Sports columnist trivializes Jaycee Dugard’s imprisonment to frame an article

Mark Whicker, a sport columnist at The Orange County Register, had a terrible idea for an article: use the imprisonment, systematic rape, and forced pregnancy Jaycee Dugard was subjected to by Phillip Garrido as an excuse to talk about moments from the last 18 years of sports that Whicker wanted to rant about. Then, Whicker actually wrote this article. Someone actually approved it. And the Orange County Register actually published it. In case you needed evidence of the institutionalization of rape culture.

It doesn’t sound as if Jaycee Dugard got to see a sports page.
Box scores were not available to her from June 10, 1991 until Aug. 31 of this year.
She never saw a highlight. Never got to the ballpark for Beach Towel Night. Probably hasn’t high-fived in a while.
She was not allowed to spike a volleyball. Or pitch a softball. Or smack a forehand down the line. Or run in a 5-footer for double bogey.
Now, that’s deprivation.
Can you imagine? Dugard was 11 when she was kidnapped and stashed in Phillip Garrido’s backyard. She was 29 when she escaped. Penitentiary inmates at least get an hour of TV a day. Dugard was cut off from everything but the elements.
How long before she fully digests the world she re-enters? How difficult to adjust to such cataclysmic change?
More than that, who’s going to explain the fact that there’s a President Obama?

I’m sorry, how does any of this, including Obama’s presidency, matter in comparison to the hell Dugard was put through by Garrido? In what world is missing events in sports history the relevant “deprivation” Dugard experienced? How can a person write a sentence like this: “I know you’ve had trouble digesting all this so far, but they also built a basketball arena at USC. Honest to God.” You think the building of a basketball arena will be hard for this woman to digest? Seriously Whicker, how clueless are you?
Unsurprisingly, Whicker and The Orange County Register got a lot of negative, outraged feedback on the article. So Whicker issued an “apology.”

It was not my intention to do so. But it’s obvious that I miscalculated the effect the column on Jaycee Dugard, and the events that she might have missed during her captivity, had on those who read, buy and advertise in our newspaper. …
I’ll try to earn back the trust of those customers in my future endeavors.

Whicker is sorry he lost the paper paying customers and probably advertisers? That’s what he apologizes for? There’s no overstating how messed up Whicker’s priorities are. You know we live in an overwhelmingly oppressive patriarchal and misogynist world when Garrido can imprison Dugard for eighteen years and enough people can fail to understand the weight of the sexual and reproductive violence she experienced that both the original article and subsequent “apology” could be published.
Mark Whicker can be contacted at mwhicker@ocregister.com. Contact information for plenty more people at The Orange County Register responsible for the publication of these articles can be found at this page.
h/t to Vanessa’s friend Mary Alice.
Previously: Friday Feminist Fuck You: Philip Garrido