Ordinarily I don’t pay much attention to celebrity misbehavior, but this is kind of an odd case. Tami Erin, who starred in The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking back in ’88 and is now 38 years old, was overheard arguing loudly with her roommate (it isn’t clear whether they were in a relationship), who then cried out for help:

The Walnut Creek Police Department in northern California told the website that Erin, 38, was placed under citizen’s arrest by a neighbor who overheard the star of the popular 1988 children’s movie arguing with her male roommate. After the roommate cried for help, the neighbor intervened and detained Erin until law enforcement arrived.

So the neighbor restrained her and held her until police arrived. I’m going to assume the neighbor was male, because I doubt she would have submitted to a citizen’s arrest by a female. Additionally, I’ll bet the neighbor knew the score about DV laws. In the old days a man wouldn’t have considered arresting a woman over a domestic dispute with a man, but it seems that men are adjusting to the new reality.

Cultural changes can eventually make quite a difference over time. This is something I learned from experience in foreign cultures, where women generally wouldn’t consider intervening in another woman’s domestic troubles, as opposed to the US, where women are all too happy to jump in on any woman’s side regardless of the circumstances.

Perhaps now men are finally starting to help each other instead of looking the other way. I like to think that spreading the word, as we do here and on other sites, has helped this process along. Although I am generally opposed to state intervention in families, I can’t see anything changing until women start to face the same kind of draconian enforcement as men.

Thanks to the recently renewed VAWA, Tami Erin is probably going to have a pretty rough time of it for a while. I suppose the lesson here is the following: if the woman you live with attacks you, run outside and scream for help. It’s humiliating, sure, but if it’s your word vs. hers you’ll lose, and it certainly beats jail time, DV “treatment” and all the civil disabilities that come with a DV conviction.