Daughters' internet trash talk sparks Marie Osmond's online decency crusade

You'll be happy to learn that Marie Osmond has launched an online decency campaign. Marie's war on MySpace began when she learned that her teenage daughters were talking dirty online.

Pop star-turned-doll maker MARIE OSMOND has launched a personal crusade to clean up the Internet after learning her two teenage daughters have been posting sexually explicit correspondence on their MySpace.com websites. The PAPER ROSES singer felt compelled to give a statement to US tabloid National Enquirer after the publication uncovered outrageous content on her daughters JESSICA and RACHAEL's blogs. On her site, 18-year-old Jessica, who was adopted by Osmond as an infant, claims she is a bi-sexual who craves sex "as many times as possible," while her 16-year-old sister describes herself as a "slut" and a "whore" in correspondence and opened up about her dreams of having sex with DAVID BOWIE. In her statement, shocked Marie, a devout Mormon, says, "I am saddened by some of the choices that two of our children have made. "The insidious potential for harm from adolescent Internet sites like MySpace.com only exacerbates these kinds of problems. "If my being a celebrity figure is good for anything, let it be as a voice of warning to other parents that no matter how protective we think we may have been with our children in the past, we need to become more knowledgeable and even more vigilant now in order to protect them." [Contactmusic.com]

Jessica must really healthy now that her own mother told The National Enquirer about her David Bowie fantasies.

No word yet on what Osmond plans to do about internet decency, except perhaps encouraging other parents to blackmail their children into civilized discourse. Granted, most parents can't use the media to shame their children, but the same principle can be adapted for parents even lower down the celebrity food chain than Osmond: "If I catch you writing those nasty words again, I'm going read those emails to Grandma!"

Maybe Marie is gunning for gigs at Hillary Clinton fundraisers.

Comments

[Matt]

I like David Bowie a lot, but surely any 16 year old girl who claims to want to sleep with him is either joking or in serious need of help. (At least it wasn't Kieth Richards, I guess.)

[TB]

My wife is from Provo.

One of my brothers-in-law (I can't remember which) asked Marie out on a date at one point in the 70s.

She gave him some utterly-lame 'I've got to wash my hair' excuse, but later was seen at the same High School danse with another guy.

Whata bitch.

[mudkitty]

Oh Matt - how purient of you.

[ElanaDMI]

Because being Bisexual is supposed to be a cause for shame? I think that's in the subtext of Marie's story. It doesn't sound like she respects the sexual identity of her legally adult daughter.

[Rose]

Hey, I used to have many fantasies about David Bowie myself as a young lass...I guess he's like a fine wine, getting better with age.

As for Marie Osmond, this "crusade" against myspace is more about her saving face with her right wing Christian fan base after her daughters' naughtiness was exposed to the world via the Enquirer (that is if she actually has any fan base left now).

[thebewilderness]

So there is nothing wrong with these children and there is nothing wrong with this family but ooh la wee those internets are bad? Hellooo Marie, have you ever had a conversation with these children that didn't focus on them meeting your needs?

[John]

I had a pre-pubescent hard-on for Marie Osmond back in the mid to late 70's. I'd have posted that info all over the internet back then had it been available. Too bad I had to dump her for Farrah Fawcett (in her red swimsuit. Every man alive at the time knows the poster to which I'm referring).

[Njorl]

The movie "Labyrinth" has a cult following of teen-age girls. Bowie plays male lead. He also wears tights.

Njorl

[Anna]

How sad that a woman who has set up and raised billions for sick children is disrespected so much.

I don't understand the hatred towards this woman who hasn't done anything bad to anyone and in fact has done much good in the world. How many here have raised billions for children. Raise your hands. Yeah, that's what I thought.

If anyone read her comments, you would notice that she did say that her daughters made bad choices. She said she needed to be more vigilant, and yes, she pointed to the internet which has made all this available. Available, it shoves pornography in our faces. Had any spam in your emails? She did not take blame away from her daughters at all, and obviously because her 16 year olds site is gone, she has been dealing with the situation.

This kind of thing could happen to any parent. You raise your kids the best you can and then they make the choices. You can teach them from the time they are little, and they can still choose to go the wrong way.

As for the guy who complained about Marie not going out on a date with him, since when does a girl have to accept a date from every guy who comes along? And what she did as a teenager makes her a bad person today?

[Cam]

Lindsay said: "Jessica must really healthy now that her own mother told The National Enquirer about her David Bowie fantasies."

Show us where she did. From your own entry, Marie's comments seem to be: "I am saddened by some of the choices that two of our children have made."

From your own entry, Marie only made the comments after the tabloid picked up information about Marie's daughters. Did you not even read what you were writing, while writing...um...let's make that copying and pasting?

Show us where Marie is the one who revealed the contents of the blog to the Enquirer or any media outlet, otherwise, I'm inclined to think you're just another blogger who can't be arsed to check facts when she's quoting everyone else.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

How do you suppose the National Enquirer found out what Marie Osmond's daughters were saying online? I assume they weren't airing these sentiments under their full legal names with notarized assurances to the reading public that they were in fact the daughters of Marie Osmond.

Even if they were, the NE would require some pretty serious confirmation in order to attribute those statements to minors in print. After all, anyone can pretend to be anyone on the internet.

So, it's pretty obvious that Marie Osmond outed her daughters.

The most implausibly charitable assumption is that she merely acquiesced to the outing of her daughters when she made a big fuss about how she embarked on this decency crusade after catching her own daughters talking dirty on the internet.

[joe o]

Billions for sick children? More like $1.3 billion. A much more reasonable goal.

