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It's been a big week for anyone curious about the shadowy inner workings of Hollywood's most celebrated cabalistic institutions. First, the LAT gets inside the bizarro world of Scientology's desert Cruise-courting compound, and today comes a NY Times report on the suicide of Irish-born showbiz reporter and one-time Hollywood Foreign Press Association member Nick Douglas. The Golden Globe-mounting international starfucking consortium put Douglas on a 17-month probation for various petty violations, including walking out of an MGM party with some unopened beers (have we mentioned he's Irish-born?) and selling a Tom Selleck photo to a tabloid, forcing him to return to his native Dublin, where, denied of his life-affirming junkets and movie star photo-ops, some maintain he became so despondent he hanged himself to death. The report takes a look at some other regrettable past incidents involving members of the Foreign Press, including one involving HFPA president himself, Philip Berk:

In 2003, a member, Frances Schoenberger, was suspended for flinging a glass of wine in another member's face at a party for "Gangs of New York," while the film's director, Martin Scorsese, stood nearby, an incident that became public. That same year, Mr. Berk wrote a letter of apology to the actor Brendan Fraser for having grabbed the actor's buttocks during a ceremony to announce a charitable contribution, though Mr. Berk said in an interview that he did no such thing and wrote the letter only to mollify the actor.

Isn't there a discrepancy in crime-to-punishment ratio going on when a brewski doggie-bag results in literal career suicide, but when the president of the operation plays busy-hands with Brendan Fraser's mancakes, he needs only to toss off a hastily written, "sorry about the whole ass-grab thing" note and all is forgiven?