Mel Gibson tape 5 Leaks!

Ugh, now there are five. You can spend nearly 30 minutes listening to five separate recordings of Mel Gibson purportedly raging against ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva on Radar Online. It’s almost like Radar isn’t even a proper noun anymore — this is literally the radar. “What’s on the Radar today? Another Mel Gibson tape, of course.”

Radar’s decision to release these one-by-one seems increasingly bizarre. (An editor for the site claims that the audio came from a third party, not Grigorieva herself.) It’s beginning to feel like a record company “dropping” albums. Vol. 1: The N Word, Vol. 2: A Time to Kill, Vol. 3: The Nanny Diaries, Vol. 4: Burning Down the House, and now Vol. 5: Gold Digger. I’m not trying to be flip but to make the point that this step-by-step rollout seems more like the work of a publicist for a mysterious entertainer. The saddest part is, if you’re still listening, fatigue is likely setting in, and the impact is lessening. The tapes are still in every way terrible, but due to the sheer repetition, they’re also becoming sort of mundane. You can’t help but become desensitized to something that happens every day. And unfortunately, the public’s chief reaction to these tapes is shifting from disbelief a couple days ago over the horrible content to disbelief today that there’s ANOTHER one???