The Monday I was released from jail, in June 2018, was an odd and distorted day. I was in a psychological fog, I hadn’t slept. When I was processed into the jail, I was told that “vegetarian isn’t a medical condition” and so I mostly picked over the meals, but mostly didn’t eat in lockup.
Being released was uneventful. After posting bond ($100K), I was taken back to my little cell until everything was processed, and eventually taken to a room where I changed back into my street clothes, then down an elevator and released, out a door into a warm, muggy afternoon. For the first time I was visible to the world as “rapist.”
Of course, the accusation was traumatic, but much worse was the long and pernicious aftermath. It’s impossible to calculate the real costs of such an accusation. Other than pedophilia, an accusation of rape comes with a stigma that is unmatched, and it doesn’t matter if it’s true. My attorney once quipped, “You’d have been better off accused of murder.”
Given the trauma of these events and the long tail of ruin, it’s not surprising I want to talk about it. After I was charged and arrested, I was told not to talk about it to anyone, and I had to sustain that silence for four years. Once I was acquitted I knew it was going to be important for me to speak about it, not just with people closest to me, but to anyone and everyone who would listen. I was done hiding. But trauma distorts the view of the self, which makes it challenging to speak or write about. There is a heavy shame that comes with an accusation of sexual violence, again, even if it’s not true. Because false accusations are so rare, most people just assume an accusation is true. My calculation is that by talking about it, people will reason that I didn’t do anything. After all, guilty people don’t usually walk around telling people what they did.
But is talking about it so often turning the broken bones and bruises into something purely performative?
The academic Catherine Liu has a phrase for what happens when private suffering gets deployed publicly to establish credibility and draw an audience. She calls it a passkey to authenticity. Her example was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman photographed crying near a fence some distance from a migrant facility, performing grief for an online audience. Private suffering deployed publicly. A passkey.
My accuser understood this instinctively. She leveraged a false claim, not only for a financial settlement, which was substantial, but also, and perhaps more importantly, she gained a coveted credential among the legions of survivorship.
But does this argument also apply to me?
Am I using my trauma, the loss of everything, to authenticate my story and thereby make myself special? By continuing to whip the posts, am I rendering myself more and more into a version of AOC standing in front of a fence? Me. Me. Suffering Me?
I’ve set up a podcast and write for hours every week on the subject. I’ve built a small but growing audience and they pay me for it. None of my work is a lie, but it is, out of necessity, performative. In this transaction, what is lost? What troubles me more is this: who am I without this thing? What is my work without that fuel? Is it possible to do anything else?
The more I write, the more uneasy I’ve become. I’m afraid that if I stop I will have nothing left to say. And if I have nothing left to say, where do I go? The question isn’t whether I should quit. The question is whether I would recognize myself without this.
Art bites. It can blind us, tear out our tongues, torture us. But it also expands our view of the world and can lead somewhere we couldn’t have predicted. Expression isn’t a straight line. To render our wounds into something the world can hear, can experience, can feel, we have to do it again and again and again. Layer upon layer goes on and comes off.
The answer is, I don’t know. What’s on the other side of this canvas is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else. And like any great mystery, the clues are hidden. In my case, they’ll be revealed in the arc of writing and creating. Or they won’t.
Charles Bukowski wrote, “Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the ground crying and screaming. And then you will get up, because you always do."
And I would add “..and you write about it.”
