Kathy Griffin: The Red Herring

I can't say I've ever read a celebrity magazine in my lifetime, and after this I probably never will. I thought BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post had a monopoly on hearsay and conjecture, but Celebitchy seem to take the cake. This article I chose is Kathy Griffin: ‘I didn’t commit a crime. I didn’t rape anybody'. You can see where I derived my title from. Some of the fallacies identified are from the "journalist's" commentary, and some are from the statements made by Kathy in a interview by The Hollywood Reporter about the aftermath of here botched comedy skit earlier last year .

Red Herring

The quote from Kathy Griffin in article title gives us our first fallacy the red herring. Kathy's statement that "I didn't commit a crime, I didn't rape anybody" is a classic example of the fallacy. The premise is unrelated to the claim. The claim is that she did not commit a crime, the crime in question would be threatening the President of the United States, it does not follow that since she did not commit the crime of rape that she therefore did not commit a crime. If you are being accused of manslaughter, you cannot exonerate yourself simply by stating that "I didn't evade my taxes".

Poisoning the Well

The author of article, Hecate, tries to make the point that Kathy is really just playing the victim, and trying to milk her controversy dry. She does a preemptive ad hominem in the beginning of the article to illustrate this.  Helcate writes "...she said she is practically a prisoner in her $10.5 million-dollar compound in Bel Air". The unnecessary addition of the cost of Kathy's house, and sarcastic use of the word "compound" is suppose to convey that she really isn't a prisoner, and that she is wealthy enough to not warrant much sympathy.

Strawman

Hecate obviously has not sympathy for Kathy's grievances, to the point of misrepresenting the claims and motives that Kathy is citing for her worries. Hecate writes " The main point Kathy wanted to make in her interview is that not only is she not a criminal but that it’s everyone else’s fault she’s being treated like one." It is clear from the excerpts from the interview that Kathy did not blame everyone from for her predicament, but the author is making a caricature of Kathy's statements in order to advance the claim that she truly is not as much of a victim as she claims.

Article Link: http://www.celebitchy.com/564999/kathy_griffin_i_didnt_commit_a_crime_i_didnt_rape_anybody_/