No, Women Are Not OK Right Now

Sources

Birenbaum, Gabby. “Tony Gonzales Admits Affair with Aide Who Died by Suicide.” The Texas Tribune, March 5, 2026. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/04/tony-gonzales-admits-affair-staffer-suicide-texas-23rd-district-congress/.

Brown, Allison Gordon, Isabelle Chapman, Casey Tolan, Pamela. “Exclusive: Four Women Describe Sexual Misconduct by Rep. Eric Swalwell, Including a Former Staffer Who Says He Raped Her.” CNN, April 10, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/10/us/eric-swalwell-sexual-misconduct-allegations-invs.

Coursey, Michael. “Statistics: The Criminal Justice System.” RAINN, June 16, 2025. https://rainn.org/facts-statistics-the-scope-of-the-problem/statistics-the-criminal-justice-system/.

Odzeniak, Saskya Vandoorne, Niamh Kennedy, Kara Fox, Anna. “Polish Man Arrested Following Undercover CNN Investigation into Online Rape Networks.” CNN, April 9, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/09/europe/polish-arrest-cnn-online-rape-investigation-intl.

Schneider, Gregory S., Laura Vozzella, Danielle Paquette, and Teo Armus. “Justin Fairfax Grew Obsessed with Clearing His Name. His Family Paid the Price.” The Washington Post, April 18, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2026/04/18/justin-fairfax-wife-murder-suicide/.

Vandoorne, Saskya. “Exposing a Global ‘Online Rape Academy’ That Is Teaching Men How to Abuse Women and Evade Detection.” CNN, March 26, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2026/03/world/expose-rape-assault-online-vis-intl/index.html.

Wagner, Bayliss. “Will Tony Gonzales Get a Pension and Who Will Fill His Seat in Congress?” San Antonio Express-News, April 17, 2026. https://www.expressnews.com/projects/2026/tony-gonzales-resignation-explained/.

Wong, Scott. “Reps. Eric Swalwell and Tony Gonzales Officially Resign amid Misconduct Claims.” NBC News, April 15, 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/reps-tony-gonzales-eric-swalwell-officially-resign-misconduct-claims-rcna331765.

Transcript

Hi it’s Monday, April 20th, 2026, you’re tuned in to Why, America? I’m your lawyer friend Leeja Miller. If the first 15 months of Trump’s second term hasn’t been enough of an indictment of men in positions of power, the last month or so has raised it all to a fever pitch. And in the midst of such a tumultuous news cycle, where atrocities are being committed every day, usually funded by our tax dollars, where headlines can feel random and unrelated because we are being just inundated by information every moment of every day, it can be hard to pull the pieces together into a coherent picture to get a bigger understanding of what’s going on. Today I’m going to do that for you because there is a disturbing series of headlines that are all connected that paint a harrowing picture about life for literally half the global population. It’s a story as old as time, about how men use their positions of power to exploit and abuse the women around them in horrific, brutal, barbaric ways, and then gaslight women into thinking they’re at fault and wrong for speaking out. For some of you, today’s topic may be too heavy, and I totally understand if you need to duck out, I’ll catch you for the next episode. But I know 62% of you who watch me are men, and so I ask that you please pay attention and give a shit because the women in your life, especially those of us who pay attention to the news, are not fucking okay, and it is feeling extra heavy to move through the world right now. But it’s important that we don’t look away from the truth, from the lived reality of women all around the world who are being victimized by the men in their lives, who are existing, logging into their teams meetings, going to their kids band concerts, with likely layers of trauma they’ve experienced at the hands of men, and there’s a lot of sadness and there’s a lot of rage, and women tend to turn it inwards towards themselves in self destructive ways, so the abuse compounds and it feels like there’s no way to escape any of it. Because there isn’t. This is the world men built. Let’s talk about it.

