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glompcat · 2 years

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full article under the read more. Please be aware there are descriptions of rape, sexual harassment and intimate partner violence in the article.

By Karen Weise

Aug. 18, 2022

SEATTLE — Kacie Margis, a model and artist, first learned about Dan Price in 2020 the way many people do: through social media posts that celebrated his progressive politics.

Five years earlier, Mr. Price had propelled himself to an unlikely position for the head of a 110-person payment processing company when he told his employees that he was raising their minimum pay to $70,000. His announcement was covered by The New York Times and NBC News. Esquire did a photo shoot. He made appearances on “The Daily Show” and at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

By the time Ms. Margis discovered him, his reputation and following online had grown even more. His self-styled role as a C.E.O. speaking truth about corporate greed resonated with a wide audience. His posts on social media had been liked tens of millions of times. He joked with Kelly Clarkson on her daytime talk show, with Lionel Richie looking on. He introduced Andrew Yang to a Seattle crowd during Mr. Yang’s presidential campaign. He video chatted with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who called him “the one moral CEO in America.”

Mr. Price was a young, handsome executive whose worldview spoke to her; a real live influencer on social media who criticized the excesses and arrogance of other business leaders. He posted a seemingly endless stream on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, saying the right things about inequality. About mental health. About women.

After Ms. Margis liked one of his Instagram posts in 2020, Mr. Price, who was 35, messaged her: “Happy Valentine’s Day beautiful!”

Ms. Margis, who was 27, ignored the message initially but replied back early last year, after friends in a group chat once again shared one of his tweets.

“You’re wonderful,” she wrote.

Soon, they were talking regularly. Mr. Price visited her near San Diego and flew her to Seattle. But what started as a whirlwind courtship ended three months later with an accusation of rape.

On Monday, the police in Palm Springs, Calif., said they had referred Ms. Margis’s case to local prosecutors, recommending a charge of rape of a drugged victim. Prosecutors in Seattle earlier this year charged Mr. Price with assault in another incident.

After responding to questions earlier in the day from The New York Times, Mr. Price tweeted that he had resigned on Wednesday evening as chief executive of his company, Gravity Payments. He wrote that he had become a “distraction” and needed to “focus full time on fighting false allegations made about me.”

There were warning signs about Mr. Price, but Ms. Margis did not see them. When she did a Google search, many of the top results for “Dan Price” were his own social media accounts, along with flattering stories. Buried was the reason he had, for a time several years ago, nearly vanished from public attention: An article I wrote in 2015 for Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that his story about the pay raise had notable holes, and that his former wife had accused him of domestic violence.

Overnight, the attention largely dried up.

But Mr. Price found an antidote to obscurity: Social media. Tweet by tweet, his online persona grew back. The bad news faded into the background. It was the opposite of being canceled. Just as social media can ruin someone, so too can it — through time, persistence and audacity — bury a troubled past.

Mr. Price’s internet fame has enabled a pattern of abuse in his personal life and hostile behavior at his company, interviews with more than 50 people, documents and police reports show. He has used his celebrity to pursue women online who say he hurt them, both physically and emotionally. Ms. Margis is one of more than a dozen women who spoke to The New York Times about predatory encounters with Mr. Price.

“Social allows him to control the narrative,” said Ryan Pirkle, who spent almost seven years running marketing for Mr. Price’s company.

In his statement to The Times, Mr. Price said he had “never physically or sexually abused anyone,” and that “the other accusations of inappropriate behavior towards women in this story are simply false.”

Mr. Price added that descriptions of him as a toxic boss were inaccurate. “Making Gravity an outstanding place to work is my top priority,” he said, “and I believe I’m achieving that goal.”

“Is This The Best Boss in America?”

Inc. Magazine, November 2015.

***

I first met Mr. Price in the fall of 2015, after he and his wage-raising story were seemingly everywhere. Though his business was obscure — Gravity made a few million dollars a year in profits processing credit card payments — job applications and customers flooded in.

Mr. Price was a charismatic messenger in a moment of growing inequality, but the story he was telling in public didn’t add up. Mr. Price told the media that his brother, who co-owned Gravity, sued him after the wage increase and implied it was retribution for reducing their profits. Court documents show that Mr. Price’s splashy $70,000 wage announcement took place after the lawsuit was initiated.

Mr. Price told media outlets that his divorce several years earlier was amicable. But his former wife, Kristie Colón, had given a TEDx talk in October 2015 in which she described their relationship as abusive.

“He got mad at me for ignoring him and grabbed me and shook me again,” Ms. Colón read from her old journal. “He started punching me in the stomach and slapped me across the face.” She recalled once locking herself in a car, “afraid he was going to body-slam me into the ground again or waterboard me in our upstairs bathroom like he had done before.”

Mr. Price said those incidents “never happened.”

The video was never made public. Mr. Pirkle said that at Mr. Price’s direction, he contacted the University of Kentucky, which hosted the TEDx talk, saying the presentation could be defamatory. The university said it “simply decided not to post” the video. Mr. Price denied that he directed Mr. Pirkle to contact the university. Mr. Pirkle said he deeply regretted his role in preventing the video from becoming public.

When the Bloomberg Businessweek article ran in December 2015, the reaction was swift. Mr. Price lost a $500,000 book contract and the Hollywood talent agency WME dropped him.

Just as fast as he had risen, he was gone.

Shortly after the article published, Mr. Price pulled his staff into a conference room and told them that he had protected Ms. Colón. He said she was young and emotional. “There was a period of time where she just had a lot of trouble and she was acting crazy,” he said, according to an audio recording of the meeting. “I would restrain her, which is not right.”

He had his staff compile a long dossier on perceived threats, including his former wife, brother and me, according to Mr. Pirkle and three others. (Mr. Price said the dossier was not his idea.) He ultimately won the court fight with his brother, and a judge found that he did not pay himself more than their shareholder contracts allowed.

Mr. Price briefly returned to the spotlight in 2016, when his employees appeared to surprise him with a royal blue Tesla. He teared up and said, “Are you kidding me?!”

“That was his idea completely,” said Mr. Pirkle and confirmed by Matt Dho, who worked in the marketing department for four years. Mr. Price said that was not true, and “the idea that some people are trying to soil this cherished memory is deeply hurtful.”

But Alyssa O’Neal, the then 21-year-old employee who people thought had suggested the Tesla gift at the time, said in an interview that one of Mr. Price’s senior lieutenants actually made the suggestion in a small meeting and told her to take credit.

The stunt got attention from the mainstream press, but it quickly faded.

Mr. Price later that year summoned a handful of employees to his home so they could watch a documentary about the attempted comeback of Anthony Weiner, the New York politician caught messaging sexually explicit photos to young female supporters. Mr. Price reclined in bed, healing from knee surgery, as his staff sat on the bedroom floor, according to several people present. He asked what they learned about drowning out negative news.

“He is definitely obsessed with how seemingly you can just become famous,” said Mr. Dho, who was there.

Mr. Price turned to social media, where he could control his message. With each post about out-of-control C.E.O. pay and stagnant wages, his following grew.

By 2019, America’s best boss was on his way back. The Wall Street Journal included him in a group of “luminaries,” and Nick Kristof profiled him in the New York Times Opinion section.

