This is an update of one of the most serious, personal and popular articles on this site, One Year On: The Consequences of Betrayal. It concerns a moment, sometime past midnight on 1st December 2009, when I discovered that a friend whom I liked, admired, respected and loved – may a rampant beast of prey rip his gullet in twain – was nothing more than a Tiger Woods or, since this is an annual update, a Rio Ferdinand, a Ryan Giggs or an Ashton Kutcher. Ah, those 'family men'. They always pretend to be nice guys; it's part of their abuse kick. Ooh, like Hugh Bonneville, the johnjuncter who hates women so much he buys them to do what he wants in bed and then forcibly silences them so they can’t say what they want after it. Watching Lost in Austen will never be the same again! I’ll keep that one up there until his lawyers get in touch. Oh - and hello, Mrs Bonneville, if you're reading this. You're married to a piece of scum who buys women for sex because his pleasure and sense of power, plus the sheer pleasure of lying to your face for years and years, added to the frisson-kick and career/image benefits of being known publicly as a lovely family man, are more important than anything else.
Back to the toxicity. Because my friend CM – may the heavens open and send a plague of ravenous clicking cockroaches upon thee – was well-known in his field and a colleague as well, I found that the subsequent dismantling of everything I had ever known, thought, believed in, hoped or had faith in stretched not only to my personal life of friendships but also to my professional life, my social life and my daily existence. I discovered that being stabbed in the back does indeed literally feel like being stabbed in the back.
As I uncovered the extent of his emotional mistreatment of women and his thickly layered lies I also uncovered the extent of the outer world’s collusion and protection with this abuse. I could not work for, promote or protect these people any more, or stay quiet about the sexism I experienced and witnessed every single day. This led to further articles, a sense of intense despair and an annihilating collision with the glass ceiling. The contempt for women which I encountered in this one individual was, I realised, shared by many colleagues of both sexes, most of whom befriended, liked and helped him - and he took this help with great alacrity. Should any culture fan wonder why it is that some (many, most) shows, events, shortlists, recommended lists, panels, literary festival and so on have no women, or heavily outnumbers women, let me tell you, it’s exactly what it appears to be: misogyny and man-worshipping. Hence the phenomenon of cultural femicide, of female radio silence and of literary women and literary prizes not being on the same podium. Oh, quick quote: Roman Polanski gets a cover-mention in Empire magazine’s Dark Knight Rises issue. Congrats, Ro. How's the raping going?
But that’s the deep, underlying, 5000-years-old issue. Let’s talk about surface issues. I have become implicated in an abuser’s mess, found my name dragged into filthy gossip, appeared as a colluder, complicit or someone who turns a blind eye to and even abets the emotional abuse of other women. CM – may the circles of hell open and Satan roast you on his pitchfork while you squeal in agony and fruitlessly plead with the Fates – has given me a life sentence of crippling fear, anger, disgust and grating humiliation. I live in the constant terror of hearing his name, seeing it or his work, bumping into a mutual friend or colleague or indeed into him. I live a reduced life in which I do not read the papers, listen to the radio or watch TV, so profound is the physical and spiritual sickness. To betray, to abuse, is to tear something extremely fundamental in the fabric of the universe.
CM, every time I see your name I feel a stab of fear. To deceive is to take a life.
To experience the effects of betrayal is to have everything in one’s life destroyed but not rebuilt. As Michelle Margherita writes in the current issue of Elle, "Anyone who's ever been cheated on understands the noose of grief that constricts your heart and steals your breath. The emotional pain becomes physical. Your heart literally aches...It was amazing how quickly the toxic dust of betrayal fell over my life. ...Worst of all was the overwhelming sense of loss, rage and confusion that lived in my chest..." And as Alex Heminsley writes in a frank piece on the same topic in an earlier issue of the same magazine, “Suddenly, I doubted my own judgement, questioning the motives of all those who loved me most, and disbelieving their kindest words. I was consumed by anxiety about what other mistakes I might make.” CM has earned my derision for ever, but this does not matter. An abuser, physical or emotional, does not think that women are human; indeed, an abuser is a sadist who enjoys women’s pain, or he would not inflict it. For himself, he has earned great outer success. Were I to out this person, I would be attacked, not him, although he is the perpetrator.
To experience betrayal is not only to be maliciously and deliberately deceived for one period in one setting by one immoral person acting with premeditation, malice, sadism, forethought, coldness and controlling secrecy. The effects go far beyond the incident and are completely enmeshed in a wider culture which does not punish abuse and even rewards it. It is not just about boyfriends and girlfriends doing things in secret or colleagues and friends gossiping, but about misogyny, machismo, abuse, impunity, hypocrisy, corruption, power dynamics, the solidarity of abusers, work, success, society, culture, the future, the glass ceiling. One is attacked in one’s fundamental beliefs, at the level of one’s emotional certainty and at a physical level – because the emotional pain is wholly physical. I spent most of the last two years feeling, literally, as though I was being cut with knives. My skin crawled when I was alone. Then it crawled when I was in company. I lost and gained weight erratically, unrelated to my diet and exercise. I have lost my looks, etcetera, and now see myself in the Tube window opposite, this haggard, grey, ravaged, devastated, hunched person whose face is full of lines. What on earth was I thinking, in the years leading up to this, throwing parties, wearing outfits, chatting it out like some Tinkerbell of sociability; what a stupid, deluded fool I was. When all the while, the joke was on me.
