The Fallout: How Violence Against Women Became Acceptable Again
There was a time when hitting a woman could end a man’s career. Now, he might get community service.
An Oklahoma teen named Jesse Butler was convicted of raping and choking two sixteen-year-old girls until one nearly died. He faced nearly eighty years behind bars. Instead, he walked free under a youthful offender deal that gave him one year of rehab and community service. That is not justice. That is rot in the system.
Jesse Mack Butler, 18, escaped jail time last week over the spate of sick attacks on the two 16-year-old girls in Stillwater in early 2024 — including one that left one victim close to death after being choked unconscious, News9 reported.
Initially, Butler — then 17 — was charged as an adult and was slapped with 10 felony counts, including rape, attempted rape, sexual battery and assault.
The baseball player pleaded not guilty to all charges but later struck a deal with the district attorney’s office to change his status from adult to youthful offender.
Butler, who is the son of a prominent local sport coach, switched his plea to no contest after a judge signed off on the deal.
Under local laws, the youth plea deal meant Butler was sentenced last week to just one year of rehabilitation and community service — despite facing roughly 78 years in the slammer. – New York Post
And it is not just the courts. It is the culture. Violence against women has become tolerable again, not because people suddenly think it is right, but because we have grown numb to it. Somewhere between outrage and exhaustion, society stopped protecting women. The system that once overreacted now barely reacts at all. Justice became political. Fairness became optional. And women became collateral damage in the culture wars.
From Outrage to Apathy
In the 1980s and 1990s, when a man was accused of raping or beating a woman, it was a national scandal. The headlines were loud, the coverage relentless, and the public outrage immediate. The idea that a man could harm a woman and still keep his reputation was unthinkable. That awareness was new at the time, and it mattered. It changed how people saw abuse, how the media covered it, and how justice was expected to work.
Then came a lull. For a while, it seemed like society had learned the lesson. The stories became less frequent, or at least less shocking. People started to believe that we had moved beyond that kind of violence, that women were safer now, that progress had been made.
Then came the MeToo movement, decades later. It began as a necessary reckoning. Women finally said enough. Powerful men were exposed. Predators were punished. For a brief moment, it felt like justice had finally arrived for generations of women who had been ignored or silenced. The movement gave victims a voice, and for the first time in years, men in positions of power faced real consequences for their behavior.
When Awareness Lost Its Honesty
It changed things, at least for a while. But awareness without honesty becomes something else. Once every accusation was treated as fact, the moral clarity started to fade. Real pain was mixed with performative outrage. Real victims were crowded out by opportunists. The movement that began as a cry for justice slowly turned into a culture of accusation.
And that left everyone unsure of what to believe. If all women must be believed, then none are questioned. If none are questioned, then truth itself stops mattering. Somewhere between compassion and credibility, the balance broke.
The warning signs were already there long before MeToo went viral. The Duke lacrosse case in 2006 and the fabricated Rolling Stone rape article in 2014 had shown how quickly false accusations could destroy lives. By the time MeToo reached its peak, the public had already seen what happens when outrage replaces evidence.
And here we are now, watching truth vanish. People do not know what to believe, and that uncertainty has turned into indifference. When truth becomes negotiable, accountability disappears. And when accountability disappears, violence returns.
When Fiction Starts Telling the Truth
Even art has begun to reflect our confusion.
Hollywood, of all places, is finally starting to admit what went wrong. In the new film After the Hunt, Julia Roberts plays a Yale professor whose student falsely accuses a man of sexual assault to cover up her own academic dishonesty. The movie does not mock women or deny the reality of abuse. It does something far braver. It shows what happens when justice becomes performance, when accusation becomes a weapon, and when truth becomes optional.
The film’s title itself is haunting. After the Hunt. That is where we are now. After years of witch hunts and hashtags, the damage is visible. Innocent men lost their names, their jobs, and sometimes their lives. Women who spoke the truth were drowned out by those who lied for attention or ideology. And as the movie dares to suggest, the real tragedy is that we have learned nothing from it.
The Human Cost of Hysteria
For some of us, After the Hunt hits hard. My book The Devil’s Triangle is about the nightmare I lived in 2018 during the Brett Kavanaugh nomination battle, when a woman named Christian Blasey Ford claimed that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in 1982 and that I was in the room when it happened. The last several years of my life have often been spent debunking attempts by Hollywood and the media to create a false narrative about what happened. Hollywood has been a central part of the attempt to declare me and Kavanaugh guilty.
This is why After the Hunt is such a surprise. The film actually condemns reckless accusations, the loss of due process, and the mob mentality. It admits that such accusations can result in suicide, something that I struggled with in the aftermath of the mauling of 2018. Even the film’s title itself brought back to mind something one of my oldest friends told Fox Nation when he was asked to describe what 2018 was like for me: “He was hunted.” – Washington Examiner
One of the film’s fictional books is titled The Future of Jihad Is Female. It is a not-so-subtle jab at the way feminism has turned militant. Fairness and due process have been replaced by moral crusades and ideological purity tests. It is no longer about justice. It is about dominance.
