Sean Combs, the musician variously known as “Diddy”, “Puffy”, “P Diddy” and “Love”, made a conspicuous scene in the courtroom when the verdict was read. He put his hands into a prayer gesture and mouthed “thank you” to the jurors, and pumped his fist in the air. A federal jury in New York on Wednesday had acquitted Combs on federal charges of sex trafficking women, finding him guilty only on lesser charges of transporting the male prostitutes he allegedly forced the women to have sex with across state lines. The mixed verdict was seen as a triumph for Combs, who faced the possibility of life in prison if convicted on trafficking and conspiracy charges. Outside, jubilant supporters of Combs – which have in recent weeks included the provocative rapper Kanye West – erupted into celebration. Some reportedly poured baby oil on each other and yelled: “It’s not Rico, it’s FREAKO.”
Those triumphant chants were references to the organized group sex encounters that women – including two who testified as witnesses for federal prosecutors – have described as rapes. The women – two ex-partners of Combs’s, the singer Cassie Ventura and another alleged victim known as Jane – told the court repeatedly over the course of an eight-week trial that they were coerced into participating in the encounters, which Combs called “freak-offs”, with violence, drugs, coercive financial arrangements, and threats. The encounters were filmed by Combs, and the videos were shown to the jury; in addition to the testimony of the women and the videos of what they say were their assaults, jurors were also shown security footage of a savage beating Combs inflicted on Ventura in a hotel hallway following one such party in 2016, and heard from a hotel security guard who says that Combs paid him $100,000 to destroy video evidence of his conduct.
Even according to the version of events that Combs himself has admitted to, the musician is abusive, cruel, manipulative and violent toward women. He has admitted both to using drugs and to beating Ventura. But the charges he faced in the federal trial that stretched the length of two months in New York hinged on whether the women’s participation in the group sex parties was consensual. They said it wasn’t; Combs says it was. As they so often do in sexual assault cases, the jury sided with the man.
It is almost banal, by now, to observe that we are in the midst of a #MeToo backlash, and that the brief span – now nearly a decade behind us – when men were held momentarily accountable for their sexual abuse and exploitation of women has been replaced with a sadistic and gruesomely triumphant restoration of the status quo ante, with powerful men afforded impunity for sexual violence against women, with their supporters and fans taking vicarious pleasure in their consequence-free demonstrations of male status, and with the misogynist collective contempt of women who come forward now becoming a centerpiece of online communities and celebrity media alike. In a piece on #MeToo backlash, the writer Jamie Hood referred to the ebb of collective outrage over sexual violence as a kind of “moral lethargy”. But in the chanting men outside the federal courthouse on Wednesday, I see something darker and more energetic, something that is not indifferent to men’s sexual entitlement and the suffering they inflict on women with it, but actively in thrall to it. Those who oppose sexual abuse, it seems, lack all conviction. Those who support it are full of passionate intensity.
It is true that part of the cause for Combs’s acquittal lies in a problem that predates #MeToo and therefore cannot be blamed on its backlash: the epistemic difficulties of abusive relationships. Abuse by men of their female partners is frequently psychologically baroque, employing tactics of humiliation, coercion, gaslighting, and shamelessly opportunistic exploitation of the tendency, shared by many women and especially the young ones, to esteem themselves unworthy and broken, and to look to men to be their saviors. Such dynamics tend to produce conflicting testimony from the victims, who might say loving or forgiving things to their abusers while the relationship is ongoing that are used against them later by abuse apologists, misogynists, and defense attorneys. In the Combs case, the defense team could point to text messages their client exchanged with the women in which they expressed affection and desire. To the jury, these outweighed the texts in which they said they felt forced into the encounters, tried to avoid them, or were reminded by Combs when he demanded sex that he was paying their rent.
But it is worth dwelling, I think, on what the women at the center of this case endured in order to try to make their alleged abuse recognized by the law. Ventura and Jane were subjected to grueling testimony about what they say were tremendously dark experiences. Strangers were shown videos of them having sex; Ventura was beaten, and a video of her beating went viral. The defense, meanwhile, has not been chastened by any supposed post-#MeToo cultural taboos against victim-blaming or slut-shaming. In cross examination, the women were humiliated with lines of questioning meant to portray them as gold diggers and sluts. Intimate harms they endured, physically and emotionally, were picked over by a national audience. And after all that, the jury still sided with the man they say trafficked and abused them.
It is a central tenet of feminist politics that the unspeakability of sexual abuse is part of what allows it to thrive. In the second wave, activists formed “consciousness raising” circles, in which women would discuss the function of sexism in their own lives; the idea was that only by naming and articulating the violence and indignity they were subjected to could women be prepared to change it.
#MeToo functioned on a similar principle: the idea was that women, by telling their stories, could find solidarity with one another. And maybe they have: one can hope, desperately, that wherever they are, Ventura and Jane are surrounded by women who are angry for them. But in #MeToo, women’s storytelling had a second task. Women, it was thought, in telling their stories, could not only find solidarity with one another, but could change the minds of the reflexively misogynist world, could convince the institutions and cultures and communities that had long dismissed and mocked us to instead take our side, see us with compassion, and deliver us justice.
That part turned out to be naive. Outside the small circle of feminist solidarity, it turns out, no one is much moved by rape victims’ pain. Instead, audiences tend to dismiss these women: to resent their displays of woundedness, to be annoyed by their demands for accountability. They want the women of #MeToo to shut up. If verdicts like this are any indication, maybe we should.
- Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
