I support Larkin Grimm, all of the victims of Gomeshi, Kesha, myself and every other person who has been abused, harassed or assaulted emotionally or physically. I address the claims against Lucy Decoutere and Jennifer Gira’s claims that make the victim into a liar if for whatever reason she could not, on a dime, transform love, partnership or respect into hate or alienation. For the victim wants to believe in the one she has loved or befriended as much as anyone else, maybe even more – because in the desire to ‘undo’ damage, to turn back time, in the exhaustion of facing a new trauma, it may feel as if the abuser is the only one who holds the key to making the event stop repeating in her mind, or stop being real, stop having existed. Beneath this mirage, he holds the keys to shifting the light of the Real, if for no other reason than that the consumption of the other through abuse has just changed the Real, it has broken the social agreement between the two and sucked both parties into the aggressor’s unconscious and fantasy space. Imagine the bright light of the two – two lights superimposed to illuminate more fully (as in more mutually/as in dialogue) suddenly dimming as he switches off the relevance of her psychic reality and personhood and takes over their encounter with only his own graphic confusion; the Real of the two of them in negotiation, in conversation, has been re-made into his interiority, unconscious, fantasy, desire (call it any of these but include the word “aggressive.”) Since he was the one who dimmed the lights and stopped what she dwelled in as the [shared] Real, it seems in that moment, as if he also has the power to turn the lights back on, and in doing so to halt the repeating, disorienting memory of violence. Her need for him to call this halt may be delusional, but it is a mirage produced by psychic exhaustion, after having been used, consumed, expropriated from her own flesh. (However it sounds here, I do not believe that everyone has the same experience, Please recognize that my understanding comes from my own and is only that until others decide to join it in their own forms.)

Apologies can in fact structurally mitigate damages. They are desirable after trauma because they might ease the festering and burning in, the entrenchment of the disposable, unloved en-trapped and en-trashed feeling that later becomes the new structure of victimized being. Why would you, she, me, we not use whatever methods possible from love letters to lofty declarations, to angry statements made in the vernacular of the struggling unconscious, made in hope or in fear or in shame, made under the shadow of control to avoid these feelings? Why would we not? Because we are expecting a lawsuit? Really? Rape is an instrument of war that produces mind control by shooting the bullet of hate into the intimate space of love, destabilizing and disordering its target.

What does the victim desire after being raped? What I wanted first was to make the rape to have never happened, or to have been something else. I searched desperately for a truly viable, emotionally explanatory re-description not of the act, but of the motivations behind making me feel the things I was forced to feel for years. What I wanted was for trauma to be something else, something for which the healing would not take years, something that would not be a twisting set of constant disabilities, or scar my life.

Some people stop talking to the rapist after being raped. Other people can barely integrate that the man who did *that* was the same person who they had embraced, worked with, or loved days before. “Come back here and make it stop!” stated with sugar because there is no hope of getting this apology or acknowledgment or moment of confrontation or truth unless he feels safe, flattered and loved is not in any way unreasonable. For if that moment could be achieved it would be worth more than any legal showdown or victory. It would be worth the value of years or decades of life. The delusional desire to undo abuse is what abuse produces, and why it is such an effective form of control utilized by militaries.

I have more to say about this but I wanted to say something now.