The List: A Novel

The creation of The List is inseparable from the #MeToo movement, which is intended to bring justice to the survivors of sexual assault. The first tweet on @_the_list reads, “We created this account as official channels continue to fail survivors of abuse in the media and entertainment industries. We have no choice but to do something ourselves” (23). The goal of The List is for women to take control of meting out justice. Because “official channels” do not hold predatory men accountable, #MeToo and documents like The List are meant to fill the vacuum. As sharing and listening to sexual trauma becomes the main form of justice, denying or doubting a woman’s allegations becomes a form of injustice and sets the doubter on the side of the predatory figures in the debate.

This radical new form of justice places Ola in a fraught position; she cannot ignore or dismiss The List outright but also cannot suppress her belief that Michael is innocent or, at the very least, not as guilty as he is portrayed. This inner dilemma is made manifest when Ola agrees not to write about The List for Womxxxn but still believes that Womxxxn should address the issue of the list. As she explains, “I can’t be responsible for silencing the voices of the women who contributed” (62). Thus, MeToo and The List break the pattern established by traditional institutions of justice such as the police and the courts. Such spaces have a history of failing to hold men accountable for their actions. This issue is addressed when Celie says that she went to the police to report Papi Danks’s sexual assault and was outraged to learn that the police would not bring charges against him due to a supposed lack of evidence. Even if the authorities chose to try Danks, Celie doesn’t believe she’d get justice. She asks, “What if the trial went public? Sometimes I find myself thanking God it ended there” (371). With this statement, it is clear that Celie imagines that the hypothetical trial could provide skeptics with a way to shame her publicly.

In Nora Salem’s “The Life Ruiner,” an essay published in Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture (ed. Roxane Gay, HarperCollins, 2018), Salem asserts, “It’s hard to admit, but part of it has to do with the need for an audience. We don’t exist without other people; therefore, our pain isn’t real until somebody else looks at it and goes, ‘Damn, that looks like it hurt’” (e-book, unpaginated). This quote is relevant to analysis of The List because Salem confirms the link between justice and listening seriously to survivors’ experiences. In the context of the novel, Celie does not find justice with the police, but she does secure an audience in Ola, who validates her pain and apologizes profusely for not staying with Celie that night, which might have prevented the sexual assault. Similarly, Nour receives a supportive audience when she publishes a blog post about Mathew Plummer’s predation, and her words compel Michael to reflect more thoughtfully on the day-to-day experiences of women who have survived a sexual assault.

The dynamic of the novel often mimics the setup of a court trial, with the assault survivors playing the part of a person giving testimony, while the reader plays the role of an attentive jury member. Further reinforcing the courtroom configuration of social media, Ola explicitly derides “the court of Twitter,” but Rhian, The List creator, counters that such drastic measures must be taken in order to deal with crimes that should already have been addressed by more official entities. Thus, the author uses these characters and scenarios to deliver a scathing critique of the traditional justice system, drawing attention to its failures and explaining women’s decisions to find other spaces, including Twitter, to “deal” with the “crimes.” The story implies that if people do not want to render verdicts online, then they should create spaces in the material world that can respectfully handle sexual assault and abuse.