defamation
I've spent four years trying to forget going on the record against an abuser
During the summer of 2018, I, along with several other women, some of whom I remain friends with to this day, went on the record for Jezebel about the abusive behavior of a then-prominent male journalist in New York media. It was the most emotionally demanding and challenging period of my life, but for a long time I was perversely grateful that the experience afforded me a deeper understanding of the justice system when it comes to defamation and slander. I felt pride that I was able to provide other women who were considering coming forward about the behavior of abusive men with advice about how to handle the many pitfalls that come along with any sort of official reporting of allegations.
Today, I am deeply saddened, discouraged, and enraged at the verdict in the Depp—Heard defamation trial. I have to admit, I did not follow the minutiae of the daily proceedings — I have worked very hard in the past few years to move past the my own situation, and to some degree, that has included shielding myself from news that had the likelihood to send me into a panic spiral. At this point, of course, it has become impossible to ignore this trial and the implications of the verdict.
The following text is an essay I wrote in the months and years following my own experience of speaking out against an abuser and being threatened with defamation. Instead of publishing it, I used it for grad school and fellowship applications, and I told myself that it was a worthy use of the text, that I did not need to publish it in a forum for public consumption. Of course, I was also afraid. I’d gone through the process once, I did not want to dredge it up again.
But today I feel compelled to share this text. I feel it sheds light our the tragedy that has occurred with this verdict, as well as a twisted irony: much of this essay is about the lengths that women must go to in order to protect themselves legally when speaking out about abuse; this verdict has shown us that nothing at all can guarantee those protections. I have also, in the past few years, become wary of traditional publishing and the way that media outlets pressure writers to meld their stories into a stringent publication-based voice, not to mention the pressures of word count, clicks, and the like. In a moment like this, begging editors for the chance to have a piece of writing be wrung through the commercial editing mill and mined for clicks feels wrong. Thank you for reading, and blah blah blah, consider subscribing to my Substack, paid subscriptions especially appreciated for the aforementioned reasons that I distrust traditional publishing and also b/c I just got laid off from one of my higher paying gigs lol. Without further ado.
[This essay was written in 2018 and 2019 and has been edited lightly for clarity]
In the years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve had ongoing intimate relationships with only two men. One, I dated for six months. I hoped it was on the road to becoming something serious, he knew (and told both me and our mutual friends, repeatedly, months later,) that it was not. The other, I met, somewhat circuitously, because of the first, we seemed to fall for each other quickly and meaningfully, though the affair devolved quickly into both melodrama and actual trauma. Though neither of the relationships was by any measure ‘serious,’ they were nevertheless the most involved entanglements I’d experienced at the time.
These two men of the deeper entanglements in New York were, are, both writers. They both write within what they call a ‘beat,’ and both of their beats are serious, deeply important, and, as they say, ‘of the moment.’ The man I dated for six months wrote about Russia.
I did not think I would ever be able to give identifying details about the second man, if I ever chose to write about him. I planned on simply saying that he wrote about once esoteric but now semi-prominent topics of national importance. It could have been Russia. It could have been anything.
The second man wrote, and perhaps will continue one day to write, about white supremacy, fascism, the alt-right.
While with these men, I thought frequently about how the so-called ‘importance’ of my writing paled in comparison to theirs. I did not see it as a close contest. I wrote, and write, about books, mostly books by women, and about women’s art, about women’s pain. And, I write about myself.
By the tail end of the time I was involved with the second man, I had basically absconded any belief that my own writing was important. I didn’t berate myself for doing it, I don’t think that everyone’s art has to serve a greater social purpose. But I did not believe that it mattered. I believed that I was possibly skilled and possibly talented, but that what I did was basically self-serving. It didn’t cause harm, and it maybe helped authors in the relatively niche subset of book criticism. The book I was working on, and the essays I attempted to write, well, they were fine. But they were not relevant. Not like the men.
-
I met the second man when he was presenting at a panel on the freedom of the press. He’d been arrested while protesting at Standing Rock. I thought this was hot. We had mutual friends. After that night, we followed each other on social media, and soon we were talking every day, finding each other at parties and leaning into each other’s faces for hours as we ignored the people around us. It was the most consistent attention I’d ever received from a person, and it immediately intoxicated me.
