Take Heed, Reactionaries
Guest writer Sock on abolition and the betrayal of principles in practice
This post has been vetted with feedback and approved with consent by Isabelle (not her real name), the victim.
Mercury has been somewhat correct about her belief that “the Court of Public Opinion” skews away from Harvey, even if not directly towards or in Mercury’s own favour. It doesn't matter if you think Mercury is suspicious or untrustworthy too. What matters is that in going out of your way to discredit and doubt Harvey and her supporters or friends, this by default also indirectly plays in Mercury’s favour. The entire premise of “Who’s behind the burner accounts?” offers three options: (A) Mercury, (B) Harvey, (C) some third-party.
How do you explain your position, when you believe Mercury’s victims victimhood and concede that they’ve been harmed – but also somehow think that they are stupid or incompetent or insane enough to not be able to accurately identify and name their own perpetrator, that they’ve been deluded into believing it’s Mercury “masterminding” everything, and that it’s actually an ambiguous Someone Else? The implication is that you believe that the answer to “Who’s behind the burner accounts?” is not (A) Mercury. By elimination, this means there are only two options remaining: (B) Harvey, or (C) some third-party. How do you explain your position, when you’ve been bombarding anyone supportive of Harvey with endless demands for proof? How do you explain your position, when it’s been two years and you’re still circulating rumours about how Harvey forged a court correspondence letter (concerning 377A) without asking: “What the fuck does Harvey have to gain from sabotaging her own case and credibility in this manner, especially when licensed lawyers will obviously be able to tell it’s forged? Why the fuck would she do something so stupid?”
And some of you have extrapolated your beliefs that Harvey forged her court correspondence letter (concerning 377A) to even believe that she never got raped at IMH in 2014 to begin with, and just made it up “for attention”. As Harvey has expressed her own stance before: “Who the fuck would want to be publicly known as a sexual assault survivor if there had been any quiet way to obtain justice for rape?” Isabelle has been of the same opinion, and now some of you have worsened it even for her.
Harvey is on the margins of the margins. If you have any understanding of how structures of power and institutions of authority work, or intersectionality (not the co-opted liberal version, but its proper Crenshaw definition) as some of you claim to, you should be able to recognise that so much is stacked against Harvey. She is not only an imperfect victim, but arguably one of the most difficult people to humanise and speak directly to. Harvey’s supporters and friends can testify to this: How many of you have actually had an equal-to-equal conversation with Harvey personally to seek good faith and honest clarity, without prejudice? Not a single lawyer reached out to Harvey directly about the forged court correspondence letter (concerning 377A) until over a year later, and by this point, the disinformation had spread so far and wide that it would already feel convincing to the layperson. At this point, Mercury’s victims were already being harassed non-stop and were only just realising and processing the scope of disinformation surrounding Harvey – that some of them themselves had previously fallen for, including the forged court correspondence letter (concerning 377A). It was not until building a reciprocal relationship and establishing lines of transparent communication with Harvey that things slowly came to light and the pieces started coming together.
That this world defaults to demonising, vilifying and discrediting Harvey has been apparent since as early as primary school: She switched schools 6 times and ultimately had to drop out due to being bullied for being different in ways that nobody could understand. If you took your time to care for and chat with Harvey, you would maybe finally understand the wealth of love, pain, isolation, beauty, strength and courage Harvey has had in her life. Harvey is so much more than just a “dubious rape victim”, a “dangerous criminal” (mainstream media has jumped at the opportunity to reinforce this narrative, and so have some of you), a “shit-stirrer trying to discredit everything that civil society has built over the years”. Harvey is also someone who’s privately supported numerous trans folks, attended some of their funerals (trans women do not survive for long after incarceration), gone out of her way to keep precarious people safe. Harvey has housed, fed, loved and cared for so many people most of you will never know or meet or hear of because you’ve never cared to ask and have already made up your minds.
None of this is to say that Harvey is a saint. Nobody has claimed this. Harvey has been harmed and Harvey has harmed. So have you. So have I. So have all of us. Sometimes, harm happens unintentionally. Sometimes, harm happens deliberately. If you are actually committed to abolition and harm reduction (not in its co-opted liberal form) you should understand that harm is never isolated, but embedded in webs of context and complicity; likewise, accountability is never isolated, but embedded too. The fundamental questions in any proper transformative/restorative justice work are: Who’s been harmed? How do we support them in a manner that centers their agency? If they, too, have caused harm, how do we decipher that? How do we hold space to acknowledge that too? How do we map out these messy and complicated webs of context and complicity? How do we negotiate relationships between multiple parties, recognising that each party is themselves complex, fallible and ever-evolving? How do we re-look at these webs to understand them not as mere snapshots, but entanglements – the paths of which we choose to walk lead us to deeper understandings of historical truths and shared global flows of power, authority and violence?
Nobody is interested in making any claim that Harvey is untainted. To be spotless is to be inhuman, and we are saying that Harvey is human. We do not need to rely on cleaning Harvey’s image up to a level of palatability, respectability and indisputable innocence in order to nonetheless still adopt a principled stand against carcerality. Accountability processes should not be on the state’s terms, as these tend to be black and white, and punitive in ways that do not care for webs of context and complicity. Accountability processes should be on our terms. They are there for us to reclaim, and they were what some of the victims were and have been engaging in with Isabelle, who herself has not actually found closure from the carceral system.
The victims have gotten irritated at Isabelle because their lives are also at stake. They have gotten frustrated, and Isabelle has held space for their frustration. Isabelle has been harmed, and the victims have held space for that harm. They each understand each other’s desperations under crisis – particularly upon recognition that holding space for these messy and complicated webs of context and complicity are directly contradictory to the carceral system’s black and white calculus. Community accountability prioritises relationship-building. Carceral accountability prioritises getting-the-job-done. The victims have put in the work and care to speak with Isabelle, after she approached them first. They have sought her consent to publish their pieces. They have checked in with how she’s doing almost on a daily, what she’s comfortable with, how can they support her, can they buy her food. Can you say the same, not just for Isabelle, but for Harvey, Carissa, J-min, Lune, etc. – whose victimhoods some of you claim to empathise with and believe, but in practice act against through your refusal(s) to look them in the eye and have an equal-to-equal conversation with them personally? You call the victims conspiracists, delusional, hysterical and overreacting. We’ll put aside the ableism, transmisogyny and overall dehumanisation for now, and ask instead: What are your alternate explanations? And what do any of the victims gain from any of this, really? Let’s return to Explanations A, B and C. What’s your actual position?
This is a reminder of what Mercury has said before in 2022:
