My Betrayer Will Never Be Shamed
The bravery of Gisele Pelicot makes OP feel weirdly envious because she knows her betrayer will never be publicly shamed or criminally prosecuted.
***
Dear Chump Lady,
The outpourings of support for victims like Gisele Pelicot make me feel my own isolation so keenly. I was not hit or raped during the breakup of my marriage, though I felt that both could possibly happen any day while it was happening. Even though actual violence didn’t occur, it felt close, and I was frightened and confused in a way I’d never felt in my life. I thought he might kill me, and I also knew I couldn’t say so because I would be labeled hysterical. I went through something that caused me to feel like I should or would die.
It has taken massive willpower to come back from being abandoned.
My parents are dead, my only brother also died young. My only remaining close relative, the only person who knew me, was my FW. He turned on me and used our intimacy and his knowledge of me to create fear and, not physical paralysis as in Gisele’s case, but psychological paralysis. Two years later, I still couldn’t create a correct narrative of what I’d gone through. It’s still difficult now, after five years.
There is no-one close in my life I can really confide in, who has the time and sympathy to listen. I mete out small portions of my story judiciously and take the empathy I am afforded gratefully, but they are only droplets and glimpses of what, honestly, is a roaring canyon. So thank you so very much for providing a support forum. You have helped me immeasurably.
If I’d been physically hurt, I believe the sympathy and understanding would be there more readily.
And my story would have been understood by a wider net of people. (Starting with the domestic violence community, in fact, who are prepared to deal with violence but whom, at least where I live, were at a loss to help or advise when I hadn’t fled physical violence.)
The stories of egregious violence, like Gisele Pelicot’s, at least for me, have a chilling effect, as in “what have you got to complain about? What happened to you wasn’t so bad”. And it’s true, obviously. Certainly not as bad, and not as outrageous. My life was not clearly in danger, though I felt a murderous rage from my FW.
It’s the physical violence that actually makes the violence stop being invisible to the world.
Nonetheless, I was yelled at, physically intimidated, smeared, ostracized, and I had my financial support and my childrens’ stripped away.
Now, I love and am grateful for Gisele Pelicot.
I love “shame must change sides”.
And I love to hear her voice, her language. I feel terrible for her and it makes me so happy her rapists were punished.
But at the same time, seeing the sunlight she’s received, it makes me sad that my garden-variety betrayer will never be shamed. Instead I have to swallow the pill of lectures from the court on how he is a deserving father, and the insult and disrespect of a divorce judgment drawn with the full knowledge of all parties that he will dishonor it, and that I do not have the means to pursue it — because he impoverished me.
My children do not have a clear directive from society, “your father should not have deserted you”.
I hope one day the opprobrium will extend to more FWs than the worst of the worst. I have no doubt Gisele Pelicot would agree.
ChumptyDumpty
***
Dear ChumptyDumpty,
While you may not get the justice you deserve, I think we all can live “Shame must change sides.”
Your FW will not be publicly shamed. The world continues to not see double lives (infidelity) as a form of abuse. Your ex is not going to jail for abandoning his children.
But, you can refuse the shame too.
That’s where the heroism is — and this is how the narrative changes.
The damage Gisele Pelicot’s husband and those men did to her will never go away. That trauma is forever. But she’s refusing to let those crimes cow her.
From the recent New York Times interview with Pelicot. (Gift link)
She is in good health, with no flashbacks from the years of abuse. A recent operation cleared her of cervical cancer from one of the four sexually transmitted diseases that the rapists passed to her. In February, she paid off the last of the debts racked up by her former husband. And she has fallen in love with a man who shares her life and home, and sits in the next room waiting for the interview to end.
She smiles at me and squeezes my knees as I get teary.
Her message to rape victims: “You must not give up on being happy.”
Happy seems like an impossible directive, but my God, if that woman can survive it, we can too.
Yes, BUT SHE HAD JUSTICE, TRACY!
This is where we get into the Pain Olympics. (This is not the Pain Olympics, as I never tire saying.) Pelicot had justice, but she had unspeakable trauma. And is there ever any accountability that can make up for what she endured?
That doesn’t mean we should ever falter on demanding accountability. But the harder work is rebuilding your life. One of the many reasons people cheer for Pelicot, is she took all that shit and hit Return to Sender.
This is not my crime. This is not my shame.
YOU WEAR IT.
seeing the sunlight she’s received, it makes me sad that my garden-variety betrayer will never be shamed.
We don’t control everyone. You shame him. Even with everything that happened to Pelicot, there were men who tried to say she was faking it.
