In light of the sexual harassment news just from the past week, you’d be excused for wondering if taking down Harvey Weinstein and his counterparts had done any good at all. Now, hundreds of Southern Baptist leaders have been accused of sexual abuse, and Mandy Moore’s ex-husband Ryan Adams has been revealed to be a narcissistic, libidinous creep.
But the trajectory of exposes on sexual harassment and assault reveals an important side of abuse that’s not often discussed. If the biggest charge against the #MeToo movement is that it has crippled itself by conflating serious crimes with unfounded allegations, its next great flaw is overemphasizing abusers and neglecting the friends, colleagues, and admirers that make their guilt possible.
Last week, an investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News revealed that Southern Baptist leaders and volunteers have sexually abused more 700 victims over the past 20 years. Nearly 400 leaders face sexual abuse allegations but only some 250 have been charged.
Some allegations of misconduct were neither reported to law enforcement nor shared with other congregations. Multiple registered sex offenders continued to lead.
Just a few days after the Southern Baptist story broke, the New York Times published an expose on rock singer Ryan Adams. The prolific singer-songwriter has a history of emotional abuse and sexual harassment toward women, one of his victims was just 14 years old. He even admitted his communications with her were inappropriate, texting: “If people knew they would say I was like R Kelley lol.”
The 44-year-old sent explicit text messages to the underage musician, Ava, and pressured other female artists to turn their professional relationship physical. When he felt a relationship slipping, he turned to emotional abuse.
The singer-songwriter has released 16 albums, has a tour planned for this spring, though many are calling for a boycott, and the FBI has opened an investigation into his behavior.
How do hundreds of leaders in a religious body get away with sexual abuse, and how, simultaneously, does a narcissistic degenerate continue to find new women to harass? The halo effect.
Abusers in the Southern Baptist church and men such as Adams get away with their actions because they seem so good that they can do no wrong, and the people in their networks say nothing, becoming complicit in their corruption.
Church leaders are meant to be pious, musicians to be artistically pure. If Adams is an artist, a visionary, a poet, he cannot also be a manipulator, a liar, an abuser.
Phoebe Bridgers, one of Adams’ ex-girlfriends, said her friends, family, and fellow musicians helped her out of the relationship. His helped him hide it.
“Ryan had a network too,” she wrote. “Friends, bands, people he worked with. None of them held him accountable. They told him, by what they said or by what they didn’t, that what he was doing was okay. They validated him. He couldn’t have done this without him.”
If we wonder why sexual abuse scandals continue to break, even while the issue is getting more publicity, we must remember that whole communities are complacent, and therefore complicit. We cannot eliminate sexual abuse without addressing the accomplices who watch and do nothing.
