{"id":10832,"date":"2020-07-19T00:50:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-19T07:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10832"},"modified":"2020-07-17T12:55:28","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T19:55:28","slug":"the-real-burning-bed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2020\/07\/19\/the-real-burning-bed\/","title":{"rendered":"The Real Burning Bed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/video-dept\/the-burning-bed-recalls-the-case-that-changed-how-law-enforcement-treats-domestic-violence?utm_source=nl&amp;utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_070920&amp;utm_campaign=aud-dev&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;bxid=5be9e74224c17c6adfd571bb&amp;cndid=14696637&amp;hasha=224005d5146471ced50eaecb3a83e763&amp;hashb=19f8dec59c317f588b8a71a1610e7e5fe5f01c40&amp;hashc=c3efbc0c0a351b600558628c967270e66b6b4b5626998e7a028935dac0a33f6d&amp;esrc=&amp;utm_term=TNY_Daily\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from The New Yorker<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h1 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u201cThe Burning Bed\u201d Recalls the Case That Changed How Law Enforcement Treats Domestic Violence<\/h1>\n\n\n\n<p>By\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/contributors\/anna-boots\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Anna Boots<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Burning Bed (1984) Movie Clip\" width=\"1080\" height=\"608\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/q-5y0_M8mNY?feature=oembed\"  allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>For thirteen years, Francine Hughes\u2019s husband, James (Mickey) Hughes, beat her routinely. Something as small as the inflection of a word would set him off: he\u2019d pin her down in a chair and pummel her. They divorced in 1971, but, later that same year, he moved back in. \u201cShe did try to get away,\u201d her son, James Hughes, remembers in \u201cThe Burning Bed,\u201d a new short documentary from Retro Report. \u201cBut he would also tell her, \u2018There is nowhere you can go, bitch, that I won\u2019t find you.\u2019&nbsp;\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>One night, in 1977, Mickey subjected Hughes to a particularly humiliating beating. \u201cSmashing food in the kitchen, dumping out the garbage, rubbing it into my hair, hitting me,\u201d Hughes recalled in a television interview, years later. \u201cI thought, I\u2019m never coming back, never, and then I thought, Because there won\u2019t be anything to come back to. That\u2019s when I decided I would burn everything.\u201d When Mickey fell asleep, drunk, that night, Hughes doused his bed in gasoline, lit it on fire, packed her four children into her car, and drove away as flames engulfed the house. Hughes was then charged with the murder of her ex-husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Hughes\u2019s story has been told before\u2014the new \u201cBurning Bed\u201d documentary borrows its title from the journalist Faith McNulty\u2019s 1980 book about the Hugheses and from the 1984 TV-movie adaptation, starring Farrah Fawcett. The documentary emphasizes how groundbreaking Hughes\u2019s case was. Lee Atkinson, who was an assistant prosecutor in her case, says that, at the time, police officers would not arrest someone for a misdemeanor unless they saw the crime committed. For Hughes, this policy meant that the police came to her house repeatedly and did not arrest Mickey. \u201cDoes she have bruises? Yes. Does she look like she\u2019s been abused? Yes. The police will take a report, but they wouldn\u2019t make an arrest,\u201d he says. At a time when the criminal-justice system failed to deal with\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/tag\/domestic-violence\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">domestic violence<\/a>\u00a0because\u2014as an \u201cEvening News\u201d broadcast put it\u2014\u201ctraditionally, wife-beating has been considered a family affair,\u201d Hughes\u2019s case initiated a sea change, forcing a long-suppressed conversation about domestic violence in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>[ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/video-dept\/the-burning-bed-recalls-the-case-that-changed-how-law-enforcement-treats-domestic-violence?utm_source=nl&amp;utm_brand=tny&amp;utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_070920&amp;utm_campaign=aud-dev&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;bxid=5be9e74224c17c6adfd571bb&amp;cndid=14696637&amp;hasha=224005d5146471ced50eaecb3a83e763&amp;hashb=19f8dec59c317f588b8a71a1610e7e5fe5f01c40&amp;hashc=c3efbc0c0a351b600558628c967270e66b6b4b5626998e7a028935dac0a33f6d&amp;esrc=&amp;utm_term=TNY_Daily\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">click to continue reading at The New Yorker<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from The New Yorker \u201cThe Burning Bed\u201d Recalls the Case That Changed How Law Enforcement Treats Domestic Violence By\u00a0Anna Boots For thirteen years, Francine Hughes\u2019s husband, James (Mickey) Hughes, beat her routinely. Something as small as the inflection of a word would set him off: he\u2019d pin her down in a chair and pummel her. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10832","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10832\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}