Like Suicide
TW: I talk frankly about suicide, suicidal ideation, being the partner of someone with bipolar disorder who is in a manic cycle, being in family that passes on suicidal ideation to their children, being in relationships where your partner uses suicide as a threat to control your behavior and pushes you to commit suicide yourself.
Yet another attack on Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain is about how the documentary talks about suicide. I only noticed this today and man, is that Twitter take just the usual bunch of rot that I always hear every time the subject comes up. Suddenly everyone is an expert on suicide and Tony Bourdain. I haven’t seen any of these people talking about him before the movie came out, but suddenly they know everything about him, his mental state, and how his life ended, but I digress. What do I know about suicide? Well, a lot.
My suicide bona fides:
I grew up mostly in my grandparent’s home where my grandmother repeatedly threatened to commit suicide (at least once every couple of months) and sometimes added that she would take me and my uncle, who was four months older than me, with her. We were terrified and hid but she never followed through with it. But the person threatening to do it doesn’t have to follow through to make their threats strike fear in your heart.
My father was, unsurprisingly, obsessed with suicide and one of his favorite songs was Ozzy Osbourne’s Suicide Solution, which I don’t think he interpreted quite in the spirit that it was intended. It’s a little vague and that vagueness might be influenced by Osbourne’s own self destructive urges. He also threatened to kill himself any number of times in front of me as a child and pre-teen and ended his life by taking a massive overdose of his prescriptions meds one weekend. He was dying slowly anyway, it didn’t kill him outright, he was very strong as an ox, but after the OD obliterated his brain, he didn’t last more than a few days. My family, a bunch of ridiculous Catholics, refuse to admit this because dogma, but I know him better than they do. While I think there is a small-ish chance that it was a mistake due to his mental illness, taking the entire contents of three freshly filled prescriptions accidentally on the day you picked them up from the pharmacy is low.
I, big shocker, have had suicidal ideation for most of my life. After my father “disowned me” via note and died, I spent about a half an hour laying in a dark room with a butcher knife held to my chest trying to figure out if life was really worth torturing myself for further. I was seriously considering driving that knife up through my mouth into my brain or up under my chest plate into my heart. It was a big knife. I didn’t do it. I also spent many years engaging in passive suicide actions like driving on the Los Angeles freeway system for hours at dangerous speeds to relieve my anxiety and self hatred. I almost ate it a couple of times too, but didn’t.
I think that one of the neglected causes of suicide is the example of suicidal ideation from family members and other loved ones that are unaddressed in families and relationships and that is largely ignored in our society. When you are a small child or teen watching your parents or other family members using suicidal threats to control other people’s behavior or see them attempt or commit suicide and then having no one address the mental issues that drive them to it, that’s a big problem. When children are not given counseling and there isn’t frank talk about suicide with those children. When those kids grow up and have their partners play those games on them, it’s worse. Even when it’s someone who’s never experienced it as a child, but they get hit with it as an adult in an abusive relationship, it can lead to tragedy. What’s wrong here is a lack of focus on everyday mental issues, manipulation, and trauma that people seem to think will not affect others, especially children, or result in more tragedy. I got my suicidal ideation from my grandmother and my father. I got a double dose and I am very lucky to be alive today. While I refuse to actively kill myself, I have nearly passively hurt or killed myself a number of times. Mark my words, ignoring this phenomena is not going to help.
Like Will Graham, therapy doesn’t work on me. I am alive today only out of spite. I refuse to give the people who hate me, mostly my parents and relatives, but also various others who have done me wrong, the satisfaction of seeing my death notice and be able to chuckle, haha, I knew that bitch would never make it. I’m completely serious. Life sucks the big one and I never fucking asked to be born, but the defeat of death is the only thing that sucks even more. Really, I want to be alive so I can piss on all of their graves.
Does that sound harsh? It does? Good. But that’s not all!
The first myth about suicide is that you can’t stop someone from doing it. That’s definitely not true. I have stopped two people from killing themselves in my lifetime and assisted with keeping a number of people from doing the same thing on social media. I took care of my ex after he swallowed an OD of non-lethal pills that a friend gave him. Yes, even when the attempt is non-lethal, it’s still a suicide threat or a dress rehearsal for one. This is not to say that family members and friends are responsible for suicide attempts or have failed in some way if they didn’t prevent it. I talk about this to counteract the going narrative that people who are suicidal can’t be saved. They can and I have done it. I will tell you about these examples so you can see it in practice and as evidence of my statements. The catch is that the suicidal person has to tell you that it is their intention to commit suicide in enough time for help to be rendered or they have to listen to you and ask for help. Anthony Bourdain’s friends and family were very concerned about him, but they had no idea that this is what he intended to do. They bear no responsibility for what happened. How could they have known? Do I feel the same way about Asia Argento’s involvement? No, that’s a different story, much like the story of how suicidal ideation gets passed on and encouraged in relationships. Some people in relationships use suicide threats as a means to control their partners, just like my family members and my ex did.
