By stacy lee kong

Content warning: This newsletter contains references to sexual violence.

I keep thinking about the type of compartmentalizing it takes to write hundreds of words about great someone is, even though you’ve been privy to the details of their most horrible actions. I mean, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis—and the 48 other people who wrote character reference letters on Danny Masterson’s behalf this summer—knew that five women had come forward with remarkably similar, truly horrific stories about the The ‘70s Show actor. Just like they knew he’d been on trial twice for raping three of those women, and that he’d been convicted. (The first trial ended in a hung jury in November 2022 and he was eventually convicted on two of the three charges in May.) They knew he gave them drinks that left them feeling disoriented and confused, that he sometimes hit them and spat on them, that he did this over and over again. They knew that years later, he arranged to have a friend’s son, the classmate of one victim’s nine-year-old daughter, tell the little girl that “mommy was a liar and Danny didn’t rape her mommy.” They knew his Scientology allies had harassed and stalked the women who came forward and, in one case, even poisoned her dog.

Even if they hadn’t attended a single day of court or read one victim impact statement or even glanced at a news article about Masterson’s two trials, they’ve been friends for 25 years, as they pointedly stressed in their character reference letters. And if Masterson was willing to go on an internet talk show and joke about child sexual abuse material and sexual assault, I can only imagine what he was saying at parties and when they went out for dinner and when they were just hanging out in private.

They knew.

So… how did they square that knowledge with the things they said about him, in the letters they wrote to Judge Charlaine Olmedo, the Los Angeles Superior Court judge who presided over both rape trials? Or maybe the more important question is, what does it say about the way our society treats rape, and rape survivors, that this is something they could manage to do?

Blame rape culture for the approach Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis took in their letters

“As a friend, Danny has been nothing but a positive influence on me. He’s an extraordinarily honest and intentional human being,” Kutcher wrote on July 27, in his character letter for Masterson. “Over [our] 25 year relationship I don’t ever recall him lying to me. He’s taught me about being direct and confronting issues in life and relationships head-on, resolving them, and moving forward… Not only is he a good friend to me I’ve witnessed him be a good friend to others and the kind of brother others would be lucky to have. As a role model, Danny has consistently been an excellent one. I attribute not falling into the typical Hollywood life of drugs directly to Danny… He also set an extraordinary standard around how you treat other people.”

For her part, Kunis referenced Masterson’s “innate goodness and genuine nature,” “caring nature and ability to offer guidance,” “unwavering commitment to discouraging the use of drugs” and “integrity, compassion and respect for others.” “He demonstrates grace and empathy in every situation… Danny Masterson’s warmth, humour and positive outlook on life have been a driving force in shaping my character,” she concludes.  

It's not only Kutcher and Kunis, of course. Debra Jo Rupp and Kurtwood Smith, who played Kitty and Red Forman on The ‘70s Show, also praised Masterson, as did actors Giovanni Ribisi and Billy Baldwin, screenwriter and producer Jim Patterson, Masterson’s wife, Bijou Phillips, as well as his parents and family members. All told, 50 people wrote letters of support, and while I haven’t read all of them, the ones I have read hit the same points over and over again: Masterson’s a good guy. He’s a role model, a leader. He has integrity and warmth. People love him!

The problem is, of course, that while that may be true in their dealings with him, it’s clearly not the case for everyone, and it’s certainly not indicative of his ability to do horrific things. As many people, including me, have pointed out, all these character letters do is highlight the fact that people can be good and kind to some friends, loved ones and professional contacts, while simultaneously committing horrific acts of violence and violation against others. (See also: Iggy Azalea’s letter of support for Tory Lanez, Michelle Duggar’s letter of support for her son, Josh and indie musician Leslie Rasmussen’s letter of support for Brock Turner.) Well, okay, that’s not all they do—they also perpetuate rape culture. By emphasizing what a good guy Masterson is, his friends and family are helping normalize, downplay and excuse sexual violence.

As MSNBC columnist Noor Norman explained this week, “those letters reflect a deeply pernicious logic about abusers that allows most of them to operate with impunity. The letters rely on binaristic framings of abusers, whereby they are all or mostly ‘good’ and made a few ‘bad decisions’ (see: Kunis’ use of ‘innate goodness’); or they are all or mostly bad and beyond redemption. But that’s precisely the logic that discourages people from accepting that a person might be a good friend to one person and a violent rapist to another. It’s also the logic that allows rapists and other abusers to get free passes.”

