'I felt like a weight was lifted': how I May Destroy You empowered sexual assault survivors
Note: this piece contains accounts that may be triggering for survivors of sexual assaultWatching Michaela Coel’s acclaimed drama I May Destroy You, Amanda Jones had a realisation, a sense of shock setting into her body. She turned to her husband and said: “I think I was raped.”
It has been nearly two months since many of us took a seat in Coel’s classroom, where she taught viewers – more clearly than any sex education class ever did – about consent, sexual assault and rape. Situated in a nuanced black British experience, the series follows twentysomething Twitter-starturned-novelist Arabella Essiedu (Coel), who survives multiple sexual assaults while navigating beautifully flawed relationships with her two best mates, Terry (Weruche Opia) and Kwame (Paapa Essiedu).
The story is specific yet relatable, capturing the zeitgeist as our generation grapples with individual identities and collective experience. Arabella’s palpable shift in moods run parallel with her changing hairstyles to take us through an authentic story of processing and reporting rape, betrayals and toxic relationships, flecked with joy, dark humour – and period blood.
Jones, a writer, is giving the final push to her first novel about the #MeToo movement. Lockdown has been a time of motivational struggle for her, as many people have found, but she was also unexpectedly presented with what her therapist called delayed shock. “My limbs sort of turned to lead,” she says, describing her physical reaction to the programme. When she realised she was raped in her 20s after seeing Arabella become a victim of “stealthing” (non-consensual removal of a condom during sex) by the character Zain, she felt “really tired and heavy. I felt dizzy.”
The east Londoner remembers the discomfort and humiliation she felt as the man who stealthed her laughed at her anger. She buried the feelings, assuming they were part and parcel of sexual freedom in the 90s, paired with a healthy dose of Catholic guilt, she jokes.
“I think it must be really, really common,” Jones says. Indeed one study from a sexual health clinic in Melbourne, Australia, found that 32% of women and 19% of men who had had sex with men reported having experienced stealthing. The ambiguity around the incident, with no “villain”, made it gut-wrenchingly real for many viewers. “It was really brilliant how they portrayed [Zain] as a nice guy who she slept with again after that,” Jones says. “It’s those grey areas around rape and sexual assault that you almost brush off.” Jones’s final thought stayed with me: “A really nice person who you’re in a loving relationship with can rape you. And we all need to be aware of that.”
Considering that approximately 11 adults are raped or sexually assaulted by penetration every hour in the UK, and the National Sexual Hotline reports that there is a victim of sexual violence every 73 seconds in the US, I May Destroy You’s story was important. Faye White, 27, tells me of her harrowing experience of being raped in her sleep as she took a solo backpacking trip in Australia in 2015. She was also attacked during lockdown on her way home from work. “After watching I May Destroy You, I realised that it definitely triggered some feelings for me,” says White. “Although I had therapy five years ago, I’ve decided to have some more, which is something I never really thought I would do.” The number of people convicted of rape is at its lowest on record, while reported cases have risen sharply, which some say effectively leads to decriminalisation. White, a journalist from Dorset, describes the scene where Arabella is in the police station and is told that there is nothing more they can do, as they hand back her belongings. “That happened to me twice and it was almost word-perfect. The disappointment in her face really hit home.”
It was the tumultuous final episode of the series that pushed White to get more therapy, with the audience seeing the different reactions Arabella might have to facing her attacker. White recalls the powerful imagined scene where Arabella’s rapist, David, is in bed with her and says: “I’m not going to go unless you tell me to.”
“It just made me think that I kind of sit with this and live with these feelings and these memories every day,” she says. “There isn’t a day where I don’t think about it. But I want to get to a place where I am happily living with it
and alongside it, rather than being controlled by it.”
Liam Austen, a copywriter from London, found the experience of Kwame’s character to be a trigger. In episode four, he introduces a hesitant friend, Damon, to Malik, a stranger from Grindr, for a potential threesome. Damon leaves while Kwame has consensual sex with Malik. But as Kwame is going to leave the flat, he is raped in a harrowing scene that Papaa Essiedu has described as a historic moment for British TV.
Austen, 24, had a similar experience with an ex-boyfriend. “I didn’t truly realise how much shame, anger and hurt I was still carrying from that time,” he says. “Watching the fallout and how other characters approached it allowed me to step back and assess how I had been acting, while also making me feel much less ashamed. I felt like a weight was lifted after watching it, like I’d been released after not even realising I was trapped.”
