Aileen Wuornos was Innocent
Aileen Wuornos: the elusive female serial killer.
She is presented in the pop culture as a total anomaly, a perversity, a side-show horror attraction, a bad seed — at the very core, astray of what a woman is supposed to be, or what a woman is at all. The movie about her was called: Monster.
Aileen Wuornos killed seven men. She was a sex worker working from the streets along the highways in Florida. She said the men raped or tried to rape her, and that she killed them in self defense.
First, its important to understand some basics facts about Aileen’s life. Growing up, her father was in jail for the sexual abuse of a 7 year old, and eventually killed himself. Aileen herself was a pedophile victim. Aileen was sexually assaulted by her grandfather, and was 14 when one of his friends raped her and impregnated her. She gave birth, and the child was adopted by another family. Her grandfather — who had sexually abused her and allowed his friend to rape her and get her pregnant — threw her out of the house at 15, when she began doing sex work to support herself while LIVING IN THE WOODS. The horrors continued as she tried to kill herself six times, racked up various petty crimes over the years, and experienced ongoing sexually abuse while continuing to support herself.
The popular narrative about Aileen is that she had lived such a profoundly difficult and damaged life, something so tragic and so anomalous, that she ultimately just snapped and started killing innocent men to take out on them what was done to her. In this way it is suggested that she wasn’t, in fact, acting in self-defense at all, but rather in an animalistic, rageful trauma reaction. This narrative is interesting because it fits along with the idea that pedophile victims in particular are irrevocably damaged, and not only that, but they are dangerous: you see this in the cultural belief that pedophile victims grow up to be pedophiles — this is empirically not the case, but it is a popular pseudo-medical delusion of the masses, that feeds into this idea that pedophile victims are totally doomed and particularly, doomed to commit various violent acts.
The general response was and remains, to Aileen’s case, incredulity that these men could have all tried to rape her, that she would have to kill seven men in self defense; therefore, it wasn’t self-defense, and she was a murderer, and because there were seven of them, she was a serial killer.
I’m going to start out by walking through why it is not only possible but perfectly likely, that all of those men did in fact try to rape her and she was very much acting in self defense.
Claim: couldn’t possibly have been in self-defense, because there’s just no way seven men would try to rape her in a year.
LOL.
This to me, is the underlying crux of the legal and cultural condemnation of her: there’s just no fuckin way it was self defense for SEVEN men. One man? Maybe. Seven men? Absurd.
LOL.
As much as broader society would like to think of rape and attempted rape as something that happens very rarely, it is pervasive, and there are groups of people for whom specifically, rape is a near constant, something that happens to them over and over and over across a lifetime; her encounters with these men are very much consistent with what we see happening with these victim groups over time.
Aileen was of a unique demographic, specifically, that was the perfect recipe for serial rape. For one, she was a pedophile victim; pedophile victims are more than 13x more likely to be raped again *in their first year of college alone* — but of course, Aileen didn’t ever even make it to college; she was literally living in the woods and doing sex work as an underage girl. Pedophile victims are far more vulnerable to rape throughout their lives; this is due to a mix of environmental factors but largely the fact that research has demonstrated, time and time again, that sexual predators tend to attack women who have been sexually abused before — predators actually know when someone is a victim of sexual violence, and can literally tell just by the gait of a woman if she’s been victimized before. So while Aileen was working on the sides of the highways, they could tell that she was vulnerable just looking at her there; this is what predators prefer, targets who have already been through violence.
Sex workers have a 45% to 75% chance of experiencing sexual violence while working, some studies say that over 60% have been raped on the job. And we just don’t have a good picture, at all, of what the overall violence profile against sex workers is — again you run into this issue in sexual violence statistics where you end up with a stat like “x% of y group has experienced rape”, but that doesn’t show HOW MANY TIMES those people are raped; but we do have plenty of evidence to show that these are repeat occurrences.
Aileen was also a bisexual women. Bisexual women are at the greatest likelihood for both child/teen and lifetime sexual violence, 63% of bisxual women are raped in their lifetime, over half assaulted for the first time by age 18, and seven times more likely to be re-victimized in the future. As you can imagine, the mental illness of PTSD, plus a host of mental consequences we see associated specifically with pedophile victims, as well as poverty, are also major contributors to the likelihood of ongoing, life long rape.
So what we are looking at in Aileen is someone who was sitting at these massive, deeply dangerous intersections for extreme, repeat sexual violence; EACH unique path involved not only just rape, but repeated rape, rape that happens again and again over the course of a lifetime. If there are any intersections that are most likely to return a result of really incredible, catastrophic and torturous, ongoing rape, it would be an extremely poor, homeless/transitory, bisexual pedophile victim and survival sex worker on the street level.
With everything that had happened to her, with her profession, and with the ability of male abusers to detect vulnerable women on sight, she was a total target for getting raped. Literally every system was set up to making her the victim of just ongoing , ongoing rape.
People act like it is so improbable that SEVEN MEN could have tried to rape her, like it is so improbable that she could have been attacked by seven men within a period of 12 months. Are you out of your minds? If she had multiple customers per day and worked a lot of the time, as she was doing to survive and to support her partner, who she was financially responsible for, this is beyond possible, even likely.
She could have easily seen hundreds of customers during that time. She herself said that she had had thousands of client engagements. There’s very little reliable resources, but there are reports anywhere from rapists being 3% of the male population and on up. So if she’d even seen 4 clients a week, she would be well within the statistical probabilities for having seven engagements with rapists during that time alone; not to mention the fact that her risk of being hired by a rapist was way higher BECAUSE she was a pedophile victim, because she was bisexual, because she was a repeat victim of sexual violence and rape, and because she was a sex worker on the highway.