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My partner on today’s video Cloaked asked me to put my name and phone number into their site and I was pretty shocked to see what they found of my information floating around the internet. They found FIFTY SIX instances of my private information on data broker sites. Mind you this is despite the fact that I am VERY careful about removing my data and making sure that none of my information is floating around out there. I was pretty horrified that despite my best efforts there are websites trading in my private information. Data brokers make literally BILLIONS of dollars selling your information to spammers, scammers, and stalkers. My phone is literally close to unusable because of the DAILY spam calls I get, all the time, even when I tell them to add me to their do not call list. And every time you sign up for something, you’re risking having your information thrown out into the universe for scammers to buy up and exploit. And they’re betting you won’t do anything about it, and usually they’re right. But a lot of data removal services just remove your data AFTER it’s already out there. The real problem is that every time you sign up for something, which is all the time because everyone wants your email and phone number for everything these days, every time you do that you create new vulnerabilities for your data to be exploited. That’s where my partner on today’s video Cloaked steps in. Not only will Cloaked remove your exposed data, but their app also lets you generate unlimited burner email addresses, usernames, and phone numbers to use whenever you sign up for something. And you can call, text, or email from within the app using those burner accounts. Having a separate identity for each thing you sign up for secures your information and keeps data brokers from being able to tie those accounts back to your identity. So that means when you sign up for stuff, not only are you protecting yourself, you’re also turning the tables and making these data broker companies spend money on your useless data that won’t give them any actual information. Love that for us! Cloaked also has a built-in VPN and a password manager and will cover you with its $1 million dollar identity theft insurance policy. Go to my link cloaked dot com slash leeja for a free security scan. The scan only takes a few seconds. The longer you wait, the more of your information gets bought and sold. If you’re ready to take your privacy back into your own hands, use cloaked dot com slash leeja to get 30% off any plan now.

Last Tuesday, Democratic representative from California Eric Swalwell and Republican representative Tony Gonzales both resigned from Congress on the same day in order to avoid getting pushed out by their House colleagues. Both were under separate investigations by the House Ethics Committee for alleged sexual misconduct. Swalwell, a rising star in the Democratic party who was poised as a leading candidate for California governor, has been credibly accused by four separate women of sexual misconduct that ranged from smarmy sexual advances and unwanted dick pics from the married father of three to alleged rape. And yes I’m censoring that word because this episode is already probably going to get demonetized and I’m trying to get the information to as many people as possible. His alleged victim was a former staffer who claimed he raped her on two separate occasions while she was too intoxicated to consent and on the second, despite telling him no, he left her bruised and bleeding afterwards. It is a House ethics violation to have any relations with a staffer, let alone nonconsensual ones, which is obviously a crime. Other women have come forward saying he began messaging them on social media, relying on his position of power in politics to entice them into talking to him, promising to get them jobs, connect them with the right people. The women he allegedly targeted were young, ambitious, and he allegedly used his power and authority as their boss, as a political figure with connections, to prey on that ambition and inexperience to get what he wanted from them.

Separately, Representative Tony Gonzales, a catholic, married father of six children, resigned the same day as Swalwell to avoid the Ethics investigation into HIS inappropriate relationship with two different staffers. Both staffers alleged he sent them sexually explicit messages while they worked for him, asking for nude photos and propositioning them for sex. One of the staffers, a political aide named Regina Santo-Aviles, confirmed to her friends and husband that she had a sexual affair with Gonzales over the course of a few weeks in 2024. 18 months later, last September, Regina Santo-Aviles set herself on fire in her front yard in Uvalde, Texas, and died the next day of her injuries. Two months ago, the San Antonio Express News published a story alleging Gonzales’ affair with Santo-Aviles, which Gonzales vehemently denied. They always do, don’t they. In March, on a podcast interview, Gonzales admitted to the affair, though he said it was a lapse of judgment and he asked God for forgiveness, and what do you know God had given him that forgiveness, isn’t that lucky. He ended his bid for re-election to the House of Representatives, but by that point enough lawmakers were calling for his resignation and an ethics investigation into him. So last week he and Swalwell both resigned, a political calculation so as not to upset the balance of power in the House–both a Democrat and a Republican resign, no harm no foul, business can proceed as usual.