I went to Europe for two weeks. We snap chatted every hour that we were both awake. It was maybe my fourth day in France when the “shitty media men” list circulated the internet. This man and I were in the same group DM, and the entire group, all somewhat media affiliated, discussed it with rapt attention.
He and I began messaging separately. He said,
“Like, as a guy in media, I’m like, “I get it. I’m flirty, maybe I was misconstrued along the way. Maybe I miscommunicated, and I’m at fault. Maybe I’ll be on that list.” The reason I’m FINE with being on a spreadsheet like that is that I know, truly know, that i’ve never committed real abuse, that I’ve acted nobly OVERALL. So I LIKE that these things exist, because I deeply trust that they’ll be used to find the harassers, the abusers, the rapists, etc. But when list like that is made public, it undermines the process which is necessarily confidential.
“It’s a corporate version of “What if we both get drunk and have sex, and then she later says, it’s rape?! What then???” But that like, functionally never happens. The actual material reality is disconnected from how these things play out.
“Like, could I end up on that list? Sure. Absolutely every one of us could, except for Andrew who is a saint. But am I a RED name? Fuck no. Hang those guys.
“If there are abusers, let’s out them and exorcise them from the bloodstream in whatever way works.
Two nights after I returned from Italy, I sobbed as he told me that he’d never felt about anyone the way he felt about me, that I drove him crazy, that he hadn’t been able to think about anything but me since we’d met, but we couldn’t be together. We then had sex, without a condom.
If I misconstrue what happened in the intervening months, If I misconstrue anything that happened between us, I could, once again, be threatened with defamation. How do you prove emotional abuse, how do you prove manipulation? That is what both journalism and the law ask victims to do, but when you’re with someone intimately, you’re the only two people in the room. I have my friends who saw me as I spiraled downward. I have my therapist, who once compared what I described to her as mouse caught in a reinforcement experiment. Is that enough?
Eight months after I met him, I was sitting in a soundproof conference room in the office of Gizmodo Media Group near Union Square. I was speaking into a recording device as Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, the editor in chief of Jezebel, interviewed me as a source for an article documenting this man as a serial abuser of women.
-
I went to Wisconsin, where I’m from, for five days in May of 2018. When I came back, I was informed by my roommates that there was a rat in the apartment. It was stuck to a glue trap, but all of my roommates were out of town. One asked me to dispose of it.
I left my room and tried to get close to the rat. It was only partially stuck to the trap, so it could still move around the room. When I got close, it screeched and tried to throw itself off the trap, convulsing. I kept jumping back in fear. I don’t know if the rat could have harmed me, but I physically could not force myself to get closer. I could barely look at it, flailing because it knew it was caught, without screaming.
I went back into my room and slammed the door. During the night, the flailing rat escaped the trap.
-
In the first week of June, I went to the bar where I often drink with my friends on Thursday nights. It is theoretically a politically-affiliated writers happy hour, but many of us go simply to socialize. I was introduced to a woman by a man, he said, “I think you two would get along.”
I ended up telling her that one of my friends was writing an article about what to do when there’s a ‘bad man’ in your friend group, how to socially excavate abusers. She asked if there were any specific examples. I said that there were a few, but the most recent issue we had was with one specific person. I said his name.
Her face went slack. I knew, by now, what this meant.
“Fuck. My roommate was with him last night. He’s been trying to seduce her.”
I told her a brief version of what had happened between him and I, and that I knew other women he’d abused as well. She was extremely concerned, and said that her roommate, like me, like most of the women he was with, was unusually vulnerable.
I left the bar, called a friend in California, started to cry. When I got home, the woman I met at the bar texted me: she’d come home to her roommate, in the article that was eventually published known as ‘Nina,’ slumped over and crying. The previous night, this man had verbally berated her for several hours, forced her to show him her ID to prove she wasn’t lying about her age. He’d said that her suicide attempt was a plea for attention. Eventually, he coerced her into having sex against her will.
-
In the beginning, and again when the article was published, a small subset of people were skeptical. They asked, why did you resort to going to a reporter?
In April, just several weeks after the last time we slept together, some of these allegations almost surfaced. Someone had tweeted, women were talking. He asked me to talk to him about what was going on, since no one else would.
