Ah so 'what's yours is mine and what's mine is also mine' is their motto and guiding philosophy.
What Deborah Orr is failing to grasp is the fact that it is not anyone's responsibility but the thief's if a window is left open and a thief climbs in and steals your jewelry, or if a woman walks around town with one of those backpack style bags containing her money, or if a wallet is carried in a back pocket and a pickpocket reaches in. It may well be stupid to do all of the above but nobody who gets robbed is stupid to the point where the thief is not guilty of theft by reason of the stupidity of the person whose money is stolen. And I bet Orr herself would press charges if she was cleaned out even if she had left the window open. I can't imagine anyone smacking themselves on the forehead and saying 'Duh. My fault entirely', in any case where they have been robbed, no matter how great the temptation their personal belongings presented to a person who took advantage.
And just because you do it once ,or ten times, and get away with it doesn't mean it's not theft every single time. It would be theft if it was a carer stealing from an old lady in a home and it was theft in the Saatchi/Lawson case. Common sense my arse.
They themselves presented themselves as family in so far as they knew everything about the household. Orr can't have it both ways in her characterisation of calling them 'family' as paternalistic. They saw themselves in that light.
The problem with employing people in your own household is not one of master and servant and the tendency to baulk at this. It is pure laziness and failure to manage, and there are lots of really, really bad managers out there, in all walks of life and not just the domestic workplace. Working in a private residence doesn't mean you are a servant any more than it makes your employer your master if you are working in finance. Methinks Orr has watched a few too many Downton Abbey reruns, given the picture she appears to have of how things were done in the era when homes with servants was the norm above a certain income bracket. TV series set up the contrasting worlds and all the rest of the drama that goes into Upstairs Downstairs and Downton because otherwise it would be more boring than watching paint drying.
The reality is that in days of yore households were often minutely managed by many families. Result -- the money and the family silver stayed in the family and nobody got ripped off in the process of ordering goods or services. And there were friendships too, and bonds between employer and employed, and still stuff was not stolen. Perhaps the big difference between that sort of picture and the one presented of the Saatchi/Lawson menage was that people understood the difference between Mine and Yours, right and wrong, give and grab.
The Grillos rightly objected to peonage, or debt bondage. It is illegal because it is slavery by another name. Nothing to do with Hegel or co-dependency whatsoever, (and that section and its references is risible).
You cannot insist that someone is in your family, then cry fraud when they behave as if they are.
Oh yes you bloody well can. These were not children of 6 and 7. Orr fails to do the Grillo sisters the honour of treating them as grown adults.
The whole article is a patronising piece of shite.