Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Where do the motherless daughters run?
I need to tell you something Grimm. In the original Snow White — the story, not the film — the Evil Queen was Snow White’s mother, not her stepmother. That’s not necessarily the grim part.
She was so attached to the benefits bestowed upon her as a result of her beauty — the proximity to power, the wealth, the lifestyle — and so concerned her seven-year-old’s budding beauty might threaten that power, she was ready to have the Huntsman kill her own child. Maybe she thought of her daughter as an extension of herself. Extension Children are supposed to sparkle just the right amount, and reflect back on their creator, making her shine more brightly. They are never supposed to outshine her altogether.
Snow White would not have been the first daughter of a narcissistic mother, but most of them kill you with words, slowly.
When the Huntsman failed, the Evil Queen set out to do the deed herself with the poisoned apple. Seven years later, the “handsome prince” found Snow White, fourteen years old and comatose in a glass coffin where the Dwarfs had preserved her. There was no kiss in the original tale, the prince just saw her and had to have her, so his servants took her coffin-encased, unconscious body back to the castle and lugged it from room to room. He insisted on being able to see her at all times.
One day an exhausted servant dropped the coffin, dislodging a piece of the poisoned apple, and Snow White woke up … and got to begin a terrifying version of “happily ever after” with a prince who probably said she wasn’t anything like he thought she would be once she began expressing needs like living girls will do. Just a guess.
Maybe he took her on a hike or a boat ride. Maybe she just disappeared one day.
Before Snow White bit into an apple that changed the course of her life, there was Eve, and according to medieval folklore, before Eve, there was Lilith — Adam’s first wife in the Garden of Eden. God made Lilith from the same dust as Adam, not from his rib — Lilith was his equal. She refused to be subservient (she liked to be on top), and Adam wouldn’t have it, so Lilith fled the Garden and planted a garden of her own.
In response, she was banished from the Garden of Eden, which is kind of funny, because she’d already left. Pretty sure she yelled, “Boy, bye!” over her shoulder as she slammed the gate.
There are horrible things that happen after, it’s an ugly breakup story and Lilith takes a lot of punishment, but we’ll leave it there. Lilith has become a post-modern feminist icon, symbolic of women who rebel against the idea that our desire and disobedience is the problem.
After Lilith took off, God created Eve from Adam’s rib — but even Eve couldn’t listen. If only she hadn’t been tempted by the Serpent. If only she had not taken a bite out of an apple from the Tree of Knowledge — thereby condemning all of humanity to be exiled from the Garden of Eden for the rest of time — life could have been so sweet. Dammit, Eve!
It’s always desirous females and the men who can’t control us ruining everything. Adam gets exiled, too, after all, because he should have stepped in. He should have stopped the Serpent. He should have gotten his woman in line for her own sake, and everyone else’s. He should have led like a man must, women aren’t up to the task and can’t be trusted to make good decisions!
Sounds very much like the men who think women should not be allowed to vote, and — sadder still — the women who trust them.
Let’s stick with Lilith for a minute, though, because I finally watched the Lilith Fair documentary last night — named for the Lilith in question, of course — and cried through so much of it. Lilith Fair, for anyone who may not know, was a music festival created by Canadian singer-songwriter and absolute badass Sarah Maclachlan, to showcase an all-female line-up of musicians — and push back on the rampant, toxic sexism in the music industry at the time. It was a traveling festival, and they went on tour for three years starting in 1997. I was there the first year at Jones Beach, and the entire world should be a Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery Tour right now. It would do us all so much good.
Did you know radio stations used to avoid playing female artists back-to-back because they thought listeners would lose interest? Rock-n-roll was man’s work, and you couldn’t have too much of that “chick music” because it wasn’t serious. It wasn’t hardcore. It wasn’t for real musicians. Venues and promoters were loath to take on an all-female music festival because they were certain ticket sales would be abysmal. No one would buy tickets to The Gorge Ampitheatre, for example, if there weren’t any dudes in the lineup.
I wonder how many times in history women have been told they can’t do something because, well, actually, things don’t work like that. Sarah Maclachlan’s own mom told her not to dream too big, because nothing ridiculously amazing was going to happen. No doubt she said it as a way of shielding her daughter from disappointment, but not every child will rebel against a shield like that, some will surrender behind it without even trying to fight.
