And you thought your family was dysfunctional...

[joboo]

"Just Melvin, Just Evil" is a very hard to find documentary about the tormented family of Melvin Just, a man almost too evil to be believed. In it, they detail their experiences of abuse over decades, at his hands, even admitting to knowing of a murder he committed to keep his crimes quiet."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY4eHaiVK9s&feature=player_embedded#!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lY4eHaiVK9s&feature=player_embedded#!

[k-os]

What an awful, tragic story. Several generations of ruined people, and the damage continues, and likely will continue for generations to come. Damn.

[Dogman]

A hunk of hi speed lead would have solved this problem.


A monster in the family

Michael Carlson talks to a film-maker about his portrayal of a horrifying step-grandfather


http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01311/arts-graphics-2001_1311741a.jpg






By Michael Carlson

12:00AM GMT 13 Jan 2001
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/template/ver1-0/i/share/comments.gifComment (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4721024/A-monster-in-the-family.html#disqus_thread)


JAMES RONALD WHITNEY says he originally thought of filming his family's story because it reminded him of opera. But if his remarkable documentary, Just, Melvin, resembles opera, it is opera as written by Jerry Springer. This is a tale of incest, child abuse and an unproved murder, carried out over several generations, and all generating from Whitney's step-grandfather, Melvin Just.






Portrait of a monster: Melvin Just, Whitney's abusive step-grandfather and the subject of his documentary Just, Melvin


Although it is depressingly hard to keep score, Melvin molested 10 children and step-children. He also allegedly raped and murdered a district nurse checking on the children's safety. He engendered a litany of broken lives and continuing abuse of children. Whitney was molested when he was only five by his favourite uncle, and at the age of nine lost his virginity to a cousin. "I'm no different from the rest of my family," says Whitney. "I just approach life differently."

Yet, for all its shocks, Just, Melvin is not a work of morbid depression or a confessional freak show. It is, rather, a challenging film that reveals the real cost of abuse but, also, the deep strength of familial love. It is disarmingly funny, too. As Whitney, who works by day as vice-president of a Wall Street investment firm, says, with a hint of irony, "It's a very light movie, a light little flick."

The film was conceived in 1997, when his mother, Ann, called to tell him that his grandmother, in hospital and weighing less than five stone, was drinking herself to death. Ann was organising an impromptu family reunion around her mother's hospital bed.

While contemplating his family's dysfunction, his mother's numerous suicide attempts, and his own mixed feelings of love and hate for his grandmother, Whitney fixed on the idea of making a movie. Drawing on the contacts of friends, clients in the film business, and his own financial resources, Whitney had a production team assembled later that same day.

"I get bored very quickly," he says. "So I was convinced from the start to make the film for me, not for an audience."

Just, Melvin consists largely of interviews and family gatherings, filmed by Whitney, who remains mostly behind the camera. Starting with his mother's testimony, who calmly chops vegetables while detailing her step-father's abuse, the stories grow progressively more horrific, particularly as we observe the effects the abuse has had on the people who turn their lives inside out for the camera.

Had Whitney decided to make it in a more usual documentary style, Melvin Just would dominate the screen, which would have been far from audience-friendly. What we see instead is the way the family is still dominated by Just's legacy of abuse.

In talk shows the viewer is a voyeur, encouraged to feel safety by the sympathetic platitudes of a host drawing compassion from cue cards. Whitney's approach drops the barrier between family and audience.

"I didn't find the camera distancing me at all," he says. "I was just having conversations with my family. It's not like the camera made me a father-figure or confessor. It was always a case of 'us' or 'we', and most of the time I didn't even know the camera was there."

No one appears conscious of being filmed. Sisters argue about whether one was actually turned on by having sex with the other; Whitney's Uncle Jim says there's nothing wrong with asking his half-sister to live with him as man and wife; someone explains why none of the neighbours confronted Melvin when the nurse disappeared ("he was a terrific mechanic"). Family gatherings sparkle with moments of touchingly protective comedy. "We haven't lost our sense of humour," Whitney says. "It may seem strange, but it's okay if not everyone gets it."