Aileen said she couldn’t even remember the number of times she had been sexually assaulted; again, that is lining up very clearly with known facts about her demographic and circumstances. As another data point, in one study, 48% of sex workers in San Francisco had been raped more than 5 times.
Society denies that repeated, repeated rape is a pattern that occurs reliably in certain groups, especially pedophile victims, rather than as a fantastically rare phenomenon. At the same time it was acknowledged that the reason why she killed these men was due to life-long, repeated rape, it was denied that those men themselves were part of that repeated sexual violence and that it was totally probable that she was rightfully, defending herself against them then.
In fact, her first trial, for which she received the death penalty for a single “victim”, the court suppressed evidence that the “victim” had actually served 8 years for assault with attempt to rape, and was described as possessing “strong sociopathic trends”. Aileen said that he strangled her with a cord, threatened to kill her and rape her dead body, sodomized her and raped her vaginally, and burned her with hydrogen peroxide on her genitals and rectum.
So even in that first trial, for that one man, she received the death penalty for defending herself for rape by a documented rapist.
The way that the culture and legal system has been able to accommodate this documentation, that he was, in fact, a rapist — is that it was this man who made her “snap”, it was her “last straw”, and that’s when she decided to go on a killing spree. But this is 100% against everything that Aileen herself consistently said about the “murders”:
“I still say that it was in self defense. Because most of em either were gonna start to beat me up or were gonna screw me in the ass… so I’d fight em and I’d get away from em. And then I’d… as I’d get away from ‘em. I’d run to the front of the car or jump over the seat or whatever, grab my gun and just start shootin”
What Aileen’s story pointed to, is that here was the manifestation of a system that did not just abstractly terrorize with women with the threat of rape (“rape culture”), or where women are raped, singularly, particularly by a stranger; but a system in which some women are just subjected to incalculable sexual trauma again and again and are not permitted to defend themselves from it. A lot of people find it hard to understand that for some of the women in this country, especially who are victims of child sexual abuse, who are bisexual, who are sex workers — rape is literally a constant factor in their lives. The fact that so many people are removed from that reality, and stick with singular, unpredictable “stranger rapes” as its understanding of the phenomenon, is not a material reflection of how this is playing out in reality.
In order to think that Aileen was guilty, in order to sentence her to DIE, you have to fully disregard the full picture of the levels of rape that you do see, structurally, in society; you have to disregard the number of men who are rapists; you have to disregard the nature of sexual abuse as cumulative and ongoing across a lifetime; you have to disregard the way men are able to TELL by how someone WALKS alone (as Aileen walked along the highway), that she is a good target; you have to disregard the work that sex workers do and how dangerous it can be for them, and how much rape happens in that field.
You have to discount a total view of what is happening in all of those areas. Because Aileen looked very much what the trajectory of a white, bisexual, street-level sex worker and pedophile victim, looks like. A lot of poverty, a lot of danger, a lot of barely scraping by — a lot of rape. Again, the entire legal and popular framing was simultaneously that she HAD been so serially abused that she snapped, perhaps inevitably; and yet also proposed there was no way she was serially abused so much that seven men might try to rape her.
The thing is, I think a lot of people DID know it was 100% plausible, that it was 100% plausible that those seven men did absolutely try to rape her. Acknowledging that these rapes were completely probable — and I mean come on, at least one of them was a convicted rapist already — is only a problem if you think that women shouldn’t be allowed to or shouldn’t kill their rapists or their attempted rapists. Or that you don’t want to admit that this extreme of violence is happening at all. That you think women should let themselves to be raped rather than to kill the person that who is trying to rape them;
that while rape isn’t a capital offense, defending yourself from that rape is.
“The principle is self-defense. They say its the number I say its the principle, the heck with what, it has nothing to do with the number kill[ed], its the principle”…
The opinion of many men and of course the law and patriarchy in general, is that rape SHOULDNT and ISNT a capital offense, much less that it is potentially mortal in and of itself (suicide, drug addiction come to mind). So rape can’t get you the death penalty, but defending yourself from rape is murder, and not self defense, and is actually a capital offense. In this scenario, the only person who can get the death penalty stemming from rape is the woman.
Weird!
I think that whether or not women are allowed to kill their rapists is, in fact, one of the must fundamental, foundational questions in society — from this question flows so much of a legal system in a society where women are subjugated and violated as course.
And in this case, they had an answer to that question: kill the rape victim.
“Putting someone who was raped, to death? Fucking motherfucker”
It is my belief the Aileen Wuronous was totally innocent; she killed these men in clear self-defense; that her capture and murder by the state functioned as a cover-up of the serial sexual violence that some women in particular face. It also settled definitively whether or not women are allowed to defend themselves from sexual violence.
The Aileen Wuornos case requires us to confront the reality that rape is occurring, it is occurring this often and this seriously, to the point where it is literally lifelong torture; to confront that women are regularly experiencing this level of violence and that they AREN’T allowed to respond the way that natural law permits, which is by killing your attacker.
They had to kill her. If they didn’t, they would have to admit what had happened to her, what was happening to other women, and happening to other women at scale. If they didn’t, rape would be something that men could be shot for,
and if men could be shot for rape,
there would be a lot of dead men around.
As in, the population of men in the country would be visibly reduced by literally millions and millions. And that is why she died: to save their skins.
For my part, I believe that Aileen was totally innocent, and lament her death. She would be just 66 now.
“Self defense is self defense no matter how many times it is, I don’t care if its 100 times. I never provoked those guys, I never provoked them, I never shown any provocations whatsoever…. There was no provocation whatsoever, there was no need for them to look for the closest weapon in the vehicle and try to use it on me to rape me.”
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Quotes from Aileen pulled from “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer”, the 1992 documentary.