Don’t believe me? Read here.
The first person was one of my roommates shortly after I moved to LA. She was a nice rocker girl who had a Canadian drummer boyfriend who was about to be deported by the US government. This young woman was so upset about it that she called me at work and told me she took a bunch of pills. I didn’t know where her boyfriend was and what the status of her relationship was with her parents, but I was the only person who she felt she could reach out to for help. I was elected by proximity. I immediately called 911 and told my manager that I needed leave to make sure my roommate wasn’t dead when I got home. For once, they didn’t object to my emergency request. By the time I managed to get home, the ambulance was already there and she was getting medical assistance. She hadn’t taken anything in any quantity that was lethal. The paramedics called her parents. She lived.
The second was when a mutual friend posted what amounted to a suicide note on a message board and me and a friend who lived in another city became concerned that they was serious. Their husband, who they adored, had just revealed that he had been cheating on them and left them for another person. They were humiliated and desolate, he was particularly cruel in his exit. My friend in Fresno had their number and knew the area of the city where they lived. Fresno had an idea where they might be because they weren’t responding to calls or texts. After a really quick discussion where I insisted that Fresno call the police and see if our friend was okay and Fresno felt exactly the same way, Fresno contacted the police and the cops found them in their car on a street near their home. Neither of us wanted to take the chance that we were right and let our friend die. We were more than willing to look foolish if we were wrong. They were in a bad way and needed medical attention, but they lived too. Later on they sent me a gift as a thank you, because, you see, they didn’t really want to die, but the callous way that they was treated by someone they loved the most in their life caused them such intense pain and anger that they made an attempt. They are happily living with their second spouse in another city and have been married for years. All of which never would have happened if they had succeeded in killing themselves. Keep that in mind when you think about what happened to Anthony Bourdain.
My ex, who is bipolar, a raging fuckhead with a Latina kink, and the 666th reason why I will never trust a man again, took an indeterminate amount of pills and left an empty pill bottle on his desk late one night. He had given no previous indications that he was suicidal. I found him facedown on the living room rug and googled the name of the medication on the pill bottle. It was non-lethal. He had never bothered to tell me he was bipolar and that he was unmedicated, which is incredibly dangerous for anyone with bipolar disorder. It is also incredibly irresponsible. When he finally confessed when he woke up the next morning, I helpfully didn’t mention the unsent MySpace message he wrote to his ex girlfriend about how miserable he was with me in Los Angeles that was on his computer screen. Apparently, it never occurred to him that his miserable depression might be related to his condition, it was just me. I immediately found him help and a psychiatrist who was able to put him in a study for medication for free and eventually provide him with his preferred meds regularly at a discount. It took me less than a half an hour to do this. He never even tried. He waited for it to become a crisis and for me to do it for him. He made me responsible for taking care of him in a way that made me responsible for keeping him alive. Yes, I chose to accept this, but I’d like to see you try to refuse your loved one in this scenario. This is a fairly common, but very cruel manipulation technique that abusers use. Keep this in mind when you think about what happened to Tony Bourdain.
Also, it never occurred to me until I wrote this that my ex might have just been playing me with this episode. I assumed, because I loved him and felt responsible for him, that he really tried to kill himself. But while writing this and thinking about it, the more sinister possibility that he was totally manipulating me, like a certain Italian, and finally the likelihood that he staged this attempt to control me finally hit. Do I know this for sure? No, but the pills I assumed he took would not kill you and that was made clear on the pharmaceutical websites. Maybe he drank and took enough to pass out. Maybe it was an accident, maybe it wasn’t. But yeah, I think he played me. He didn’t put himself at risk, just like my roommate didn’t.
PSA: I am friends with a number of people who have bipolar disorder. I am very fond of my friends in real life and on social media with bipolar disorder. They work really hard to stay level and take their meds and go to therapy and do the work to keep the disorder’s worst effects from taking a toll on their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Because, far from what people think, bipolar disorder is a very serious and complex illness that is very hard to treat and is quite dangerous to the people who have it. I have nothing, but the utmost respect for these people and nothing I say about bipolar disorder, Asia Argento, and my bipolar ex in this essay has anything to do with them. You see, they take responsibility to keep themselves healthy. My ex and Asia Argento didn’t.
