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.
- whether
or not Derrick Johnson can be presumed competent despite expert testimony to the contrary.
- whether Derrick was equipped to consent to sex, and
- 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.
