Jury Of One, Part One
I can’t tell this story in chronological order. Maybe it’s because it’s still happening, maybe because of the two years of earth that I have shoveled over the top of it not to feel the searing pain, rejection, abandonment, self-doubt, and hurt that it caused. Sometimes I can’t feel it, not because it’s not hot but because it is. It’s like a circle. I don’t know where it starts and ends anymore. The more I learn about the cyber landscape and cyberbullying, the more helpless the hopelessness becomes. The attack on my life and the lives of those I love was nothing but a game, at least it was for someone.
Click… flash….. begin……
It was the January and I was running around Manhattan obsessed with finding the perfect ring. I wanted to give her something on the day that I hadn’t been able to give her before. I worried about the toll awards shows might take on someone’s personal sense of value. It’s a lot of pressure. So I had an idea, I wanted her to know that no matter what happened that night she was a star, at least to me. I wanted her to feel caught, held, valuable, and honestly loved. I even had a custom ring box made with an inscription. I gave it to her that morning, over coffee, standing under a billboard of …her. Back at the hotel, the team was pressing her Valentino and my little black vintage Dolce and Gabbana. Make-up and hair folks were setting up, and managers lurked nearby keeping everything running smoothly.
Everything I did, everything I planned, was to keep the focus right where it belonged, on her. I had no idea that outside the walls of us lurked hate and jealousy that was so hell-bent on destruction that it would alter the course of my life. That was not the plan. We stood on a red carpet, surrounded by aggressive photographers shouting, “Look left! Now right!” and asking repeatedly, “What is your partner’s name?” I did not know—and I wish I had—that the moment you step onto a red carpet, you are categorized as a public figure, whether you truly are one or are just in love with one.
Click… Flash…. she won
That’s what I remember about the Oscars— that it was our last good day. It was also the last day I had a right to privacy, and the day I would learn how free speech can be used to destroy lives. Freedom of Speech is a fundamental human right that allows individuals to express their opinions, ideas, and beliefs without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. This right is recognized as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and by international human rights law through the United Nations. However, the same principle that protects free expression can also be misused to shield harmful behaviors, such as cyber harassment.
While it is crucial to uphold the right to free speech, it is equally important to establish boundaries that prevent its abuse to protect individuals from online stalking, harassment, and bullying. Balancing these concerns is essential to ensure that freedom of speech does not become a tool for harm, but rather a means to foster healthy, respectful, and safe communication.
Within days of the win, an angry religious letter in a handwritten envelope was delivered to my house, warning me to “change my ways…or else.” I wasn’t as surprised by the contents of the letter as I was concerned that someone had found my actual address. This was followed by a sexually explicit comment on my blog, then another, and another, and another.
I hit report, delete, and it bounced back like a ping pong. Report, delete, report, delete, report, delete. Then the title read, “Don’t delete this one.” We were in real-time with each other—me representing myself and them unwilling to put a name to the version of themselves they were representing.
The attack on my blog felt like an invasion of the creative space I had created to share the simple joys of life while living in this tough twenty-first-century world. It was a place where people often went to find healing or inspiration for their own lives. I was used to getting comments about how my words touched their souls; I was not used to getting comments about touching “old pussy.”
The anonymous emails that followed reached my friends, friends of friends, coworkers of my friends, my ex-husband, my brother, coworkers, friends of my coworkers, my employers, and my children and their employers. My attempts to put out this rapidly spreading fire were thwarted by a legal system that had simply not yet caught up to the technology.
“Imagine being older than ur mother-in-law..... well Sue don’t have to imagine cause she is a whooping 2 years older.....Sue is old enuf to knw fingering and fucking some1 her daughters age is disturbing...the milf has been wearing an engagement ring since 2020... I wonder if she takes it off when she goes to see her 86 year old mother who by the way thinks her daughter needs a boyfriend! But nah she busy fucking a kid and doing it for the whole country to see.”
After more than a year of meeting some of the top experts in the field and being surrounded by an incredible support system, what I have learned about our vulnerability and the flaws of our laws has me shaken and frankly, I am exhausted by our unwillingness to change in the face of our very lives being stolen.
Lawmakers are relatively relaxed about this subject, even as young lives are cut short by sextortion, sex trafficking, and suggestive online bullying. All of this by the way is bated by our simple desire to be seen and to be loved.
The internet has become ripe soil for bullies who hide behind avatars, virtual private networks, and anonymous email services. I began to wonder, is the declaration of human rights always so humane, given you don’t actually have to stand by the words you have a right to?
“We don’t get to win??? But we have! Yall have adjusted your lives accordingly. U removed ur pics more than 2000 of them. Sue hasn’t logged into IG in weeks ....We know about some “private” convos y’all be having! We are inside Dahlia! We inside...And did we ever mention - mission accomplished? ”
So why keep talking about it? Why share the humiliating and degrading comments about me with everyone? Because this is bigger than me. This is a rising epidemic in this nation that none of us want to talk about because it calls us to look at our own digital hygiene.
According to the Pew Research Center, 41% of Americans have experienced online harassment, and 66% have witnessed it happening to others. Additionally, a study by the Cyberbullying Research Center found that 37% of young people have been victims of cyberbullying.