My ex was incredibly jealous and possessive, so much so that he would put pressure on me to be home whenever he got home to have hot food waiting for him and to know that I wasn’t somewhere where he couldn’t control what I was doing. One time, probably during a manic cycle, he nearly got into a fist fight with some dork who was hitting on me and who I was politely trying to discourage because we were at work and we needed the money desperately. I was the center of his universe, right up until the moment that I wasn’t. What I have observed is that some people with bipolar disorder, who are unmedicated and who worsen the condition by drinking and doing other substances, which they will do for relief, have what I refer to as a time limit on their relationships. Not everyone with bipolar disorder is like this, but they are more likely to be if they are unmedicated. They convince their partners that they love them so much and that they are so dependent on you, that you enter into a co-dependent relationship with them. This is their way to control you. It’s a cage that is built of love, guilt, and fear. After a while, you take on their obsessive style of love out of loyalty. In many cases, manic cycles will cause them to indulge in risk taking behaviors, like aggression, excessive desire for sex, especially with people outside of their relationship, false belief of superiority, spending large amounts of money, and self harm. They have insomnia, mood swings, and suicidal thoughts. I will take this moment to say that their behavior is not just dangerous to the people around them, but also very dangerous to themselves.
One thing that I have noticed is their ability to say the most hurtful things that anyone who knows you really well would be able to do, out of the blue. Looking back, there were a couple of times, when out of the blue, he said something so hurtfully vicious to me, that I saw red. My reaction was pure, MOTHERFUCKER, WHAT DID YOU SAY TO ME? The only thing that kept me from losing my shit was the love that I bore for him. They are also known, in extremis, to attack people physically. The reason that Lawrence Olivier broke up with Vivien Leigh, who he adored, was that she physically attacked him one night and he finally struck back. He shoved her and she hit her head on a marble table. The cut on her head was bad enough to bleed. He was appalled by what he had done and came to the correct conclusion that he could no longer stay married to her because it was possible that he might react badly to her taunts and her violence and hurt or kill her. It was out of a concern that he could no longer control himself when she was in a manic cycle, and that she was getting to a point where she might do something really bad, either to him or to herself just because he was around. It was as if his very presence sent her into a frenzy. That was what the last six months of my relationship with my ex was like. Just being around him, treating him with any kindness that he wasn’t willing to accept, like showing concern, or trying to talk to him about what was wrong enraged him and drove him to do and say many more things to humiliate me further.
It was so bad that I was having constant panic attacks, some lasting up to 12 hours, with trapped air burning in my chest. Acid reflux that choked me when I could get some sleep. Towards the end, I wasn’t sleeping for more than an hour or a two at a time. Every night. I was so terrified and so filled with despair that I couldn’t eat. What I was eating was aspirin, every four hours, sometimes up to four at a time. I told myself it was because it was a cheap pain reliever for my sinus and back pain, but it was really because every time I took some aspirin, I felt a small measure of relief. I felt a small bit of control returned to me. I was trying to get into a medical study, so I could get a large sum of money and prove that I was worthy to him again, and I kept getting refused because my iron count was too low. I was anemic, but I have been intermittently anemic for my entire life. I was shocked to learn how bad it was during my last blood test when someone gently told me that my hemoglobin count was eight. The level of low hemoglobin that requires a transfusion is seven.
Anemia can lead to a rapid or irregular heartbeat (arrhythmia). When you’re anemic your heart must pump more blood to make up for the lack of oxygen in the blood. This can lead to an enlarged heart or heart failure. — Mayo Clinic, Anemia Causes and Conditions.
Basically, I nearly killed myself over this person in 2016. I knew that taking the aspirin was taking a toll on my body, but it was the only thing that gave me any type of relief. I was constantly talking to people, asking advice, trying to decipher his drawings because I was so focused on him and what he wanted. It was like I didn’t exist anymore or I only existed to serve him. I recognize the aspirin now as another passive and slow suicide attempt, but at the time, it was the only thing that kept me going. I can now recognize his manipulation, but I was so tired back then all the time I could barely think. My heart fluttered. I was filled with the terror that he might kill himself, even after it was clear that he was sleeping with anyone he could con into it. In our apartment, while I was still living there. He would sit there every night with a pair of headphones on, after I served him dinner, and I could feel the hatred he had for me coming off of his body in waves.
Most shamefully, when he threw me out of our home, the home that I had found for us, I got on my knees and begged him to give me another chance. He gave me a few months to find a new place, but resented every day I spent there and treated me like a servant. He had told me when he got a well paying job, the stress of which brought on a psychotic break and the long manic cycle, that I could just pursue my acting and contribute as much as I could. He was paying the rent, but for years, I was the person who paid the lion’s share of expenses, the rent, or arranged for work so the rent would get paid. When I got a large sum from a medical study, any time that he asked for money, I handed it to him. No questions asked. Suddenly, none of that mattered and I was a leech that “wasn’t contributing”.
