Everyone knows a Rob Porter
If he didn’t work in the White House, no one would care that Rob Porter hurts women. I say this as a survivor of domestic violence. It’s grotesque watching abusers and apathetic bystanders monopolize the narrative yet again. I am hollowed out, alternating between numbness, anger, and exhaustion.
No one cared before— the man’s resume glitters — and I can’t imagine that anyone will start caring now. The truth is — there are Rob Porters everywhere.
When I was little I used to think, it’s because I’m a child that adults don’t believe me when I explain why I’m in pain. If I just get a little older, if I learn how to communicate better— eventually they’ll listen.
I needed to believe that I had agency, that I wasn’t isolated in a virtual prison. It broke me when people I cared for bore witness to my abuser’s behavior and then called it “love.”
Of course, they’d agree that human sacrifice is barbaric. Every single one would describe the practice of widow burning, roasting women alive on funeral pyres to spark a dead man’s path to heaven, as barbaric.
And yet, the vast majority called my beatings “arguments.” They shakily nodded along with my abuser’s perverse gaslighting. My late mother and I were alleged to be manipulative, plotting whores out to destroy a decent man with our tears.
I wonder, has any man ever been killed by tears? Women die every day from domestic violence.
I watched these bystanders accept as normal, even preferable, that I’d have no future, that I’d be a caretaker to a lunatic for life. If I died young, or was institutionalized, that was acceptable human sacrifice for my household. As one of his women, my life was worthless.
I read people’s faces when they sat at our kitchen table and watched and listened for hours while my abuser attacked me, verbally, mostly, with the occasional fist flying close to my nose. I remember being grateful that he was old, and that he didn’t have the energy for worse. I felt lucky that he didn’t hit me, though that luck ran out when I inched closer to 18.
I didn’t expect people to intervene, granted. People were blacklisted from our lives for acts far smaller than defending me. Besides, interrupting his rants meant prolonged punishment for me — for his offense at their audacity.
We were all too terrified to say anything. But eyes convey so much. There were those who refused to look at me (fuck those people). Others kept the same flat expression on their face, like a Swiss banker who feels slightly distasteful about laundering Nazi money.
Only a handful of people expressed real disgust. They saw what he was doing to me and they were horrified. They looked at me with empathy, not pity. Those looks saved me. Those looks said, you’re not imagining things. It’s him, not you.
I was accustomed to being treated like trash. The price of admission to our house was my ritual humiliation. The people who refused to comply, who saw me as a fellow human being deserving of better — their silent rebellion made me believe I could escape. I was desperate for an alternative to hell, and they modeled it for me.
The sad truth is that many people prefer proximity to power over sleeping well at night.
People lingering in my abuser’s orbit, whether out of love, loyalty, or self-interest, were regularly pushed into ethical compromises at my expense — because he was a powerful, demanding man. Every time they misconstrued, minimized, or denied my reality, they acted as his accomplices. Like ostriches, they stuck their heads in the sand to avoid acknowledging their betrayal.
Before I cut off all communication with my past, strangers felt entitled to lecture me about the worst moments of my life. They rationalized it as if their passing knowledge of my abuser was stronger than the truth living in my bones and blood.
Domestic violence creates an ethical dilemma for bystanders by forcing them to take sides.
Unlike Bret Stephens, most people won’t admit in public that they side with a powerful abuser. Cowards prefer anonymity when throwing victims under the bus. Think about it — how many people admitted they were voting for Trump? How many blame Melania for being mistreated?
The larger issue, and what causes me the most anguish, is the way our world is built to protect abusers and silence victims. There are still too many well-educated idiots out there ignoring cause and effect to pronounce that only broken people get abused. As if abuse isn’t what breaks many of them.
I worry that #MeToo, with its focus on sexual assault and harassment, is already overwhelming the emotionally immature in our lives. Who is going to tell them that gender violence isn’t limited to rape? Critics will say that opening the floodgates and addressing domestic violence is far too heavy a burden on society— it’s too pervasive, too intimate, too close to home.
We must admit that as long as the world we live in protects abusers’ license to rampage behind closed doors, none of us are safe.
As we’ve seen over and over, add an assault rifle and those rampages escalate into mass shootings. Platitudes won’t protect us, but soul-searching might. What is a human life worth to you? Who do you give the benefit of the doubt? What will you do going forward to end indifference?