I told him some of what I knew, without getting specific or mentioning names. I said I didn’t want him to defend himself or debate the veracity of what I’d heard. I just wanted to try and help him to change. During that conversation, he spoke with derision of the women he assumed I was talking about, but he ultimately said that he was trying to change, that this was all in the past, that he was in therapy and going to church often. I told him I would try to help him, because I believed that he was capable of change.
It was less than two months later that I met ‘Nina.’
Less than two months.
What would you do?
Would you talk to him again? I could not. I jeopardized myself and other women the first time I discussed the allegations with him. I knew of four people who had tried to confront him. Sometimes you hear, years later, that a man who hurt you has hurt someone else. This was two months.
What would you do?
When I met ‘Nina,', she said: “I checked. I asked our mutual Twitter followers. Everyone said he was okay. I was careful.”
What would you do?
-
The second week of June, his roommate sent me a message on Twitter to apologize. He and his girlfriend had spent the past several months minimizing the man’s behavior when any one of the women in our social circle brought it up, and they now recognized their denial. We met up at a bar, and at various points all laid our heads on the bar top and cried. They kept apologizing, and I said, stop. We’re here now, everything is forgiven, we can’t resent each other.
I defended him too, for a long time. Other women had warned me about him: nonconsensual choking, manipulation, coercion, non-consensual non-condom usage, and I didn’t quite believe it was as serious as they said, even as I was crying every night, facing panic attacks and depression. I blamed myself for everything.
I’d still been talking to him, even after we stopped sleeping together, even when he lied to me as I confronted him about the other women. Less often, and I’d tried to cut off contact, but he’d reacted angrily and I said I was sorry. He kept saying we should hang out, and I kept hedging, next week, the week after. He later sent records of our communication to his lawyer, claiming that it was impossible that he’d emotionally abused me as I had still been friendly with him after our sexual relationship ended.
Emma Cline: Of course women attempt to appease men who’ve abused them, or try to transform the pain into friendship, blur the sharp edges in their minds into the shape of something manageable. It’s like teaching someone how to play a game and then punishing them when they follow the rules; women would act differently if we believed there was any other way to escape unharmed from the whims of men. We’re navigating a society defined by them, and suffering for it. Yet we’re blamed for our attempts to survive within those parameters. Until the world proves it doesn’t hate women, the silence will continue. I hope it’s changing. I don’t blame my younger self, but I do wish something different for her. I wish for it without knowing whether it is truly possible.
An unintended consequence of sharing something that traumatized you is that other people believe that gives them license to decide whether or not it was traumatic.
If I say what happened to me during the time he and I were involved, people who understand emotional abuse will nod in recognition, and people who have never experienced it or think it’s not a big deal will call me childish and weak. I have no interest in gaining public validation. Instead of describing the specific and replicated process of emotional manipulation, I offer a few details:
There is a recording on my phone that my therapist asks me to remember every few months. It is a recording of me screaming and crying, it is several minutes long. You can make out the words: “You need to remember this. You need to remember this. This isn’t worth it.”
The first time I spoke to a reporter about him, off the record, I told the story of the first night we spent together.
The reporter looked at me: “Can you pause for a minute. Can you think back on the people you’ve been with throughout your life. Have you ever cried the first night you spent with someone before?”
No, I told him. No.
“Yeah, it’s uncommon, right?” He said. “And yet each the women I’ve spoken with about him so far describe it.”
The night he asked me to explain to him why people were circulating his name as a man to be afraid of, I tried to explain in bare details what I’d heard. A non-consensual choking allegation came up, he looked me in the eye and said,
“I don’t know where that could have even come from. I don’t even get off on choking. I’ve never choked anyone.”
He’d choked me less than a month prior.
In that moment I realized: I could be speaking to one of two people: a very sick person who did violent and consent violating things when in some sort of fugue state and genuinely believed later that he had not done them. Or, I was speaking to a person who knew exactly what he had done to me and other women, physically and emotionally, and he knew that the woman sitting in front of him was not going to argue with him. Both of these possibilities were damning. Neither allowed for a scenario in which things were alright, in which this man was the person I’d convinced myself he was.
