This Is Not a Show: We All Know a Cassie - On Spectacle, Survivors, and the Limits of Our Legal Imagination

Trigger warning: Rape, Sexual assualt

A few weeks ago, I was walking across the grass at Saint Mary’s College of California, where I am a graduate student in the Creative Writing Department. There was an installation of red flags planted in the grass. Each flag, I learned, represented twelve missing and murdered Indigenous women. A sign nearby read: In 2022 alone, 5,487 Indigenous women and girls were reported missing. I stood there longer than I meant to, not because I didn’t know these numbers existed, but because of how little room they’re given in public conversation. There were no camera crews. No news headlines. No hashtags. Just red flags, a breeze, and the reminder that absence when it’s racialized, gendered, Indigenous is often met with silence.

And yet, a case like Sean “Diddy” Combs’ becomes a national obsession. There are memes. Timelines. TikToks parsing every frame. Commentary like “the feds don’t miss.” I saw one post that said: “Cassie’s story isn’t even the meat and potatoes of this case.” That line haunts me. What does it mean when someone’s decade-long story of abuse and survival isn’t considered substantial? What does it say about us, hungering for something more sensational before we’re willing to believe?

I continue to sit with the comment above and I also have to confess: I haven’t followed every detail of the Diddy case. Not because I don’t care, but because I do. Because I know enough to know it still hurts. Every new headline has been a sharp inhale. Still, even without knowing each raid or motion, I know how power works. I know what silence protects. I know what it means when survivors speak and are dissected before the law even gets involved. So no, I haven’t been watching every move but I have been tending. Tending to truths that don’t need proof, to pain that doesn’t wait for validation, to the belief that survivors deserve more than spectacle.

So here are the facts we cannot ignore. In the U.S., nearly 1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be raped in their lifetime; 1 in 3 women and 1 in 9 men experience sexual violence involving physical contact; every 68 seconds someone is sexually assaulted and only about 25 of every 1,000 perpetrators will go to prison [1,2]. Among American Indian/Alaska Native women, over half experience sexual violence, and 1 in 3 are raped [1]. Black women are similarly vulnerable: about 1 in 5 report rape, 41% report coercion, and for every Black woman who reports rape, fifteen stay silent [1,9]. Hispanic women report a lifetime rape rate of around 13.6% and over a third experience other sexual violence [13]. White women are not exempt: nearly 20% report being raped, and nearly one in four women overall experience sexual assault. LGBTQ+ communities face even higher risks: 46–61% of bisexual women and 64% of trans survivors report assault [28]. Asian American / Pacific Islander women report that 18% have experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetimes; 12% have experienced gender- or race-based physical violence in the past year, with South Asian women specifically at 18% [14]. South Asian women in the U.S. face unique patterns of abuse: approximately 11% report sexual abuse, while 48% experience physical violence, 38% emotional abuse, 35% economic abuse, and 26% immigration-related control [6]. Among those who seek help, less than 11% access counseling or support services. Data on East Asian women specifically is more limited in the U.S., but research consistently documents stereotypes like hyper-sexualization and submissiveness that increase vulnerability to violence and hinder reporting, reflecting systemic invisibility [1, 14]. These are not statistics. They are lives carried in silence, bodies hardened by disbelief.

And language matters, too. Somewhere along the way, we started using words like abuse, gaslighting, narcissist, trauma as if they were content buckets or social media hashtags, stripped of weight, used to signal instead of sit with. But these words come from somewhere. They come from survivors clawing toward truth. From people who had to name the unspeakable just to survive it. When we use these terms casually, without care, without context, we don’t just flatten meaning, we make it easier for people to dismiss it altogether. “Everyone calls everything abuse now.” “That’s not real trauma.” These aren’t harmless takes. They pave the way for disbelief. For mockery. For silence. And in that silence, real harm festers.

Because unfortunately, we all know a Cassie. We may not know the full extent of what they’ve survived, but we’ve worked beside them. Shared rooms with them. Loved them. And forgotten them. We know people who flinch when a door slams. Who go quiet when the subject shifts. Who find ways to care for everyone but themselves. Sometimes, we know deep down, that something happened. We just didn’t want to name it.

And still, when survivors speak: the trembling, the rage, the quiet, they are often met not with compassion, but suspicion. We label them dramatic, emotional, bitter. Even other women sometimes uphold systems that harm us. Patriarchy rewards proximity to power, and that reward often looks like silence, disbelief, or loyalty to abusers in the name of keeping peace. What if you understood that you don’t need to know her timeline to offer belief? You don’t need every detail to offer care.

