Diddy performs onstage on the 2023 MTV Video Music Awards.
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This week, the federal trial in opposition to Sean “Diddy” Combs started in New York. Combs is going through prices of intercourse trafficking and racketeering, and he has pleaded not responsible to all prices. Combs’ protection legal professional, 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 either side,” Agnifilo mentioned in court docket. “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” 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, ‘Effectively, 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 isn’t okay within the legal regulation world to abuse someone after which say, ‘Effectively, they’re at fault, too.’ “
Bev Gooden, writer of Surviving: Why We Keep and How We Depart Abusive Relationships, believes the thought of “mutual abuse” goes in opposition to the very definition of abuse as properly.
“Abuse is a few sample of conduct designed to keep up management over one other individual,” she mentioned. “Abuse is about energy, it is about management, manipulation, not simply bodily violence or aggression. And so even when each folks have interaction in dangerous behaviors, one is usually the abuser controlling the state of affairs.”
Gooden added that it is important to grasp the facility dynamics at play to have the ability to differentiate between abuse and combating again, even when they appear comparable.
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 may cause hurt. And I believe that is what the general public is seeing after they see somebody lashing again or lashing out on the abusive accomplice – [but] that is not the identical factor as being abusive. Hurt isn’t abuse. Battle isn’t abuse. Abuse is about energy and management. It’s a sample, not simply messy conduct on either side.”
However why would Combs’ protection concede that his relationship with Ventura was violent in any respect? Levenson thinks that the protection is attempting 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 numerous dangerous and bodily painful sexual actions. And his protection was, ‘Effectively, that is simply the way in which we now have intercourse,’ ” she mentioned. “And actually, that case ended up being dropped.”
Gooden mentioned kink 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 in opposition to Combs,” Levenson added, “however I believe the protection is attempting 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 actually victims.’ “
Gooden added that this narrative may be particularly palatable for the general public, who may be followers or admirers of a celeb like Sean Combs.
“We regularly have a tough time believing that somebody we maintain in excessive esteem might be abusive, that the identical palms that create artwork can even create terror,” she mentioned. “That is actually exhausting to sit down with, and I empathize with people who find themselves working by means of that, ‘trigger I have been there. I believe a more healthy option to take care of that harm and confusion is to simply accept that somebody could be good to you and nonetheless harm another person.”