One night in June, his roommate and I were out at a party. He said he was starting to feel unsafe in the apartment, the man had come home and dragged my friend out of the living room, slamming the door to his bedroom, asking him what he knew about the situation. While this was happening, the roommate’s girlfriend would be texting me, trying to listen at the door. The night of that party, I gave the roommate the keys to my old apartment, I’d paid rent through the end of the month. I said, just keep them. I’ll feel better knowing you guys can leave if you have to.
Two days later I woke up to seven missed calls from the friend. He and his girlfriend had to leave in the middle of the night, but we’d forgotten to exchange my address. They called our other friends until someone who knew the location of my old apartment was awake.
I’ve only slept with one person since all this happened, and I haven’t cried, but I find myself lying in bed after, feeling disgusted and abject.
Five women went on the record to Jezebel. The bloggers who have expressed sympathy for him seem to believe that we are the only five, that these were aberrations in normal behavior, rather than a pattern.
I know of ten more who felt unsafe going on the record, or didn’t know about the article until it was published. I’ve spoken to half of them. It was not an aberration, it was not a one-off being a jerk, or a five-off being a jerk.
-
In the initial weeks of reporting, I reached out a woman, Amanda Schmitt. She is a family friend of my neighbors growing up. I emailed her because she’d sued her former employer, a prominent man in the art world, Knight Landesman, who had sexually harassed her for years.
After I met with her, she sent me a short piece she’d written.
Amanda Schmitt: Protest comes in many forms and it is a continuous project. Art can break rules and open doors that appear to be permanently closed. Artists like Betty Tompkins, Zoe Leonard, and Artemisa Gentileschi —among countless others (to whom, in their private and public acts of solidarity, I remain grateful)— clarify, expose, and articulate issues which many still find unspeakable. In Gentileschi’s depiction of Susanna, Tompkins and I have found a warning, imaged centuries ago, that this road is a long one, and it’s not going to be easy, but that each of us has the responsibility of paving the way for those to come. By pursuing prosecution (and in Tompkins’ and her gallery’s case, by inserting this dialogue into the marketplace), both Susanna and Gentileschi forced their communities to take a position, and in so doing, dismantled the false consciousness of complicit neutrality.
I am writing this about Artemisia and Betty, and Zoe and Linda, not only as an act of identification, gratitude, and historical solidarity, but also because my lawyers cautioned me not to write anything about my own experience at this time. This is another kind of silencing, though its juridical forms of suppression mirror those of Gentileschi’s time as well. In contemporary parlance, we all know that “Everything you say can and will be used against you in the court of law.”
Amanda is also the person who told me: assume the man you’re describing to me will hire a lawyer.
-
Another thing the man we accused wrote about, or at least tweeted about often, was free speech.
Since I’d spoken to Amanda, I knew his hiring a lawyer was to be expected. I didn’t even begrudge it. I even thought, well, he should have a lawyer, everyone deserves one.
The lawyer sent Julianne, the journalist writing the story, a cease and desist letter, and threatened to sue for defamation if the article was published. Julianne wasn’t phased, she said she’d heard this before.
In addition to defamation, his lawyer threatened ‘conspiracy charges.’ Whenever it came up in conversation, I quickly insulted its legal viability: “The definition of a conspiracy in a legal sense is conspiring to commit a crime. We didn’t commit a crime.”
But privately, I wondered if it were possible. And I believe that it is. Perhaps we will not be the group of women who are indicted for conspiring to defame, but one day a group of women will be. A college student has been sued for saying that a man was a rapist in a text message that was widely circulated. Stephen Elliot is attempting to sue Moira Donegan for the Shitty Media Men list, the very list that the man bragged to me about loving while I was in France.
Every morning I wonder if this is the day he is going to mount a legal complaint. It could happen anytime. At first, I lulled myself into a false sense of security—he knows it would ruin his future job prospects, he’s seen how the public has reacted to other men doing the same. But in truth, I have no idea. Stephen Elliot waited a year to sue Moira Donegan.
We were told several weeks after going on the record that the fact that we had tweeted—some in allusions, some overtly—about the story could lend credence to this theory about a conspiracy. His lawyer cited the ‘evidence’ that we’d ‘liked’ each other’s tweets.
Liked each other’s tweets.