Mr. Price didn’t write most of his posts himself. He hired a ghostwriter: Mike Rosenberg, a former reporter who resigned from The Seattle Times after sending sexually explicit messages to a female reporter in Brooklyn.

“We had employees that were livid” about his hiring, said Bobby Powers, Gravity’s former head of human resources. Mr. Rosenberg declined to comment.

Mr. Price said he used social media to help Gravity attract customers and employees, saying that “I get over 100 direct messages daily,” and that he shared the company’s story to inspire others.

In a morning show spot in 2021 revisiting the wage increase, Mr. Price told CBS that he was “way happier now.” At Gravity, the CBS correspondent added, “it seems like there’s a lot of that going around.”

“Wow! I’ll work for you!”

— Kelly Clarkson, December 2019.

***

Dan Price, the good boss, went viral. But more than two dozen former employees say the image fueling his clout, and that attracted his female followers, was a mirage.

“You never knew which Dan you were going to get,” said Stefan Bennett, who worked at Gravity for almost 13 years. He and others said Mr. Price was an unpredictable leader. Small incidents made him snap.

Jen Peck, who held a top role at Gravity, found it so troubling, her doctor eventually wrote a note to Gravity recommending she quit “for her own physical and mental well-being,” calling the environment “hostile.” Ms. Peck is now a director of engineering at the real estate site Redfin.

But Mr. Price’s profile made leaving the company difficult.

Korinne Ward, who spent almost five years in company leadership, said “it felt like a part of you was giving up on this thing you had been promoting.”

Before he announced his resignation, Mr. Price suggested nine Gravity employees I should speak with. Most said they didn’t know him well, enjoyed their work at the company and described him as a boss who had taken feedback that he could be too forceful.

“Lifting someone out of poverty is the most effective anti-depressant in the world.”

Liked 185,000 times.

***

In April 2021, three months into their relationship, Ms. Margis met Mr. Price in Palm Springs. Along the calming rush of Tahquitz Creek, Mr. Price hiked barefoot, often whipping out his phone to check his Twitter. His message celebrating the sixth anniversary of the wage increase got 180,000 likes, and other media, including a piece in People, shared his story.

The next morning, Mr. Price had to make a call and demanded that Ms. Margis leave their room, she said. Wearing just a bikini and cover up, she protested, but he insisted. For hours, she was locked out, killing time by messaging friends.

“Drop hiiiimmm,” one friend wrote back.

“It’s a no from me dawg,” another agreed.

Mr. Price found her by the pool and leaned in for a kiss, she recalled. She rebuffed him. He snapped that she was not a good listener and didn’t understand him. “He said it is so hard being him in the world because of his intelligence,” she later recalled.

This account of what happened next was detailed in interviews with Ms. Margis, a police report, contemporaneous messages with friends and interviews with three people she spoke with soon after.

Ms. Margis returned to Room 423, where she took a cannabis edible to counter insomnia, something she’s regularly done since being at the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival. Mr. Price returned and tried to initiate sex.

“No, I just took an edible and I’m going to bed,” she would tell the police she said. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

As she drifted to sleep, she felt him penetrate her, she told the police. She pretended to be asleep, worried he would kill her if she tried to stop him.

After he finished, she waited a few minutes then walked to the bathroom before confronting him.

“Did you just rape me?” she told the police she said. He flatly denied it, she said.

She was “shaking so bad and could hardly speak,” she would text a friend a few hours later, adding that “he looked me dead in the eyes and said what I know happened didn’t happen.”

She told Mr. Price she felt pain, and had semen inside her. He began offering excuses, that he was just using his fingers, then he said just the tip of his penis.

“I know what you did,” she responded.

According to the police report, Mr. Price boasted that no one had believed Ms. Colón’s allegations of abuse “because of who he is and that no one would believe her either.”

Mr. Price retreated to the front desk, demanded a new room and provided what the manager told the police amounted to a “back story”: that his girlfriend “felt uncomfortable about falling asleep” during sex, the manager recalled, so he “opted to leave her alone in the hotel room.”

Once the cannabis wore off, Ms. Margis fled home. The next morning, her instinct was to fight.

She texted her friends that she might need them as witnesses. She saved her underwear, and filed the police report. Then she called her mother, who waited in the hospital parking lot while Ms. Margis submitted to a rape kit. Ms. Margis returned to the car, and gave her mother one of the small comfort gifts the hospital gives survivors, a heart-shaped stone, with one word etched: “HOPE.”

“Always invest in people.”

Liked 179,000 times.

***

Two days later, Ms. Colón, Mr. Price’s former wife, was checking Instagram when she got a message. “I am reaching out and hope this is not triggering in any way,” Ms. Margis wrote.

Ms. Margis went on to say that Mr. Price had raped her and that she believed Ms. Colón’s “every allegation.”

It wasn’t the first time that Ms. Colón had heard from women about bad encounters with Mr. Price.

Ms. Colón had relocated across the country and tried to move on. But escaping Mr. Price’s presence was impossible — even her own therapist had told her she had seen friends share his posts on LinkedIn.

Ms. Margis said she had considered telling her story publicly. “I want to do all I can to make sure he never harms another woman again in his life,” she wrote, but feared he would “come after me.”

Eventually, Ms. Colón connected Ms. Margis to a man named Doug Forbes, who had been blogging about Mr. Price for years. Mr. Forbes had wanted to make an uplifting documentary about Mr. Price but fixated instead on what he alleged to be fraud. Gravity defended its practices in a Facebook post.

Mr. Forbes published posts, often running thousands of words long, about Mr. Price, and had tried without success to get more than 30 news organizations, including The Times, to run them.

But if someone Googled the right terms, his blog would show up. He heard from Ms. Margis, and posted an anonymized version of her account last August.

Mr. Price said on Wednesday that he believed that Mr. Forbes was funded by a competitor, whom he declined to name. Mr. Forbes called the claim “irrefutably false.”

Other women found the post based on Ms. Margis’s experience and contacted Mr. Forbes, who published additional anonymous accounts and introduced several women to each other. That informal community of women that Mr. Forbes had helped forge also contacted me. But there were even more women. In all, more than a dozen described predatory behavior.

Mr. Price messaged Serena Jowers, a fitness coach near Seattle, in December 2020, after she liked some of his posts on Instagram. On their third date, Ms. Jowers said, he pulled up videos on Pornhub, to show her what he liked. After she resisted watching pornography, he pressured her into having sex, she said. She realized he was touching her with only one hand, then saw him holding his phone. He was recording them.

Ms. Jowers jumped up and grabbed the nearest blanket, yelled at him, and fled, she said. The next morning she texted him, saying the filming made her feel like she was not in control of her own body. “I want you to delete any video/pics you took,” she wrote.

“I’ll do that,” he immediately texted back. Three other women, two of whom he also first messaged on social media, also told me that they learned Mr. Price secretly filmed them.

One girlfriend, who asked that I not use her name, said Mr. Price would invite beautiful young women he met on Instagram to join them on his yacht, where she felt expected to entertain them.

“I am tired of being the head of the harem,” she wrote in her journal.

Three times he had sex with her in the middle of the night without her consent, she wrote in the journal.

When they argued, she said Mr. Price would grab her hand and put a pulse monitor on her finger tip. His heart rate never was elevated, so he could make good decisions, he would say. Her pulse would race, so he said she was irrational.