The Death of Truth
Even the liberal media cannot handle that mirror. The New York Times called the movie “anti-woke resentment,” proving exactly the point. When Hollywood and academia can no longer tell truth from narrative, when the mob decides who is guilty, society stops believing in justice altogether. That is how we arrived at this moment, where violence against women grows, and no one knows what to believe anymore.
That movie isn’t just calling out Hollywood; it’s warning the rest of us what happens when truth doesn’t matter anymore. It is about what happens when a culture stops protecting truth altogether. Once honesty becomes optional, everything that depends on it begins to crumble. When people can lie without consequence and institutions defend ideology over justice, the slide from false accusation to real violence is only a matter of time.
It becomes a wicked circle: the dishonesty that once weaponized outrage now fuels apathy, and the apathy allows real harm to grow unchecked. Rinse. Repeat.
A New Kind of Violence
The consequences of that indifference are showing up everywhere. In courtrooms, in schools, in sports, and on the streets, women are being hurt again in plain sight.
In women’s sports, biological males are now competing and in some cases injuring women under the banner of inclusion. When a Massachusetts high-school basketball player was knocked down and hospitalized after colliding with a trans-identifying male, the media called it controversy. Not injury. Not unfairness. Controversy. Protecting women now requires a disclaimer.
Meanwhile, on city streets, women are being randomly punched by men. Videos from New York, Los Angeles, and other cities show women walking alone when men suddenly strike them. The attacks go viral for a day, then fade. Another clip, another outrage cycle, another moment forgotten.
BREAKING: The City of Chicago FINALLY released footage of the BRUTAL, unprovoked attack of Kathleen Miles by suspect William Livingston after @CWBChicago filed a FOI request.
Livingston can be seen walking up behind Miles before punching her in the head, knocking her out, and… pic.twitter.com/TJreUXSX6D
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 21, 2025
These are not isolated stories. They are symptoms of a society that has replaced moral judgment with moral fatigue. Whether it is the courtroom, the locker room, or the city sidewalk, the message is the same. Women’s safety is negotiable.
The MeToo Fallout
We are living in the aftermath of a movement that began with purpose but ended in confusion. Justice turned into theater. Theater turned into apathy. When false accusations made headlines, real victims lost credibility. When men were canceled for awkward flirting, we blurred the line between discomfort and danger. Now, when real danger strikes, people hesitate to care.
I am not a feminist. I do not need a movement to tell me right from wrong. But as a woman, a mother, and an American, I cannot ignore what is happening. The message is clear. Men who hurt women are getting away with it again, and the public’s moral outrage has expired.
The Silence of Good Men
Even overseas, the conversation sounds familiar. On a recent episode of the UK talk show Loose Women, the panel discussed a horrific case of rape and murder that left an entire family dead. The hosts called it part of an “epidemic of violence against women,” then asked a haunting question: where are the good men? One woman said we need the decent men to stand up and speak out — to call out other men, to draw lines, to intervene. Another wondered aloud if those men are even willing to do that anymore, or if modern culture has driven them away.
When one of the panelists said, “We need the good men to step up,” she was right. We do. But that plea came with an uncomfortable question: have we scared them away? For years, we have told men to sit down, to quiet down, to stop leading and stop protecting. We called masculinity toxic and treated chivalry like a dirty word. Now we are wondering where the good men went.
The Men We Drove Away
Maybe some withdrew out of fear. Maybe others decided it was easier to stay silent than risk being mocked, canceled, or accused of something for simply speaking up. But if a man’s conscience is so easily intimidated, was he ever “good” in the first place? That is a question worth asking. The world does not need men who perform goodness only when it earns applause. It needs men who do what is right, instinctively, when it costs them something.
Still, it is fair to ask what we, as a culture, have done. When we label entire generations of men as toxic, when we sneer at their instincts to protect, and when we punish their attempts to lead, we should not be surprised when they stop showing up. You cannot insult men for being men and then ask them to be heroes. At some point, both genders have to decide whether they want to fight each other or fight the real problem — the slow, growing indifference to what is right.
Where Do We Go From Here
Justice does not need hashtags; it requires courage. Judges need to punish predators, not protect reputations. Justice needs lawmakers who draw biological boundaries where fairness and safety demand them. And it needs ordinary people, you and me, to stop scrolling past the violence and start calling it what it is: the depravity we have learned to tolerate. God help us if we start thinking Sharia law sounds like an improvement.
This is not about politics or pronouns or power. It is about decency. Once we stop believing women deserve protection, everything else crumbles. Family, law, trust, the idea of America itself.
Violence against women was never supposed to be normal. But that is exactly what it is becoming.
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Excellent post. Keep up the great work.