#MeToo Backlash Defamation Suit: Defense Fund

Thank you for stopping in.

This is admittedly lengthy, but what I have to talk about has taken up five years of my life. I think I get to ask for a few minutes of people's time.

THANK YOU to everyone who has donated so far — I can't tell you what it's meant. Thank you so very much again.

In 2019, I received a series of serious and credible allegations about a fellow member of the local theater community. I believed the allegations, I absolutely still do, and I carried them forward as the allegiant requested, and as several people close to the situation advised, including a rep from Safe Passage, our local organization serving survivors of domestic and intimate partner violence. The man at the center of the allegations sued me. 

Let me be clear:

I didn’t ask for an allegation like this to be handed to me, I did not make any decisions about how to handle the allegations without consulting others, the allegations had no direct connection with me whatsoever, I never made a direct accusation, and yet here I am. I was a messenger — a concerned adult who was informed about an alleged pattern of sexual misconduct against young women in my community — and I have taken a huge bullet that's ripped through my life for five years and counting, all for responding completely appropriately.

So what has that bullet actually looked like?

I have always worked with kids, and I’ve always worked in the arts, which means that I was already fairly low income, in a dreadful economy. A sudden high level of financial need does not create a high-paying job. This has meant that I have had to work multiple jobs, without rest, for years on end, including through a pandemic, to pay an attorney out of pocket. I had no other path available to me — lawyers who work pro bono are nearly impossible to find. So there were periods of time I have spent working literally 24 hours a day — I would be teaching during the day, I would go straight to a bartending shift at night, and then return not home, but to a pet-sitting job. And this has gone on for YEARS. 

That’s not just an unfortunate set of circumstances on paper. People seem to think that this has been an inconvenience — no, it has been an IMPOSSIBILITY. It’s not that I’ve had to forgo vacations and other luxuries — I’ve had to regularly choose between gas and groceries, and sometimes didn’t even have the means for those. I can’t fix anything on my car that’s not an emergency — I’ve had no AC for four years, for instance. I don’t have shared custody of my dog anymore, because I was working too much to be home with her. I’ve lost my own theater company, as well as contact with most of my arts community — there is no time to engage when you are constantly working. The list goes on and on. (More below.) And, quite frankly, I never should’ve had to face ANY of this. And I remain shocked and heartbroken at the degree to which I’ve had to face all of this totally alone.

The health ramifications have been enormous. I’m beyond tired, beyond exhausted, beyond burnt out — my system is obliterated. I’ve spent years on end sick with exhaustion and stress, and that’s not just a phrase — I’ve gone through several rounds of losing 30-40lbs in 6ish weeks, leading up to court dates. I also have had severe back problems. Do you know what can contribute to back problems? Extreme stress. I also have failing vision, and the next step is surgery. Do you know what can contribute to vision problems? Extreme stress. Stress attacks the body, and after years of this lawsuit, mine’s begun to break down — my heart is in trouble, just like I’ve been saying it would be for years. (I have said over and over again — this BS is going to take me out with a heart attack, a stroke, or a bullet. Guess we’ll see how prescient that turns out to be.) This experience of spending five years and counting in survival mode, of staying in a sustained state of fight or flight for a half a decade, has wreaked absolute havoc on me physically. Never mind the stress of never knowing how violent a man apparently engaged with me might become.

Then, after being dragged through all of that for five years — simply because I believed a young woman and agreed that what she had to say needed to be conversation — the jury found against me at the trial. Pretty stunning outcome, quite unexpected, and I have a lot to say about it.

As for the trial itself, I will offer a constitutionally protected OPINION of what ultimately happened here: it is my OPINION that the judge handed the plaintiff's side a cheap technicality, and ensured that the jury found against me. At no point was the plaintiff's original defamation claim actually proven, as NO claims in the allegations were disproven. Quite the contrary — they were repeatedly corroborated, including by his own witness. What happened was that, on the ninth day of the trial, the day before the jury went into deliberations, I had a witness testifying. Her story was included in the list of allegations, and she had known the plaintiff for many years. She was ANOTHER young woman testifying, again, to the veracity of the allegations, and giving her account of this man's character. The judge stopped her testimony, removed her as a witness, and struck her testimony from the record. He said that her testimony was "collateral" and therefore "potentially confusing to the jury." For the life of me, I cannot understand how her direct verification of part of the allegations I was sued over was "collateral," rather than directly relevant. It was certainly damning, but not at all collateral, nor in any way confusing. (The plaintiff's character witnesses, meanwhile, were allowed to wax poetic for about a hundred years about what a swell guy he is. But mine was cut off and tossed out.) The judge then went on to speak at length about "defamation per se," which can be a number of things, but in this case, he was referring to falsely accusing someone of a crime. The reason, ostensibly, that he did this was because the claim I originally heard from the young woman who'd go on to write the allegations did include a crime. I repeated this claim to a small committee that this man and I both served on, after being pressed to do so, citing it as the reason I didn't think he should continue on the committee. (I was one of three women on the committee who brought up concerns about this man. Neither of the other two were sued.) But that crime detail was wrong. I don't know whether I misheard, or she misspoke, but there was a miscommunication. (It was when I went to her to clear it up a few hours later, to ensure that I WASN'T somehow accidentally supporting a false accusation, that she wrote and sent to me her series of actual allegations.) But no one had really been talking about that small conversation, nor "defamation per se," until the judge shifted the entire focus of the trial on the last day. He then told the jury, and I quote, "Even if it's an accident, you MUST award monetary damages." Now, I'm no lawyer nor am I a judge, but if I were on that jury, I would have felt that I'd just been ordered by the judge to find against the defendant. This doesn't seem right to me, and it's my opinion that this is the only reason the jury found against me.