So, we have to tell our stories; we have to make enough noise that there is no choice but to change. The power of storytelling lies in its ability to connect us, evoke empathy, and inspire action. And when we get tired or feel defeated, we have to hold the line and remember what we were made for: to be charitable towards one another.
Charity / cher-ə-tē
a gift for public benevolent purposes or lenient judgment of others
Charity was once a word that meant the highest form of love, but now people can be heard saying they don’t want your charity. We don’t want each other’s highest form of love. Looking around, that seems clear. The internet is the best example—it is a place where we are free to both shine our light and ravage one another like cannibals. It leaves me wondering… Where is grace hiding?
Grace / grās
Disposition to or an act or instance of kindness, courtesy, or clemency.
The quality or state of being considerate or thoughtful
I think grace is hiding between the lines. In between the lines of hate, grace hides for the writer. There is a moment when a victim sees through the trauma inflicted to the lived trauma of its author. What happens there if we talk about it? If it wasn’t anonymous? Grace lies on the other side of everything we are stubborn about. How much does it take for us to love? We seem to fear apology and build walls of ego and stone, when on the other side, after the moment when no air seems to move, grace reaches through. I think we have to count on that. It’s my observation that grace tends to lurk where ego lives no more.
“Of course, u would ship ur mom off to a memory care center just before Christmas to make room for ur girlfriend ...Wow just wow Sue not even one last Christmas?...Now that Florence is out of the picture she has old hag all to herself again!!!! ”
I was sipping tea with Mom at her nursing home when a woman named Theresa walked around the room asking if we had seen her husband, Jim.
“Where is he?”
She thought Jim had left to play golf hours ago and was on his way home. She stood with her walker wondering if I had heard from him.
“No, I haven’t.”
Truth be told I don’t know Jim. But this is a memory care center and Theresa does not know that I don’t know her either. She is just concerned about her husband.
“Well I am worried, he should be here.”
“Maybe he is caught in traffic,” I say looking for a way to ease her mind. She shuffles off. I wonder about Jim.
I know my mother is expecting Dad to pick her up at 5:00 but the 5:00’s come and go and she wonders why she is still here. Then a bird lands on a feeder or a tree blossoms and we are living moments they may have shared and he is here again.
Theresa is back, going table to table murmuring seriously. She gets to our table and tells us Jim has died. My mother looks up, away from the birds that remind her heart so much of my father, and takes her hand.
“Oh I am so sorry, I am just so so sorry.”
Her voice breaks.
She puts Theresa’s hand on her cheek and holds it in the only version of a hug they can extend one another over a walker. She doesn’t mention that her own husband has passed and that she understands. She is just sorry for Theresa’s loss.
Suddenly Theresa breaks free and shuffles to the center of the small dining room and makes the announcement that Jim has died. He had just gone to play golf. She was distraught. “What do I do now?” I looked around the room knowing she had just gone table to table with this information and each person responded with true compassion. They lived her loss as if it was now, not 5 minutes or 5 years ago. I could feel the love.
Maybe that’s it. We all have to lose our minds a little to get back to the place we were meant to be.
I wondered in horror if this was the moment she relived every day. Mom lives on the farm gathering eggs because “she was so little she could squeeze in and get them all”, And truly, thank god there were no pigs. Could it be that Theresa lived in the moment of her beloved’s death wondering what comes next over and over again?
It is a good question though, what comes next when you remove love?
“U literally posted ur lover on ur work website and went wiht her to ur work she spoke at one of your classes and other places................ so work and personal are the same for u and u went to the Oscars, Tonys, even the Glaads with her and posed wit ur noses touching,....why cry about privacy?”
Today, we are distracted by our phones and the debate over the value of AI. Is it stealing our jobs and our money? Is it rendering us irrelevant? We consider a relationship to be a text or a like on social media, and we call these connections friends...
I feel as if it has stolen something greater, mainly because we, as a collective whole, have allowed it. We have no laws protecting us from the machines we live on and the invisible landscape that is changing our world. Is it stealing our humanity, our true ability to love? Every time you log on, if you are not reaching out in support of the efforts of another and instead raise your fingertips in hate, a little more of the beauty of the human spirit drains away—for all of us.
When do we get back to the grace part? To the part where we simply hold another’s hand? We keep zigging and zagging around it like a race we're eager not to win, a podium we dare not stand on. We stand on ego and money, distracted by piety or shame, and never seem to reach the finish line—the place where we can actually begin, grace.
Today, over two years since it all began, we are still unaware of who is behind this. The gaping wound it left is stitched sloppily closed. Occasionally, someone reopens it, and we start again. This is not just one story—the story of stalking, harassment, and cyberbullying, or even celebrity. It is also about the depth of our relationships, our rights, our futures, our children's futures, our civilization, and why we hurt so badly that we think it gives us permission to hurt others. This is about strangers, loss, hope, the law, money, privacy, and just plain survival. Ultimately, though, this is a hunt for love, because who we are cannot be answered in a life void of grace.
Click…flash….to be continued