Charlie Sheen is an Scumbag Who Routinely Beats Up Women and Ought to Be Locked Up

Anna Holmes makes the case in an NYT Op-Ed.

FORTY-THREE minutes into his “special live edition” with Charlie Sheen on Monday night, Piers Morgan finally got around to asking his guest a real question. Before that, Mr. Morgan and Mr. Sheen had mostly traded chuckles and anecdotes about multiday benders, inflated network salaries and meet-ups in Aspen, Colo. But then, after three commercial breaks, Mr. Morgan inquired, “Have you ever hit a woman?”

Sheen denied it, says Holmes, and Morgan didn't pursue. His record says otherwise, she says, and puts in some details.

Our inertia is not for lack of evidence. In 1990, he accidentally shot his fiancée at the time, the actress Kelly Preston, in the arm. (The engagement ended soon after.) In 1994 he was sued by a college student who alleged that he struck her in the head after she declined to have sex with him. (The case was settled out of court.) Two years later, a sex film actress, Brittany Ashland, said she had been thrown to the floor of Mr. Sheen’s Los Angeles house during a fight. (He pleaded no contest and paid a fine.)

In 2006, his wife at the time, the actress Denise Richards, filed a restraining order against him, saying Mr. Sheen had shoved and threatened to kill her. In December 2009, Mr. Sheen’s third wife, Brooke Mueller, a real-estate executive, called 911 after Mr. Sheen held a knife to her throat. (He pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.) Last October, another actress in sex films, Capri Anderson, locked herself in a Plaza Hotel bathroom after Mr. Sheen went on a rampage. (Ms. Anderson filed a criminal complaint but no arrest was made.) And on Tuesday, Ms. Mueller requested a temporary restraining order against her former husband, alleging that he had threatened to cut her head off, “put it in a box and send it to your mom.” (The order was granted, and the couple’s twin sons were quickly removed from his home.) “Lies,” Mr. Sheen told People magazine.

Sheen gets away with it because he's rich, powerful, and has powerful enablers like Morgan and his CBS bosses, and yes, especially, Sheen's current target, Chuck Lorre. Lorre and his writers created the lovable scamp Charlie Harper behind whom the far more sinister real Charlie Sheen hides.

Holmes argues, convincingly, I think, that Sheen's habitual abusiveness is part of a pattern where society tacitly allows rich and powerful men to abuse lower status women.

Whatever his pathology, his recent mania symptoms suggest that he might be in a more dangerous phase. It's highly plausible that he might kill somebody else before he kills himself.