And I always think something beautiful is about to happen…

Content warning: 

This essay follows me for most of 2024, it shares what it must but keeps everyone anonymous, it spares me personal details and private pain. Please do not break anonymity or privacy, or expect more of me than i can give. This essay discusses BDSM consent violations, harm and abuse, assault, pregnancy loss, alt-right hate & harassment campaigns, death and sexual assault threats, trauma and trauma recovery.  

This is my year of harm, my year in trigger warnings. Writing this is a trauma response. 

~

My name is lauren and i have been in and out of sex work ( FS, Digital, and Film) for almost 20 years, sometimes going by Jones or Eve. i have been actively practising BDSM for most of that time (you can read about some of that here). i am in a ten-year BDSM dynamic with a partner i love deeply, and i met my other partner, my spouse and best friend, 5 years ago through my writing on erotica and BDSM. Together, we made a collection of films and photos as our relationship evolved and we fell in love and got married. 

i have always processed my life through creation. Taking an abstraction like an experience or a sensation and turning it into something tangible is how i integrate experiences into my life. This is especially true in times of transformation - sexual assault, chronic illness, falling in love – struggling with transformation informs much of my work. The past year and a half has been the most transformative of my adult life, but i have only recently felt safe enough to make anything out of it. This essay is a necessary step.

2024 held some truly beautiful moments i will cherish forever, with some remarkably wonderful people. But i was also violated in almost every possible way, and every aspect of my worldview was challenged, shattered, or permanently altered. Among other transformations, this past year destroyed any boundary between my body and the truth of interconnected harm that i learned about theoretically through abolition and transformative justice. 

In my professional life outside of SW, i work to understand systems. User systems were my full-time job, and as a job, it aligns well with my instinct to see how parts fit together to make an outcome. Working in systems for the last two decades has helped me develop a systemic vision and pattern recognition. So, as this year happened to me, as events that were traumatising and challenging in isolation occurred, i also had the heartbreaking opportunity to see the pattern of harm and how it was deeply interconnected to other people's lives, how their harm was connected to mine, and mine to theirs.

Each of these events was difficult in isolation, but they were fucking tragic in their cumulative impact on my life and mental health. i learned with a shocking intimacy that trauma wasn't an impact crater in the centre of my life, experienced alone, but an intricate lace spread over all our lives like a shroud, an interweaving. 

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i first came to believe in the tenets of Transformative Justice through a politically socialist alternative high school and a liberal arts university education, through reading books like ‘We Will not Cancel Us’ by adrienne maree brown and other works by thinkers like bell hooks. i grew into adulthood believing, in part through my trauma recovery systems, in living accountability in our everyday choices, that breaking cycles of harm within our communities and ourselves is an intentional personal action. 2024 showed me, not gently, some life-altering things about practising these ideals, what it means to care for those who experience and cause harm, and to exist online in the rapidly closing fist of fascism. 

This is an honest account of my thoughts and experiences in 2024. This is also a public promise to my self and my community that i will do the best i can with what happened to me and others. i will fail, of course, we all do in many ways, but i needed to write this to tell you that none of us are safe, that no matter who we dehumanise or dispose of, we never get any safer, that paying pain forward only harms everyone around us. And at the same time, i want to tell myself and you that all we have is each other, and the only safe worlds are the ones we build together, by turning towards eachother. i want to tell you that i love you. 

There is no possible reality in which everyone will believe what happened to me happened, or agree with my choices in the wake of these events. There will be people who will hate me and try very hard to destroy me for saying these things. But suppose we agree, in the abstract, that love (the love bell hooks identifies as our ‘commitment to each other in community’) is our greatest work, and we agree, in theory, that at times this work is unbearably difficult. 

Suppose we believe together, as i do, that love is the imperative that renders every life meaningful and valuable, and we agree even though everything alive is dying or hurt, that all people, including ourselves, are possibly harmful  -  still, we agree, we are here in this world to love. 

What, then, is our agreement? 

