Notes on Chris D’Elia’s Abuse of Teen Girls
“when you’re young you don’t realize you’re being preyed on. not only due to someone’s age but the fact that he was famous made me feel ~special~ but i wasn’t. he was trying to use the power imbalance against me and others.” - @girlpowertbh
This past month, dozens of young women spoke up about being sexually harassed, groomed, solicited and assaulted by Chris D’Elia, currently age 40.
On Twitter, Simon Rossi, Colleen Riley, Michaela Coletta, Abby Grills, Leah Knauer and others made statements and posted screenshots of emails and messages in which D’Elia asked for nude photos (child sexual abuse material), proposed and solicited sexual activity, and arranged or attempted to arrange meetups with the girls. The @sheratesdogs account also collected anonymous accounts (she received stories from over 500 people!) from other young women and witnesses with similar stories about D’Elia’s pattern of predatory, grooming behavior, as well as accounts of sexual assault, exposure and rape. The LA Times has additionally reported on the experiences of five other survivors, including Julia Holtzman, Jackie Cowan, and Laura Vitarelli. I encourage you to read all of the victims’ statements.
At the time of these interactions, each victim was a teenage girl, between the ages of ~16-19. D’Elia? In his 30s.
Whew, where to start. First, I highly commend each victim who has and will continue to speak out. This takes such bravery and commitment to justice and to other women, and now it is our collective responsibility to make sure that D’Elia is not allowed to continue preying on young girls. I hope that D’Elia’s personal and professional communities will take the appropriate steps to secure safety.
A few thoughts on the situation:
I feel *really* bad how Simon, Colleen and other victims have had to experience the typical circus of public scrutiny, cruel attacks on character/choices, rape apologism and victim-blaming that we see particularly directed at teen sexual abuse victims. The level of investment that people have in covering up/defending ephebophiles and, in this case, white maleness, celebrity, etc. is absolutely appalling and has been on full display since the story broke.
Many commenters over the past month have acted as if it is was the victims themselves who committed a crime; these insinuations if not outright accusations have revolved around a narrative in which the victim “seduces” the adult. A.) as if it is even possible for a child to seduce an adult! But B.) this is something that pedophiles/ephebophiles often claim, that they are “seduced” by the child they violate and rape. So it is literally pedophile/ephebophile logic. Makes your blood run cold to hear the exact same thing that pedophiles/ephebophiles say coming out of a thousand mouths on the internet.
Why were the girls emailing older guys in the first place? Were they seeking him out? Why did she reply to him anyways if she knew how old he was? The pedophile public runs through each possible twist, distortion and invention, with the special kind of wrath reserved for teen girls: each question insinuates that they are untrustworthy, perverse, attention seekers, gold-diggers and groupies… (Of course, none of these attributes, even if they *were* true in these instances, justify abuse… besides, how are a bunch of grown adults damning teen girls for seeking stability in a capitalist society that regularly leaves them without resources, closeness to celebrity in a Hollywood-obsessed culture?…) Society continually and at every turn locates every possible evil that plagues it in the teen girl, enemy #1.
So much of this is about discrediting victims and giving reasons why teen girls *deserve* to be sexually preyed on, or WANT to be sexually preyed on, with sexual abuse operating as a kind of perceived justice in itself (“she got what she deserves”). It’s also a type of projection, where people are blatantly projecting their own untrustworthiness/perversion as someone who is invested in abuse of teen girls onto victims.
And it has a direct impact on victims. As a society that supports pedophiles and ephebophiles, teen girls are literally gaslit to the point that they blame themselves for it and internalize the suspicious, victim-hating lens: Laura Vitarelli describes her experiences after D’Elia invited her and another young friend to a “party”... with no one present except him and where he proceeded to expose his genitals to the girls:
“On the drive home, we kept trying to figure out if we had done something wrong or given him the wrong impression,” said Vitarelli. “After I shared the story on Twitter this week, I almost started crying because it was so nice to feel supported by random people agreeing the situation was wrong.”