It’s by equal turns laughable and horrifying. Showing solidarity on the worst website in the world, the conspiracy of the century!
In the group message we had to chart the story’s progress, sometimes we made jokes. People do that when they’re having trouble shouldering stressful situations. It turned out that in a legal case, these messages would be subject to discovery. It was too late to do anything about it, but we could see how it would be spun: look at these people, laughing about a man’s downfall, rather than what we were, which was laughing because we had exhausted crying, exhausted screaming, exhausted fear. We often described feeling delusional, like we’d entered an alternate reality.
In other ways, the threat of discovery was our friend: many people said that it was the reason the man was unlikely to actually pursue legal action. He wouldn’t want his past to become public record.
It’s a mistake he made in traumatizing writers: we’re a little less skittish than the general population about having our private affairs made public. My entire life is already on Twitter. I didn’t bat an eye when I found out that one of my quotes in the story concerns the fact that I’ve never been in a serious relationship. Let it be public knowledge, let it be on the internet. It’s true. I’m sometimes ashamed by it, but I’m not afraid of it.
Aimee Bender: Writers who lord power in disturbing ways over other writers set up a similar bind. Don’t mistreat a writer and then tell her not to tell anyone. I mean, don’t do that to anyone, but in particular, doing it to a writer—a writer/student, especially—is a lot like Bluebeard dangling that key. Open, don’t open. Tell, don’t tell. If the writer listens, and keeps the secret to herself, she is cutting herself down at the very core of her being. Because writers write. Writers tell. Writers live lives, and then try to communicate something real about these lives.
I haven’t watched TV regularly in eight years, but in August I began watching The Americans. Soon I was watching it every day, an episode in the morning, an episode before bed, several in the interim, I’d watch it on my phone on the subway. I dreamt about it, I referred to Philip and Elizabeth as Phil and Liz. Every time I went to work I’d pour lemon juice into a pint glass, fill it with sparkling water, and exclaim about how delicious it was. I prowled the bodegas for new versions of sparkling water I’d yet to try. I went to Sephora and routinely bought serums and acid pads and highlighters. I spent every day mixing the products differently to secure the best outcome for my face.
I did not become obsessed with sparkling water, makeup, and The Americans because I couldn’t confront my own emotions. I’d spent nine months doing little else. I became obsessed with sparkling water, makeup, and The Americans because I could not confront the evil of a man who would rather attempt to ruin the lives of five women and the journalist who tried to help bring them peace than admit that he had spent eight years systemically decimating women’s psyches. I could confront what he did to me, but I did not know how to confront that, on a structural level, it was very possible that he would win. That he would stop women from speaking, the most basic of our rights. We didn’t know if Jezebel was going to run the story. It had been held up in legal for weeks.
I took a vacation to Montreal and spent an afternoon screenshotting my entire text history with the man. I sent Julianne every instance that I’d reassured him he wasn’t hurting me, and explained how my mindset had changed in the time since we’d been together. I started to question my own sanity, rereading those texts. What had compelled me to tell this person he wasn’t hurting me, when I could barely think of anything else?
I began to forget what my life was like before the process began. I moved right around when we met Julianne, and I cannot recall how I spent my days at my old apartment, what my routine was.
But then I remembered: of course: it was worrying about him. Even after we stopped being involved, the anxiety he engendered in me took up so much of my days. In this way, the new way of living was no different, it’s still an abusive man occupying my energy and my time and my emotions. Then again, I could eat. During the months I was involved with him, I could only drink ensure and smoothies, eat granola bars, I would get nauseous trying to chew solid food.
I was no longer trapped in the prison of the feedback loops that began as a result of his behavior towards me. This new trap was a different one: will a man to whom I’ve already lost so much also attempt to take away my ability to speak of what happened? The ability of all women to speak without fear of retribution?
People throw around the word defamation a lot, but it’s a very specific definition. To prove defamation, you must prove that the person in question committed “actual malice,” which means that they knowingly lied.
You can say that we made a mountain out of a molehill, that we’re snowflakes or easily wounded. But none of those things are breaking the law. None of us lied.
