Dead-Guy Speech Freedoms

The 1st Amendment in reverse, and what an abuser's natural death can do for me now

My ex-mother-in-law has gotten about two decades younger in the last few years since her abusive husband died, and we have become friends. She is in her mid eighties, and consistently prettier. She wears sun dresses, ties her undyed hair in pony tails, laughs and listens and is loving. I had only ever known her before as argumentative, difficult, unreasonable and angry. Because people don’t want to believe certain things about abuse, you might want to say that she has gotten gentle with age, or that I have, and that the seasons of life explain why our relationship or our personalities have changed. That would be the culturally and pop-psychology sanctioned explanation, but it is both untrue and based in abuse blindness. Although she had left him decades before, her constant exposure to his presence due to family ties and a sense of obligation had afforded her no real psychological oxygen. Finally he died, and unburdened of the cruelties his presence embodied even just in her memory, she is lighter.

I have recently learned that dead people (at least in the US) can’t sue you for defamation; more specifically, their heirs cannot. The right to defamation claims ends with your last breath. Although in practical reality the law does not permit me to name abusers who are alive and litigious without running the risk of legal harassment, possibly turning myself into an un-famous, miniature version of The Torture of Amber Heard, nothing can stop me from naming abusers who have kicked the bucket. (A detailed guide to the dangers of writing about real people, even while telling the truth, here). The threat of legal harassment is one of the tools used by perpetrators to continue to abuse their victim long after the relationship is over - he can haul her endlessly into family court if they have children together, make false accusations in criminal or civil court, and sue her for defamation if she as much as identified herself as a survivor of intimate partner violence.

Legal abuse encompasses other, very damaging types of abuse: financial (she has to pay for an attorney even if the claim is frivolous, and lose work time to go to court), and psychological abuse through fear. It is socially sanctioned, considered a “right,” housed under the roofs of courthouses everywhere. A perpetrator will use it to impoverish, intimidate and control the victim without consequence, and within the full purview of the law, even if he loses every time. I have experienced all forms of this, including threats of defamation claims, and I lost both my house and my job to to its side-effects. Not to be able to speak about one’s own life experiences in public is an ultimate form of control and erasure of reality, that feeds right into the ultimate aim and motivation of abuse itself.

I have publicly named an abuser and his lackeys before - a predatory middle-school math teacher, but only under the umbrella of a report by an institution. To feel safe attaching the perpetrator’s identity to that circumstance took both his deadness and a full official proclamation of the abuse - something pretty rare during one’s own lifetime, and at all.

As an act of abuse defiance and truth-telling that I cannot safely carry out with abusers who are still alive, I’d like to call your attention to the stone-cold-dead Joe Wetzel. He was wealthy, successful, very smart and intellectual, a connoisseur of the finer things: gourmet food and wine, art, high-ceilinged converted urban living spaces, deep-sea diving, skiing, tennis. I think of him as a stepfather, but only because my mother and I spent two years living with him in his expensive post-modern apartment in downtown Boston, and then a whole year trying to get away from him. Eventually we had to move to a much more troubled city to escape. In a contemporaneous letter to herself, my mother describes how Joe Wetzel once flipped over the (obligatorily) pristine and candle-lit dinner table, and threw the dinner plates around us as we cowered against the wall. I would have been seven or eight and I do not remember this incident (only fools and abusers question the tricks of traumatic memory), but I have always dimly recalled that he had a penchant for flipping over dinner tables full of food, one of them set for Thanksgiving.

It was necessary to watch him closely, watch his eyes for any flicker of bad weather, because I knew without words that he was dangerous and violent, in his own ways. He kicked my mother and I out of the apartment in the middle of the night once, with no car (the car was his); it was before cell phones, and we wandered around until she found a payphone and got someone to answer. We walked through dark, wet streets to their living room floor. During the trying-to-get-away period he got me alone and told me that my mother didn’t love me and would eventually leave me too. He forced his way into the tiny one-bedroom apartment she had rented to leave him: that was bad but is not really mine to tell, although I was there and the fact of it will never leave me.