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i don't want to write this part. But it is the beginning of 2024, and of my story. in early January 2024, my partner, a queer nonbinary porn performer and sex worker, crossed a negotiated hard limit of unconsciousness from breath play during a scene with a new friend and co-performer. Their friend lost consciousness for a few moments and resurfaced in panic. it was an accident and a mistake. Accidents in scene are very upsetting. My partner, worried and upset, called me and told me about it the day it happened. We discussed it over the next several days, because any mistake or accident, any overstep or harm in a scene is genuinely upsetting and shocking to everyone involved, especially the person it happens to, and they were very worried for their friend. An accident makes everyone on set, in a scene or in a relationship stop and ask a lot of questions. 

My partner told me the scene was negotiated and consented to as part of a day of content creation and friendly interactions, and was otherwise a positive encounter. They shared with me that they provided aftercare and comforted their friend, trying to help them recenter. They told me they held them, bathed them and fed them. They told me their friend said they were shaken, but felt safe in the end and was recovering, 

In the following days, i was reassured that the experience, while real and triggering, was being addressed and acknowledged by everyone. My partner told me they were checking in and their friend was alright and having their aftercare needs met. Over the next few days, when we checked in about it, my partner said they were reaching out and following up. I believed this was how accountability was being achieved, and the harm, although unintended, was very real and being addressed.  

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As far as i knew, my partner and their friend were still in regular and positive contact twenty days later, still texting and checking in, my partner telling them they were important and special as they made plans and exchanged inside jokes, when a different, sudden and significant trauma impacted all of us. 

Twenty days after the accident, still in the frozen fucking  hell of January 2024, i was drugged and assaulted by a stranger in a hotel in North Carolina. 

My partner got off a plane and found me drugged and in and out of consciousness. They saved me that night and kept me safe. They comforted me when i woke up screaming, calling for help and afraid of the dark. in the days and weeks that followed, they took care of me. Either because the drug was very poisonous or because of how it interacted with my existing chronic illnesses, i was sick, and my mouth was injured. i needed help to walk across our hotel room. i couldn’t keep food or water down, and i was in a lot of pain. it was difficult to move or dress myself, and painful to swallow. As i recovered physically, my partner and i talked about how i needed to be kind to myself to recover emotionally, but we both lost trust in the world. 

We had nightmares and began displaying behaviour and mood changes as a result of our experience. Looking back, it seems so obvious that we entered functional freeze as a result of trauma.  In May, we got married, and as we talked about the future we wanted for eachother, we also talked about what happened. We discussed how we noticed changes in eachother, we felt frozen, as if we were having trouble feeling truly real, present, and effective in our lives. We were impatient, withdrawn and struggling. i had stopped making art, and they had stopped connecting to others, ignoring friends and family. We discussed starting therapy to take a closer look at January. 

But we didn’t get around to it. 

A few weeks after our wedding, we faced another debilitating trauma to my heart and body - another plunge into a frozen ocean where we both struggled to cope. i lost a pregnancy, a medical emergency complicated by my chronic illness, and my partner once again had to drop their life and help me hurt and heal. 

In the intervening months between the assault and the miscarriage, my partner had not shown up for the person they hurt or themselves (or anyone really) in a meaningful way. Abandoned and with a lack of care, their friend cut off all contact, blocking them on social media in the spring, around the time of our wedding. Abandonment and lack of care for another's well-being is abuse.

My partner and i talked about this when it happened as well. They told me they thought things had been okay between them, not perfect but okay. i told them, perhaps to everyone’s detriment, they had to respect non-contact. i reassured them if their friend’s needs changed, if they wanted support or an apology, they would reach out, and my partner could try to make it right. And then i forgot all about them - because i was quietly drowning. 

i was still quietly drowning in November when my partner told me they were going to be called in for an accountability process because of the harm and neglect they caused their friend, and i readied myself to support the process any way i could. *

There are things i thought and hoped would happen based on accountability processes i've read about and seen in the past**. My partner and i discussed the steps they could take depending on what was requested by the call in. They promised they would honour the process and their friend. i had no reason to doubt them, i knew this person; i had seen them work with love and respect towards those around them, i had witnessed them make others feel safe on set and in romantic relationships, and i had survived on their love for months. i promised them i would do what i could to support them.

