Deconstructing Tell Them You Love Me: Against the Erasure of Derrick Johnson

The Netflix documentary, “Tell Them You Love Me” revisits the case of the grooming and sexual assault of Derrick Johnson, the disabled Black man who the perpetrator met through his older brother, her former student. The film, like much of the media surrounding this case, hyper-focuses on the privileged position of the perpetrator, the degree of disability of the victim, and past scandals surrounding the method of communication the perpetrator used with the victim. As a result, Derrick, the disabled victim, is left devoiced, dehumanized, and a continued prop in the story of the crimes committed against him. 

 

Derrick’s brother and mother are inadvertently adding to the erasure of the man they are trying to protect. Derrick’s family is now completely ignoring that his gestural language is communication. They are firm in their belief that Derrick is incapable of any communication pathway despite advances in AAC technology and mind reading devices that will eventually be able to more accurately determine individual capacity, among other things. In the production and promotion of “Tell Them You Love Me,” Derrick Johnson’s family has become complicit in framing and retelling the story of his abuse and assault in a way that completely centers his privileged abuser. 

 

Jelani Cobb describes a critical point about predatory behavior in his long essay, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and the Cloak of Charity: "It’s not uncommon for people to tangentially benefit groups that they’re simultaneously exploiting.". . . "In that light, the philanthropy can be seen as a sort of honeypot scheme, in which a concern for social issues lulls people into seeing only one side of the giver.” “In some cases, charity doesn’t contradict monstrosity. It enables it." The view of so many in the perpetrator’s circles of privilege who benefitted from the charity of the abuser and her family is very much the situation Cobb describes.

 

This is not, as the film implies, a story about a debunked methodology misleading a well-intentioned white savior. This is not about disabled adults' rights to live as autonomous adults, or their right to sex. This is not about Facilitated Communication. This is the story of how the violation(s) against Derrick Johnson continue, and how they continue to erase his personhood, his communication pathways, and his right to participate fully in his own life.

Summary of The Crime, Trial, and Appeal

 

In January of 2016, Rutgers Ethics Chair Marjorie Anna Stubblefield (nee McClennen) was convicted of two counts of sexual assault for the grooming and sexual abuse of Derrick Johnson, an African American nonspeaking disabled man who is the brother of one of Stubblefield’s former students (see NYT article). She was sentenced to twelve years in prison. 

 

On June 9, 2017, an appellate court reversed her conviction. The appellate court ruled that a jury could decide the credibility of the defendant’s claims that Mr. Johnson gave consent to sex via Facilitated Communication (FC). Judge Ellen Koblitz wrote in the opinion: “Unfortunately, the [trial] court, in its attempt to cleanse the record of controversial FC methodology, limited the evidence to the extent that [Stubblefield] was not given a fair opportunity to present her defense,” 

“The jury was not presumptively gullible,” Koblitz continued. “It did not have to be shielded from employing its common sense to fairly evaluate the testimony from both sides.”

Stubblefield then accepted a plea deal in which she admitted that she should have known her victim could not consent to sex. 

 The Documentary

 The Netflix “documentary” “Tell Them You Love Me” continues a pattern of presenting Anna Stubblefield as a well-meaning confused victim of a discredited methodology. FC was used to rally its community members to support Stubblefield during her trial. Then FC was used as the technicality to win an appeal for Stubblefield’s release. FC is now the blamed scapegoat in this documentary, weaponized to proclaim Stubblefield is not a predator. 

 Media descriptions of the film also center Stubblefield and scapegoat FC as the thing to blame for Stubblefield's crimes. In a recent Time magazine essay, entertainment reporter Lindsay Lee Wallace mislabels Dr. Howard Shane, (an FC skeptic and detractor featured in the Frontline documentary "Prisoners of Silence" and used during the trial against Stubblefield) an  FC expert. Wallace follows the media pattern of minimizing obvious red flags in Stubblefield's actions by declaring the issues complex while adding no nuance to said complexity proclamation. 

