Meredith2000–2014
CW: discussion of rape, discussion of assault, discussion of suicide, death, mention of weight loss
Hey, Bluebeard, I Got Yr “Personal Truths” Right Here
I was 22 when I arrived in Manhattan in 1998, fresh out of college, and moved into a former shooting gallery around the corner from the Tonic nightclub. Having nabbed an internship at the Village Voice, I dove headfirst into the downtown music scene and NYC comics world as both a performer and a freelance arts & culture writer. I learned firsthand, rather swiftly, that the Culture of Coolness could be brutal on young women, especially more naïve or trusting ones. Putting it bluntly: my life in NYC throughout my twenties was a nonstop exhilarating hustle and a goddamn abattoir in terms of the sexualized and gendered abuse I both observed around me, and directly endured.
I had fondness for Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis. In late 2000, I interviewed Warren for Publisher’s Weekly, via email, from my vermin-infested apartment. Warren took a shine to me. I already considered him to be Kind Of A Big Deal, and he certainly didn’t discourage that perception! We remained in contact for nearly 15 years. In the early days, watching from afar, he hyped me up, promoted my work, swapped funny and gross memes with me, provided a virtual shoulder to cry on, and we exchanged music/film/book recommendations. He even surprised me one birthday by turning me into a character in one of his comics. He didn’t ask permission to use my likeness, of course. Just did it. And I loved it. Felt so special. For my part, I brought a whole lotta open adoration and lively anecdotes from the underground to his table. I doted on him. There’s no doubt in my mind that Warren enjoyed feeling “large 'n' in charge” with me.
At the time, few were telling me they believed in my talent as either a musician or as a writer. Warren did, and I was living to prove him right. When I visualize him from that era, he’s hunkered down at the center of a Venn diagram consisting of snarky paternal mentor figure, benevolent wizard, PR boot camp sergeant, and flirty but "harmless” uncle. He made it easy for this young, hopeful dork to love and trust him. To this day, I’m grateful for Warren’s kindness during the early years of our acquaintance. Those were dark times, and his initial mentorship was a source of light and hope, if a bit grimy. But then, I’d always felt a bit grimy, myself.
In 2003, while one of my bands was touring Europe, we met up in person outside of a music venue in London. He bought me several stiff drinks at a nearby pub. We got soused and geeked out together over all sorts of fun stuff. Doctor Strange, for instance-- my favorite superhero at the time, closely followed by Swamp Thing. In person, some of Warren's behavior spooked me. At one point he went beet red, vibrating with rage as he spoke scathingly of his domestic partner. The force of it shocked me. But he quickly corrected course. Warren had a knack for knowing exactly how to draw me back out of my shell, making me feel seen and safe. My chronic stage fright was bad that night. He gave me such a tender pep talk right before I went out under the lights, I was moved to kiss him. It was chaste. I felt pure and simple love for him. Warren was my friend. I loved my friend.
In 2005, after a lifetime of untreated CPTSD with recursive layers of PTSD, and following nearly two solid years of abuse and exploitation by my boyfriend at the time, I was shattered when a close friend OD’d. She was, herself, a blatant casualty of the Culture of Coolness. After she died, I began to unravel, rapidly. This fact would have been very clear to Warren. I told him I wasn’t doing well. I didn’t feel sexy, let alone lovable. The boyfriend was being increasingly awful. I was, in fact, losing my shit. If memory serves, that’s around when my long-running correspondence with cyber “Stalin” starting to drift vaguely towards something more intimate, albeit in an undefined way.
Gotta rewind for a second: in 1996, I was a passenger in a near-fatal car accident that left me with severe permanent damage to my body, eardrum, and brain, along with a lot of chronic pain. I received a substantial settlement from multiple insurance companies, the bulk of which steadied my freelancer’s life for many years. Now, back to mid-2005: approximately a week after that settlement money ran out, my aforementioned boyfriend –who’d encouraged me to spend my financial cushion on and with him-- dumped me. I was heartbroken and wrangling with deep shame. I told Warren. It was the only time he ever phoned me internationally. An expensive call, back then! He spoke to me as one might speak to a scared animal or a little kid-- a steady murmur, telling me that he loved me, reassuring me, not for the first time, that he’d always there for me. “I’m not going anywhere.” He was in flirty uncle mode. I didn’t question whether or not that was appropriate. Felt lucky. Felt loved. I was aching for someone to tell me they wouldn’t give up on me. My emotional devotion, and my unhealthy reliance on his reassurance, deepened.
