Jerry Lewis was never a hero to the disabled community

[delisen]

36. Jerry Lewis could have evolved but continued to aggrandize himself

while making people with disabilities objects of pity.

As the world evolved and began to understand the making people objects of pity held back people with disabilities from participating in the life the rest of us enjoy, lewis clung to his formula.

When people with disabilities asked him to change his hurtful formula, he lashed out at them and ridiculed them, and tried to make them objects of scorn.

My own belief is that if you want to raise money for medical research into disabling conditions, you should not do it in a way that hurts the people in whose name you are raising the cash.

These were people for example who had MDA or other conditions who attested to how the "object of pity" formula caused prospective employers turn them away.

Telethons themselves used a formula for raising money (I worked for an agency that used them for fundraising). The target audience was the lower middle class or lower class housewife with young children who would be moved emotionally to make pledges they could not afford- when they could not pay what they pledged they got phone call with scripts to induce guilt for not paying what they promised .

While J Lewis may have been "donating" his time, telethons have expenses, I expect that Lewis and the organization itself had considerable expenses.

In some charities the expenses almost equal the money raised each year.

I don't know what the expenses were for raising the "billions" over decades, but when organizations or news articles just throw out numbers like that, my experience has taught me to be skeptical.

Who was helped more over those decades, Jerry Lewis, research, people with MDA? I don't know.

As for Lewis in his own life, one of his children wrote about his brother's siucide:

From The Hollywood Reporter:

Joe had problems his entire life and I blame our father … Jerry Lewis is a mean and evil person. He was never loving and caring toward me or my brothers. I don’t know if Joe’s death is drug related, but I believe it could have been prevented if he and my father had been on better terms. I believe he partly died of a broken heart. [My father] doesn’t really care. He’s more worried about his career and his image than his own family.