I felt unsafe three years ago when the tabloids published woman-shaming stories about me, and when strangers –including women– piled on with ridiculously nasty and even threatening comments about my gender, my ethnicity*, my body, or my personality; just like Trump and countless others, including women, shamed Hillary and other women.

Today, November 12, 2016 marks the three-year anniversary of a shameful lawsuit filed against me by an angry ex-boyfriend for things I didn’t do, and this week’s shameful, anti-woman election result brings up parallels meaningful to me as I ponder what I can do to take action in the wake of the Trump disaster. Now, as with three years ago when my first inkling of the lawsuit was a phone call from the NY Daily News asking if I “had a statement regarding the $1.25 million dollar lawsuit just filed in NY Supreme Court” against me, I feel a sense of the surreal and a raising of my hackles. That day, after a brief silence, I asked the reporter, “is this a joke?” I know that some people wondered if it was a joke when Trump ran for the nomination, and that many of us are now experiencing feelings ranging from the surreal, to disbelief, to horror. The aftermath of the biased tabloid stories against me in 2013 (and surprisingly, a NYT story in 2014) parallels the shock and shaming people can feel after a race- or gender-based attack, and for me mirrors the real damage done to Hillary and to our nation by the shaming perpetrated by Trump and his allies during the campaign.

I know Hillary suffered when she was attacked, although she hid it well and soldiered on. As we must. But we can also become a nation of much more vociferous upstanders against the upwelling of racism, sexism, and misogyny. What concrete steps can we take?

I spent a decade working to achieve social justice and land rights in the Brazilian Amazon. I’m not exactly a shrinking violet. But the combination of the trauma of gender-based shaming resulting from the former lawsuit against me and the current sexist climate has me shaken.

When the tabloids called me out of the blue in November 2012, unprepared to make any statement, I begged the reporters not to do a story on the lawsuit and I assured them I was innocent of any accusations. They wanted me to give them names of other people who might have done what I was being sued for (publish nasty blogs against my accuser – I didn’t); instinctively, I refused. They said if I did not give them names I would look very bad in the stories they would write.  I felt so ashamed for these women reporters making a living doing this to me.  Divide and conquer is a well-known tactic deployed by some in the media and in courtrooms and investigations.

In the past few days I have experienced a few uncomfortable moments, when men I’ve never seen before, in groups of two or three, seemed to be leering at me with bad intentions; muttering and then laughing abrasively while looking at me. More than once this week I’ve been dangerously cut off by men in cars with right-wing bumper stickers, who looked at me menacingly all the while.  Normally I would pay little mind to such behaviors, but because of the frightening atmosphere of the recent election outcome, I’ve had the bizarre, irrational feeling in my gut of being unsure if anyone would stand up for me if I was attacked. Am I merely in the grips of our collective paranoia?  Or are we in an environment where people feel emboldened to act in openly racist and sexist ways?  Judging by recent news reports coming in from all over the country and even in my community, I feel it is the latter. Divide and conquer has turned into a successful tactic of the alt-right. Violent words can easily morph into violent actions.

The trauma of the tawdry 2013 defamation lawsuit against me and the apparently coordinated media assault on me afterwards, all very costly to me emotionally, professionally, and financially, is re-stimulated by the anti-woman, racist atmosphere that is bubbling up around us. I know others in recent months have had trauma similarly re-stimulated by news stories about racist and sexist words and acts revealed during the Trump campaign and continuing now.

At the same time, I am heartened by people openly talking about racism and misogyny and vowing to fight it; and I feel a sense of solidarity with the unjustly attacked. I feel ready to be an activist again.

Many, like Ashley Judd, Monica Lewinsky (I know; ironic to include her in an article also defending Hillary – or is it?), Lindy West (This American Life), and Amanda Hess (Slate), have stood up to or spoken at length about shamers and cyberbullies. Despite some public consciousness about especially vitriolic and threatening attacks on women, Hillary was similarly abused with seeming impunity by the president-elect and many others, resulting in an outcome of national and international consequence.

