Hunter S. Thompson: A Glimpse of the Feminist Perspective

CW: discussion of sexual assault, racism, sexism

Today we are going to be looking into Hunter’s portrayal of the sexual assault allegations leveled against the Hell’s Angels, in his article The Motorcycle Gangs. This breakthrough piece would later evolve into his infamous book named for the notorious gang. Hunter decides to write about the outlaw gang because he can clearly see that the motivation of the mainstream media is to portray them as horrific monsters that travel the West Coast in packs, stalking every innocent in every town, for no better reason than a bloodthirsty need for chaos. He goes in and learns the obvious- they are people, and therefore complex. He does not necessarily try to portray them as heroes, but he is pretty much always on their side. For the most part, this is a good thing. But when we’re talking about sexual assault, I don’t think it is.

We have to acknowledge that Hunter makes no claims to objectivity. The entire nature of gonzo journalism goes against it. But his opinion is widespread and influential, and when discussing the survivors in these cases he is, in a word, scathing. And some of the “evidence” that he has for condemning these women is at best dubious, at worst false. So let’s get into our analysis of Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels and sexual assault.

“If you’re “asked to stay out” of a bar, you don’t just punch the owner–you come back with your army and destroy the whole edifice. Similar incidents–along with a number of vague rape complaints–make up the bulk of the report. Eighteen incidents in four years, and none except the rape charges are more serious than cases of assaults on citizens who, for their own reasons, had become involved with the Hell’s Angels prior to the violence. I could find no cases of unwarranted attacks on wholly innocent victims. There are a few borderline cases, wherein victims of physical attacks seemed innocent, according to police and press reports, but later refused to testify for fear of “retaliation.” The report asserts very strongly that Hell’s Angels are difficult to prosecute and convict because they make a habit of threatening and intimidating witnesses. That is probably true to a certain extent, but in many cases victims have refused to testify because they were engaged in some legally dubious activity at the time of the attack.”

The report he refers to is the Attorney General’s official report into the criminal activities of the Hells Angels.

Here Hunter does acknowledge that the Angels do threaten people to keep them silent, but he effectively goes on to completely dismiss it as an issue, both here and later in the piece. However, claiming that people didn’t testify because they were doing something illegal does have any bearing on the truth of what happened. It just means they didn’t testify. Now Hunter doesn’t claim that it does, but rather offers another explanation as to why it may be hard to prosecute the Angels.

“In two of the most widely publicized incidents the prosecution would have fared better if their witnesses and victims had been intimidated into silence. One of these was the Monterey “gang rape,” and the other a “rape” in Clovis, near Fresno in the Central Valley. In the latter, a 36-year-old widow and mother of five children claimed she’d been yanked out of a bar where she was having a quiet beer with another woman, then carried to an abandoned shack behind the bar and raped repeatedly for two and a half hours by fifteen or twenty Hell’s Angels and finally robbed of $150. That’s how the story appeared in the San Francisco newspapers the next day, and it was kept alive for a few more days by the woman’s claims that she was getting phone calls threatening her life if she testified against her assailants.”

Ok, so we have the San Fran newspaper publishing the horror story, which makes sense for them to do.

“Then, four days after the crime, the victim was arrested on charges of “sexual perversion.” The true story emerged, said the Clovis chief of police, when the woman was “confronted by witnesses. Our investigation shows she was not raped,” said the chief. “She participated in lewd acts in the tavern with at least three other Hell’s Angels before the owners ordered them out. She encouraged their advances in the tavern, then led them to an abandoned house in the rear… She was not robbed but, according to a woman who accompanied her, had left her house early in the evening with $5 to go bar-hopping.” That incident did not appear in the Attorney General’s report.”

So we’re not going to argue anything about the validity of the Attorney General’s report, as that’s not what we’ve researched. Hunter seems to say that the report has massive holes, then implies that this case being left out gives the new story legitimacy. And again, we don’t know if it is. But Hunter writes as if the truth emerged victorious here, despite there being some pretty looming questions in his account.

What in the name of sanity is a charge of sexual perversion? This sounds like some McCarthy type shit given its happening in the 60s in America. It sounds like in the second version, she may have committed public indecency or that “sexual perversion” may apply to sex in a public place. But tbh sounds like it’s something that’s meant to ban everything but heterosexual missionary.

Who are these witnesses she is confronted by? Could they potentially be the people we know have already been threatening her?

As of 2019, less than 1% of sexual assault cases in the U.S. lead to a conviction. This article was first published in 1965.

