LingerieGate: ODLH Counters Stripper Charge

C’mon, we don’t have to convene a Warren Commission to pore over the racy photos purported to be of Oscar De La Hoya on x17online.com last week, and determine their authenticity, do we?

This looks like a technology aided extortion plot to extract money out of Oscar De La Hoya, or embarrass the heck out of him, or both.

If you haven’t seen them, you can look at a sampling in the Sunday New York Post, or hop on to x17online.com. I hesitate to give them any traffic with a plug, because it is clear to me, in my opinion, that somebody Photoshopped Oscar’s head onto the body of some fella posing in a fishnet jumpsuit. The authenticity of these photos has to be in question, and for the website to run it isn’t even iffy, it’s wrong.

The lady who is in the center of Oscar’s LingerieGate, a stripper at New York’s Scores flesh-flash pit, said she has no idea how the photos were leaked to the net. If you believe that, then you think guys buy Penthouse for the articles.

The stripper, Milana Dravnel, took them in May in a hotel room in Philly, she says, and she then showed them to some pals. One of the pals, she declares, stole them, and somehow, mysteriously, Oscar’s people found out about them.

The stripper has come to Oscar’s defense, saying that “it takes a real man to put on lingerie” in the Post story. With friends and defenders like these, Oscar…

The stripper says that in intimate situations, Oscar calls himself “Goldie,” but in the Post piece, she said that the boxer/promoter/entrepreneur and she have a “platonic friendship.”

The lady, though, has been telling different versions of her “relationship” to different “news’ sources. She told the Brit tabloid, News of the World: “He was acting like a girl on the back (of a motorcycle), grabbing her round the waist screaming ‘Faster! Faster!”

Milana and Oscar, who has been married to Millie Corretjer since October 2001, did not have sex, the stripper told the British paper.

He did strip nude and try on outfits, she maintains, but “It wasn't a sexual relationship, but I'm sure it gave him a lot pleasure to be with me. He just wanted a bit of fun, a change from his boring life. It wasn't an affair.”

De la Hoya is susceptible to accusations of misconduct in this milieu. He has four children, by four different women. He was not married to three of the ladies, and has been the target of several lawsuits. His galpal before he got married, Shanna Moakler, sued him in 2000 for $62 million, and claimed he was abusive and an alcoholic. The case was settled in 2001.

Another woman alleged the Oscar raped her in 1996, when she was 15, but authorities in LA didn’t file charges, because of a lack of credible evidence. The woman filed the suit two years after the alleged incident occurred.

Oscar put out a statement, through his attorney, saying that he does know Dravnel, that the photos are fakes, and that he would pursue legal remedies.

Frankly, I don’t give a flying eff if Oscar likes to dress up as the Queen of England and have Corgis lick peanut butter off his naughty bits and pieces. What he does in his off time is his business. This nation of faux-Puritans has a fixation on what others do with their privates, in private time, and most of the moralists tsk tsking get a secret kick out of trafficking in the gutter.

They care more about what the high and mighty do with interns and strippers than matters of substance. They spend more time drooling over BJs with interns than determining whether thousands of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians are dying in a war that was started and continues under false pretenses. And once they get their rocks off, they move on to others matters of importance, like the buffoon OJ Simpson.

It’s all crap, and the joke is on us.

I sometimes fall prey to the temptation of immersing myself in trivial, sensational “McNews” myself.

It’s easy, and mindless, and when I focus on this crap, I don’t have to contemplate the larger issues, and send my blood pressure soaring at the large-scale lawlessness being perpetrated in plain site.

As we all focus on substance-less subjects like LingerieGate, we take out eyes off important matters.

Does anyone care that of the $12 billion that was sent to Iraq in 2003-2204 for postwar reconstruction and maintenance, $9 billion of it is not accounted for? That full-scale looting by conscience-free greedmongers occurred while decent souls fight for our freedom and liberty risk death on a daily basis in Iraq?  While vets are given sub-shoddy treatment, and forced to traverse mountains of red tape in the VA system.

Hey, we all need diversion. That’s why you come to this site, and I respect that, so it’s about time to end rant, and get back to boxing. LingerieGate has little to do with the sport, really, but since Oscar is now the most prominent face of the sport, and it has to affect his life, we have to at least acknowledge the sordid affair.

But do me a favor, as an antidote, watch Ken Burns’ The War on PBS, and ponder substantive matters too. We all crave, and need diversion, but we have a duty to not sink into the culture that the marketers and news-delivery people have helped create.

As long as no laws are broken, Oscar can play Queen and let the Corgis have at 'im, it isn't our business.