This is what abuse looks like, and it’s not even about the abusers.
Where would abusers be without their enablers?
Will we ever have the courage to look in the mirror and realize who the enablers are? But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s circle back to that in a minute. Meanwhile grind your teeth at a few examples.
Kathie Klages, comfortably retired. Maybe.
Michigan State University has been front and center in the Larry Nassar scandal. But how did he get away with it for so long?
There was a coach. A coach who refused to believe the young women telling her what Nassar was doing. A coach who was Nassar’s buddy. A coach who told those girls, those women, stop defaming that great man. Trust me, he knows what he’s doing.
How many years, how many reports, how many victims did gymnastics coach Kathie Klages whitewash? How many young women got gaslighted by this coach who was supposed to be their support, their mentor, their trusted pillar of protection?
How many families sent a precious daughter into the care of not just a vicious monster in Larry Nassar – but an obscene ogre in the person of the very woman they trusted to watch over her?
The very woman who saw the shitstorm headed her way and ducked into retirement with full benefits. You have to wonder how she sleeps. How she dodges the nightmares of what she did.
The good news, if there’s karma in any of this? Klages is now facing charges of lying to investigators. Maybe she’ll spend a few cushy retirement years in a dank prison cell. But still…
That’s what abuse looks like.
Dear John… here’s some teal shit for you.
And abuse looks like John Engler, interim President of that same university, the man who took over after MSU President Lou Anna Simon stepped down in the wake of this same scandal. The man who had a duty, a moral obligation to face this crisis head-on, validate every victim, throw the whole organization prostrate on the ground in front of those women and their families and their advocates and beg forgiveness. The man who should have made this his first priority from the time he woke every morning, no, hell, even in his dreams at night his salary as Interim Guy In Charge should have been paying him to come up with proactive solutions.
Instead, Engler drew a bead on a Nassar victim and claimed she was in it for the cash. He directed MSU PR to focus on the good stuff. Pretend the bad shit never happened. And when the signature color of a victims’ group appeared at a planning meeting, this man, this white knight, sized up the room and said…
“Get that teal shit outta here.”
That really happened.
A retired coach who should have prevented the mess. And a bumbling temporary president who can’t get out of his own way wishing for victims to just… disappear. Both entitled, both holding themselves above the fray. Both part of the problem, likely never to be held to account.
That’s what abuse looks like.
Ever wonder what these guys talk about?
Like a first baseman and a baserunner.
“Any place in this town where I can go get some wings later?”
And abuse looks like a guy in red, a guy who just got promoted by the leader of the world’s billion-plus Catholics.
Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera (above, center) retired as a bishop and was snatched up as a paragon of goodness by His Holiness himself. Rivera’s now a cardinal. Which means evidently you can say whatever the hell you want, and no chance you’re getting fired.
So he tells an interviewer he doesn’t want to talk about sex abuse going on in the parishes, he doesn’t want to talk about the coverups by bishops, he wants to talk about the good things, the sweet stuff, the glory and good news of salvation in our good lord Jesus, but no, those accusers better back off and think about their own sins, the skeletons in their own closets, before soiling the good names of the priests and religious orders who mean only to set them on the path to righteousness.
OK that was a bit of poetic license. But the point is the same. Don’t talk about it. Don’t expect me to talk about it. Don’t make accusations. Bury that guilt deep inside and move along. Move along here, nothing to see.
There’s no chance, is there? No chance Pope Francis puts down his morning paper, buzzes Rosie at the front desk, tells her to get Obeso Rivera in here pronto? No chance Cardinal Sergio Obeso Rivera flows through the giant office door at the Vatican in his bright red robes, gets sat down by the Big Guy and told…
“You’re fired. My tailor found some jeans and a tee shirt in your size. Hand over the red outfit. You looked nice in it. Bummer. I hope your passport is up to date, you’re on a noon flight to Mexico.”
…and Francis calls security, they strip that fine red gown from the oversized ex-Cardinal and they haul him out. Of course it doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t go like that because it’s called entitlement. It’s called privilege. Anything else would be like, well, like any other job in the world, any real job, where the rest of us low-lifes could get fired on the spot for what we say to a reporter. But a cardinal is empowered. He can do whatever he wants.
And that’s what abuse looks like.
MacArthur: no big deal. It only happens, maybe, this often.
