47gone from a shoestring operation to a force to be reckoned with.
After Alabama passed the country’s most restrictive abortion ban
in May, the group’s bank balance leaped from $5,000 to more than
$2 million in just two months, enriched by the online activism of
celebrities like Rihanna and Reese Witherspoon.
For Russell, the job meant moving to Tuscaloosa to work
for an organization whose primary mission is funding abortions
in Alabama— including those Parker performs. But she was
un deterred: This was a chance to do important work at a level
she’d only dreamed of. And her supporters had her back; all sum-
mer, the fire Russell had lit continued to rage online, and with
increasing vitriol. Why was Parker, “a serial rapist,” even allowed
to perform abortions anymore? one activist asked on a Facebook
page called #IbelieveCandice. “I wouldn’t feel safe under his care.”
For all his eloquence on the subject of a woman’s right to
choose, Parker is not deft at expressing the emotional impact of
his exile, or of such invective. He uses phrases like profound dis-
appointment and moments of pain. But he once offered, piercingly,
that the way Russell had written on Medium of his hands all
over her had made him sound “animalistic,” like the stereotypi-
cal sexualized black man.
While Parker says he prefers not to dwell on the racial dimen-
sions of this story—a black man accused of a crime and condemned
with no recourse—one of his close friends, the social-justice advo-
cate Wyndi Anderson, believes that on some level he had been steel-
ing himself against this possibility. “If you grew up in the South,
this is what we think black men do—rape women,” says Anderson,
who is white and was raised in South Carolina. “As a black man
who has been putting his hands on and in white women and [other]
women, he has been waiting for this fucking thing, this charge,
since the day he started doing this work.”
The few who did publicly take issue with Russell’s denunciation
of Parker were lambasted for victim- blaming, or written off as “rape
apologists.” The documentary-film maker Dawn Porter, who spent
three years in Parker’s orbit while shooting her 2016 film, Trapped,
about the diminishing number of abortion clinics in the Deep
South, uncorked her outrage on Twitter: “What did i miss? You
drank 4 martinis and a bottle of wine on your own. Did he force
you to do that? You slept with him and you regret it? That makes
him a PREDATOR?” Mallory McMaster, one of Russell’s fellow
abortion storytellers, fired back: “Dawn, your next documentary
should follow your abrupt departure from the movement after
showing us all that you don’t share our values.”
The notion that a woman who drinks too much is at all respon-
sible for unwanted sex has become verboten in recent years—
understandably, because it risks reopening an old window, allow-
ing back in the creeping suspicion that women are in some way to
blame when they’re assaulted. But in reality, things get messy. In
her Medium post, Russell herself wrote, “If I had done the right
thing, left at the appropriate time, stopped after two drinks like I
should have, none of this would have ever happened.” By the time
we met six months later she was free of any ambiguity. The fact that
Parker was sober figured prominently in her thinking. If they’d both
been drunk, the sex would have been “not great, but not preda-
tory,” in Russell’s estimation. But because he’d had his wits about
him and she hadn’t, she said to me, as if addressing Parker directly,
“That’s your bad. You’re a feminist leader and a physician, and you
are choosing to count that as consent. That is your mistake. That
makes you a predator.”
The law draws no such distinction. These days, we all know
that a person cannot consent to sex when incapacitated by drugs
or alcohol, but what constitutes incapacitated, exactly? In most
states, including Texas, an accuser who drinks of her own volition
(versus, say, being roofied) must be fully unconscious— literally
unable to resist—to qualify as such. So legally, it doesn’t matter
how wasted Russell was—as long as she wasn’t passed-out. Cynthia
Godsoe, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in
gender and sexuality, says the standards in this area are beginning
to shift: Under Title IX rules, which govern how colleges address
sexual assault on campus, people who are visibly drunk are some-
times considered past the point of consent. And coincidentally, a
bill is now pending in the Texas statehouse to expand the defini-
tion of sexual assault to include cases of what Godsoe calls “serious
drunken ness,” or, in the language of the legislation, cases in which
“the actor knows the other person is intoxicated” to the point that
he or she can’t “appraise the nature of the act.”Russell’s drinking, her spotty memory,
and her troubled past make her exactly
the kind of woman whose account of
sexual assault was for generations
dismissed without a backwards glance.