Sean Combs was sentenced on Friday 3 October to more than four years in prison, having been convicted of transportation to engage in prostitution. It was the culmination of a tawdry and lengthy trial which revealed his longstanding practice of abusing women close to him. It’s a sentence which falls oddly flat, more than Combs and his defence seemed to anticipate. The sentence is not reflective of the broader significance of his misdeeds, as of course a sentence for a specific crime should not be. Although Combs was found guilty on two counts of transporting human beings for sex, he was found not guilty on more severe charges which were determined by whether women who participated in his infamous group-sex parties did so consensually. They said no, he said yes, and the jury accepted his defence.
The significance of this case lay not only in the downfall of a self-aggrandising mogul, nor even in the widely viewed, profoundly shocking video of Combs violently beating his then girlfriend Cassie in a public area of a hotel before dragging her around by her hair like a dog. These things are notable and repulsive in their own isolated right, but the trial and its coverage has also served as a touchstone to evaluate the dwindling aftermath of the MeToo movement.
Almost as quickly as it began, MeToo was being accused of redundancy and ephemerality, of being tone-deaf, or pointless, or a failure. This seems inevitable when you take an issue as ancient and pervasive as sexual abuse and try to concentrate it narrowly and in media-friendly packages. But in recent months, in the wake of an energised wave of public misogyny following the re-election of President Trump, the languishing success of the movement has become more obvious and more deflating to witness. For all the concern about the fates of men who might be wrongly accused, men who were verifiably proven to be aggressive misogynists rebounded from their troubles with ease.
In 2022 Johnny Depp won his case accusing Amber Heard of defamation – but two years previously he had lost when he sued the Sun for calling him a “wife-beater”, after a judge declared the claims were substantially true. His messages, revealed in the second case, and uncontested by Depp, joked about raping the burned corpse of his ex-wife. Depp’s career momentarily stalled, but no longer than an average A-lister’s random career break. Soon he was, and remains, back, starring in multiple major studio films this year. I am not saying it is wrong or right to employ Depp, only that the warnings of blacklisting simply did not come to pass. Still, Depp is angry and bitter about the movement. “I was like a crash test dummy for MeToo. It was before Harvey Weinstein. And I sponged it, took it all in… Better go woke!” he told a Sunday Times interviewer facetiously.
Combs, at the mercy of a judge, has taken responsibility for his violent behaviour, but frames it through the prism of his own redemption arc: (“I can’t change the past, but I can change the future. I know that God put me here to transform me.”) As so often in cases like this, the culpable man concedes that he has transgressed, but the focus is on him, his troubled path and what caused him to break, with scarce insight or interest into why it is women who must predominantly bear the brunt of their psychic trauma.
That the most famous victims of MeToo were usually reasonably rich did not make their suffering any less real or troubling, but it perhaps went against the cause. It was easy to glance at those women and think not, “If it can happen to them it can happen to anyone – and does,” but instead to see their extremely unusual privileges as a way to dismiss abuse, to handily consign it to a blip for the entertainment industry.
In a time of encroaching fascism, there is an urge to turn away from feminist causes because we have been taught that they are optional, an extravagance. The liberal columnist Ezra Klein recently said that states like Kansas should run pro-life Democrat candidates, a neat example of women being the first category to get thrown under the bus by male progressives who feel entitled to decide the hierarchy of harm. Those alienated by the excesses of identity politics often point to delusional Hollywood girlboss feminism as an example of its failures. They highlight the class of deprived white men who are enraged to be told they are privileged by the rich. But the common variety of domestic abuse has everything to do with economic deprivation. In our own communities such abuse often involves financial mistreatment or coercion, and is exacerbated by a lack of economic independence on the part of victims.
Recent cases, including that of Combs, have prompted confident declarations that MeToo failed. “Maybe MeToo is really dead”, one headline read; “The Diddy verdict is the latest gruesome marker of a post-MeToo era” said another – but the spectacle of celebrity court cases was never going to be the vehicle for meaningful change or justice. This is not to say the law is irrelevant; we need the law to enshrine the the right of women to exist in equality with men when it comes to employment, property ownership, suffrage and the equivalent protection from assault and rape in our homes which a stranger on the street enjoys. It’s often said that we must change attitudes rather than merely laws, and yet the fact remains you cannot mandate an attitude, while you can mandate a law.
There is a danger, though, in framing these most unusual cases as the death knell of a necessary social movement – the danger of enacting a kind of nominative determinism. It’s wrong to give succour to the reams of smirking misogynists who would welcome our hand wringing admission of failure. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t be honest about pervasive sexual violence – the author Chris Kraus has a line I often find myself recalling: “Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?” Rather we should consider that the tools of a morally vapid media and the judiciary – so limited and so crippled by its patriarchal origins – were not the required ones for the task at hand.
As with so much in contemporary life, our attention would be better rewarded if diverted away from the pageantry of wealth and fame and back toward the everyday, the community, the local. The substantial and lasting battles are and always were the ones in our own neighbourhoods, not on talk shows or whittled down to a pin worn by an actress on a red carpet. Once you start to look, you will find there are people there already doing the work. They are who we should look to now for stories of how change takes root.
[Further reading: Searching for London’s most performative male]
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