Lakireddy v. Kaavya -- Who's the Veritable Brown Villain?

(This has been cross-posted to Pass the Roti.)

I just typed “Lakireddy Bali Reddy” into Technorati, and it returned a scant twelve posts, several of which are completely unrelated to the case I will discuss shortly.

Then just for the hell of it, I typed in “Kaavya Viswanathan,” and got back three thousand, two hundred and twenty-three posts. And keep in mind many people wouldn’t have spelled her name correctly.

I know it can be fun to trash a young brown sister who almost became a remarkable overnight success, but are we really that much more schadenfreude than we are sincere? Because if our motivation in obsessing over “Kaavyagate” was really to put down the collective axe on bad brown behavior, I think the tale of Reddy and his heinous crimes of power and exploitation — along the lines of gender, age, class, caste, and immigration status — would have made the rounds in a big way starting about six years ago, such that his Defense would have absolutely no case in the hearing that occurred on Monday.

So who is this abominable creep of whom I speak? There is a pretty good factual background on Diana Russell’s web site (note: some of the racial/cultural references on the site may be problematic; feel free to comment on that). Basically, he is an incredibly wealthy landlord based in Berkeley, California (owns several restaurants and other business and residential property), who trafficked in several girls from his village in India over a thirteen-year period to extract cheap labor and sexually abuse them. Although the exact extent of emotional distress caused to some of the victims is unknown and was indeed the matter in dispute today, it is undisputed that one of the victims was pregnant with his child — at age 17 — when she died from carbon monoxide poisoning in the housing he provided for her. Yet, from Russell’s site:

On March 7, 2001, Reddy pleaded guilty to smuggling teenage girls from India for sex (sic) — including one as young as 13 — in a plea deal. In return for this admission, John Kennedy, the Assistant U.S. Prosecuting Attorney, whose job it was to represent Reddy’s victims, recommended that he spend only between 5 and 6 1/2 years in federal prison and pay only two million dollars in restitution (his Berkeley properties alone are worth more than $80 million) to three surviving victims and the parents of the Prattipati sisters. Shockingly, in return for Reddy’s limited admission of guilt, the Alameda District Attorney agreed not to charge Reddy for statutory rape of the girls despite the fact that he had forced sex on them for many years. Kennedy was clearly derelict in his duty to Reddy’s victims when he accepted Reddy’s outrageously minimal admissions of guilt as well as for proposing an equally outrageously minimal sentence for these extremely serious crime.

In the end, all he got was eight years prison time, which started in 2001. And the hearing held on May 22, 2006 was to cut down even that, because of alleged “obstruction of justice” coming from an interpreter involved in the case, who apparently encouraged some of the victims to exaggerate their emotional distress. Luckily, the judge didn’t buy that this “obstruction of justice” exceeded the kind caused by Reddy himself, and retained Reddy’s 97-month sentence. However, what scared me was that the courtroom was packed with supporters of Reddy — at least sixty of them. There were but a handful of people present to stand up for the victims and against the exploitation that this man committed. The press release from ASATA, Maitri, and South Asian Sisters can be found here. These three groups in addition to Berkeley-based Narika have been tracking the case for several years, with ASATA having been formed in 2000 in direct response to the case.

Would the response from the community have been different if the perpetrator were not South Asian? Would it then have been more widely discussed and bemoaned how young South Asian women were victims of this awful exploitation, because it also had a racial element? Is this another case of not wanting to air out our dirty laundry? Do some of us think it is less bad that it was (sort of) intra-community than it would be if the abuse came from someone of a different race, suggesting that there is some sort of entitlement or at least tacit acceptance for gender-based oppression within our community?

Or perhaps some of the reservations on the part of “progressive” brown folks come from the fact that we are against the prison-industrial complex, and the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality? While I would agree that our criminal justice system has gotten way out of hand, we lock up too many people, we have backward priorities, we should prioritize rehabilitation over retribution, and all that jazz… I just can’t apply that theory to this case, where it is a clear crime of power. I just don’t see progressives running around trying to free skinheads who committed hate crimes from the PIC — nor should we have any sympathy for people who commit gender-based crimes of power, whether inside or outside the community.

In any case, it makes me highly uncomfortable as a brown women to think that if I got caught up some nerdy academic scandal, my brown brethren would be the first to trash me in their sadistic little grapevines, and my name would be blown off the charts in Technorati; but were I to be completely and utterly exploited and violated by a Desi man, his name and good reputation might be left virtually untouched.