That was Tuesday. On Thursday, a headline you may have missed: former Virginia lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, a Democrat who once had a promising future in politics, shot his wife Cerina several times before killing himself in a murder suicide that occurred while their two teenage children were present in the home. His teenage son was the one who called 911. His wife Cerina, a dentist, is remembered as a calm presence who never enjoyed the spotlight or being the wife of a politician. Justin Fairfax’s fall from grace began 8 years ago. A Columbia-trained attorney, Fairfax was considered a promising politician in the Democratic party, ascending to Lieutenant Governor in 2018. Then, in 2019, his boss Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia at the time, had a scandal involving a blackface incident documented in a photo of his medical school yearbook. According to the Washington Post, Northam denied being in blackface in the photo, kept his job, and finished a successful term as governor. But at the same time as that scandal was breaking and Justin Fairfax, as Lieutenant Governor was preparing to take over as governor, his own scandal emerged. Two different women stepped forward and alleged that Fairfax had sexually assaulted them. One woman, now a professor at Scripps college and a fellow at Stanford University–see how I have to give her credentials to make you believe her–says he assaulted her at a hotel during the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a memory she had repressed but resurfaced when she began seeing his face as he ran for lieutenant governor in 2017. A separate woman alleged he raped her in a premeditated and aggressive attack in 2000 when they were both undergraduate students at Duke University. That accuser had already been raped in a separate incident by a Duke basketball player and when she brought the matter to the dean of the school she was discouraged from pursuing charges. Fairfax denied the allegations and hired Brett Kavanaugh’s defense team but his reputation was ruined. He continued as lieutenant governor until the end of his term, though, don’t worry. He came in fourth in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race, and then got really depressed and also obsessed with clearing his name, withdrawing entirely from his family. His marriage began unraveling from there. The couple were separated and in the process of divorcing at the time of the murder-suicide. According to divorce court records, in the months prior to her death, Cerina had taken on the duties of being the sole breadwinner of the house, the sole caretaker of the children, as well as doing the cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping to keep the household together. She was two weeks away from a court mandated deadline for him to have to move out of the house. And then he murdered her.

At the end of last month, CNN released a devastating, difficult to read report detailing what it described as a “global rape academy”, an online chat group made up of nearly 1000 men sharing stories, tips, tricks, and camaraderie all around the goal of drugging and raping their wives while they slept. The reporters who worked on the story discovered the chat group via an online porn website called Motherless, where CNN reports the website hosts over 20,000 videos in the “sleep porn” category–videos uploaded by users of the website depicting them allegedly raping their drugged, unconscious wives. 20,000 videos. The videos had hundreds of thousands of views. In February, Motherless, a porn website that hosts hundreds of thousands of videos, had over 80 million visits. It was through that site that the journalists were told about the private Telegram chat, called Zzz, with its 1000 members teaching each other how to successfully drug their wives, but not go too far and cause an overdose, how to do the eye check to make sure she was really asleep, with some users offering links to livestreams of the event, and others selling drugs that the men could use on their wives for $175 per shipment. Since the report dropped, Telegram has shut down that specific chat group that CNN exposed, and one man in Poland named Piotr has been arrested.

This has all come out in the last few weeks. Add to that the horrific revelations from the Epstein files, that our world is run by men who use their power to exploit and abuse young, vulnerable girls, and the only person in the entire US who has faced any punishment for participating in the scheme is a woman, who absolutely deserves to be in prison but like let’s not pretend that doesn’t say a lot about how our world works, and you start to feel like the walls are closing in, like there’s no way out of this horrible fucking predicament of being born a woman in a world that will endlessly use you, abuse you, tell you you’re wrong to question it, and then discard you when it’s done with you. And I want to talk about how the legal system plays into all of this, because I am a lawyer and I do want to ground this in what this looks like from a legal standpoint.

