Thread by @audrawilliams

TW: SEUXAL ASSAULT AND RACIST VIOLENCE

[Thread]

Liam Neeson just gave an interview about some movie he's in. He told this story:

"I was away and I'd been back and she told me I'd been raped. And she handled the situation of the rape in the most extraordinary way ..."

"But my immediate reaction was I asked did she know who it was? She said no. I asked "What colour were they?". She said it was a Black person. I went up and down areas with a cosh* hoping I'd be approached by somebody ... "

* kind of like a billy club I think

" ... I'm ashamed to say that. And I did it for maybe a week. Hoping some Black bastard would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something you know? So that I could kill him ... "

" ... And it took me a week, maybe a week and a half to go through that. And she says to me "Where are you going?" and I said "I'm just going for a walk" y'know? She says "What's wrong?" and I said "Nothing's wrong, I'm fine ... "

" ... And it was horrible, horrible when I think back, that I did that."

FOUR THINGS ABOUT THIS:

1. The next time someone is being critical of racist movies about sexual assault that centre the needs of male bystanders over female victims, I don't want to hear anyone say "It's just a movie"

2. If we are to believe his own narrative, the only reason he did not commit race-based homicide was because he never got the opportunity.

3. Every word of this is complete trash, including the performative displays of retroactive shame. If you feel an impulse to praise his "bravery", know that he can say this sort of thing 100% confident it will have zero impact on his career.

4. My heart breaks for the woman who was left alone with her trauma, worried about her partner and his endless walks. If she reads the news, she will now get to re-live this story, and learn the real reason the man she loved was roaming the streets instead of being with her.

(This is basically the opposite of the story with Sinead O'Connor and Kris Kristofferson.)

Oh here we go:

“I’m not a racist,” Neeson said Tuesday. But he did feel a “primal urge to lash out” so he “went out deliberately into black areas in the city, looking to be set upon."

thegrio.com/2019/02/05/lia…

He's literally saying: "I'm not a racist I just went to a Black part of town hoping to murder an innocent Black person because of what another Black person did."

I keep seeing men saying "Wanting to avenge sexual violence against someone you care about is common. I've felt it", without acknowledging that is 100% not what Liam Neeson was talking about. It is not "revenge" to kill an innocent person of the same race who did something bad.