As someone who spent serious adult years in the sport horse industry, this does not surprise me. None of it.
This industry is so rife with actively abusive trainers who, like artists, writers, and poets in prior days, skate by on talent and ability and are excused for their absolutely atrocious behavior because of it. They abuse clients the same way they do their grooms and interns. They pay poverty wages and get away with it by claiming you're a contract worker (while treating you more like an actual slave) and everyone just goes along with it because you need their approval to succeed in the industry. They destroy young women's bodies and minds with impossible labor expectations, and none of this is even touching on the sexual exploitation that happens with some very big names and some very young, legal but young, women who are unquestionably lacking in even the barest bit of power in the "relationship".
I love the sport like I love breathing, but if I had a daughter, I would never let her get involved the way I was for most of my teenage and young adult life.
As a kid my sister was a horse girl and I have NEVER encountered a more toxic community. I mean practically every single person who was in it professionally (ESPECIALLY if they owned a barn/board place my God), you could immediately clock them as seriously disordered. I'm actually surprised there isn't more violence from this group tbh.
It's a sport and an industry. Therapeutic riding is not in the same ballpark lol.
It's like any sport really: hyper competitive, and the loudest people with the most opinions get the most airtime. There are certainly kind people in the sport too, but they are rare at the international level.
I did the country bumpkin version of horse sports as a kid (I had a farmer uncle who was willing to trade farm labor for time with his little herd of charity cases) and my rare encounters with the real deal always kinda made me glad I didn't have the money to truly participate.
Yeah, if you are wealthy you have the resources to protect yourself from the lawsuits. The wealth could also act as a defensive measure as people who arent as well off may be too intimidated to bring them to court.
Some clients do, but most of the trainers do have an intense love for the animals. You spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands dollars with/on these animals, and I should have said too that I think a lot of the toxicity comes from the fact that no one gets into this sort of masochistic sport if there isn't already something a little wrong with them (myself included lol).
No one should like the idea of spending a 20-hour day outside toiling until your body feels like it is going to fall apart, no one should want to just hammer their heads against the wall with an animal over and over and over until something clicks, no one should find that kind of mental and physical exertion appealing, and the people who do are very driven and very single-minded and, as someone else said, not always very good with other people lol. They tend to be independent thinkers who do best alone with the animals, and interacting with other humans is like a necessary evil to accomplish their actual goals.
Gonna go against the grain of the other comments that replied and say it comes down to the sort of personalities drawn to it; they often gravitate to horses in part because they have trouble connecting with other people. It's very similar to people who are really serious into animal rescue. Now add the competitive edge of sports and the relative wealth and privilege. Regular horse people have, and it's kind of an insane combination. They really tend to lack people skills in a very profound way.
I appreciate this connection. I’ve volunteered in animal rescue off and on over the years and I can just imagine what kind of power trip some of them would go on if they had the money to do so. (Even if their hearts are usually in the right place.)
Have you heard of the horse that Liam Payne from One Direction (rip) bought some years back? I hope that horse and the rider at the time (idk if she still has the horse) is good and treats the horse well.
I've had to spend an annoying amount of time recently defending the very concept of NGRI to laypeople. (I am agnostic about whether it's appropriate in That Case and I am not interested in debating it, lift your fingers from the keyboard.)
On the whole I think it's actually underutilized because it's just so resource intensive to prove and most people with severe enough mental health issues for it to be a consideration do not have attorney money. To me as an attorney that is a problem, because in my sweaty little heart I think protecting the sanctity of guilt is imperative for a good justice system, and that is undermined when we convict people who at the time of the crime lacked the capacity to know right from wrong.
This case, though. Jesus Christ. This has all the markers of blatant misuse of NGRI.
A question I had brought on by That Case but not specifically about it: does it seem to you that our legal system is maybe inadequately set up to deal with grey areas in matters of culpability and mental illness?
It seems to me like there’s a number of cases where the best place for someone is clearly not incarceration but confinement in mental health treatment until such a time as they are deemed safe, but who forthrightly and honestly don’t meet the same standard of complete inability to know right from wrong at the time, and therefore who bear some form of culpability in one way or another that needs to be addressed in the course of treatment.
