The New York Daily News — which I totally admit is my guilty pleasure paper of choice — deserves serious opprobrium for embedding this speculative, blame-the-victim crap into the emerging story about domestic violence between pop star Chris Brown, 19, and “Umbrella” singer Rihanna, 20.

The pop world’s power couple have been dating for more than a year, and rumors have swirled that they were engaged. Yet there were rumblings in recent days about troubles, and sources described the Barbados-born beauty as a clingy girlfriend who can’t bear to have Brown out of her sights.

You know what? Nobody knows the details of Brown and Rihanna’s relationship except…Brown and Rihanna. What we do know is that no woman deserves to be beaten. Period. The end. “Clinginess” does not cause a man to jump out of his car and beat a woman on the side of the road.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.