Taylor Swift took rape culture to court and won
After silence and criticism, she’s talking the talk
After a year of controversy and silence, Taylor Swift showed that the feminist credentials on which she built her career weren’t all talk.
She did so in a federal court in Denver, where a jury ruled in her favor Monday night, believing that she was groped by ex-Denver radio DJ David Mueller in 2013. From the start, Swift has claimed her involvement with the case has been to help other women. She filed a countersuit against Mueller, who claimed her mom and manager got him fired, to “serve as an example to other women who may resist publicly reliving similar outrageous and humiliating acts.”
Her testimony was a textbook study in rape culture, as Mueller’s team questioned her on the stand, attempting to discredit her and make her feel guilty. Swift was firm, even feisty, in her answers: “I have an uncanny ability to elicit new criticism,” she cracked, when Mueller described her as “cold.”
And in a statement after the trial, Swift nodded to her privileged status, recognizing that while her efforts were aimed at helping women, not all assault victims have the resources she has. “I acknowledge the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this,” she wrote, pledging to donate money to help other women battle their assault cases.
Swift’s victory is a bright spot in an otherwise messy year for the star, with much of the drama calling her feminism into question. She has largely stayed away from the spotlight after Kim Kardashian “exposed” her on Snapchat last July, releasing audio of the singer allegedly OK’ing her involvement in Kanye West’s Famous. Swift claims she did not give her approval, and positioned her opposition to the track’s “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex” lyric as a rallying cry for women, which Kardashian threatened to expose as a charade.
Criticism of Swift intensified after the election of President Trump, after the vocally feminist star stayed quiet through the campaign cycle and steered clear of the Women’s March on Washington, save for one tweet. In January 2017, Buzzfeed published a 6,000-word piece titled “How Taylor Swift Played the Victim for a Decade and Made Her Entire Career,” with critics elsewhere calling her “spineless,” “anti-feminist” and “complicit” in Trump’s election.
By taking the stand last week, Swift didn’t wholly absolve herself from this criticism, but may have made inroads with fans who want to see her battle for women’s rights. Even with her considerable privilege going into the case — she countersued Mueller for a single symbolic $1 in damages, funding the trial herself — taking on the legal battle was still a risk. Her mother, Andrea, spoke about the difficult decision to go to trial in a pre-trial deposition. “We didn’t — I didn’t — want her life defined by that moment,” she said. “I didn’t want to bear the days and weeks and months of Internet sensationalism ... and memes to absolutely violate her more than she already had been.”
Thankfully, Andrea Swift’s visions of a disastrous trial didn’t come true. In fact, Taylor Swift’s victory may be a defining moment for the star. After years of positioning herself as an unflinching advocate for women, with this trial, she talked the talk.