Emily Ratajkowski is calling attention to the connections she claims nobody wants to talk about between Sean “Diddy” Combs and the notorious Menendez brothers.
“With everything that’s coming out about Diddy and the allegations and also this new Menendez brothers show called Monsters I think we need to have a conversation about male sexual assault,” the model and actress says in a video posted to TikTok Sunday.
Ratajkowski notes that the reason Diddy was able to “hide in plain sight for so long” was because many of his alleged victims were male and because “our culture views male sexual assault as extremely emasculating.”
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She says she watched a video of one of the Menendez brothers being asked if he was gay in a decades-old interview because of “what his father did to him because he was a victim of sexual assault," adding: “It’s really, really scary.”
Ratajkowski suggests that there was “homophobia” among the men on the jury at the brothers’ 1996 murder trial, where it was argued that the siblings carried out their parents' murders because of the sexual abuse they had suffered at the hands of their father.
The idea was perpetuated that because someone was sexually assaulted “he probably wanted it,” and the siblings were both convicted and jailed for life, Ratajkowski adds.
The Gone Girl star calls it “a really scary cycle” and references the sex abuse cases of singer R. Kelly and writer Junot Diaz. “These are victims in childhood of sexual assault who then later went on to have horrible, horrible behaviors and become the perpetrators because they could not talk about their experiences or process it healthily, they end up hurting people,” she says.
In the TikTok video, Ratajkowski insists she’s “not making any excuses” for abusers. “I’m just saying there are ways we can stop this cycle from happening,” she adds.
“I’ve seen it in my own life, with men that I’ve known, who’ve had really unhealthy sexual tendencies and behaviors, and they’re like ‘Oh, that’s just how guys are. We just naturally have these weird sexual inclinations that women don’t.’ Which is such an excuse. And then it comes out that they have experienced sexual assault.
“I really hope we start having more conversations about this so that men and boys can feel more comfortable talking about this.”