Instead I have to swallow the pill of lectures from the court on how he is a deserving father,
Deserving fathers show up for their children. Emotionally and financially. It takes a lot for the court to sever the primal ties of parenthood. But trust me, your child knows who shows up and who doesn’t. Refuse to wear the shame of a court judgment that thinks you’re a bad parent for hating injustice. Ducking child support is UNJUST. Abandoning parenthood like you’re canceling a subscription is UNJUST. I’m sorry the world doesn’t yet agree, but keep documenting it and talking about it. And maybe in a hundred years people will take sane parents seriously. This is a big ship to turn around.
I do not have the means to pursue it — because he impoverished me.
You have the means, however impoverished, to show up for your children and love them. Again, this is systemic injustice — drugging women to assault them is also systemic — you only have your life. Refuse to let him steal your joy. Love your kids anyway. Fight for accountability if you can, but the more important work is always showing up.
I hope one day the opprobrium will extend to more FWs than the worst of the worst.
Yes, they all get a bench in hell.
Hugs. And happy Tuesday. You’re mighty for enduring. Keep up the fight.
I understand OP, the deep rage. My Ex who made excuse after excuse on why we couldn’t start a family left me for someone 10 years younger. They post happy family photos with their toddler while my second Husband and I struggle and my never be able to have them.
He deprived me, and his family all cheer for him. People who knew me since we were teenagers, and I’m forgotten. A road bump in his true love story with the woman he took camping behind my back.
The injustice threatens to consume me, but it only burns my own hand. I tell my truth, and actively work to focus on my own life. I haven’t given up on children yet, and will find ways to have a fulfilling life even if it doesn’t happen. I am with someone who supports me in both big and small ways, and my Mother says she is so glad I didn’t have children with my Ex. We will see what life holds, but he’s taken so much from me. I feel the anger, but I also won’t let his memory steal on minute more of my one precious mortal life.
They both know, deep down, who they really are and what they both are capable of.
It does not seem like it now but you dodged a bullet not breeding with a FW.
That poor toddler. Both his parents are FWs.
Abusers isolate their victims. I too have almost no family left but did keep friends and I sang like a bird about the reason for divorce. That’s my own small outlet for that burning rage. Whenever I can I spread Tracy’s message about infidelity is abuse.
Around here there’s a chump in real life who doesn’t want people to know she got a std from ex’s hooker habit and didn’t really want to help me (just talking) during my divorce from a similar FW even though she’d received some expensive stuff from me years prior. So disappointing. In her isolation she only confides in one gossip monger and still hasn’t seen through that frenemy.
I took the opposite approach and yes FW is shamed a little bit by friends and neighbors who ignore him at the grocery store. Why should I be ashamed of a narcissistic sociopaths actions?
Silence is not golden.
I would love nothing more than to be able to move on from the rage, and I do what I can to stay present in the moment. It’s just not happening for me. What he did to me during the marriage is in the past, but what the legal system did to me is an ongoing injury that doesn’t seem to be healing. The problem is that the money he stole, he got to keep, and I am going to have to give up and move someplace cheaper, where I won’t know a single living soul, at age 70, if I stop working. The financial hit isn’t in the past, it’s the present and the future.
Two months ago, FW had a very serious stroke and now he’s unable to work, to drive, or even to use his right side. I wish I could be a more gracious person and feel empathy for him, because he’s all alone precisely when the one thing he needs, is a loyal partner who can be there for him. He can pay for erratic and unreliable home healthcare aides, but he needs what money can’t buy all of a sudden. He made his choice. He chose money and casual sex fuckbuddies, and I walked out. I invested in friendships and relationships, and at least I have that going for me. If anything like that were to happen to me, my friends would be fighting one another over who got to sit by my hospital bed.
It has been a little over eight years since DDay for me. Sailing over a very stormy and turbulent sea of rage, despair, grief, depression, anxiety. But I am not in that boat alone, thank goodness.
It has taken me a very very VERY long time in this process to realize and feel that what Marcus Aurelius said almost 2000 years ago is true:
“Whoever does wrong, wrongs himself; whoever does injustice, does it to himself, making himself worse.”
He argues that wrongdoers harm their own character, and that the best revenge is to not resemble them.
Crap character will keep anyone out of the best seats in the house of this one life we get.
They really are their own punishment. But it’s a very long voyage over that sea I talked about to get to the place where you truly feel it and believe it.
Hang in there.
PS….I happened upon a photograph of Gisele Pelicot with Camilla Parker Bowles, the notorious queen of affair partners, an abuser who fancies herself as some kind of champion for domestic violence survivors. I wish Gisele Pelicot had the ability to see her for who she is and declined the invitation to tea and the photo op. My fantasy is that Gisele politely declines the invite saying, “I can’t accept your invitation because of your status as an abusive female.”
