Someone is editing all the bullshit out of celebrity sexual assault apologies

Over the past month, as more and more victims of sexual assault and harassment come forward to name their celebrity accusers, we’ve grown oddly accustomed to the pattern of these particular news stories: Someone accuses a celebrity of something terrible, we express shock/disappointment/lack of surprise, the celebrity in question issues a half-hearted apology, and we debate whether or not the apology was good enough. One potential problem with this process is that, after that first step, the alleged abuser seems to be in control of the narrative. The public becomes much more interested in their guilt or innocence and the tone of their apology than with the victims left in their wake. As The Daily Dot reports, poet Isobel O’Hare has been spending the last week addressing this fact by transforming these sterilized and unsatisfactory apologies into short poems that serve to reclaim the language of abusers.

“The Louis CK statement in particular, to me, seemed like it was Louis CK’s last chance to make everyone look at his dick one more time,” says O’Hare, who believes CK’s use of the phrase “my dick” and the recurrence of the phrase “these women” in many of the apologies are just further symptoms of the systemic sexism and narcissism that caused these incidents in the first place.