Guess she showed her mom and all the music promoters and venues and music industry insiders, too. Those tours sold out for three years straight, and every town they played, they donated $1 dollar of each ticket to a local charity. The festival grossed $60 million dollars over those three years, and $10 million went to nonprofits supporting causes that benefit women, including domestic violence education and prevention and Planned Parenthood.
Along the way, the women on tour had their own lives changed — not just professionally — though they watched in awe as their albums climbed the charts, many of the headliners found themselves nominated for Grammys, and incredible new artists were discovered on the “village stages” — but also personally.
Some of them had babies during the tour, and those babies would be breastfed backstage before a set and handed to one of the other musicians, or they’d go out on stage with their moms. There’s a moment in the documentary where Erykah Badu is singing to 20,000 people with her baby in her arms like it’s the most natural thing in the world, because it is. It can be.
The tour provided healthcare to everyone, roadies included. Grown men were brought to tears because they could send their kids to the dentist. Life is pretty good when women run things — maybe we should vote for them. After the Indigo Girls joined the tour and started asking who wanted to collaborate, it became the norm for the headliners to close the shows together.
The tour attracted a largely female audience, it was a famously queer-friendly community, and there were plenty of good men in the mix. Dan Levy, who produced the documentary, was 14 or 15 when he went to Lilith Fair as a closeted teenager. He said the experience of being there in a crowd of accepting, loving people made him feel safe, and that it felt like a “quiet revolution.”
There was relentless pushback, lest you imagine this was some kind of utopia. No matter how successful the tour, they had to keep proving it. There were daily press conferences where the women endured the same uninspired questions all the time:
“Why do you hate men so much?”
“Isn’t this ‘women in music thing’ just a passing trend?”
“How do so many women get along without cat fights and jealousy?”
“Do you all have a big sleepover together every night?”
“Isn’t it divisive not to have men in the lineup?”
Yes. It’s so divisive to have one thing in the entire world other than our gynecological exams — and god knows there are plenty of men trying to control those, too — where men are not centered.
Which brings me to this thing that’s been circling like a mind-shark lately. I kept feeling like I was forgetting something important, but I wasn’t forgetting, I had just shoved an unpleasant thing somewhere deep, the way we do so we can exist. And it wasn’t a thing, it was a he.
Andrew Luster. He’s the thing I didn’t want to write about — but someone should be writing about him at this juncture, and I don’t think anyone is. Maybe his name is familiar to you. He is the great-grandson of Max Factor, and an heir to the Max Factor cosmetics empire.
He’s also one of the first men to serve time for drugging women, raping them, and filming the assaults. His assaults (the ones we know of) occurred from 1996-2000, pretty much the same time Lilith Fair was happening. Long before Dominique Pelicot, and long before the men uploading 20,000 “sleep content” videos to the porn site Motherless — let alone all the other sites hosting content like it.
Luster grew up in Malibu, CA, went to the prestigious Windward School in Santa Monica, attended Santa Barbara City College, dropped out — and never got a job. Grew up with a silver spoon in his mouth and venom in his heart. He’d go to Mexico to surf and fish, but spent most of his time surfing, fishing, and hanging out at the huge compound he bought not far from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
At night, he would go clubbing at places near the college, slip GHB in the drinks of college girls, bring them back to his compound, rape them while they were unconscious, and film himself while he did it. Sounds familiar, and I think it is important to mention because I am starting to worry that this has been going on a lot longer than we think. Here’s a quote from a BBC article about the case at the time, and I pulled this quote for a couple of reasons:
When detectives raided his home, they say they found 17 videotapes of Mr Luster having sex with apparently unconscious women, many of whom have yet to be identified.
Detectives were reportedly investigating whether he could have been part of an international ring of playboy millionaires said to be known as the Bachelors, who trade film of their date rape attacks over the internet.
Several years ago a British woman claimed that she had fallen victim to such a gang, telling police she had been raped in a London hotel after GHB was slipped into her drink.
