An Abuser is a Network

Some thoughts on how our complaint archives can help us to read the Epstein files

Content warning: This post includes a discussion of sexual assault, sexual harassment and hostile environments.

In listening to stories of complaint, I have been learning why so many people don’t complain. I think of Kate’s explanation for why she didn’t complain after she was sexually assaulted by a lecturer in her department over twenty years ago.* She said to complain about abuse would be “complaining to your abuser.”

I spoke to Kate along with Tina and Stephanie who had been undergraduates in the same department. When a story broke about sexual harassment at their university a few years ago, Tina posted a link on Facebook, commenting, “No surprises there.” Kate responded, “Some things don’t change.” They arranged to meet up. Tina described, “We kind of disclosed everything to each other, what had happened.” They lifted the lid by talking to each other. That’s how they learnt that between them they had, in Stephanie’s words, “knowledge and first-hand experience of harassment and/or assault from five male members of staff within one department.”

Hence the clarity of Kate’s observation that complaining about abuse is “complaining to your abuser.”

To complain about abuse would be to complain to your abuser or to the colleagues or friends of your abuser, some of whom participated in the abuse, or to the institution that gave your abuser the power they abused, for whom your abuser is likely an investment, a person to be protected.

An abuser does not just have a network. An abuser is a network.

Kate also said, “they have each other’s backs.”

When they have each other’s backs, their backs become doors.

By listening to those who’ve complained in institutions, and sometimes about them, I gathered not just stories but secrets. It is not hard to understand how complaints become secrets given that to complain, formally at least, is to end up in a closet, a small room with a locked door. You complain in a closet and your complaint ends up in one. When you get the complaint out, it can be quickly contained or “shoved in a box,” to borrow Dee’s words for what happened to hers. A filing cabinet can be a bin, old and rusty, where you place what is to be discarded, what is to become dusty.

Not all complaints are housed or hidden by organisations given there’s no need to file complaints that are not made.

When you don’t complain formally, you might end up creating your own complaint file; putting what happened to the back of your mind, so you can get on and do your work.

What has been filed away has not gone.

And not just because of what goes on.

Having lifted the lid by talking to each other, Kate, Stephanie and Tina ended up making a formal “historic” and collective complaint. They decided to do so in part because they found out from current students that one of the other professors who had harassed and assaulted them was still “at it.” Yes, over twenty years later. When violence is buried, it is repeated. The scale of abuse in this department should have been a scandal. But no, it wasn’t. The institution found a way to bury their complaint, making it history, quietly retiring the professor; his record, its record, cleaned. Stephanie wrote a letter to the university, complaining about how they had “scaled down the problem to one rogue member of staff who has recently retired.” I suspect that letter ended up in the bin they call a filing cabinet.

A complaint that takes a long time to come out can still end up discarded.

In my recent book on complaint, No is Not a Lonely Utterance otherwise known as No!, which is the title I will use from this point on, I share many stories of complaint including non-complaints and almost-complaints and dropped-complaints and delayed-complaints. I think of myself as a caretaker of this mountain of discarded materials, what we can call a complaint archive. Whether or not we make complaint the object of research, to be a feminist at work is to assemble a complaint archive. Our commitment to the project of changing institutions, to dismantling the structures that make institutions so hostile to so many, is how we come to hear each other’s stories of complaint, what happened when we did, why we didn’t.

Our complaint archives can be a handle, also a lens, helping us to sift through the materials in the Epstein files, allowing us to show what we know; what is in the files, however disturbing and shocking, is not novel or new. I write this post in solidarity with all the women who said no to violence and abuse, who kept saying it, reporting and complaining, risking their livelihoods and lives. I write this post in solidarity with everyone who has seen in the Epstein files so many of the fragments that make their work and their world a hostile environment.

So many fragments; each piece, sharp.

