‘I May Destroy You’ Imagines a Path Back From Sexual Assault - The New York Times

In 1998, nearly two years after I was sexually assaulted and during the height of my depression, I’d spend hours imagining what I would do if ever saw my assailant again.

In some of my thoughts, I’d track him down and demand an apology. In others, I’d scream my story out loud, giving him no chance to dispute my account, while making sure those most important to him — his boss, his fiancée, his friends — knew the violence he was capable of doing. In my darkest moments, I’d replay scenarios in which I’d attacked him — sometimes with a knife or a gun or, at my most extreme, a bomb — in a desperate attempt to approximate his decision to destroy me.

I never did see my assailant again, and more than 20 years after that brutal night, I can barely remember his name. But my retributive fantasies returned as I watched the season finale of “I May Destroy You,” HBO’s summer breakout hit, which aired on Monday.

The show revolves around a rape victim named Arabella, played by the creator, writer and co-director Michaela Coel, and it is partly based on Coel’s own experience with sexual assault. In 2018, she revealed that one night while she was working on her first show, “Chewing Gum,” Coel went out for a drink with a friend, only to wake up the next morning realizing that her drink had been drugged and she had been sexually assaulted.

In “I May Destroy You,” Coel created an entire series based around flashbacks and fragmented memories of a rape. The show opens with Arabella (called Bella by her friends) taking a break from working on her book to meet a group of friends at a bar, after which she ends up being dragged to a bathroom stall and assaulted. In subsequent episodes, she fills in the gaps in her timeline by talking to friends she was with that night, retracing her steps via Uber and A.T.M. receipts and discussing the crime with the police and a survivor’s support group.

And yet, as her memory becomes more clear, accountability for her perpetrator becomes more elusive. In Episode 8, nearly nine months after her assault, police officers sympathetically tell her the DNA sample they retrieved from her had cleared their only suspect, and that without further evidence, they must declare it a cold case.

Officially, there is now no assailant to be found, no one to be arrested or convicted of her assault, and no legal recourse available to her. So Arabella’s seeks justice through her art, and Coel’s fragmented storytelling becomes even more so: She offers three different potential endings, and one real one.

In addition to creating an astonishingly original narrative about sexual trauma, Coel also does something far more ambitious: She gives Arabella the power and authority to choose from one of a variety of endings, even if they contradict one other, without ever calling into question the fact of Arabella’s rape.

By offering multifaceted endings, Coel gives victims of sexual assault, particularly Black women who have survived rape, some of the most radical and cathartic moments of television I have ever witnessed.

In the first scenario, Arabella fantasizes a revenge in which she and her female friends Terry (Weruche Opia) and Theo (Harriet Webb) drug, brutally beat and then strangle David (Lewis Reeves), the young white man that her memory identifies as her assailant. Arabella takes the man’s bloody corpse back to her apartment and stashes it under her bed.

From left, Weruche Opia, Coel and Harriet Webb in the season finale, which includes multiple scenarios in which Coel’s Bella confronts her attacker.Credit...Natalie Seery/HBO

In another version, Terry and Bella concoct a plan to have a coked-up Bella trick David into assaulting her again, in order to have the police catch him in the act and arrest him. Once David realizes that Bella is not sedated by his drugs, however, he tries to assert himself by belittling and attempting to choke her, only to quickly break down and apologize, while intimating that he too is a victim of assault. Moved by his vulnerability, Bella takes him back to her apartment, where he admits to having raped others many times before, even once going to prison for it. That scene closes with a teary Bella trying to help an inconsolable David as the police take him away.

Next, in a near-empty bar this time, Bella introduces herself to David, who is shy and deeply flattered by her attention. Like all the other scenarios, they end up in the restroom, but this time, they make out, with Bella and David returning to her apartment to have consensual sex. The next morning, Bella does not wake up with a bloody forehead or plagued by flashbacks, but with David tenderly watching her. “I’m not going to go unless you tell me to,” he says. And when she asks him to leave, he, and the bloody version of himself stuffed under her bed, walk out of her bedroom together.

After each of these encounters, Bella abruptly grabs an index card, scribbles down what happened, and pins it to her bedroom wall. At first, it is unclear whether she is trying to remember what has just happened or if she is trying to determine which ending is the right one. Not until the fourth and final scenario, in which we see Bella deciding to stay home rather than spending another night at the bar in the hope of confronting David, do we realize all these situations are potential endings for Bella’s second book. More poignant, we also realize that we are seeing her journey of healing.

As I watched Bella transform from avenger to empathizer to wooer, and David morph from rapist to victim to lover, I became increasingly nervous. I wondered if her attempts to humanize David would lead some viewers to think that she was not actually raped. I immediately thought of the phenomenon of sexual assault victims who come forward and are demonized and doubted because they maintained contact with their assailants after their attacks.

But I also understood the payoff. Through a brilliant series of undoings and re-doings, she covered the range of possibilities that many of us survivors privately explore in our journals, in therapy and in our imaginations, our striving to approximate some semblance of justice when the law and our communities fail to protect us.

“I May Destroy You” can be considered as part of a larger cultural trend in which Black women’s experiences with sexual assault are appearing with greater frequency and treated with more sensitivity, in documentaries like “Surviving R. Kelly” and “On the Record” and television shows like “Queen Sugar,” “The Chi” and “Lovecraft Country.” (Except for “On the Record,” all of these were created by Black women).

This season of Lena Waithe’s “The Chi” on Showtime, which had its finale on Sunday, in particular stands out for its story line about the kidnapping of a teenage girl named Keisha (Birgundi Baker). The subplot explores the overlooked phenomenon of Black girls being abducted and sexually exploited, and Keisha’s recovery depicts sexual assault as a kind of founding trauma that binds several generations of Black girls and women, including her mother, to each other.

The intimate and layered storytelling of “I May Destroy You” stands out, however, because Coel does two incredibly hard things at once. She explores, with great nuance, the complicated and often fraught public conversation about sexual assault and consent. She also centers rape victims that have historically been treated as less worthy of support: Black women, those attacked while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and in the case of Bella’s friend, Kwame, Black queer men.

The finale ends with the launch of Arabella’s book “January 22,” which she self-publishes after losing her original publishing contract, but which also symbolizes her wresting control of that fateful night back from her assailant. In some ways, this outcome echoes Coel’s actual decision to walk away from a $1 million dollar Netflix deal in order to maintain ownership of this show. But, this result is also unfulfilling and deeply unfair, because Arabella, like so many sexual assault survivors, has been left to resolve the criminal act done against her on her own.

And though I remain curious about the long-term effects this trauma will have on Bella’s well-being, I’m likely to never know. There have been no indications from Coel or HBO that there will be another season.

The incompleteness, however, is really the point. In a world where consent is too often taken away from us, we survivors are then left to put ourselves back together. “I May Not Destroy You” courageously re-enacts that journey back to self, and bit by bit, imagines a way for us to start over.

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‘I May Destroy You’ Imagines a Path Back From Sexual Assault - The New York Times
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