Amber Amour sat on the floor of the bathroom, waiting for the man who had just raped her in the shower to put his clothes on and leave.
She was angry, shaken, disgusted, hurt. She had little faith that the criminal justice system would do anything to help her. But she wasn’t helpless.
“I was like, well, I have myself,” she recalled. “I have my followers – I should at least be able to count on them.”
Amour took a photo of herself. Her face is a mask of anguish. She is huddled on the ground, clasping her knees to her chest, tears sliding down her cheeks.
“I have all those fucked-up feelings that we get after rape,” she wrote in the caption, “shame, disgust, suffering. I’m here, alone, and any DNA has been wiped away in the shower. The South African police will just roll their eyes when I walk in. Feeling sicker than ever now.”
She hit publish and shared the image with her 20,000 Instagram followers.
Over the next few hours, the 27-year-old returned to Instagram to publish a chronicle of rape’s aftermath. In another photograph, her knees poke out of a hospital gown. Her feet are in stirrups. Her body is a crime scene.
“My view of the rape kit,” Amour wrote. “Thank you all for being so loving & supportive during this time … For those who wish to BLAME ME or any other survivor out there, I want you to know that you are the very reason that I am so brutally honest.”
For every supportive “without consent it is rape” response to Amour’s posts, there was at least one “this bitch is a liar”. Social media is an imperfect tool for responding to a crime that has been around for thousands of years.
But an increasing number of women are using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms for justice they say they cannot find in a court of law. Arguing that the legal system can treat them worse than a rapist, they are taking control of their stories, warning other women and exacting very public punishment.
The mainstream media has covered allegations of sexual assault against porn actor James Deen, poet Thomas Sayers Ellis, rock star Michael Gira, music publicist Heathcliff Berru, Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, and comedians Cale Hartmann and Aaron Glaser – all of which originated in social media postings.
The risks, however, are great – and the protections few – for the survivors and the men they accuse online. Critics call the accusers “digital vigilantes”. At least one website allows anonymous women to accuse men by name. Those who post damning accusations open themselves up to costly libel suits.
“Honestly, the comments, they were worse [than the police] because they were ongoing,” Armour said. “My story is ongoing. I’m constantly being bombarded with dozens and dozens of messages telling me that it was all my fault.”
Not surprisingly, most people who are raped do not turn to law enforcement for help. For every 1,000 rapes in America, 344 are reported to police, 63 reports lead to an arrest, 13 cases get referred to prosecutors, and seven will lead to a felony conviction, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. Only six rapists out of 1,000 will be put behind bars.
“Even with the advances we’ve made, going through the justice system is an ordeal and still, most rapists are not convicted,” said Patti Giggans, executive director of the advocacy group Peace Over Violence, which got its start 45 years ago as the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women. “That hasn’t changed.”
Rape shield laws in most states protect victims from having their past sex lives introduced as evidence. But turning to the justice system forces people who have been raped to relive the trauma. And even when victims are willing to go to trial, prosecutors generally will not take cases that boil down to the victim’s word against the suspect’s.
By turning to social media, Giggans said: “There’s no trial, no real way to have any kind of judicial rendering. That’s part of the reason [people] do it. One could say that it is a form of vigilantism.”
A form with deep historical roots. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, activists in Los Angeles would go into the workplaces of men they believed to be batterers and harass them on behalf of abused women.
Public shaming has been used “in every society for a thousand years at least”, said Catherine Fisk, a professor of law at University of California, Irvine. “There are lots of people throughout history who have used speaking out when they felt the legal system was not protecting their rights.”
While historical vigilantes may have been armed with pitchforks and torches (or pamphlets), digital vigilantes threaten their targets’ Google search results.
Daniel Trottier, an assistant professor of media and communication at Erasmus University Rotterdam, describes the impact of such campaigns as “weaponised visibility”: an intentional violation of the target’s privacy through the widespread (and likely permanent) dissemination of negative facts.
The destruction of a person’s online reputation is no small thing in an age when every employer, landlord and potential romantic partner relies on Google as a free and easy background check.
And it’s not only the intended targets who are harmed.
Whitney M Phillips, an assistant professor at Mercer University and the author of a book on internet trolls, said that while she unequivocally supports the right of survivors of sexual assault “to share their stories however they choose, whenever they choose, wherever they choose, with whomever they choose”, she is wary of the unintended consequences of social media vigilantism.
“Something that you do or say or post now can be taken and recombined and re-harnessed for negative ends and without your knowledge or consent. It sets people up to be re-violated, and if the original harm is violation, that’s really scary.”
