By Victor Greto
Am I the only person who feels for Jennifer Wilbanks?
She’s the so called “runaway bride” — actually, the “would-like-to runaway pre-bride.” The 32-year-old Georgia woman whose highly publicized disappearance just days before her wedding near Atlanta in late March caused a national media obsession.
When she turned up, she lied to everybody about being abducted by a white woman and a Hispanic man. After quickly confessing to cold feet, she pled mental problems, then later pleaded to a felony for making a false statement to police. Sentenced to 120 hours of community service and a fine of $2,550 payable to her home county’s sheriff’s department, she is continuing mental treatment.
She also recently announced that she sold the book and TV rights to her story for a half million dollars. She told this to Katie Couric and nearly nine million viewers on the Today show last week.
During the show, Wilbanks apologized for her behavior. She said she had been very afraid, that her running away was a cry for help and that, now, she was getting that help. And, yes, she was getting big bucks for it.
I feel bad, and I’m not kidding.
Not so most people, it seems, including Colleen Kemp, nee Lyons, the Delaware woman who fought the weather odds and married the love of her short life, Brian Kemp, during a blizzard at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts in Wilmington.
“What she did was wrong,” Colleen told me recently, when I asked her what she thought of Wilbanks’ odyssey away from marriage and toward notoriety and big bucks. “Marriage is a challenge worth doing. You don’t do that to someone you loved. You don’t worry someone you love.”
That makes perfect sense, of course, and Colleen should know.
As for Wilbanks’ lies: “I couldn’t say I was kidnapped,” Colleen says. “How could she not realize this might happen, after the Laci Petersen thing?”
These are two different things: the “what she did was wrong” idea, and the “she should have known better because of Laci Petersen” idea.
Even so, both speak to what’s going on in our society and culture. But not only our knee-jerk cynical reaction to Wilbanks’ post-caught cry for help and mental health problems, and the big book and movie deal.
We — you, me, the company I work for, and the rest of the media — facilitated and made all this runaway bride (inevitably named, of course, after a movie) nonsense not only possible but predictable.
People run away every day. From a lot of things, such as would-be marriages, financial trouble, domestic violence, even the desire just to get out of where they’ve been all their lives.
There is an edge of cowardice to some of this running away. Still, it’s an option we’re free to pursue.
But most are gone for no reasons of their own. In fact, there are nearly 50,000 active missing adult cases in FBI files, more than 30,000 of whom have been missing for more than a year.
Now, Wilbanks’ publicized example may trivialize many of the truly missing, but that’s not her fault, either.
It’s our delicious longing for the seamy side of ourselves, that part of us at which we love to leer with at least one eye wide open, that the sagas of Wilbanks and Petersen are all about.
We’re still not tired of Wilbanks’ story, regardless of how avidly we vow not to watch the movie or read the book.
A poll conducted by Parade Magazine, the original flighty Sunday supplement that set the standard, showed that Wilbanks was chosen the top “most fascinating real-life crime drama,” followed by Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson and Robert Blake.
This is fine company, but of a different sort.
Wilbanks did what thousands of people have done before, are doing now, and will always do: run away from their troubles. Only she — because of her age, color and class (all three of which are grist for further discussion) and the technological communication monster we’ve created — was put on display, on the other side of a glass, for all to see and mock.
We may even gawk at her police report, available on the Web, which shows, among other things, that she’s got some kinky oral fantasies concerning white women and Hispanic men.
Caught up in a web of attention because she did something terribly human — run away from a marriage she was unsure about, try to re-evaluate herself in a different context out west (the message of the Dixie Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces,” right?) — she did what any scared person would do: lie to make it all better.
Now, she’s going to reap hundreds of thousands of dollars from the very machine that made her notorious to begin with, that made her the laughing- or pity-stock of anyone holding a remote control.
That’s postmodern empowerment for you.
In a way, Colleen says she understands what Wilbanks experienced. Colleen’s own quick marriage, a relatively rushed affair because the couple closed on a house and were planning a vacation, took a lot of the pressure of self-doubt from her own mind.
“Women are pressured to do everything,” says Colleen, a professional hairdresser. “I see brides all the time, and they worry about the silliest things.”
They do. And so do the guys. But there’s nothing silly about a man or woman’s personal crisis. Nor is there anything silly about what we do to people on television, by holding them up as objects of scorn or cynical pity, in reality shows, or on the so-called news.
But there is something silly about us.
I feel for Wilbanks because I feel for us.