There’s a scene in the 1990 movie Awakenings, about Dr Oliver Sacks’ investigations into the epidemic of sleeping sickness in which Robin Williams – who plays a character based on Sacks – muses on the evidence. “You’d think,” he says, “at a certain point all these atypical somethings would amount to a typical something.”
I hear some version of that in my mind every time I see another documentary about predatory men and their abuse of (almost invariably) women and children, hidden in plain sight as they go about their life-wrecking business with impunity, often for decades. Michael Jackson, R Kelly, Jimmy Savile, various rock legends, Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein are among the most recent, but the list could go on and will undoubtedly be added to in the future.