Another thing to file under #WhyIDidntReport. When pedophilia and ephebophilia soak the environment, victims absorb and internalize the narratives too… And due to the backlash against the victims who have come forward (As Abby stated: “Not going to lie, I feel a lot more violated by a lot of you creeps in this thread than I ever did by Chris D’Elia”), we should be worried about a possible silencing effect on other victims.
So far the accounts of women who said they were raped, drugged or sexually assaulted by D’Elia have largely been reported anonymously, with most of the more-publicized stories from girls who shut D’Elia down early in the grooming attempts. Due to society’s victim-blaming, it is harder for teen girls who were successfully seduced by grooming to come forward… even though grooming literally works as a familiar, manipulative pattern of seduction (as Oprah explored with Michael Jackson victims Wade Robson and James Safechuck in After Neverland), there is a refusal to recognize grooming of children and teens as an abuse process that the adult is responsible for and which jeopardizes the target.
As always in cases involving teen victims, the public also went ape shit about AgE Of CoNsEnT -- somehow the way people trot out this talking point/distraction technique reminds me of how people screech about “free speech!!!!”….
Anyways, commenters went ham looking up age of consent in the various states where the abuse happened, pinpointing the legality of the abuse… For the record, some of the girls were under legally-defined age of consent and some were at or slightly over at the time of interactions, so stratifying the abuse along these lines was of course the immediate concern of the apologist hordes. People look to age of consent law primarily to let abusers off the hook and excuse their own moral leniency and predatory/apologist attitudes… this time was no different. People love to make age of consent the golden arbitrar of consent, morality, whether something is abuse or not, rape or not, etc., with an attitude that at or after age of consent everything is permissible under the sun towards young girls… disgusting attitude.
Further, people have a poor understanding of how these laws function, and in many of these cases, federal laws may apply since there was travel between states -- see the PROTECT LAW. Not to mention that exposing yourself to someone non-consensually, drugging them to have sex with them, and having sexual relations with someone who hasn’t consented is all illegal regardless of the age of the victim…
Get this: NONE OF THE GIRLS HAVE EVEN SAID THEY ARE SEEKING LEGAL REMEDY, D’Elia hasn’t been arrested or charged with a crime, and yet, age of consent is made the central focus… But the focus on age of consent, of course, has nothing actually to do with the law, understanding it or its histories, applying it correctly or using it to effectively stop abusers …
Rather, we see an impact like this... Victims being confused and unable to get help/support: One anonymous victim spoke up, saying “Chris D'Elia kind of groomed me when I was 17 years old and slept with me when I was 17. Technically it was legal in the state, but then he continued to emotionally blackmail me telling me that if I left him I'd never hear from him again, etc. he also told me that he was really into the fact that I was still in high school.
I've tried to talk to someone about this for years but I was of age and it technically wasn't illegal so it wasn't a legal issue”
Victims are perfectly aware that not meeting the strict and narrow definition created by age of consent laws means their stories will be ignored, shit on and used to vilify them.
D’Elia’s camp itself has even jumped to an age-of-consent based defense, showing even MORE how age of consent logic support abusers, not victims, insisting that his contact with all the accusers was “legal and consensual”. (First, this is clearly contraindicated by emails showing that he consistently sexually solicited and groomed girls underneath the age of consent; and the many victims said they DIDN’T consent in any way… but in age-of-consent la-la land, no one cares about that…)
As “evidence” of D’Elia’s supposed dedication to legality and consent, his team has produced an email in which, after sexually soliciting a teen girl, she responds “Chris… I’m 16” and he demurs…
but this doesn’t “absolve” him of shit, just shows that he’s savvy enough to realize when he’s dealing with someone who can identify and resist grooming in that moment. Predators like D’Elia work effectively to find vulnerable targets and quickly move on from those that seem resistant or that might pose a risk of discovery.
“we don’t warn girls enough of predatory men. these older men are preying on you. it’s not exciting. it’s concerning. that is why i’m speaking out. i don’t want anyone else to go through what so many young girls have already.” - girlpowertbh.
