The racial invective is indefensible — and doesn’t even make sense, in context — and he does sound like an angry nut — but aside from THAT . . .
I’ve listened to the tape and it’s not really that bad. Obviously, she knows she’s recording HIM, so she’s trying to sound as mild as can be. But it sounds like two minutes pulled out of an ongoing argument, in which one person, having gotten the other to the verge of exploding, subsides and lets the other go off for the sake of the recording.
I’m not saying it’s not bad. I’m saying if someone recorded you at your worst moment how would you sound? And what if they egged you on so as to produce your worst moment? How would you sound then?
The man has an offensive way of expressing himself, and APOCALYPTO did sort of look like the work of a maniac, and on the recording he sounds like a guy deliberately working himself up and being nasty because he knows he can. Yet I also wonder if he doesn’t actually have a legit grievance in that relationship. Indeed the thing that impresses me most negatively about the tape is that he’d involve himself with such a woman in the first place. That there could be an attraction doesn’t speak well of Gibson’s maturity or sense.