The Glove Didn't Fit

Cassie had video evidence. Evidence so shocking that Diddy addressed it publicly in advance of the trial that came to its excruciating, unjust conclusion today in New York City. She had horrifying video evidence of herself being dragged across a hotel corridor by her abusive ex. Beaten. Humiliated. Violated.

I am compelled to write this right now. Why? Because nobody that purports to speak on these issues is saying anything. They remain silent. Every single one of the supposed “feminist” voices are deathly quiet today. They are posting pictures of anything else on their social media feeds during a seismically difficult moment for women worldwide; a moment that once again signals the death of women’s voices, of women’s rights, of women’s bodies, of women’s agency, of women. They’re posting pictures of cafes and museums, carefree, unbothered. And I wonder.

Is it because Diddy is Black, and Black people can’t commit crimes?

Is it because Cassie and “Jane” are Black, and Black women cannot be raped?

Is this the racism of low expectations again? Is this the same diseasse of the mind that makes these “feminists” support Jihadists? Don’t get me wrong; the male rapists are first and foremost the enemy here. But I will never so long as I live forgive the women who cut the MeToo movement off at its knees before it had space to run. They did it for their own gain. They turned the silence breakers against one another. They isolated the survivors. They robbed the victims of their only cash flow. They exploited their stories. And then they continued to turn a blind eye to the very thing they claimed to care about. Carefree, unbothered.

Diddy was acquitted despite 34 witnesses testifying against him after seven weeks. Former girlfriends, assistants, male escorts, stylists, and hotel workers provided the stacks of evidence. Some witnesses were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony. My phone blew up while I was spinning at 7.15am.

“How?!?!?” asked friends.

“Why?”

And my kneejerk response is: What even are those questions? Where have you been? Who do you hang out with? Society hates women. The jury “of one’s peers” always need a woman to hate. It’s the sport of the weak. It’s Olympics for couch potatoes. It’s how small-minded mediocre peasants spend the moments between school runs and TV dinners. Gossip - the past-time of men, and tragically also women, who spend their lives envious of their own sisters, thereby handing the men who abuse them an open goal.

Why? How? I’ll tell you why and how. Diddy has more money and power than his victims. He has been a household name for decades. It doesn’t matter how much evidence the victims have, the rap king/acting god/ape man always win. It doesn’t matter that he cannot rap for shit. “I'm the definition of half man, half drugs,” he once spat. Pure Einstein. The grand sum of his “talent” is all contained in one dumb chorus;

We ain't goin' nowhere
We ain't goin' nowhere
We can't be stopped now
'Cause it's bad boy for life

(Ben Stiller, you might want to take back being in that music video, by the way).

Just like Woody Allen, Diddy told the world who he was in broad daylight, in songs, in the press, in the lifestyle, in the paparazzi pictures, and the world said - more of that please.

In the Washington Post in 2018, domestic violence survivor Amber Heard wrote:

"I had the rare vantage point of seeing, in real time, how institutions protect men accused of abuse."

A profound sentence that will live on eternally, even more so because of the price she paid to write it. There is not a day of my life that passes where I do not contemplate the cost for penning that one sentence of a truth that is proven repeatedly ad nauseum. And yet again today, in front of a Manhattan jury, where Sean “Diddy” Combs was acquitted of the sex trafficking and racketeering charges that would have landed him behind bars for life. He was convicted merely of two charges of prostitution.

Some commentators have suggested that this is the end of #MeToo. For me that moment came on June 1, 2022, when Johnny Depp successfully silenced Heard, after two years prior being found guilty of ten out of twelve incidents of domestic abuse in the Royal Courts of Justice in the United Kingdom. On the same evidence, a jury found that he was defamed by these words. An unsequestered jury during an excessively longer trial, accompanied by a turbocharged social media witchhunt.

Professor Catharine MacKinnon wrote in Only Words about the pornographic element of such trials of sexual abuse.

“[Women are afraid] of speaking about sexual abuse in public, their sense of reviolation when doing so, their shame. It is because of how they are seen… Women do no want to be pornography. When words of sexual abuse are in our mouths, that is pornography, and we become pornography because that it what pornography is.

Once you are used for sex, you are sexualized. You lose your human status. You are sex, therefore unworthy of belief and impossible to violate. Your testimony that you were sexually abused proves your abuse, which defines you as sex, which makes it incredible and impossible that you were sexually abused. In a world made by pornography, testiony about sexual harassment is live oral pornography starring the victim. Because the account becomes a form of sex, the abuse is rendered consensual in the mind of the viewer.”