The day after she confided in a friend, whom I spoke with, the friend was on a plane to help her grab things from Mr. Price’s house and yacht, and leave.

“There’s no labor shortage. There’s a shortage of jobs treating people with basic respect.”

Liked 122,000 times.

***

Mr. Forbes shared information about the Palm Springs incident with employees at Gravity. The news roiled the office.

“This is supposed to be a company that holds itself to a higher standard,” said Dan Ludwig, who worked there for a year and a half, “but it kinda reeked.”

Mr. Price took a leave of absence in the fall of 2021. But at a company meeting last November, Mr. Price, who was the company’s sole owner and board member, said he was ready to return.

Late this January, Mr. Price met Shelby Alexandra Hayne, an artist with whom he first messaged in 2019 on Instagram.

“I greatly admire your adventurous spirit!” he wrote to her. “And you’re super hot LOLzzz.” They exchanged messages. Ms. Hayne, then 24, shared that she had recently graduated from college. He shared a clip of himself on Fox Business, saying, “Here’s my morning so far.”

Mr. Price proposed times to meet, but Ms. Hayne brushed him off. A few months later, he tried again.

People she admired regularly reposted items from Mr. Price, and when she ran across Mr. Forbes’s blog, she wondered, “Is this just some person with a vendetta?”

She said she hoped that Mr. Price could provide advice and connections to integrate activism into her art. She and her boyfriend decided it was worth meeting him, even if he might expect a date.

“You’re doing the most impressive things,” Ms. Hayne wrote Mr. Price in December.

In January, they had dinner at a restaurant in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where she said they discussed politics. What happened next was detailed in interviews, a police report and text messages.

As the restaurant closed, her Uber app wasn’t working, and Mr. Price suggested they stay warm in his Tesla as she downloaded it again.

Sitting in the front seats, he tried to kiss her and grabbed her throat, she told the police.

“He did not let go of my throat right away,” she recalled.

“After I rejected him,” she said, “he transformed.”

Ms. Hayne called her boyfriend, pretending he was her brother, and asked him to rush and get her. Mr. Price sped north, driving her to a Park N Ride.

She was scared because he was “very drunk,” the police report said.

“Hurryyyyyyy,” she texted her boyfriend.

Mr. Price raced up to the top floor of the parking lot, drove the car in doughnut circles and pulled into a spot, she told the police. He reached over to kiss her and grabbed her throat again, his hand pulsing in and out “for minutes,” the police report said.

“SQUEEZING HARD,” she would text a friend the next morning.

And then, he let go. “I’m too drunk,” Ms. Hayne recalled him saying, as he went into the back seat to pass out.

As her boyfriend, Jesse Snowden, pulled up next to them, “she jumped in and pointed her fingers forward and was like GO NOW,” Mr. Snowden recalled.

When she described what just happened, Mr. Snowden remembered Mr. Forbes’s blog. Ms. Hayne wrote him to share her story. Mr. Forbes connected her to Ms. Margis, Ms. Colón and several other women.

“I told her she should call the police and file a police report,” her father, Steve Hayne, a criminal defense attorney, told me.

Ms. Hayne is not the only woman who described Mr. Price’s hands on her neck. Danni Askini, an activist for transgender rights, remembered her first date with Mr. Price a decade ago, when they met on OkCupid. After a pleasant time at a bar, he walked her back to her apartment building, which they entered through the garage. When she would not invite him upstairs, he snapped, she said, and pushed her against a wall.

“He gripped my neck and kinda choked me,” she said. He put his hands down the back of her skirt and assaulted her, she said, before she could shove him away.

She said he tried to laugh it off. “‘I just thought this is what girls like,’” she recalled him saying.

It is painful, she said, that he “is the poster child for this politics that I really care about.”

August 2022: 775,000 followers on Twitter.

***

Mr. Price has gained hundreds of thousands of followers online since Ms. Margis fled Palm Springs last April.

On Monday, the Palm Springs police department submitted its investigation to the Riverside County district attorney, recommending a charge of rape of a drugged victim, according to Lt. Gustavo Araiza. The prosecutors must now decide whether to file charges.

Ms. Margis said she feared a backlash online if she accused him publicly. She had received threats after appearing in a BuzzFeed video about the Las Vegas shooting. And because she modeled swimsuits, she worried people might say she had asked for what she had not asked for.

But in February, something changed that made her think she could be believed: prosecutors in Seattle charged Mr. Price in Ms. Hayne’s case.

The city brought three charges against him: reckless driving, assault and assault with sexual motivation. The Seattle Times reported on the case in April, and Mr. Price went from posting multiple times a day to going totally dark on social media.

Later that month, Ms. Hayne said the prosecutor told her that the city might drop the charges after seeing that some of the earlier Instagram messages she exchanged with Mr. Price were flirtatious. Her father, a lawyer, wrote a stern letter, and Mr. Forbes, the blogger, emailed several women, urging them to share their stories and Instagram screenshots with the prosecutor. The prosecutor’s office declined to comment.

On May 31, Mr. Price appeared stone-faced, his long hair looking slightly damp, on a court video conference. The prosecutor had dropped the charge for assault with sexual motivation, but proceeded with the case for reckless driving and assault.

Mr. Price’s lawyer entered “not guilty” pleas on his behalf, and the judge issued a non-harassment order until a trial scheduled for October.

“I trust the legal process, and I am looking forward to presenting my defense and proving my innocence,” Mr. Price said in his statement to The Times.

He began tweeting again in mid-July. He got half a million likes in his first week back.

Karen Weise is a technology correspondent based in Seattle, covering Amazon and Microsoft. Her work aims to help readers better understand two of the most powerful companies in America and their growing influence on society. @kyweise

More on Dan Price and Gravity Payments

The chief executive, who made headlines for setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle-based company, resigned after being accused of rape.

▫ Raising Wages: In 2015, Dan Price said that the idea for a new minimum salary began percolating after he read an article on happiness.

▫ Praise and Backlash: The news that Gravity Payments, Mr. Price’s company, would raise its minimum wage generated both positive responses and skepticism, while fueling internal tensions.

▫ A Legal Victory: The recent allegations against Mr. Price aren’t the first legal troubles he has faced. In 2016, he won a court battle with his brother, who accused Mr. Price of overpaying himself and inappropriately used a corporate credit card for personal expenses.

#dan price #rape cw #ipv cw

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cinnamonmustard · 2 years

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In my experience one of the best things you can do for people experiencing intimate partner abuse is hype them up relentlessly. Tell them true facts about why you love and admire them. People with self esteem stand up for themselves more

#ipv cw #dv cw

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antlerqueer · 2 years

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of all sexualities, bisexual women are most likely to experience intimate partner violence in comparison to het and gay counterparts of the same gender, as well as men of any sexuality. (see source for full study)

#intimate partner violence cw #ipv cw #domestic abuse cw #domestic abuse tw #depp v heard cw

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sapphic-sex-ed · 2 months

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i looked on your abuse tag for a while and didn’t see that you answered this but if i’m wrong lmk. any tips on how to pull a friend out of an abusive relationship? i know i can’t control her but she asked me to tell her when her relationship starts to look like what mine did and when i told her she didn’t listen and now she’s getting back with the same person after 3 days. i know i’m not supposed to control her but i don’t know what to do besides an ultimatum at this point. hoping someone else has better advice before i do that.