But the things i thought would happen didn't happen at all, as things i never anticipated unfolded.

The harmed person’s pod requested my partner make an online statement acknowledging the harm they caused, which my partner did. They acknowledged they were struggling, hurt others and let people down, and they would step back from their pornographic and photographic work and focus on addressing the harm they caused, however it was requested. But no other requests were made,

My partner was called out online for lack of consent, sexual assault, and lack of aftercare. Their friend denied consent was negotiated, and mass social shaming of my partner began immediately. Language of understandable anger and dismay quickly gave way to deep contempt and threats of violence. The call out took on a terminal intensity. My partner was rejected by their community and friends instantly; they were accused of faking or weaponising their gender identity, people who, a day before, said they would support their accountability efforts, disavowed ever having compassion for them. Their former abuser was empowered to spread harmful lies, detracting from and obfuscating a story of real harm. 

Overwhelmingly, the comments online became saturated with violence. My partner's life was threatened hundreds of times, violently and graphically. They were told to commit suicide hundreds of times. Vigilante violence was openly discussed in public posts shared by former friends and sent to them directly as graphic threats. 

They received countless messages of "support” which said things like “all women make false accusations” and spoke horribly and violently of the harmed individual. They received hundreds of messages encouraging and glorifying sexual assault, messages that contained violent anti-feminist, anti-sex work, and pro-fascist beliefs riddled with queer and trans hatred. 

My partner heard more from supportive alt-right fascists than from any concerned community members. They heard from very few friends or the harmed person’s pod or anyone invested in a process of accountability towards the victim.

In the following weeks, my partner was fired from their civilian job. Deleting social media and other SW sites disqualified them from receiving affordable therapy from not-for-profit SW-informed organisations, adding significant barriers to their attempts to build a support network or foundation from which to offer accountability. Their home was threatened with violence, invasion and arson. They were actively surveilled and they had no choice but to move very quickly (they left their security deposit, which covered most of their rent, but informed only one person on their lease to keep their whereabouts and movements as secret as possible for their own and others' safety). 

My partner became suicidal. 

As i watched all this unfold, i was devastated. it didn't matter that in five years together, i had never shared anything but connective, safe, and empowering experiences with them. It didn’t matter that every engagement we had only deepened my trust in them. Years of engaging ongoing informed and evolving consent, years of conversations about consent and the problematic nature of power dynamics hardly mattered to me. It didn’t matter that i had witnessed their gentleness, their playfulness, their clear negotiations on sets and in romantic partnerships; it didn’t matter that i had read and helped write BDSM consent documentation they shared with co-performers… all of this became irrelevant to me. 

None of it mattered. For the language and implication of the accusations made online to be objectively true, i must have been – not just blind, but actively lied to at every stage of my relationship since it began. The person i married could only have been an exquisite fabrication who abused me with lies and gaslighting, false STI tests, a fake personal history, and and and and….

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‘Everything that happens to you, happens to me.’ This is something i say to my partners to build empathy and connection, to show my understanding in good times and bad. And, during their online callout,  this became literally true. Within the first few hours, i became a target of extreme online harassment. i’ll never know why, perhaps because i was tagged in all their pinned posts and most popular work, but of the 50,000 people who visited my instagram profile during the opening hours of the call out, before i took my account private and eventually deactivated it (Instagram sent an email celebrating my high traffic record, 50x higher than my account’s next highest day), dozens of people sent me graphic sexual assault and death threats through my instagram account, and countless more through my website. Attempts to hack my deactivated Instagram account and website lasted over a month and still occasionally occur. All my site content was scraped and put on revenge porn sites. 

i was not expecting to receive threats at all. Even though my partner was as transparent as possible with what they thought was going to happen, i was unprepared to be targeted. i am still shocked and honestly embarrassed by the impact it had on my body and mental health. it shook decades of trauma recovery, and, after a year of other significant traumas, i just totally fell apart. 