The 12-part series not only supported people through past trauma, but also changed how some reacted. Having watched the show, Alice Bradshaw-Smith, a PR account director from Bristol, phoned the police in a situation she previously wouldn’t have. After a scary stand-off with a man who jumped out at her as she walked home from a friend’s house, Bradshaw-Smith chose to report the incident to the police because the show had empowered her to do so. “Whereas previously I might have thought I was making a big deal out of a situation, I reacted completely differently having seen a central character [report an incident to the police]. I completely respected her for that decision.
It was a really brave one.”
Lex Kennedy, from Los Angeles, said the show made him rethink how he supported survivors of sexual assault. “I identify as a black trans masculine person and I recognise that within my community we don’t really step up for black women,” he says. “It’s always: ‘Well, what happened?’, qualify your trauma, qualify your pain, versus: ‘How can I be there for you?’” Kennedy passionately describes how Kwame’s demonstration of friendship to Arabella was a catalyst for his change. Referring to episode two, the 32-year-old film-maker says: “When Kwame finds out that Arabella had been harmed he just shows up. He’s there, waiting for Arabella to take the lead.”The characters in I May Destroy You are inspiringly direct. Vague concepts become beautifully straightforward, something that motivated 27-year-old Kahar to be more open with the people he dates. After watching the show, he told his dates that he was seeing more than one person, and has started checking more actively about the use of contraception. “The shock in Arabella’s face really resonated with me, when she realised somebody had stealthed her and she wasn’t aware that that was illegal,” he explains.
This series resonated with so many precisely because it focused on the doubt that forms in many people’s minds around difficult, taboo themes. It concentrated on the assumptions, the space between consent and coercion, the thoughts we habitually suppress, and the nuance of experience rarely shown in a TV industry that so often focuses on society’s extremities. It has helped kickstart new conversations and behaviours. “Rather than just expecting things to be OK by default, I’m actually asking questions,” says Kahar.
In the US, Rainn offers support at 800-656-4673 or by chat at www.rainn.org. In the UK, Supportline can be reached at 01708 765200. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732) or www.1800respect.org.au. Some names have been changed
workers and spouses who filed 2013’s original suit $10m, but they would have to pay back insurance plans like Medicare, Jacobs would be released from any future responsibility and the 2018 verdict would be vacated. After lawyer’s fees, and if the settlement were split evenly, each plaintiff would receive roughly $125,000 – an amount some workers say would be nowhere near enough to pay their medical expenses.
They turned it down, so Jacobs offered 197 additional workers and their families, plaintiffs in subsequent legal actions, $10,000 each to drop their own lawsuits (according to court records, roughly 30 plaintiffs have settled). When news of the settlement offers leaked to the press, Jacobs tried to get a court to charge the workers for the company’s legal fees. A judge rejected that – but with no settlement reached, each plaintiff from the phase I trial now has to prove their individual illnesses are linked to their coal ash exposure in a phase II trial planned for 2021.
While TVA is not a party in the current lawsuit, Jacobs is still contracting with the company. The utility’s customers could also be on the hook for Jacobs’ escalating legal bills. Workers have begged TVA for financial help paying medical costs via a health insurance program. But TVA denied their request, and Brooks, the TVA spokesperson, told Southerly and the Guardian that “TVA is not a party to that litigation” and “will continue to respect the judicial process”.
Now, some of those involved in the lawsuit are nearing the end of their lives. Others have died. The workers I spoke to say they’ve never even gotten an apology from TVA.
After 12 years of fighting, many wonder if they’ll ever see a cent.
•••
Coal ash is the nation’s second-largest waste stream after household garbage, and it contains a slew of heavy metals such as arsenic, chromium, mercury and lead, as well as radioactive materials such as uranium. There are over 1,400 coal ash sites across 45 US states and territories.For decades, the waste material has been dumped by utilities in unlined landfills or ponds, leaking into waterways and groundwater across the country.
TVA’s Kingston fossil plant in Harriman, Tennessee, is no exception. Operating since 1955, Kingston still produces roughly 1,400 tons of ash each day. TVA’s CEO, Jeff Lyash, referred to the ash as 100 years of deferred costs. For decades, utilities and regulators did not address this growing problem. Then, around 1am on 22 December 2008, a six-story earthen dike burst at the Kingston plant, spewing over a billion gallons of coal ash mixed with water – roughly 150 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of thick, grey muck – across 300 acres, pummeling two dozen houses and choking nearby waterways. To date, it is the North American continent’s largest industrial spill, five times larger than the BP oil spill.