Yes, absolutely, it's just tricky to figure out how to fit that into a legal system that's focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation.
What can get particularly tricky is that our lack of wiggle room for that gray area can result in punishment that is often harsher than the victims (including their families) want. Especially in cases where violence occurs in the family unit or other very close knit environments, where people are especially likely to see the gray area. That not only leads to underreporting of crime, it often worsens the survivors' trauma.
It 100% is. The legal standard for NGRI is known as the M'Naghten Rule, after a man named Daniel M'Naghten who shot and killed a man who he mistook for the British Prime Minister in 1843. He was acquitted by reason of insanity, and the political establishment was so upset about it that they essentially changed the law so that any future such cases would end in a conviction.
Interestingly, Queen Victoria is part of why we have that rule, because she was personally upset about the acquittal. (To be absolutely fair to her she was probably unusually entitled to be in her feelings about it, because she was the victim of multiple assassination attempts, including one only a handful of years before the M'Naghten case.)
It's a nuanced issue. I do get why people recoil at NGRI because it goes counter to what feels fair. But it also doesn't feel fair to harshly punish someone -- potentially even kill them -- for a crime they would not have committed but for their mental illness.
Also on a practical level it's not like being committed is substantially better than being incarcerated. You usually get air conditioning because it's required for certain medications to work correctly. You certainly don't get your liberty, and you're often in commitment indefinitely.
Queen Victoria always at the scene of the crime smh.
But yeah, Andrea Yates - the most 1:1 comparison to the current big NGRI trial in the news - is in commitment, has been since her trial, and almost certainly will be until her death. She doesn't want to be let out.
I think one major issue with our legal system is the goal seems to focus more on punishing the criminal than it is public safety.
As I see it, incarcerating someone serves a few different purposes:
- retribution - having the wrongdoer face consequences of their actions
- deter future crimes - people are less likely to commit a crime if they know what it entails
- protect the public - separate the offender from the community/potential public.
- rehabilitation - reform offenders so that they can return to and participate in society
However, most of the focus seems to be the first two points. People care more about a criminal getting “what they deserve” than they do about what is going to benefit the community. People would rather put someone in jail for life, than have them go to a mental health facility, get treatment/medication, and return a functioning member of society.
I won’t comment on that case, but use a different example. I had read about a multi year experiment in Canada, where they decided to test prescribing heroin to those with addiction. Patients would go to specialized medical clinics to get their daily dose of heroin, enough to prevent withdrawal symptoms. The goal was not necessarily to wean them off of heroin. What they found was that during the experiment, illicit drug use, drug related crimes, hospital stays and overdoses all went down. Many of these patients were able to get and hold down jobs, move off the streets, etc, because they were no longer focused on getting their next hit. After the studies ended, patients and doctors fought to be able to continue this treatment, but they were shut down, despite the positive results. The health minister felt it went against their “anti-drug strategies”.
I remember having discussions about this case with people, including those in law enforcement, and it’s kinda crazy the push back. Like I get that this was an experiment, and who knows how it would work on a larger scale and long term, but so many people I talked to were completely against even considering it. They hated the idea of people getting access to drugs, because drugs are bad. Despite the fact that crime went down, hospital stays went down, that patients were able to contribute to society. It was better for the patients as well as the community. But that was less important than “people shouldn’t do drugs”.
I think that many people feel the same way about NGRI. It doesn’t matter their mental state, it doesn’t matter that with treatment people can return to society without being a danger to others. They need to be punished.
Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he shot Lauren Kanarek twice. But still, he positions himself as a victim.
In 2022, Barisone was tried in New Jersey for attempted murder. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. “This was a remarkable verdict,” Ian Parker writes. “Fewer than one per cent of Americans charged with felonies plead insanity, and the great majority of those who do have previously been hospitalized with a serious psychiatric condition. Barisone had no history of serious mental illness, and by the end of 2023 he had no such illness, according both to his own account and to the State of New Jersey.”