The first reason I pulled the quote is the part where the BBC journalist says “Mr. Luster was having sex with apparently unconscious women…” No one is “having sex” with unconscious women. That is not a thing that can happen, just like no one can “have sex” with unconscious men. I think we know this, but there are a lot of things I thought we knew.
If women were drugging their partners until they were unconscious and snoring audibly — lifting their eyelids so other women could see how fully knocked out they were — and then sodomizing them with strap-ons or other objects they had on hand, filming this depravity and uploading it so other women could pay to watch, I think we can feel sure no one would say these women were “having sex” with the men they were violating.
I bet Congress would suddenly spring into action and amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act right quick. I bet they’d be using Palantir and every other tech-bro billionaire spyware/malware/AI thing they have to hunt those women down and arrest them, don’t you? Maybe test out the new/old firing squad they’re so excited about. Bring back a little burning at the stake, even. But men posting videos raping their unconscious wives? Nah. Still up there, still making money.
There is no part of me that could debase and demean another human being that way, and I want every man to understand how fucking pathological that is. The men who read my stuff already know, that’s why I said every man, and it’s also why I flipped genders — for the kind of man who wants to talk about math right now. Maybe it’s good for that kind of man to imagine falling asleep in his own bed and not feeling sure he’s safe.
We live in a culture that objectifies girls’ and women’s bodies so much and so often it’s become background noise, but there are men who have gotten to the point where they just see us as “a body” for their use. Men in those chat rooms who paid to watch were making suggestions about what those husbands should do to their wives next. I made the mistake of looking at some of the screenshots of text messages. There is a certain kind of man who gets off on robbing us of any tiny scrap of dignity.
Men like these, also from a BBC article:
Boxing champion Mike Tyson served three years of his sentence for raping beauty contestant Desiree Washington in an Indianapolis hotel room in 1991.
He denied harming the 18-year-old because, he said, her eyes were not blackened and no ribs were broken.In 1993, solicitor Angus Diggle, 35, was given a three-year sentence for the attempted rape of a woman solicitor after a ball. Her friends found him wearing only frilly cuffs and a luminous condom. He told police: “I spent £200 on her. Why can’t I do what I did to her?”
On April 13th — just a couple of weeks ago — a 14-year-old boy body-slammed a 15-year-old girl to the ground in New York City, and stomped her head with his foot while his buddies filmed it, laughing and egging him on — allegedly because she would not give him her phone number. I am not linking because the video is so horrifying I can’t get it out of my head and I don’t want you to be similarly haunted.
The girl is now home from the hospital, and the boy has been arrested. She will need physical therapy for her neck, she is dealing with debilitating headaches, a concussion, potential brain injuries, and, of course, trauma. Her mother is pulling her out of school, as this boy has been harassing her for some time and the school has not stepped in. It is far too hard to get help from our schools, the police, the legal system. They wait until we are hurt before they intervene. Sometimes they wait until we’re dead, and then it’s too late.
I will tell you, I am amazed and grateful her daughter is alive. Seeing the video, I was not sure she would be. Having a sixteen-year-old daughter myself, I am still sick to my stomach.
The mother of the boy is defending him to the press, and anyone who will listen.
I am at a loss. I have a son and a daughter and I love them to the ends of this earth and beyond. This is not the correct response and I imagine that goes without saying. No one could watch the video of what happened to that girl and defend it. Talking to the press is not what you do right now if you are his mom. What you do is figure out if there’s any hope of deprogramming your extremely violent and seemingly sociopathic son. You spend your time right now trying to get him help, not defending his actions. The same goes for the boys who were filming and laughing. None of them are well.
This is the kind of “teach girls who the boss is” ideology Andrew Tate preaches. I don’t know if this kid and his friends are fans, but it would not surprise me at all.
The other thing I wanted to point out in that BBC quote above is this weird aside about Luster being part of “the Bachelors”? Whatever happened to that investigation? I can’t find anything about it, though when I Googled “the Bachelors, billionaires, international date rape ring” — the recent case of the Alexander brothers came up — which started to make my head hurt.
Two of the most successful luxury real estate brokers in the country (twins) and their younger brother, who covered security for them, all convicted of sex trafficking, drugging, and rape, after eleven women came forward to accuse them.
