Geraldo Rivera Fondling Bette Midler, Things Are Getting Yummy

If you live long enough, you’ll see everything. If you make it but a few more weeks, you’ll see the entire string of sexual harassment and groping accusations from 1963-2017 on against men you never thought of much in the first place, largely by women you don’t think much of either. Not always the case, but usually.

Geraldo Rivera stuck his neck out for Matt Lauer following the Today Show anchor’s firing for sending female coworkers sex toys as gifts, having sex with an intern and pinching Katie Couric’s behind. At least one of those activities puts your judgement into serious question. Rivera took to Twitter which no man about twelve should ever use. He’s 74.

Sad about @MLauer great guy, highly skilled & empathetic w guests & a real gentleman to my family & me. News is a flirty business & it seems like current epidemic of #SexHarassmentAllegations may be criminalizing courtship & conflating it w predation. What about #GarrisonKeillor?

Whatever weird thoughts run through Rivera’s brain, even the more laudable ones that seem to hinge on friendship and loyalty, he needs to edit that shit. As much as you may personally admire the outspoken feminist male who also uses his position and power to fuck chicks who’d never normally touch an older bald man, you don’t do the public support thing as the news is breaking and you have no clue yet what exactly’s coming out. Is he flirty or killing women and burying them in his basement? At least wait 24 hours.

Rivera reversed course and Twitter-apologized as everybody must if they want to stay employed by any media outlet or sizable corporation. Rivera explained that his defense of Lauer was actually a sharp condemnation of harassers who all need to be killed by rusty bullets to the temple. Something like that. 180 doesn’t do his followup Tweet justice.

Bette Midler took the Geraldo Rivera sticking-neck-out-for-no-good-reason incident to remind America that in a 1991 interview with Barbara Walters, she told a story about how Geraldo Rivera twenty years earlier groped her breasts during the setup for a TV interview. If you love hearing about unattractive senior citizens harkening back to sexually inappropriate fondling 45-years earlier, this is the story for you:

Tomorrow is my birthday. I feel like this video was a gift from the universe to me. Geraldo may have apologized for his tweets supporting Matt Lauer, but he has yet to apologize for this:

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Seems authentic. Whatever that means. A twenty year old tape about an incident twenty years before that about a guy we all probably assume is a weird, if not offensively weird, fella. Maybe you’d have let your daughter meet Matt Lauer before this past week; nobody ever would’ve let anybody they care about in the supervision of Geraldo Rivera for any period of time. It’s as distasteful as thought as listening to a Bette Midler song.

We’ve clearly hit the portion of this pandemonium outing where even the prurient sexual aspects of the tales are no longer enticing. It’s one thing to think about a 20-something sexy actress being forced to play naked parlor games for movie roles. Another to imagine Geraldo Rivera putting his greasy palms onto Bette Midler’s mammaries. We’re approaching queasy territory.