when it committed mass murder in the Kozara region of western Bosnia. … (Waldheim’s name appears on the Wehrmacht’s “honor list” of those responsible for the atrocity.) In 1944, Waldheim had reviewed and approved a packet of anti-Semitic propaganda leaflets to be dropped behind Russian lines, one of which ended, ‘enough of the Jewish war, kill the Jews, come over.’”
Not only did Schwarzenegger invite Waldheim to his wedding (to Kennedy-turncoat Maria Shriver), but, according to Wendy Leigh’s biography, toasted Waldheim at the event, expressing nothing less than love for the notorious Jew-killer (who had the sense not to attend, but who did send a wedding gift):
“My friends don’t want me to mention Kurt’s name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the U.N. controversy, but I love him and Maria does too, and so thank you, Kurt.”
Partial redemption: Schwarzenegger is not an anti-Semite; he’s made substantial donations and raised funds for various Holocaust memorials and projects.
But: That doesn’t excuse his relationship with Waldheim.
But: Rabbi Marvin Hier (in the Jerusalem Post) absolved Arnold: “He probably did not have any clue as to the seriousness of the allegations against Waldheim at that time.”
But: We don’t buy that, because 1) Ignorance is no excuse; and 2) a native Austrian whose own father was a Nazi stormtrooper can’t be that ignorant.
Oh, guess we forgot to mention: Arnold’s father, Gustav, was a Nazi stormtrooper… and voluntarily, at that:
The brief entry in one of millions of documents stored at the Austrian State Archives shows that Gustav Schwarzenegger, the late father of the film star now running for governor of California, was a volunteer member of the Sturmabteilung, or SA — the notorious Nazi storm troopers also known as brownshirts. …The “SA 1.5.1939″ listing shows that the elder Schwarzenegger joined May 1, 1939, the year after Germany annexed Austria and six months after the brownshirts played a crucial role in the bloody Kristallnacht riots. …
There’s no doubt that Schwarzenegger’s father was a convinced Nazi; Austrian records indicate he joined the party on March 1, 1938, two weeks before the country was annexed. A separate record obtained by the Wiesenthal Center indicates he sought membership before the annexation but was only accepted in 1941.
AP, August 24, 2003
What’s worse than being friends with Kurt Waldheim:
Admiring Adolf Hitler. Arnold may abhor everything Hitler stood for, but he did express “admiration” for the man, according to Pumping Iron director George Butler, in 1975 outtakes from the documentary:
“I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power.“I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it. … The feeling like Kennedy had, you know, to speak to maybe 50,000 people at one time and having them cheer, or like Hitler in the Nuremberg Stadium. And have all those people scream at you and just being in total agreement with whatever you say.”
We’re not saying any of this makes Arnold a Nazi — by all accounts, he is quite anti-Hitler, and deeply embarrassed by his father’s Nazism. We’re saying that he can’t possibly be so stupid as to have never understood the gravity of his friend Kurt Waldheim’s war crimes, nor the consequences of expressing admiration for Adolf Hitler… nor his own unequivocable desire for Hitler-like control over the masses:
“I didn’t think about money. I thought about the fame, about just being the greatest. I was dreaming about being some dictator of a country or some savior like Jesus…”
— To Rolling Stone, June 3, 1976
“I was always dreaming about very powerful people, dictators and things like that. I was just always impressed by people who could be remembered for hundreds of years, or even, like Jesus, be for thousands of years remembered.”
— In the documentary Pumping Iron (1977)
“My relationship to power and authority is that I’m all for it. … People need somebody to watch over them… Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.”
— To US News and World Report, 1990
As European historian Martin Lee said to Amy Goodman in 2003, “For Schwarzenegger to have made [the wedding toast to Kurt Waldheim] at that time after these revelations surfaced is really quite shocking. It shows, at the very least, insensitivity to the victims of Nazism and anti-Semitism. … One way or another the point is not that Schwarzenegger is a Nazi, the point is that it raises character issues that he’s not qualified to be in public office.”
Perverse injustice: He was still elected governor of California in 2003.
What’s even more perverse: Exit polls indicate that 44% of Arnold’s supporters were women.
Other memorable quotes from Arnold:
“I can look at a chick who’s a little out of shape and if she turns me on, I won’t hesitate to date her. If she’s a good fuck, she can weigh 150 pounds, I don’t care.”
— To Oui magazine, 1977
“At the Mr. Olympia contest in 1972, we had girls backstage giving head, then all of us went out and I won.”
— ibid.
“Men shouldn’t feel like fags just because they want to have nice-looking bodies…. Recently I posed for a gay magazine, which caused much comment. But it doesn’t bother me. Gay people are fighting the same kind of stereotyping that bodybuilders are: People have certain misconceptions about them just as they do about us. Well, I have absolutely no hang-ups about the fag business…”
— ibid.
“I like them with black hair, with brown hair, with red hair, with big breasts, with little breasts, with a big ass, with a little ass.”
— In the documentrary Pumping Iron (1977)
“Neither my mother nor Maria is allowed to go out with me in pants.”
— To Playboy, 1988
“Eating isn’t cheating.”
— On the subject of oral sex,
to Premiere magazine, 2001
“No one that has been around me would believe that a woman would be complaining about me holding her.”
— To the Weekly Standard, 2002
“As we were rehearsing, I saw this toilet bowl. How many times do you get away with this — to take a woman, grab her upside down and bury her face in a toilet bowl? I wanted to have something floating in there.”
— Referring to a scene in Terminator 3,
to Entertainment Weekly, 2003
“Obviously, I’ve made statements that were ludicrous and crazy and outrageous and all those things, because that’s the way I always was.”
— August, 2003
“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I have no memory of any of the articles I did 20 or 30 years ago.”
— The following day, at a press conference
“When you see a blonde with great tits and a great ass, you say to yourself, ‘Hey, she must be stupid or must have nothing else to offer’, which maybe is the case many times. But then again there is the one that is as smart as her breasts look, great as her face looks, beautiful as her whole body looks gorgeous, you know, so people are shocked.”
— To Esquire Magazine, 2003
“Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets, and I have done things that were not right, which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended I want to say to them, I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because this is not what I’m trying to do.”
— October 2, 2003
Memorable observations:
“All his liabilities won’t matter if he needs just 21 percent of the vote. There are going to be enough Californians who don’t care about the dope and the women.”
— Political analyst Bruce Cain, August, 2003
“Arnold has acknowledged that at times his behavior, while good-natured, could be rowdy and bawdy. He has apologized to those who felt offended. Arnold has stated, when he began his campaign, that he did not live his life under the expectation that he would someday be governor.”
— Schwarzenegger spokesman Sean Walsh, October 5, 2003
“What a world. Voters have elected a serial groper to be governor of California. And women helped put him there. …
“Whatever were they thinking? That the devil made him do it? That all men are dogs and can’t help themselves?”
— Mary Jo Melone, St. Petersburg Times, October 12, 2003
Divine justice: None yet, but we’re sure it’s on its way. Unless he becomes President.
Suggested Bible reading for Mr. Schwarzenegger:
For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.
— Romans 8:5-6