Later that same year, a cocaine-addled bandmate in one of my main music projects cranked up his amp so loud during a show, my previously-injured eardrum ruptured and leaked. When I angrily insisted that he turn it down, he berated me onstage. My head didn’t stop ringing for days. I was sick of his shit. I was sick of everyone’s shit. After years of enduring casual, culturally acceptable scorn everywhere I turned, the incident prompted me to quit the group. I considered retiring from music altogether. I couldn’t stop thinking about my vibrant friend who’d survived unfathomable abuse only to drown in a few inches of bathwater with a needle in her arm. I was in some kind of freefall.
Shortly after leaving the band, while on a phone call with a peer, the first concrete evidence I’d been shown of my ex’s compulsive lying and cheating came to light, and it dawned on me that he’d been deceiving me for the entirety of our courtship, relationship, and post-breakup “friendship”. I’d been duped. I’d been badly used. Flashbacks involving a half-dozen sexual assaults I’d previously waved off with but he’s my boyfriend and I love him pushed to the fore. Those led to concentric layers of older memories of sexualized violations dating back to early childhood. For one impossibly long, fractalized moment, standing in my kitchen in Brooklyn, frozen, staring at the knife rack with a flip-phone in my hand, I was reliving every last little horror, all at once, forever, reaping the whirlwind of 29 years full of lies, verbal abuse, violence, neglect, sexual coercion, rapes, exploitation, secrecy, grief, and gaslighting.
My psyche came apart like a Matryoshka doll. Full psychotic break. I attempted suicide but made it to the ER. A medical team doped me up, patched me up, and stuck me in a rubber room for observation. I was still in that room when my ex somehow found out what happened. He immediately started calling and emailing multiple people tell them I’d tried to kill myself, saying that he was very worried about me, but unable to help me directly. He was, of course, also sure to mention to these mutuals that anything I had to say about him shouldn’t be believed. You know, like, because of her obvious, like, mental problems? Proactive ass-covering. Grifters gonna grift. Some of my close friends told him to fuck off. Many others believed him.
When I came out of the hospital, I was medicated to the gills and in a near-constant state of dissociation from my own body. I weighed less than I had as a petite pubescent 13-year-old. It wasn’t hard for anyone to believe my ex about me being crazy. Hell, most people I knew had even less of a clue about consent than I did at the time. Besides, by then, it was undeniably true that I wasn’t mentally sound. A majority of my colleagues continued to be my abuser’s friend, to hire him, and to chum around with him in nightclubs and bars.
People treated me differently after the breakdown. Of course, that broke me down even further. It hadn’t taken much for the downtown music scene to write me off as damaged goods. For a few wildly out-of-control months from late 2005 through early 2006, I was out of my gourd on a cocktail of prescription benzos, booze, and a bad script of psychosis-triggering SSRIs. It was the only point in my life that I’ve experienced full-blown mania. A terrifying time. I felt abandoned by all but my besties. I considered myself very fortunate to count Warren Ellis among them.
And yet that’s precisely when the outright sex talk with Warren began. It’s still humiliating for me to admit that our most flirtatious and overtly sexual exchanges happened while I was in crisis, literally raw from a suicide attempt, barely functional, and tunneling through a mountain of self-hatred and shame. And he knew. Warren knew, and presumably derived pleasure from looking at my emaciated, dead-eyed nudes and selfies. As soon as a new doctor adjusted my bad brain meds a short time later and I started pulling my life back together, I stopped being sexy with him. Even then, the obvious power imbalance didn’t feel right. Afterward, I blamed myself, my mania, for letting the friendship tip in that direction. Because of all of his assurances before my breakdown, I trusted him to stick around, and I wanted to keep being a good friend to him, too. I was concerned that Warren might be feeling abandoned. (Hah.) I worried about his notoriously poor health. (Dammit, I still do.)
