Megan Williams

If you have heard that Megan Williams is recanting her testimony, and are wondering what the hell is going on, the short answer is: we will never know. There is nothing that will ever be particularly clear in any case with such a volatile mixture of racism, sexism, and exploitation. Or, let me revise that. There is nothing about the facts of the case that will ever be particularly clear in a case with such a volatile mixture. There is plenty about our social narrative and the public worth of different human beings that becomes clear in the ways we talk about black female victims of violence who have been sexually and financially exploited by authority figures. So we’ll probably just have to give up on ever knowing “what really happened” (unless you’re the police, judge, or jury, that is) and resign ourselves to learning a lot about public vitriol and our own internal prejudices, which is far less juicy and engrossing than a horror movie “sex” crimes case.

But if you’d like to know something more about the case than what gets repeated in the mass media, and if you’d perhaps like to read an analysis that doesn’t feel like it’s just smugly waiting for the chance to say FALSE RAPE ALLEGATION HURFL BLURFL, I’d suggest this.