“This rare court-sanctioned narrative—sanity, criminal insanity, quick reversion to sanity—might seem like tremendous luck, given that he faced a decade or two in prison,” Parker continues. “But this isn’t how Barisone has experienced his freedom. It wasn’t surprising to hear him mourn what he’d lost since shooting someone in the chest twice. But it was striking to hear how fiercely he resented having lost anything at all.” In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Parker reports on the case.
Oh my god thank you for reminding me of Bad Art Friend, that's genuinely one of the craziest stories I've ever heard. It sort of rattles around in my head as "the kidney donor thing."
I agree, but the fact of the matter is this woman is lucky to be alive, holy shit. I would hope the community wouldn’t be behind him if she had died from her wounds. He really shot her point-blank.
Kind of off topic, but I can’t help but notice dressage competitors diminishing the horse’s role in the sport (re: the line about horses only liking being out in a pasture). I’ve seen plenty of horses drop into some of those specially trained gaits just for fun, completely untacked, but NoOo, these riders are just so powerful, so completely dominant, that they’ve thoroughly mastered and bent these powerful creatures to their will.
atomicsnark | 14 hours ago
As someone who spent serious adult years in the sport horse industry, this does not surprise me. None of it.
This industry is so rife with actively abusive trainers who, like artists, writers, and poets in prior days, skate by on talent and ability and are excused for their absolutely atrocious behavior because of it. They abuse clients the same way they do their grooms and interns. They pay poverty wages and get away with it by claiming you're a contract worker (while treating you more like an actual slave) and everyone just goes along with it because you need their approval to succeed in the industry. They destroy young women's bodies and minds with impossible labor expectations, and none of this is even touching on the sexual exploitation that happens with some very big names and some very young, legal but young, women who are unquestionably lacking in even the barest bit of power in the "relationship".
I love the sport like I love breathing, but if I had a daughter, I would never let her get involved the way I was for most of my teenage and young adult life.
kamace11 | 14 hours ago
As a kid my sister was a horse girl and I have NEVER encountered a more toxic community. I mean practically every single person who was in it professionally (ESPECIALLY if they owned a barn/board place my God), you could immediately clock them as seriously disordered. I'm actually surprised there isn't more violence from this group tbh.
PhiloPhilic | 13 hours ago
In your opinion, what causes the community to be so toxic? I hear this all the time but isn’t horse riding supposed to be therapeutic?
atomicsnark | 12 hours ago
It's a sport and an industry. Therapeutic riding is not in the same ballpark lol.
It's like any sport really: hyper competitive, and the loudest people with the most opinions get the most airtime. There are certainly kind people in the sport too, but they are rare at the international level.
GoodBoundaries-Haver | 12 hours ago
The horse community is rife with extremely wealthy people and people who see horses as more akin to a fancy motorcycle than a companion.
fluffstuffmcguff | 12 hours ago
I did the country bumpkin version of horse sports as a kid (I had a farmer uncle who was willing to trade farm labor for time with his little herd of charity cases) and my rare encounters with the real deal always kinda made me glad I didn't have the money to truly participate.
LaIndiaDeAzucar | 12 hours ago
Yeah, if you are wealthy you have the resources to protect yourself from the lawsuits. The wealth could also act as a defensive measure as people who arent as well off may be too intimidated to bring them to court.
atomicsnark | 12 hours ago
Some clients do, but most of the trainers do have an intense love for the animals. You spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands dollars with/on these animals, and I should have said too that I think a lot of the toxicity comes from the fact that no one gets into this sort of masochistic sport if there isn't already something a little wrong with them (myself included lol).
No one should like the idea of spending a 20-hour day outside toiling until your body feels like it is going to fall apart, no one should want to just hammer their heads against the wall with an animal over and over and over until something clicks, no one should find that kind of mental and physical exertion appealing, and the people who do are very driven and very single-minded and, as someone else said, not always very good with other people lol. They tend to be independent thinkers who do best alone with the animals, and interacting with other humans is like a necessary evil to accomplish their actual goals.
