Laws are for the poors
Wouldn’t it be nice if, just now and again, bad things happened to bad people? Wouldn’t it be refreshing if violence against women was taken seriously instead of being treated like one big joke?
Yes, but alas, that is not the world we live in. Over here in reality, we’ve got an adjudicated sexual predator as president, a defense secretary who has been accused of sexual assault and aggressive behaviour towards his second wife, and a supreme court where a third of the male justices who get a final say on legal issues have been accused of sexual misconduct.
And we’ve got Sean “Diddy” Combs: the disgraced entertainer who escaped this week with what many people consider to be a slap on the wrist after a New York jury delivered a mixed verdict in his seven-week federal sex-trafficking trial. The trial was focused on allegations that Combs had coerced two women, including his ex-girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, to take part in “freak offs”: drug-fueled sexual encounters involving hired male prostitutes and humiliating acts.
I don’t want to downplay the Diddy verdict. While Combs was acquitted on the most serious federal charges, of racketeering conspiracy and sex-trafficking, he was still found guilty of the lesser charges of transporting the male prostitutes he allegedly forced women to have sex with across state lines. The disgraced musician was also denied bail and is facing a barrage of new civil cases alleging abuse and assault. While we still don’t know how much time (if any) Combs will be sentenced to, he did not get off scot-free.
I also don’t want to boil the results of a complex trial down to “misogyny”. It would be overly simplistic to say that the jury of eight men and four women in the Diddy trial simply didn’t believe women. The fact is Diddy was not on trial for being an abuser, or a bad person, or for his highly publicized battery of Cassie, one horrifying instance of which was caught on camera and the subject of a previous civil case. He was on trial for a specific set of charges, the most serious of which the prosecution did not have enough evidence to prove.
But this is not to say that justice was done. Far from it. The trial is yet another demonstration that the legal system is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of intimate partner violence, the ways in which survivors deal with trauma, and the uneven power dynamics weaponized by abusers. If we had better legal frameworks for domestic violence and coercive control, perhaps prosecutors would not have turned to trafficking charges to try to secure justice.
“Trafficking cases come with longer statutes of limitations, more severe penalties and more public support,” notes the human-trafficking expert Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco in USA Today. “And existing domestic violence statutes are often outdated or ill-equipped to address coercive control, especially when the abuser is wealthy, powerful and legally savvy.”
It’s not just the law that is ill-equipped to address coercive control – this complex issue is still minimized by some factions of the media. A Washington Post piece (written by two women), for example, described Combs as a “music producer turned modern-day Gatsby”, a framing which casts the “freak offs” as hedonism rather than something more sinister. The writer Sarah Kendzior notes that allusions to F Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby have been used to soften the image of high-level sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein for decades.
In the courts of public opinion, men like Combs are also far too often seen as playboys rather than predators. After the verdict on Wednesday, CNN reported that several spectators could be seen pouring baby oil on themselvesalong with wearing T-shirts reading: A Freako is not a RICO (RICO is a reference to the racketeering charges).
Perhaps what is most depressing about the Diddy verdict is that it is all too easy to imagine a path in which Combs finds his way back to prominence in public life. Donald Trump hasn’t ruled out pardoning Diddy and it is not inconceivable that he might; birds of a feather stick together, after all. Chris Brown still has a music career despite being charged with felony assault following a domestic violence incident when he beat up Rihanna in 2009. Brett Ratner is directing the very expensive Prime Video documentary about Melania Trump despite being accused of sexual misconduct by six women (he has denied the claims). With enough money, good lawyers and the right connections, you can get away with almost anything.
If you can call Sean Combs ‘Diddy’, you can respect someone’s preferred pronouns
The indictment against Diddy is titled United States of America v Sean CombsAKA ‘Puff Daddy’, AKA ‘P.Diddy’, AKA ‘Diddy’, AKA ‘PD’, AKA ‘Love’. And yet some people think that calling someone by their preferred pronouns is too complicated.
Horrific sexual violence used against Tigray’s women
“Tigray is often described as a forgotten war,” Tess McClure writes in an incredibly disturbing but essential read. “If it has been forgotten, it is not by those who endured it, but by the global powers that looked away from one of the most brutal conflicts of this century.” That brutality includes reported wartime sexual abuse by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers against tens of thousands of Tigrayan women.
After Texas banned abortion, more women nearly bled to death during miscarriages
More brilliant reporting from ProPublica on the devastating effects of abortion bans.
Men don’t sleep through baby cries after all
There’s a longstanding idea that women are fine-tuned to hear babies crying in a way that men aren’t. A new study has debunked this. Turns out there’s no excuse for the fact mothers are still performing three times more night-time care than fathers.
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A couples retreat … with AI partners
Wired invited a bunch of people in serious relationships with AI partners to a romantic weekend getaway at a remote Airbnb. Agatha Christie would have had a field day with this.
How a controversial ‘parenting test’ separated a Greenlandic woman from her children
Denmark colonized Greenland in the 18th century, then turned it into an autonomous territory. The “Danization” of Indigenous Greenlanders continues, however. Countless Greenlandic mothers living in Denmark have been separated from their children after failing highly controversial “parenting competency” tests. These tests “have been criticised by campaigners and human rights bodies that say they are culturally unsuitable for people from Inuit backgrounds, and therefore discriminatory”, the Guardian reports.
The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation: ‘slaughter masquerading as aid’
Doctors Without Borders calls for the immediate dismantling of “the Israeli-US proxy operating under the name the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”. There is nothing humanitarian about a system where “over 500 people have been killed and nearly 4,000 have been wounded while trying to get food”. Shame on everyone trying to rebrand and obfuscate Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war, including all the media companies trying to censor documentaries coming out about the horrors in Gaza and the media personalities and politicians who are more appalled by musicians at Glastonbury than babies dying from engineered starvation.
Planned Parenthood may not survive the Trump administration
Moira Donegan analyzes the Trump administration and the supreme court’s attacks on Planned Parenthood, which mean nearly a third of their clinics may have to close: “The result is a de facto ban not just on abortion, but on any healthcare provision by pro-choice providers for vast swaths of American women.”
The week in pawtriarchy
Forget snakes on a plane, Santa Barbara has been dealing with sheep on the street. More than 300 sheep caused a traffic jam after escaping from their pens in California. They were eventually returned to safety but for a little while the traffic situation was very baaaaaad.
