The kinds of accusations Karen Monahan has thrown at my dad, Keith Ellison, and her inability to stand firm on the truth are very much qualities inherent to the Karen I know.I‘ve been quiet on this issue the past few days because I’ve been trying to find a way to process this strange and upsetting situation. I also wanted to wait until after the primary and the DFL endorsement because this is not a political issue for me, but a deeply personal one. But I never actually signed up for public or political life. I can’t sit back and watch as Karen’s tried and true red flags appear and the public selectively ignore them. This is my experience with Karen:
I lived at home with my dad when Karen moved in. We made space for her. Once, I came home from a term at college and found that my bedroom had been transformed into a storage closet for her things. I slept elsewhere in the house to accommodate her.
Her sons, Justin and Austin, who are both older than me, had a key and were welcomed whenever they pleased. Her grandchild has been here, her friends have stayed here. Karen has been welcomed into my uncle’s house in North Carolina, and my nana’s home in Detroit. If you asked me if I ever, for one second, thought that Karen had ever expressed timidity or fear around my dad the answer would be an emphatic no. In many ways, she prioritized her own comforts at the expense of others.
I don’t believe in binaries like “good” or “bad”, so I won’t be calling Karen either of those things, but I do think it’s important to tell my experience with Karen living with her for a few years.
I first met Karen as a teenager, and she took issue with me when I didn’t warm to her right away. It was a new situation for me and I was still processing my parents divorce. She mistook my hesitancy to accept her as defiance.
She then quickly became actively territorial and threatening towards me as her relationship with my dad became more serious. To me, then, it felt like she was trying to manipulate my dad against me by accusing me of destroying her things and then telling my dad about it in hopes that he’d reprimand me. I never touched her things. As a teenager I couldn’t tell if she believed her accusations against me, or if she simply wanted to drive a wedge between me and my dad.
My attempts to give her more and more space only brought more stress. One weekend, when I finally cleared enough space in my room to sleep there, she refused to knock or respect my space. I felt as if there was nothing of mine that she had to respect. She even accused my mother of stealing her things even though my mom had never visited my dad’s place. She went further by getting my brothers involved, and making passive-aggressive comments about which ones of us she “liked”. She ranted about the young women she mentored, sometimes giving such grossly intimate details about others even after she’d be asked to stop.
I’m now being told that she has been posting on Facebook that government agents are hacking her computer and deleting relevant emails and files… which is simply in line with the kind of thing she finds believable. No one but her son asserted there was a “tape”, and she has flip-flopped on it’s existence. Again, this is how I’ve experienced Karen responding to skepticism.
Many people—including, probably, many people reading these words—believe Karen. That reality both gives me hope for the beautiful momentum that the #metoo movement has built, and a profound anger at the injustice of these false accusations. But Karen Monahan is exploiting a movement. She is banking on those who have nothing but good intentions to believe her.
If I didn’t know Karen, I too would want to lean towards believing the accuser and being skeptical of the accused. Because those of us who are invested in the safety of women know that false allegations just do not happen often.
I sincerely hope that Karen finds the closure she needs for whatever grief she is holding. I hope that she finds peace. I also hope, not only for my family but for the good people who support her, that she corrects this horrible mistake, that she admits there is no video because there was no incident, and that she reckon with her anger in a more honest way.
― wayne trotsky (Simon H.), Sunday, 19 August 2018 17:43 (five years ago) link