But the betrayal and realisation also happen at a political level. All betrayal is a type of power play and a game of abuse. After that first discovery I discovered many more, the majority perpetrated by those who sit in offices and give interviews talking in a nice, liberal, egalitarian way, while constantly abusing, sabotaging and undermining women in the most intimate, savage and destructive ways. This understanding of the ubiquity and connectedness of professional discrimination, personal abuse and cultural excusal, of perpetrators covering for each other and assisting each other’s careers, combined with the sheer physical agony, led to a series of intense articles, both here and in the Guardian, in the months that followed: On despair, Stand by your man? Hell no, You can never go back, Relics, Gordon Ramsay's appetite for sexism, Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny, Love letters, The boys' club, old and new, So Today is a boys' club - what's new?, Say it sister - a girlfriend gives some tough love and His Friend's A Philanderer Too: A One-Act Play
But the betrayal and realisation also happen at a political level. All betrayal is a type of power play and a game of abuse. After that first discovery I discovered many more, the majority perpetrated by those who sit in offices and give interviews talking in a nice, liberal, egalitarian way, while constantly abusing, sabotaging and undermining women in the most intimate, savage and destructive ways. This understanding of the ubiquity and connectedness of professional discrimination, personal abuse and cultural excusal, of perpetrators covering for each other and assisting each other’s careers, combined with the sheer physical agony, led to a series of intense articles, both here and in the Guardian, in the months that followed: On despair, Stand by your man? Hell no, You can never go back, Relics, Gordon Ramsay's appetite for sexism, Casual sexism is nothing but misogyny, Love letters, The boys' club, old and new, So Today is a boys' club - what's new?, Say it sister - a girlfriend gives some tough love and His Friend's A Philanderer Too: A One-Act Play
The effects and consequences two years on are exactly the same as they were one year ago. My life now is worse, and less. I no longer want to succeed, because I don't believe I can succeed. I only want to survive without being destroyed. I do not trust anyone I meet, particularly anyone in power. I cannot rely on anything. If anyone says or does something decent I think they are lying, tricking or playing a game. If someone seems pleasant I think it is just because they are a good liar – and, horrifically, I have often been justified in this cynicism. It simply never occurred to me that anybody would lie and cheat. As Margaret Atwood writes in The Handmaid's Tale: "The moment of betrayal is the worst, the moment when you know beyond any doubt that you've been betrayed: that some other human being has wished you that much evil."
Evil is the right word, but the moment of realisation was not the worst. The worst was and is the neverending aftermath and the rolling-out of consequences, each one worse than the last. When certainty in life has been destroyed, the only thing left is magical thinking: I must pray that I am surrounded by colleagues and friends who do not despise and abuse women, who do not lie to us and enjoy it, who like to read our words, hear our voices, watch our films, who are not sleazy, who like to be around us and who realise that we are human beings. I must have faith that the myth I had lived by - that I was destined to 'make it' and, like sodding Luke Skywalker, go away and return in greatness - will not happen and will never happen. Yet I do not believe these prayers will work, because prayers and belief require faith. You can never be unbetrayed.
Evil is the right word, but the moment of realisation was not the worst. The worst was and is the neverending aftermath and the rolling-out of consequences, each one worse than the last. When certainty in life has been destroyed, the only thing left is magical thinking: I must pray that I am surrounded by colleagues and friends who do not despise and abuse women, who do not lie to us and enjoy it, who like to read our words, hear our voices, watch our films, who are not sleazy, who like to be around us and who realise that we are human beings. I must have faith that the myth I had lived by - that I was destined to 'make it' and, like sodding Luke Skywalker, go away and return in greatness - will not happen and will never happen. Yet I do not believe these prayers will work, because prayers and belief require faith. You can never be unbetrayed.
CM, I want to congratulate you: you wanted to become successful, and you are. You are goal-orientated and indomitable in both your abuse and your career, which women aid as fans and enablers, and there has been no karma for you whatsoever. I am sure that you are abusing other women even now and always will. Every time I see your name and see you pretending to be a ‘nice guy’, talking softly, with soft eyes, being charming, being polite and seeming civilised, namechecking your partner and mentioning women artists every so often, I feel like I have been stabbed in the heart and I boil with anger and total and utter devastation that this is the world I have to live in now, for the rest of my life. I feel intensely sorry for your students, your sister, your neice and all your friends and colleagues. I am glad your mother never found out how you abuse women. When I see women grovel to you I want to be sick. The duplicity of the two-faced is tremendous to behold. When you are setting up, gameplaying and tricking someone, CM, the trick is real to them. They do not know they are being used and manipulated. How easily you people abuse. How tightly you stick together. How little kickback there is. How assiduously you take everything you can get. How smoothly you lie. How is it that you thrive? Why is it that you get to live, and I must die? Not because of what you did, but because of what I have learned: we cannot win against the boys’ club. They hate us. I am ambitious, fearless, talented and strong, but the culture which supports and abets you is corrupt and misogynistic and the game is rigged. You wanted to lie to, deceive, sabotage and cheat many women, and you did. You thought you would be assisted and protected by countless other men and their geishas, and your own groupies, and you were. Your friends and colleagues are exactly the same as you in their 'private' mistreatment and public annihilation of women, and one day I will name them. You didn’t want to explain or apologise, and you haven’t. You wanted to be an abusive man, and you are.