Throughout 2006, I continued reaching out by email to try to keep him in the loop, writing long letters that he only rarely and increasingly tersely responded to. It was an abrupt shift. I blamed myself for that, too. Once I got into a monogamous relationship a short time later, Warren just about entirely ghosted. In May of 2007, after months of being frozen out in spite of sending all kinds of missives describing my progress and telling him how much I missed him, I worked up the courage to ask what I'd done to deserve being dropped without a word after years of friendship.
He promptly and coldly replied that he was cutting me off because he knew I was going to die.
His exact words were “I’m sick of watching my darlings die.” That’s when I finally managed to get pissed off at him. Messy as I’d been, his assessment wasn’t only wrong, but cruel. Not to mention inaccurate. I’d hit a rough patch for understandable reasons but I’d been doing so much work to get well. I’d sent him regular letters documenting my progress. I’d never stopped reaching out for him. Warren was my friend. I loved my friend. Yet here was my mentor, my champion, informing me I was hopelessly sick and no longer worth his time or energy, mere months after phoning from England to say he’d always be there no matter what.
We had a big fight. I thought I was being so badass and brave, advocating for myself to convince this man that I was worthy of his time. It didn’t occur to me that he’d even consider throwing our years-long friendship away once I’d rescinded his dodgy-af supply of malfunctioning MPDG pr0n. It never crossed my mind that he might be purposefully fucking with my head for sport, or out of spite. Up until a month ago, I would have found either notion farfetched. Knowing what I know now… anything’s possible.
There’s no bottom floor in hell.
Obviously, I should have cut the guy off forever. Instead, I pounded on the door to Bluebeard's castle be let back in. Once I did, Warren (grudgingly) apologized for our “misunderstanding” and ushered me into a private server full of ambitious, brilliant people whose careers he would proceed to help build up over the course of the next decade by leveraging his own substantial influence. His attitude made it clear that I’d need to succeed at a very high level in order to ever impress him again and of course, I wanted that. From then on, I was living to prove him wrong.
We met up at the San Diego Comic Con in the summer of 2007. I insisted. I was still hurt by how he’d treated me in the aftermath of my breakdown. I needed to tell him to his face how much his actions had hurt me, and couldn’t he see how much stronger I was now, how ready for liftoff? It was the second and last time we ever hung out in person, seated alone in a cordoned-off section of the patio bar at his hotel. Once again, we got munted. Warren’s publishing house had (ludicrously) hired a bodyguard. Later, they sent over a group of gorgeous burlesque performers in full zombie costume to say hello. Warren seemed equal parts gleeful and mortified. “[They] got some girls for me!” It was surreal. After the living dead ladies left, Warren gossiped conspiratorially about another multi-talented young woman he’d met in person for the first time earlier that day: “I got the impression that she is very submissive.” That woman would eventually become one of his greatest mentoring successes.
Eventually, Warren managed, at long last, to apologize with passable sincerity for his mistreatment of me. Then, in a confessional tone, he told me “I was in love with you for a very long time.” If I wanted, he said, I could come up to his hotel room. I told him, truthfully, that were I not faithfully committed to my monogamous partnership at the time, I’d have considered it. My most visceral memory from that evening is that he hugged me very tightly, and long after I’d stopped hugging back and actively tried to pull away, he continued to hold me against him. His bodyguard was standing right there. Suddenly, I was keenly aware of how much larger Warren was than me. A too-long-hug must seem like no biggie to most people reading, but it set off klaxons. Being crushed against his torso with his huge arms heavy on my back, held against my will, however briefly, triggered another one of those turducken o’ trauma situations that I now recognize as what’s called an “emotional flashback”. An amygdala hijacking. Any physical attraction I’d ever felt for him evaporated. I left his company shaken and confused. I don’t recall ever mentioning any of the more distressing details from that night to anyone except the close friend who picked me up from W’s hotel and quietly drove me home while I sobbed in the passenger seat of their truck. Warren was quick to follow up in the ensuing days with a whole lot of “wow, we were really drunk” type comments, and I was more than happy to go along with that.
