Diddy performs onstage on the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards.
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This week, the federal trial towards Sean “Diddy” Combs started in New York. Combs is going through expenses of intercourse trafficking and racketeering, and he has pleaded not responsible to all expenses. Combs’ protection lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, is utilizing a well-known tactic to explain the hip-hop mogul’s relationship with one in all his accusers, his former longtime girlfriend, singer Casandra “Cassie” Ventura.
“There was hitting on each side,” Agnifilo mentioned in courtroom. “We will take the place that there was mutual violence within the relationship.”
This idea, also known as “mutual violence” or “mutual abuse,” means that each events in an abuse case engaged in abusive conduct. This concept was additionally introduced up within the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial.
However Loyola Marymount College regulation professor Laurie Levenson mentioned “mutual abuse” just isn’t a authorized protection of abuse.
“You will not discover within the regulation books a mutual abuse protection. What you may see are defendants arguing, ‘Nicely, I actually thought that the sufferer was consenting as a result of they had been doing it to me, and due to this fact I may do it to them,’ ” she mentioned.
“[But] it’s not okay within the prison regulation world to abuse someone after which say, ‘Nicely, they’re at fault, too.’ “
Bev Gooden, creator of Surviving: Why We Keep and How We Go away Abusive Relationships, believes the concept of “mutual abuse” goes towards the very definition of abuse as properly.
“Abuse is a few sample of conduct designed to keep up management over one other particular person,” she mentioned. “Abuse is about energy, it is about management, manipulation, not simply bodily violence or aggression. And so even when each folks interact in dangerous behaviors, one is usually the abuser controlling the state of affairs.”
Gooden added that it is vital to grasp the ability dynamics at play to have the ability to differentiate between abuse and preventing again, even when they appear related.
She mentioned, “I discover that what typically will get labeled as mutual abuse is extra precisely a trauma response… The factor that I all the time say is that trauma responses could cause hurt. And I believe that is what the general public is seeing once they see somebody lashing again or lashing out on the abusive companion – [but] that is not the identical factor as being abusive. Hurt just isn’t abuse. Battle just isn’t abuse. Abuse is about energy and management. It’s a sample, not simply messy conduct on each side.”
However why would Combs’ protection concede that his relationship with Ventura was violent in any respect? Levenson thinks that the protection is making an attempt to reframe this “mutual violence” as a consensual a part of the sexual relationship – a technique she noticed within the case of former Dodger’s participant Trevor Bauer.
“Trevor Bauer, again in 2021, he was accused of abusing [someone] with varied dangerous and bodily painful sexual actions. And his protection was, ‘Nicely, that is simply the best way we now have intercourse,’ ” she mentioned. “And actually, that case ended up being dropped.”
Gooden mentioned kink just isn’t abuse. Practitioners are adamant that enthusiastic consent is central to kink.
“Now [Bauer’s case] wasn’t as excessive as what’s being alleged right here towards Combs,” Levenson added, “however I believe the protection is making an attempt to reframe this as, ‘Gee, that is simply how the world of rock ‘n’ roll works, and these folks wished to be a part of it, so they are not really victims.’ “
Gooden added that this narrative is likely to be particularly palatable for the general public, who is likely to be followers or admirers of a star like Sean Combs.
“We regularly have a tough time believing that somebody we maintain in excessive esteem could possibly be abusive, that the identical arms that create artwork may also create terror,” she mentioned. “That is actually arduous to take a seat with, and I empathize with people who find themselves working via that, ‘trigger I have been there. I believe a more healthy strategy to take care of that harm and confusion is to just accept that somebody may be good to you and nonetheless harm another person.”