And no, her name isn’t Ghislaine Maxwell.
Image by Ibrahim Asad’s Photography on Flickr
She’s been bothering me since I read her story on social media a few weeks ago, detailing vicious abuse by a narcissistic psychopath.
I wish I could feel unadulterated compassion for her, but there’s an ugly underlying message I can’t stop thinking about.
Her tacit admission she aided and abetted child porn and the global trafficking supporting it.
She didn’t report him, of course. Because abuse.
I won’t fault her for not allowing police to charge him with assault and attempted murder when he pushed her down his staircase and broke her arm in several places. Nor, I guess, will I fault her for staying with him for a few years after. It’s her life. It was her choice.
But she allowed him to keep consuming kiddie porn, plus other highly questionable content with technically legal, even clearly adult women who may have been no more consensual. Now it’s no longer about the writer, but all the children and adults forced into the pornography slave trade for sick, vicious bastards like her former ‘Mr. Perfect’ to wank off over.
If she bore no responsibility for herself, she did for the children she knew were being victimized, however indirectly, through his voracious appetite for what she described as the very worst, most abased, most destructive pornography. Not all of it depicting children but some, she said, almost certainly illegal.
I can’t make excuses for her. She chose to stay, and she proved it was a choice when she chose to leave. The victims of his sick wank material, including the ones who were of legal age but possibly also just as enslaved, didn’t have choice.
The woman aided and abetted the ugly world of child pornography and sexual enslavement, even after she left the filthy sonofabitch.
The ugly truth a lot of women aren’t going to like: Women contribute to child trafficking too, when they refuse to turn in those they know support it.
There’s no getting around it. This woman enabled the child trafficking industry by never reporting. Period.
If she can choose to leave, she can choose to report it.
Was she afraid of post-breakup violence? I’m not sure she was, considering she posted under her real name, and gave his real name.
I don’t know why she stuck with Mr. Perfect given he could only be more loathsome if she’d found him sneaking young bodies into his bedroom or discovered a few in the basement. He only had sex with her for about a year, ending when she refused to allow him to do the repulsive things he wanted to do to her, or the equally repulsive things he wanted her to do to him.
She went sexless after that. I’ll bet he didn’t.
She didn’t describe the details, but claimed she’d seen content she could never unsee. She begged him to stop, to seek help, even vomited a few times at what she saw, to no avail.
I’m not sure what she ever got out of this relationship after he removed his human skinsuit.
He was good-looking, I guess, and of course charming while they courted. He was well off, as she described a really beautiful mansion with a gorgeous Italian marble staircase when she moved in with him. Then, in accordance with countless abuse case studies, he revealed his true self.
The doctors told her she’s lucky she didn’t die from the fall, that it was fortunate she fell on her hand, even though they initially considered she might lose part of it. (She didn’t.)
After Mr. Perfect drove her home, stopped at the drugstore to get her prescription Percocet, and kept the pills for himself so he could get high while wanking off to filth, leaving her alone with Tylenol, she didn’t leave him. Years later, she finally did. It had something to do with the fact that the doctors had to cut off two precious, meaningful bracelets to treat her arm.
That’s what drove her to leave, not the victims of Mr. Perfect’s sick obsession.
And she still has yet to report him.
I wonder who he’s f**king now.
I wonder how old they are. I wonder how consensual it is. I wonder what he’s doing to them before, during, and after.
She let him get away with it. All of it.
Image by Ruslan Gilmanshin from Pixabay
People don’t like when I ask embarrassing questions about abuse, like why it persists. You know, like when women reward abusive behavior.
What If Women Refused To Fuck Abusive Men? Would they die with their bike grip-shaped dick in their hand? Here’s another infuriating one: Why do we not hold women to the same high standards to which we hold men? We ask why Donald Trump and Bill Clinton rode Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express, but not why Trump’s baby mamas or Hillary Clinton tolerated their husbands’ friendship with the monster.
We’re forty years past The Battered Woman and The Burning Bed. We’re graduating more from higher education than men. We’re earning more money, we’re more independent, we’re showing up more at the head of the boardroom table. I get tired of reciting this. Yadda yadda yadda.
If there’s any woman who’s not a helpless little victim, it’s Hillary Clinton.
We’ve got more power, we’re not as reliant on men, we more often have the financial ability to walk away. But many don’t. For the same old talking points as days of yore. Yadda yadda yadda.
The problem clearly isn’t only men. Women allow this. Feminists don’t challenge it, nearly enough. Not when it comes to holding women accountable.
We’ve got to do a better job than we’ve been doing. We’ve got to raise the standards for ourselves, and other women.
We need to talk more about the way tolerating abuse affects others.
Like the friends and family whose lives she might put in danger if she leaves Mr. Perfect, especially if she moves back in with them.
Like the co-workers whose lives she might be endangering if Mr. Perfect shows up at the office with a gun. (This almost happened to a former employer before I began working there. The guy didn’t show up, but the office went into lockdown when their employee reported he was looking for her and considered dangerous. And this was in Canada.)
Like the children she has, since the best way to hurt a woman is to harm or kill her children.
Whether Mr. Perfect contributed his seed or not.
Or, you know, the children and young women he’s been indirectly victimizing (maybe directly too, depending on what he does outside the home), by not allowing the police to arrest him for trying to kill her and then mentioning, ‘Oh, by the way, take a gander at the shit on his computer.’
I’m tired of the excuses. The writer left Mr. Perfect to continue feeding the international sex trafficking/child pornography industry and, I suspect, possibly rape/sexually abuse adults and children of legal or illegal age.
If Jeffrey Epstein were still alive, he’d thank her for her support. Maybe Donald Trump and Bill Clinton can do that for him.
Even though she named Mr. Perfect in her article, he still owes her a huge debt of gratitude for protecting him from the law and for enabling him to continue victimizing the utterly powerless.
We can make all the excuses we like, and people can excoriate me for saying this but this woman will die knowing one thing.
She aided and abetted child pornography.
She let him get away with it.
But, maybe she can still be proud of herself for, you know, ‘finally leaving him’.
What a hero.
This story first appeared on Medium in February 2021.