For many years to come, I’d make light of my various drunken escapades, laughing off even the outright criminal liberties others had taken with my body while I was inebriated or blacked out. Not sure why. Some kind of Gen X “cool girl” defense mechanism, maybe? I don’t do that anymore. I don’t drink anymore, either. Not in years.
Warren was my friend. I loved my friend. But the love I felt was no longer pure or simple. My attachment style was decidedly anxious. Simultaneously, I wanted more than ever to prove my artistic merit to him. I was determined to “keep up with the others”, accomplishment-wise. Up until around 2013, there was a consistent dynamic between Warren and me: I'd be involved in creating something (a magazine, a music video, an article, a blog post, an interview, a song, a selfie, whatever), often asking his advice about it, and then share the finished product with him in hopes of being praised. In turn, he often promoted my output across his then-massive, bustling cybermedia platforms. Better yet, he would tell me he was proud of me and that he loved me. Achieving notoriety was never half as much about accruing money or prestige for me as it was about proving myself worthy of the love and respect of specific people. I think I wanted that reassurance more than the fame Warren kept encouraging me to strive for. I knew that if I didn’t keep leveling up, striving for higher peaks, he was likely to neg me, which I dreaded. When I didn’t do exactly what he recommended, career-wise, I got either the silent treatment or some nasty name-calling. Much later, I found out that he often complained privately about how “mental” I was to others (without acknowledging his own abuses, obviously).
Our dynamic wasn’t dissimilar from what I’d experienced in childhood while being worked over by well-regarded but sadistic adults –instructors and doctors—with unchecked authority over me. Of course, I didn’t connect those dots until well after I went no-contact with him and put in the therapy hours. For a full decade, across multiple fields of play, I kept trying to accomplish all I could to finally be considered Good Enough by him, by others like him, and never quite getting there. My insecurity was far from all Warren’s doing, of course. But our push-n-pull dynamic amplified my uncertainty just as surely as regular injections of steroids will boost muscle production. Warren developed friendships with other young femmes, some of whom he had met through me. He would often triangulate us, disparaging them to me, and (we eventually realized), me to them. Sometimes, I felt like they were my competition. Other times, as though they were my sisters. Often, both at once. Total headfuck.
Some consistent truths from the era of 2005 through 2015: Nothing I did felt real. Nothing I was felt good. Thanks to the sketchy company I increasingly prioritized over healthier friendships in order to further my career, I was developing an uglier and less authentic identity by the minute. I was more bitter and shut down during that decade than I’ve ever been before or since.
None of my accomplishments felt like mine. I truly believed that any vocational success I had, I owed largely to Warren’s mentorship. Any failure I endured was amplified by his increasingly obvious contempt and distancing.
I couldn’t see it back then, but after the breakdown in 2005, I wasn’t really “me” anymore. I was a ghost wandering through someone else’s house in a near-constant state of hypervigilance. I’ve struggled with involuntary dissociation since I was a toddler. It got much worse after that crisis point. For a solid decade, as a result of a lifetime of amassed and ongoing sexualized abuse, I just about completely checked out of my own body. Warren’s behavior with me amplified that already well-established disconnect. Eventually, everything started falling apart all at once: Coilhouse Magazine & Blog, The Parlour Trick partnership I’d been working in for years, the hugely dysfunctional long-term relationship I’d stumbled into shortly after my nervous breakdown. In retrospect, I clearly see that I stayed in all of those toxic dynamics far longer than I would have, had I been remotely stable when they began. One of the hardest “if only”s of my life will always be if only I’d immediately committed to ongoing talk therapy after the suicide attempt in 2005. Coulda, woulda, shoulda. Instead: numbing prescription drugs, avoidance of personal accountability, denial of suffering, heavy compartmentalization. There would be no deeper examination of either my mortal, or moral, woundings, for a decade. (Now who’s the living dead girl?)
Some folks reading this in their stuffy little caves are gonna roll their eyes at what I’m about to write. That’s fine. No fucks given on this day. Sincerely, unequivocally:
Rape culture broke me all the way down.