The spill led to increased federal regulation in 2015 – although the Trump administration has since rolled back the new rules – but the lack of federal and state oversight made arranging cleanup simple on TVA’s part: they hired Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc, a Texas-based contractor with a history of worker safety lawsuits.
Subcontractors hired workers, mostly through unions, to excavate the coal ash and haul it on to train cars so it could be shipped to a lined landfill in Uniontown, Alabama – a rural, low-income community that is 90% Black. (Residents there, four of whom were unsuccessfully sued by the coal ash landfill for defamation, filed a civil rights claim against Alabama officials for dumping it, but the EPA rejected it in 2018.)
Because the 2008 recession hit east Tennessee hard, hundreds of people quickly signed up for a well-paying job by a trusted utility. They received health insurance for their families while they worked and workers say they made around $25 an hour plus overtime – and they worked overtime often, logging 12 to 18-hour shifts, seven days a week, for years. The men I spoke to say they were proud to help a community through a catastrophe alongside TVA.
Months after the spill, Jacobs wrote the first of many revised safety plans for the cleanup, which were approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, and TVA, who also employed safety managers. The oversight administrator for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation was also on site, and later served as a witness for Jacobs at trial.
Then in May, the EPA issued a Cercla order regulating Kingston as a hazardous waste site within the EPA’s Superfund program. But the designation was complex: though the substances that constituted coal ash were hazardous substances under Superfund law, coal ash itself was not regulated as a hazardous waste.
Although workers took hazardous waste training, those I spoke to and others who testified or supplied affidavits for the 2018 trial, said they were not informed of the constituents in coal ash, or that they could be dangerous to human health. In 2009, Anda Ray, TVA’s project coordinator for the Cercla order, told 60 Minutes the spill’s coal ash had similar constituents to soil and rocks, and that she’d swim in the Emory River, then filled with coal ash.
But workers say none of the regulators provided respiratory equipment to workers, despite complaining of being covered with toxic dust every day for years. Jacobs’ safety manager at the time, Tom Bock, told them they could safely “eat a pound of coal ash a day” and directed at least three workers – two laborer foremen and a tool room manager – to turn over or destroy onsite dust masks.
According to TVA spokesperson Brooks, the public utility takes “every precaution necessary” including having to “determine and provide the proper protective gear for the workers”. A spokesperson from Jacobs said that “depending on their specific work activities, workers were either required to wear respiratory protection, or were permitted to wear respirator protection on a voluntary basis, in accordance with the site safety plan”. Within the exclusion zone, the spill site where hundreds of workers toiled daily, court records show only four men were able to jump through Jacobs’ hoops for approval to wear dust masks, which they had to self-supply.
Workers say they were discouraged from wearing any form of PPE besides steel-toed boots, a hard hat, a fluorescent vest and occasionally goggles or gloves, and safety orders by statewide regulators and TVA support these claims. When they asked to wear dust masks, or when they were prescribed dust masks from their doctors, they said company culture implied if they wore them, they’d be fired. Union members, especially those who’d worked in the mining industry before, knew that typical safety regulations required PPE and that the silica dust – a mineral 100 times finer than sand that can lodge in the lungs and cause respiratory illnesses – in the coal ash could be hazardous. Witnesses during the trial testified Jacobs tampered with dust monitors, manipulated dust sampling results, and failed to warn workers about the dangers. (Jacobs said the air monitoring manufacturer, Mesa Labs, testified the equipment was handled properly.)
“The biggest problem was that they didn’t want to scare the general public,” said Michael Bledsoe, Doug’s older brother who also drove trucks on the site. “They didn’t want them to see us wearing masks or respirators or Tyvek suits. They wanted to basically keep it [coal ash] a secret and that was told to us every day.”
•••
Craig Wilkinson and his older brother Keith left New York to take jobs at Kingston in August 2009. For seven months, Wilkinson worked the night shift, backhoeing wet coal ash pumped out of contaminated riverways, then squeezing out water with the back of a 1,600 gallon bucket before tossing the ash into a canal eight feet below him.
Fly ash, a powdery and minutely fine type of coal ash captured in power plant stacks, was everywhere. He remembers the particles distended in the beams of his backhoe like ice crystals.
