My 2 Cents on the Griffin Mansion Fiasco

There is a column on the MSN News website called "Rossen Reports," a column dedicated to exposing scams.  Here is a link to yesterday's Rossen Report, but if you're not interested in reading the whole article, let me summarize a bit:  The article is about Griffin Mansions, an estate located close to Las Vegas, that rents itself out for extravagant weddings.  For years, Griffin Mansions illegally operated its business without the proper permits, including health permits (which would allow them to serve food), liquor licenses, etc.  Eventually, the government got sick of waiting for the permits to be filed, and shut the business down.  The thing is, even a month after being shut down, Griffin Mansion was still booking new events -- and, more to the point, accepting payment for those events -- long after they knew that they wouldn't be able to deliver.

To make matters worse, it now turns out that, even before the government shut them down, the owners of Griffin Mansion apparently never intended to use their clients' money for its intended purpose -- paying for the weddings -- as the owners instead used the money from the business account to pay for their own personal shopping sprees, spa excursions, and fertility treatments.  Griffin Mansion had actually produced a number of truly glorious weddings in the past -- just enough to build up a solid reputation -- only to then use that reputation to scam people out of what will probably come out to millions of dollars, when you add up all that they bilked from their dozens of victims.

Okay, I hope that everyone reading this agrees that the actions of these con artists are absolutely deplorable.  I'm running on the assumption that we can all agree that that much, at least, is a given.  But what I want to talk about here isn't the actions of the con artists.  I want to talk about the online reaction that this news story has generated.

If you go to any number of online sources -- most notably the MSN News page that broke this story in the first place -- you will find a few people who are sympathetic to the con artists' victims.  But these people are far, far outnumbered by people who either delight in the victims' distress (usually implying that the victims, due to either their naivete or their wealth, somehow deserve their misfortune) or take the opportunity to make groundless accusations and insults to the brides ("she probably would have ruined his life anyway" seems to be the most common one, as if the readers of the article somehow personally know these women).  In fact, the comments section got so vitriolic that MSN News apparently had to shut down the comments section, which has disappeared from the page since the first time I read the article (late night on Feb. 5, the date it was published).

In response to all of this hostility, I would like to respond by quoting the late, great, William Shakespeare:  What the fuck, people?!?  (Okay, I admit that's more of a paraphrase of the Bard than an outright quotation.)  Seriously, it's not like I'm a stranger to the wealth of senseless rancor on the Web.  I used to be a very active poster on the IMDb, until all the hostility motivated me to delete my account.  I used to be a very active editor for Wikipedia until the pure malevolence of other editors motivated me to delete my account there as well.  So by now, I'm well aware that people use the anonymity of the Web to say some truly awful things, usually without any provocation at all.  But every time I think I've finally grasped the awfulness of humanity, the Internet shows me that people can get even worse than I'd previously suspected.

I think even the the most naive of us is aware that there are unscrupulous people out there who are out to make a buck and will do anything, regardless of legality or morality, to do it.  But reading the user comments after the Rossen Report on Griffin Mansions makes me wonder, not for the first time, whether the Internet somehow naturally attracts the absolute worst of humanity, or if I'm really reading an accurate representation of how the general public behaves and thinks.

I'm not going to go on and on ranting about people in general, because most of the people reading this most likely are people I know, like, and respect.  But I do want to make a few more relevant observations before I leave this topic behind:

1.  There seems to be an element of "sour grapes" going on in the comments, as many people are explicitly reacting to what they see as an unnecessarily extravagant expenditure on the wedding packages.  Griffin Mansion's "all-inclusive" package, which includes not only use of the space but also flowers, food, photography, etc., runs a little more than $20,000.  First of all, I ask you if twenty grand really seems like an "unnecessarily extravagant" amount to spend on what is traditionally referred to as "the most important day of your life."  It seems to me that many of these victims are possibly not wealthy at all, but just middle-class people like you and me, who have had the misfortune of being bilked out of the money they have been saving up for this extremely important life event.

But even if you answer "yes, that's way too much money for a reasonable person to spend on a wedding" and jump to the conclusion that these people must be wealthy, I still don't understand how that justifies the hate poured on these victims.  Yes, times are hard for many of us these days, but does that mean that wealthy people somehow automatically deserve our disgust and bile?  I just don't understand that kind of thinking.

2.  One brave soul already went to the comments page and made many of the same points I just made above.  She defended the victims and said that they did not deserve the hate poured onto them by previous comments.  This woman was shouted down by such an overwhelming majority of posters that I felt sorry for the poor girl.  Some posters called her naive, while others used a thesaurus-worth of synonyms for words that could otherwise be spelled with only four letters.  Despicable.

3.  With plenty of help from my parents and wife, I recently paid for and planned my own wedding, so I know first-hand how expensive and stressful the whole thing can be.  I know what it feels like when something, even a relatively small thing, goes wrong at the last minute.  The thought of going to all that trouble and spending all that money only to find out that it was all for nothing, that the money is gone, the venue is gone, and you don't have the resources or time to come up with any alternative because the date is far, far too soon by the time you find out that the whole thing is in the pot . . . well, I both can and can't imagine that happening.  Yeah, I know that's a direct contradiction, but it's also true.

Anyway, I'm winding down, and if you're expecting me to reach some kind of insightful point, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I don't have anything.  But I will close by posing my earlier question:  What's with all the pure venom on the 'net these days?  Is there really something about the Internet that attracts the evil of humanity more than the good?  Or is that actually an accurate representation of us at our most basic, and the anonymity of the Web is just allowing us to show our true face?  I ask you, readers.  I ask you.