Rachael Denhollander has been one of the driving forces of liberalism in the Southern Baptist Convention using the issue of sex abuse as a spearhead for the infiltration of feminist ideology and the MeToo Movement. However her influence is not limited to only the Southern Baptist Convention. The Presbyterian Church in America relies on her credibility as well. As a lawyer she represented Jennifer Lyell in a defamation suit against the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention which paid out over $1 million dollars in favor of a largely unsubstantiated narrative that Jennifer Lyell was sexually abused by David Sills.
This month, Jennifer Lyell has been at the forefront of the SBC because of an article written last month by the Daily Wire’s Megan Basham. The SBC went into a full crackdown on Basham and her supporters, all to maintain the survivor status of Lyell. The SBC opposes asking questions on this matter, and a leaked audio tape surfaces in which major unsubstantiated claims were made, specifically about police involvement and Sills wife’s involvement. The video has since been removed from YouTube, but not before Lyell deleted her Twitter account.
On Wednesday, Capstone Report published an article about Rachael Denhollander’s support of Amber Heard referring to a lengthy Twitter thread on July 2nd. The thread states:
Abusers are skilled at this manipulation, even to the point of creating situations where they can call the police on their own victim – he gets angry or violent, comes close to her, maybe never even touches her, but smashes holes in the wall by her, or backs her against a wall…
He’s much stronger, bigger, he doesn’t need a weapon, she already can’t get out. Maybe he hasn’t even touched her yet, but he’s put her in danger, she knows if he starts beating her, she won’t be able to get away. So she hits, shoves, kicks first, or grabs something as a weapon..
As soon as she hits first or grabs an object to defend herself, he calls the police. She gets a report filed on her. Now it’s much harder to get protection from the legal system – even though it was already extremely hard. He gets the support and empathy. She gets labeled “crazy”
She’s experienced severe trauma. So her memories are fragmented, not linear. We know trauma does this.
She’s desperate and terrified, not calm and rationale. Maybe seeing a therapist, on meds, has diagnosable depression.
He says she’s crazy. Unstable. Irrational.
We know trauma does this. It causes neural damage. You can literally see it on brain scans.
We know trauma survivors have stress hormones coursing at high levels constantly in their bodies, and that this taxes organs and impedes neural processing.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that memories are fragmented, disclosures highly emotional, and mental health diagnosis present. That the survivor lacks clarity and the ability to stay calm.
That’s just what the neural damage causes, not even considering the mental manipulation.
He, on the other hand, has none of this damage. He’s calm. Articulate. Able to twist those dynamics he created, to discredit her. He’s still in control, so all we see is the calm, rational man explaining how crazy his wife really is. How much he wants to help and loves her.
He takes the very damage he created and weaponizes it to make sure no one believes her, and he stays in control.
This is the same thing sexual abusers do – weild the trauma and instability created by the assault, as “evidence” that their victim is unstable and “made it up”.
And this version of the abuser is more likeable than the broken, exhausted, angry, desperate victim.
He’s relatable. She’s crazy. He can connect with the people around him and engage relationally. She’s messy and has needs that require real effort.
So people side with him. It requires nothing of them, and often they receive a level of emotional or relational gratification from this, because he’s still manipulating the community, and they’ve become part of it.
Jurors have none of this training, and are simply part of our society. All those rape and abuse myths the culture responds with, jurors are part of that culture too. And they often have access to less information because of evidentiary rules.
Yes, they can get it wrong.
Rachael Denhollander clearly touts the Heard abuse narrative propped up by the MeToo movement and was soundly rejected by a jury. The jury found that Amber Heard knowingly made false statements against Johnny Depp in her Washington Post op-ed. Another way to put it is that the jury found that Johnny Depp was in fact abused by Amber Heard, in addition to rejecting the MeToo narrative. Rachael Denhollander rejects the jury’s verdict claiming that they are untrained. It is rather astonishing for a lawyer to so brazenly bash the jury system like that. Following the Johnny Depp verdict I wrote:
The defeat of Amber Heard and, by proxy, feminism signifies that the culture is more willing to hold women accountable for their actions than at the time when Heard libeled Depp in the Washington Post. In sharp contrast, however, we have seen the Evangelical industrial complex, Big Eva, shutter at the idea of holding women equally accountable for their actions.
The possible overturn of Roe v Wade led to multiple members of Big Eva come out denying a women’s culpability in an abortion. This happened in the pro-life movement, even though in over 40% of abortions, the mother is the only abortionist.
Additionally in Southern Baptist circles, women like Jennifer Lyell are paraded around as victims of sex abuse, despite the fact that she was a fully grown adult women having a sexual relationship with a married man while being a higher on the corporate ladder in the Southern Baptist Convention. He had to resign while she would eventually get paid. Moreover, Johnny Hunt has dubiously been accused of sexual assault, in an account that would never hold up in court. Far from saying the men in these situations were innocent as doves, the women are hailed as victims this day just as Amber Heard was.
In the broader culture we see a desire to hold women accountable for their actions, yet in religious elite circles, we see internalized feminism reigning over biblical notions of due process. The world is ready to move on from #MeToo, but the church is not.
Rachael Denhollander is the kingpin of the MeToo grift in Evangelical Christianity and she weaponizes her survivor status to be above plebian questions. Yet her audacious support of someone who so clearly lied about being beaten by Johnny Depp and posed for cameras while on the witness stand is the latest demonstration that she serves an ideological agenda, not a ministerial capacity for sex abuse victims. Her objectively wrong claim that David raped Bathsheba was demonstrable evidence that she has a Culturally Marxist framework, in that she is applying power dynamics to her interpretation of the text. But her support of Amber Heards shows that this ideology cannot be combatted with evidence. She will believe what her feminist ideology dictates and the effeminate church leaders will gobble it up.
One Response
For a lawyer, her take here is abysmal. The whole point of having juries is they aren’t experts and, hopefully, don’t bring the kind of preconceived and high-handed thinking Ms. Denhollander exhibits in this statement. As an attorney who has tried 80 jury trials (and second-chaired about 30 more), I can testify that almost all jurors work really hard to deliver the right result as they understand the law and the evidence.
Part of the point of having every day people serve as jurors is that they aren’t experts and don’t have the kind of biases someone like Ms. Denhollander has. Amber Heard’s counsel was free to put on the kind of evidence Ms. Denhollander refers to (and may have – I didn’t follow the case closely). Her silly statement about evidentiary rules is obnoxious and incorrect. Judges invariably want to allow more rather than less evidence and typically err in favor of allowing evidence when it appears to have even some slightly reasonable connection to the case. Ms. Denhollander’s take sounds less “lawyer-like” and more “law-school” like, indicating it’s probable she has little actual experience trying cases or arguing evidentiary motions.