Over the approaching days, there will probably 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 costs and intercourse trafficking. And social media will fill with memes, outrage, and scorching takes about superstar privilege, race, and misogyny.
Some will name the partial conviction a victory for survivors. Others will say he received off simple. 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 greater ideological and cultural backdrop right here that shapes how a case like this will get prosecuted, adjudicated, and acquired.
We live via an period of response in opposition to 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 Courtroom 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 price. 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 in opposition to highly effective males. Cosby was freed on a technicality regardless of dozens of ladies accusing him of assault, highlighting how even convictions will 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 sort of closing chapter, leaving the community of shoppers untouched. In the meantime, states cross 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 usually excused or minimized on the highest ranges of energy, juries and the general public grow to be conditioned to see these crimes as murky, negotiable, and even inevitable.
Jurors could hesitate to impose the harshest doable 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 arduous ethical traces, and an inclination to downgrade even severe crimes to one thing extra socially acceptable, like “dangerous habits,” “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 tougher to safe the sort 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 strong media mogul on intercourse trafficking and sending him to jail for all times would have been about greater than punishing one superstar. It will have been an unambiguous assertion that girls’s sexual autonomy issues, that compelled or coerced intercourse just isn’t merely “transactional,” and that the state will intervene to defend girls from male sexual entitlement.
However that’s exactly the sort of ethical stance that’s beneath assault on this period and ladies’s resistance is a risk to social order.
In that world, handing down a life sentence for intercourse trafficking in opposition to an ultra-rich, related, male superstar, particularly one who also can declare racial focusing on, could be greater than punishing Diddy. The racial dynamics listed below are advanced. Whereas Black males are disproportionately criminalized, that reality also can grow to be a defend for rich Black celebrities going through sexual abuse claims.
It will set a precedent.
It will say: The state is keen to outline this habits as past the pale. It’s keen to guard girls’s autonomy and dignity in opposition to male energy, even essentially the most elite male energy, no matter race.
That may be a harmful precedent for a system transferring within the different path.
As a result of the rise of a Gilead-like social order will depend on 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 will be a declaration of values that the system presently refuses to make.
So even when the jury isn’t consciously pondering: Now we 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 holding the door open for sexual exploitation, compelled delivery, and male sexual dominance.
Diddy’s conviction on the lesser costs was, in some ways, a political dodge.
It permits the justice system to assert it held a strong 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 rigorously averted.
By convicting him just for transporting girls for prostitution, the jury avoids making the daring ethical and authorized assertion that his actions had 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 will depend on 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.
SEE ALSO:
Sean Combs Acquitted Of Most Critical Expenses
Why Sean Combs Was By no means Going To Be Absolutely Held Accountable [Op-Ed]
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