My deepest root trauma: intense and relentless absorption of long-sustained, culturally upheld hatred of the feminine. In the aftermath of everything crumbling, dismantling the baroque survival mechanisms my brain likely began developing before the age of three became its own full-time job. It took years for me to figure out who I even was underneath it all. I’ve had to take my entire life apart down to the studs in order to move forward and away from that constant waking nightmare. [Sidenote: I do realize that this essay is long-winded and meandering. Please forgive me. I need to at least try to convey how Every Dingdang Thing Is Connected. Can’t talk about the Warren stuff without contextualizing the rest.]
Everything bolstering that uncharacteristically glam public-facing identity has been demolished at this point. None of the “alt cult diva” crap feels real to this healthier person I’m slowly, stubbornly becoming. GOOD. Looking back, I can grieve for the clueless young woman that I was while simultaneously feeling huge relief about letting her go. Kill your darlings, ehn? Once again, I’m in freefall. Only this time, it’s in service of embracing the whirlwind with a far more full-fledged, broad-winged sense of personhood.
Back to the spring of 2013, I was convinced that I was evil, unsalvageable garbage who’d disappointed everyone who ever helped me in my career. Warren was increasingly quick to call me names. “Emotional cabbage”. “Silly cow”. “Daft”. “Crazy”. He made it clear to me that I was letting him down. In the private server where a bunch of us still hung out, some of the others began to devalue me as well. I worried they were beginning to take cues from Warren’s now-obvious scorn. I pushed back hard against comments I considered dehumanizing, or sexist, or queerphobic. I want to make it crystal clear that don’t hold anything against anybody from that time or place. I hope old comrades can muster compassion for me when they recall my threat displays, my knee-jerk reactivity, which must have seemed overwrought to them. That said, it was a lonely, scary time. Eventually, I told the group I no longer considered our virtual clubhouse to be a safe space, and I left. Warren was furious. Soon after, he shut down the server, and phased me entirely out of both his public and private life in favor of several other substantially younger proteges.
In July of 2013, when I returned to California from living abroad, everything I’d tried to build in the aftermath of my 2005 nervous breakdown was falling to pieces. I should have gone into therapy immediately, but that would’ve required me to believe I deserved healing, which I decidedly did not. I felt monstrous in the truest sense. I’d internalized that I was doomed, that I was damned. Once again, I started looking for love and reassurance in just about all the wrong places. In 2014, it began to come to light that several of the men I’d been working most closely with for years, both in various corners of my performance life, and in my capacity as co-runner of Coilhouse, had been covertly assaulting and raping people. I began to notice the cult-like hierarchies in many of the cliques I moved through, which usually featured a masculine person or people with untreated addiction problems holding court at the center. I observed how a lot of femmes, including me, were conditioned to prioritize the comfort and social standing of these “charismatic megafauna” over one another’s basic safety. I let myself begin to process the ways in which I’d been exploited and scapegoated not only by these abusive men, but by other community members, fellow femmes, who refused to hold the abusers they directly benefited from being close with accountable. So many of them cared more about protecting their own privileges and social standing than they did about doing the right thing. So many of them chose respectability politics over being genuinely respectful of others’ humanity. It was devastating and alienating.
Stumbling forward, I considered the ways in which we’re all complicit in a culture of systemic and relentless hatred of anything that doesn’t read as white, straight, and male. My grief and guilt and horror alchemized into an incandescent rage. I began reading up on abolitionist literature by queer and feminine Black folks. I started getting compulsively involved in grim, sometimes poorly executed white feminist iterations of the same. Every connection, every tool I’d acquired over the past several years, I used, harshly, in service of all manner of back alley call-ins and public-facing call-outs of alleged serial abusers in the communities I moved through.
“Fuck it. Burn it all down.” That was my M.O. I was tearing through all of my ill-begotten social capital in service of taking down bigger, meaner monsters. I was waging some kind of self-immolating asymmetrical warfare fueled by immense self-loathing and a conviction that I was an irredeemable failure of a human being. Eventually, this work led me to others who’d been almost identically misled and abused by Warren Ellis. People talk. Whisper networks, of course, aren’t enough to keep everyone safe from “missing stairs”, but the way I saw it, they were better than nothing. Thanks to conversations with Bluebeard’s other brides, I realized that Warren has been exploiting far more people than I’d ever imagined. His pattern of misconduct stretched back years before I’d ever met him. I was certain his increasing influence in Hollywood and subsequent escalation in both wealth and connectivity must be boosting his predation.