(Diana doesn’t get a hall pass for cheating either.)
Cheating is abuse and all parties to it are guilty.
♥️
Now I’m legally divorced, I’m starting to feel the consequences of what he did, and the finantial abuse he’s putting me through.
I won’t find justice. We have both jobs, so for my country’s judges is enough to rule you out from a pension.
I understand you OP and I want to hug you.
And for Giselle Pellicot, she deserved so much more justice and a finantial reimbursment from french justice yet still… somewhat judges decided she have to pay whatever that POS spent.
I hope for all chumps happiness, and of course… tuesday.
Yes, Ms. Pelicot got to pay his debts! That’s adding insult to unimaginable injury. Maybe the judge couldn’t resist issuing a “f**k you, victim” from the bench, from on high.
I understand how you feel. I also felt a small pang that my horror story remains my burden while FW lives a glorious life with a new wife appliance. At least Mr Pelicot and the 50 other weird depraved men will spend time in jail. Publicly named and shamed.
Gisele Pelicot made a conscious decision to look glamorous each day so she wouldn’t be dismissed by the media. In interviews she has shared her story, and the toll it has taken on her children.
I am working on being happy with what I have (not much) while still mourning what I loss (my health, the money I worked for & saved, the future I thought I had with my college sweetheart of 40 years.) That’s why we are all here. Looking for support & comfort.
Cheaty McLiarface will deal with little external shame because he has spent decades setting up the narrative that I’m the problem with friends and family behind my back. Meanwhile, I was 120% on Team Cheaty. Never talked him down to others. Created an image of an ideal marriage.
It took a while to get over the lack of contact much less support from people (the Switzerland and flying monkey types, I came to understand) who have been in my life for decades. And I still have moments where I lament how completely unfair it all is. But I’m grateful that they’ve weeded themselves out. Replaced by genuine empathetic human beings. How refreshing.
I feel this too, and it’s been about 9 years. Also no extreme or overt abuse, such as physical violence or rape. Some rape-adjacent behavior (coerced into sex post-discovery only to cry through the experience and have him inform me that in some legal contexts I have forgiven him by “consenting” to it – very effed up) and the emotional and mental manipulation by an undiagnosed sociopath (so I don’t even have a solid diagnosis to confirm what I know to be true). I am still working through what this level of betrayal has done to me emotionally and mentally in therapy. I don’t expect justice, but as Tracy said I can refuse the shame of someone else’s otherwise criminal (maybe not legally, but in the eyes of all that is good and decent) and abusive behavior. You can’t compare yourself to others – your pain and experience was real, it was hurtful and impactful to you and your life, whether or not it can command a collective gasp from the world. And we in this community know – there will always be people who understand on some level what you went through. It was terrible, and you are not alone in your pain or your triumphs as you work your way through it all.
First of all-I would imagine her flashbacks from the horrific trauma that Ms. Pellicot experienced are well managed-I very much doubt that they are all the way gone. Trauma “be like that” as the kids would say. That takes a lot of work and a lot of bad days(like the one you are having-and that’s ok! They happen!)
It’s ok to go through what you are going through. You’re not alone(even if you feel that way). The people we trusted most in the world were also the people that taught us what real isolation is. And they further tricked us into believing that is how it would always be-even in their absence. My takeaway from the Gisele Pellicot story is a lot more about personal resilience, coming out of our personal hells and walking into the sun. Healing, at least in my experience, is a very personal journey. We just don’t have to do it alone if we don’t want to.
Believe me-I get it. The only people in my universe that fully empathize are the people that it has also happened to. My Traitor will never be tarred and feathered the way I would like her to be. My own mother had apparently maintained contact with her until very recently I found out (and lo and behold-there is a reason I do not talk to my mother). It sucks. It really does.
I had a couple of revelations about all of that though:
A) The conversations about cheating being abuse are happening and ongoing. We are sitting on the bleeding edge of that knife going Mach 5 toward the future (and the future, as always, rules). It sucks that we are not there now. Ms. Pellicot, Melinda Gates, Beyonce, and others are helping pave the way for even more conversations. Those conversations happening, us making our voices heard? That is how the change happens. That is how our gardens get that particular wavelength of sunlight. We have to keep fighting.
(side bar on all of that: one of the most interesting days in my career, I think I have shared on this experience before, but it bears repeating-the day Gender Identity Disorder became Gender Dysphoria in the DSM. Our understanding of issues evolves as more voices are heard, as more people gain understanding…and we admit that there are things that we were wrong about in that fashion.)