 The film moves between what nondisabled viewers believe is the bizarre nature of the case and the beautification of Stubblefield as the misguided white savior character. This inserts black trauma as an entertainment vehicle. Adding Professor Devva Kasnitz as a character witness to subliminally imply that Stubblefield was virtuous and kind to her therefore Stubblefield could not intentionally harm a disabled Black man is disingenuous at best.

Staging commentary from Dr. Kasnitz in key moments as a counterpoint to excerpts of the Johnson family interviews and snippets of Stubblefield’s narration of her biased view of events, subliminally invites the viewer to compare Kasnitz’s life of interaction with Stubblefield and her family to the life Derrick Johnson has without Stubblefield’s control and abuse. Stubblefield even goes as far as to invoke an unknown nonspeaking “friend” who told her that if he had been Derrick, he would have chosen a life with her. The fact that after disturbing unverifiable statements like that from Stubblefield, Dr. Shane proclaimed he did not believe her to be a predator is shocking. 

 What is most disturbing about the film is this continued idea that when powerful people abuse their power over others, the blame is placed on a methodology rather than the perpetrators of said abuse. Is the abuser not to be held accountable for the harm they cause?

 The Injustices Against Derrick Johnson

 The continuing use of media to platform the perpetrator, weaponizing the trauma of the disabled African American victim for circus like entertainment and scapegoating a methodology to deflect blame from the crimes committed is inexcusable.

 Let’s be clear. Johnson was repeatedly sexually abused by Stubblefield, a trusted person in a teaching role. To convict his abuser, the state responsible for meting out justice failed him. Derrick Johnson was stripped of dignity, paraded into the courtroom, inhumanely exhibited, and declared incompetent. The adversarial nature of our court trials, combined with a criminal justice system that particularly fails marginalized victims of sexual assault, didn’t provide Johnson with the supports that were his right as a survivor of such trauma. Like too many marginalized rape victims, he was discarded from the story of the crimes committed against him.

 Race and disability are assigned credibility deficits that obstruct justice for BIPOC victims in the criminal justice system. When the perpetrator is a white woman with this degree of power over her marginalized victim, the perpetrator is given such credibility excess that the story of the victim becomes the story of the perpetrator, and the perpetrator morphs into a faux victim, eventually erasing the true victim, in this case, Derrick Johnson. 

 Derrick’s erasure from any ability to communicate (despite the prosecution’s witnesses stating that he did communicate by vocalizations and body language) was particularly ableist. Multi-modal communication includes gestures and physical expressions of consent and denial thereof. Stakeholders who work with high-support-need nonspeaking disabled adults know they can express their likes and dislikes through verbalizations and physical indications of approval or rejection. So why were these indications of acceptance or rejection by Johnson himself erased from the trial against his confessed abuser?

 Johnson’s brother John testified that their suspicion of his abuser grew when Stubblefield claimed that Johnson, who loved gospel music, disliked it via corrupted facilitation. John stated that they knew these could not be Derrick’s words because they witnessed his physical expressions and verbalizations of pleasure at the music when attending church services. His family knew what sounds and movements Johnson used to express likes and dislikes based on years of interaction before having any hope of AAC support. One of the greatest injustices in nonspeaking evaluation is the idea that gestural language, the only baseline communication mode available to those unable to access verbal speech, is somehow infantile. 

 Stubblefield’s facilitation was so corrupted that despite her testimony that Johnson repeatedly sat up and tried to escape her when she molested him, she insisted that he consented based entirely on her biased interpretation of facilitation she subverted. 

 Why were Mr. Johnson’s physical demonstrations of his lack of trust in his abuser ignored? Perhaps they were inconsistent with the prosecution’s case, which required Johnson to be declared incompetent. It also benefitted his abuser’s defense strategy, which needed to backdoor FC into the trial to conflate the case from one of sexual assault to one about the legitimacy of FC. 