We have much to learn from the files about how the networks created by powerful men to participate in the sexual abuse of women and girls are used to protect each other from consequences, with that line between participation and protection so blurred. I am grateful to all the feminists including Celeste Davis, and Kate Manne who have reminded us that we already have a name, patriarchy, for much of what we find in the files. The title of Davis’s essay, “There is one word that explains why how so many men can be in the Epstein files” is helpful. She notes, “the bulk of the attention is converged around figuring out who and what exactly enabled Epstein’s rampant sexual abuse—wealth, elite networks, institutional failure and blackmail.” Davis shows how patriarchy is at work in the resistance to naming it. Manne begins her essay by observing that what Davis states is “an important and obvious truth: the common denominator in sexual abuse is patriarchy.”

Patriarchy is at work in the communications between men in the files, their brutal bonding over the demeaning of women and our bodies. However familiar, however normalised, this language is hard to hear. I think of Patricia, a woman professor who ended up being seated at a table of men. She said, “the conversation was not what I would have expected from people at a university, especially somewhere like here, which I believed at the time was a good place to be with its attitudes to women. The conversation was like being in a men’s club, you know. It was really offensive. They didn’t notice me.” The men at that table used the same words to describe women’s bodies that are much repeated in the Epstein files. Because they did not notice her, Patricia witnessed that bonding, heard the conversations that mostly happen in private emails, in clubs, behind closed doors. When she complained to the Deputy Head of Human Resources, a close colleague of most of the men at that table, he nodded and did nothing.

We need to give problems their names because of what keeps happening. So, by problems, think systems. We also have much to learn from the files about how global elites search for ideas that naturalise their power and status, turning their exchanges, their sadism, their cruelty, into virtues. As Ana Marie Cox describes, “Epstein is less the thread that connects the rich and powerful than a lens through which all of those existing connections snap into place: the common denominator for the cursed ideas—white supremacy and patriarchy, a cheapening of human life and human values and human choice—propelling the apocalypse forward.” We hear in so many communications, the utility of positive and negative eugenics, that “the stronger” should be aided to reproduce more and given tools to eliminate “the weaker.” One text from Epstein asks, “if the brain discards unused neurons,” why should “society keep their equivalent.” Ideas are materials. So by ideas, also think systems. We cannot address the trafficking of women without also addressing the system of racial capitalism that renders some people, some populations, more precarious, more easily turned into property or commodity, to be exchanged, used, used up, discarded. I think of how bell hooks always nailed it by naming it, speaking constantly of “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” stressing the importance of using a “language that would actually remind us continually of the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality.”

That we need to find a language to “remind us” of systems of domination is a crucial insight into how such systems work. Why? Because power is so often obscured and not just by language. That the stories of complaint shared with me helped me to see how power works more clearly is, perhaps surprisingly, in the details. Hearing what happens behind closed doors is to witness how systems are not just there but actively maintained by what some people do, and by what they don’t do.

In No!, I share Shazia’s story of complaining about racism. To complain about a racist organisation is to complain to one. Shazia did not get to hear how her complaint was talked about behind closed doors, although she was told by the Head of Human Resources that she had “a chip on her shoulder,” which probably tells us all we need to know about how she (and her complaint) was received. In the middle of giving her testimony, Shazia told me about another complaint made by students. During seminars, the Professors in the department, all white men, kept making derogatory comments about the work of postgraduate students and more junior colleagues. It had become a routine, conversations punctuated by cruelty; jibes, jokes and laughter. The students stopped attending the seminars. When they were reminded that attendance was compulsory, they made an informal complaint explaining that “they actively choose not to go these seminars because they were designed for a handful of senior white men in the department.”

Shazia was at the meeting in which the students’ complaint was discussed. The professors responded thus, “the first thing the director said is that we must defend ourselves, perhaps these people didn’t attend the sessions because they found them too intellectually challenging.” The professors then decided to have an “open meeting,” which was officially framed as a chance for the students to air their grievances but was really about “calming them down.”

The professors were, indeed, receiving a complaint about themselves (“complaining to your abuser”). And in receiving it, they made the same kind of derogatory comments about the students that the students had complained about. Complaints about their conduct were treated as evidence of the students being weak (“they found them too intellectually challenging”). That’s exactly how diversity and equality policies such as “dignity at work” are often judged, as weakening an elite, the guardians of institutions and their legacies. Complaints about misconduct are often treated as impositions on the freedom of elites to speak and to act however they so wish. And by act, I mean act. One of the findings of my research is that physical and sexual assaults are treated as styles of communication and thus protected as free speech (read here for an extended discussion of this finding). One report into the conduct of a Head of Department who bullied a woman over decades, and then physically assaulted her, cleared him of wrong-doing. How? In the report, he was described as “having a direct style of management.”

Conduct itself can be understood as a transmission system, how messages are passed down about what is acceptable to say and to do, rather like how electricity is conducted by wire. Some people complain in order to try to stop that transmission system from working. But then their complaints are stopped because that transmission system is working.

In No!, I also shared Andrea’s story of complaining about the conduct of a senior man when she was an MA student. When she indicated she might complain about him, she is warned by Bianca, the course leader, “be careful he is an important man.” We learn so much about what warnings are doing from that one! A warning is telling you what to avoid by telling you who is important. That instruction to be careful was really a recommendation that Andrea protect her relationship to the person who abused her.

Many warnings not to complain about abuse are directives; telling you to become part of the abuser’s network. I call it a door deal: if you have their back, you will not be shown the door. Behind many a door, you will find many a deal. Hence a complaint against an “important man” will almost always implicate a wider network. Conduct is about the transmission not just of values but benefits.

Importance is a social achievement. The more important a person becomes, the more they can do for more people. The more important a person, the more people are involved in protecting them. Andrea herself watched her whole department fall into line “to protect the professor.” Bianca who gave her the warning was a woman of colour, and relatively junior. Maybe she understood that to progress she would need support from “an important man.” The warning she gave was likely one she had herself received.

Andrea said she received “solidarity” from another tutor Kelly, when they happened to meet “on the stairs.” But then the next day Kelly asked to speak on the phone so Andrea “wouldn’t have a record of it in writing” and basically told her she had no grounds for complaint. Andrea said she “sounded scared.” Andrea felt sympathy for Kelly who was on a temporary contract. She thought she was probably “trying to protect her precarious position.”

A conversation that happened on the stairs in which solidarity was expressed. Another conversation on the phone in which solidarity was withdrawn. What happened in between these conversations? Andrea had her own theory; she said someone “got to her.”

By someone, think network. Some people are coerced into becoming part of an abuser’s network. When people who are more precarious are easier to coerce, precarity is behind the widening of the network. So, even when protection is achieved through coordinated actions, it does not mean they are all performed voluntarily.

When you complain about the conduct of those with more connections, you will hear the sound of those connections travelling as messages through a network that includes but exceeds internal systems for handling complaints. To make a complaint is to call in, you send an alert by speaking to such-and-such person or persons, perhaps located in HR, about such-and-such person or persons. It just takes one person to indicate they might complain about “an important man” to hear phone lines becoming busy; buzz, buzz.

You can hear so many busy lines in the Epstein files, many emails fired off, followed no doubt by many phone calls: Epstein, a convicted sex offender, treated as the one damaged, in need of help and protection; Epstein, giving his support to other powerful men against the complainers and the killjoy feminists who called them out.