2) The way my Traitor would need to be pilloried, humiliated, cast down, torn apart, and gutted for me to be 100% satisfied with her defeat and to feel that ledgers are completely balanced with her simply does not exist. How does the saying go, “if you seek revenge, dig two graves.” It’s like a different layer of relationship policing-the level of dehumanizing horse hockey involved is not worth the effort.
So I give her the real punishment: the world I am not in. “…but give me time. A day will come when you think yourself safe and happy, and suddenly your joy will turn to ashes in your mouth, and you’ll know the debt is paid.”
There is no punishment for these Traitors greater than letting them be themselves-they will get theirs in the end. They always do. It will hunt them. It will find them in some quiet moment when it catches up to them-just as our quiet moments haunt us sometimes. We just don’t get to be there to watch because we are moving on with our lives.
The justice we earn is not of the traditional shape. I am a victim of gun violence among my other traumas(yeah, I’ve had a rough go of it, but if you’re reading this, you have too, and I am sorry). I was sagely advised by my victim advocate that “there is no healing in the court room.” We grow bigger, better, and stronger. And we live in the social media and AI world. It’s hard not to conceive of any picture we see with a great degree of skepticism.
I give no more of my life or energy to that person, save for the occasional nightmare and latenight regret when all of my daily allotment of serotonin and dopamine have left for the day to their own wanderings robs me of that piece of control. Then I wake up again, lower my crown, and continue my conquest.
There are supports out there-this is one of them. It is truly horrible that there is not the wider understanding of what we go through with all of this. My friends very fortunately do not understand what this is like-and they are better for it. I don’t want anybody else to have to go through this. I’m happy if it had to happen to anybody I care about that it happened to me. It transpires that I am almost custom built for taking those hits.
It is times like this where I wish it was easier to reach out more privately and individually-though I completely understand why we can’t in this space.
For what it’s worth ChumptyDumpty, having said all of that today…I’m proud of you! I think you’re doing great. It doesn’t feel like it-but if you’ve ever had major surgery, you know that healing is its own unique, hard to understand kind of pain(and where I come from? Pain is Strength.) You spoke up, you didn’t let this kill you, and by your own admission you used your own willpower to pull yourself out of the black hole called “Betrayal.” That’s…huge! Bigger than the black hole, even! Give yourself more credit.
I really don’t have a lot of sunlight to give today, but you are welcome to all of mine if you’re feeling dark.
Happy Tuesday to those that celebrate!
It’s pretty sad that it took what was done to Mme Pelicot for there to be such universal sympathy. No doubt it’s harder to blame the victim when she’s been drugged–although several of her accusers tried, or suggested consent had been given because they’d been invited to rape her by her husband, a brazen claim given the name of the app–“Without Her Knowledge”–they were using to find women to rape.
I’d like to believe that her admonition “shame must change sides” will trickle down to other instances of abuse, but I don’t have much real hope. I do think her courage in going public can help others of us who have suffered abuse of other kinds.
My friend and I were both sexually abused by our biological fathers. We have a few dark jokes we share whenever we see victims get a huge payout from an estate, church, or organization. Things like: “If only my father had been a priest!”
We joke because what else can you do? Our fathers both never faced justice. If I were to share my story, I know I would never be believed by family and family friends. There will be no sunlight, no day in court, no payout, or catharsis.
I spent my youth in broken pieces, hopelessly depressed and crying out for help. I wanted someone to see how wounded I was, someone to say something, someone to care. Around 20, I realized no knight in shining armour was coming, and even if he did, he couldn’t really help. He couldn’t undo the damage. He couldn’t sort out the jumbled mess of my mind. Only I could do that.
I had to pick myself up. I had to fight for my life. Our abusers “win” when we collapse inward and stop fighting for our own happiness. Our abusers “win” when we let our victimhood define us. Our best revenge is a healthy life well lived and loved, despite their efforts to break us.
Chumpty Dumpty – CL and previous commenters have posted many wise words. I won’t add to that, but just wanted to show up here and give you a {{big hug}}
Yes, don’t give up on happiness. Gisele is very right on that front.
In my mess, I somehow got the idea that things would get better. Even working three jobs (one in retail-ugh), there were moments of purpose and peace. Each visit to my wonderful attorney confirmed that we would eventually get the legal break to end the marriage. And we did.
It was unjust that my ex treated me the way he did. And it was unjust that he basically tossed aside our college kids in the process. But that’s all on him. Our job is to figure out the rest of our lives without him.