Daisy Coleman's Death Lays Bare the Myth of 'Surviving'
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Image: Randy Shropshire/WireImage
The final moments of the Netflix documentary Audrie & Daisy, about the near-impossibility of punishing sexual violence in America, put a hopeful end on the film’s dual narratives. Daisy Coleman—who survived both a sexual assault and then allegedly being dumped on her front lawn, unconscious, in just a t-shirt and sweatpants in freezing temperatures—graduates high school and tells the camera that she doesn’t want to be angry anymore. “I want to be happy, and I want to move on with my life,” Coleman says. Meanwhile, Audrie Pott, who died by suicide following her own attack, gets an honorary high school diploma as her mother smiles through tears in the audience. Immediately following these scenes, several other women, raped when they were girls, share stories of survival at the National Press Club just ahead of a montage of Coleman’s smiling, hopeful selfies in the final seconds of the film. The editing creates a warm contrast to the darker, unsmiling images previously used to evidence Coleman’s post-assault frame of mind. That positive finality is well-meaning, but it’s also a lie.
Coleman’s recent death by suicide is a grim reminder that stories around sexual assault—even responsibly told ones like Audrie & Daisy—are narratives crafted for audiences, not reflections of the real experience of surviving sexual assault. Grieving sexual assault isn’t a ladder, elevating the survivor until they overcome the horrible thing that’s happened. Grief born of sexual trauma is a ball of knots, the cycle beginning and ending afresh without warning, overlapping and intertwining so that the lines between emotions become difficult to parse and the edges begin to fray. “Why can’t you just get over it,” is a heartless refrain from rape apologists and deniers in the beginning. But over time, the push for a final, permanent move to acceptance comes from all sides, not just the wrong ones. A story has to end.
In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, based on interactions with terminally ill patients, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five-stage model of grief: denial, followed by anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. The model, though never intended to describe the experiences of those beyond the terminally ill and unsupported by anything more than anecdotal evidence, has become a Freytag’s pyramid of sorts for the ways anything traumatic is portrayed in pop culture. And narratives around what happened to Daisy Coleman, including Audrie & Daisy, follow this model closely. Framers of the story paint a picture of an idyllic world where it’s an anomaly for a handful of teenage boys to text the 14-year-old sister of a high school buddy, inviting her and a friend to binge-drink to unconsciousness, as the schoolmates of Coleman allegedly did, then (allegedly, of course) film her rape. What follows is a narrative that builds audience anger at the alleged rapist and the sheriff who protects them, bargaining as we follow a case that ends in a plea-bargain for the accused rapist, depression over the sad state of our culture, and finally a positive note about survivors, acceptance, and moving on.