Women gamers are attacked for gaming while female; I was attacked for being sued while female; women candidates are attacked for running for office while female. The common theme is open, unabashed misogyny, and it all fits in to a narrative of the extreme right. [[UPDATE: an article on Gamergate makes this point more persuasively, here: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/01/gamergate-alt-right-hate-trump ]]

Are we as a nation going to accept this? NO! You might think that the lawsuit brought against me and the tabloid follow-up/pile-on was small potatoes and irrelevant, but I feel that the suit (Wender v. Silberling 2013), filled with multiple, non-actionable, sensationalist exhibits and accusations some of which had zero place in a defamation suit,  and the resulting tabloid-fueled frenzy, rested comfortably within a culture of male commoditization of female humiliation. I am told that defamation suits are often junk-filled and designed more for media attention than for anything else.

As the daughter of a former Special Assistant Attorney General of the United States who worked hard against organized crime in the Kennedy Administration and in NY state, and who was a board member of the Anti-Defamation League, I feel especially concerned about the current blatant systematization of violent words and acts against women and minority ethnic groups.

I now feel a bit like I belong to a club of outspoken women who staunchly defend themselves while having to ignore the most ridiculous accusations and threats. I have been too frightened and traumatized to speak up much since the lawsuit against me ended in 2015, but now I feel heartened when people stand up for Hillary and for others shamefully attacked for their gender or race.

When Gloria Allred’s law firm stood up against Trump by pledging to defend — for free — the women Trump is threatening to sue for their allegations of assault and harassment, she said that Trump would be destroyed during the discovery process. This instantly reminded of two things: The moment when the woman who, 6 months after the defamation suit was filed against me, filed her own lawsuit against my male accuser for damages for rape, assault and battery [this blog segment redacted due to threats – EVEN THOUGH THE SUIT, INDEX #155963/2014 on WebCivilSupreme, IS PUBLIC RECORD AND THIS POST IS FREE SPEECH PROTECTED] hired Gloria Allred’s firm to represent her (though she later changed attorneys) – they said the defendant would be destroyed in the discovery process, and indeed he settled and paid plaintiff; and the two women who famously hired Allred to defend them against a male attorney who had brought defamation suits against them (Couloute v. Ryncarz 2012), a suit the women won and which we cited in our motion to dismiss the suit against me. (Perhaps notably, however, those women did not deny their posts about their ex-boyfriend, while I certainly deny what I was sued for. In a defamation suit you may use as defense both that things stated are true and that you did not state them; this is not considered contradictory.)

By standing up to Trump and offering to defend the women for free, Allred undermined his bullying tactic, and she took a stand of solidarity – yes, a feminist stand – to defend women who speak out against abuse.  Allred is well known for this, and is frequently attacked for being a “feminist” for defending women who have been assaulted.  I was attacked by trolls as a “feminist” after the defamation suit was filed against me. I scratched my head – since when has “feminist” become a dirty word?  Hillary was attacked and her campaign undermined by people calling her a feminist.  Would those people rather women not be allowed to have the vote, have their own bank accounts, own property, have credit cards, or be in public office?  Some of these are the very same people who speak out against Muslims, saying that sharia law will take over the U.S.  Why would those same people imply feminism is bad?

Attacking women as “feminist”, and assaulting women and then attacking them with defamation lawsuits to shut them up, all fit into the same patriarchal values we need to deconstruct if we are going to confront the misogyny still pervasive in America. I’d like to take back the word feminist – for which there is no male gendered counterpart – and make it something everyone is proud of again.  If that means women and men standing up for women and against misogyny – good!

Allred knows from vast experience that women are often threatened with lawsuits merely to shut them up, because they frequently lack the financial resources to defend themselves. Along with the explosion in online shaming and wars of words, there has been an explosion of lawsuits, many of them completely bogus and brought against people in order mainly to shame them (if you are accused, people tend to believe the accusations), or to bankrupt them (you must defend yourself in a defamation suit or a default judgment is entered, and even if it goes to trial and you “win”, you don’t get your attorney’s fees back – fees that can easily run into the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.) Most such civil suits are withdrawn or settled out of court.