 Stubblefield ignored Johnson’s behavioral indications that he did not consent to sex. She, and her defense team, centered validation for FC as the trial’s purpose to induce the FC community to support her. To those who believed the legitimacy of their loved one’s AAC method was on trial, championing Stubblefield equaled defending their loved ones’ right to communicate. Stubblefield’s supporters also believed that by siding with Stubblefield, they advocated for Johnson’s right to AAC using FC. 

 So, any potential testimony that Johnson made his needs known through vocalizations, body language, and attempting to escape from danger was ignored. The only information considered was the perpetrator’s interpretations of what Johnson wanted and the prosecution’s declarations of Johnson’s incompetence. 

 What is This Case About?

 Despite Stubblefield and her team’s successful efforts to backdoor FC into the trial and this film, this case was not about the legitimacy of FC. The sexual assault on Derrick Johnson was about. 

1.  whether or not Derrick Johnson can be presumed competent despite expert testimony to the contrary. 
2. whether Derrick was equipped to consent to sex, and
3. Because the power imbalance, in this case, is so great, did Derrick submit to sex because he was coerced or helpless to escape making this defacto sexual assault?

1.     Derrick Johnson’s Competence Question

Presuming Derrick Johnson’s competence is a core value of epistemic justice. Countering structural ableism begins with acknowledging that every human being has the inalienable right to personhood, and personhood begins with presuming people are competent. I assume Johnson is competent because competence is his ethical birthright.

 The competence dilemma that harms the nonspeaking  ID/DD community stems from systemic ableism. Current competence assessments rely too heavily on our ability to observe a subject’s reaction to oral or written language. These assessments cannot explain evidence of competence in individuals with complex support needs that present outside of diagnosis-based presumptions of incompetence. 

 The case of people declared to be in a so-called “vegetative state” is an excellent example of the unethical nature of the presumption of incompetence. Modern medicine still does not understand what people who cannot communicate because they appear comatose from brain trauma can grasp.  Sam Goddard ‘wakes up’ from a so-called vegetative state with Ambien. When awake, he reports that he hears and understands what those around him say about and to him while he is in a comatose state. Examples like these are reminders not to presume someone is incompetent regardless of how we perceive that individual’s degree of disability.

 We don’t know about Derrick Johnson’s competence, and we only know what specific professionals could assess in an afternoon, a few hours, and read from a medical history. Professionals don’t spend months documenting a nonspeaking client’s vocalizations and gestural communication. We won’t know about Johnson’s “competence” until he can be assessed through means beyond today's accepted standards. 

 Because he has been declared legally incompetent, whether Johnson gets any kind of AAC support from now on depends on a family who believes he is incompetent because they trusted Stubblefield, and she destroyed their trust. Yet cases like Sam Goddard’s indicate presuming a person is incompetent because they have high support needs is an act of epistemic injustice. We must presume competence because we have too many cases where the unthinkable has happened to those deemed incompetent who were not.

2.               The Question of Consent

We also know that abuse of nonspeaking individuals with complex support needs can go on for years, unreported unless something dramatic happens (see the case of the San Carlos first nations patient whose rapes went unnoticed and unreported until she gave birth). 

 Being equipped to give consent and report abuse is critical. In Derrick Johnson’s case, he didn’t get the life skills education, impartial AAC support, supported decision-making support, and proper sex education to consent to sex with anyone.  We do not even know whether Johnson’s sexual orientation was clear to him, but we do know from Stubblefield’s own testimony that Johnson resisted her sexual advances. 

3.               Predation, Submission, and Consent

 Stubblefield behaved in ways consistent with other predators of vulnerable people 

• She increasingly spent time alone with Johnson.
• She lied to his family about the nature of her activities with Johnson. 
• She exposed him to pornography (rather than, for example, allowing him to build a team that might support decision-making about proper sex education, expressing gender identity, sexual orientation, etc.)
•  She increasingly acted in ways to distance, & isolate Derrick Johnson from his family (gaslighting family members by insisting her preferences for classical music and wine were Derrick’s, and her removal of Derrick from home to undisclosed locations without family consent etc.), 
• She ignored his attempts to escape her assaults. 