Thank you for asking this highly relevant question. I'm sorry your friend is in a bad relationship and I'm sorry you have been through this as well - abuse is too common and that's why I'm glad you asked. We all need this information.

Most people's first instinct when their loved one seems to be in an unhealthy relationship is to raise the question with them. How people do this differs, and I would always opt for what's called curious exploration (open questions about the relationship and reflections of the emotions your loved one expresses) over confrontation, as the latter seldom is productive. In your case, anon, you raised it as agreed upon beforehand but your friend wasn't receptive to your thoughts. This, too, is common.

In my experience with clients in a abusive relationships, there is a lot of shame tied up into being a "victim", one of several reasons "survivor" is a preferred term. To imply or explicitly state that their relationship seems abusive can in instances when they're not ready to hear that yet lead to resistance and a deeper commitment to said relationship. The genuine concern for their safety is taken as criticism of themselves and their own person, usually as there probably exists some doubts and insecurities already. When we are already insecure we tend to become more protective of whatever it is we are insecure about. For this reason I would stray from words such as 'abuse' or even 'unhealthy'. Not to say that labeling abuse as abuse cannot be a relief to some - when they are ready for it it can be very cathartic for somebody else to see and acknowledge their experiences as abuse - but they need to be further along in their acceptance and insight for that to work.

As people who care about them, it can be difficult to see a loved one stay with or go back to an abusive partner. We want them to be safe and happy and to us it seems obvious that the source of their misery is the abusive partner. But abusive relationships aren't always all bad all the time. That's how we get stuck. It's like a slot machine. It can be helpful for some to speak about their relationships like a behavioral addiction - the mechanisms are similar or the same. That's what the actual definition of love-bombing is, btw. The increase in loving behaviors by an abuser right before or right after a bad abusive episode meant to keep the victim in the relationship. Because of this pattern - tension, incident, reconciliation (honeymoon phase or love-bombing), calm - it can be difficult for the person being abused to see the abuse, as it's not all bad all the time. That hope that the love-bombing or calm phases will prevail is what is so addictive about the abusive relationship. "This time maybe it will work out".

For us who see the abuse, we want to support our loved one, and the first instinct if usually to get them to leave. As discussed, that's not an easy task. It's common for abused partners (speaking explicitly about IPV, but any type of domestic violence regardless of relationship works similarly, although leaving may look different when the abuser is a relative) to leave the abuser between 3 to 11 times before they leave for good. Some never leave. What abuse does, at its core, is strip us of agency and dignity. We become dependent and degraded. If somebody else then comes along, no matter how good their intentions, and tells us that we must leave that too is stripping of agency and will be met with resistance. The change needs to come from within the abused person themselves.

Confrontation creates tension both within you as a friend and within the loved one you're trying to help, and can lead you to drift apart, especially if the abused feel like you are judgemental of their relationship. We don't want this to happen. Isolation is one of the main tools an abuses utilizes, consciously or not (because while some people are just cruel and consciously abuse others, a lot of the time the abuser is only half-way aware of what they are doing), to keep their victim in the relationship. Instead, what we want to do is offer support on the abused person's terms. Don't try to persuade them to leave. Instead offer support like a place to stay if they need it. Or a shoulder to cry on and an ear to listen. Just doing friendship things and preventing isolation. What somebody needs will be based on their relationship and other social and psychological factors. If the abuse is physical they may need somebody who can drive them to the ER. Or if the abuse is more psychological (not mutually exclusive obviously) they may need somebody they can call at any hour to cry. Economical abused people may need someone who can open an account for them to stash away money or such. Ask your friend what they need if they are open to that. Or if you notice something they might need help with if you can do that for them. If they are very downtrodden and lack the ability to decide if they want help with X thing, you can speak in statements like "I will do X thing for you when you need me to".

When it comes to talking about the relationship, I use a lot of elements om motivational interviewing (MI) when I meet people in abusive relationships. You're not a therapist or a counselor, you're a friend, but the core tenets of MI are based in compassion and evoking change through that. To use skills like active listening, simple and complex emotional reflections, and open questions to bring to surface the person's own reasoning are not outside the scope of a layperson. To hear yourself say something aloud often makes it easier for us to hear the flaws in our own reasoning because now it's not just an internal thought, now we hear it as others do, and that is what using MI elements does. Again, you're not a therapist, but to use active listening skills is good in any private relationship.

I hope this was helpful. I also invite followers to share their tips from experience both as survivor and friend of survivors.

-mod liz

#mod liz #abuse cw #cw abuse #ipv #abusive relationships #abuse

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odessa-castle · 1 month

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NLTS might just be one of my favorite fics of all time. The characterizations, the banter, the tension - it's all 10/10 (and I loooove all the little nods to Shakespeare).

Your Cazador is truly menacing and has such a looming presence for a character who doesn't appear much on the page. You mentioned in an earlier ask that you deliberately built Cazador and Astarion's dynamic on the emotional language of intimate partner violence (which I think is so heartbreakingly accurate). If you feel comfortable, could you talk a little more about that choice, why you made it, and/or how it shaped your writing?

Beyond excited for part two!!

Thank you so much! NLTS has come to mean a lot to me, and I'm glad this story means something to other people, too.

As far as Cazador and Astarion's dynamic and IPV goes, I think I did mention in the tags that I had a lot to say on the subject, and I do, but I'm going to put it under a cut for fairly obvious reasons. Read on at your discretion.

So! Vampires. You can do a lot of things with vampires, and with the sire-childe relationship in particular. I'm not going to do a whole scholarly review here or anything, but suffice to say that it is inherently, to some degree, a relationship based on power and control, and the transgressive nature -- the blurring of boundaries between parent and lover, the interplay between sex and death, etc. -- is part of the horror and part of the appeal. Also, biting is sex, and the issues of consent arising from the former are extrapolated onto the latter. Again, there's a lot of room to play with metaphor here, depending on the story you want to tell, but if it's not kinda fucked up, then why even bother?

Astarion and Cazador's relationship is likewise one where a number of different lenses can come into play, depending on what you're interested in exploring. I do think one of the draws of Astarion's story is the way that it takes certain conventions that pop up around vampires and strips the layer of metaphor away -- Astarion's sexual abuse is explicitly a part of his story in a way that I (and many others) didn't expect to see presented so frankly. And I knew I wanted to do some of that metaphor-stripping myself when I wrote this.

The fantasy/supernatural elements let you really go to some extremes when you're writing about Astarion's abuse, and Cazador is awful enough that almost any horror you can come up with is something he'd plausibly do to Astarion. And there are some evil geniuses in this fandom. The things I've seen people do with torture and body horror, with mind control, with sheer sexual depravity -- chef's kiss. I love you guys. I don't think that's where my strengths as a writer necessarily lie, though, and it wasn't quite what I wanted in terms of either theme or tone for this story. I wanted both Wyll's and Astarion's loneliness and low self-worth to be grounded in something really emotionally recognizable, in part so they could recognize these things in each other, and I wanted to show off the...quieter moments of their trauma, almost. The critical voices they've internalized; their self-censoring and self-deprecation; the things they've normalized that really shouldn't be normal, actually.