But perhaps we think we do because many of us are trained to be more eager and celebrate punishment aka prisons than to ask what survivors need to live. We cheer indictments, comment “lock him up.” But do we ask: What does healing feel like? What does repair take? Punishment is not transformation. Incarceration is not care. We know how to remove someone but do we know how to stay? To support? To serve? What seva have we offered? What listening, community, safety, tenderness have we built, not for spectacle, but for sustained presence? If we’re not asking those questions, we’re not seeking justice. We’re seeking catharsis. And catharsis is not justice. Saying “Well, at least she got a settlement” is not justice. A payout is not restoration, it’s paperwork, silence, and a public declaration that harm can be bought. And when we treat money as the only form of accountability, we fuel the myth that survivors “make things up to get paid.” But if we truly cared about survivors, we wouldn’t wait for lawsuits or indictments. We’d be building community circles that hold abusers accountable, where truth-telling isn’t punished but honored. We’d ask survivors: What does restoration look like for you? What do you need to heal, to feel safe, to return to yourself? And perhaps we’d realize that justice isn’t a check or a charge, it’s presence. It’s repair. It’s care that shows up, not just when it’s trending, but when it’s hardest.

And this is where the current law has its limits. It can punish, but it cannot restore. It can name, but it rarely listens. It can convict, but rarely does it show care. We like to imagine it as a scalpel—precise and neutral—but in reality, it’s a hammer: heavy, delayed, uneven. Too often it lands hardest on those already carrying harm. The law in this country was never designed to care because it was designed to control. As Michelle Alexander reminds us in The New Jim Crow, “law and order” often reinforces racial and economic hierarchies instead of dismantling them [13].

We’ve seen the same dynamics before. The Amber Heard–Johnny Depp trial became a global circus streamed in real time, memefied endlessly. Coverage focused less on the complexities of abuse and more on her hair, her clothes, her expressions. In one study, social media engagement with the trial eclipsed the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling and coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine [14]. Critics called it “a public orgy of misogyny,” and researchers warned it would have a chilling effect on future survivors coming forward [15,16]. This wasn’t justice. It was entertainment.

And I personally don’t want to live in a world where belief waits for police documentation, where pain requires surveillance to exist, where headlines grant permission and investigation is the proof. I want us to stop asking, “Why didn’t she speak sooner?” and start asking, “What did we, what did I, make impossible for her to speak at all?” I want us to stop treating harm as a headline, to stop expecting perfect victims on perfect timelines. I want to check in on my friends. To support survivor‑led organizations. To practice consent consciously. To interrupt harmful behavior when it’s still close. To hold myself and my communities accountable before the state does.

And even now, as we think of their stories, there are thousands of survivors who remain unnamed. Survivors whose stories never made headlines. People who are still missing, not just in body, but in memory. Indigenous women and girls whose disappearances were met with silence. Trans youth whose pain is misnamed or erased. Migrant workers. Street-based survivors. Children who were never asked what happened. Men who don’t know they’re allowed to say it out loud. This world has always been louder for the powerful. And still, some carry their stories in quiet, tucked in between their teeth, waiting for a space that can hold it.

We began this conversation standing in the quiet presence of red flags on a college lawn. May we remember that not all pain is televised. That not all survivors get to speak. That care, if it’s real, must stretch toward the unheard, not just the viral. That the work ahead is not just legal or cultural, but deeply human. Because if we are only interested in justice when it’s federal, televised, or tied to fame, we are not seeking justice, we are seeking spectacle. And I refuse to be a spectator. This is not a show. It’s a reckoning. It’s a mirror for us all. It’s a call. The real question isn’t whether Diddy will get what he deserves, it’s whether we’re ready to stop building systems where survivors must go missing, or bleed for us to believe them.

To Support Survivors

• National Domestic Violence Hotline — thehotline.org | 1-800-799-7233

• RAINN — rainn.org | 1-800-656-HOPE

• Healing to Action — healingtoaction.org

• StrongHearts Native Helpline — strongheartshelpline.org | 1-844-762-8483

• The Loveland Foundation — thelovelandfoundation.org

For Your Own Healing / Unlearning

• What My Bones Know — Stephanie Foo

• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

• Healing Justice Lineages — Cara Page & Erica Woodland

• Survivor Love Letter — Tani Ikeda & Kai Cheng Thom (eds.)

• TransformHarm.org

References

1. CDC NISVS, 2022.

2. RAINN, Criminal Justice Statistics, 2024.

3. Urban Indian Health Institute, MMIW Report, 2022.

4. NBWJI, “Black Women & Sexual Assault,” 2023.

5. Crenshaw, “Say Her Name,” 2020.

6. CDC, “Prevalence by Ethnicity,” 2021.

7. NSVRC, 2023.

8. Human Rights Campaign, 2023.

9. Rape Crisis UK, Impact Report, 2022.

10. MSF, Sexual Violence Care in DRC, 2021.

11. Gilligan, Joining the Resistance, 2011.

12. Pitre, “Peer Advocacy,” Violence Against Women, 2020.

13. Alexander, The New Jim Crow, 2010.

14. API-GBV, “Facts & Stats,” 2022.

15. Vox, “Amber Heard Trial as Misogyny,” 2022.

16. Wired, “TikTok and the Weaponization of Testimony,” 2022.

17. Asian American Feminist Collective, 2023.