But he could still attempt, and I believe that we’re entering a society where he could win. Imagine an older man’s opinion of this case. Imagine Brett Kavanaugh’s. We live in a world where men are free to abuse women, but endless obstacles block women from seeking justice. We may be headed down a road where women are not even free to talk, to whisper. The world is built to let men play out their whims on women with no consequence and that is what we see them flailing, rats convulsing on a trap, to protect.
During this process, one of the only things to comfort me was what other women have written about abuse. I returned to the same articles and essays over and over, reading lines that made me feel like I was not insane, but rather—back in April, I began listening to a song by Lana del Rey on repeat. A woman who very few people take seriously, in fact. The song is called I Can Fly.
Lana del Rey: I had a dream that I was fine. I wasn’t crazy, I was divine.
I believed for so long that he was doing important work, and I was doing nothing. But without Judith Slaying Holofernes, Emma Cline, Moira Donegan, Bonnie Nadzam, Amanda Schmitt—countless women, where would I have been? It all began to feel related: not taking women seriously, in the arts or elsewhere, is a convenient way to ensure that people will be skeptical when women try to speak about what happened to them at the hands of men.
I do not know if we are going to win this fight. Not just the ‘we’ of the women who went on the record with me, the collective ‘we,’ the women who are trying to seek justice for themselves and each other via the #MeToo movement. The national discourse indicates that we will not. There are not many things I’d put my livelihood on the line for: I’m weak and afraid and used to creature comforts. But for women and their ability to speak, I realized over the four months that the article was in limbo, I would risk everything.
‘Risking everything’ in this scenario might sound like hyperbole, but I assure you, it is not. He sues us for a comically large sum, says that he can no longer secure a job in journalism because of the article. Say it goes to a conservative judge or a carefully voie-dired jury, and he wins. We declare bankruptcy, our credit is ruined, we cannot rent apartments or get approved for credit cards. I thought of this scenario so many times in the months between talking to Julianne and the article's publication. But I never considered pulling out. If I didn’t do this article, I was giving up not just on this one predator, but on one of our last reserves of power, the female narrative.
Bonnie Nadzam: I see so many writers—male and female, including many I respect and look up to—pictured with these men on social media, these men who travel around the country—and even the world, now—teaching the rest of us how we should tell our stories. (Think about that for a moment).
Though this man, praise be to god, does not teach women how to write, he benefitted for years off the supremacy of the male narrative. He told a story: he was complicated, and the women he slept with became obsessed with him and he simply had never wanted to date any of them seriously and that made all these women, (all these women,) go crazy.
In June, I said to his former roommate a form of what I was quoted in the Jezebel piece: He quickly found the part of me that was the most sensitive, stroked it for a month or so, and spent the rest of the time he knew me slapping it, poking at it, as though I was a confused animal he was torturing.
I thought my friend, his ex-roommate, would think I was crazy too—but instead, he looked at me with fear in his eyes. He’d talked to one of the man’s longer term exes on the phone a few days prior, a woman who I’ve never met, never spoken to.
He said: “That’s almost exactly what Alex said to me. That very same thing.”
He succeeded for so many years by hiding his behavior in the plainest sight of all: within a woman’s head. He used the same tactics to manipulate women in New York media circles for five years, resting on the inherent trust of a male story.
Bonnie Nadzam, again: Something I’ve learned about narcissistic people, through these experiences, is that if they can’t control you, they’ll try to control the way people see you.
On the night I tried to confront the man and many other nights we spent together, I saw the way he spoke about other women: she has a vendetta, she’s insane, she’s a stalker, she wanted to marry me and I said I just didn’t feel that with her. Some of these comments were incendiary, others were commonplace. All I knew was that I didn’t want him to say these things about me. So I stayed in his corner until I was so broken that the things I loved no longer gave me pleasure, and the opinions of the people I loved ceased to matter. I never thought about the fact that even if he saw me in a tiny shard of a positive light, (which, he probably didn’t,) everyone around me, the friends who saved my life, saw something very different, and very pathetic: a woman willing to sacrifice everything for someone who continued to hurt her.
I thought when I talked to him in April that he was keeping me close because he respected me, because I was important to him. I see now how blindly naive I was. I think he saw that I was a potential ally, because he knew I still had feelings for him. I spent a long time trying to diagnose his psyche, and eventually I realized that it was a dead end.
