Last week, a jury ruled that Sean Combs was guilty of two counts of transportation for prostitution, but the jury declared that he was not guilty of more serious charges of sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. While these charges still carry a maximum sentence of ten years, the overall mood is one of victory among Combs’ team and supporters. After the verdicts came in, fans of Combs stood outside the court cheering and spraying baby oil over one another, a reference to the so-called ‘freak offs’ where several women alleged they were forced to participate in days-long orgies. Combs was denied bail but articles have already been written positing a possible comeback for the rapper. Noted antisemite Kanye West, who turned up at the trial in support of Combs, is allegedly eager to collaborate with him.
There is video of Combs chasing his ex-girlfriend, Cassie Fine, through a hotel and beating her mercilessly as she tries to escape him. You can go and watch it on YouTube now. There was never any doubt that Sean Combs is a violent misogynist who abused his partner. For as long as I’ve been a professional writer, I have heard stories of Combs’ cruelty towards those who work under him and whispers of how Cassie was treated. A hell of a lot of people talked about this grand ‘open secret’ that rotted at the centre of the music industry. It wasn’t a surprise when he was arrested. Nor was it, alas, when he was found not guilty of several major charges. I wish I could say I was even a little surprised to see Combs have so many people eagerly in his corner yelling down Cassie and calling her a liar. Sadly, this is the norm for victims. Always has been. Now, it’s just louder, more financially potent, and politically reinforced.
I began working in this field the same year that Harvey Weinstein was revealed through two separate investigations to be a serial abuser. It’s easy to forget the genuine shock of that moment, of someone who many had heard stories of for decades being exposed for the monster that he was. It felt like we’d undergone a true paradigm shift. Power did not protect you anymore. Soon, #MeToo gained power, giving victims (largely but not exclusively women) some comfort and a sturdy foundation from which to speak their truths. Laws started to change. The press began to listen. Honestly, it was an exciting time, a glimmer of hope in the first year of the Trump administration in the shadow of Gamergate.
But it didn’t take long for the backlash to hit, as we all knew it would. Louis C.K., a self-confessed sex criminal, changed up his act to be more right-wing and went back on tour, winning Grammys and making more money than ever. Johnny Depp hijacked the legal system to destroy Amber Heard publicly and had the world cheering him on in the process. Tory Lanez has more fans than ever while he rots in prison for shooting Megan thee Stallion. Ghoulishly, being an accused abuser became, if not a badge of pride then a dog-whistle for the wider cultural push to reinforce rape culture in the name of ‘anti-woke’ supremacy.
It also didn’t take long following the mainstreaming of #MeToo for the usual suspects and their newspaper columns to start positing, with false sincerity, that the movement could eventually go ‘too far.’ A few famous dudes of questionable talent lost their high-paying jobs and some people cried censorship. Once it became safe to do so, they were re-employed and elevated to the status of heroes. The statistics were already in favour of abusers getting off scot-free, but now everyone else was engaging in a profitable system to further defame and dismiss accusers. Look at how many people made bank being ‘body language experts’ and meme machines for the Depp-Heard trial, or the bloggers churning out story after story to attack Megan and Cassie.
Plenty of political commentators jumped on the bandwagon too. How could they not when the most powerful man on the planet was also accused of rape and found culpable in a court of law? At what point in that process of electing Trump for a second time did #MeToo go too far? That’s the question I keep coming back to: at what point did this movement ‘go too far’ for those who are now trying to both-sides a seemingly endless cycle of smears and propaganda? It’s not as though the post-Weinstein flush of support for victims led to a mass arrest and charge campaign against the accused. Weinstein and R. Kelly are really the only two who faced jail time, and the latter was free and heralded for decades before that despite everyone seeing a video of him urinating on an underage girl.
There wasn’t a slew of false allegations (a giant red flag in this discourse that forgets how extremely rare such things are.) Women didn’t become celebrities for being victims. The courts weren’t clogged up with #MeToo cases. Very few men actually saw repercussions. A few lost their jobs but they got them back quickly, often in a new line of employment with ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric.
Neil Gaiman is a curious exception to this current tidal wave. The author was accused of vile abuses and assaults through investigations by Tortoise Media and Vulture. The reports were damning, painting the former ‘geek king’ as a serial manipulator who preyed on his own fans and allegedly exploited them with the help of his ex-wife, Amanda Palmer. His fans rejected him almost immediately, and with very few exceptions. You didn’t see a ton of Gaiman devotees pretending to play devil’s advocate or claim that they could just separate the art from the artists. This seems to be largely because his fandom, one he cultivated, was made up of women and queer people who prided themselves on their progressive politics. There was no upside to staying on his bandwagon. They had standards.
It’s embarrassing but wearily predictable how much of this has become inextricable from a ginned-up ‘culture war’ used by the usual suspects to push a crooked agenda and reap further profits. But isn’t this how it’s always been? Rape culture sells. Comedians tell rape jokes and the women who object are seen as humourless censors. Influencers shill Amazon-affiliate links for rape alarms. Rent-a-gob columnists and politicians make bank from screeds detailing their conspiratorial rantings about how the world is out to get men. The so-called manosphere spreads hate to sell ‘life courses’ and workout regimes. There’s always something for sale, and in the grand scheme of societal change, profit wins out over real change every single time.
It’s easy for people to claim that ‘#MeToo failed’, that it never accomplished its mission or fell apart due to infighting or wokeness or whatever the scapegoat of the day is. Certainly, it’s hard to ignore how organisations like Time’s Up, initially designed to support victims of sexual harassment in the workplace, lost sight of its goal and became too focused on glitzy issues over the realities of most women’s experiences (well, that and one of the group’s leaders involvement in the attempted cover-up of the Andrew Cuomo sexual harassment allegations.) Lots of promised support for marginalized groups of less glitzy areas of concern never materialised. And it wasn’t as though Hollywood cleaned its own house either. They just waited a few months or years until the headlines went away to rehire the accused abusers, from Brett Ratner to Louis C.K. to Brian Jordan Alvarez.
But to say that #MeToo failed or went too far would be to assume that the powers-that-be ever wanted it to succeed. Countless activists have done an incredible job in holding the authorities’ feet to the fire, but the bosses still seldom have real motivation to change. They kicked out Weinstein because it was both too embarrassing to associate with him and no longer profitable enough to deal with the hassle. But others have found opportunity to be plundered from his cruelty, even behind bars, as grifters like Candace Owens use him to further misogynistic conspiracies. It’s no surprise Owens, a useless sack of sh*t, is doing this right as she’s acting as a so-called ‘source’ on the Justin Baldoni-Blake Lively case (on the Baldoni side, of course.)
It’s still more beneficial to protect abusers than push them out, to insist that it’s all just a few bad apples over a systemic sickness that needs change on every level. Change is hard, time-consuming, and expensive, and it requires cleaning house to eliminate those who fostered those crooked systems in the first place. If your options are to do that or do nothing, you can hardly be surprised when the power brokers pick the latter, and less so when they choose the third option: double down and blame the women for ‘going too far.’