[Mary Jones]

Hey, Bowie still looks good--I can't blame 'em, even as a joke.

Seriously? It sounds more like teenage bravado on the part of the girls than anything, and to have their mom not only snoop their sites but talk publicly about it.

And it's hardly a surprise that the daughters of a publicly uptight Mormon would rebel like this.

It happened to me, with my own family, and I'm 27 years old! There are relatives who won't talk to me because of what they read on what I thought was an entirely pseudonymous livejournal. I didn't know they'd go looking for me on the internet and try to connect my data trail. Learned the hard way that there really is no privacy, and anyone with enough time and Google can really ruin your life.

[parse]

Lindsay, your "how do you suppose the National Enquirer found out" excuse for making an assumption unsupported by the article you posted is pretty lame. Your assertion that "the NE would require some pretty serious confirmation in order to attribute those statements to minors in print" is amusing, given the reputation of the publication in question. Do you believe everything you read in the National Enquirer, or only claim to regard the tabloid as credible when you've been accused of being lazy in regard to fact checking? Even after being challenged about your interpretation of the article, you don't show any signs of having attempted to confirm whether what you've reported was true or not. I think you are being irresponsible.

[togolosh]

parse - the NE is actually pretty reliable, requiring better sourcing than most major media. They've been sued repeatedly and usually win, precisely because they are so careful about covering their asses.

I'm not sure that Lindsay's assumption is right, but attacking the NE's credibility isn't an effective argument. They're tawdry and unscrupulous, but they tend to be accurate.

I wouldn't be surprised if an acquaintance of the girls tipped the Enquirer and they tipped Marie in order to create a story that will sell papers.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Togolosh, I have to admit, that's a compelling theory. You scientists and your lateral thinking!

Even so, I think Marie must have sold the girls out. (Although, maybe just for a tiny marginal gain.) She could easily have denied the allegations and killed the story. I doubt her girls are famous enough to keep the story alive without her cooperation. If it were Brittany's dirty internet logs, the NE would have found a way to substantiate them, with or without Brit's mom. Somehow I doubt that they would, or could, prove that Marie's girls wrote that stuff, unless someone very important in their lives was prepared to sign off on the claims and (more importantly) agree not to sue over them.

I suspect that Marie Osmond's crusade is motivated by an unholy mixture of religious fervor, attention lust, and plain bloodymindedness.

[parse]

Linday, when you say Marie Osmand could have easily denied the allegations, is that because you think that the information about what her daughters posted are not true? Or that they are true, but Osmond could have lied and gotten away with it, and that's what you think she should have done? I can understand if you were to say she could have refused comment, but do you think the principled thing to do in such a sitation is to lie?

Togolosh, could you be more specific about your assertion that the NE requires better sourcing than most major media? And also that "they have been sued repeatedly, and usually win"? The lawsuit I'm most familiar with is the one Carol Burnett won, after the paper reported that she was drunk in public. The credibility of the paper suffered more recently over a story alleging that family members of kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart were guilty of sexual misconduct.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

The NE has a very canny legal team and a very rigorous fact-checking policy. I reflexively discounted anything that showed up in their headlines until I made friends with an editor who used to work for them. (At least the policy is rigorous as far as due diligence is concerned. They're very careful to get converging confirmations for major allegations from people who are plausibly in a position to know.) That's not exactly rigorous by historical or epistemic standards, but it's a far cry from printing unsubstantiated rumor or making shit up).

The NE's a scandal sheet, but a very careful scandal sheet nonetheless. It's a business. It doesn't go printing unsubstantiated C-list rumors that will just get them sued. There's no percentage in it.

Unless you're prepared to posit that the NE's willing to print unsubstantiated rumors about minors, how do you think they knew to the editor's satisfaction that these girls wrote anything of the kind?

Their mom is now saving her good name by crusading against her daughters and her friends.

Put two and two together. The tabloids or third parties may have alerted Marie, but honestly, I don't see how anyone forced her to embark on a crusade.

Maybe she's so sincere that she just doesn't care what her efforts do to daughters' reputations. Or maybe she was blackmailed into giving them up.

[Joe]

The National Enquirer is a news source?

You have got to be kidding.

Covering your ass legally so its difficult and expensive to sue you = being pretty reliable?

You have got to be kidding.

Saying parents should watch out what their kids do is a crusade against the internet?

Did everyone smoke crack recently and forget to invite me?

...and piratebay is down
...a sign of the coming apocalypse.

You're all a bunch of ninjas

[Tofumar]

"Every man alive at the time knows the poster to which I'm referring."

I wasn't alive at the time, and I still know what poster you're talking about.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Granted, the NE has reinvented itself in the last 10 years. Check it out the next time you're waiting in line at the grocery story. No more UFO sex abuse stories.

[1984 Was Not a Shopping List]

Too bad I had to dump her for Farrah Fawcett (in her red swimsuit. Every man alive at the time knows the poster to which I'm referring).

I know the poster, but I was always a Jaclyn Smith man. Damn.

[Dunc]

Of course, in the pre-internet age, they'd just have written that stuff in their diaries...

[Joe]

I don't know... I'd actually rather read about a woman abducted by aliens giving birth to satan's baby... than more celebrity eating disorders and nosepickings.

And frankly a mother, celeb or no, overreacting to details of her children's self-published sex lives just doesn't go much beyond fishing for boogies, in my opinion. Mileage may vary.

[Feathers McGraw]

I'm just picturing David Bowie reading this article and chortling to Iman across the breakfast table: "I've still got it, baby!"