BDSM community and the release of 50 Shades adaptation in the wake of Bashara

Film version of book release 2.13.15

The Detroit Free Press today has an excellent tie-in to the release of the film version of the book 50 Shades of Grey, which is charting at number two in Amazon's contemporary romance category this morning.

“Every time Grey's character took a hand or a belt to Steele's backside or bound her wrists, I thought about how he could be a Bashara in training — a younger, far more attractive version of the Grosse Pointe Park businessman sentenced to life in prison for hiring a hitman to kill his wife in 2012 because he wanted to live out his sadomasochistic fantasies unencumbered,” writes columnist Kristen Jordan Shamus.

As I worked on the upcoming book, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Adultery, Privilege, and the Killing of Jane Bashara (Penguin/Berkley, fall 2015), I spoke with numerous people tied to the lifestyle in and around Detroit’s BDSM and alternative lifestyle scene. All were critical of the way the lifestyle was used by the state as a motivation to murder. 

“Bob’s case put the lifestyle in an unfortunate light,” Rick Falcinelli, a longtime member of the scene, told me in January after he completed his testimony in Bashara’s two-month long trial. He said critics of the lifestyle are “going to get another boost…in February with the misinterpretations of a movie version of 50 Shades of Grey.”

“Ever since the book came out, we’ve been laughing," Falcinelli says. "It misrepresents the way people behave. The book is written for entertainment, not reality, and they write it to play to stereotype.”

Among the poorly portrayed elements is the main character, a wealthy guy named Christian Grey, who woos the lead female character.

“The book does not explain the mindset and motivation for” getting into the lifestyle, Falcinelli says.

Mindset and motivation for checking out the alternative lifestyle is explored in the Bashara book, which is slated for a September release. Why spoil the surprise?

The prosecution based much of its case on Bashara’s participation in the BDSM scene and his hopes to start a new life with his BDSM partner, Rachel Gillett. To do so with freedom, prosecutors said, he killed Jane, his wife of 26 years.

Bob Bashara: “What’s BDSM got to do with it?”

 

Flyer for Bashara's first business enterprise 

The Bashara trial is about to end, with closing statements coming Wednesday, and now we’ll see how the state did. It’s been almost three years since Jane Bashara was murdered, her life snuffed out in her garage under a boot on the foot of Joe Gentz, a man who says he was paid by Bob Bashara to kill Jane. 

Gentz is doing 17-to-28 for second-degree murder in the case.

For Bashara, the state wants a first-degree conviction, saying that without his actions, Jane would be alive. He's also charged with conspiracy to commit first degree murder, solicitation of murder, obstruction of justice and witness intimidation.

It’s been a drawn out trial, with 74 witnesses and typically graphic exhibits – a classic murder trial spiced with the BDSM world that Bashara admits he was part of during his last years with Jane.

“They’re using the fact that I had this alternative lifestyle as motive for me wanting to harm my wife,” Bashara told me one day last year. We spoke many times on the phone after he was sent for prison for soliciting the murder of Gentz. A lot of those conversations will show up in the book I’m wrapping up, Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultery and the Killing of Jane Bashara, which comes out on Penguin/Berkley in the fall.   

The state claims that he wanted Jane out of the way so he could have a life with his girlfriend, Rachel Gillett, who shared an affinity for the lifestyle with Bob. Also, the state claims that money issues were pressuring Bashara and Jane had a fat IRA that he would be privy to if she were to die.

“My wife was not inhibiting me,” he told me. “If I didn’t want to have Jane, I would have simply divorced her. But I had plenty of income and money was never an issue. I was paying for two kids going to college, had cars and they got whatever they wanted.  If [daughter] Jessie wanted a $500 pair of boots, Jane got them for her.”

Investigators found statements that showed a wide gulf between the income of Bob and Jane. She made close to six figures some years as a marketing consultant and he made barely $20,000 a year as a landlord and sales rep for a chemical company.

It’s not my job, but the defense failed to note that a self-employed individual should show a low adjusted income; better for taxes. I don’t know if that was the case with Bashara, but I’m sure that fact went by the jury in a state where so many people are desperately clinging to whatever employer will have them.

The state did, however, do a good job of exposing Bashara as a bad guy in terms of character. He cheated on his wife, who was clearly intent on working things out in a troubled marriage. He was a slumlord, and a hot-headed bully by a number of accounts. There was an episode in which his daughter found an incriminating text to one of his mistresses – yes, he had more than one - on his phone and he grabbed the phone, erased it, and handed it back to her: “What text?” he said, or something similar. That stuck with me as particularly mean-spirited. Who does that?

He was also head of the local Rotary Club. Do they let any angry man run that group? The club has done its best to erase all mentions of its connection to Bashara. Was he a great guy who did you wrong? Or did he do such a good job of glad-handing and bringing in money that they put up with him? It was never quite squared in trial. 

There were some lighter moments in a dark setting. He used to go out to the golf course in ritzy Grosse Pointe and do blow and smoke weed with a buddy, and we're talking in recent yeas. That he knocked back lines and joints on the golf course of the local country club was amusing to me; I’m sure he wasn’t the only one doing such a thing.

I wrote about the case at the outset of the trial for the Daily Beast.  We’re done. The jurors will do its best to figure it out after taking nine weeks out of their lives to listen to a parade of characters, some pissed off, some amusing and a few sad depressing. 

Bashara came into the courtroom on Monday whistling, ebullient. He’s apparently confident that the state failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he procured the murder. Hang on. It could get good.