I severed all remaining ties and began openly, publicly giving others a heads up. I spoke to a lot of mutual friends about the stories I’d been hearing. Some of these friends were at least as financially secure in their fields as Warren was by this time, yet remained loyal to him, at least publicly. My distress was discounted as hyperbolic. Over and over again, I was ignored as an unreliable narrator. Quelle surprise! Even the most explicit allegations I brought up somehow bounced right off. He’s a sad, lonely, harmless old man. Don’t try to make it more than that. Okay, sis.
There was this sense, especially amid the VIPs I knew, of “if nothing he’s doing is illegal, it’s not worth getting involved”. Never mind the underage girl who allegedly sent him nudes on MySpace. Forget the contended grooming of teenage fans who he eventually drew into sexualized transactions. Once again, I was just some attention-starved hysteric. Same as I’d been as a child, pleading to be rescued from violation at the hands of reputable adults. Same as I’d been in New York City, struggling, and failing, to find the language to explain how much more damaging the psychological abuse, and general apathy of others concerning that abuse, has been than even the worst physical assaults I’ve endured. (If only the concept of “gaslighting” had been popularized sooner.)
Big, hard, hopeless, maddening Cassandra feels. My peers’ inability to absorb negative information about Warren didn’t feel specifically hostile. I knew it wasn’t personal, but wow, did it hurt. Thank goodness for those who did believe me! I kept hollering and arguing and despairing until I reached another breaking point in the aftermath of an especially brutal social justice campaign that publicly exposed a close former friend who’d turned out to be a serial rapist. I’d started suicidally ideating again. Thankfully, I pulled myself out of it and doubled down on my recent commitment to therapy, celibacy, and booze-sobriety.
That’s when I finally began to think that maybe, just maybe, I deserved to get well. With the help of a phenomenal MFT who specializes in the treatment of CPTSD and relational trauma, I started peeling back my many-layered dysfunction as an adoptee, as a survivor of multiple forms of assault, and as someone whose body and brain has weathered multiple violently severe near-death experiences. I began to see how formative trauma, for so long as it’s not directly confronted and dealt with, can end up creating a lifelong pattern of avoidance and dysfunction. I started understanding why I’d been falling in with narcissistic, sociopathic, or otherwise empathy-challenged people my entire life, and why I was so desperate to please them. Some of these people were more innocuous and well-intentioned than others. None of them were harmless any more than I've ever been harmless while in a reactively abusive mode. I began figuring out how to forgive myself. For everything. All of it. Not only for what had been done to me, but for how I’d behaved as a result.
For a long time now, I’ve openly identified as a recovering abuser. A big part of why I have no desire to damn anyone for all time is because it would mean damning myself, and I am so very, very done with damnation. In specific regards to ameliorating the Culture of Coolness, harm reduction’s all I care about. No glory for these exposed guts. I’m not writing a heckin 6.6K essay about my lifelong cumulative rape and abuse trauma for fun or attention. Garbled and long-winded as this screed might be, I’m writing it in service of clarity. Whatever happens next, has gotta happen in service, first and foremost, of protecting other similarly marginalized beings from further violation.
As for Warren, specifically, the man’s clearly been struggling with some sort of devastating emotional wound for most of his life. Because of his professional success and star power, he’s been able to avoid confronting his own root trauma in favor of developing some truly innovative, one could even say frontiersmanlike methods for feeding an ever-ballooning psychological dependency upon… [ gestures vaguely at Fart Daddy’s toilet throne, which now doth overflow with flaming turds].
What, even, are we, to him? Immortan Hoes? Matricide Girls? Some sorta living, breathing, crying, pleading doll collection? What comfort does Warren derive from keeping trophies in the form of hundreds, maybe thousands of jpegs and pngs and movs and mp4s, presumably filed away in his personal FapVault™? Understanding why dudes like Warren go full Jame Gumb is next to impossible for me. I’m just grateful that I don’t have to unpack it, curled up in a ball and hating myself, down in some pit the daylight never reaches. Not anymore.