This is the same judge that went on and on at the beginning of the trial about his role as "merely the referee." But that doesn't seem like the action of a referee at all. That seems a lot more like someone taking the ball away from both teams, strolling down the field (because no one can touch him) and simply tossing it through the goal on behalf of one team.

As for the "defamation per se" claim itself, beyond the fact that I said this to about five people, and retracted it hours later, so it went nowhere and did not in any way affect the plaintiff, there are several defenses that can actually be made against a "defamation per se" claim. One is if the outcome would have been the same had the false claim not been made, and I argue that it would have been, given that a number of the other allegations were verified. Another is if it's in the public good, and given the nature of the other allegations, I'd argue that it was. But above all of that is the fact that I never actually accused him of a crime. I never said anything as a statement of fact, which appears to be part of the definition of "defamation per se" — I always couched it as an allegation. In other words, I never said "He did this" — I said "I was told this." And this is supported by email evidence from the time. But when the judge abruptly removes your witness and, in my opinion, makes a brand new case against you, and then — again, in my opinion — orders the jury to find against you, all on the day before the jury deliberates, there's not really a chance to build a defense. The judge, in my opinion, stepped in and tried the case for the plaintiff. And what do you know — I lost.

I don't understand how that's legal.

And then I couldn't appeal, because you are only given thirty days, and my resources and energy were, and remain, completely annihilated, so I couldn't afford a lawyer for an appeal. Which brings me to another huge point: we do not have a justice system, we have a privilege system. (I say that, acknowledging that what I faced was only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what others have faced in our justice/privilege system. Communities of color, and black men in particular, have been targeted by this system for as long as it's existed, and to much greater harm, including death.) The fact that I couldn't appeal this ridiculous judgment simply because I didn't have the means to pay for it is hideous. The fact that men can bring these suits at all, with no legal barriers, is hideous. There's a whole category of illegal lawsuits under the heading of "Abuse of Process," and these BS defamation suits live up to many of those categories to a laughably blatant degree. And yet, there is no barrier to bringing these suits against women, and the financial abuse starts when the lawsuit starts — there's no need for a verdict for these suits to deeply harm women. So why, if these suits have no basis but rage and revenge, are they allowed to move, unfettered, through the system while the women facing them suffer horribly?

Targeted financial abuse is the main point in a lot of these cases. As such, material resources for women facing these suits must meet the overwhelming material needs that these suits create. Pro bono attorneys specializing in these cases must be plentiful, readily available, and easily findable/accessible. I cannot tell you what an exhausting and defeating slog it is to try to find one, and to hear "No" again and again and again, from sources that purport to care about women's causes — ACLU, National Women's Law Center, Legal Aid, and more. This needs to change — pro bono lawyers for these cases cannot be rare and elusive, as these cases are spreading like wildfire. (See my update for articles about other women facing these suits.)

Quite frankly, the law itself needs to change — this "defamation per se" loophole, which includes a category for "sexual misconduct," creates harm and denies justice, much the opposite of its purported intended effect. It leaves categories flung too widely open, and winds up restricting people's ability to speak freely about their experience. The law is being successfully subverted in order to abuse women.

In short — if women are legally prohibited from speaking up about patterns of abuse toward them, how are we actually supposed to have these conversations that the #MeToo movement promised us access to?

This case, and every case like it, begs a simple, fundamental, and horrifying question: do men still own women? Do men still have the legal right to do whatever they want to women, while women do not even have the legal right to speak of it?

It would seem so.