Faithful reader, it’s been five years since I left that apartment totally destroyed and in shame, and typing the first sentence of that last paragraph just made me weep and howl in agony. That’s what it’s like when you are in this kind of relationship. That’s the pain you feel and the overwhelming obsession that grips you. It’s born out of a legitimate caring and exploited by your partner with alternating bouts of obsessive attention and threats. My ex didn’t threaten to kill himself regularly like my grandmother did, but I recognized the depressions he exhibited from my childhood when my grandmother was suffering from a different type of mental disorder. Once he made that cry for help attempt, I was on alert. I couldn’t handle the thought that he might do it again for real and I did everything I could to please him to try and get even a drop of that diminishing flow of love from him. I would have done nearly anything to make him love me like he first did again. Once he knew that he had me, he dropped the pretense and became a judgmental asshole. Everything I did had to be for him. Nothing I did was good enough. I looked terrible. I wasn’t fashionable enough, and as I got more and more depressed, the more contemptuous he became. He regularly said things so hurtful that they destroyed what little self esteem I had left. But he had engineered the situation so that pleasing him was the only thing I could do. Meanwhile, he kept pulling bigger and bigger spiteful stunts to try and make me go away. He got more and more bold after he had a disassociative episode that was likely a psychotic break that led into the manic cycle that lasted for six months. I didn’t even feel this level of hatred from my father and he was clinically insane at the end of his life. My ex hated everything about me, especially the things that he used to find the most attractive about me. However, every once and a while, the old loving version came back. When the special screening that I had gotten us into at the New Beverly of Kill Bill: The Entire Bloody Affair happened, he was suddenly attentive and kind. All morning. As soon as we left the theatre, his scowl returned and he went back to hating me again. Just like that. That wasn’t the only time that the old self came back, but it was the most obvious. He is a huge Tarantino fan and just the thought that Tarantino might be there and he might get to meet him put me in his good book for a few hours. As soon as that didn’t happen, he had no further use for me.
The one thing that I don’t agree with in the Roadrunner documentary is the assumption that Bourdain’s obsessions with Asia Argento was born out of an immaturity or simply that he was prone to obsessive behavior and that he was trying to destroy himself. I don’t think that that is the truth, but it is what anyone who hasn’t been in a relationship with someone like this could think is true. Unless you have lived through a similar situation, how could you know? Asia Argento is bipolar and I doubt that she was getting treatment while she was with Bourdain. How do I know this? I know because her mother Daria Nicolodi narced on Asia after they had a fight and Asia said some really nasty things to her. Bear in mind that this is how Asia talks to her own mother. Imagine what she said to Tony Bourdain when he was at his most vulnerable.
Argento may or may not be under treatment today. Argento has openly boozed and smoked pot on Instagram which is not helpful for unmedicated and possibly cycling people with bipolar. Her mood swings were very evident. Once, while Bourdain was filming in Laos, she posted a moody snippet on her stories that featured a song about suicide that cut off suddenly. I wasn’t involved and I knew what that meant. It frightened me. The very public affair with Hugo Clement and her complete humiliation of Bourdain has the hallmarks of the kind of ignominy that someone who is in a manic cycle will subject you to. It’s the classic dodge of a person who wants to be rid of a partner, but doesn’t have the nuts to actually break up with them. They can’t do it without doing something to hurt you that is so bad that they hope you will get rid of them. But it’s also the urges and symptoms of a bipolar manic cycle.
I’ll go back to the story of Lawrence Olivier and Vivien Leigh’s marriage. Leigh saw Olivier onstage and she fell into obsessive love. You see, they are actually the obsessive ones. They start out obsessed with you. She did everything she could to catch his attention and cozy up to him even though both of them were married. You see, she had decided that she was done with her first stable husband, Leigh Holman, and wanted excitement with the dashing Olivier. She would have him as her husband, marriage be damned. What Vivien Leigh wanted, Vivien Leigh got. They then had a passionate affair that ended with their respective divorces. They became a golden couple. But slowly, problems started to creep in. She would have violent mood swings and do hurtful things to Olivier and their friends that she wouldn’t remember, or claimed that she didn’t remember, afterwards. Leigh would disappear and would be found in a disturbed ex-lover’s home, confused and barely clothed. She had an obsessive affair with Peter Finch while making the film Elephant Walk and a mental breakdown. She would be filled with racing thoughts of seducing random men she came in contact with even though she still wanted to be married to Olivier. She was finally diagnosed with manic depression, which is now known as bipolar disorder, for which the only treatment was ECT, and tuberculosis. Things only got worse. After they broke up, she still idolized Olivier, but could only handle being around Jack Merivale, which was a relationship that was much more like her first husband. Merivale was solid, steady, and comforting and he didn’t challenge her. She became most violent and most hateful to the person that she was living with and the man who she claimed to love so passionately until she couldn’t bear to be around him. Until it wasn’t safe for them to be around each other.
