Now We Hear It: Becca And Renee Weren't "Married"

Julie Kelly reports:

An attorney representing Renee Good’s estate acknowledged in an interview with the Washington Post that Becca Good was not her wife. Antonio Romanucci, the Chicago-based attorney who also represented the family of George Floyd and succeeded in winning a $27 million settlement for the Floyd family, said Renee’s “partner, parents and four siblings want ‘to honor her life with progress toward a kinder and more civil America.” Romanucci further confirmed the pair “were not married.”

On Friday, just a few days after publishing the story about Thompson, the Times had to admit in a separate story that Becca and Renee “were not legally married.” But a review of Times articles published since the shooting does not show that the paper has corrected any previous articles describing Becca Good as the “wife” or “widow” of Renee Good.

Thios brings back a number of questions I had in the immediate wake of the shooting. Reports at the time characterized Becca as Renee's "wife", apparently without fact checking, for instance, Becca Good, Wife of Renee, Releases Statement: "We Had Whistles. They Had Guns". According to Wikipedia,

A nearby resident said that, after he heard Good's SUV smash, he went outside and saw Rebecca Good "covered in blood" and sitting in front of the building, crying, "You guys just killed my wife".

Clearly the disingenuousness began at the scene. But there are other questions that cascade from the fakery. As I noted on January 9, the SUV Becca and Renee were in was a Honda Pilot, a $50,000 car. That immediately set warning lights flashing for me: who owned that car, and how did they pay for it?

But I put those questions aside if she and Becca were "married" -- it must be community property, although reports were that Renee was a stay-at-home mom:

Good previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union, but was primarily a stay-at-home mom in recent years, the ex-husband said.

So how does a stay-at-home mom drive a $50,000 SUV that isn't community property? The Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed that the vehicle was co-owned by the two women and had been registered to a Kansas City address. So this leads to an entirely reasonable question how Becca was able to afford a $50,000 car. But this is the question that must not be asked:

A push by the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the widow [sic] of Renee Nicole Good after her tragic killing at the hands of a federal immigration officer has sparked a mass resignation of federal prosecutors in Minnesota, reports say.

According to reports, at least a dozen federal prosecutors across Washington and Minnesota have indicated their plans to resign. This includes six federal prosecutors in the state who left their jobs on Tuesday, and another six top prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department in D.C..

. . . The resignations came as a result of a push by top Justice Department officials to investigate Good’s widow, a move that has sparked outrage over the seeming mission to punish a family already grieving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent’s brutal and public killing of Good.

This comes amid flagging efforts to draw equivalence with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Even PBS is acknowledging it's not going well:

Five years ago, video images from a Minneapolis street showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as his life slipped away ignited a social movement.

Now, videos from another Minneapolis street showing the last moments of Renee Good's life are central to another debate about law enforcement in America. . . . Yet compared to 2020, the story these pictures tell is murkier, subject to manipulation both within the image itself and the way it is interpreted.

. . . "The people who are writing the cultural narrative of the Good shooting took notes from the Floyd killing and are managing this narrative differently," said Kelly McBride, an expert on media ethics for the Poynter Institute.

. . . When one online commentator wrote that Good did not deserve to be shot in the face, conservative media figure Megyn Kelly responded, "Yes, she did. She hit and almost ran over a cop."

Poynter's McBride said the media has generally done a good and careful job outlining the evidence that is circulating around in the public. But the administration has also been effective in spreading its interpretation, she said.

Unmentioned in respectable media is also the problem that lesbians are a tough sell. Yesterday's Babylon Bee carried the headline Minnesota Changes Official State Bird To Screaming Lesbian

Following recent developments stemming from political protests and clashes with the federal government across the state, Minnesota announced that it had changed the official state bird to a screaming lesbian.

After the recent spate of screaming lesbians, state officials agreed that a change was needed to modernize the official state bird and make it more fitting and identifiable as embodying what everyone thinks of when they think of Minnesota.

Even before general recognition that Renee and Becca were never formally "married", although they had the legal option of doing this, the constant use of words like "family", "stay-at-home mom", "wife", and "widow" were falling flat. It didn't fit the competing narrative of two former heterosexual marriages and three kids, two from one, one from another, with the six-year-old dropped off at day care before the shooting. Devoted mom indeed.

It's hard nbot to conclude that legacy media is losing its grip over public opinion.