Please Don't Shoot the Messenger

“I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” — Genesis 3:16 (KJV)

I want to begin with an apology. What I am about to say will offend some people, and I am genuinely sorry for that. I am not speaking about all women. I am not dismissing the very real pain of those who have been truly victimized. Sexual violence is real and it is serious and those who have suffered it deserve justice and compassion without question.

What I cannot do is sit quietly and accept every media narrative without applying the same scrutiny I apply to everything else. I have never been able to do that. DahTruth was built on the conviction that truth matters even when it is uncomfortable, and this week the truth is very uncomfortable indeed. So please do not shoot the messenger. Just hear what I have to say.

What I also believe, and what I have watched play out repeatedly, is that the media is not simply reacting to pressure. It is often making deliberate choices about which stories to elevate and when to elevate them. There is a selectiveness to what is amplified and what is ignored. There are moments when a public figure is no longer protected, when the culture has decided they are no longer worthy of defense, and that is when the full weight of exposure is allowed to fall. That does not mean every accusation is false. But it does mean we have to question whether the timing, the attention, and the narrative are being driven by truth, or by a decision that it is time for that person to fall.

Before I go any further I want to tell you where I am standing when I say what I am about to say.

I am an American Black woman. And I have spent my entire life watching American Black men be accused, convicted, and destroyed by allegations that the broader culture accepted without question and the legal system processed without mercy. That history lives in me the way it lives in anyone who grew up knowing the names and knowing what those names cost.

Emmett Till was fourteen years old. A child. Murdered in Mississippi in 1955 over an alleged interaction with a white woman that decades later she admitted she had fabricated. He did not live long enough to defend himself. There was no trial that mattered. There was only a casket and a mother who insisted the world see what had been done to her son. Mamie Till made sure we looked. We should never stop looking.

Harper Lee gave us To Kill a Mockingbird as fiction but the story it told was not fictional to anyone in the American Black community. Tom Robinson was a composite of every Black man who had ever been accused by a white woman and handed to a system that had already decided the outcome before the first word of testimony was spoken. The accusation was the conviction. That was not literature. That was life.

In my own generation I watched it continue in different forms. Tupac Shakur faced rape charges that were later dropped and yet he was convicted of sexual assault and served time. Mike Tyson was convicted of rape and most people in my community did not believe those accusations reflected the full truth of what happened. Bill Cosby spent years as America's beloved father figure before allegations surfaced, accumulated, and ultimately resulted in a conviction tied to a relationship that by any honest account had elements of consent woven through it. Jay Z has faced allegations in recent years that have not held up. Shannon Sharpe has faced accusations that the facts have not supported.

I am not saying powerful American Black men are incapable of wrongdoing. They are not. R. Kelly is a man whose crimes against young women, many of them American Black girls, were known and tolerated by an industry that chose profit over protection for decades. He is guilty and the record bears that out. Diddy is a more complicated figure in my mind. I see him less as a predator in the traditional sense and more as a man who built and fed an entire culture of excess and illicit behavior, the way Hugh Hefner did, where the line between willing participation and exploitation was deliberately kept invisible. That culture consumed people. Whether it consumed them with or without their consent is a question the courts will have to sort through. What is not a question is that he curated it and called it a lifestyle.

What I am saying is that I have watched this weapon used against American Black men my entire life with a precision and a cultural willingness that left no room for doubt or scrutiny. The accusation arrived and the verdict followed. That history made me a skeptic. Not a blind one. A historically informed one.

Now I look at the current moment and I see more white men facing these allegations publicly than at any point in my lifetime. Part of me understands the cynical reading of that. That finally the machinery is turning in a direction it avoided for centuries. That powerful white men are being held to a standard that American Black men never had the protection to hide behind.

But I do not think that is the whole truth either.

Because the pattern I am describing, the willing transaction rewritten as victimhood, the accusation deployed when the arrangement stops serving one party, the media narrative that accepts one version of events without asking the obvious questions, that pattern does not belong to any race. It belongs to human nature. It has always been there. It was just aimed more precisely at some people than others for most of American history.

What I want is the same standard applied in every room and in every direction. The same scrutiny. The same questions. The same insistence that the whole truth be told regardless of who is telling it and who it is being told about. That is not cynicism. That is just honesty. And honesty is the only place I know how to start.

It started in a garden.

The serpent did not force Eve. He enticed her. He offered her something she wanted, knowledge, elevation, the ability to know what God knows, and she looked at it, desired it, and reached out and took it. Adam ate too. Both were accountable. But the transaction began with a desire and a deliberate choice. Nobody dragged Eve to that tree. She went because she wanted what was on it.

And God did not look the other way. He held Adam to a higher standard because Adam carried a higher charge. The ground that had never needed to be tilled before now required his labor for the rest of his life. The consequence was real and it was lasting. That is the standard men in positions of power and trust are still meant to be held to. When you carry authority you carry accountability. There is no separating the two.

That dynamic did not end in the garden. It has followed humanity through every generation, through every palace and every political chamber and every back room where power and desire have found each other. There is a particular kind of woman, and I want to be clear that I am speaking about a particular kind and not all women, who understands what she has and uses it deliberately to get what she cannot obtain through skill or merit alone. She makes the transaction with open eyes. She takes what is offered. And history is full of her.

The problem we are living with today is not that this woman exists. She has always existed. The problem is that she has discovered she can rewrite the terms of the transaction after the fact. And a media culture desperate for a particular narrative will help her do it.