The Alexander brothers are now, allegedly, seeking a pardon from the president. This president really seems to like rapey sex traffickers. These are irrefutable facts at this point. It’s not only Epstein and Maxwell, it’s the Tate brothers. And potentially the Alexander brothers, who happen to have sold Ivanka and Jared their $24 million dollar mansion in Florida in 2021, and were reportedly “longterm brokers for the couple.” After a while, you have to recognize a pattern of behavior.
Back to Luster. He was caught because a young woman remembered what happened the next morning and went to the police.
They raided his house and found the 17 tapes. One of the women who had been filmed while unconscious went on to move in with Luster for a few months and have a full-fledged relationship with him, because she had no recollection of their first night together. She didn’t know what had happened to her for years. She just had a lingering uneasy feeling because he had a wall of photos of his “women friends” in bikinis, and he added her photo to the wall one day.
When she read he’d raped someone and police were asking women to call if they had information, she reached out. When she went to speak with them, they recognized her as one of the women in the videos. That’s how she found out.
In addition to the videos, police also found 13 illegal firearms, and illicit drugs. They arrested Luster, bail was set at $10 million, and he awaited his trial in jail. When the trial began, his attorneys asked that bail be reduced to $1 million so he could go home for the holidays with his family, under house arrest with an ankle monitor.
Let’s pause. In what world is a man who has been caught with tapes where he has clearly drugged and raped multiple women — oh, and also unregistered firearms (one of them an AK-47) and illegal drugs — going to have a judge let him go home for the holidays?
We all know the answer. A world where the legal system makes exceptions for billionaire white men — and where judges (and others) practice “himpathy” — a term coined by brilliant writer and philosopher Kate Manne. This tendency to feel concern for “good boys” and “good men” who’ve just taken a “bad turn” or made a “bad choice” that shouldn’t effect their whole lives, after all — happens in rape cases on such a frequent basis it’s a wonder we haven’t burned this whole thing to the ground.
The prosecutors argued Luster was a flight risk and asked the judge to please take into consideration his vast financial resources and connections. The judge would not be dissuaded and lowered the bail, which Luster paid promptly. Andrew Luster went home for the holidays. At some point he disappeared. When he did not show up in court after the holidays, police went to his house, then his mother’s.
She said she hadn’t heard from him. Some miraculous way, his German Shepherd was there with her, though. Meanwhile, the trial continued without him, and after a couple of months of brutally painful testimony from three of his victims — and the footage of all the others — he was convicted and sentenced to 124 years in absentia.
I guess this is the part where I will tell you I was assaulted when I was sixteen years old. I was assaulted by an adult I thought I could trust. When I told my mom (something I did not do right away because I was kicking myself for having had too much to drink, and “making bad choices”), she confronted this man.
He said it was consensual. She believed him, not me. That is the most abridged version of one of the most painful betrayals that has ever happened to me in my life. It was almost more excruciating than this man robbing me of my own agency over my body, or any sense that I mattered as a person at all. As I was trying to gather myself up and try to think of reasons to hang on, she walked into the middle of that mess and broke my heart in a way that it still hurts to think about.
Maybe that’s why it continues to break my heart so profoundly when women hold up the system that harms them. I would probably be more devastated than furious if it weren’t for the fact that it harms all of us, and our daughters, too. If you want things to change, you can’t vote for people who don’t respect women. You can’t vote for people who hurt women. You can’t defend men and boys who demean or assault girls or women. You can’t laugh when they tell jokes, you can’t make excuses for them, or ignore it when they say demeaning things. Not if you care and want things to be different.
During those five months when no one knew where Luster was or if he’d ever be seen or heard from again, I went to a big dinner party with family and extended family and family friends. This was 2003 so I was 32. I had been paying attention to this case the way I always pay attention to cases like this, the way every survivor of assault pays attention to cases like this whether we want to or not.
Maybe we are hoping people will stop asking, What was she wearing? Or judges will stop putting such a high value on the “promise and potential” of the rapists who stand before them at the expense of the trust and value of the girls and women sitting in the courtroom who have been violated, betrayed, attacked in more ways than the one, and have — nonetheless — remained brave and resolute long enough to make it to the moment of sentencing, where they are hoping to get a modicum of justice and respect.