Why have I told you all of this? Well, if you wonder how Argento went from what was supposedly a successful Parts Unknown shoot in Florence on May 26th to a weekend with Hugo Clement so fast, that’s part of the manic cycle. My ex was living with me and took a surprise solo vacation back east where he hooked up with an old crush and then sheepishly returned and pledged love. He told me that when he came home that he was fully expecting me to be gone. He spent the next six months guiltily making me special breakfasts every weekend, but he wouldn’t admit anything. Then, when my expiration date passed, he started going out to Meet-Ups, supposedly for his art career, that were a cover for him trying to find someone else. He had a whole dramatic, frustrated, wanna be love affair with a dog portrait painter while expecting me to cook him dinner every night. This was after he tried to hit on his therapist. He was “desperately in love” with them both. He was trying to fuck anything that moved. Hugo Clement was the one who sent out the video of Asia Argento making her “fiery speech” at Cannes. Clement was there with her and knew to film her speech, because she clearly told him what she was doing, but Tony Bourdain wasn’t there. He was in Asturas, Spain. He had left New York City early before she had a speaking engagement at Harvard. It’s another strange thing. It seems like something he would be proud to attend, but he left. While Argento was at Cannes, she posted an IG story in which she tore up a ticket to a Cannes screening. I’m sure that was a message. You would think he would be there, but he avoided the whole thing. The man who loved film and probably, under normal circumstances would have loved to attend Cannes was not there. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but I have my suspicions.
An early indicator of the real trouble in my relationship was the time I found my ex completely naked, using my computer camera, in front of his computer with a chat program loaded. I was in the middle of performing in the run of a play and I was away a lot. Sometimes he had to heat up his own dinner. Oh no. I had made the mistake of bringing home part of my wardrobe to wash it and I left it at the apartment. I realized this as I was driving up to the theatre and turned right back around to get my costume. When I opened the door, what a sight greeted my eyes. I was in a state of shock. My boyfriend who had such an all-consuming in love with me that he would weep when I left him alone for more than 24 hours was trawling the internet with his dick out. I grabbed my clothes and said, “What the fuck are you doing?” and then “I do not have time to deal with this.” Then I ran out and had to perform that night feeling like my whole world was shattered. What I didn’t realize until much later is that when my bipolar boyfriend got angry, he would punish me by stepping out of our relationship sexually. The reason that I think Asia hooked up with Hugo Clement is because she was angry with Tony Bourdain. The other contributing factor is that she was probably in a manic cycle with overpowering anger, grandiose thinking, and risky behaviors coursing through her body. I also think that, like my ex, she had reached the point where the expiration date on their relationship was up.
One of the worst things about this situation is that your bipolar partner is very good at seeming normal to everyone else. So to the new people that they are trying to con, they act normal. All of their hatred is focused on you as their enemy. They will smile while you’re in public and wait until you get home to freak out. In an effort to get rid of you, they will say some of the most bloodcurdlingly awful things to you. They will refuse all attempts to ask for understanding and empathy. To them, you are worse than every villain that has ever lived. You are their worst enemy and nothing you do will convince them otherwise. It’s like you killed their family. I’m serious. If you don’t believe me, here’s some examples of what it’s like to live with bipolar and be the partner of someone who is bipolar.
Here are the signs that your relationship with a bipolar partner is unhealthy. I recognize every one of them in my life and in Tony Bourdain’s life.
But, you say, Asia is mentally ill, doesn’t that mean that she can’t be held responsible for her actions? Legally, that’s debatable, but she has lived her life doing all the things that exacerbate her condition, drinking and drugs, refusing medications and treatments until there’s a crisis or until she’s forced into it, and deliberately not disclosing her illness to her partners. What she did to Bourdain seems to have connections to the texting suicide cases. Yes, there’s more than one of them. In the texting suicide case of Michelle Carter, she was convicted of the manslaughter of Conrad Roy. Inyoung You has been charged with the involuntary manslaughter of Alexander Urtula. Remember that Tony Bourdain said that he and Asia argued via text. The following screenshot shows the kind of cruelty she dumped on him for something that he didn’t even do to her while he was trying to show her sympathy.
The appalling and shoulder shrugging conclusion that many in our society have come to is “Well, Tony had demons. He was depressed. He was going to do it at some point anyway.”. Of course, this comes after accepting Asia Argento’s version of the events. In response to this, I remind you that what his co-worker, who was in Kayersberg with him, said was that he was angry. His brother Christopher said “My brother committed suicide. I think if someone else had been in his room, it might have been a murder and not a suicide. I think he was just having explosive anger and this was the only way out.” This wasn’t depression. It was rage. Where did the rage come from?