From the first threat, my body was trapped in relived trauma. i was frozen in a physical response so deep i couldn’t sign in to my website to shut down the contact form to make it stop. it would take me over two weeks to be able to face this task, and it would prove impossible to make it stop completely ( I received a threat in July, almost 9 months later) i lost 14 lbs in a month. i had nightmares i hadn’t had since my first assault as a teenager, i was afraid to be alone in my house, i stopped sleeping and was hallucinating people trying to break into my home. It’s taken intensive therapy and somatic work to feel safe alone and sleep through the night. i had to quit my job to focus on my mental health and recovery. i am hurt and hungry for kindness, and i was (and still am) very afraid of what saying any of this will do.

Traumatised by everything happening to me online and viscerally aware it wasn't a safe or honest environment that could empower me with truth to make informed decisions about my or my partner’s future, i spent the following weeks and months investigating my partner offline, going to therapy and researching what happened to me.

Immediately, i wrote a timeline with the harmful incident at the centre and mapped our lives around it. With my focus shattered by trauma, i began documenting my evolving thoughts and discoveries to keep track. I asked my therapists, friends, and my other partner ( who also happens to be a therapist) to review them and offer their insight and feedback. i talked to anyone i could reach without social media – my partner’s friends and former and current partners and co-performers. i asked painful and invasive questions of everyone. i read my partner's text and chat histories in great detail to verify their descriptions of consent interactions, conversations, and the conclusions they drew from them were honest and reasonable, and to verify their accounts of the aftercare they offered and the responses they received were accurate. i felt horrible doing this, like a ghost of my former self, haunting the unthinkable as i looked for gaps, omissions and lies in someone i loved. ***

What i found was a person very transparent about what they understood was happening, who didn’t try to limit or control who i spoke to as i searched for answers, someone who opened themselves to every painful question and invasion of privacy i requested. i found someone others spoke well and kindly of, even if with shock and sadness at the accusations. i found someone who didn’t lie about the interactions they described to me in January, and who, according to their text histories, did check in, did provide aftercare and apologies in the following days, who did have reason to believe they were meeting their friends' needs in the twenty days before our shared trauma shifted their priorities and attention of care. To be honest, i don't know what else they could have done.

As i heard more about my partner, that confirmed my positive experiences with them, and as i reread their online interactions with performers, friends and others, i also began to think about my own life and experiences in similar situations. i have known harm in BDSM caused by tender boundaries and unexpected outcomes within engagements inherently loaded with risk. Those familiar with breath play know that unconsciousness is not a controllable variable or preference but a logical outcome of the act, often only a whisper away. This is a reality throughout BDSM—no one can negotiate away unintended but logical consequences. A play partner cannot promise you will not get a scratch from a knife, a burn from a rope, or a bruise from a bite. i have no doubt harm happened. 

Accidental unconsciousness has happened to me with other partners,  and i know intimately how difficult the return to consciousness can be. i’ve hallucinated and heard voices, i have struggled and fought, i have relived traumatic moments on the way back, not knowing where or when i was. i have needed care and comfort, and i know how not receiving care and not having our needs met is harmful. 

Knowing all of this, i searched for a history of malice and harmful intentions, for abuses of power, but all i found was aftermath. 

In her essay “On Cancel Culture, Accountability, and Transformative Justice:”, adrienne maree brown says, “in most online call-out cases, very complex realities get watered down into a flawed aspect of people’s personalities … one mistake or misunderstanding.” When i opened my partner to intense scrutiny, i did not find a perfect person. i found a flawed person who made mistakes, but someone who, in our five years together, never lied to me. Someone who, i discovered in the hardest way possible, offered me a truly remarkable amount of internal consistency and authenticity, who never denied the harm they caused, whether on the day it occurred or eleven months later. Someone who moved with me through a year of harm, experiencing failure, loss and trauma of their own, offering me their strength and compassion the entire time. 

In the wake of violent threats and targeted harassment and an ongoing traumatised state, i began therapy, and i learned two things: 1. Targeted harassment and bully and online call-outs very rarely differ in substance or outcome. 2. i had discovered first-hand what the anti-LGBTQ online extremism pipeline looks like in action. 