I'm not going to get too deep into the nature of my interest in IPV. Suffice to say that I have both personal and professional experience in that area, and that like all artists, I bring pieces of myself into the things I create. What I can say is that I don't think I've ever encountered an IPV survivor who didn't experience some form of emotional abuse as part of that power and control relationship, and that a lot of survivors have talked about how that can be the hardest thing to recover from, because it gets so deep inside your head. It warps the way you view yourself; it distorts the way you see the world. You carry your abuser's voice with you, whether or not they're there. And it's not easy to make it go away. It's not easy to make the emotional conditioning go away, to disentangle the survival mechanisms you've had to develop once you no longer actually need them to survive. These things hold true with, like, basically every form of ongoing abuse, they're not necessarily unique to IPV, but they're a big part of IPV nonetheless. (And they're certainly things we see from a lot of the companions in-game, Astarion very much included. Gotta love how his immediate response to you initiating the breakup conversation is "did I do something wrong?")

I do know that discussions of the exact nature of Cazador's abuse of Astarion can get, uh, fraught. I do think Cazador's sexual objectification and possessiveness of Astarion are, well, text, and Cazador certainly uses other people as proxies to enact sexual violence on Astarion. I didn't include, and don't plan to include, any outright sexual contact between them on-page because I think the point comes across clearly enough without it (and because jesus, enough stuff happens on-page in NLTS, there needs to be a balance if I don't want to turn the story into one giant downer). For me, the crux of their dynamic lies in one of Astarion's first descriptions of Cazador: a man obsessed with power -- not political power, but power over people.

Cazador might think of himself as rational and in control of his own actions and passions -- a lot of abusers will tell you that they're just being logical, you're the one bringing your emotions into everything -- but in reality, he is obsessed with his control over Astarion. When he feels like that control is being threatened, he sees it as a direct assault on his own self-image and power and masculinity, and he takes it out on Astarion to convince them both that Astarion still belongs to Cazador. I don't think Cazador wants Astarion's love, necessarily; I don't think he knows what love actually is, anymore. I think he wants Astarion's true submission -- and he's never going to get that, because Astarion obeys him out of fear, not trust, and trust is what submission actually requires. (As is choice, which is also a thing that Cazador does not and will not give Astarion.) Basically, the closer Wyll and Astarion get, the more Cazador gets caught up in these dominance games, and those are ultimately him pissing on a lamppost rather than him accomplishing anything.

And I do write him as fixated on Astarion to a degree that he isn't with the other spawn. He doesn't really care about Dalyria taking Branwyn as a lover, for example, because whether rightly or wrongly, he doesn't perceive that as a threat to his control over her (or as a threat to his own self-image); he could tell her to stop, and she would, without him needing to compel her obedience. But Cazador doesn't feel as secure of his ownership over Astarion, for good reason, and that plus his sexual obsession makes him act Totally Normal about all this.

In NLTS, Cazador is, generally, not reacting to what Wyll and/or Astarion are actually doing. He's reacting to perceived threats to his ego, whether or not those threats have any basis in reality. Cazador breaks Astarion's rib because he wants to break Astarion's rib. It's not even sensible as a punishment, but it makes Cazador feel powerful, and it makes Astarion feel worthless. As I mentioned in an earlier post, he makes Wyll's gift to Astarion all about himself instead because it's a way of soothing his ego, and because, at that point, he's still thinking of Wyll as an easily-controlled dupe. Things change once Wyll duels Lord Andoril -- Cazador's proxy and mouthpiece -- over Astarion, and wins. It doesn't matter what Astarion did or didn't do. It matters that, to Cazador, someone publicly challenged his ownership of Astarion and got away with it, and Wyll is the kind of threat that (at this point) Cazador can't simply have killed and be done with it. The fallout for Cazador's business prospects isn't great, sure, but it's also not really what he cares about most. But really, the thing most getting in the way of Cazador's political ambitions in this story is...Cazador himself. Even if he'd tell you otherwise, because Cazador's not exactly self-aware.

This is also the point where Cazador being low-key annoyed that Wyll wants Astarion for something other than his body turns into Cazador becoming Big Mad about that fact, because Cazador cannot handle the idea of Wyll laying claim to some part of Astarion that he himself doesn't have access to. (Yes, this is a really fucked-up way for him to frame the fact that Wyll, you know, sees and values Astarion as a person. But well, Astarion is not and never has been a person to Cazador.) On some level, Cazador isn't wrong about this, either -- Wyll genuinely is a threat to his control over Astarion. But because Cazador is a petty, jealous little tyrant of a man who doesn't understand love, he catalogues this threat as Astarion offering his submission to another man. Astarion having his own autonomous wants and desires is, obviously, not something that crosses his mind. When Wyll is exiled, Cazador fully gives himself over to his inner green-eyed monster, and abandons all pretense of self-control or calculation. Cazador forcing Astarion to enjoy -- or well, take physical pleasure in -- his own rape is, among other things, Cazador trying to brute-force Astarion's submission.

The thing about power and control relationships is that the abuser never really feels secure in them. Nothing is ever good enough; everything can become a new ego threat. Cazador is alone, and he's miserable, and really, he's made himself that way.

One commenter really hit the nail on the head in Chapter 14: I was like "oh now wyll won't be a useful political tool," as if Cazador was some kind of evil political mastermind, rather than an evil horrible monster. There is, indeed, an evil political mastermind in NLTS -- but it's Enver Gortash, not Cazador Szarr. Gortash does more in half a chapter than Cazador does in basically the entire fic. In NLTS, Cazador is not a monster because he's a powerful and terrifying supernatural being -- although he is also that. He's a monster because he's a jealous tyrant who can't see past the tip of his own nose. And honestly, I think that makes for a scarier villain.

#the ask and the answer #butnodamage #nothing like the sun #cw for frank discussion of ipv dynamics - although i think the nature of the ask itself makes that fairly clear #this post was more draining to write than i expected but it is also full of things that i very much want to say #and now i'll hop off my soapbox

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angorwhosebabyisthis · 3 months

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there are a lot of reasons i'm really, really impressed by how well sdmi portrayed the dynamic of an abusive relationship with pericles and ricky, and one of the big ones is how accurately they show what it looks like when abuse starts to escalate.

the extent of that is yet another thing that'll take a longpost of its own to go into, because it spans like.... the entire arc of their relationship in the show. but one thing that stands out to me in particular is their portrayal of the massive red flag that is a partner trotting out bigoted behavior against a group you're in. especially insults, and especially directed right at you.

this show has a LOT of fatphobia, jesus christ does it ever, and there are certainly some fatphobic tropes going on with ricky; but i've always been surprised and impressed by how many of the nastier ones they avoided, especially considering his role in the story and what his arc is about.

he is a major, nuanced character whose trauma is treated with full weight and sincerity. it's implied that his body type changed the way it did due to the trauma he went through when he was younger, and the ensuing mental illness, which is a pretty realistic experience for a lot of people. the things that happen to him are played for full tragedy and horror, when it would have been so, so easy for them to make light of it because Tee Hee Fat Guy and Tee Hee Male Abuse Victims Funnee. despite how his whole thing involves corporate greed, they don't go the route of portraying him as Gluttonous and Hedonistic; if anything he is very obviously not using all that money for even basic physical self-care, and the only time we ever see him eating anything it's when he's drinking wine grape juice with pericles. which, like, there's issues to be unpacked with that too, but jesus christ it's an improvement over what usually happens with characters like him.

he's a fat queer man who isn't degendered or made feminine in a mocking and/or predatory way. (there's nothing wrong with feminine fat queer men and they need more non-shitty rep, please and thank you god, but there is a lot of nastiness in the tropes they're often used for in mainstream media, and one of those tropes is when people consider 'fat queer man' and 'masc' to be oxymorons.) no one ever once calls him ugly; if anything multiple people in his life think he's attractive and desirable, for better or for worse. no one body-shames him. and no one ever mentions his weight.

except pericles.

'The Horrible Herd' and 'The Devouring' are two halves of a whole here, re: escalation of abuse. 'Devouring' is when the abuser goes full mask off and shit hits the fan; 'Horrible Herd' is the wind-up before the punch. HH is when ricky realizes things are getting Bad and he needs to put a stop to this now, and Devouring shows what happens when he tries, because by the point where it's gotten bad enough to give him a wakeup call it's already too late. it's how abusive relationships tend to go, and it's chillingly accurate.

and what's one of the things pericles says during Horrible Herd when that punch is winding up? something no one's ever said before now, including him? 'you pudding-faced dummkopf.'

he body-shames him. he insults his weight, and that's a major turning point. bigotry is something that's often there to some degree from the start, but not always, because some abusers are good at hiding things like that until they're confident they've got you where they want you. the message with ricky and pericles is loud and clear: when this happens, the walls are dripping blood. get out.

(if you can. and be careful when you try.)

when this show is good, it is really, truly good. god damn.

#sdmi #scooby doo: mystery incorporated #ricky owens #professor pericles #pericky #abuse cw #fatphobia cw #domestic violence cw #i am just consistently fucking blown away by what fantastic SA/DV survivor representation ricky is #i have no idea how he ended up where he did; especially with how godfuckingawful their *other* portrayals of IPV are; and just. wow.#he is incredibly important to me and i love him with my whole heart #also; to be very and extremely clear; i do not say he's queer as a headcanon or because he feels like he has Vibes #he is quite literally one of the two most blatantly thread-away-from-textually-explicit queer characters in the show #a show that is famous for *velma and marcie.* that is *saying something.*#and the other most blatantly queer character in the show is pericles #and they are mutually *why the other one is queer-coded*#ricky is a fat canonically bisexual man and he is an abuse survivor whose story is treated with respect and that is just. so much.#and that is why i am insistent that people do not ever ever tag my posts about them with 'not ship'#you don't have to ship them yourself to acknowledge that they're a thing and that matters; and discuss it #but like. don't. do not. do not ever try to cut ricky being canonically queer or a DV survivor off of anything that i post. thanks #SDMItag #dyn: when i die i want you to die too

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beulahsapphire · 1 year

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This is my wife’s childhood friend, Talia Petoia.

On the night of March 10, 2023, Talia was shot in the chest by her abusive boyfriend, Tyler Laughter, who claims the incident happened while he was cleaning his gun. Talia was rushed to the hospital, but the doctors couldn’t save her; she died that night.

One week later, before the autopsy was even completed, Tyler was charged - with involuntary manslaughter. He was put in jail on a $20k bond, only 10% of which needed to be paid to bail him out. He was free within hours, having not spent a single night in jail.

There’s been very little media about this case, despite the best efforts of Talia’s friends and family. In fact, when Talia’s mother contacted a reporter at a local news station several days after the shooting to ask why there had been no coverage yet, she was informed that the station had reached out to the sheriff’s office about Talia’s death only to be told that it was an accident and that there was “nothing to report.”

We’ve been calling the DA to encourage him to escalate this case to the SBI, given the seeming lack of care given to it by local authorities and the fact that the chief deputy is related to the shooter, but so far, no progress has been made.

There’s a lot of other fucked up shit going on with this case - more than I can type in one post - but suffice to say that Tyler Laughter is a dangerous man. Talia was not the first woman he abused - more have come forward in the last few weeks - and I’m afraid that that she won’t be that last.

Ways to help, for those who are interested:

Talia’s family started a fundraiser to higher private investigators and cover legal fees. Any leftover after meeting those goals will go to a scholarship in her name.

Contact the DA. Voicemails left after hours and emails are good too, if you don’t want to actually talk.

Even just reblogging this post and/or interacting with the other social media pages and hashtags we’ve created for this helps. We’re still asking the authorities to do the right thing and give this case the attention it deserves, but if they won’t do what we ask, we want to embarrass them into acting. Make this case such a big deal and so widely known that they are shamed into doing their jobs.

Linktree with the fundraiser, contact info/scripts for the DA, and other social media HERE.

#police corruption #justice #intimate partner violence #justicefortaliapetoia #wearpinkfortalia #probably no one will see this #but i have to try #cw: death #cw: dv #cw: ipv #update: fuck it i’m blazing it

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lucysweatslove · 10 months

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TW/Content warning re: domestic violence, IPV, questioning. May be v. triggering for victims/survivors of DV and IPV especially those who were not believed. (btw it is NOT about me directly; I am in a loving and generally healthy relationship and I have never personally experienced DV (as a side-side note, one of my best friends has, we helped her get out))

So. My sister is visiting my parents atm. My mom's family reunion thing is going on rn and my sis drove up to attend. (I have just barely started to feel like Me again after Rural Site Adventure, hence opting out).

Background, p 1: my family has a fam friend we'll call N. N was a past student of my mom's, I think potentially a past client but I can't fully remember the story there. She is "in between" my parents' age and mine/my sister's- I'm not sure if she's technically a young Gen X or an older Millennial, but just to give some context regarding age. My family gave her a lot of support when she was getting her life set up, including financial support in the form of interest-free loans. When my little sis was tiny (she is very much Gen Z, still in high school), N lived with us and would help out a ton around the house, with child care, even doing things like chaperoning my dates when I was in high school. There was a bit of a blow-up idk how long ago where my mom felt like N was mothering my little sis too much and boundaries were getting mixed up, and then idk when but then they made up. I've been mostly out of the house for 12 years and totally living away from them for like 9 years, so I don't remember a lot of the specifics.

Background, p 2: My parents' relationship is not great. The gist is: a lot of infidelity from dad and my mom has a lot of emotional lability for as long as I can remember. She can get pretty mean and is prone to a lot of emotional manipulation and tactics like gaslighting, goalpost-moving, triangulation with me + my older sis, guilt-tripping, diminishing others' experiences... i mean we all do these things from time to time, but she does them very often and only on the VERY rare occasion does she take responsibility (I am not saying my dad's infidelity was caused by my mom's emotional lability or that it set off the emotional lability, and I'm not excusing anybody's behaviors; I think all of this is super multi-factorial). Early on when I was in college, before I really knew much, my dad sat us all down (with my mom, after talking with her) and confessed to his infidelity + said he was considering divorcing mom to be with the woman he was cheating with. I laid into him basically saying that running away from all of us wouldn't solve whatever lead to his cheating and make him happy. He already is once divorced (idk why/what happened with his prior marriage, he hadn't yet met my mom even so that wasn't it). I told him maybe he needs to figure out what HE needs to change rather than flitting around from person to person hoping it'll work out. He decided to stay, they went to therapy, there have been no signs of further incidence (not that it's impossible, but my mom also monitors everything his does including his whereabouts via his phone 24/7). Though my mom will say she's forgiven him, she doesn't act like it- and I get trust has been broken, but it extends further to like, financial control, eg, refusing to let my dad who is actually considered elderly now retire, won't let him buy a new speaker system while my mom takes multiple long international trips. And my parents are well-off. They have the money for all of that.

Okay now the issue.

Apparently N was talking with my sister and mentioned something about Mom and domestic violence. My sis asked if I've ever heard any of their issues phrased like that- and no, never. That alone doesn't mean much - although my mom has called BOTH of us in tearful crisis-mode before and has shared more than I think is appropriate, DV is like the one thing many victims/survivors hide and never actually speak up about.

But... my mom is not shy with her body around any of us. Not a nudist, but has no issue changing while talking with us, going to the bathroom with doors open. She has never "hidden" her body in any way at home. She will hide sometimes (choosing baggier clothing, longer sleeves or lengths) when she is out in public, but I think this is partly Mormon modesty and partly body image issues, as again, she has never taken any precautions to hide her body around us kids. In all my memorable life, I have never not once seen unexplained injuries on my mom. I have seen a few small bruises on legs or arms and not known exactly where they have come- but honestly, I would see them after she was doing manual type labor like moving wood, working outside, reorganizing the pantry, moving heavy furniture... and never bruises in a weird pattern or suspicious location, never multiple bruises in different stages of healing.

I also don't sleep well and often don't have a good 24 hr sleep cycle. I don't think I'm non-24, but my sleep/wake cycles are highly variable. My little sister would have night terrors, too, and wake up from them not remembering but also needing help settling back to bed (she would come and get me or ask to sleep in my room frequently). Since I was the only other person upstairs, I stayed up to listen for her terrors so I could be there when she woke up and she wouldn't have to toddle around to find support. This means that during middle school and all throughout high school, I very rarely slept throughout the night. This also means I heard many many many fights between my parents. I have also quietly tiptoed down the stairs to see what tf was going on more times than I can count. I have never seen any signs of physical aggression from my father in these arguments. Definitely both sides are v guilty of emotional and verbal abuse, which is still abuse and is still a problem. I'm just saying I have never seen outward aggression (hitting, punching, kicking, flailing, throwing anything at all, breaking anything, etc) nor have I seen posturing or yelling. More times than not, if somebody even raised their voice, it was my mom.

When I was a child and spanking was still a think "experts" recommended (apparently), my mom would tell my dad to spank me for a punishment, and my dad couldn't do it and would pretend- he would whisper to me that he was going to put his hand palm-up and smack his own hand so it "looked" real if my mom was watching, and I was to scream and cry so it sounded real.

My dad was a vet before he was a psychiatrist. He left vet medicine in part because he was so sad every time he had to put down an animal, or see animals being mistreated. We had many animals growing up from dogs to hamsters and rats and guinea pigs to horses and bird and fish and cats. 0 signs of aggression with them- the worst thing is when he's really mad because a dog went potty in the house he'd get kinda gruff and grumble and swear.

This does not mean that my dad cannot ever be aggressive, or has not ever been aggressive. This does not mean that when I'm not around he acts the same way. I'm not saying it is impossible, or that my mom is definitely lying or "lying by omission" and hinting that the verbal abuse has extended to physical abuse too. I'm not saying things haven't been hidden from me.

I'm just saying... in my nearly 3 decades of life, I have not once seen my dad be truly aggressive. Even while drunk- he's not aggressive, he gets giggly and silly and then tired and falls asleep. My sisters (both of them) have not seen anything, any signs. Even looking back retroactively- nothing that we can say "omg maybe that was a sign we missed." In the patterns I've seen, including where my parents don't know I'm witnessing it, my dad is a huge pushover and my mom will show more signs of anger and aggression. I am getting weird vibes from all of this, and I'm legitimately concerned about why my mom is saying / insinuating these things.

Edit bc I forgot a part that I wanted to share but got too distracted.

My mom also has had some health stuff. She has MGUS which is kinda like a blood pre-cancer, specifically for her it’s like pre-multiple myeloma, but progression is slow and prognosis is overall good. But, this was discovered during workup for pernicious anemia. There’s no real known time frame for how long she had pernicious anemia. B12 deficiency (a main cause of pernicious anemia) can lead to a host of psych stuff including cognitive slowing, confusion, changes in memory, depression, and sometimes even delirium or acute psychosis. She did do B12 shots but it’s been a while since she’s done them, I think. But during that time, her memories were WEIRD. Like she would mix up things between us kids frequently, invent random and totally benign memories (she was convinced I not only ran track in 4th/ 5th grade but was really good at it, when reality was I tried to get out of running in PE because it hurt my throat/burned to breathe while running).

When she was a child, there was also possibly some DV in the home? It’s kind of unclear what exactly happened, but it’s a real possibility. My granny had some form of psychosis at one point- again not sure exactly because this was a long time ago (my mom’s a boomer) but I was told had a gyn condition that would cause her hallucinate/send her into an acute psychotic state, and once she had a hysterectomy, she was better. There was speculation it was ovarian cysts (per my mother; also, not PCOS) but never a confirmation. I have had a burst ovarian cyst that sent me to the hospital and I thought I was dying from the pain, but no psychosis. Anyway. My sis and I wonder if she had a teratoma and had autoimmune encephalopathy.

The point tho, my granny would hallucinate something like dishes in the sink and tell my mom to do them, but there wouldn’t be any dishes to do. So then granny would think she was blatantly disobedient, and punishment back then sometimes was corporal. I don’t have details from my mom, so I don’t know what happened, but we now know that any corporal punishment is detrimental and essentially DV, so regardless of how far it went, it’s problematic.

So, what I’m getting at: my mom has historically had B12 deficiency bad enough to have serious pernicious anemia, and my sis and I noticed a major cognitive shift around that time. She would mix up memories all the time. Since she’s had it before, she could develop it again. And that could lead to increased irritability, cognitive change, MEMORY issues. And she likely has very real DV memories.

Me, wanting to see best in everybody bc I’m just the perfect picture of an optimist (sarcasm), wonders: what if my mom currently has pernicious anemia and B12 deficiency again to the point her memory and cognition are all kinds of messed up, and she’s confusing her real memories from her childhood with my dad? Especially if the same feelings (eg powerlessness) came up.

#cw domestic abuse #cw domestic violence #cw dv #cw ipv

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that-gay-jedi · 2 months

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No glory to the slain. I told my killer she was gentle,

beaten blue and red I claimed it as a kiss.

All the brutal lovers whose secrets I kept

like bruises under armour

added my forbearance to the tips of their spears.

Should've made a scene, but held my tongue.

I'll never know who I could've spared.

So when the silence of the strengthless dead

steals over me for the last time,

I won't be able to count the ghosts.

No pride in scars, no glory to the slain,

no valour in discretion.

#original poem #cw domestic violence #cw ipv

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spiteless-xo · 7 months

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I LOVED THIS CHAPTER JUST BC THEY ADMITTED THAT THEIR RELATIONSHIP WAS REALLY ABUSIVE 👏🏻

Fr, I study psychology and rn I'm studying a case of an abusive relationship and the similitudes made me go like "omg, just like Jean and Reader at tbaw 💀"

Anyways, I have a question hehe In the hypothetical case that Jean actually hitted reader or was about to, Reader would've forgiven him?

thank you so much, i'm glad you enjoyed it!!

oooo, thank you for asking!! putting under a cut because it's a sensitive topic

i really want to say that reader would leave the second jean laid a hand on her. that she would lose all built-up feelings for him in an instant and completely end their relationship... but i don't think she would

even though she's already starting to lose/question her feelings about jean, i think she's still stuck in this cycle of being desperate for his love and making excuses for his behaviour. even when he scared her in the current chapter, she apologized to him for reacting the way she did.

i think jean would hit her and she would be upset, but then she'd try to rationalize it as being a one-time thing. she'd know in her heart that what he did was wrong and so she'd keep it a secret. she wouldn't tell levi, not sasha, and omg DEFINITELY not eren.

there's that quote about frogs in pots. where if you put them in a pot of boiling water, they'll jump out, but if you put them in cool water and slowly increase the temperature, they won't realize what's happening until it's too late.

that's kinda what's happening with jean and reader. his behaviour has been slowly getting worse and worse and she's just getting used to it :( as sad as that is.

i think if he acted this way back when they first met, reader wouldn't have gotten a crush on him. she probably would've hated him.

hopefully, this will be jean's wake-up call to actually be better and change himself 🙏

#tiff.ask #brilium #tbaw.fic #aot #cw domestic abuse #cw ipv

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enby-axels · 2 years

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If Depp’s behavior was textbook abuser, Heard’s was textbook abuse victim. [...] In the final year of the relationship, a sort of learned helplessness took over. “I would try to stand up for myself,” she said. “I would push back, I would push him off of me. … I would yell at him and scream at him, I would call him ugly names.” [...] Every beat of Heard’s narrative — the honeymoon period, the relentless escalations, the day-one apologies followed by day-two denials — follows well-established patterns of interpersonal violence. Heard’s narrative also matches nearly all the available evidence — even the evidence against her.

- The bleak spectacle of the Amber Heard-Johnny Depp Trial

#i stand with amber heard #quotes #michael hobbes #abuse mention #rape mention #misogyny #cw ableist language #cw slurs #ipv

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aroadamparrish · 11 months

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i know its super old news at this point, but i’m just at a loss still.

someone published an article talking about their experience as a survivor of abuse— without mentioning their abuser’s name— and was put through a publicized defamation trial for it. so many people hungrily consumed the coverage like entertainment, not even thinking that maybe it’s fucked up to set a precedent that survivors should have to keep their abuse completely private, or expect to have all of the details of their private life put on trial in front of the entire world.

#i fee like the dep supporters get confused whenever misogyny or biphobia so i left those out here <3 get well soon #nat.txt #ipv #domestic abuse #abuse #abuse cw #i don’t really want this showing up in the tags but also dont want to have people accidentally get triggered so lmk 😬

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romancandlebyelliottsmith · 2 months

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cw: SA, $/h,

you know you did something fucked up and I made that abundantly clear to you. You had so many different opportunities to apologize or try and make it up to me, and what did you do? Not a goddamn thing. You have no fucking clue what I’ve been through because of you and you have no idea the way I used to think so highly of you. I would talk about what you did to people but then beg them to keep you in a good light because I thought you had some sort of semblance of good. But, that was all extremely wishful thinking. I have defended you in conversation, I have acknowledged your better traits, I have lied and covered for your ass. I’ve done this for years now. And only now, when you think you’ve “changed”, you come to me to apologize?

Firstly, if you didn’t want an actual relationship with me, you should’ve fucking said that so we could’ve avoided all of this to begin with. There are family members of mine who have passed away who knew about us and, as far as it can be considered, still do. I would’ve never agreed to do this if you never wanted a relationship with me. I’m not a quick fuck.

Second, even if you are sorry, it doesn’t change the fact that you have left a crater in your abscence. I have avoided Walmart like the plague for about two years now. I saw your best friend at Subway and almost threw up. I’ve seen him and his girlfriend at the fair and have hid from them. God fucking forbid I see your cousin in public. Any time I see someone who looks like you in public, I go into fight or flight mode. I’ve had people come up and ask about us and what happened when they have no fucking right to ever do that and I have resisted the urge to choke them the fuck out. When I go out and I see you pass by in public in your car (I always fucking know it’s you), it ruins my entire fucking day. You have no idea what you have done to me. What was a fun little month long fling for you has been a fucking nightmare for me for almost three fucking years. I hate sex. I hate intimacy of any extent. I have panic attacks regularly.

Third of all, my senior year was fucking terrible. When we went to our state competition, I was quite literally hallucinating and going through psychosis. I was arguing with my parents a lot. I had tried to kill myself twice and when I tried to tell you, someone I thought was a friend about it, you called me selfish. You want to know selfish? Breaking up with your girlfriend of two years, making a giant spectacle out of it for a girl you could barely stand for a month, cheating on her, dumping her for another girl, and THEN not only cheating on that girl too, but then fucking COMING BACK TO THE ORIGINAL GIRL YOU DUMPED YOUR GF FOR, saying some fuck shit about “YOU’RE SORRY”??? Have you even apologized to your ex? Where the fuck do you get off on this? What part of your brain makes this an okay thing to do? Why the fuck would you do this to me? Why would you do this to people who care about you? If I ever meet your ex, I’m going to fucking give her financial compensation for the shit you’ve put the both of us through.

Do you realize I missed the burial of my grandfather’s urn to hang out with you? The same burial that had been put off for 3 years because the ground was frozen and because of Covid? The same fucking grandfather who died on what would’ve been our one month anniversary? Do you ever see something that reminds you of me? Not just, “Oh, that’s kind of like Kyle”. Something that just immediately takes you back to that time. It happens to me every single fucking day. I was getting to a point where I was getting better and was starting to move on. But, guess what happened! You got bored of whatever girl you’ve been leading on this month and you went through your back catalogue of manipulation and thought, “Oh, it was only a month long thing. Maybe if I bat my eyes enough and feign sympathy enough, maybe she’ll let me fuck!”

No. That’s not how this going to go. You had every opportunity to man the fuck up and grow a pair and apologize. This shit may not mean anything to you but it’s meant so fucking much to me. There’s no point in going everything you’ve done wrong because I know it wouldn’t matter to you. You’re not going to ever fucking care. I have tried to show nothing but patience and compassion and sympathy towards you. And what did that get me? Trauma that is going to follow me for the rest of my life. It has gotten me fired from places. It has ruined my friendships, my relationships, my outlook on life, my state of mind, my fucking everything. But, I’m so so so sorry you think you’ve changed enough to deserve any sort of sympathy on my half. If I ever see you again, I will fucking kill you.

#do not reblog #kyle vent #actually ptsd #actually traumatized #post traumatic stress disorder #ptsd #trauma survivor #intimate partner abuse #intimate partner violence #ipv awareness #abuse mention #cw s/h mention #cw abuse #cw sa #cw sui mention #vent blog #reblogs

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