John Johnson testified that he did not understand why Derrick was having nightmares until Stubblefield disclosed her abuse of him. In the Netflix film, John states that he discovered scabbing torn skin from abrasions on Derrick’s back. John and his mother Daisy investigated, asking whether Derrick fell. They later realized that these were lacerations from Stubblefield assaulting Johnson on a mat in her office. At the time he had no idea of the extent of harm Stubblefield, who outweighed the slightly built Johnson, had done to Derrick. In his brother’s opinion, Derrick was traumatized by his ordeal.

 Stubblefield claimed she had consensual sex with Derrick Johnson. Let’s acknowledge that Johnson submitted to sex. Submission is not consent. In Amina Srinivasan’s New York Times Op-ed: What’s Wrong With Sex Between Professors and Students? It’s Not What You Think., she discusses  Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson (1986), the case where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled “that acts of apparently consensual sex, when involving parties marked by a significant power differential, can, in fact, be instances of harassment.”

  Per Srinivasan: “Mechelle Vinson was a young Black woman who said she had given in to the persistent pressure to have sex with her boss because she was afraid, she would be fired. Her consent to sex, the court noted, did not mean that her boss’s sexual overtures were welcome if her consent had been secured by coercion. Universities realized that it was now possible to argue, by the same logic, that professors were sexually harassing the students with whom they were (apparently consensually) involved. Students might be agreeing to such relationships out of fear — of a bad grade, lackluster recommendation, or worse. As a result, many universities extended their sexual harassment policies to restrict apparently consensual professor-student relationships.”

 In Derrick Johnson’s case, his means of communication depended on compliance with Stubblefield’s demands. His access to an entire community was dependent on her whim. The power imbalance in Stubblefield’s relationship with Johnson put him in Mechelle Vinson’s position. Worse, unlike Mechelle Vinson, Johnson could not speak without prejudice about this situation because, unlike AAC users like  Martin Pistorius,  he didn’t have uncorrupted AAC support. Johnson’s only means of AAC support depended on a trauma-inducing individual.

 Skewed Ethics, Centering the Abuser, Erasing the Victim

 The ethics in Derrick Johnson’s case were also flipped and skewed because of the structural hyper sexualization and fetishization that is part of the history of how society stereotypes Black males. The media’s infantilization of Johnson by repeated presentation of his incontinence as proof of his diminished capacity was part of a pattern of systemic ableism that strips epistemic agency and humanity from Black disabled victims. Add to this the media rushing to center the abuser’s story rather than Derrick’s, and the result is the catastrophic erasure of Johnson from the injustice done to him. 

 Some disability rights community members rightly pointed out the ableism of Johnson’s family evident in acts like his mother consenting to parade him into the courtroom during Stubblefield’s initial trial. Such observations fall short because they erase the abusive nature of Stubblefield’s relationship with Johnson’s mother and brother. She was in the position of an educator and counselor of sorts to Johnson and his family; she claimed to represent the ethics of presuming competence and anti-ableism. Her destruction of trust also taught Johnson’s family that presumption of competence caused harm to their loved one, who they were charged with protecting. So, when I say perpetrator Stubblefield irreparably harmed the family, we must include the entire family.

 In addition to public centering of the white, femme, privileged abuser in Derrick Johnson’s case, some community stakeholders presented arguments tangential to the crime being tried. Academia produced papers discussing the right of disabled men to have sex, the legalities of sexual relations in the disability community. Some in academia reduced Derrick to an object in his own story. His trauma became a case study, a research topic, something to be analyzed, debated, and discussed. The hyper sexualization, dehumanization, fetishization, and infantilization swirling around Derrick Johnson, combined with academic dissection of Black disabled adults in trauma is a subliminal and systemic form of microaggression. It was evident in other historical events where white privilege harmed  Black disabled males (Emmett Till, the Scottsboro Boys). 