During his first day of orientation, TVA’s head of security, Jean Nance, assured Wilkinson that the coal ash was safe, but he started feeling strange after a few months: aching bones, blurry eyesight, shortness of breath. Three years later, he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema. He suffered chronic bouts of pneumonia, and eventually began coughing up blood. By 2015, Wilkinson retired on disability and required oxygen around the clock. In 2017, he received a double lung transplant. He told me he has since taken 12,000 pills annually and spends roughly $15,000 a year on his medical treatments. His primary care physician attributes his severe lung disease to fly ash exposure. Nance, a lifelong TVA employee, died of leukemia in 2015.
“It’s like a bad dream really,” said Wilkinson. “I never would’ve stayed but I was assured everything was all right.”
During the cleanup, scores of workers showed similar symptoms. At first, some called their shortness of breath, nose bleeds, coughing fits, and allergylike symptoms the “Kingston crud” and attributed it to exhaustion. But about a year or two after the spill, there were whispers of a slew of other, more serious ailments: high blood pressure, plummeting testosterone, chronic sinus infections requiring inhalers, black out spells, and raised, itchy sores.
Coal ash lodges in the lungs forever; the toxins in it can damage the body years after exposure. Research shows that short-term exposure to coal ash can cause shortness of breath, dizziness and vomiting, and prolonged exposure can impact every major organ system in the human body, causing birth defects, heart, lung and neurological disease, and a variety of cancers. Dr Paul Terry, an epidemiologist at the University of Tennessee, analyzed worker health concerns for phase I of the lawsuit. In particular, Terry noticed the relation between coal ash and the frequency of respiratory, cardiovascular and skin conditions.
“All of the diseases that were looked at by us were plausibly related to coal ash exposure,” Terry told me. “Particularly the protracted exposure they had over time without any protection like masks. They weren’t five miles away living in a house. They were in the middle of the dust, some people for years.”
Bledsoe said everyone “was pretty sure we weren’t going to fare real well” after the job ended. His coworker, App Thacker, who was laid off after he told supervisors about his own medical issues, mentioned pursuing a lawsuit. In 2013, a couple dozen workers, including Bledsoe and Thacker, met with a local lawyer, Jim Scott, and decided to sue Jacobs. But the cleanup lasted two more years, and even after the suit was filed, site-wide policies on health and safety developed by Jacobs and approved by TVA continued to make it extremely difficult for respiratory equipment to be used.
A Jacobs spokesperson claims there “has been extensive misinformation” about the cleanup and that there’s “no evidence” that the health effects were from the coal ash. “Jacobs worked closely with TVA in upholding rigorous safety standards,” the spokesperson said.
In early 2017, a private investigator told Jamie Satterfield, a reporter at the Knoxville News Sentinel, that she needed to look into the sick workers. At first, she was skeptical. Her father was a coalminer and she was familiar with the dangers of inhaling coal dust. “I couldn’t conceive that these workers were not outfitted in protection. It made no sense to me,” Satterfield said.
She called plaintiffs in the lawsuit, listening as they rattled off their symptoms. But it was Wilkinson who convinced her. He immediately hung up on her, then called back with permission from Scott. He said he was dangerously close to committing suicide. He wasn’t able to pay his medical bills before getting early Medicare at age 55.
Three years later, Satterfield’s reporting validated how many workers felt. She revealed that state and federal agencies were not reducing worker’s health risks by obtaining internal documents revealing TVA knew coal ash contained high levels of radioactive materials and heavy metals decades before the disaster. She also discovered Tennessee’s environmental regulators altered sampling results, downplaying higher levels of uranium and radium.
Before her investigation, Wilkinson said, “I was contemplating going out to the back shed and ending it.” He told Satterfield if she agreed to tell their story, he’d hang on.
•••
There is little research on the combined impact of coal ash on health, according to Avner Vengosh, a professor of earth and ocean sciences at Duke University. In part, he said, it’s because the people most often living near coal ash facilities are rural, low-income, and may already suffer health issues.
“How you actually link the coal ash [to health impacts] is challenging, and how you delineate the net effect of the exposure to coal ash to all the underlying health effects is a major challenge,” Vengosh told me. “It’s why prevention is so important, and an organization like the EPA needs to prevent or reduce the risk for such communities.”