Cassie and “Jane” experienced a public humiliation for what benefit? They bravely gave testimony for what purpose? The perverse entertainment of a caveman public? The Diddy result tells women the following: You don’t own your experience. You don’t own your story. You don’t own your voice, your memory, your language, your vocabulary. You don’t have the ability to trust what you know. Because it is of no use to you. In such circumstances the assault, the abuse, the rape takes control. It owns you. He owns you. Why did you ever dare think you could seek justice?

The same old questions rear their ugly head. Why didn’t she leave? is still the inquiry of the ignorant, this time asked of Cassie and “Jane”, inferring that they consented to their own abuse. Hear me. In a relationship of violence and abuse, there is no consent. The violence is the threat. Everything else is compliance. That is the only way you survive. You survive however you can. A compassionate supporter will say what we mean when we insist: there is no shame in it. Although women who don’t survive do not have to live their lives like those who do: with the inescapable shame that they somehow live.

Andrea Dworkin once wrote:

Escape, in fact, is hell, a period of indeterminate length reckoned in years, not months, when the ex-husband commits assaults intermittently and acts of terrorism with some consistency. Part of the torment is that freedom is near but he will not let the woman have it. Many escaped women live half in hiding. I am still afraid of my ex-husband each and every day of my life—and I am not afraid of much.

Maybe you don’t know how brave women are—the ones who have stayed until now and the ones who have escaped, both the living and the dead. Nicole Simpson is the hero. The perpetrator is the problem, stupid.

There’s something else I feel I have earned the right to say. The current “feminist” movement is a con. “Feminist” is not the same as what I would refer to as a women’s rights advocate. It has become a marketing tool, like “progressive” or “socialist” or “anti-racist”. The “feminists” who purport to protect victims and survivors are exploitative frauds who use their platforms to defend abusers, rapists and cultists. They don’t care about women. They care about their own fame. They are angrier about a transfemale swimmer Lia Thomas, having medals stripped yesterday by UPenn after experiencing an unfair biological advantage in the women’s competition. So angry they have clearly exhausted themselves to have necessary outrage today over the real deal. (Imagine being a woman in a pool next to Lia Thomas). The same “feminists” spent an entire Olympics season last summer crying that Imane Khelif was a woman because she identified as one, despite having no proof, and literally knocking out all of the biologically female competition in a boxing ring.

“Feminists” are using other women’s victimhood to propel themselves. This is why none of them acknowledge or publicly talk about the women who were raped and murdered on October 7. They don’t care about women. Many of them hate other women. They certainly hate Jewish women. Black women, too, apparently. Unless it scores woke points, of course. Good for a photo opp perhaps. Diverse. Equitable. Inclusive.

This is why “feminists” remain silent today. Maybe they’ll post tomorrow, once the agenda has been greenlit for them. Once there’s an angle. Once there’s something to put in their bio.

These “feminists” do know about abuse though. They know about coercive control. They know it is not a one-time thing. It’s a pattern. It takes time. It builds. It’s punitive. It is predatory. It is strategic. It is planned. It is sabotage.

It doesn’t start with dragging the victim around in a hotel corridor, but eventually that’s where it ends.

I don’t ever want to put words into the mouths of victims and survivors, because that is of life-saving value to the likes of Cassie and “Jane”. I cannot put words to their feelings today, to their pain, to their sense of betrayal, to their fear, to their sense of isolation, to their own inner hell. I cannot put words to any of that. It is not my place. All I can say is that I believe them.

Doug Wigdor said today of his client Cassie:

“Although the jury did not find Combs guilty of sex trafficking Cassie beyond a reasonable doubt, she paved the way for a jury to find him guilty of transportation to engage in prostitution. By coming forward with her experience, Cassie has left an indelible mark on both the entertainment industry and the fight for justice.”

Femininity is a threat to men, and to other women. A female who doesn’t comply or perform. A female who knows what is true before she even speaks it into existence. She shatters the illusion of power. She destroys the image of control. She tarnishes the gloss of the male empire. She cannot be tamed. She is a wild thing. She is holy. She is free. It’s sort of incredible that she even survives. She has a strength beyond the comprehension of her haters. They think she’s lying. That someone is paying for her. That she controls the narrative and pulls the strings. They think she stole it all. That she got there by holding others back. She cheated somehow.

Maybe not. Maybe she earned the right to stand up and tell the truth of what happened to her, whether she’s ever believed or not. Smear her, deny her, rage at her. One thing is undeniable. She was and will always be right. Joan Of Arc allegedly said “I’m not afraid. I was born for this.” She knew her destiny. She accepted it. She came out swinging anyway.

I wrote a piece about coercive control lately. Given the predatory nature of things these days, I would say it’s one of my most vital writings of late. Please for you, for your sisters, for your daughters, read it.

A slow-moving bullet