 Erasing Black Disabled Voices

Outraged members of the disabled Black activist community tried to explain that Derrick Johnson’s case followed the pattern of white female sexual predator grooming and abuse cases to privileged peers in social justice spaces. They were shut down. Black disabled activists tried to point out that this case was an example of the historical harm done to disabled Black males. They were gaslighted into silence and ignored. In the aftermath of the Stubblefield arrest and trial, folx who did not want to acknowledge Black voices suppressed them. All faced what Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw called “intersectional erasure.”

 Credibility deficit is part of structural racism. Witnessing this happening to Derrick Johnson exposed structural racism subliminally embedded in the attitudes of Stubblefield supporters who refused to accept she abused Johnson under the guise of charity. This kind of testimonial injustice is so prevalent in cases of sexual abuse of Black males that victims are often treated like suspects.

 Stubblefield supporters continue to conflate the charitable work that cloaked her abuse and generalize it to mean that somehow, she could not abuse a Black disabled man because she did not abuse white ones. Stubblefield’s being in a troubled marriage with a Black man doesn’t mean she didn’t fetishize Black males. 

 In reports during the trial and in media coverage of the film, Stubblefield’s presentation of her ex-husband Roger Stubblefield as an abusive Black male is simply accepted without question, a textbook form of racial stereotyping of Black males as abusive partners.

 Stubblefield being married to a Black man at the time of the sexual abuse of Johnson does not minimize her behavior, just as being the ethics chair at Rutgers did not stop her from behaving unethically. Her positions and how they informed the ethics Stubblefield claimed to champion did not keep her from abusing Derrick Johnson. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” as a defense diminishes the gravity of the harm done to Derrick.

Devastating Consequences for Disability Justice

As for Stubblefield, her trial and appeal outcomes are no surprise. Equally unsurprising is the additional platform of an entire film dedicated to weaponizing FC to portray her as the hapless victim rather than a convicted felon. The lack of accountability in the criminal justice system for privileged offenders continues despite the increase in such crimes. Regardless of status or identity, sexual predators in positions of power spend time grooming those around their target (family, community members) and the victim. During the grooming process, many predators cloak themselves in the guise of volunteers and community helpers (social justice activists, Boy Scout leaders, teachers, priests, and coaches). 

 No type of sexual assault results in a minor impact on the victim, regardless of the degree of disability. Rape is a violation of the human body, whether the body is abused violently or under the false guise of affection. In some cases of rape, the rapist claims to love the survivor to reduce the consequences of their criminal activity. Rapists often gaslight victims to silence. Some continue to force victims to marry their rapists, thus freeing the rapist of the legal consequences of their actions while consigning their victims to further abuse. (See the story of survivor activist Sherry Johnson here)

 The rape stereotype that if the abuse is not physically violent, or the victim is disabled, the harm to the individual was not significant is the weakness Dr. Anthony McCarthy emphasizes in his paper countering Singer and McMahan’s flawed New York Times Op-ed calling Stubblefield’s sentence “excessive.”

 Singer and McMahan used the Op-ed to apply Singer’s hedonistic utilitarian view of disabled adults like Derrick Johnson. They argued that Stubblefield’s sentence was excessive for completely ableist reasons. McMahan and Singer ( who devalues the lives of disabled people like Johnson) stated they were encouraged and given the information they requested to produce this Op-ed by Stubblefield’s mother. Stubblefield’s mother’s biography presents her as someone who dedicated her life to supporting nonspeaking disabled people. Yet she championed an Op-ed that diminished Derrick Johnson and his trauma and dehumanized him to save her daughter. 