And the rhetoric around this issue is so utterly backwards that it becomes full on propaganda. One of the plaintiff's witnesses sat on the stand and repeated the oft-used BS line that "It only takes an allegation (to ruin a man's life)." I beg to differ. It only took receiving an allegation for this man to have the legal right to violate my life for five years and counting. Meanwhile, false accusations continue to barely, barely, barely exist:

"Studies suggest the prevalence of false reporting on sexual assault is between 2% and 10%, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center. And there’s a big caveat to those numbers: “Research shows that rates of false reporting are frequently inflated, in part because of inconsistent definitions and protocols,” the resource center said. For example, some law enforcement agencies might label a r*pe claim as 'false' just because there’s not enough corroborating evidence to prosecute. (Those cases would be more accurately described as 'baseless' rather than false.')"

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/03/health/sexual-assault-false-reports/index.html

Given that the law won't change any time soon, I feel it is the responsibility of the #MeToo organization, and the National Women's Law Center, and groups like them, to aggressively address this wave of backlash, and formalize a massive amount of support for the women facing these lawsuits. As it stands, these organizations only offer services to women who are directly targeted by sexual harassment and abuse. There is not yet a category for women being hit with the violence of these abusive lawsuits. But #MeToo started a movement, and now men are using the court system to silence that movement, and women like me are being heavily victimized along the way. This needs to be met with a hell of a lot more power than individual women struggling to fight each individual lawsuit on their own.

Short of any formalized sources of support, including a change to the "defamation per se" laws which prohibit free speech, and the apparent lack of laws that allows these abusive suits to move through the court system,, communities need to show up for women in their midst being targeted with these lawsuits. Communities need to rally around these women and absolutely flood them with support, starting with financial support, as these are financial attacks first and foremost. And, as I've outlined, financial abuse carries over into psychological and emotional abuse, which becomes physical abuse.

Trust me, however — communities are NOT showing up for these women. To be fair, many people in my community did not know that this was happening, but a good number did, and from that sample set, I can tell you that the degree to which I was not only unsupported, but decisively abandoned, and in many ways scapegoated, has been really eye opening, and quite frankly disgusting. In a lot of instances, the disruption that these allegations created was treated as a worse problem than the allegations themselves, and I was overtly blamed. In others, people quietly just left my life. (One example was the person who showed up to the trial one day — I was very moved at the show of support, but it turned out that he wasn't there to support me, but the person who was nervous about testifying. One day of testifying, and she had his support. Five years of abuse, and I didn't hear a word. This was a friend of over twenty years.)

Add to this the fact that these allegations spanned ten years — a full decade — before they reached me. And, according to the allegations, there were witnesses. I never should have heard a word about this, because the alleged pattern of behavior never should have lasted that long. Where the hell were the avenues to formally report allegations like these in our supposedly feminist community? Why was I the first person to take a stand about this issue? Never mind what I went through — if these allegations are true, I'd like to know why this alleged pattern of behavior was allowed to continue for ten full years before someone did something about it. (Please note: I'm not the hero of this story. I didn't speak up — someone else did that. I was simply the one who listened.)

This is a community that crows to the hills about its own feminism. Here was a SEARING feminist issue raging through their midst, and those who knew largely looked the other way, at BEST. These are people who would otherwise loudly rally around the IDEA of "believing women." Here was their chance, and they bolted when that idea became a reality. "Believing women" can't just be an empty phrase. People seem to love the *idea* of feminism, of #MeToo, of supporting women and girls, until it's no longer a tidy bumper sticker or a clever hashtag. If you can't solve it with a knitted pink hat, or a beloved annual 5K, or voting, then people turn away, and even repudiate you for bringing this ugly reality into their comfortable fantasy. What a vicious shame.

What do people think that believing women actually entails? A few tears over a cup of tea? And then we go back to keeping the whole thing quiet? It is well known that abuse thrives in silence, but no one seems to say the second part: that silence is rewarded. While breaking that silence is met with further abuse.

So what does feminism actually look like? Well, I argue that it doesn't LOOK like anything. The very problem is leaving feminism in the realm of aesthetics, rather than action, and in rhetoric, rather than reality. Bumper stickers and other labels, pithy social media shares, and pink hats aren't where feminism ENDS — those things are where feminism BEGINS. Like any and all other activism, feminism must be, at its core, an ACTION. Feminists must, in some way, actually PRACTICE what they preach, well beyond loud self-proclamation. (This borrows from the adage that it is not enough to be non-racist — one must be ANTI-racist.) The reason that this is so imperative is that the other side — misogyny, patriarchy, sexism — is VERY active. These lawsuits are only one facet of the action of a culture bent on harming women. But they're a growing one, and must be addressed decisively.

One way to do that is to, as I said, flood these women with support, starting with financial support. SHOWER them with money. And find other ways to support them as well — gift cards to grocery stores, and places like Target, gift cards to Chewy if they have pets, gift cards for gas. Maybe offer to pay for something like a housecleaning service, or even childcare. And add some roses to the bread — do they like massages? Restaurants? Mani/pedis? Movies? Museums? Bookstores? Do you perhaps have the means to offer them a weekend away in a nice spot that they like? They're going through HELL. Give them means for moments of solace from that hell. And if you have no means to offer material support, let them know that you support them as a friend, that you know that what they're going through is wrong and dreadful. and that you believe them, and believe in them. I cannot tell you what a difference this would have made to me over the past five years.

