I’m a Survivor. The Diddy Case Isn’t Shocking—It’s Familiar.

As a survivor of intimate partner violence, a researcher studying the systems that protect abusers, and an advocate who has supported others in their healing, watching the public reaction to the Diddy footage has left me with a familiar ache.

We are being told this is shocking. That what we’re seeing is horrifying. That no one could have imagined the depth of violence.

But those of us who’ve survived know this story already.

We know how power protects the abuser. We know how silence is enforced—not just with threats, but with shame, legal intimidation, NDAs, and the fear of not being believed. We know how the world turns its face until there is something it cannot look away from—video footage, a bruised body, a lawsuit that forces the truth into the public record.

Only then does the collective gasp come. And only then do people ask:

Why didn’t she say something sooner?

She did.

We did.

But the cost of speaking out—especially against someone rich, famous, beloved—is often unbearable. We are not believed until belief costs the world more than disbelief.

This is not just about one man. It’s about an entire system—legal, cultural, and media-driven—that enables abusers when they are powerful, and isolates those they harm. It's about how society treats survivors not as truth-tellers, but as suspects. We are interrogated more than the people who hurt us.

What’s more, this moment reveals the racial dynamics we often refuse to confront. Black survivors, in particular, face a brutal intersection of racism and misogyny. We are hyper-visible as objects of consumption, and invisible as victims. As Kimberlé Crenshaw has written, Black women live at the margins of public empathy. When we name abuse, we’re told we’re tearing down the community, or that we must be lying because the perpetrator is “one of ours.”

Let’s be clear: accountability is not betrayal. It’s love. And love includes truth.

The media plays its own role in this cycle of disbelief and denial. Too often, stories like these become tabloid drama. Outlets focus on the spectacle of a celebrity’s downfall instead of the patterns of control and abuse that made it possible. There’s little space given to survivor voices, to community context, to healing.

But justice isn’t a headline. Healing is not clickbait. Survivors don’t get closure from a 48-hour news cycle. What we need is cultural change—a shift in how we listen, how we respond, and how we hold people accountable, no matter how powerful they are.

Research shows what many of us already know: being disbelieved is its own form of trauma. Survivors who are met with skepticism or blame often experience deeper psychological harm, delayed healing, and even a higher risk of future violence. And that disbelief is shaped by race, class, gender, and status.

So I’m asking—again, not for the first time—for something simple and radical:

Believe survivors.

Believe us when there’s no video. When there’s no headline. When we tremble, when we risk everything, when we say: this happened to me.

Because too often, by the time the world listens, it’s already too late.

In Community,

Tay