Even in a world where Chris HASN’T violated any technical laws (which is not the one we’re living in), that doesn’t mean that he is innocent in any broader sense, that he isn’t a dangerous sexual predator, that he hasn’t hurt young girls and women (GROOMING IS SEXUAL ABUSE!!) or that he should be allowed to keep circulating in a professional capacity that gives him particular advantages in hunting teen victims (money, fame, access), or be embraced in any public or private sphere.
Age of consent as always, operating socially as a diversionary tactic, and for predators, as a moral defense…
With already so many reports establishing D’Elia’s hunting pattern — @sheratesdogs received stories from over 500 whistleblowers — we can only speculate at how big the actual scope is here. Scope is one of the most disturbing and remarkable aspects of this case. The preliminary numbers suggest that are literally thousands of girls out there that D’Elia has groomed and abused. Who knows how many of these girls he has violated, in the same or more extreme ways?
As far as insights to how predators operate, it’s worth knowing that D’Elia seemed to be picking girls who went to his shows, but also browsing around social media sites like Facebook and Instagram:
One morning in the fall of her senior year of high school, Julia Holtzman awoke to find that Chris D’Elia had sent her a direct message on Instagram.
The 17-year-old was confused. She was not a fan of the then-36-year-old stand-up comic, and was not following his page. But she saw that D’Elia had a verified social media account, and was intrigued. So she responded to him, asking how he’d found her.
“Just came across. Is that bad????” he said in the November 2016 exchange.
“It was clear I was in high school. I had 16th birthday pictures and photos of me at football games [on my Instagram],” Holtzman, now 20, told The Times. “I told my guy friends about it and they were like, ‘He’s famous! You have to answer.’”
This case illuminates how child/teen predators like D’Elia are able to use these online tools to hunt victims, sitting on these tools, scrolling the social graph by the hour for teen girls. We see how social networks enable abusers to attack and groom in a way that is significantly more efficient and has enabled this massive scale of attack.
Of course it’s no coincidence the Facebook/Instagram conglomerate (Instagram is owned by Facebook) provides amazing tools for this exact use case. Facebook was created by Mark Zuckerberg as a tool to compare the relative hotness of young girls. Facebook’s primary product is in fact the personal data of, and pictures of women, largely young women. Zuckerberg created a misogynist super-weapon against teen girls that is actively in use by men to pray on them…. Conway’s Law at its absolute most depraved and despicable…
And seriously, What is the cumulative effect of this over time on girls, of receiving SO MUCH grooming through these platforms? What is novel here is not the existence of child and teen sexual abuse, but the debut of new, more efficient and tailored technology solutions that accelerate and streamline abuse processes…
My last note is on the number, and audacity, of public appearances and statements D’Elia has made that flaunt his abuser status, playing a pedophile in NOT ONE but TWO shows. Simon Rossi opened her account of the abuse by stating “i still can’t believe netflix cast chris d’elia as the pedophile in season to of “you” like the literal IRONY”.
RIGHT?!?!!?
As The Hill notes, D’Elia also stated in a recent podcast: ““Ever seen a f---ing 14-year-old? She looks 30. There's no such thing as a 14-year-old girl anymore. They go from 6 to 25.”
With Shawn Dawson also being called out recently for sexualizing children, we have to consider again how predators often tell us who they are or engage in public displays, performances, hints and admissions of their abuse. It seems also gleeful, as if the abuser is getting something out of pushing these boundaries, “hiding in plain sight,” seeing just how much they can get away with, putting it right up in people’s faces… it’s a very twisted psychology that is absolutely evidence that abusers know EXACTLY what they are doing and indicates how much personal satisfaction/gratification they are able to extract from it ….
Just something to keep in mind as conversations around what non-carceral solutions to abuse look like in a world where police have been abolished (yay!!!) … as @theleilaraven has stated, “abusers are playing chess with us. i'm less interested in rehabilitating individual abusers and more interested in transforming the culture that enables abuse.”
Fuck you D’Elia!!