Rather than being numbed, the audience learns to share Whitney's affection for his relatives - people who are homeless, or who live on society's fringes, in trailers or wrecked cars. "They've all tried suicide," he says, "but none has succeeded."
Yet regardless of their circumstances, Whitney is committed to his family members. "I'd go out tonight with any of them rather than with you," he told the audience at the Sheffield Documentary Festival late last year.

Whitney is too irrepressible to stay out of the action entirely. He intercuts the film with scenes from his own early life: as a Chippendale dancer; a performer on camp variety shows; a quiz-show contestant. It's as if his maniacally outgoing performances were the very minimum it took to propel him from the context of his family. When he wed his English dance partner, the ceremony included dance routines by the bride and groom. He is now divorced and lives with a group of pet monkeys.

Whitney seems compelled to sell himself to the world, seeking its approval. Watching him promote his film in person, you feel he would gladly take the video door to door, introducing it to each and every prospective buyer.

The force of his personality makes his on-screen confrontation with Just a powerful and dramatic moment in the film. Just, who had been convicted of child molestation in 1978, and served eight years in a California prison, had in 1994 also been called as a suspect in the late Sixties murder of the district nurse. He was under investigation when his step-grandson interviewed him. What could motivate a serial abuser to face his accuser on camera?

"He asked me, 'what do I get out of it?'," Whitney explains, "and I said, 'a burger and fries'." Sure enough, Melvin, in a wheelchair, belly protruding from his tee-shirt, gobbles his burger as he denies, with grunts of "un unh", abusing his children, committing incest, and killing the nurse (even though some of his daughters claimed to have witnessed the crime). Only once does Just drop his guard, and his burger. "If you keep at this f-ing subject, I'm going to molest you right quick."

"My mother said watching me confront him with everything he's done was the best therapy she's ever had," Whitney says.
It makes Just's ultimate scene even more amazing. As he lies dying in hospital, he is visited by some of his daughters. Pambi, born crippled, was abused and prostituted by her father, yet she breaks down in his arms, still seeking love and protection. The power of a child's faith and need, despite the depth of its abuse, is stunning.

Just died in 1999, after Whitney's film was shot but before it was screened, and before he could be prosecuted for the nurse's murder.
Following its warm reception at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival last year, Just, Melvin was bought by the American HBO cable network, and given screenings to make it eligible for an Oscar.

Whitney's family attended the film's American premiere in Seattle. "None of them had seen it before, and the audience was busy watching them as they watched the movie. But they loved it, and the question-and-answer session with the audience was the most positive thing that's ever happened to them."

Whitney's next film deals with his father, who married Melvin Just's sister, then married a prostitute, before marrying Whitney's mother, who is Just's step-daughter. When Whitney was nine, his father then ran off with his mother's best friend and became a Hell's Angel. He now lives in the mountains in northern California with a harem of much younger women. Another opera in the making. But does Whitney fear that this dysfunctionality is inescapable?

He laughs. "That's why I have monkeys, not children."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4721024/A-monster-in-the-family.html

[Awoke]

This whole article and movie reek of a Psyop piece, to plant the seeds which would normalize sexual abuse and butress battered wife/daughter syndrome.

Probably filmed by employees of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations.

[joboo]

The documentary was created by a grandson in order to either put the guy behind bars, or kill the guy in the process (the latter appears to have succeeded).

His mother was a victim, and very suicidal. Grandson has an IQ of 155, mother is 160 apparently. One has to wonder why your mom is so depressed, and wants to kill herself being of such high intelligence, so he started asking questions within the family. Having watched it, and a had day to think about it, I don't really see a conspiracy angle.

What strikes me as the most bizarre aspects is some of the younger girls still show some level of affection for the guy, one of them a great deal.

[Glass]

Evil spirits have a very solid hold on that family. The two twins are completely possessed. The perpetrator is also possessed which can be seen during the first interaction with him. You can see his eyes flicker as the possessing spirit flips into the front line to deal with the questioning.

