It’ll be very interesting to see what Bill O’Reilly says about the whole Jaycee Lee Dugard case. For those that aren’t aware, back in early 2007 O’Reilly made some incredibly insensitive comments about another abduction case involving a child named Shawn Hornbeck.
On his show he had this to say about the Hornbeck case:
I’m not buying this. If you’re 11 years old or 12 years old, 13, and you have a strong bond with your family, OK, even if the guy threatens you, this and that, you’re riding your bike around, you got friends. The kid didn’t go to school. There’s all kinds of stuff. If you can get away, you get away. All right? If you’re 11.
This is what I believe happened in the Hearst case and in this case. The situation that Hearst found herself in was exciting. She had a boring life. She was a child of privilege. All of a sudden, she’s in with a bunch of charismatic thugs, and she enjoyed it. The situation here for this kid looks to me to be a lot more fun than what he had under his old parents. He didn’t have to go to school. He could run around and do whatever he wanted.
Bill clearly doesn’t believe in Stockholm Syndrome. When it came out that Shawn had been brutally violated and dominated O’Reilly seemingly forgot everything he said to the contrary, including his promise to apologize should he be shown to be wrong, and suddenly talked about how sick all of this was. He also said he’d never mention Hornbeck by name again even though Shawn himself wanted his name mentioned in a bid to raise awareness of his situation so that others might learn from it.
Now we have the case of Miss Dugard. I have to wonder if, deep down, Bill actually believes she enjoyed herself these last 18 years as it seems evident that she could have found a way to escape in all that time.
Something tells me that he may have finally learned his lesson on this one.