Even deep into my adulthood, all of this was presented to me and processed as the inevitable result off his supposed psychological problems, alcohol, his brilliant-man-demons. It was never named as abuse. That which I could not name, explain or identify, that which was excused and papered over, I was powerless to avoid in my life going forward.

It would have been much, much worse if he had lived in a society that had no taboos against domestic and sexual violence. He cared about his public persona, he was afraid of my grandfather, and would have been afraid of jail. Laws and social codes, how they are applied to the abuser (or, more frequently, not applied), make a huge amount of difference in the majority of cases. Domestic violence was barely illegal in the late 1970’s, but due to the nascent women’s movement it had enough of a stigma to curtail most of his actions to psychological harm - always bordering on assault. He was not a psychopath, just a regular abusive man, who believed himself and his needs to be central, superior and deserving. We were not brutally battered, nor did he care at all about our well-being. It was enough, and brought enough future harm, for me to have a clear certainty that Hannah Arendt had the idea of the banality of evil somewhat backwards. It is not just that individuals are easily manipulated into believing that their actions are not evil, but that too many people genuinely believe in their right to be evil by weaponizing control over the mundane details of everyday life. This type of cruelty in families is so pervasive that most people perceive it as ordinary, normal - the putrid but inevitable human refuse of intimate relationships. As much as we want to negate the very idea, there are real aggressors and real victims in family life, and to look away is both societal and individual cowardice.

In that note to herself which I found by accident decades later, my mother repeatedly writes: “—- (my name) had it worse.” I think she meant that he took special pleasure in being cruel to me. That should not surprise anyone; there is such a high correlation between the household presence of children from a previous marriage and intimate partner murder, that a question about it is included in the Danger Assessment some police forces use to flag people who are at high risk. If you probe the relationship abuser’s concept of material economy, the unrelated child is a threat to his hegemony over the mother’s attention, services, affection and body. That child is also more likely to question his kingship than his own biological offspring, and to have ties to people that he cannot control. The abuser’s economy leads to all-or-nothing conclusions, and the decision to extinguish her (or sometimes multiple people’s) possibility of autonomy, their means of an autonomous production of happy lives without him. This is done through a huge variety of oppressive measures that usually do not include murder, but it is also the reason why most DV homicide victims are killed while trying to leave or within the year after leaving. For lack of a way of murdering us that did not put him at risk of losing his post-modern apartment, Wetzel’s methods of destroying our access to well-being included a short grooming gesture (kindness and giving me treats), then telling me with feigned sadness that my mother didn’t love me. With an eight-year-old, that is likely to be effective.

My interest in actually naming Joseph A. Wetzel stems partially from the fact that I cannot name an abusive ex-husband who told and showed me that he wanted to kill me, but whom I am always at risk of seeing in the supermarket. I’ve been waiting for years for the the self-help book entitled How To Live Within A Few Miles of Someone Who Tried To Kill You, but in the meantime I will use the speech avenues open to me. I can say with certainty about dead Wetzel that like other domestic abusers he was a person who very consciously and intentionally hurt others - he was not a concept, a victim or a far-away social ill. My very alive and remorseless ex-husband hides behind the legal curtain of defamation laws and short statues of limitation, which allow him to move from one victim to the next. He is even less of a concept, and still inexplicably imbued by society with the power to silence me.

Recently I found a picture of Joseph A. Wetzel, which I set ablaze in a cast-iron pan that used to belong to my mother. Setting fire to something as a means of symbolic political expression has been deemed protected 1st Amendment speech by the U.S. Supreme Court, even if it might be offensive to others. By burning an image of Wetzel and writing about it I accomplished various things: a private expression of my anti-abuse values, an act of reclamation of free speech rights lost to domestic violence, and defiance against both the harm he did to my mother and the timeless home-based oppression of women in general. It was personal and political. And it was good.