Diddy, Cassie and the Allure of Victim Blaming

Earlier this month, when I searched on TikTok for Casandra (Cassie) Ventura’s testimony in the federal sex trafficking trial against Sean Combs, one of the first autocomplete suggestions was “cassie is a liar diddy.”

Ventura is not on trial. She is considered to be the government’s star witness in the racketeering conspiracy case against Combs. There are many other high-profile witnesses who testified to Combs’s violence, including the rapper Kid Cudi, who briefly dated Ventura, and Dawn Richard, who is a former member of the group Danity Kane. The entire world saw hotel surveillance video depicting Combs physically assaulting Ventura that was obtained by CNN, and Combs paid Ventura an eight-figure settlement after she sued him for sex trafficking and sexual assault in 2023.

Ventura would seem to be a trustworthy witness to her own experience. Yet social media commentators have been trying to undermine public support for her and, by extension, cast doubt on the question of Combs’s culpability. These influencers tend to present some of Ventura’s comments to Combs out of the larger context of his alleged abuse, preying on a public that is poorly informed about sexual assault and domestic violence.

During cross-examination, Combs’s lawyers had Ventura read text messages where she seemed to be responding enthusiastically to some sexual encounters that Combs planned. But Ventura testified that she felt coerced into this behavior, and it would make sense that she was trying to placate him; for example, she said that Combs threatened to release videos he recorded of their sex acts if she refused his demands.

Combs’s defenders do not seem to care about this context. For example, on X, Andrew Tate, the manosophere influencer who has over 10 million followers and whose tagline is “I think women are dumb,” called Ventura a gendered slur, went after her husband and claimed, “No victims. Only volunteers.” (British prosecutors authorized 10 charges, including rape and human trafficking, against Tate this week, adding to his international legal troubles.)

The basic line from most of the anti-Cassie content is that maybe she was beaten up — they have to concede that because of the hotel video — but she’s lying about the rest of it, because she’s a vindictive, bitter, money-grubbing ex trying to bring a successful man down.

This cultural playbook is called DARVO, a term coined by the psychologist Jennifer Freyd, which stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, said Kat Tenbarge, who writes the newsletter Spitfire and has spent years covering how the internet responds to accusations of abuse. (This is also a tactic used by individual abusers toward their victims.) Often the alleged victim is treated as the greater monster, Tenbarge explained, and the men who are accused of violence are painted as “the true victims who deserve some sort of restitution or justice through the system.”

Combs is not the only celebrity currently getting the kid-glove treatment by some. There’s a larger movement, led by the influencer Candace Owens, that’s attempting to snuff out the remaining embers of #MeToo and resurrect the reputation of the disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused by more than 90 women of sexual misconduct. Even at the height of the #MeToo movement, his accusers were attacked; as one of them, Louise Godbold, put it in Slate, they were “congratulated for our ‘courage’ while simultaneously lambasted for being ‘attention seekers,’ ‘gold diggers’ or downright liars.” Weinstein is back in the news because he is currently in the middle of a retrial for sex crime charges; a previous conviction was tossed out on a procedural issue.

There’s so much evidence that we’re in a moment of backlash against the progress of women and girls, and I wanted to find out if the general bashing of celebrities like Ventura and Weinstein’s alleged victims could have a chilling effect on everyday victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse.

Highly publicized trials like Ventura’s tend to show the insidious ways that abuse can work, and ideally provide victims with a narrative that may help them feel less ashamed. But when women like Cassie are vilified it can cause the opposite reaction, driving victims deeper into hiding. Would they be less likely to report their victimization to the police, because they fear they would not be believed, or that their accusations would be weaponized against them?

It turns out that question is impossible to answer with fresh data, because the statistics on sexual violence in the United States are so poorly kept in the first place. That’s because our society cares so little about the victims of rape, we can’t be bothered to keep track of it.

The most recent version of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is from 2016-17, which was eons ago in internet time. It’s also very difficult to track sexual assault allegations across the entire country because every state has different statutes that cover sex crimes, according to Megan Augustyn, an associate professor at Florida State’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice.

For a paper published in 2023, Augustyn and her co-authors looked at the terminology used in every state for the “primary — legally most severe — offense of sexual violence in legal statutes.” They found that nine different terms are used for the most severe offense of sexual violence, and less than half of states use the term “rape” to label that offense. The statutory definition of rape matters, the authors argue, because it shapes the public perception of the severity of the crime.

Augustyn said that in her experience working on a campus, students are perhaps more likely than they used to be to report sexual assault informally — they are more willing to tell a friend or a resident adviser what happened to them, because colleges have done a lot of educating in the past five or 10 years on consent and related issues. But when it comes to reporting sexual assault to the police or prosecutors, there’s still a great deal of reluctance, because victims are worried about being retraumatized, and they see what happens to accusers like Cassie as a cautionary tale.

Tenbarge said the chilling effect extends to social media creators who stand up for accusers like Ventura in these high-profile cases. Because so many platforms incentivize misogyny, “Those people have often endured so much online harassment. They have deleted their accounts, they’ve fled social media platforms, they’ve said less.”

Considering the voices aligned against her, Ventura, who was in her third trimester of pregnancy when she testified, showed remarkable fortitude in that courtroom, which could provide a counterweight to all the ugliness around her. “This week has been extremely challenging, but also remarkably empowering and healing for me,” Ventura said in a statement. “I hope that my testimony has given strength and a voice to other survivors, and can help others who have suffered to speak up and also heal from the abuse and fear.” I hope so, too.

End Notes

A feminist Trojan Horse: This sounds like a troll, but I really believe that the second season of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives” is the most subversively feminist show on television. (I wrote about the first season last fall.) Without too many spoilers: One of the characters finds out she is pregnant on camera, and she is very vocally ambivalent about this. Her marriage is not in a good place, and she bursts into tears when she sees two lines on her pregnancy test. In a broader society where the only acceptable response to pregnancy is unalloyed joy, seeing a woman have complicated feelings about it, especially when she’s enmeshed in a subculture that prizes motherhood above all, feels slyly revolutionary.
Up Schmidt’s Creek: I have been horrified to see the “super-skinny ideal” creep back into the mainstream over the past three years. For The Cut, E.J. Dickson went into one of the darker corners of thinfluencing by infiltrating The Skinni Société, a subscriber-only Instagram group run by an influencer named Liv Schmidt. Dickson revealed that the group included girls under 18, who were being encouraged to develop unhealthy, weight-obsessed behaviors. In response to Dickson’s exposé, Meta restricted Schmidt’s account to viewers over 18 and stopped allowing her to monetize her subscriptions.

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