Or, as singer-songwriter and musician Larkin Grimm put it: “First you get raped by a person, then you get raped by the media, then you get raped by the commenters. Then, if you take it to the justice system, they’re going to rape you too.”
Grimm used Facebook on 25 February to accuse Thomas Sayers Ellis – a prominent poet and the leader of the band Grimm was playing in at the time – of sexual harassment.
“I do not believe in Facebook witch-hunts or mob justice,” she wrote, but she had turned to social media after attempting to report the harassment to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and being informed that, as a freelancer, she had no legal recourse.
After she posted the allegations, Grimm said several of her bandmates accused her of “lynching” Ellis, who is black. She decided she could no longer remain silent about another incident that she had kept secret for eight years and posted on Facebook that, in 2008, the frontman of the band Swans, Michael Gira, had raped her.
The fallout from both allegations was explosive. The music press quickly picked up on the allegation against the rock star. (Gira initially called the allegations “a slanderous lie” and later issued a statement characterizing the incident as “a consensual romantic moment that fortunately was not consummated” and an “ill-advised tryst”. He declined to comment for this article.)
Meanwhile, in the literary world, a “collective” of anonymous writers submitted a lengthy dossier of allegations against Ellis to Vida, a non-profit organization best known for its annual publication of the gender breakdown of bylines in magazines.
Vida published the “sample of de-identified disclosures” on its blog, characterizing the allegations as a “a system of disturbing sexual and professional misconduct within and beyond learning spaces”. The allegations range from the criminal (anal rape) to the obscure (a lengthy diary of a relationship that concludes with an account of bad but consensual sex).
Grimm says the torrent of online abuse after her allegations went viral was in some ways worse than being raped.
“Every time my phone buzzed, I would get a rush of adrenaline and my heart would start pounding, as if someone set off a load of fireworks,” she told the Guardian. “Whereas the aftermath of being raped was just depression. This was like I felt constantly under attack and like my life was at risk.”
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Grimm and others who turn to social media for justice are at risk in many ways. Their online targets could sue them for defamation. Even if the accused rapists lose in civil court, the rape victims would have to spend money to defend themselves. The details of the alleged attack would be aired publicly and the victims would have to relive the trauma.
And then there’s the damage to men accused of rape. The US legal system is based on the concept that people accused of crimes have the right to defend themselves and face their accusers. Even though rigorous studies have shown that only 2% to 8% of rape reports are false, that’s little comfort to the wrongly accused.
“The judicial system is a terrible way to solve these problems, but it’s the best one we’ve got,” said Nina Ginsberg, a vice-president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. “Unless you’re talking about an out-and-out violent rape where someone is physically captured and raped, these are really complicated cases.”
At best, the justice meted out by internet vigilantism is uneven. For some, the professional consequences are swift and substantial.
Deen was dropped by several porn companies, Appelbaum by several internet security organizations. Ellis, the poet, was removed from the classroom at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and appears to have dropped out of the literary scene entirely, though he continues to perform with his band. Glaser has been “blackballed” by the New York comedy scene and has had to move back in with his parents, his attorney said.
Cale Hartmann’s ex-girlfriend, comedian Beth Stelling, posted photographs of bruises on Instagram with a caption alleging that she had been “verbally, physically abused and raped” by the comedian. Hartmann gave a rare post-allegation interview to Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice Media who hosts a podcast on Compound Media. (Hartmann declined to speak with the Guardian.)
Six months after Stelling’s allegations went viral, Hartmann said his career was in ruins, he had been abandoned by his friends, and he had to leave LA to live “with my mommy in Philadelphia”.
Ultimately, Hartmann complained that he had not be able to defend himself in court. “Please, please go to the police,” he said. “Take me to court. Try to put me in jail. I would love that.”
Given the rate of successful US rape prosecutions, it is no surprise that he would prefer an official trial to a digital one.
But for others, serious allegations seem not to have had much material impact.
After releasing a new Swans album in June, Gira sat for interviews with the likes of Vanity Fair without facing questions about the rape allegations.
Meanwhile, Gira’s accuser, Grimm, has found that sharing her story has undone years of work building her reputation as a musician. “It’s important to me to be known as an artist,” she said. “Now if people Google me, they get my rape story.”
Despite all of the backlash she has faced, however, Amour said that she would not do anything different today.
“Me telling my story was my own form of justice,” she said. “I don’t regret it. I don’t regret anything.”