What We Already Know

How abuse becomes normalized in plain sight.

How The World is Gaslit into Tolerating Violence Against Women

We are shown a man verbally abusing a woman in her place of work. The videos stream in our social media feeds. We are led down a path that tries to convince us that this behavior should be tolerated. The written transcript is scrubbed from official websites to silently make it go away. Their objective is to make us believe it didn’t happen.

And when that doesn’t work, they insist it wasn’t as bad as what we saw. And when that gaslighting fails too, they reach for the oldest tactic of all: convincing us she deserved it.

The Pattern

The violence women experience follows a pattern. It begins small and escalates. Each step in the pattern serves a purpose. The purpose is to demean, humiliate, and create fear.

The next time the victim encounters it, they’ve already been beaten and broken down. They are less likely to fight and more likely to excuse the behavior.

America’s abuser-in-chief has been tormenting people, and our country, and our world, with his tactics, virtually unchecked.

This coercive control attempts isolates all of us in our fear.

He wasn’t merely telling one professional woman “Quiet, quiet, piggy.” He was exerting his power over all of us, especially women. This wasn’t the beginning of his cruelty, and it won’t be the end.

Coercive Control In Public View

Patterns of domination don’t erupt suddenly; they evolve. And as they evolve, they move into the open.

Violence never begins with a single punch.

It may include physical assault eventually, but it always relies first on escalating intimidation, verbal degradation, emotional manipulation, and financial control.

Its purpose is domination.

Public humiliation is not accidental. It is a deliberate tactic. It’s designed to isolate victims and signal to everyone watching who holds power.

He walks around with impunity, convinced he’s untouchable. That blend of entitlement and a fragile ego makes him particularly dangerous.

He’s a wannabe dictator who needs to prove he’s in control. Not in control of himself, but of every person around him.

When Power Becomes Public Violence

When any man, including a president, lunges at a woman, points in her face, tries to silence her, calls her names, shames her body, and uses his size to overwhelm her, on camera, we are not witnessing an intense disagreement.
We are witnessing domination tactics performed for the world to see.

He serves up additional punishment by threatening her career. He didn’t verbal express that her job was in danger during the interaction, but the implication was obvious. And it’s not a stretch, considering his history of retaliating against late-night hosts and news organizations. His verbal assault wasn’t just disrespect, it was a threat to her employment and financial stability. She’s a working, traveling reporter trying to do her job. Her job is to ask him questions.

When someone wants to dominate and instill fear, they use their body. Lunging. Finger-pointing. Looming. All of it is designed to force compliance.

We’ve been excusing and tolerating his venom since 2016. Well, many people have. Many have not. Pundits, however, keep offering excuses, leading to mass acceptance of his hateful and dangerous rhetoric.

So it’s no surprise this behavior remains in his repertoire. It’s meant to shame and humiliate his victims. It has been unnervingly effective. There is no bottom. No end to the harm. There’s only escalation until full compliance or annihilation.

And here is the deeper truth:

When a leader performs violence publicly, it conditions the public to tolerate it. It numbs outrage. It normalizes the intolerable.

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Escalation Isn’t Accidental

What’s striking now is the rapid, dangerous escalation. A clear sign of a perpetrator losing control.

This began with recorded verbal aggression of what we know happens privately. Now he wants everyone to witness it. He needs the spectacle to regain dominance.

He’s triggered by the Epstein files nearing release.

And so the aggression escalates into threatening elected officials with execution and manufacturing the conditions for the use of military force.

The Cycle of Escalation

These patterns are predictable.

Verbal assaults precede physical intimidation, which precedes sexual violence.
It’s not random. It’s increasingly bold and brazen.

We had someone running for president in 2016 who bragged about mistreating girls and women. He eventually became an adjudicated rapist. Two dozen girls and women have accused him of sexual misconduct dating back to the 1980s. He’s close buddies with a renowned child sex trafficker and was implicated in testimony by a 13-year-old girl of sexual abuse.

There have been countless opportunities to hold him accountable. Time and again, powerful people chose not to.

A System Built To Protect Predators

Society refuses to band together to protect women and children.

How many people, from law enforcement to the courts to the media, reduce the violence against women to a “misunderstanding” or an “inconvenience” she should simply get over?

If perpetrators were held accountable the first time, the next victim would likely be spared.

Violence continues in small, invisible ways no one sees. It unfolds in homes, workplaces, online, and on the streets. And now, it is televised, committed by a powerful man, in front of our very eyes.

From Jesse Butler in Oklahoma to the sitting president to Epstein himself, predators are freed, forgiven, or handed a slap on the wrist. They are released to wreak more havoc on society.

Clear, irrefutable evidence is never enough. Women’s worth is traded against the privilege of men.

What We Already Know

We don’t need more videos, pictures, or testimony to prove what we already know.
We don’t need the files to believe the truth.

These documents are being used as political chess pieces when they are the stories of little girls being tortured.

We’re again forced to participate in a process that re-victimizes women while perpetrators are “out in the streets,” free to inflict more harm.

I don’t have the solution to fix a corrupt system. My voice alone cannot convince a culture that treats women as property that we are not. My words may never reach the men who harm us to tell them women deserve safety and equality.

What I do know is this:

Women and our allies carry the burden of advocating for one another. We are tasked with naming violence when it happens. We are expected to silence those who excuse it.

And we will. Because refusing to stay silent is the first act of liberation.