But those years happened, I faced them largely solo, and now here we are. My health has been utterly torpedoed, and the huge material debt remains. For the likes of me, especially after being forced through this BS ringer for the past half decade, my lawyer's fees from the trial add up to quite a sum. And there's also the stupid judgment that's been gathering interest this whole time, because I can't afford it. (I just got a summons to appear in court again because I haven't been able to pay.) But it’s not quite a sum for everyone, or for many hands, and I need to find those people. I need to find those sources, who actually believe in this — in #MeToo, in feminism, in the welfare of women and girls — people who recognize that feminism needs to be a real world application, and not just a thought project. People who believe this enough to literally put their money where their mouth is. Help me dig out from under this colossally stupid and unjust debt I’ve been saddled with.

I want to be done with this. And not just because I'm operating at a level of exhaustion that I didn't know existed, STILL having to slog through overwork with no rest. (With failing vision and chronic pain.) I can't tell you how many experiences and opportunities this has robbed me of. For instance, I had been training with Intimacy Directors and Coordinators (IDC) to become an intimacy professional. (If you don't know what that is, it's like a fight choreographer, but for intimate scenes on stage and in film.) I had been training, up to the certification level, and found that I was quite a good fit for the work. However, certification training costs something like five thousand dollars, and requires a stint in NYC. If I had five grand, it needed to go to my lawyer. What an ugly irony, that I could have had a thriving career by now, working to ensure people's safety around sexuality in theater, but this case stood in the way of that, and still does. Beyond this, I'll say that my parents will be eighty next year, and are experiencing health problems. I'd like to be in a position to support to them, rather than having to continue to force myself through an ongoing and unrelenting schedule of overwork. Lastly, my extended family experienced a profound act of violence in early 2023 — everyone is physically ok, and the court cases are done, but the reverberations reverberate to this day. I'd like to be available to support them as well, rather than continuing to white knuckle my way through trying to keep my head above water through this ongoing process of severe financial abuse .... all because I believed a young woman in my community, and agreed that her story needed to be a conversation. Generally speaking, I want to move on and no longer think about this garbage. I'm tired of this man and his lawsuit taking up any space whatsoever in my life.

And all it would take would be money. So please consider donating, and sharing — it would be helpful for this to go viral, and bring in more donors who sincerely care about this issue. And if you do decide to donate, please consider giving as egregiously as I have been FORCED to for five years and counting.

The alternative is that I simply file for bankruptcy. Again — all because I believed a woman and agreed that this needed to be a conversation. I don't think that I should have to do that, but if there's no other option, I will. Either this person gets his abuse winnings because this community supports me, or he gets nothing. I'm good either way. I'd certainly rather be financially bankrupt that morally bankrupt.

It's a popular trend now to say that you need to let yourself rest, but I haven't had the option to rest for years. They say that if you don't rest, your body/system will eventually MAKE you rest, and this has happened repeatedly — I've had multiple physical/systemic breakdowns, and I've just had to keep going. I've been FORCED to just keep going. I want the chance to rest. Frankly, I want my five years back. I won't get that time or those chances back, but at the very, very least, I'd like space to recover from the physical and emotional toll this has taken. I'd like the chance to recover from the trauma — to, again, finally REST after a half decade of constant work, of constant fight or flight, of constant extreme stress .... again, all because I believed a young woman and agreed that this needed to be a conversation.

I've watched people around me thrive in these same past five years, and I'm happy for them, but this has prohibited/killed any chance I've had to thrive in that time. Help me do that now. Help me get rid of this abusive, abusive debt, help me be more available to my parents and to my extended family in the midst of what they're going through, help me pay for the eye surgery that I likely need because of this experience. Help me because you recognize that what happened to me was categorically and catastrophically wrong. Help me because you recognize that I stood up for members of my community, and got attacked for it. Help me because I actually DID the thing that people imagine they WOULD do in this circumstance — and in our culture, there is apparently a very heavy debt to pay for standing up and doing the right thing. Whether or not these allegations were true, this needed to be a conversation. But even demanding that can get you successfully sued in a culture that prioritizes men and their feelings over women and their experiences. Again, we have a privilege system, and not a justice system, but this is your chance to offset just a tiny shred of that horrible reality. Help me rest. Help me recover from this abuse. Help me get away from this violence and back to my own life — help me, as I come away from this burning garbage heap, get a chance to reclaim my own capacity to thrive.

I think I deserve that.

I hope you agree.

Thank you.