The American rapper P Diddy is facing a major criminal trial involving sex trafficking, and one woman’s testimony may be crucial in his sentencing. That woman is Cassie Ventura, an ex-girlfriend whom he began to date when she was 19. He was 37 then. Cassie is now 38, and is 8-months pregnant with a supportive spouse. In courtroom sketches that were released online, she appears to also be crying or in distress.
Diddy was physically violent to Cassie, and this is something that many people implicitly understand to be wrong. But physical violence is rarely present in interpersonal relationships without emotional violence. The emotional violence may be equally strong, stronger, or else an undercurrent. But a person’s sheer size or access to weaponry aside, it is emotional violence itself that usually sets the conditions for any other kind of violence to occur.
Most emotional violence in such contexts is insidious and the damage accrues slowly before it snowballs into key events — the kind of events that one may be able to narrate to another person and be understood, without being termed as overreacting. The ways in which Diddy convinced Cassie to remain in a relationship with him are known only to the both of them, even if one person lies about it. Hurt may be unintentional, but harm never is.
Last month, an open letter about sexual abuse by the Sri Lankan Tamil-French author Shobasakti was posted online in two languages. Among the ten points in it, I found the last one very salient: “Shobasakthi’s promises to multiple women, simultaneously, in different countries and cities, that he is in a long-term, monogamous meaningful relationship with them, thereby misleading and gaslighting them and causing distress.”
What a powerful thing it is to have acknowledged that sexual exploitation under the pretext of love — whether through explicit statements or more manipulative means — falls under the spectrum of violence. It is violence that is fundamentally emotional in nature, but has lasting effects on the body memory too.
Recently, very recently, a man I loved shook me by the shoulders in a nuclear-intensity conversation wherein he claimed that 18 months of seeing each other did not constitute a relationship. He shook me by the shoulders because he wanted me to look at him as he yelled at me. I yelled back, the physical touch snapping me out of the mental disassociation I was experiencing because of my confusion and shock over his words. The way he grabbed me was the least of the ways he harmed me; and not just that night. Here I am at 39, in a place I was first in at 16. So many women, and some who are not women, know the cyclical way in which abuse appears in our lives.
For Cassie, this cyclical abuse has reappeared even when she is in a stable and loving relationship. She must revisit a nightmare from her youth, recount gory testimony, in order to punish Diddy for what he has done to many people. My heart goes out to her, because I — and so many others — have been her. We are her. We know.