In talking with SW-informed therapists (through amazing organisations like Pineapple Support and Diverse Roots Therapy), i learned  LGBTQ & SW online communities are surrounded and surveilled by extremism and hate groups. 

We all know we live in the closed fist of fascism, and these groups become more dangerous and powerful every day as they target us en masse through ever more compliant social media sites. in these environments, conflict within the LGBTQ & SW communities is co-opted. When accounts with tens of thousands followers repeat a name, as happened to my partner, they get picked up by ‘amplifiers’ from hate groups who use targeted harassment to expand organic reach and influence within the commnity, corrode community bonds, spread isolation and rejection which empowers recruiting, and amplifying and proliferating harm comminuty wide by building false narratives and content about marginalised communities and individuals on-line and in the real world. 

These groups have been identified and studied by organisations like the Centre for Extremism, the Gaald Social Media Safety Program, and the CCDH, who have discovered online amplifiers are key players in an ecosystem of anti-LGBTQ+ hate that drives online harassment and inspires real-world extremist activities, threats, legislation, and violence. Call-out culture among marginalised communities on platforms where they are already heavily surveilled and censored invariably leads to more violence within and upon those communities, and their online harassment tactics make accountability and repair impossible, despite the best intentions of many people within those communities. 

In healthy and supportive conditions, guilt and self-reflection are used by individuals and encouraged by communities to build accountability and inhibit socially and morally harmful behaviours. However, in threatening situations, the nervous system interprets everything as a danger, and our brains can’t distinguish between in-person and digital threats. They are equally traumatic experiences. Targeted social harassment prevents any behaviour but survival mechanisms. These responses are not indications of an individual's personality, character, beliefs, guilt, innocence, or even intentions or desires to participate in a process - like all trauma, they are complex biological responses to our environment. And like all trauma, being trapped in survival makes the growth and development a human needs to access self-reflection and change very difficult. ****  

i know because it's exactly what happened to me.  

Transformative justice teaches us that the stories of victims are sacred in how we confront and address harm. it also teaches us that harm doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it is collectively enabled and has a collective impact. This means most people are both victims and perpetrators of harm. This doesn't excuse people’s harmful behaviour or mean that a person who has caused harm doesn’t need to acknowledge their actions and take responsibility, but it does mean we need to cultivate curiosity to understand the context in which harm occurs and to create environments and systems that best support the accountability we need. This means acknowledging that there are environments that best support accountability and working together to build them. 

i understand, intimately and viscerally, that this three-body problem of harm i experienced and witnessed this last year and a half is happening all around us all the time. i’m not trying to address an individual element of harm or an accountability process as much as i want to make a point about giving fascists vehicles for harassment while damaging our paths to healing. How we cope with trauma in community with eachother shouldn't sacrifice those around us, nor should it feed us to our enemies or empower our collective oppressors while also making the accountability we desire impossible. Accountability is achieved through intentional knowing, not inflicted punishment, and the conditions that make each of those possible exist in opposition to eachother. 

i do not say any of this to flatten or reduce any harm to the universal harm we all experience. i say it because it is a truth that touches the core of my worldview and understanding, and so it must inform my actions and choices. if there is no room in my theory of justice for good people to make mistakes from which they can recover, how can i believe we are going to build a better world at all? 

The best way to honour the harm i and others have experienced is to support any good faith effort to ensure it never happens again. An element that protects and perpetuates cycles of harm is relationships that enable it through silence, denial, and protection. i can't be part of such a cycle any more than i can discard a good person who has always shown up for me and is genuinely asking for support. Allowing harm to become a pattern by not addressing it is wrong, but so is the destruction of personhood; it’s just as much a part of enabling the cycle of harm as silence.

in the wake of last year, i have been diagnosed with CPTSD, and i have committed myself to recovering as much as i can. i have seen how terribly i can be hurt, and i know where i am safe. i am committed to learning from this time of recovery and growth and sharing what i learn. i hope to grow into a position where i can work more directly supporting others in the future. One of my greatest strengths, i think, is the belief that something beautiful is always about to happen, is always possible. And i want to find a way to extend this belief out into the world. 

