Please forgive Jelisa Castrodale for being a bit frazzled and a day late with her column this week. Not only is her sister getting married, but someone may have discovered her secret identity as Hit Girl. Do not repeat that.
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By Jelisa Castrodale
For the past twenty years, the Law & Order franchise has been an ever-present part of the television lineup on NBC, on any number of syndicated cable channels, and at your unemployed brother’s house. At seemingly any time of day, you can click past QVC, past Animal Planet and inevitably land on a double-digit network broadcasting their trademark white-on-black titles and using appetite-killing phrases like “severed limb”, “bodily fluids” or “Special Guest: Kathy Griffin”.
Among the offspring that Original Recipe Law & Order has spawned are trenchcoat wearing classics like Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the heavily accented Law & Order: UK and Law & Order: SVU, which covers the most squirm-worthy cases. SVU frequently pulls its major plot points from current events, like bonus questions on a Social Studies quiz. If Dick Wolf and the other producers have been paying attention to Ben Roethlisberger’s offseason, they may want to re-assign the title initials as “Steelers Victims Unit”.
Yesterday, five hundred plus pages of Georgia Bureau of Investigation records were released concerning the sexual assault allegations a 20-year-old student made against the Pittsburgh quarterback. According to the already over-blogged excerpts, Roethlisberger followed the girl into a nightclub bathroom and when he approached her, he was already, um, running a naked bootleg. I won’t recount the rest of the gag-inducing details, partially because they’re available on other websites and partially because I don’t want to revisit this package of mesquite-flavored potato chips I just ate.
Although criminal charges won’t be filed — thus the release of the GBI records — the NFL may step up their own defense and suspend Roethlisberger for a portion of the upcoming season. Roethlisberger’s reputation is already dented and damaged after a previous sexual assault accusation and his endorsement profile has taken its first hit too. Earlier in the week, PLB Sports announced that they would be ending their relationship with Roethlisberger, immediately stopping production and sales of Big Ben’s Beef Jerky. That’s an understandable decision; who wants to have anything Roethlisberger-related near their mouth?
Big Ben has put the “jerk” in their jerky since his rookie season and his withered beef bits have been one of of PLB’s All-Time Best Sellers. The Pittsburgh-based manufacturer has previously marketed a number of equally unsettling novelty foods featuring other Steelers players, including running back Jerome Bettis and former QB Tommy Maddox, whose only indiscretion was sucking at football.
This morning, all references to Roethlisberger had been removed from their website and the products on their home page were related to Boston Red Sox players instead. For $21, you can order twelve jars of Dustin Pedroia Black Bean Salsa and the company will throw in free shipping and also swift, unyielding diarrhea.
Despite the GBI’s detailed report and the just-released photographs proving that Roethlisberger dresses like a douchier Jon Gosselin, PLB Sports is the only one of his sponsors that has taken a knee; his other two sponsors continue to stand behind him, which seems to be the safest place since he has yet to back into any unwilling partners.
Roethlisberger has not been dropped by national retailer Dick’s Sporting Goods, either because they, too, are a Pittsburgh-headquartered company or because they couldn’t find a bigger Dick to put on the cover of their catalog. He also remains on Nike’s roster of athletes, though they may want to remind him that “Just Do It” is just a slogan and not a credible legal defense. Roethlisberger really couldn’t be tangled with a more inappropriate sounding group of advertisers, not until Planters decides to re-brand their products as Unsalted and Assaulted Peanuts.
If Roethlisberger’s overworked management team wants to replace PLB Sports with another three-initialed advertiser, maybe they could consult with the marketing department at KFC. Their latest breaded-and-fried aortal explosion is being sold with the slogan “Unthink”, which is something Ben Roethlisberger absolutely knows how to do.
Case closed. Chung CHUNG.
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Jelisa Castrodale is a writer and comedian who has learned a lot about life by making a mess of her own. She chronicles her failures at The Typing Makes Me Sound Busy, covers music for London’s BitchBuzz and twitters while she waits at stoplights. Castrodale was featured in the book Twitter Wit and was named one of Mashable’s 10 Funniest Twitterers.
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