These are some of the photos that two paparazzi took of Asia Argento with Hugo Clement in Rome. People will go on about “tabloid bullshit”, but these photos aren’t hard to interpret. Clement is there for a visit and there are pictures with Asia wearing at least three different outfits, which means multiple days. Clement stayed at the same hotel that Bourdain stayed at when he visited Asia, the Hotel de Russie, and the two were seen going back and forth all weekend. It was the same weekend that the Hong Kong episode first aired. The one that Bourdain had insisted Argento direct and fired one of his long time friends and one of his show’s best DP’s, Zach Zamboni, for. He was so proud of that show. Can you imagine the humiliation of having your girlfriend, who you have staked your reputation and backed through everything, getting caught, with photo evidence, obviously having a public affair with some French reporter that she met at Cannes? The very weekend that the show you arranged to have her direct and have been so publicly proud of first airs? A woman that you have constantly praised and promoted on your social media? A woman that you asked the mother of your beloved child to stop posting about you on social media for? A woman that you pushed friends away for? A woman that you raved about to everyone! Imagine that she can’t even be bothered to hide what she’s doing behind your back and clearly doesn’t give a fuck what it does to you. Having this fuck session happen at the Hotel de Russie, where Bourdain and Argento probably spent most of their nights together, must have been a hellish blow to his heart. He couldn’t have felt more duped and disposable. Maybe he remembered that Argento had never really done the same for him, which must have hurt on top of everything else.
I’ll confess here that I was my ex’s biggest booster of his art. I made sure he felt confident enough enter a contest to make a music video for a David Lynch song and he won a prize from another one of his favorite directors. I was constantly sharing his drawings on social media and telling everyone I could how talented he was. I schemed to get him into art shows. I made sure one of his drawings was featured by The New Beverly Cinema on social media and then their account followed him. I was so proud. He never shared a single thing about me or had the same pride about my work. It was all about him.
What Ottavia Bourdain revealed in the documentary demolished Asia Argento’s “open relationship” fiction. Asia was clearly very jealous of Bourdain having any type of friendly relationship with his wife and insisted that he ask Busia-Bourdain to stop posting photos of them together as friends. Why? Because, as I have noted before, people with bipolar can be intensely jealous, but I also think Asia also wanted to manufacture a fiction where she was the only woman in Bourdain’s life and his single focus. It has worked. Even after she was credibly accused of statutory rape and she blamed the victim, Jimmy Bennett, and claimed that Bennett assaulted her, people are still lining up to insist that Asia’s more important in Bourdain’s life than his widow and that the lack of her perspective in the Roadrunner documentary means that Morgan Neville was being dishonest. You really think that Asia Argento deserves a seat at the table when no one else who was in his life thinks that or wants her there? I have to say that you really have no respect for the people that he loved and who loved him. You curiously only have respect for one woman and not the multiple women whose testimony is in Roadrunner. Ottavia Busia-Bourdain, Helen Cho, Lydia Tenaglia, Allison Mosshart, Kim Witherspoon, and Karen Rinaldi. This is erasure of the word of six women because you really want to defend an indefensible woman. Because you want to be angry at someone. It’s really depressing to see people that are normally reasonable pretend that the truth, from women, doesn’t matter because they think they are defending #MeToo for someone who has mocked it on more than one occasion.
There was a quite a bit of information from the people who were on set with Bourdain in Kayersberg in Roadrunner, namely that he was very angry. I came upon this report from an anonymous user on Instagram from a few years ago and it tracks with what we heard in the film. Why was it anonymous? Well, Asia Argento is very litigious. She, like Donald Trump, threatens people with lawsuits because she knows that most people will fold under a legal threat. She also likes to threaten people in other ways too. People used to be scared of her. BTW: Morgan Neville said that what he included about Asia Argento in the documentary was only a fraction of the information about the end of her relationship with Tony Bourdain. He’s right, there’s a lot of information out there about Argento. This account got nuked shortly after posting these. Gee, I wonder how that happened.
In review: while Tony Bourdain might sometimes have gotten depressed, like we all do, he was enraged at Asia Argento’s hurtful and callous behavior towards him in early June 2018. They fought intensely for two days. Asia Argento is bipolar, and when in a manic cycle, bipolar people can exhibit reckless sexual behaviors, like hooking up with a French reporter so publicly that there were pictures sold to the Italian gossip magazines, and they are uncaring of what anyone else wants, especially to their partners, who they will violently push away and insult in the cruelest ways possible. You know, like have screaming fights on the phone while someone is trying to work. There’s also the texts that were probably sent, remember that Bourdain said that they fought via text, and messages on social media. If you paid attention to the people who knew him who spoke out in Roadrunner, you would know that he sent a message himself. The Instagram story with the music from Violent City that Helen Cho told us about. Note that Bourdain went completely silent after posting the Violent City Instagram story, but Argento continued to post as if nothing was wrong, except that she posted this some time before Bourdain was found. Even the New York Post thought it “bizarre”. I think it was a very specific message to one person. The phrase, “You know who you are” is the same phrase she used to call out who she considered Weinstein’s enablers at Cannes. It seems like a threat, just like those words were in her speech at the film festival. A very specific threat. She deleted this shortly after Bourdain’s death was announced. That’s because she knew how bad this looked. Her weak excuse is that she fell asleep in the shirt and woke up and took this picture. Just because. Totally a coincidence.