There’s an aversion to hope and kindness in moments like this, with people dismissing it as naive or foolish at best, abuse apology at worst. My choices will be viewed by many as wasted or misguided, and there can be a cruel edge to some who would prefer revenge or ongoing punishment to growth. However, in this situation, i believe justice is knowledge that prevents future harm, and i am one person doing the best i can to act on what i believe is right. All i can do is face the pain, uncertainty, and casual cruelty of the world around me with grace, kindness, and hope to make a small, bright beam of difference. 

~

Acknowledgments

A deep and genuine thank you to the people who sent resources and made recommendations - especially people who drew on their own call out experiences to help me see that ‘after’ was possible. Thank you to every friend and mutual who reached out during a crisis to hold a little space, even if it was hard for you. You are blessings to me, you made all the difference by being present and curious, by offering compassion when it was so desperately needed, by sharing your experiences, your stories, your time, and resources. I carry you forever in my heart, and I stand by you always.

Sources & Resources 

These are my sources of reading and knowledge gathering over the last months. i may update my "year of Kindness" reading list from bluesky here as well. Many, wonderful and brave people have thought better thoughts on this than me. i hope i can make them and my community proud.

i Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom 

On Cancel Culture, Accountability, and Transformative Justice by adrienne maree brown

What if instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them in?

Prof. Loretta J. Ross 

We Will Not Cancel Us And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice by adrienne maree brown

Transformative Justice: A Brief Description

Accountability Process Primer 

The Nitty-Gritty: Sexual Violence and Transformative Justice in Alternative Communities

Think. Re-Think. by the Northwest Network

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love bell hooks

Does Social Media Leave You Feeling Angry? NPR

Anti-Defamation League : Anti-LGBTQ+ Extremism

Digital Hate Social Media’s Role in Amplifying Dangerous Lies About LGBTQ+ People -  from The Center for Countering Digital Hate

Freeze Reactions in Autism: Recognise the Signs ****

The Neural Signatures of Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt: A Voxel-Based Meta-Analysis on Functional Neuroimaging Studies ****

Notes: *Speaking out about surviving harm is difficult; it is full of risk and hope and bravery. Survivors deserve to be met where they are in their process, they deserve to be believed with love and respect and held with kindness; above all they need to be supported and protected. Their stories must inform the shape of justice. I honour this as a survivor among survivors. I believe what unites every survivor is a very honest and genuine desire to end cycles of harm. ** this is a whole essay in itself but, based on my reading and accountability process i have witnessed with friends in the BDSM and Sex positive communities, like Reid Mihalko’s very public process, or in-group processes i have seen for close friends, i expected there would be needs and requests and goals from the harmed person and their pod for repair and planned communication on progress and participation. Traditionally, restorative efforts are structured by the community around the individuals involved. The harmed person participates in actionable steps, such as mediation with elders or reparation for counselling. In these cases, people can participate in accountability reporting made to pods through structured, safe communication, which then reports to the concerned and invested community in good faith. The goals of these processes are to limit the scope of harm so the harmed person can heal while also helping people who cause harm enter the community again in time, following a transparent path, while also protecting the community from bad-faith actors. In September, I am beginning a restorative justice facilitation training where I hope to learn more about how to support this process. Personally, i feel that that our experinces of harm and abuse are used to generate rage bait for alt-right harassment campaigns on social media should fill us with rage, but also stop us from empowering it.

***Please note: The most dangerous and deadly time for people who are in intimate relations with perpetrators of violence and abuse is when the perpetrator loses power. Calling people out if you genuinely believe they are very harmful without at least warning their intimate partners puts them at incredible risk. i and my meta (my partner's other partner) are fortunate this wasn't our situation, but it could be anyone's, please don't do that

****Because of how our brains and nervous systems work the impact of targeted social shame from harassment is more harmful and longer lasting for autistic and neurodivergent people ( like people with ADD, ADHD), or people with PTSD, CPTSD or other trauma related experiences, and to be honest that's me and almost everyone i know in the queer community