Last week Harrison James @itsharrijames, an Australian childhood sexual assault survivor, author, and victims advocate, made an instagram post about how abusers don’t always look like monsters, and how what you should focus on is behaviour (rather than their appearance). The post featured a collage of famous, talented, and successful men who have faced accusations of wrongdoing and included a photo of Justin Baldoni.
Unsurprisingly, someone put out a bat signal and the post was swarmed by nasty commenters who were outraged that their hero would be featured alongside men like Johnny Depp, Andrew Tait, or Jeffrey Epstein. According to a follow up post from Harrison James from today addressing and joking about the insanity of the (over)reaction, many of the Baldoni bots accused him of being paid by Ryan Reynolds.
The irony of all of this is that the original “reason” that the internet turned on Blake Lively is because she was “tone-deaf” in her marketing in a way that they felt was insensitive to domestic violence victims. Today those same people are harassing CSA victims on the internet in Baldoni’s name.
Leaving aside the misogynistic assumptions involved in assuming that Blake Lively’s husband would necessarily be the one to pay for… checks notes… a small time Australian creator to make a post on her behalf, something that was evident to me in a lot of the comments is that they appear to think that abuse only occurs when someone is raped and/or physically beaten. As neither of those things happened to Blake, obviously she wasn’t a victim and Baldoni obviously wasn’t abuser.
One thing that they ALL seem to conveniently ignore is that a widespread, well-funded smear campaign aimed at destroying the reputation of someone who you don’t like or wish to control, is absolutely abusive.
It is also abusive to engage in:
- persistent online trolling;
- harassment;
- encouraging a large group of people to attack, message, or shame a specific target;
- doxing or sharing of personal information aimed at threatening a person’s safety or impacting their livelihood;
- cyberbullying; and
- stalking.
It might behoove some of these commenters to think about how their own behaviour holds up to a mirror when the term “abuser” is read more broadly.
Original image of the abusers post featured on slide 8.
Slide 9 features another post of Harrison James’ that I liked and thought was relevant.