Along the way I’ve had to learn a lot about civil suits and about online defamation and the law; and about shaming tactics, PTSD, and trolls. I’m still perhaps most shocked by some of the smart women who piled on to help further the shaming and damage of the suit against me (which was withdrawn in 2015, after going through partial discovery). Where was their sense of inquiry and truth? Where was their conscience and benefit of the doubt? When people get hungry for revenge it seems their intelligence is dulled and their capacity for compassionate thoughtfulness diminished. For example, I believe that those shouting out against immigrants (often race-based) are not full-time nasty people; but their capacity for compassion gets blinders on it when mass hysteria occurs, just like what happens for people when faced with an opportunity to do online shaming. The alt-right has been extremely successful in mobilizing social media shaming (see the recent article in The New Yorker Oct. 31, 2016, about the alt-right’s Cernovich, for example http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/trolls-for-trump ). Hate speech acts inciting violence are not, and should not, be protected.

We need a movement more powerful to overcome this insidious undermining of our common decency values; values I suspect are held somewhere underneath even by most people who jump on the exciting bandwagon of shaming, with its heat of the moment adrenaline rush of excitement, a quick laugh at the expense of women or minorities. (Some of this is purely childish anger redirected from parents and transferred to strangers, political candidates, and especially female candidates – see my blog post on this: “Electing Trump was a National Temper Tantrum.”) They may feel their individual lousy comments are inconsequential, but they add up, and they hurt in very real ways, and even culminate in criminal acts. This is organized violence and it is now being embodied by our president-elect and his supporters.

As feminists have pointed out for decades, the personal is political. And this was proven in spades this week when mass gender-based attacks on Hillary paid off in a win for sexism and a win for Trump and the alt-right. We can’t let the payoff be the triumph of gender- and race-based attacks!

Do I believe in the First Amendment? Yes, of course! Do I believe that hate speech can and does lead to hate acts? Yes!

We will, I hope, come through the fire to become a nation of ever more upstanders, and not a nation of ever more trolls or promoters of violence, although, or maybe because, our president-elect sets such a bad example.

We can’t do this alone. Everyone needs to join in to combat racism, misogyny, violence, and internet trolls. Solidarity! (Perhaps we need a brand showing solidarity, as the Poles did when emerging from under the thumb of Russia: Solidarnosc! What will our brand be?)

I think about lobbying for lawsuit reform, a cause already organized, seeking to make frivolous suits harder to bring; but I’m not sure how that fits into battling the current political climate or if my efforts as a non-attorney would be substantially helpful. NYS does need Anti-SLAPP laws, which many other states have.  I’ve had people suggest that I start an organization that helps women slapped with bogus revenge lawsuits or who are targeted by online shaming attacks including revenge videos; such attacks against women seem to far outnumber similar attacks against men, although both are of course deplorable.  Others have suggested I take up the many media offers I’ve had for interviews to talk about defamation suits and online shaming. I’m not ready to do those things. There are anti-bullying organizations out there; perhaps I can reach out to them. But what else can I do?

In a March 26, 2015 New York Times post by Katherine Schulten, asks, “What do you think that we, as a society, can or should be doing about this issue? What can you do as an individual? Do we need a “cultural revolution” to create an online culture of compassion and empathy?”   What are others doing to combat online misogyny, and the war of words on women?  Do you have a suggestion for how I can help in this fight?  Please private message me on Facebook if you do.

–Louise Silberling, Ithaca, NY

*I am half Jewish and half Mayflower descendant. Because of my surname I was aggressively called “a Jew” by some of the trolls, a fact completely irrelevant to the lawsuit. Racist attacks are inexplicable that way. What was relevant to me was my father being a member of the Anti-Defamation League, and although I do not practice Judaism, I felt proud of my heritage. Ironically, my accuser in the lawsuit, also half Jewish, does practice Judaism.

Here is a link to a story about the lawsuit against me being withdrawn: http://web.archive.org/web/20150523200725/http://cornellsun.com/blog/2015/03/22/lawsuit-against-c-u-employee-withdrawn/

And a link to my recent blog post with thoughts on how electing Trump was essentially a national temper tantrum, satisfying the transference anger against mothers (i.e. Hillary as stand-in for people with unresolved childhood rage): https://louisesilberling.com/2016/11/09/a-reflection-electing-trump-was-a-national-temper-tantrum-we-can-all-grow-up-and-do-better/