The way I see it, collective commitment to harm reduction combined with self-love is the only way out of hell. That means I can’t indulge whatever desire I might have to see a perpetrator “ruined” or “destroyed” or whatever. I am nauseated, I am horrified, I am fucking enraged to learn the full scope of Warren’s dehumanizing abuses. But I refuse to deny his own basic humanity. I do hope my former friend can redeem himself. In the end, though, whether he commits to the deeper work of figuring out how to make genuine amends or not, I’m satisfied with knowing that our communal opposition has brought a halt to Warren actively exploiting and hurting others. That is, at least, by implementing his specialized hoovering technique.
My second-favorite Holzerism: “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE”
Whatever happens next, either in Warren’s specific case, or in a broader cultural sense, there must be more drastic consequences for sexual misconduct of this sort. At every scale. That “apology” Warren posted last month ain’t it. The exploratory emails he’s been sending out privately, en masse, read more like disingenuous press releases than admissions of wrongdoing, let alone true remorse. Comparing notes with the others, I finally see how much of my own guilt and shame was intrinsic to the grooming process Warren honed over decades. My dude has been relying upon severe cognitive dissonance to keep this industrial-strength exploitation going all these years. I think we’ve managed to break his conveyor belt system real good. I’m proud of us.
For centuries, white supremacist misogyny, both internalized and externally endured, has been making it possible for men like Warren –not to mention far more prosecutable predators-- to thrive. We’ve been normalizing all of this nonsense for millennia. We continue, collectively, to make endless excuses for Very Important Vampirism. Already, the recent advent of the internet is breeding gobsmacking mutations of that ancient hierarchy. Let’s break it down: glittering-eyed, cunning “Internet Jesus”, squarely aping gonzo and bemoaning his own body’s frailty, injects himself directly into cyberspace to gorge, both virtually and tangibly, on a never-ending stream of enfleshed and pixelated young bodies. Does that shit not read like a dystopian scenario dreamt up by some far more sophisticated scifi writer? Cronenberg should make the movie. Better yet, Anna Biller!
Fame is a fuckin wasting disease of the soul.
As an activist buddy puts it, “Sex is power and power is sex for narcissists.” A paradox: in the bohemian circles I once moved through, it’s common for predatory addicts to become fluent in feminist humanist shorthand, duping everyone (even themselves!) into thinking they’re good and ethical people. Consistently, though, this specific class of predator is most concerned with securing dependable access to their next hit of dopamine. Everything they do is in service of stockpiling whatever flavor of narcissistic supply pumps their ‘nads. They may build and maintain a projection of paladin-level Lawful Good, but hidden behind their shields there are usually multiple recipients of their exploitation or misconduct, too scared and too vulnerable to speak up. Other grand poohbahs of the Culture of Coolness master a “hiding in plain sight” technique cribbed from the likes of Hemingway, Bukowski, and (Warren’s patron saint) Hunter S. Thompson. Whatever the style of engagement, any valor performed by these specific cult-of-personality types is disingenuous. Behind their screens of Good Deeds and their noblesse oblige, all of them are scrambling to feed some truly sad and dehumanizing dependencies.
On that note, I have no more time for the various well-off, professional white celebrity “Fuck You, Got Mine” feminists I used to run with. Not until they Do The Fucking Work as well. There can be no “subverting the dominant paradigm from within” while once is simultaneously accepting paychecks, invitations to fancy dinners, or PR boosts from Bluebeards. May I never be That Asshole again, wittingly or no. Fighting for the autonomy of more vulnerable demographics has to be my top priority. Not selectively. Not on a case-by-case basis. My own advocacy cannot be influenced by how fond I am of an alleged perpetrator, or by how powerful they are, or by whatever perks are afforded to me by remaining cozy with them. Hold me to that, please.
