In the span of a week, four American men became public faces of violence against the women and girls in their lives. On Friday, April 10, the San Francisco Chronicle published the account of Lonna Drewes, a former congressional aide who says Rep. Eric Swalwell drugged, choked and raped her in 2018. Three other women described other misconduct. By Monday, April 13, he had announced his resignation.
Within hours of Swalwell’s announcement, Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas also announced he was resigning. He had spent months denying a sexual relationship with a staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, who worked in his Uvalde office and died by suicide in September. She set herself on fire. Gonzales, who is married with six children, sent text messages asking Santos-Aviles to send “a sexy pic,” and continued doing so after she told him he was “going too far.” Gonzales admitted the affair weeks earlier on a conservative talk show. “I’ve asked God to forgive me, which he has,” he had said. “And my faith is as strong as ever.” But this self-professed spiritual confession does not account for what the messages show: a boss who held power over his subordinate’s salary and career, who refused to take no for an answer, and who kept pressing after she told him to stop. After her husband discovered the texts and announced their pending divorce to Gonzales and other staffers, Santos-Aviles was, in her widower’s words, “black-sheeped,” and effectively pushed out of the office where she had built her career. Her widower’s attorney says her mental health, with no documented prior issues, deteriorated under the workplace harassment. Gonzales insists he had “absolutely nothing” to do with her death.
On Thursday morning, April 16, former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax shot his estranged wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, several times in the basement of their home. He then went upstairs and killed himself. Their teenage son called 911. In 2019, two women accused Fairfax of sexual assault. The system delivered what it usually delivers: He was not charged, his accusers were not vindicated and everyone was invited to move on. He ran for governor, lost, and his wife filed for divorce. A judge ordered her husband to leave the family home by the end of April. Instead, he fatally shot Dr. Fairfax in the basement two weeks before the deadline. Friends told the Associated Press that in a group text the night before the killing, Fairfax brought up the recent allegations against Swalwell, comparing them to what he still considered “a rush to judgment” regarding the accusations against himself. This is what people mean when they say “believe women.” The women who accused Justin Fairfax in 2019 were trying to tell us something, and we didn’t listen, and now Dr. Cerina Fairfax is dead.
That same Thursday, the musician D4vd was arrested on suspicion of murdering Celeste Rivas Hernandez, a 14-year-old girl whose dismembered body was found in the trunk of his abandoned Tesla last September. Prosecutors say he had been sexually abusing her since she was 13, after meeting her when she was 11, and that he killed her after she threatened to expose the relationship and end his career. D4vd is charged with first-degree murder, sexual abuse of a child, and mutilation of human remains. His breakout hit, “Romantic Homicide,” features a music video with a bloodied woman. Another of his videos depicts a person being stuffed into a car trunk.
Four men, four abuses of power. This string of violence surfaced right in the middle of April — Sexual Assault Awareness Month. By the time the last story hit my inbox, I felt demoralized and dumbfounded. No matter how many times this happens, we still cannot find a way to hold men accountable. What we do seem to manage, with remarkable ease, is accuse women of not trying harder, not preventing, not surviving correctly. Because somehow, even as we are dying, it is still our fault.
This invisible labor permeates my own life in ways both large and small. I am a woman who works in national security policy, specifically around AI and cyber operations. It is a field that is predominantly male, and where most real business happens over coffee, at happy hours and over Signal chats. I have learned not to smile too much, not to make too much eye contact, not to cross my arms because a man once told me it read as “defensive.” I monitor my exclamation points. I often wear a fake engagement ring. Recently, a man connected with me under a professional pretext, and afterward he wanted to continue the conversation on Signal, which is how a lot of business in my field gets done. The tone drifted from friendly to flirty, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt because as a woman, there is a steep professional cost to being wrong or simply seeming difficult. I brushed off overtures to grab drinks, heart emojis, questions about my age and comments about my face. The next morning he had gone back and silently edited out the flirtatious tone in his messages, not knowing that the edit history is documented. When I confronted him, he gaslighted me about what he had written. This man was married with kids, but even if he were not, I knew firsthand that the burden of maintaining professional decorum always falls to the woman.
It is so constant and so distributed that it disappears into the baseline of female life, which is why we have gotten so good at ignoring its cost. We pay it in time, in vigilance, in the small muscular work of adjusting a facial expression, in careers not pursued and rooms not entered and cab rides taken instead of trains. I am debating, right now, whether writing this piece will cost me my credibility, simply because I said something.
Every woman I know performs some version of this — not just to stay employed, but to stay alive. I left a relationship that required a lawyer, a criminal complaint, thousands of dollars in legal fees and trauma therapy, and months of my life I will not get back. I am one of the lucky ones. I have resources. I have a job with health insurance. I had written evidence to back up my claims and friends who believed me. And still, the process was punishing. I relived my trauma for so many audiences, I prepared for cross-examination, and I lived with the understanding that none of these measures would actually save me if my ex decided to escalate.
Our justice system and our social norms are built to protect men, at any cost. We pay that cost in therapy, in lawyers, in locks and alarms and the particular anxiety of praying that a man you have just met will decide you are a person worthy of respect rather than an opportunity. We pay it with our lives, and nothing changes.
When Drewes’s allegations surfaced, Swalwell’s legal team reportedly floated a theory that should be sitting on the desk of every law professor in America: The accusation could not be credible, they suggested, because after the alleged assault, the accuser had asked Swalwell’s office for a professional reference. The defense is that a woman who was assaulted by a powerful man and then tries to keep her career intact by maintaining a functional professional relationship with him could not possibly have been assaulted because real victims, apparently, torch their own lives on the way out. If she leaves loudly, she is vindictive. If she leaves quietly, she is lying. If she stays in contact, she is also lying. If she cuts contact, where is the evidence? Every exit strategy is a trap, weaponized to protect men and uphold the notion that there was nothing to exit from.
The trap is the point. The trap is how men like Swalwell stayed in Congress for 13 years, how men like Fairfax ran for governor after being accused of rape, how D4vd’s grooming and abuse of Hernandez persisted from when she was 11 to her horrific death at 14, before anyone intervened. The women who come forward, the ones brave enough to say anything, are not lying. This country’s inability to act on their accounts is not a gap in the evidence. It is a choice we make again and again and again. Women are not the problem. We have been doing the work, all of it, and we are exhausted.
I am not asking for sympathy. I am asking you to be usefully angry. And the next time a woman in your life adjusts her behavior in a way that most men never have to think about, notice that we are paying a tax you are not. We have been paying it our whole lives.
