John Grisham (not pictured: Grisham’s foot, which is currently very much in his mouth)

Before I get in to this you need to know that John Grisham has apologised for the comments he made yesterday. You need to know that he has an efficient publicity team at Doubleday US and that they issued an apology from the author in which he said, “I regret having made these comments, and apologise to all.” Grisham said that his comments “were in no way intended to show sympathy for those convicted of sex crimes, especially the sexual molestation of children. I can think of nothing more despicable.”

Yesterday, The Telegraph ran a video interview with the author, who has sold over 275 million copies of his books worldwide, in which Grisham, for no explicable reason —he doesn’t seem to have been prodded, jibed or tricked— got a matter off his chest. Grisham complained that:

We have prisons now filled with guys my age, 60-year-old white men, in prison, who’ve never harmed anybody, who would never touch a child but they got online one night, started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons and went to far and got in to child porn or whatever.

Grisham then went on to describe what had happened to “a lawyer friend of mine, a good buddy from law school” when he had drunk too much and stumbled onto a website labeled “16-year-old wannabe hookers’ or something”, downloaded some stuff, and found himself in prison for four years. Grisham’s defense of his good buddy from law school was that the sixteen-year-old girls “looked 30, you know all dressed up and whatever” and that “he didn’t touch anything”. “He shouldn’t have done it, it was stupid”, said Grisham, “but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys, you know”.

Outrage followed soon after.(A sampling can be found here, here, here and here.) As many have noted, Grisham’s remarks are offensive for a number of reasons, but they also feel unfortunately typical. They reveal his (but not only his) ideas about race, that white men don’t do this kind of thing; class, that privileged men don’t do this kind of thing (implied even as Grisham tells a story about such a man) and a deep misunderstanding of the fact that you don’t have to “touch anything” to participate in the sexual abuse of children: looking is also active participation.

What was most surprising to me is how Grisham uses his good buddy’s profession as a lawyer as his defense: he went to law school so how could he possibly have been doing anything wrong? Rather than: he went to law school, so he should have known better. And then there’s the age-old “but she looked older” excuse; Grisham uses it as though it’s an original and foolproof argument.

Within a day, Grisham’s interview appeared, scandalized, was commented on and written about, and then apologized away. Grisham apparently meant to attack the US judicial system but he landed on completely the wrong target. Instead he revealed himself to have some dodgy lawyer buddies, you know, white sixty year old men who have been wronged by the same judicial system that they worked so hard to be part of. Actually, on second thoughts, maybe he landed on just the right target.