Post-Warren, I’ve been fortunate to be treated with unwavering respect by successive mentors—brilliant creatives who have been quietly Doing The Fucking Work for decades. Thanks to the long-term friendships I’ve developed with them, I now know it’s entirely possible for a prestigious, significantly older or more powerful person to hold and keep healthy boundaries in their relationships with younger, relatively unknown peers. Thanks to the examples they set, I no longer have doubts about how manipulative and compulsively sick Warren’s own behavior was with me.
Whether that behavior was criminal or not, I just want my former friend to Do The Fucking Work.
It’s taken several years of nonstop recovery work of my own to begin feeling like a whole person. I’m more stable and more fully integrated than I’ve ever been. Work in process, of course, and that work will never be done. Obviously, Warren is far from entirely to blame for my lifelong dysfunction. I won’t scapegoat him like I’ve been scapegoated. But the guy had more active, aware, hands-on control over my life and career trajectory than just about anyone else before or since. He undeniably abused his sway over me, and that dynamic damaged my sense of self-worth in ways that I’m still unpacking.
Being able to unpack my damage in solidarity with 100+ lovable humans who have suffered similarly, and far more gruesomely, in most cases, has been a revelation. I’m grateful we all made it this far. I mourn for those who died before Warren got #MeToo’d. It’s true, after all, that some of his darlings have died. I think of them often, both those whose names I remember, and the ones I never learned about. I continued to be haunted so gently and sweetly by the ghost of my beautiful friend who died in 2005, whose suffering had so much in common with my own. I call them my siblings. I wish they were all still here with us, processing and healing. They deserved better. We all deserve so much better.
My favorite Holzerism: “IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER”
I haven’t spoken much about Warren’s inarguably positive acts, and I need to. When I was interviewed for the documentary film Captured Ghosts ten years ago I said: “Warren doesn’t just map culture. He makes culture.” That’s still true, and not only in distressing ways. So many kind, loving people I still count among my dearest friends have been championed by Warren. A big reason I didn’t speak out more definitively before now was out of concern about hurting their livelihoods and their families, not to mention Warren’s own family. Another is that even now, as I spit out the last of this poison, swallowed long ago, part of me still feels like I owe Warren everything. But I know that’s not true. That’s the conditioning talking. That sense of dependency is a consistent tactic he’s used to corral and isolate countless people in the first place. It’s the cogdissiest!
I don’t think the generosity and brilliance of a Bluebeard should be erased from whatever legacy they retain. However, their legacy must be made honest.
TL;DR: Whether his patterns of behavior turn out to be legally damning or no, Warren Ellis has been hurting people for decades. It needs to stop. In order for all of us to heal, we must be brave, collectively, and talk unashamedly about what made that abuse possible for so long. Moving forward, we have to figure out what’s to be done to prevent harm like it from happening again, and I think we all have to undertake this work with as much compassion for ourselves, and for others, as we can possibly muster.
If I can Do The Fucking Work, Warren Ellis can Do The Fucking Work. If Warren Ellis can Do The Fucking Work, anybody can Do The Fucking Work. I trust that more than anything. I have to. The alternative’s too bleak. No gods, no masters, no heroes, and to hell with a bunch of nihilistic Culture of Coolness theatre. Let that performative celebrity edgelord nonsense topple and fall right along with white supremacy, kyriarchy, and kleptocracy. Humanity is clearly in some kind of demolition phase right now. It’s a necessary part of this entire planet’s healing process. TEMPUS FUGGIT! Once the teardown is over and the debris is cleared away, we can pour a foundation to support the building of a more sturdily kind society.
I hope I live to see that groundbreaking work, but I’m not counting on it! I have made a wholehearted commitment to being a better ancestor. That’s more than enough for me.
Confronting and unpacking this multitudinous shitshow has been terrifying for a whole lot of us. It’s also healing. Whoever you are, whenever you are, thanks for taking the time to witness us. I do hope you’ll be gentle with how you speak to and about us. But I’m not counting on it, let alone depending on it.
I’m less afraid than I’ve ever been. There’s nothing anyone can say to me or about me that’s half as cruel as what I’ve already said to and about myself.
Now, then! Let’s heal, please. All of us. Together.
Fuck shame.
Meredith Yayanos
July 4th, 2020