First and foremost when I was in law school the thing that was most apparent and most consistently driven home to me was that our laws and our entire legal system is based upon or still entirely made up of laws that were written by white men. Even laws written more recently that women were allowed to participate in, are based on other laws and a legal system that was designed by and for men. And I think that understanding should ground every discussion about reforming the system. It was not created for us, and in many instances it was created to be actively hostile to us or to forget and exclude us altogether.

There are two areas of law that jump out to me as important to understand here. First is, very briefly, Section 230 of the communications decency act, which I won’t get too in the weeds with, but has basically been interpreted to mean that any host of any website, like motherless, the host of 20,000 sleep rape videos, cannot be held liable for the content that others post on its site. And so for women who may be depicted on that site, they have very little recourse, and it is very hard to get a site like that taken down or to get the site to at least remove the videos that are illegal.

And the other important area of law is criminal law, and really criminal procedure. I’m not going to go into the specific words of laws against assault, because what I’m most concerned with driving home here is the experience of “getting justice” for a woman who has accused a man of sexual assault. I am talking in binary terms here please don’t fucking bean soup me in the comments–yes, men can be victims, yes nonbinary people can be victims. The vast majority of the victims of sexual assault are women. So that is what I’m talking about. The first hurdle is being believed. That is probably an issue that came up for you as I was discussing the various horrific headlines from the past few months. For the alleged victims of Eric Swalwell, for example, why did they keep talking to him? Why did they maintain a relationship with him? When did they let it go on for so long? Why did they continue to get drunk with him when he made sexual advances? Why did they allow themselves to get so drunk with him? Those are the questions that are going to infect not only the public perception of the accusations but also the police officers who they try to report the incident to, the friends they try to talk to. In order to press criminal charges there has to be a prosecutor willing to pursue the charges. That prosecutor is going to want to know they have a solid case before proceeding. And they are going to want evidence. Why didn’t you get a rape kit test at the emergency room immediately afterwards? Nevermind the backlog crisis that is leaving rape kits on shelves unprocessed across the country. Why didn’t you tell anyone immediately after it happened? Do you have text messages? Photos? Dates? Times? Exact number of drinks ingested? Proof of his mental state at the time of the incident? You didn’t have any physical injuries, no photos of bruises. Did you say no? Did he know you really really didn’t want it? Are you sure? What were you wearing? And that’s not to demonize all prosecutors out there, there are some who are genuinely caring about survivors, about prosecuting rapists, but they have to build a case and the case has to fit within our legal system and our society, one where a jury of your peers has to determine beyond a reasonable doubt that he did the crime. Beyond a reasonable doubt. But it’s so easy to doubt women. But then of course if you find a prosecutor who will pursue your case and maybe you can afford a lawyer to support you along the way, you then have months or years of a court battle ahead of you, including an exhaustive discovery phase. Collection of documents, photos, text messages, private information, depositions that can stretch on for hours or even days where you have to sit across from the guy’s defense attorney while he asks you invasive questions, forcing you to relive the incident over and over and over again, until you MAYBE reach a trial, which is exceedingly rare, that a sexual assault allegation ever sees a day inside a courtroom, at which point you have a room full of strangers looking at all this invasive evidence that’s been collected, and staring at you while you sit on the witness stand and withstand aggressive questioning by a sleazy defense attorney while the man who assaulted you sits and watches. And then the jury goes into its private room and comes back and says you didn’t do enough to convince them, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he did this to you. And this is only if your case ever makes it that far. According to statistics from RAINN, for every 1000 instances of sexual assault, only 25 perpetrators ever see the inside of a jail cell. That’s less than 3%. And that’s only the assaults that we know about. The vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported. And of the assaults we DO know about, 2/3rds are never reported to the police. And that process I just outlined for you is why. When you are feeling vulnerable, scared, hurt, and violated, it isn’t really your immediate instinct to go talk to a COP. You know, our overly militarized incredibly violent police force whose members are reportedly far more likely than the general populace to be perpetrators of abuse themselves. On top of that, however, is the social stigma and victim blaming that makes a woman question herself, not to mention the fact that our society is a grooming machine. Women are groomed, from very very young, by every member of our society not just the “Epstein class” not just the rich and powerful men, not just the perpetrators of actual sexual abuse, by every member of this society we are groomed from a very young age so that we do not question the things that are done to us, things that are deeply problematic, that are deeply traumatic, things that rob us of our innocence, that rob us of our own bodily autonomy, we are taught from near infancy to not question any of it. And so when someone does something to you but it doesn’t fit within the clearly defined walls of “a bad man grabs you from the bushes in the night and you fought and screamed and said no but he raped you to completion” well then I guess it wasn’t that big of a deal, it wasn’t technically rape, he didn’t mean it, I’m the crazy one for acting like that was such a big deal, don’t make a fuss about it, stay quiet. And society itself writes it off, says ah but what was she wearing, says well is it worth ruining his entire career over, oh it was just one time, she was drinking too. So that in order for us to be heard, in order for us to be believed, in order for there to be any awareness, any attention paid, any public reckoning, it has to be a massive, heinous crime in order to get peoples’ attention.