So, here we were at dinner, sixteen years after my mother had looked me in the eye and said, “He told me it was consensual, and I believed him.” A thing I had swallowed like a handful of glass, even though I knew the second the words left her mouth she had broken something between us that I wasn’t sure we were ever going to be able to fix. Even kintsugi has its limits.
Luster was “on the lam” a thing you hear in films from the thirties. I was sitting at this table and suddenly, I was hearing snippets of conversation about the trial, which people were talking about everywhere at the time.
A man I knew well was a few seats away. He was saying it made no sense, Andrew Luster was heir to the Max Factor fortune, and a good-looking guy on top of that! He could have any woman he wanted. He didn’t need to drug and rape anyone — obviously these women were gold-diggers.
I was frozen in my seat. My heart was racing and I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. My fork clattered to my plate. With all the noise and conversation, no one heard but my mother, who was staring at me. She was also frozen, with a look on her face I couldn’t place.
“There are tapes! There are seventeen videotapes of women who are unconscious because he drugged them and filmed it while he assaulted them! Actual tapes, not just their accusations. Proof! What more do you need!”
I got up too fast and my chair fell back and I was running away from the table because I couldn’t breathe. I was gasping trying to get air in my lungs. I hadn’t even realized I was the one who had erupted, the words were flying out of my mouth before I knew I was speaking. It was not like me to make a scene.
I’d been raised to be polite and never to talk back, and even though I was a grown woman, I would still avoid confrontation like that at a family event. Now people would wonder why this was so upsetting to me. Some of the women would probably figure it out.
Tears were flying and I wished I’d rented a car, because this dinner was outside the city and now I was stuck. I made it around the corner and out of sight, but I had no clue where to go. Suddenly my mom was behind me. At first I thought she was angry I’d upset the night, but she shocked me. She put her arms around me, something my mom did not often do.
I didn’t like to cry in front of her. I’d learned not to tell her things she could use against me the next time she was drunk, which was never too far in the future from whatever time it was currently. I’d learned not to let my guard down or let myself be vulnerable, but now she was being vulnerable and it threw me. I was sobbing, so at first I didn’t hear what she was saying, I just realized she was saying the same thing, over and over again, the way you might when you’re comforting a child.
“I’m so sorry, I believe you,” is what she was saying to me.
Andrew Luster’s mother has always been sympathetic to him. She has believed in his innocence regardless of the videos and the testimony she heard. Luster says the tapes were consensual and the women were making pornography films with him. His mother still believes it, or chooses to, even though you can hear and see some of the women snoring in these videos.
When interviewed she said, “I just felt that they were acting out sexual fantasies and private behavior that they never expected anyone else in the world to see. And something that people do in the privacy of their own home suddenly becomes international news.”
Andrew Luster’s sentence was reduced from 124 years to 50 years because the original judge did not specify why he should serve consecutive sentences instead of concurrent ones at the time of sentencing — a thing California state law requires. But because of a loophole that opened in 2013 which reclassified rape of an unconscious person as a nonviolent crime (a loophole that has since been closed by Governor Newsom, but not in time to effect Luster’s release), he will go home on Halloween, this year. October 31st, 2026. He is sixty-one.
I can’t think of too many things scarier than that. But I’m sure his mother will be happy.
You're a master braider, Ally. Lillith, Snow White, wife rape, not being believed, himpathy... it's all so interwoven, all so egregious. My soul also cannot begin to conceive of drugging someone and debasing them. I can't even look at the weeping willow in my backyard without seeing the god light pouring through it. How exactly does one untether oneself from the fabric of reality? How does someone sever their connection with the divine in such a way as to defend or act upon these atrocities? What a goddamn waste of existence. (Also, I cried when your mother hugged you. More so when she didn't believe you, but there were real tears on both ends of that story. I'm so sorry, friend.) Thank you for shining so bright, even when it burns.
This is breathtaking, thorough, biting and emotionally vulnerable. My God. Thank you for your hard work, and your open heart. My heart is breaking right now.