PhiloPhilic | 11 hours ago
Thanks for the insight! I chuckled at (myself included) lol. I’ve never known a “horse girl”/person so I’ve always wondered. Makes sense.
kamace11 | 12 hours ago
Gonna go against the grain of the other comments that replied and say it comes down to the sort of personalities drawn to it; they often gravitate to horses in part because they have trouble connecting with other people. It's very similar to people who are really serious into animal rescue. Now add the competitive edge of sports and the relative wealth and privilege. Regular horse people have, and it's kind of an insane combination. They really tend to lack people skills in a very profound way.
PhiloPhilic | 11 hours ago
I appreciate this connection. I’ve volunteered in animal rescue off and on over the years and I can just imagine what kind of power trip some of them would go on if they had the money to do so. (Even if their hearts are usually in the right place.)
rotervogel1231 | 6 hours ago
I've encountered many people who are very nice to animals ... but that's the only thing they're nice to.
KAS_stoner | an hour ago
Have you heard of the horse that Liam Payne from One Direction (rip) bought some years back? I hope that horse and the rider at the time (idk if she still has the horse) is good and treats the horse well.
fluffstuffmcguff | 14 hours ago
I've had to spend an annoying amount of time recently defending the very concept of NGRI to laypeople. (I am agnostic about whether it's appropriate in That Case and I am not interested in debating it, lift your fingers from the keyboard.)
On the whole I think it's actually underutilized because it's just so resource intensive to prove and most people with severe enough mental health issues for it to be a consideration do not have attorney money. To me as an attorney that is a problem, because in my sweaty little heart I think protecting the sanctity of guilt is imperative for a good justice system, and that is undermined when we convict people who at the time of the crime lacked the capacity to know right from wrong.
This case, though. Jesus Christ. This has all the markers of blatant misuse of NGRI.
FullPruneNight | 13 hours ago
A question I had brought on by That Case but not specifically about it: does it seem to you that our legal system is maybe inadequately set up to deal with grey areas in matters of culpability and mental illness?
It seems to me like there’s a number of cases where the best place for someone is clearly not incarceration but confinement in mental health treatment until such a time as they are deemed safe, but who forthrightly and honestly don’t meet the same standard of complete inability to know right from wrong at the time, and therefore who bear some form of culpability in one way or another that needs to be addressed in the course of treatment.
fluffstuffmcguff | 13 hours ago
Yes, absolutely, it's just tricky to figure out how to fit that into a legal system that's focused on punishment rather than rehabilitation.
What can get particularly tricky is that our lack of wiggle room for that gray area can result in punishment that is often harsher than the victims (including their families) want. Especially in cases where violence occurs in the family unit or other very close knit environments, where people are especially likely to see the gray area. That not only leads to underreporting of crime, it often worsens the survivors' trauma.
raphaellaskies | 13 hours ago
It 100% is. The legal standard for NGRI is known as the M'Naghten Rule, after a man named Daniel M'Naghten who shot and killed a man who he mistook for the British Prime Minister in 1843. He was acquitted by reason of insanity, and the political establishment was so upset about it that they essentially changed the law so that any future such cases would end in a conviction.
fluffstuffmcguff | 12 hours ago
Interestingly, Queen Victoria is part of why we have that rule, because she was personally upset about the acquittal. (To be absolutely fair to her she was probably unusually entitled to be in her feelings about it, because she was the victim of multiple assassination attempts, including one only a handful of years before the M'Naghten case.)
It's a nuanced issue. I do get why people recoil at NGRI because it goes counter to what feels fair. But it also doesn't feel fair to harshly punish someone -- potentially even kill them -- for a crime they would not have committed but for their mental illness.
Also on a practical level it's not like being committed is substantially better than being incarcerated. You usually get air conditioning because it's required for certain medications to work correctly. You certainly don't get your liberty, and you're often in commitment indefinitely.
raphaellaskies | 12 hours ago
Queen Victoria always at the scene of the crime smh.
But yeah, Andrea Yates - the most 1:1 comparison to the current big NGRI trial in the news - is in commitment, has been since her trial, and almost certainly will be until her death. She doesn't want to be let out.
PrincessConsuela52 | 12 hours ago
I think one major issue with our legal system is the goal seems to focus more on punishing the criminal than it is public safety.