Meanwhile, former workers’ bills have piled up, robbing them of their retirement savings. Some have had to sell off property and cattle. “I don’t think I can afford to settle with them,” said Bledsoe, who lived on a fixed income. Medicare covered at least $55,000 of chemotherapy treatments alone, and he estimated out-of-pocket costs for he and his wife’s cancer treatments was $20,000.
Frankie Norris, just 59, had to take disability five years before he planned to retire and has spent all his savings on doctor bills. He quit taking some medications because he can’t afford them. He said his family has suffered from exposure to the ash he brought home, too. His wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and uterine cancer this year. His daughter-in-law lived with him during the cleanup while pregnant with his grandson. He was born with a cleft foot and has sinus problems.
Along with COPD, Tommy Johnson has low kidney function and black out spells once or twice a week. His wife, Betty, had to quit work to become his caretaker. Medical bills cost about $5,000 out-of-pocket annually. “Your retirement benefits and social security, it just wipes it out after a while,” he said.
Those who are uninsured and too young for Medicare can’t afford to see the doctor. Jason Williams, 49, had to quit his last job after passing out 12 times in one day. He also has low testosterone, failing eyesight and skin cancer. Four years ago, Williams had surgery to remove cancer spots on his nose; he says he still has cancer, but no insurance for continued monitoring.
TVA told community members it would pay medical expenses for all those affected during a public meeting in 2009. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Jim Scott, said he’s “disappointed” TVA reneged on that promise. (Brooks did not respond to a request for comment about this promise.)
Terry worries about compensation for families of workers who have already died. Because it will be challenging to connect each worker’s individual cocktail of diseases to their specific coal ash exposure, he said it’s a shame that at least 50 workers have already died. “I hope they can be heard somehow, the people who didn’t make it this far,” Terry said. “They deserve to be heard.”
Although TVA is not implicated in the current lawsuit, the utility could choose to intervene. In 2019, workers begged TVA’s board of directors to establish a health insurance program to help them afford their medical bills. There is a precedent for such action: 9/11 first responders recently received lifelong medical care on behalf of the US government. Although TVA board members described the workers as sincere and expressed sympathy, and one member, Richard Howorth, said they would seek “expedience” in determining what role TVA could serve in their complaints, a year later the workers have yet to see any form of assistance.
Instead, this spring, TVA donated $2m to community organizations that address hardships created by Covid-19, and distributed 50,000 masks to emergency workers. Safety masks just like the ones Kingston supervisors threw in the trash.
•••
The workers still struggle with stress, anxiety and depression. The pandemic and failed mediation has compounded their isolation: the most
recent mediation offer from Jacobs – $10,000 each for workers and their families to drop the lawsuit – came as Covid-19 spread throughout the US. Immunocompromised people like these workers are especially at risk of complications from the virus, so most told me they don’t leave the house, and haven’t seen family or friends in months. Wilkinson has had several panic attacks and struggled with suicidal thoughts. During one of our phone conversations, he told me he sometimes feels like a “waste of skin”.
Although he checks in about his health with two friends from the spill, he feels detached from the lawsuit. Some hope for a settlement so they don’t have to continue the court battle. Thacker, who originally filed the lawsuit, said he’d rather go to court if they’re not able to get a settlement with Jacobs or financial and medical assistance from TVA. “I’ve waited eight years, I can wait a little longer.”
But for other workers, time is more limited. Last spring, Wilkinson thought about moving to Tennessee to be closer to where the case is playing out, and to the landscape he fell in love with, but his health is too precarious. In June, he got bad news: his body is rejecting his new lungs, which worked at about half their capacity over the summer.
Wilkinson said his doctors aren’t sure if his body could handle another transplant. The prospect makes him feel numb. “It’s a strange feeling knowing that you’re going to die,” Wilkinson told me. “I know it’ll definitely be sooner rather than later.”
Last week, Bledsoe was admitted to the intensive care unit for ongoing complications related to his chemotherapy. In a Facebook group for the workers, Bledsoe’s sister-in-law pinned up an “urgent prayer request” for Bledsoe, who began end-of-life care days later.
At 10.55am on Wednesday, 12 August, three days before Bledsoe’s 70th birthday, I received a text: “Doug just went to heaven.”
Austyn Gaffney is a freelance reporter in Kentucky covering agriculture, energyand climate change. Her work has been featured in HuffPost, In These Times, onEarth, Sierra, Viceand more.
I was right proud of TVA until I went to work for them