I think the mother, interviewed in the kitchen preparing some food is recovering from her possession but it has clearly taken a toll. People can lose decades to this and suddenly just "wake up" to realise 20 years has passed without them really being part of those 20 years. They were there, but they weren't "there" if you get my meaning.

The grandmother was also badly possessed based on the description of her behaviour as a young woman. She also now appears to have woken up. The impression I get from her is that she is shocked at the devastation wrought on her family and is now recollecting things she saw, but did not see because her natural spirit was relegated by the demons that man brought with him.

The son appears to be hiding something. Perhaps just hiding what he knows. Not sure.

This is more common than people realise. It affects a lot of people and a lot of families. I have a young relative who also has a possessing spirit. You can see it flip in and out of control. Behaviour changes and becomes very base instinct when possessed. You can converse with it as well. It has a name and will answer questions but does get angry easy. It gets quite agro when asked if it is a ghost. It talks in a very raspy unpleasant voice. It's name is boicy or boicey or something like that.

[joboo]

I imagine one would have to mentally go to another place in order to cope with the reality of what is taking place during the abuse. Perhaps this is part of how schizophrenia/alternate personalities develop.

My best friend growing up (from 7 - 14yrs of age) suffered what I would consider horrific abuse from his father. From what I could tell it was not sexual in nature, however both his sisters ran away at a young age 17 & 18 never to return. He had an older brother that was a total asshole, and cruel to boot.

My friend told me his dad broke (badly) both his legs when he was five. I saw pictures of him in leg braces, and his gait was affected some years later, for life I would imagine. I have no reason not to believe him.

I used to have lunch at his house every day from school, and I'd hang out at his house pretty much every day after school so they got very used to me hanging around. One day I got a ring side seat to the abuse my friend kept alluding to.

Basically one day I sat frozen scared shitless out of my mind for 15-20 minutes (seemed like hours) as his father punched, and slapped him around while the mother held him down. She was told to get a knife from the kitchen, and that was used as a prop (held to the neck face, etc) all the while my friend was screaming like he was being killed. Some kind of bleach or soap was poured into his eyes, and the screaming turned to agony.

Screams turned to sobs, then back to screams, and it just kept going on. I was entirely convinced I would be next. This was all taking place in the bathroom, and I had to get by this situation in order to get out the front door (it was an apartment). What I saw as I passed by the bathroom door will never leave my memory. My best friend was bleeding profusely from the nose, it was all over his clothes, spit/mucus or something, was all over his face, he was screaming that bleach was in his eyes, the mother was holding him down, and the father was wrenching on him as he struggled holding a knife. He was a total mess.

I bolted out the door, and ran all the way home without shoes. My mother wanted to know why I didn't have my shoes, what was wrong, and why I was white as a ghost.

I thought my friend was dead (or soon to be), and I somehow escaped the same fate.

What started it? My friend was unhappy that his dad forgot to get his skates sharpened (again). That was what set it off.

Pretty unbelievable reality to call home.

[Awoke]

What action did you take to stop that from happening again?

[joboo]

What action did you take to stop that from happening again?


Informed all his neighbors on all sides that the screaming they are hearing is in fact child abuse.

The building super lived above, and I delivered daily newspapers to all of them, so when I went to collect one day, I brought it up as they all knew me.

That, combined with me knowing, toned it down considerably.

Always wanted to go back one day and deck the guy.

[Janadele]

Do so :(

[Publico]

Who's got time to watch an hour - 15 minute documentary?

[Glass]

Who's got time to watch an hour - 15 minute documentary?

People who are interested in it's subject matter might. Documentary's are long. Thats what they do.

Anyway a few gave some synopsis's in their responses to help others decide if they are interested enough to watch the whole thing. For some people it's probably a shock to see stuff like this because their life was all white picket fences but for a lot of people out there, this type of life is how it is. Until you are old enough and big enough to deck (punch the living crap out of) your molestor you're stuck living life like these people.

[joboo]

Who's got time to watch an hour - 15 minute documentary?

The same people that spend a couple hours (or more) watching TV, IOW 90+% of all industrialized societies on planet earth.

Melvin is that you?