“But it was impossible not the mention the Monterey “gang rape,” because it was the reason for the whole subject to become official. Page one of the report–which Time‘s editors apparently skipped–says that the Monterey case was dropped because “… further investigation raised questions as to whether forcible rape had been committed or if the identifications made by victims were valid.” Charges were dismissed on September 25, with the concurrence of a grand jury. The deputy District Attorney said “a doctor examined the girls and found no evidence” to support the charges. “Besides that, one girl refused to testify,” he explained, “and the other was given a lie-detector test and found to be wholly unreliable.”

So we’ve got, yet again, an absence of testimony against people known for threatening witnesses. I won’t keep harping on about this, but we can hardly consider that damning for the girls. When considering the findings, or lack thereof of the doctor we need to remember that rape kits weren’t invented until the 1970s. (I’ve included a cool article in the notes about one of the people credited with their invention, but there’s not word of anyone doing it before 1970. So five year later.) And finally, we also know now that lie detector tests are useless, and don’t prove anything about anyone. They’re essentially a technique used by police to freak people out, by convincing them the cops can tell when they’re lying. They can’t. And the machine can’t either.

This, in effect, was what the Hell’s Angels had been saying all along. Here is their version of what happened, as told by several who were there:

PLEASE NOTE: THIS QUOTE USES THE TERM ‘COLOURED’ WHEN REFERRING TO AFRICAN AMERICANS. WE DO NOT ENDORSE THIS USE HOWEVER WE DO NOT THINK IT IS APPROPRIATE CHANGE IT, AS TO DO SO WOULD BE A DENIAL OF THE RACIST CONNOTATIONS OF THE SPEAKER.

"One girl was white and pregnant, the other was colored, and they were with five colored studs. They hung around our bar–Nick’s Place on Del Monte Avenue–for about three hours Saturday night, drinking and talking with our riders, then they came out to the beach with us–them and their five boyfriends. Everybody was standing around the fire, drinking wine, and some of the guys were talking to them–hustling ’em, naturally–and soon somebody asked the two chicks if they wanted to be turned on–you know, did they want to smoke some pot? They said yeah, and then they walked off with some of the guys to the dunes. The spade went with a few guys and then she wanted to quit, but the pregnant one was really hot to trot; the first four or five guys she was really dragging into her arms, but after that she cooled off, too. By this time, though, one of their boyfriends had got scared and gone for the cops–and that’s all it was.”

But not quite all. After that there were Senator Farr and Tom Lynch and a hundred cops and dozens of newspaper stories and articles in the national news magazine–and even this article, which is a direct result of the Monterey “gang rape.”

It’s a classic he said/she said. And here is the thing about those: currently, the rate of false rape allegations is 0.5%. That’s 1 in 200. They are super rare. And what do these girls get for lying to the police? Their names were never released, so not fame. There aren’t any interviews with them, so not fortune. What they get, is to be enemies of a group that the media is telling them are dangerous beyond comprehension. That doesn’t sound like much of a motivation to me.

“When the much-quoted report was released, the local press–primarily the San Francisco Chronicle, which had earlier done a long and fairly objective series on the Hell’s Angels–made a point of saying that the Monterey charges against the Hell’s Angels had been dropped for lack of evidence. Newsweek was careful not to mention Monterey at all, but the New York Times referred to it as “the alleged gang rape” which, however, left no doubt in a reader’s mind that something savage had occurred. It remained for Time, though, to flatly ignore the fact that the Monterey rape charges had been dismissed. Its article leaned heavily on the hairiest and least factual sections of the report, and ignored the rest. It said, for instance, that the Hell’s Angels initiation rite “demands that any new member bring a woman or girl [called a ‘sheep’] who is willing to submit to sexual intercourse with each member of the club.” That is untrue, although, as one Angel explained, “Now and then you get a woman who likes to cover the crowd, and hell, I’m no prude. People don’t like to think women go for that stuff, but a lot of them do.”

The conclusion to this murky situation has to be this- media bias is completely unescapable, even for the great Hunter S. Thompson. And he would be the first to agree with that. But Hunter has made it clear here that he is not a feminist by modern standard, but then we couldn’t really expect him to be. Railing against the media failing to engage in the entire truth is important, now, and when Hunter did it himself so I don’t think he’d mind us combatting his work with another perspective- after all, he spent a lot of time doing that himself. And we will always acknowledge that I have more information now than he did then; we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. But as he taught us, question everything. And that includes our favourite coke fuelled, wildcat punching, Republican eating giant.

Sources:

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/motorcycle-gangs/

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2019/09/15/why-are-we-so-bad-at-prosecuting-sexual-assault/

https://www.thecut.com/article/false-rape-accusations.html

https://www.vox.com/2014/8/14/5999119/polygraphs-lie-detectors-do-they-work

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/17/opinion/rape-kit-history.html