Let us go back to Warren G. Harding.

Harding, America’s 29th President and former US Senator.  He was a weak and scandalous man who spent much of his political life entangled with women who were not his wife. Two of those women deserve particular attention here because their stories illuminate something the current moment refuses to see clearly.

Carrie Fulton Phillips was a close family friend of Harding family.  From their hometown of Marion, Ohio. She and Harding carried on an intense affair for years, exchanging letters that left no question about the nature of their relationship. But Carrie was not simply a woman swept up in a powerful man's orbit. She was calculating. When Harding was moving toward a Senate vote on declaring war against Germany, Carrie threatened to expose the affair unless he voted no. She attempted to use her intimate access to a United States Senator to influence American foreign policy. That is not a woman who did not know what she was doing. That is a woman who understood exactly what she had and exactly how far she was willing to take it.

The Republican Party's response tells you everything you need to know about how power protects itself. They did not expose her. They paid her. They arranged for Carrie and her husband to be sent to Japan so the whole matter could be buried before it reached the public. The cover ran all the way to the party level.

Nan Britton, another family friend came next.  She was younger and perhaps more sympathetic in the way that lovesick people often are. She was an admirer from Marion who became deeply entangled with Harding in a relationship that produced a child. What began in cheap motels eventually moved to the White House itself, where Harding would spend stolen time with Nan, not in a bedroom but in a closet.  A black space reserved for coats and shoes became the place they carried out an affair. Nan went inside that closet willingly. She accepted monthly support payments for years. When Harding died in 1923 and the payments stopped, she told the story publicly in her 1927 book, The President's Daughter. DNA testing in 2015 confirmed that Harding was indeed the father of her daughter Elizabeth Ann.

Here is what Nan Britton did not do. She did not walk out of that closet and claim she had no idea what she was walking into. She told her story honestly, including her own role in it. Whatever her motivations, she did not reframe herself as an innocent victim of a predator. She told the truth about a willing relationship between two people who both knew what they were doing.

Harding died in August of 1923 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. The circumstances of his death have never been fully resolved. Florence moved quickly. She dismissed the doctors, relied on a single physician, and had his body embalmed immediately after his passing. She refused an autopsy. There are those who have suggested she may have played a role in his death, that a woman who had spent years burning letters and protecting a man who never protected her may have finally reached the end of what she was willing to endure. We will never know. Florence made sure of that.

Florence Harding made no transaction. She played no game. She simply loved a man who was not worthy of it and paid a price she never earned. She attempted to burn all his letters and bury his secrets, giving everything she had to preserving the image of a man who had never once deserved her loyalty. She is the one in that story whose suffering was real and undeserved and whose name history has largely overlooked in favor of the scandals that surrounded her. She is Florence Harding in every generation. And there is one in every story.

Now let us come forward to today.

Allegations have surfaced against Eric Swalwell, the California congressman currently running for governor. Women have come forward with accounts of sexual misconduct. I want to be careful here because allegations are allegations and legal determinations have not been made. I am not saying what happened or did not happen in those rooms.

What I am saying is that the details being reported publicly raise questions that honest people are allowed to ask. Accounts describing voluntary contact on more than one occasion, text messages running in both directions, and no contemporaneous report of assault deserve scrutiny. Going to a hotel room does not mean a woman consented to sex. That is true and it matters. What is equally true is that returning voluntarily to the same situation a second time, maintaining ongoing contact, and only raising the alarm when the story becomes public, at a particular time, raises legitimate questions about the narrative being presented.

Imagine if Nan Britton had walked out of that White House closet and said she had no idea what she was going in there for. Nobody would have believed her. Because context matters. Choices matter. And the whole truth matters, not just the part that serves the story being told.

There is an irony in the Swalwell situation that should not go unnoticed. This is a man who called loudly and publicly for the release of the Epstein files. He positioned himself as someone who believed in exposure and accountability and the public's right to know what powerful men had done in private rooms. The chickens have now come home to roost. The same standard he applied to others is being applied to him. He cannot play hide the ball with his own record while demanding transparency from everyone else. That is not how accountability works. That is not how truth works.

He has been called to resign his seat in the House and to step back from his run for governor. As of this writing he has admitted nothing and resigned nothing. He is carrying his cross publicly, insisting on his innocence while the weight of the allegations presses down on his political future. Whether he survives it remains to be seen. But Adam did not escape the garden simply by denying he had eaten the apple. The juices were dripping his lips.

The ones I think about most in all these stories are the wives. The women at home who made no transaction, sent no texts, walked into no hotel rooms, and woke up one morning to find their lives altered by choices they never made. They are not in the headlines. They are not telling their stories on camera. They are simply living with the wreckage.  Florence Harding on repeat.  Faithful to a fault. And paying the highest price of anyone involved.

The serpent is still in the garden.

Lucifer has just learned to dress differently depending on the decade. The offer is the same. The desire is the same. The choice is the same. And the aftermath, the cover, the spin, the selective outrage, the media performance, the wife sitting quietly at home, that is the same too.

Men in power are still called to a higher standard. That part has never changed. What has changed is that we have lost the willingness to tell the whole truth. We pick the parts that serve us and call it justice. We rewrite our own choices and call it survival. We silence the questions that do not fit the story and call it compassion.

But truth does not disappear because we stop looking at it. It waits. And eventually, the way it always has, it finds its way into the light.

Please don't shoot the messenger.