The public still asks the wrong questions about abuse. Why did she stay? Why did she go back? Why did she keep texting? Why did she wait so long? Why did she smile in public? Why did she continue working? Why did she not sound certain from the beginning? Those questions are often dressed up as common sense. In reality, they are often symptoms of a deeper social failure: the refusal to understand what shame, fear, dependency, hierarchy, and survival actually do to human behavior. Abuse does not survive only because perpetrators act. It survives because victims are taught, long before they ever speak, that if they do speak, their pain will be put on trial before their abuser’s power ever is.
That is the part of abuse the public still does not want to confront. Shame is not merely a feeling that follows abuse. It is one of abuse’s most durable enforcement mechanisms. It keeps people quiet while the harm is happening. It keeps them confused afterward. It persuades them to minimize what occurred, to blame themselves, to normalize what should never have been normal, and to worry that disclosure will damage their career, their family, their movement, their community, or their own ability to keep functioning. When the public later mocks delayed reporting or scrutinizes “imperfect” victim behavior as though it were proof of fabrication, it is not neutrally assessing credibility. It is reinforcing the very conditions that made silence feel necessary in the first place.
That is why delayed disclosure should not be treated as some mysterious defect in an abuse narrative. In many cases, delay is exactly what power is designed to produce. Brooke Nevils’s allegations against former NBC anchor Matt Lauer underscore that point with painful clarity. Nevils described saying “no,” then “just giving up,” and later reflected on the aftermath of the alleged assault, including self-blame, professional pressure, and the long process of understanding her own experience. The public habitually misreads facts like these. It treats ambiguity, continued contact, delayed reporting, and psychological collapse as though they undermine the allegation. But those responses are often entirely consistent with trauma, hierarchy, and the desperate human effort to survive an experience that could not yet be fully named.
The same pattern appears in the recent reporting surrounding The Price Is Right during the era when it was hosted by Bob Barker. Former models and a producer described an environment in which gawking, unwanted touching, and humiliation allegedly became normalized, while management’s response was described less as protection than as appeasement. Kathleen Bradley, Holly Hallstrom, and Barbara Hunter publicly recounted conduct they say made women on the set feel degraded and unsafe, including a purported “10-Second Rule” that Hallstrom described as a joke rather than a serious effort to stop harassment. The lesson is not limited to one television program or one famous host. It is that people learn very quickly whether reporting misconduct will produce safety or merely a more polished form of disregard.
Dolores Huerta’s public statement about César Chávez adds another dimension to the same truth. Huerta stated that Chávez sexually abused her and explained that she remained silent for decades because she feared exposing the truth would damage the farmworker movement to which she had devoted her life. That is a devastating example of how abuse can be buried not because the survivor doubts what happened, but because she understands all too well what disclosure will cost. The public often imagines silence as evidence that the harm was uncertain. In fact, silence may reflect the opposite: a brutally clear understanding that the institution, movement, or legacy surrounding the abuser is so large that telling the truth will feel like an act of betrayal.
Taken together, these accounts expose one of the public’s cruelest habits. We still reward the myth of the perfect victim and punish the reality of the human one. The “perfect” victim resists dramatically, reports immediately, never returns, never smiles, never sends another message, never hesitates, never compartmentalizes, never blames herself, and never acts in a way outsiders find hard to understand. Real people often do the opposite. They freeze. They appease. They try to restore normalcy. They protect the workplace. They protect the mission. They protect the cause. They protect themselves from psychic collapse. Then, when they finally speak, the public seizes on those survival behaviors as though they were reasons for contempt. That reflex does not merely misread abuse. It helps preserve it.
The same dynamic appears with particular force inside law enforcement. In that setting, shame is reinforced by rank, discipline, assignments, overtime, promotion pathways, weapons, internal reporting channels, and the ever-present fear that speaking up will not end the abuse but reorganize it into retaliation. The public is often especially careless here. It assumes that because police officers carry badges, weapons, and authority, they must somehow be insulated from the coercive dynamics that trap other victims. The opposite is often true. In a paramilitary workplace, hierarchy can make private coercion professionally suffocating. A subordinate is not merely navigating the behavior of one person. She is navigating a structure.
That is why the law-enforcement matters I have previously discussed publicly should not be dismissed as isolated disputes or gossip from inside one department. Detective Shatorra Foster’s allegations against supervisory officer Trevlyn Headley, retired Lieutenant Quathisha Epps’s allegations against former Chief of Department Jeffrey B. Maddrey, and the complaint against Inspector Jeremy Scheublin all reflect, in different ways, the same underlying pressures: power disparity, fear of retaliation, delayed disclosure, institutional self-protection, and the risk that speaking up will trigger not rescue, but punishment. Foster’s allegations, as pleaded, frame abuse not as a stray workplace impropriety, but as coercion allegedly sustained through supervisory authority, degrading sexual control, and retaliation after withdrawal. Epps’s allegations describe a system in which reporting alleged abuse by a powerful superior was followed, according to her account, by professional and personal retaliation rather than meaningful protection. And the Scheublin complaint, as publicly discussed, alleges not only serious sexual misconduct by a commanding officer, but institutional tolerance after notice, including the continued presence of armed supervisory authority over the complainant. These are allegations, not adjudicated findings, but their significance lies in what they reveal about the conditions under which silence becomes rational and speech becomes dangerous.
Once that is understood, the public’s role becomes impossible to ignore. Public scorn is not just noise around abuse. It is part of the ecology that keeps abuse survivable for the powerful. Every sneer about why she waited. Every smug question about why she went back. Every insinuation that continued contact disproves coercion. Every demand that a real victim would have behaved with immediate clarity and perfect consistency. Every effort to treat shame-driven survival as evidence of consent. All of it sends a message to the next victim watching from the sidelines: if you speak, your behavior will be judged more harshly than the conduct that harmed you.
Institutions benefit from that message. They benefit when the public focuses on the victim’s timeline instead of the perpetrator’s power. They benefit when continued contact is treated as exonerating rather than complicated. They benefit when silence is read as doubt rather than fear. They benefit when people are more offended by the untidiness of trauma than by the conditions that produced it. That is why public ridicule is not neutral. It performs work. It lowers the reputational cost of institutional inaction. It gives cover to bureaucratic delay. It makes cosmetic responses look sufficient. And it quietly teaches victims that disclosure may become its own form of punishment.
The question, then, is no longer whether delayed reporting, self-blame, continued contact, or guarded behavior can coexist with abuse. We know they can. We have known it for years. The real question is whether the public is finally willing to stop weaponizing those realities against survivors. Until that changes, the shame of abuse will remain one of the most effective protections the powerful have ever had. And every time the public mistakes survival for consent, or silence for falsity, it does not merely misunderstand abuse. It helps sustain it.
About the Author
Eric Sanders is a New York civil rights lawyer and founder of The Sanders Firm, P.C. He represents clients in matters involving workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, retaliation, and police misconduct, and writes regularly about civil rights and institutional accountability. A former New York City police officer, he brings both legal and practical insight to issues involving abuse of authority and structural injustice.
Author’s Note
This commentary discusses public reporting, filed allegations, and legal claims as identified in the text. Allegations are discussed as allegations unless otherwise stated.