Bob Bashara, the Book, Coming Soon

Bob Bashara

Last week I signed the contract to do a book on the Bob Bashara case. It will be my fourth true crime book for Penguin imprint Berkley.  The case involved the January 2012 murder of Jane Bashara, a wife and mother in Grosse Pointe Park, Mich.  Her killer was Joe Gentz, a handyman and roustabout, who confessed to the killing but alleged he was hired by Jane’s husband Bob to carry out the murder. Bob Bashara is currently serving 6 ½ years in state prison for soliciting the jailhouse murder of Gentz, and is now charged with first-degree murder in the murder of his wife.

Joe Gentz

Also part of the story – the part that drives headlines – is the fact that Bob Bashara was involved in the BDSM lifestyle, coloring the case with a “Fifty Shades of Grey” element.  A September preliminary exam  included a number of parties connected to the case testifying in lurid, colorful detail, talking of Bob's penchant for dominance. Rachel Gillett, who was Bob's girlfriend at the time of Jane Bashara’s murder, met Bob on a BDSM chat site, where he called himself Master Bob. He also had a dungeon created for his trysts in the basement of one of several buildings he owned and rented out.

I’ve worked on the book for some of the last year and it’s in good shape already, plenty of original material that comes from some deep investigation and interviews with players large and small.

I’ve talked with Bob Bashara a number of times in the last year and much of that material will be part of this book. It’s the one thing I do with every true crime book, and I expect some Detroiters, provincial to a lovable fault, will be pissed that I even present the perspective of someone everyone expects to be found guilty. I got a lot of flak when I  did press for the first book, A Slaying in the Suburbs: The Tara Grant Murder, for talking and including the views of Stephen Grant, who was convicted of killing his wife Tara. Frank Beckman on WJR was charmingly critical of including Grant in the book when I hit his show. One book store, Borders in the northern suburbs of Detroit, refused to have an event/discussion of the book. I’m pleased to say that Borders is now out of business. That’s what I call real justice. That book, by the way, has sold over 30,000 copies, not a bad performance in the true crime genre.

The Bashara trial is scheduled for March in Wayne County

. It will be quite the sensation, and could draw national interest, depending on how the news cycle is going at the time. The book will come out late 2014 or early 2015.

New Discovery Show on Sarah Pender Case - New Trial?

I receive comments from people on any item I write on Sarah Pender, mostly from her supporters, who are predictably my detractors.  It’s good to read these comments, although most are poorly reasoned and filled with typos and nasty personal attacks rather than thoughtful insights that would at least reflect credibly on Sarah’s behalf. One I recently received was simple and stupid: “sarah is innocent.”

Well no, even Sarah admits she was involved in a crime and deservedly served time.

“But the truth dosn't sell now dose it,” someone else posed to me. Spellcheck, please. Another post blared “FREE STACY PENDER!” You get the idea.

But something is going to happen that may change the right minds for the right reason: A couple weeks ago, I was in Indianapolis taping a show with NBC/Discovery, along with former Marion County Deputy Prosecutor Larry Sells, about a problem in the trial of Pender. You can see it on page 115 of Girl, Wanted: The Chase for Sarah Pender, regarding the testimony of Floyd Pennington, a key witness in Pender’s trial:

“…there was a problem with his testimony and, in the rearview mirror, its impact on the jury. A letter discovered after the trial in the police file found that Pennington had offered to turn evidence on a list of people, from drug dealers to chop-shop owners. He named names on a yellow legal pad in his own writing. But the list was never presented by the defense during Sarah’s trial.

It would have been easy to pass that note by. I found it in the police file one afternoon. I was leafing through the file in the office of Indianapolis Police Captain Mark Rice. I even recall the day, a sunny summer afternoon. Larry was with me there at a desk, sitting to my right, when I found the letter. I turned to him with it, realizing that such a snitch list would have jeopardized his case. He had a poker face – Larry is a poker ace, by the way – when he read it the first time, but he clearly knew its implication.  From the book:

“I never saw that list, and it would seem that the defense never saw it either, since it wasn’t in evidence or used to combat Floyd’s statements for us,” says Larry Sells, who prosecuted the case for the state.

What if I had tucked it back into the file never to be seen again? That would have helped my story, that Sarah Pender was a dangerous criminal who had been rightfully convicted. Of course I didn’t do that. 

One misguided NBC staffer, using some convoluted logic, tried to explain to me that had Pender not escaped, I wouldn't have written a book, and Pender would have had to serve her sentence with no chance for a new trial. 

That ridiculous notion is easily refuted: If Sarah hadn't been living in a drug house with criminal meth heads, she never would have been involved in a crime of this magnitude. She wouldn't have had to escape from prison.  

Our justice system generally works. But without a free press and open records, not to mention people who are part of that press who understand legal possibilities, possible wrongs can't be righted.

So here we are, with what may be a substantial news show, Deadline: Crime with Tamron Hall, debuts this fall.  Judging by the questions and my conversations with the crew it is slanted toward Pender, whom they interviewed at a ridiculous cost of $5,000, which the beleaguered Indiana Department of Correction charges. Still, is it possible to right a wrong here? Pender could get a new trial, which anyone interested in justice should support. I maintain she is a dangerous person. But there are many dangerous people who are running around free, and to lock them up simply because someone perceives them as a threat would make for a crazy society. And if she gets a new trial and a jury finds she is guilty of a lesser offense, or no offense at all, then her sentence should reflect that.