 Presuming that because white community members benefited from acts of charity by Stubblefield and her parents, she could not harm another person not of her race is flawed logic. Boy Scouts had many troops whose leaders did not harm children, but the integrity of some Boy Scout leaders does not change the reality that  60,000 men were raped and abused as children. Remember, philanthropy does not contradict brutality. 

 Epistemic justice demands we believe the marginalized victim rather than the abuser who only knew him for two years and lied to his family, the FC community, and her former spouse for months. 

 Stubblefield continues to not apologize to Derrick Johnson or his family. Has Derrick Johnson been given trauma-informed care or an alternate means of AAC? Two years after the filming of the Netflix documentary, Derrick Johnson is shown without AAC support. Stubblefield owes Derrick Johnson and his family the court settlement they won, so he gets the therapeutic support he needs to recover. One wonders if Derrick Johnson’s brother and mother were promised the settlement owed to Derrick in exchange for telling their view of Derrick’s abuse story in this film.

 Stubblefield’s unethical actions dragged FC into a further sex scandal. Her criminal acts reignite doubt in an entire community of AAC users. Perhaps if anyone in that community had filled the seats behind Derrick Johnson’s side of the courtroom, believed, and shown support for him, this would not have been the case. 

 Calling for Restorative Justice

Stubblefield continues to be given platforms to be the center of Derrick’s story, as her crime has brought no measurable consequences or visible internal attempts at restorative justice or reparations. If we let individuals who abuse vulnerable members of the marginalized disability community continue activities (even as fringe members) without intra community restorative justice, this abuse will continue. Since we know that in some cases, charity enables monstrosity, ethics demands we recenter Derrick in the story of the harm done to him. We must confront the reality of sexual abuse within our community and work to eliminate it.

  Applying restorative justice to this case begins with acknowledging the harm done to Derrick Johnson, his family, and the disabled Black community who spoke out to defend them. It continues with taking community action to eradicate the sexual abuse of AAC users and nonspeaking adults. Abolishing abuse is possible if we accept that Derrick was the victim here and admit that our community failed him. 

 Actions like providing support brokers, proper sex education, self-advocacy training, and supported decision making teams for non-speaking adults are restorative. Ensuring AAC support for nonspeaking adults is acquired through proper professional assessment and supervised matching is critical. Proper training of all family members supporting the AAC using adults restores epistemic agency to the disabled non speaker. Marginalized communities, in particular, require access to these supports. These preventative measures ensure the balance of power between an AAC user and anyone in the position of service provider or educator is more equitable.

 If Anna Stubblefield Loved Derrick Johnson

 As Ethics Chair of Rutgers University, rather than telling John Johnson that Syracuse was too expensive, she would have reached out to Syracuse, assessed costs, and assisted in crowdfunding for the Johnson family to gain proper assessment. Syracuse University is not simply a center for FC. The university could have assessed Derrick to see which forms of AAC were the best fit for his communication needs.

 The Johnson family home needed to be more accessible for Derrick. Someone who loved him would have helped provide resources to make the home more accessible.

 Proper sex education for disabled adults begins with body autonomy and the ability to reject unwanted touching and other inappropriate advances. Proper sex education for disabled adults is given by professionals in safe settings not by those in positions of control and power over such adults. Derrick was able to gesture “no” before Stubblefield entered his life.

 Love is not control. Love yields and considers the needs, safety, and autonomy of one’s partner. If Anna Stubblefield loved Derrick Johnson, she would never accept being part of any documentary that risked him being displayed or treated in an ableist manner. Love is not selfish or self-serving.

 "Tell Them You Love Me" continues Anna Stubblefield’s efforts to center herself in Derrick's trauma by any means necessary, regardless of how much it harms the person she claims to still love, the communication method she insists Derrick communicated with, and the community trying to move on from her criminal acts. This is not love. Understand that, and center Derrick and all of those Stubblefield continues to harm. Justice for Derrick Johnson.