Mel Gibson

It’s been open season on Mel Gibson today, after the website Radaronline claimed to have heard a secretly-recorded tape in which the actor told the mother of his child (with whom he’s pictured): “You look like a fucking pig in heat, and if you get raped by a pack of niggers, it will be your fault.”

The ugly rant, which Oksana Grigorieva is alleged to have secretly recorded during a domestic dispute, comes three years after a drunken Gibson committed career suicide by informing an LA police officer that: “Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”

You can read a transcript of the recording here, and see robust condemnations of Gibson by the NAACP here and the Anti-Defamation League here. It comes days after he was accused of punching Ms Grigorieva in the face during another dispute, breaking her teeth and giving her concussion.

Hollywood dislikes wife-beating racists almost as much as it abhors anti-Semites, and quite right too. Since Gibson appears to be both, it seems unlikely that his commercial stock will recover any time soon.

But before you too rush to judgement, a very small note of caution: for some reason Radar has not published an audio recording of Gibson’s alleged comments. This may reflect a spectacular lack of news values on the website’s part, or it may indicate that there is more to this story than meets the eye. Time will no doubt tell.