Incarcerated Women Featured in True Crime Media Face Flood of Sexual Harassment |
Truthout is a vital news source and a living history of political struggle. If you think our work is valuable, support us with a donation of any size.
Content warning: This story includes graphic descriptions of sexual assault and exploitation.
Most true crime media is consumed by women, some of whom may be watching because they relate to the true crime genre’s victims. But another group of true crime junkies has different motives for watching: men looking to connect with incarcerated women.
True crime media has manufactured a uniquely degrading pipeline: Women convicted of crimes become involuntary performers in a spectacle that attracts precisely the men most likely to dehumanize them. Incarcerated women featured in these venues are then flooded with letters, with a significant portion coming from self-described incels, men who frame their desire for connection through the language of sexual entitlement and misogyny. The genre itself engineers this outcome.
The messages incarcerated women receive range from odd to downright creepy. L.S., an incarcerated woman in Texas who was convicted of killing her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend and sentenced to decades in prison, told Truthout that she was contacted by a news/entertainment show a dozen times before it aired a program made without her participation. She decided to watch the show to see if there were any updates about her case. During the commercial breaks, she shared the messages she gets when media like this airs: Guys declaring their unyielding love. Men proposing marriage. She later received a nine-page handwritten letter describing her as coldhearted because she never replies. He swears he will never write to her again, but the next week, another letter arrives, saying he has visited her mother to ask why she won’t write him back. Another man writes to explain that she must learn her place as a woman without jealousy. He regularly proposes marriage, telling her that she can be his second wife. These programs make women vulnerable to abuse from correctional officers too — prison staff have threatened to take nude photographs of her to post, and to sell her personal items to stalkers.
Criminalized Survivors Face Judgement and Abuse From Their Own Defense Attorneys
C.D., who is also living behind bars in Texas, has been incarcerated for 31 years, since she was 15. The true crime program about her (in which she did not participate) depicts her as a drug-snorting, Satan-obsessed teenage goth with an exaggerated Southern accent (none of which is accurate, C.D. says). After the true crime program about her aired, C.D. began receiving emails from men seeking to establish relationships with her. In one exchange, one of these men compared her to his 15-year-old daughter, whose “headstrong, rebellious nature got her gang raped at 15” and suggested that C.D. had likely had similar experiences. On the day they began corresponding, he offered to marry her. While he said he would not “talk smut” to her or ask her to do so in return, he stressed that their first night together “would be like a wedding night with all the usual wedding night activities.” Although he told her that he did not want to give her “‘creep vibes,” he also detailed his personal grooming rituals as well........