Billy No Good Apologizes for Sexual Violence. Clandestine Unicorn Attack Communique #2

Inspired by the idea of creating the world we hope to live in, the Bay Area-based survivor self-determination group, QUARREL, has begun to pursue a public information sharing campaign concerning the chronic abusive behavior of anarchist organizer Billy No Good.

Billy No Good has a history of engaging in emotional and sexual violence, particularly with young women of color in the movement. Since 2005, he has admitted to crossing the sexual and emotional boundaries of others. To hide his behavior, he often moves in and out of social circles, usually when evidence of his abuse becomes insurmountable.

Each time Billy’s abuse or assault on another community member is made public, feminists strive to make him accountable. He initially agrees that he has a problem and promises to change. He agrees to survivor’s demands only to manipulate the processes they have developed, effectively draining the social resources put in place for the sole purpose of addressing his behavior. This past June of 2011, it became public that Billy assaulted yet another woman.

Within QUARREL we have years of experience dealing with this man’s emotional abuse and violence. We feel an urgent need to share information about his patterns of abuse in the spaces he occupies so women can make informed decisions about how they interact with him. This comes as a direct response to having broken ties with Billy over several years of requesting accountability measures that he never followed through with, and knowing that with this recent violation, Billy’s circle of friends asked he withdraw from their anarchist organizing community.

Because Billy often emails and writes letters apologizing for his abuse, QUARREL decided to draft a letter from Billy that went further—a letter apologizing for everything he put survivors through and agreeing to demands he previously ignored. We drew from Billy’s own emails and excuses over the last six years, using many of his own words verbatim. This letter was distributed in online communities as well as at the UC Berkeley campus where Billy majors in rhetoric. This tactic was chosen not with intent to shame, but with intent to share critical information. We chose to do so publicly in order to raise community expectations about his accountability processes. As a survivor-led affinity group, we feel it is imperative to take control of narratives that have been misrepresenting our experience in order to contribute to the safety of others.

We are tired of heteropatriarchy bringing the movement down with it. We see movement assaulters like Billy No Good causing multiple levels of harm: not only do their actions impact the individuals they abuse; they also threaten the social justice we are collectively struggling for.  When someone who is actively perpetrating misogyny is involved in organizing, that misogyny becomes structured into movement building. When perpetrators learn the rhetoric to discuss sexual violence in movement spaces and then exploit it to blame survivors for the abuse they suffered, it shuts survivors down so that they might  not only become silent about intimate violence but  stop engaging in activism as well. We believe the most radical and useful place in political organizing for people who have patterns of causing this interpersonal harm is in owning and addressing their own behavior.

Billy No Good is just one example. His years of cowardice did not happen in a vacuum or without support.

We ask the activist community to rise up against emotional manipulators and sexual assaulters who exploit accountability processes, who apologize only to commit similar acts of violence, and who victimize themselves after being confronted. We challenge our beloved movements to not let interpersonal abuses of power go unchecked, no matter how normalized this harm has become. We challenge ourselves to use our wits and our guts as we continue to realize our visions of safer communities outside of the same tired models that keep us competing for resources and reliant on police to solve our problems, in efforts to support survivor self-determination everywhere.