And abuse looks like a guy named John MacArthur. A guy who’s president of something called The Master’s University. A lovely place. A Christian place. A place with rules. Rules that will keep your daughter safe if you send that precious child to Santa Clarita, CA for an education under the wise and caring guidance of Mr. John MacArthur. Your little girl, your love, your glowing light, all her life in front of her…
…and in her junior year she gets rufi’d and raped.
…and in the great and Christlike wisdom of John MacArthur, she gets kicked out of school. For drinking. For drugs. For, and we’re not joking here, “almost dancing.”
…and with parting words from the school, admonishing her for “ruining that young man’s life!” and for seeing a doctor and for going to the police instead of letting the school handle it, she makes her way home. To you. To the family that trusted Mr. John MacArthur to care for her.
…and when she rolls up in your driveway the first thing your darling little girl says to you, with tears still falling from her wounded, confused, grown-up eyes, is “Daddy? What did I do wrong?”
…and it rips your guts out when you realize…
That’s what abuse looks like.
But maybe we’re all part of the problem. Because abuse looks a lot like the entitlement we hand over to others. Abuse looks like the elitism we look up to, and it looks like things we find beautiful, things we admire. Abuse looks like, to quote a friend, someone out of “central casting for douche-baggery.”
That friend is a young woman I’ve known since she was a baby. I was her tee-ball coach. I taught her to set the bat down after a hit, not let it fly against the fence. Her family is awesome. For years we shared high-fives and laughs as she grew up a block away. And at age 27, well, let’s just let her tell the story…
“Yesterday, I walked around the streets of downtown Seattle for the millionth time in my life. I’ve walked these streets in every season, in sneakers, high heels, cardboard-lined flats, on every level of the spectrum from sober to impaired, for work, for play, for medical care, and for protest. On this particular morning, I passed by a group of professional men unremarkable from any of the hundreds I’ve seen on any other day spent downtown. That is to say, as if stepping out of central casting for douche-baggery: pristine suits (likely pressed by the hands of a woman at a family-owned dry cleaning business), gorgeous hair (likely cut by the hands of someone dependent upon their tips to put food on the table), with vape pens in hand (vapor swirling around their heads on a public street), and white (like me, and most of the other young professionals leisurely walking to work in a neighborhood named after the pioneers who burned down Duwamish longhouses to settle). Fairly or not, I had already made my assumptions about these men by the time we passed each other in the crosswalk. This was also the moment each of the three men leered at me, one taking the opportunity to inform me, urgently, of his assessment of my appearance. At risk of overusing a favorite phrase of social workers around the world: let’s unpack that.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had an encounter like this, and although I wish it were the last, I’m not hopeful for that. This certainly isn’t the worst incident, either. So what spurred me to write a public tirade on social media about it? Every layer of the moment, every detail, shone a spotlight on the entitlement of these men, and the common trope of a white woman (me) playing their victim. A sexual comment on the street isn’t a bid that I’ll toss you my number, it’s a power tactic. Vaping isn’t a cool thing that you do, it’s a privilege you have while the POC you bought bud from in high school sit with charges on their records. And the fancy job you’re on a break from isn’t one you earned in a vacuum, it’s one given to you by a world stacked in your favor. I have just one message, as much to myself as to the men in the crosswalk: do better.”
Normally, this blog would take someone else’s 400 words, cut, chop, edit for clarity, and hand you just a few dozen. But I’m just too goddamn proud of my friend Kimmy to make her put the bat down this time. That bat needs to go whirling, gyrating, thwanging against the fence. Maybe it’ll wake the fans up. I couldn’t keep her words from jumping off the page with their biting truth.
Because this is what abuse looks like. It looks like us, right there in the mirror. Don’t we admire guys in tailored, pressed suits? Abuse looks like the empowerment we hand them by enshrining their perfect hair and their high-paid jobs in bright-lit office buildings.
Whatever that POS said to Kimmy, she’s not telling. But whatever it was, you can bet he forgot all about it by the time he got to lunch.
Abuse isn’t just rape. Or molestation. It isn’t just the enabler who allows it. It’s not just the unwanted obscene comment in a crosswalk.
Abuse is a whole culture of accepting, ignoring, laughing it off. And refusing to demand a higher standard. Without that demand, we get nowhere in all this.
Kimmy’s right. That’s what abuse looks like. And she’s talking to all of us:
Do better.
Keep walking, Kimmy. And let that bat fly, fly away.