Gisele Pelicot, a french woman whose incredibly public trial in france against her husband made global headlines, had to get raped on 92 separate occasions by 72 different men for the world to take notice. CNN had to show a community of 1000 men talking about drugging and raping their wives, from a site with 60 million views per month with 20,000 videos of sleep rapes in order for the world to latch onto that headline. Genuinely I think the only reason the House of Representatives took the accusations against Swalwell and Gonzales as seriously as they did, calling for ethics investigations while doing nothing to thwart the President who has literally been found liable for sexual assault, is because Gonzales and Swalwell are from different parties, and so first and foremost the balance of power in Congress had to be considered. Since it wouldn’t upset that power balance, well then sure let’s take a look it seems bad. And even then, both men, not even the people who elected them, got to call the shots, got to get the final word and resign instead of face the music, and both of them will probably receive taxpayer pensions as is standard for members of congress. It had to be Cerina Fairfax, two weeks away from being free from her deadbeat soon to be ex husband, the victim of a horrific, dramatic murder suicide. It had to be Regina Santo-Aviles, set on fire by her own hand in her own front yard to produce a story salacious enough for us to pay attention to. Because we have all been groomed, from infancy, to believe that women are less human than men are. To downplay the abuse they suffer as not a big deal. And that leads to layers and layers of trauma for most of the women in your life. 81% of women report experiencing some form of sexual harassment or assault in their lifetime. For me it started at 10. Ten years old. And that’s just based on women who are willing to report that to a survey, I would bet it’s closer to 100%. I don’t think you could find a woman who hasn’t experienced some instance in their life where they were made to feel less than, unsafe, harassed, or abused by a man. The 81% reporting I would guess could be chalked up to women who have been so gaslit, so groomed by society that they didn’t even realize what happened to them was wrong. I was one of those women. It took a decade for me to realize that an instance that happened to me in college was sexual assault. Because well I was drinking and I made the mistake of being too nice to him and it wasn’t that big of a deal. The unlearning that has to happen for some women to face the layers of trauma that this world has enacted upon them can be too much for some people to take on. And for survivors of assault and abuse, reading these headlines can pile on to the underlying trauma in ways that make it really difficult to move about the world, to act like everything is fine, to show up fully for themselves and for the people in their lives. And it can lead to a lot of anger, that women have been conditioned to turn on themselves, in the form of self destructive behaviors, drinking, binging, purging, starving, self-immolating. But I think what most of us feel is a sense of rage. But we don’t know what to do with it or how to express it because rage to us has only been modeled by men punching holes in walls, by yelling and violence. We have no model for feminine rage. Not really. And in that, too, we have been groomed. Female rage is the wicked witch, old, hooked nose, conniving, ugly, cruel, inhuman, the direct opposite of the disney princess, the one we’re supposed to want to be. The wicked witch is the worst thing a woman could ever become. And so we’ve been groomed from a young age to do everything we can to never become her.