I have spent this time confessing to some horrible things that happened to me so that you could understand what it is like to be with someone who is kind of like Asia Argento. As bad as my ex was, I think he’s actually not anywhere near as vicious as Argento likely is. I nearly Sunny Von Bulow’d myself over this person. I would never kill myself, no matter how much I have joked about it, consciously. But I came really close in 2016 when my relationship with the Maryland Moocow ended in flames. Even after everything he did, I was focused solely on pleasing my him. Does that sound familiar?
I have read that Twitter thread from that person about how you can never blame someone else, particularly not a woman, for pushing someone to commit suicide. Conrad Roy and Alexander Urtula could probably tell you something to change your mind, but they’re not available to talk right now because they are dead. Michelle Carter literally went to prison for her pusher act on Roy. So while you might think pushing another human being to commit suicide is not possible, the US court system disagrees with you. While many of the misguided Asia Argento defenders want her to not be held responsible for what she did, many of them think nothing of blaming Anthony Bourdain for his death as if he deserved it. But it’s not just me who thinks that this is wrong. Back when Rose McGowan wrote that open letter that compared Argento to Elizabeth Taylor after Mike Todd died while implying that Bourdain “gave up” and “didn’t do the work” while Asia Argento struggled to pay the bills, working after being abandoned on “the battlefield to take the bullets”. The fucking guilt trip they laid on everyone is fucking unendurable.
This is Rose McGowan implying that Argento was his wife, when she wasn’t. That’s what that comparison means. Rose McGowan shoveled that shit with glee. Really..
The letter then published the ridiculous fiction that Bourdain and Argento had an open relationship (as an defense for the Hugo Clement pictures) and talked about Bourdain’s alleged medical history of mental illness (as a defense for the rising tide of people who suspected that Asia had done something wrong). If you want to have a discussion about ethics, Asia Argento and Rose McGowan are not Bourdain’s blood relatives, executors, or widows. All of this was stage managed to a fault. Argento and McGowan provided the media with press releases and interviews intentionally trying to re-direct the discourse. Ethically, they had zero rights to discuss anything about his supposed mental problems and zero rights to analyze his issues and blame him for his own death. It’s ghoulish. This was one of the responses to that disgusting letter and I really wish that more people had this kind of spirit right now.
“a hearty ‘FUCK YOU’ to rose mcgowan’s bullshit letter about anthony bourdain, which seems to victim blame him for not following his doctor’s advice shortly before his passing,” writer Allie Gemmill tweeted in response, “fuck that mightily.”
I’ll repeat this fact once again for the people who haven’t kept up with reality. Tony Bourdain never married Asia Argento. He said that he was never going to marry Argento. Ottavia Busia-Bourdain was his wife and is now his widow. No amount of posturing on Instagram with private photos and video of Bourdain is going to change the facts no matter how hard Argento and her stans wish it would. No amount of open letters implying that Asia Argento was married to Bourdain will make it so. It’s obvious that this what McGowan and Argento both wanted people to think. It worked so well that there are people who think that Argento has more of a claim on Tony Bourdain after a two year relationship than his wife of 9 years does. Think about that when you defend Asia Argento and insist that her perspective being missing from Roadrunner meant that the film was corrupt. Think about how you are disrespecting the mother of his child and HIS WIDOW. If you don’t get it yet, riddle me this: are there only certain women who deserve to be defended? Is it misogyny when you behave as if the woman Bourdain was still married to doesn’t deserve her time to speak and to have her wishes respected? Is the only woman who matters in this equation Asia Argento?
Why? Why do you react so defensively to the truth? Is it because, deep down, you know it’s the truth?
I’ll take this moment to remind you of something else from Roadrunner that relates to the divorce issue. Lydia Tenaglia told the story of the time that Bourdain said that he was done with the show. He said he was through and every band breaks up and it was time. He had already lost one relationship and he didn’t want to lose another. Tenaglia and her husband Christopher Collins, said, okay. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll support you. Go and move to Italy and live your life. Be happy. When confronted with them giving him exactly what he said that he wanted, Bourdain reacted by freezing and looking like he didn’t know what to do. Tenaglia floated the possibility that maybe what he really wanted was for them to say, no, please don’t go. The truth is that if Bourdain had wanted the show to end, he would have ended it right there. Also, if what he really wanted was to divorce his wife and marry Argento, he would have done it. Think about the man. Do you think that anything would stop him from getting what he truly wanted? That if he was really that obsessed with her, wouldn’t he have moved heaven and earth to be her husband? Listen to the testimony from his co-workers about how if he wanted to leave the set, he would leave. Nothing short of physical force would stop him when he was done.