This is maybe even more evident in Kutcher and Kunis’ stilted apology video; in addition to looking dishevelled and unhappy to be there, which I think implies they were more concerned about cleaning up a PR mess than actually engaging with well-deserved criticism, both Kutcher and Kunis repeated the same general message: they believed the victims, sure, but they also believed that their friend is a good man. Really, their true messaging has been remarkably consistent: they’re not interested in acknowledging his culpability, nor are they particularly interested in taking accountability for any harm they’ve caused.

To be clear, the problem isn’t the letters themselves

Here’s where it gets complicated, though. Because character letters are pretty standard fare in criminal cases, and that has a lot to do with the prison industrial complex. Legal affairs journalist Meghann Cuniff hinted at this when she tweeted, “The outrage over the letters Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis wrote for Danny Masterson is palpable, but in the legal community, at least the LA legal community, it appears nonexistent.” And New York magazine features writer Eric Levitz actually went pretty deep on exactly this issue in a piece that explained why some of the outrage against Kutcher and Kunis was absolutely justified, and some was not.

“Today, the United States incarcerates a much higher percentage of its residents than any of its European peers,” he wrote. “America’s exceptionally high homicide rate explains part of this discrepancy. The rest is largely attributable to our nation’s draconian sentencing practices… The average imposed sentence for rape was five times longer in the U.S. than it was in [the Netherlands or Sweden]… Long sentences are neither necessary nor sufficient for rehabilitating offenders. Sweden has some of the most lenient sentencing practices in the world. As of 2000, the average person convicted of homicide in Sweden served a little more than four years in prison, while the average person convicted of rape served a single year. And yet Sweden has a much lower recidivism rate than the United States. Only about 34 percent of those released from a Swedish prison reoffend within two years of reentry; in the United States, nearly half of freed convicts reoffend within that time frame. This likely reflects the grotesque nature of incarceration in the U.S.”

It seems weird to think of U.S. prison sentences for sexual violence as long, because when feminists talk about rape, we usually talk about how rarely prosecutors even bring rape cases to trial, how difficult it is to get a conviction and how short the sentences tend to be. (This is why it was genuinely shocking that Masterson was not only convicted, but also that he was sentenced to 30 years.) Because according to the United States Sentencing Commission, in 2018, 98.8% of sexual abuse offenders were sentenced to prison for an average sentence of 191 months (almost 16 years), while the average sentence for offenders convicted of rape was 178 months (almost 15 years) and the average sentence for offenders convicted of statutory rape was 30 months (2.5 years). Those might sound like ‘good’ stats, but according to the Rape and Incest National Network, or RAINN, less than 25% of sexual assaults even get reported to the police; arrests are only made in 4.6% of those cases, and less than 1% get prosecuted—so, many, many more rapists are walking free than are spending time in jail. What Levitz is asking us to do, then, is to resist our perhaps natural inclination to believe that the solution to rape is to incarcerate more people for longer.

And this where those complicated feelings come in, right? I am not an expert on abolition; I am just a person who reads a lot. But when I’ve written about it in the past, I’ve had to think a lot about what I believe ‘should’ happen in cases of domestic violence or rape, both because these are the types of violence I’ve been socialized to fear the most, and because literally every single person who wants to argue with a woman who believes in abolition will ask, sneeringly, what they want to happen if they get raped. And I gotta tell you, while my understanding of justice is still sometimes carceral, it’s difficult to discount those Swedish stats, which indicate that longer sentences do not automatically lead to lower recidivism rates. (Not that for-profit prisons, where incarcerated people tend to have longer sentences, are actually concerned with preventing future crime.) So, even if I do think Masterson deserves punishment for his crimes, I can’t be angry at the existence of a practice that’s intended to mitigate the structural inequalities inherent in America’s legal system.

What do victims of sexual violence actually want?

I think the reaction to Kutcher and Kunis’ letters and apology video can tell us two things about how we live right now: first, celebrity increasingly encompasses the totality of your life. There really is no privacy; and while we usually talk about that as a bad thing, in this case, I think I might be okay with it, because it forces celebrities to have moral consistency between their public personas/brands and their private behaviour—or at least to publicly reckon with the discrepancies. So yes, Ashton, it is hypocritical to identify yourself as a philanthropist and publicize your anti-trafficking organization while also praising a predator because he’s your buddy, while making no attempt to acknowledge the harm he has committed, much less see him take responsibility. (Also, that trafficking org is pretty problematic itself.)

