Abuse of Power and the Legacy of Jesse Lacey • Page 3

To the "power corrupts" point: I just want to drop in to say that you don't have to be famous or to have a personality disorder in order to cause extreme harm to others. You can be literally anyone, from any walk of life, and it's disingenuous to pretend that you *have* to have a platform or personality disorder in order to abuse others.

For example: my abuser was likely an undiagnosed sociopath. He was not famous, and got kicked out of his band early enough that he did not really have a platform. But the people who enabled and supported him (one of whom was my best friend in the entire world and has since treated me like gum on the bottom of his shoe while continuing to support my abuser) despite knowing it were just run of the mill, "good guys" whose mediocre bands get signed to Epitaph.

 

Yea I guess I kinda contradicted myself there cuz my whole first point was that any dude can cause this kind of harm maybe without even knowing it - not an excuse - but then I did get kinda side tracked into the power thing. I guess just think it’s a lot easier for men with power to abuse. Just as an example I don’t think I could convince any female to send me nudes because I’m easy to reject - I’m nobody. If i knew all I had to do was ask for a tit pic or some kind of weird sexual favor and I’d probably get it would I? I’d like to think I wouldn’t and i could trust my moral integrity enough not to harm anyone psychologically like that but in moments of weakness how fallible am I? How do I know until I’ve been tempted like that and successfully stood up to it?

At the same time I do understand that public pressure towards doing the right thing in these situations and public denunciation of offenders is an important step towards fixing the overall problem. I don’t want to be an impedance to that I just want men in particular to look inwards and make sure theyre preparing themselves to not repeat these types of mistakes instead of just ridiculing the men who have been called out for them. It’s easy to look at Jesse Lacey and label him a monster, it’s a lot harder to look at ourselves and realize we’re capable of causing similar damage to women and then deal with it.

 

Agree with almost everything she said but "Quite frankly, in any other job, in any other industry — Jesse would have been fired and blacklisted" is not true at all, pretty much just the opposite.

 

stop this. get help

 

I’m sorry if I offended you or something. I’m willing to change my mind on any of this. I don’t have 100% conviction in what I’m saying and some of it is reckless so I’m sorry.

 

It'll happen in time. It's not easy for a perspective to change overnight, but it can happen. It just takes patience with yourself and others, reserving judgment, being open to what a person is sharing with you (whether it's advice or a story of something that happened to them) and (hardest of all) tempering your emotional response to how people respond to you (if that makes sense)/understanding that they most likely operate on a different emotional frequency than you. Plus, it doesn't help that the tone of a person's message can easily be mistaken in this medium.
Going back to the issue at hand, if Jesse had put out a proper statement, the band had immediately come out against what he did and they broke up, I think this conversation wouldn't be taking place. We would've had our time to be angry and upset as a community, but at least we'd be able to close that chapter knowing that the band did the right thing and that Jesse was truly sorry/making an effort to reach out to his victims to apologize/make amends. But none of those things happened. I can't speak for everyone on here, but that where my anger towards Jesse and the band stems from, in addition to the fact that it's a symptom of a larger problem within our scene and pop culture at large.