I understand that people think that no one should ever be blamed for someone committing suicide, but making that a blanket statement that it is true in every situation is wrong and it isn’t helping. When people who have suicidal ideation see others get blamed for their own deaths, it doesn’t help. Our understanding of suicide and how we deal with it as a society is stuck somewhere in the 1970’s and people are dying because they feel blamed, they feel can’t talk about it, they feel isolated, there’s a fear and a stigma attached to the act that makes it into a monster in the closet that should never be disturbed. I think we would do better to come to terms with all the causes of suicide and to promote a widespread and meaningful discussion of the act. Right now, we’re just giving people who might be hurting other people a pass and closing our eyes. We’re posting rote messages about that suicide hotline instead of really listening to people in pain and encouraging them to ask for help. We’re not taking people with suicidal urges seriously. I think we need to demystify suicide. We need to stop being afraid of suicide and start taking some responsibility. We can change the perception of suicide and pull its fangs. If we don’t, we are going to continue to lose precious people that we love because we couldn’t just listen to them or they were too scared, too proud, or too ashamed to ask for help.
I think we need to address the fact that bipolar people are at risk for suicide. Most of the reason why I was terrified for my ex at all times and why I frequently put his needs over mine was because of this. You see, I could see the signs and he had already made a dress rehearsal attempt on his life. When you judge people in this situation and call them weak because they defer to their partner’s wishes and humble themselves and their pride to keep the peace, you should think about why they are doing it. They are doing it because they are terrified that one day they will find their loved one dead whether or not their partner is serious. Bipolar disorder has a death toll of people who probably didn’t really want to die, but their disorder made that decision for them. Unfortunately, in some cases, it’s the caretaker who takes that step themselves. We also have to consider the issue of those who willfully choose to remain unmedicated, refuse to disclose their illness to their partners, use suicide as threat, and the damage that it wreaks on their partner’s life, because that has a death toll too. I know, I was almost one of them.
There’s a lockstep in our world that doesn’t leave room for nuance and we don’t even really look into the root causes of suicide. We just slap a coat of “this is what mental illness looks like” over a collage of dead celebrities and tell people in distress to call a phone line. What would be better is if people who were suicidal could talk freely and honestly about how they feel and, instead of repeating a cliched homily, that we would say, “Talk to me. I’m listening. I’m here for you. Tell me how I can help you or just tell me how you feel.” and then just shut the fuck up and open our ears. That people would know how to encourage their loved ones and friends to get help and wouldn’t judge them for their distress. Because it’s pretty clear at this point that what we are doing now is not helping.
When I nearly died in 2016, I wasn’t mentally ill. I’ve been seen by one psychologist, one psychiatrist, and about four licensed therapists and they’ve all said the same thing: you’re not mentally ill. You’ve just had some really shitty things happen in your life and you are understandably in unresolved distress over it. What was happening was that I was being tormented by someone I loved dearly and who I had been trained to fear might kill himself at any moment. Not all of that training was done by my ex, but some of it was. I was exhausted and I wasn’t able to eat or sleep and my hemoglobin was so low that I might have had a heart attack or a stroke. I believe that Bourdain was dealing with a very similar situation. Bone tired, isolated, betrayed, heartbroken, and very very angry. He let himself be vulnerable, he fully opened his heart to someone, and that person carelessly threw that love and his heart into his face with all the red hot anger and viciousness that a manic cycle can bring out of someone with bipolar disorder. I know how that feels. It took me a long time to get over it. I’ll bring Conrad Roy and Alexander Urtula into it again, their SO’s faced charges for what they did. Were they bipolar? I don’t know, but it does prove that pushing someone to commit suicide is both possible and legally actionable. Many people are defending Asia Argento out of a misplaced guilt. Here’s the truth. She’s a statutory rapist who has mocked #MeToo and has lied repeatedly about the man she claims that she loves and talks to after his death. Yes, she claims that Bourdain’s presence is with her and that she talks to him.
The woman is not right. She needs help, not enablers. But still, she has lied and tried to cover things up and suppress the evidence that what she did was wrong and that it did contribute to Bourdain’s death. That means that she knows that what she did was wrong and she has tried to escape punishment. That’s the legal definition of being responsible for your actions. Also, it’s not misogyny to point out the obvious or the truth about a woman. No, really, it’s not.
What we really need to do is come to terms with suicide and mental illness. We need to deal with it, all of it, or nothing is going to change. Allowing people who are mentally ill to hurt their loved ones or themselves is not right. Allowing people to die because we are too scared or too lazy to deal with the issue of suicide is wrong too.
Don’t close your eyes to the truth.