Johnny de Mol’s request to the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute him for the alleged abuse of Shima Kaes is a PR trick, say Saskia Belleman and Paul Jansen.
Johnny de Mol caused a major media frenzy on Wednesday by asking the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute him for the alleged assault of his ex-fiancée Shima Kaes. If the Public Prosecution Service prosecutes someone, there will be a court ruling on the case and Johnny says he has a lot of confidence in that.
Smart PR trick
Telegraaf editor-in-chief Paul Jansen points out NPO Radio 1 that the Public Prosecution Service would announce whether it will prosecute Johnny this month. “If you say just before that: ‘I want you to prosecute me’, and the PPS then proceeds to prosecute… Instead of sitting in the dock, you can say: ‘That’s exactly what I wanted.’ ”
So it’s a smart PR trick, he explains. “It’s a very clever reversal of something that threatens to come at you and is very negative for you. You turn it around in a way that you can actually put a positive spin on it, give it a spin, so you can say, ‘I asked for this myself.’”
So Johnny is just plotting a media strategy? “Total. And that ‘trial by media’, with that screen, and meanwhile also going in that direction…”
Flight forward
Saskia Belleman, the court reporter for De Telegraaf, says at ‘Jinek’ that Johnny cannot request the Public Prosecution Service to prosecute at all. “No, it doesn’t work like that. The Public Prosecution Service itself decides who to prosecute and when. That requires thorough research first.”
Then why is he doing it? “Yeah, I think it’s more like a forward run and showing, ‘I’m asking to be prosecuted, so I’m innocent, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking.’ I think that’s more the thinking behind it.”
Eva Jinek: “Publicly seen?”
Saskia: “Yes.”
Winston believes Johnny
Nonsense, says Johnny’s bosom friend Winston Gerschtanowitz. “I don’t think Johnny does it for that reason at all. I think Johnny is just at a stage where he’s being asked to stop his program when in this country it’s still innocent until found guilty. But unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.”
“If you read everything that is written about him, I think that a lot of people assume or write that it may be different in their opinion. (…) If you, like him, know strongly that he is innocent, then I think he wants to bring it up quickly, because then he can move on. This is of course very painful now. Every day there is something that makes a headline and is harmful.”
hypocritical
RTL Boulevard star Luuk Ikink finds it especially hypocritical that Johnny and his lawyer keep saying that they do not want a ‘trial by media’. “That’s remarkable, isn’t it? Because they actually ask in that press release from yesterday: ‘This must be fought out in court’, and then he is at Op1 the same evening,” he says in his show column.
The performance of Johnny’s lawyer Peter Plasman at Op1 is also a media strategy, Luuk thinks. “It also seems that he is going to sit down and say: I’m going to try to create a bit of goodwill because that story in HP/DeTijd was extremely harmful. There are some very intense things in there.”
TV expert Rob Goossens: “That is also part of the media circus. If he wants to avoid that, he shouldn’t. (…) It’s getting pretty surreal.”
What does Rose say?
Columnist Roos Schlikker has ‘difficulty’ with Johnny’s attitude, she says in Today Inside. “He says all the time: ‘I almost have to bite my tongue not to say something’, ‘trial by media’, etcetera, but in the meantime he keeps coming back to it in his own program. Now his own lawyer is with Op1. I find that complicated.”
Johnny is currently on Easter holidays and he will be replaced in HLF8 by Hélène Hendriks.
Fragment
Paul on Johnny’s PR trick:
