Over the approaching days, there can be no scarcity of commentary and debate concerning the split verdict within the Sean “Diddy” Combs case.
Cable information panels will argue over whether or not justice was served. Pundits will parse the distinction between prostitution prices and intercourse trafficking. And social media will fill with memes, outrage, and scorching takes about movie star privilege, race, and misogyny.
Some will name the partial conviction a victory for survivors. Others will say he received off straightforward. And a few of us will invoke Invoice Cosby and R. Kelly to say that wealthy Black males are all the time singled out for sexual crimes whereas white predators stroll free.
However there’s a a lot larger ideological and cultural backdrop right here that shapes how a case like this will get prosecuted, adjudicated, and acquired.
We live by means of an period of response towards girls’s rights and bodily autonomy. The final decade has seen the rolling again of Roe v. Wade, a fierce assault on contraception and gender-affirming care, and a mainstreaming of violent misogyny, from incel boards to the halls of presidency.
Recall that Supreme Court docket Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed regardless of credible allegations of sexual assault aired in nationally televised hearings. Our twice-impeached president, Donald Trump, was discovered answerable for sexual abuse and defamation in civil court docket, but pays virtually no political value. Harvey Weinstein could also be in jail, however numerous different high-profile sexual assault instances have led to acquittals or hung juries, from Invoice Cosby’s preliminary mistrial to Danny Masterson’s first trial, to the repeated failures to safe convictions towards highly effective males. Cosby was freed on a technicality regardless of dozens of girls accusing him of assault, highlighting how even convictions may be undone for highly effective males.
Even Jeffrey Epstein died earlier than going through a full trial, whereas Ghislaine Maxwell’s sentencing is handled as a type of closing chapter, leaving the community of purchasers untouched. In the meantime, states go forced-birth legal guidelines that deny even baby rape victims abortions, and on-line influencers monetize misogyny, normalizing harassment, coercion, and rape as male entitlement.
Taken collectively, all this produces a numbing impact.
When sexual violence is so widespread, so normalized, and so typically excused or minimized on the highest ranges of energy, juries and the general public turn out to be conditioned to see these crimes as murky, negotiable, and even inevitable.
Jurors might hesitate to impose the harshest attainable penalties, reasoning that if presidents, judges, and billionaires can skate by with little consequence, why ought to this man be singled out for all times in jail?
The sheer scale of impunity can breed a weary cynicism, a reluctance to attract laborious ethical traces, and an inclination to downgrade even critical crimes to one thing extra socially acceptable, like “dangerous conduct,” “transactional intercourse,” or “poor judgment.”
This isn’t an accident, however a part of a broader cultural challenge to guard male sexual entitlement whereas eroding girls’s autonomy and credibility. Within the courtroom, that cultural backdrop turns into an unstated protection, making it more durable to safe the type of verdict that will meaningfully problem the system itself.
This isn’t an accident or a glitch, however a part of a broader cultural challenge that protects male sexual entitlement whereas eroding girls’s autonomy, even changing into an unstated protection within the courtroom.
On this context, the period of MAGA, convicting a robust media mogul on intercourse trafficking and sending him to jail for all times would have been about greater than punishing one movie star. It might have been an unambiguous assertion that girls’s sexual autonomy issues, that pressured or coerced intercourse is just not merely “transactional,” and that the state will intervene to defend girls from male sexual entitlement.
However that’s exactly the type of ethical stance that’s below assault on this period and ladies’s resistance is a menace to social order.
In that world, handing down a life sentence for intercourse trafficking towards an ultra-rich, linked, male movie star, particularly one who may also declare racial focusing on, could be greater than punishing Diddy. The racial dynamics listed here are advanced. Whereas Black males are disproportionately criminalized, that reality may also turn out to be a protect for rich Black celebrities going through sexual abuse claims.
It might set a precedent.
It might say: The state is keen to outline this conduct as past the pale. It’s keen to guard girls’s autonomy and dignity towards male energy, even probably the most elite male energy, no matter race.
That could be a harmful precedent for a system transferring within the different course.
As a result of the rise of a Gilead-like social order is dependent upon blurring the traces round sexual coercion, on normalizing males’s proper to make use of girls’s our bodies, on criminalizing girls’s management over their very own copy, and on trivializing or excusing sexual violence as misunderstanding, remorse, or “transaction.”
A life sentence for intercourse trafficking wouldn’t simply punish Diddy. It might be a declaration of values that the system presently refuses to make.
So even when the jury isn’t consciously considering: We now have to guard Gilead, they’re steeped in a cultural logic that sees girls’s sexual victimization as negotiable, deniable, much less vital. Misplaced within the parsing of verdicts are the voices of the ladies who described coercion, concern, and degradation—whose experiences the system nonetheless struggles to call totally as trafficking.
And the authorized system displays and enforces that tradition. This isn’t nearly one man. It’s a couple of society that’s intentionally conserving the door open for sexual exploitation, pressured beginning, and male sexual dominance.
Diddy’s conviction on the lesser prices was, in some ways, a political dodge.
It permits the justice system to say it held a robust man accountable whereas sidestepping the much more disruptive verdict {that a} trafficking conspiracy conviction, and a possible life sentence, would have delivered. And past the courtroom, this compromise verdict teaches the general public the place the traces are drawn, and the place they’re fastidiously prevented.
By convicting him just for transporting girls for prostitution, the jury avoids making the daring ethical and authorized assertion that his actions have been organized, coercive exploitation deserving the label of trafficking. It’s a compromise verdict that satisfies requires some punishment with out threatening the social order that is dependent upon tolerating, excusing, and even monetizing males’s sexual entry to girls’s our bodies.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and writer of “Spare The Youngsters: Why Whupping Youngsters Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Youngsters In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
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