Moira Donegan: And this is another toll that sexual harassment can take on women: It can make you spend hours dissecting the psychology of the kind of men who do not think about your interiority much at all.
Towards the end of the process, we did not think that the article was going to come out at all. We were fighting amongst ourselves, sometimes petty arguments, sometimes serious ones. The article was continually delayed, first by the antics of the man’s lawyer and then by internal issues at Jezebel. Had we gone to the wrong outlet? Was it being mishandled? Was the legal team at the outlet trying to drag the story to it’s death?
I kept thinking, journalism and the law are not built for this. They are built by men and for men. They are not built for victims. Men commit abuse without a second thought. Women speak about the abuse, and they’re asked to corroborate, to provide proof, to ask their friends and their therapists if they can confirm what happened. Legal teams review your words, journalists decide which words are damning but will not be construed as malicious.
It is going to take a very long time to build an acceptable framework for victims coming forward about abuse—one that is necessarily nurturing and empathetic. The way to change these structures isn’t to force victims into increasingly stringent and invasive processes—it’s the legal and journalistic processes that need to change, not women and how they speak about trauma.
The article did, eventually, come out. I read it at the bar where I work, on the computer on which I’m forbidden to open the internet browser because it can crash the POS system. My breath was shallow, my brain was fuzzy, I couldn’t take it in. That night, some other women involved in the article and several friends came to visit me. It was helpful, in the end, to be at work. It kept me moving and functional and began to clear my head, as waiting tables has always done. It had helped me when I came to work in the middle of panic attacks triggered by the man’s behavior, and here I was, nearly a year after I’d met him. What had happened? I was so exhausted and confused that I could barely fathom the trajectory of my own life.
For the next day or two, I was deeply depressed. Reading the article, seeing his manipulation and behavior laid out on paper, reminded me of existing within it, of the dark unfurnished room that I’d come to live inside. It was over, and I knew that, but the shame and tragedy of remembering how easily it had happened was enough.
That Thursday was the Ford-Kavanaugh hearing, and my sorrow and isolation was transmuted into rage. This is where I operated from for the next few days, with women all across America.
It’s been almost a month now, and I feel very little. This is a very strange process. You fray your nerves until they’re flammable, you lose your sense of time. No one understands it but the fellow victims, and in our case his roommates and witnesses. You go on dates and wince at the jokes strangers make, recoil when they try to touch you. Intimacy seems like a specter, an unattainable ideal. Your friends wonder why you’re so withdrawn, and they say things that they don’t realize will haunt you: once, we were talking about another predatory man, and a friend flippantly said: well, it wasn’t at work. My head began reeling: is that what you think of me? That this man doesn’t deserve this because he kept it together at work? Would you defend me, if push came to shove? Is there anyone I can trust, anyone who believes that my pain was legitimate?
She probably wasn’t thinking of my situation at all, but every commentary became personal, every judgment felt pointed. The people involved messaged each other all night, consistently plagued by insomnia. I lost freelance assignments and contacts and shifts at work and money. I’m in credit card debt for the first time in my life, my face would go slack in public from exhaustion, I had diarrhea nearly every day. And yet, as I write this, I still fear that no one believes what we went through to get this story out.
And then it was published, but it was not a cause for celebration. People asked if I was happy that he lost his job, and I didn’t know how to respond. Happy? Him losing his job was never my goal. My goal was to make information available so that other women could make a choice, and the process of doing so was morbid and terrifying, and then, everything was blank. What do we return to?
I am trying to make myself different, to use this as a turning point to be a calmer, more stable person. I’m on anti-anxiety medication, I’m cooking, staying home more, drinking less. I’m trying to be normal. Watching sports, taking care of my skin, running. I’m trying to make myself content with this: with visibility came stability, one that I hope I can maintain to allow the privilege of speech to other women. When I was in the dark unfurnished room of my mind, I couldn’t fight for myself, let alone for others. The words of women, my friends and those I’ve never met, dragged me back from hell. It’s a pursuit I once saw as irrelevant, and it took this year for me to see that it is the deepest story I can tell.
One of my friends said after the article: you did a very brave thing, and you made the world a safer place.
I didn’t believe this friend at first, but then, slowly, I began to.