But even more than that, this week has helped illuminates the fundamental tension in how our society deals with sexual violence. We wield it as a threat and a tool for social control (Be careful what you wear, we warn our girls, and where you go, who you ‘lead on,’ how late you stay out, how much you drink, who you trust), but when it comes down to it, when someone we know in real life turns out to be a perpetrator of this type of violence, so many people would rather maintain the status quo that do the uncomfortable work of actually holding them accountable.

It makes me think of writer Moira Donegan’s recent review of Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice, the latest book by Harvard psychiatrist, feminist and trauma expert Judith Herman. Herman has spent her career studying rape trauma, and in fact is the reason we even understand and acknowledge the unique psychological harm caused by sexual violence, Donegan says. But while her work has largely focused on recording the “psychological rupture and personal aftermath of rape or abuse” (i.e., the intrusive thoughts, paranoia, rage, sleep disturbances, hopelessness and other symptoms of psychological suffering that so many people who have been raped and abused experience, sometimes for years or even decades), this book is the first time she has turned her attention to social repair following sexual violence. Or, put another way, what victims actually want to happen to their abusers.

Overwhelmingly, “rape victims want to have the truth of the man’s actions made public…. Victims are varied and ambivalent on the question of punishment, but nearly unanimous in their desire to have the man divested of the privileges—position, status, power—that would bring him into contact with the vulnerable or permit him to abuse again. Sometimes, they want apologies… Almost uniformly, they want to not see him again,” Donegan writes. “But the question of what rape victims want from the rest of us—not their attackers, but everybody else—turns out to be more complex… Sexual abuse is often a community endeavor, perpetrated not only by the attacker himself but also by the culture that encourages sexual domination as a measure of male esteem, that degrades women’s complaints and claims to equality, and that continues, after the victim makes her revelation, to hold the rapist in high regard, to act as if nothing has happened. These complicit parties are not strangers to the victim but often her family members, colleagues, and closest friends.” (Emphasis mine.)

This is exactly what we’re seeing play out for Masterson’s victims, who were often Scientologists like himself. Their community—and sometimes even their families—turned against them to protect him. And then, when they finally received the closest approximation to justice that we have in our society/legal system, two decades later and only because they fought to hold him accountable, they saw his powerful friends speak about him as if all of that fighting, and the courage it took to face him in court, and the re-traumatizing experience of recounting what he did to them over and over, just meant nothing.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion, tbh, but if I have a final thought, it’s that what we saw Kutcher and Kunis do in their letters happens every day in workplaces and friend groups and families, too. And that’s maybe the most uncomfortable thing—that our society encourages us all to look the other way, to minimize or diminish or make excuses… Only, people often don’t feel the same outrage when it’s not about two super wealthy celebrities.

Event Announcement: What Are We (Still) Doing Here?

For creatives, IG, Twitter and TikTok are a necessity, but also sometimes the bane of our existence—not to mention a contributor to our burnout, and sometimes kind of terrible for our mental health. ⁠So, on Sept. 22, Friday Things and the West End Phoenix are co-hosting an honest conversation about the pros and cons of social media for Toronto creatives, with practical insight on building community, setting boundaries and learning how to give ourselves grace from three brilliant panellists:⁠ Niko Stratis, WEP's events and communications manager⁠, Chason Yeboah, textile artist and soft sculptor⁠ and Steen Clores, strategist designer and co-founder of Patchwork Collective.
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The details:⁠
When: Friday, Sept. 22 at 6pm⁠
Where: West End Phoenix Central, 3 Bartlett Ave., Toronto
How Much: FREE⁠
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RSVP to stacy@fridaythings.com!⁠

And Did You Hear About…

The very contentious Cut piece about how having kids can affect friendships more than almost any other life change, which I found kind of shallow, and this newsletter by Youngna Park that critiques it really well.

This fun example of home décor meets very, very low-stakes investigative journalism.

Writer Sarah Treleaven’s excellent feature on a Canadian pregnancy scammer who has “traumatized at least 17 doulas.”

The LA Times’ smart analysis on the backlash to those Taylor Swift and Beyoncé-focused reporting jobs.

This powerful essay by The Atlantic senior editor Jenisha Watts.

The celebrities who are contributing to a charity auction that supports Hollywood crew whose benefits are at risk due to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. (Natasha Lyonne will help you solve the NYT Sunday crossword puzzle and Lena Dunham will paint you a mural, fyi.) (Also, the memes are so, so, SO great.)

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