How Diddy, Al Fayed, Pelicot and co. got away with it for so long
Who qualifies as a ‘monster’?
Big fat content warning: this article discusses sexual assault. It will not be suitable for all readers or listeners. If you are choosing to listen, an audio version (by me) is available below:
When you spend time in certain environments, either in real life or online, you can quickly become used to uncomfortable behaviours. Bit by bit, the scale of acceptability gets skewed until things you may have previously objected to or found offensive are normalised. For example, if I go on Twitter nowadays I expect to read abusive comments and be fed incredibly violent content. Par for the course! Standard stuff! What did you think would happen?
This normalisation of abuse is exactly how the conga line of rapists currently hogging the headlines managed to get away with their crimes for so long. The bar for acceptable behaviour in their weird little fiefdoms got lower and lower until ground penetrating radar was needed to find it. This enabled truly dark and twisted nightmare stuff to become everyday fare. Lalala, nothing to see here.
Yet those fiefdoms were only able to flourish because a baseline of abuse exists within ‘normal’ society. They don’t grow in a vacuum despite how desperately we’d like to believe they do.
Hands up who’s a monster
Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, Mohamad Al Fayed and Dominique Pelicot not only found willing participants in their alleged (yes, ‘alleged’ – I’m not getting sued) sexual abuse, but active enablers. People who turned a blind eye or who ensured things could not only continue but escalate.
Jimmy Savile, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, R Kelly, the Catholic Church… the list goes on and on. While it’s easy to label the main perpetrators as ‘monsters’ – a title that distances us everyday folk from their behaviour and so makes us feel safer – it’s far more difficult to categorise the hangers-on and facilitators.
The term ‘monster’ is bandied about whenever truly horrific crimes come to light. It allows us to think of these people and therefore their acts as deviant one-offs, in other words: not like us. Yet, do they only become monsters after they’re caught, when the harsh spotlight of the outside world has illuminated their grubby lives and an avalanche of public disgust has poured in, or were they also monsters while committing their crimes? If so, how was it possible for people to know about it, justify it and conceal it?
‘Monster’ allows us to eschew all nuance and point the finger of blame squarely at an instigator or figurehead. It also partly exonerates them – monsters can’t help themselves. It’s an easy out that lets all of us feel better and safer. Yet it’s not the whole story.
It’s time to acknowledge that far from being one-offs or the work of aberrant evil mavericks, abuse cases like these are much more common than we care to admit and involve far more people.
A convicted sexual predator may become president
Crimes of this nature are not the sole preserve of billionaires or the professionally powerful (although it really does help in getting away with it). They’re also not only rooted in misogyny – homophobia, transphobia and racism all get a look in. Hurray!
There are skewed worlds being created everywhere, especially online, and those who are building them, those who are enabling them, and those who are following them are not all monsters. Look at Donald Trump: a convicted sexual predator who may become president (again). Are the millions of people who support him all monsters? No. But casual sexual abuse is being normalised and going mainstream (hello, Andrew Tate) encouraging people to believe that it’s okay.
The environments where the extremes of this behaviour are accepted can only exist because institutions and entrenched societal belief systems allow them to. How did Diddy get away with it for so long? Because there is an expectation in the music industry that young wannabe stars have to put out and shut up in order to progress. It’s the same casting couch bullshit that Harvey Weinstein made the most of for decades. This expectation that certain people must accept a baseline of abuse as standard is ingrained across all sectors of society. The only truly shocking thing about the Diddy and Weinstein cases is the sheer number of people involved and the fact that both the accused and many of the accusers are famous.
But make no mistake, this shit is endemic in ‘normal’ life too.
It’s the dude next door
Take the Dominique Pelicot case. The 71-year-old former electrician drugged and raped his wife, Gisèle, hundreds of times over the course of a decade while she was unconscious. Monster! (The papers even call him ‘The Monster of Avignon’.) Let’s brand him a nutter, lock him up and wash our hands of him.
Hmm…but what about the more than 80 strangers who also took part in the abuse?
From the videos that Pelicot made of these assaults (yes, he filmed it all), police were able to identify 50 of the men who’d answered Pelicot’s invitation to rape his wife via a chatroom he’d set up called ‘Against Her Knowledge’. Nice! Their ages ranged from 26 to 74 and their professions included fire officer, nurse, journalist and prison warden. Some were married and had kids. One admitted he went because he had nothing else to do on New Year’s Eve. Few of them would fit the stereotype of the classic ‘monster’: a loner living in a basement wearing their dead mum’s clothes.
Some defended themselves by saying they thought it was a consensual game between the couple, but several conceded that even then (and please note again the name of the chatroom where these men all met) they still should have sought Gisèle’s consent.
At least 30 men on the videos remain unidentified meaning they’re freely wandering about high-fiving their pals and playing cards. How do they justify what they did?
Same question goes for the doctors who agreed to enforce invasive medical exams (including ‘purity’ tests) on women and girls applying to work in Harrods. Why did they think a shoe salesperson would need to be a virgin or have a clean bill of sexual health? How about the lawyers or security personnel who successfully hid the CCTV footage of Diddy assaulting his then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in a hotel hallway in 2016?
What about the drivers, dealers, colleagues, family and friends? Sure, some people must have wanted to speak up but were blackmailed or threatened, but how about those that weren’t and just went along with it because ‘that’s how it is’?
The spirals of complicity in these cases expand like ripples in a swamp which means there’s either a hell of a lot of monsters in our midst or a hell of a lot of people inhabiting environments where abuse had become normalised.
These crimes continued for so long because of systemic prejudice, imbalances of power and a sense of entitlement by the main players. All of these criminals were hiding in plain sight so it’s a bit rich now for everyone to grab their pitchforks. It is in a lot of powerful people’s best interests that we keep labelling these abusers as ‘monsters’ rather than trying to unpick the deep-rooted issues that allow them to get away with it.
It’s in our best interests that we see abuse for what it is: inevitable if these wider issues aren’t addressed.
Just One More Thing
Marina Hyde wrote a great piece on the ‘enforcers, concealers, NDA experts and crisis PRs’ who enabled Diddy and Al Fayed, saying they were part of a ‘sex-case industrial complex’. She concluded that “we still live in a world of powerful men’s Neverlands” and that their ‘corrupt society’ only comes into contact with ‘actual society’ every so often. I agree. However, I think it’s important to acknowledge that abuse isn’t only the preserve of powerful men and is not only propagated by people who believe they’re somehow absolved from the rules and boundaries of ‘actual society’. This shit is everywhere and it’s the erosion of the rules and boundaries within ‘actual society’ that enables it.
Women’s rights are being dismantled and LGBTQ+ protection laws are being overturned, leading to more inequality and abuse – physical, mental, political, geographical and medical. People are voting for this. Diddy, Al Fayed, Pelicot and co. are symptoms of a larger illness that is clearly contagious. Let’s stop clutching our pearls and pretending we’re shocked.
(Huge hats off to all the survivors who reported this abuse. An incredibly brave and game-changing thing to do. You deserve everyone’s respect and awe.)
*Exceedingly modest reminder that I have written eight bestselling mental-health books which have been translated into at least 10 languages. I’ve also written a book about the TV show Friends which would make a delightful gift for any Friends obsessives. All are available to buy online or at your local bookshop.