Journalist Moira Donegan, who is herself “in the Epstein files” because of whom she called out has written convincingly about how many of the documents, “paint Epstein as someone for whom elites, and particularly elite men, often felt a sense of camaraderie and affection, maintaining intimate and friendly relationships long after his 2008 conviction on child sexual abuse charges.” She adds that they did not just turn “a blind eye to their friend’s sexual crimes” but “saw him as a thrower of ‘wild’ parties and a listening ear in whom they could confide their anxieties about the excesses of the #Metoo movement.” As Rebecca Solnit describes, “The Epstein files are now like a miasma of contamination, touching more and more members of the elite who continued to socialise with and cultivate Epstein after his status as a child abuser and registered sex offender was clear. In that sense, #MeToo is ongoing.”

I will return to the function of anti-feminism - and, in particular, the association of feminism with moralism -in my next post. In No! I address the widespread use of retaliation against many women who complained about sexual harassment after #MeToo went viral. I had no doubt there was a network of powerful men behind these retaliations, although we did not have the direct evidence we have now been given with the release of the Epstein files. Reporter Bryce Court suggested in 2023 that #MeToo led to a quiet but effective legal backlash, “The accused have turned around and sued their accusers, effectively silencing them.” Another reporter, Ali Medina, describes how survivors are silenced by “bringing or threatening to bring defamation suits.”

Retaliation is usually hard to evidence; it is often about opportunities not received, doors not opened. Retaliation is sometimes purposefully evidenced, made spectacular or turned into theatre. But even when retaliation is theatrical, you cannot always see how many are behind it. When the abuser is a network, it is not just the abuser we don’t see. We don’t see the network until it fails to do what it is meant to do, protect those with power from any consequences.

And then, it can be an avalanche, a mountain of materials, crashing down.

Still, with many names redacted. Still, with so many being protected.

From consequences.

And this, we do know: they can still make a mountain into a molehill. Find ways to minimise the abuse. The violence. The harm.

And yes, we are watching that happen.

As ever, we learn from revelations; how much work it takes, over generations, to force out what so many people pretend not to know.

To force the force out is often to be forced out.

The more other people invest in a person, the more power that person acquires. That is why, when power is concentrated, it can appear distributed or even diffused. The fewer heads, the more hands. When you see so many hands at work, you might mistake that movement for something else, something collective, even elusive.

Hence there is more to this picture of power.

When an “important man” is brought down, we see it: how power does not reside in just one person, magically, as if a possession. We observe it, how an abuser has an army of assistants, whose careers progress because they say yes. We show it, how those who said no, who refused or complained, were silenced by another army, including of lawyers, through secret deals, many sealed by NDAs.

Some people who enable other people to be abusive will recognise this picture without recognising themselves. I have learnt from my research that some of the people who have spoken out publicly about abusive conduct, who have even led the development of new policies on sexual harassment, have quite happily protected their own colleagues from complaints about abusive conduct when called upon to do so.

A door deal, a yes behind a door.

Protection can sometimes be achieved by what people do not know, or will not know. I spoke to Lily, a student, who had been sexually harassed by a senior man in her department, probably another “important man.” Lily sought advice from Tammy, a feminist lecturer in the same department. Tammy said she could not “do anything” because “she did not know enough.” Tammy did not take any time to find out more about what was going on: Lily said she was hurried out of her office. Tammy was probably shutting more than her office door.

It is not so much that some people don’t do anything because they don’t know enough.

Some people don’t know enough so they don’t have to do anything.

The doors that keep so much in the shadows are used by institutions, and some people in them, to obscure what is being done and by whom. There is a profound investment in keeping things unclear. This lack of clarity is superficial. When workplace abuses come out, it is common for people to say it was “an open secret.” As Soraya Chemaly has observed, Epstein’s sexual abuse of women and girls was an “open secret,” which “just means people were colluding, throwing hundreds of girls away as they did.” An open secret is information that people know without it having to be officially disclosed. Some people manage to protect abusers by working to keep that abuse almost a secret from themselves, trying not to learn the full extent of it, pulling the blinds down to stop themselves seeing too much or seeing any more. That’s how some people can be shocked by revelations about serial abusers whilst participating in the very culture that created them.

*All names in this post are pseudonyms