On this episode of the en(gender)ed, I am responding to the flurry of attacks I received from publishing Jessica Ingels’ #SurvivorStories series episode last week. 

Here is the transcript to this episode:

Greetings listeners, survivors, advocates and allies:

I am launching this episode as a follow up to our series on the weaponization of motherhood.  In our last episode in that series, Episode 69, a survivor story, we spoke with Jessica Ingels whose abuser was granted custody of her daughter, with whom she has no contact. Due to my managing my own abuser’s tactics, I wasn’t able to actively promote this episode last week, yet somehow, the survivor’s abuser found out about the interview and almost immediately, through his sister, aunt, and girlfriend, began an online harassment and disinformation campaign against me, in an attempt to damage my reputation and business. This is what abusers do—they attack and intimidate or threaten anyone who stands by the survivor, both to isolate the survivor and to exert their power and control and domination over others who dare to expose the truth about them.

Asking your friends and family to retaliate against allies of the victim and survivor is an abuser tactic straight out of the Mens Rights Activists, Fathers Rights Supremacists playbook.  It is meant to discredit the victim’s claims of abuse as part of a larger disinformation campaign, which Professor Joan Meier of Episode 9, whose research is mentioned repeatedly throughout our series, identifies the ways in which women survivors are disbelieved by the system, discriminated against, and retaliated against for speaking the truth about the abuse they experience.  

It is not unlike what Harvey Weinstein allegedly did by hiring Israeli intelligence officers to find ‘dirt’ on his sexual assault and rape ‘accusers’ in order to intimidate them, silence them, or coerce them into a financial settlement.  It is also a tactic not unlike what the current administration has been doing for the past three years–a form of gaslighting where those attempting to exert power and control over you, make claims that facts than can be verified with documents and witnesses (such as arrest records, orders of protection, convictions, violations, affidavits) and what was witnessed by your own eyes and ears– are untrue.  

Through their disinformation campaign, abusers replace facts with fiction and their propaganda, and effectively pollute our public discourse and ethical standards.  The father’s supremacists have for decades invaded the family courts across the globe, with a disinformation campaign that legitimate claims of abuse and trauma responses to that abuse are somehow the mother/victim “alienating” the child against the father.  They have weaponized the family courts so that a mother telling her child she misses her is seen as negative, manipulative, and worthy of shunning her from the child’s life, depriving both of safety and security and imprinting in them the higher risk of negative health outcomes throughout their lives.  

I hope you can take this opportunity to examine your own role in contributing to a culture where critical thinking and analysis, equality, justice, freedom from torment, surveillance, coercive control, and bias, can inform our public discourse that lead to changes in attitude, capacity, and action that will inform positive policy change and reform..  I believe strongly that sunlight is the best disinfectant to shining a light on how the systemic sexism and misogyny which disproportionately hurts women and the ways in which patriarchy hurts all of us. My hope is that these stories and interviews can serve as a blueprint for how each of us can be better allies and upstanders to abuse and abuse of power in our lives, how we can learn to listen and believe survivors, to stand up to bullying, intimidation, coercion, abuse and violence.  Please take this opportunity to share our podcast, rate and review it, and help us build a movement where we speak truth to power and collectively, end gender-based violence and oppression and build a world where every human can thrive and flourish.

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