Four years after Chris Brown assaulted Rihanna, popular culture is getting dangerously close to turning him into the victim.

“This is the story of a man fighting to get back his woman, who’s been subjected to unthinkable violence,” said Seth MacFarlane on Sunday, hosting the Oscars and referring to Django Unchained. “Or as Chris Brown and Rihanna call it, a date movie.”

Including Rihanna in the punch line was strange, as if she was somehow complicit in her own attack. But what the quip really did was inject more conspiratorial venom into those who claim Brown is a casualty of a double standard when it comes to domestic violence and the celebrity hierarchy.

In 2009, after photos of Rihanna’s battered face were leaked, Hollywood and the world recoiled with horror. But on Sunday, MacFarlane’s joke signalled Hollywood was eager to shake off the revulsion and embrace its basic instincts.

The assault, in other words, could now be entertainment.

MacFarlane’s not the only one treating it as such: On Wednesday, NBC will air an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit titled “Funny Valentine.” The synopsis reads, “When a famous rapper brutally assaults his girlfriend, the SVU squad must battle music industry politics in pursuit of justice.”

A promo that aired last week was unambiguous in what story this was depicting. The singing thug is a baby-faced, baseball-cap wearing, sweet talking sociopath who holds inexplicable sway over his pop star girlfriend. In appearance and manner, even initials, “Caleb Bryant” might as well be Chris Brown.

In the real story, Brown received five years of probation and six months of community service for punching, biting and slamming Rihanna’s head into the passenger window of a rented Lamborghini.

In this reimagining, the fictional villain could end up dead.

Brown and Rihanna, reunited as a couple and fresh off a vacation to Hawaii to celebrate her 25th birthday, are unlikely to PVR the show. But between the monologue cracks and the prime time dramas, between the gravity of what happened four years ago and the floating lightness of how they seem to remember it, any new references to the assault seem to trigger one consequence: to torque Rihanna’s belief that Brown has already paid too high a price for what he did.

As she told Rolling Stone this month: “He’s not the monster everybody thinks.”

The ubiquity of Brown and Rihanna on social media — they essentially serve as their own paparazzi, distributing images via Twitter, Instagram and YouTube — increasingly shrouds another troubling fact. For a young man who nearly lost everything, Brown seems to have learned nothing.

There may be no such thing as a teachable moment in our age of oversharing, because Brown has not spent much time under a halo. Since the assault, he’s gotten into a nightclub brawl with Drake, a parking lot brawl with Frank Ocean and a Twitter brawl with the writer Jenny Johnson that was so crude and scatological, he temporarily shut down his account.

Through all of this, whether it was hatching duet plans or serenading him at the Grammy Awards this month, Rihanna seems to drift alone, even when they’re together.

This might be the most unfortunate part of a deeply unfortunate incident. By taking clumsy but relentless shots at Brown, the entertainment industry is forcing the defiant Rihanna into the role of public defender. They are helping to perpetuate a growing myth that Brown is a victim.

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All of this trivializes the past. It also blinds everyone, including Rihanna, to what might happen in the future.