As I see it, incarcerating someone serves a few different purposes:
- retribution - having the wrongdoer face consequences of their actions
- deter future crimes - people are less likely to commit a crime if they know what it entails
- protect the public - separate the offender from the community/potential public.
- rehabilitation - reform offenders so that they can return to and participate in society
However, most of the focus seems to be the first two points. People care more about a criminal getting “what they deserve” than they do about what is going to benefit the community. People would rather put someone in jail for life, than have them go to a mental health facility, get treatment/medication, and return a functioning member of society.
I won’t comment on that case, but use a different example. I had read about a multi year experiment in Canada, where they decided to test prescribing heroin to those with addiction. Patients would go to specialized medical clinics to get their daily dose of heroin, enough to prevent withdrawal symptoms. The goal was not necessarily to wean them off of heroin. What they found was that during the experiment, illicit drug use, drug related crimes, hospital stays and overdoses all went down. Many of these patients were able to get and hold down jobs, move off the streets, etc, because they were no longer focused on getting their next hit. After the studies ended, patients and doctors fought to be able to continue this treatment, but they were shut down, despite the positive results. The health minister felt it went against their “anti-drug strategies”.
I remember having discussions about this case with people, including those in law enforcement, and it’s kinda crazy the push back. Like I get that this was an experiment, and who knows how it would work on a larger scale and long term, but so many people I talked to were completely against even considering it. They hated the idea of people getting access to drugs, because drugs are bad. Despite the fact that crime went down, hospital stays went down, that patients were able to contribute to society. It was better for the patients as well as the community. But that was less important than “people shouldn’t do drugs”.
I think that many people feel the same way about NGRI. It doesn’t matter their mental state, it doesn’t matter that with treatment people can return to society without being a danger to others. They need to be punished.
Sorry for the long comment.
strickstrick | 11 hours ago
stealing the phrase “sweaty little heart,” thank you
[OP] newyorker | 14 hours ago
Until 2019, when he attempted to kill one of his students, Michael Barisone was a leading rider and trainer in the horse-handling sport of dressage. He has never seriously contested the idea that, on August 7, 2019, he shot Lauren Kanarek twice. But still, he positions himself as a victim.
In 2022, Barisone was tried in New Jersey for attempted murder. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. “This was a remarkable verdict,” Ian Parker writes. “Fewer than one per cent of Americans charged with felonies plead insanity, and the great majority of those who do have previously been hospitalized with a serious psychiatric condition. Barisone had no history of serious mental illness, and by the end of 2023 he had no such illness, according both to his own account and to the State of New Jersey.”
“This rare court-sanctioned narrative—sanity, criminal insanity, quick reversion to sanity—might seem like tremendous luck, given that he faced a decade or two in prison,” Parker continues. “But this isn’t how Barisone has experienced his freedom. It wasn’t surprising to hear him mourn what he’d lost since shooting someone in the chest twice. But it was striking to hear how fiercely he resented having lost anything at all.” In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, Parker reports on the case.
DeadWishUpon | 10 hours ago
Archive link: https://archive.ph/DD7in
zhezhijian | 9 hours ago
Kinda reminds me of the bad art friend story. Whew. Both of them sound horrible.
NiteNiteSpiderBite | 4 hours ago
Oh my god thank you for reminding me of Bad Art Friend, that's genuinely one of the craziest stories I've ever heard. It sort of rattles around in my head as "the kidney donor thing."
ifitswhatusayiloveit | 4 hours ago
I agree, but the fact of the matter is this woman is lucky to be alive, holy shit. I would hope the community wouldn’t be behind him if she had died from her wounds. He really shot her point-blank.
SoGoesIt | 4 hours ago
Kind of off topic, but I can’t help but notice dressage competitors diminishing the horse’s role in the sport (re: the line about horses only liking being out in a pasture). I’ve seen plenty of horses drop into some of those specially trained gaits just for fun, completely untacked, but NoOo, these riders are just so powerful, so completely dominant, that they’ve thoroughly mastered and bent these powerful creatures to their will.