Okay but as always I like to end these videos with what do we do. Men need to listen to women and take them seriously, need to center women and women’s experiences more in their lives–the music you listen to the podcasts you listen to the art you consume the books you read the movies you watch how much of any of that is created by women? Also go the fuck to therapy.

Women. I don’t have a solution for you, I think to say “well all we need to do is x y z and it’ll be better” is to undersell the depth of the problem we’re facing on a global scale. But I can tell you what I do. And what I wish to do more of. My rage in my early 20s used to come out at men, a man would say something problematic and I’d be screaming at him in the middle of the bar on a Saturday night or debating him in class or shit talking him with my friends. That type of anger, the seething outward fury, I found for myself was actually counter productive. I realized I would be mad for days, my cortisol would spike I could feel it in my body, it would take up SO much of my energy, while the man I was mad at would maybe laugh at me or shrug it off and go about his day relatively unscathed. To me, that type of anger is the opposite of taking back my power. Instead I realized it is decentering that is the most important thing for me to do. Decentering men from all aspects of my life. I do not consume much content made by men. I try to avoid reading books or watching movies or consuming art made by men, I don’t listen to podcasts made by men. I am working on decoupling the male gaze from my sense of self worth, which is easier said than done. We have been groomed to dress and present ourselves based on what men might find appealing, and to feel deep shame over things that might not be attractive to men. I still feel those things. But I’m working on it. That’s the nature of being groomed from a young age, it’s really hard to break free from. And when you’re still living in it, which is a requirement to existing in this society, it’s even harder. So surrounding myself with women who are safe–which is key, many women haven’t realized the role they play, haven’t unpacked the grooming, are still very much in it, are sometimes complicit in the abuse and violence and further grooming, so safe is key–I surround myself with safe women, being in the company of other women is so important, speaking to other women about your experiences is so important. I do a lot of therapy, and I decenter men from as many aspects of my life as possible. While also being married to a man, yes it is possible, get you a man with bi wife energy, hold the men you allow into your life to the high standards you expect from yourself and other women. And then I would suggest finding an outlet for your rage, remembering that it might not look like the traditional masculine forms of anger that we are conditioned to. So it could look like getting a gun and learning to use it, it could look like self defense classes or getting strong as hell, it could also look like making art, art that pushes boundaries and expresses things that nothing else can. It could look like gardening or divesting from man-made capitalism as much as possible or speaking up in meetings or remaining soft and letting your body take up space or starting a coven or founding a matrilineal religion and getting tax write offs and constitutional protections for you and your friends based on your firmly held religious beliefs, that’s something I’ve been thinking about more lately, it can look like all of this or none of this. I think the real point of it all is figuring out a way to feel freedom. That’s the word I always go back to. Because so much of this world makes me, because I’m a woman, feel not free. I cannot walk places at certain times, I cannot wear certain things, I cannot be free in my body I cannot be free with my words I cannot freely be who I really am because I have been conditioned from birth to fear–to fear what men might to do me, to fear being disliked or unlikeable, to fear becoming that wicked witch with the wort on her nose. And the absence of that fear to me is freedom. And I’m slowly uncovering what I need to do and what it looks like to chip away at that fear and build a life that is as free as possible. If you have managed to do that, please put it in the comments I’m sure we could all use some inspiration. And hey please subscribe to this channel to help out my work, it’s free and it really makes a difference. And yes this video took a lot of fucking emotional labor please consider joining on YouTube, Substack, or Patreon to thank me and I’ll even give you all these episodes completely ad free as well. Also if you like my Reagan Ruined Everything tshirt you can get one for yourself at leeja miller merch dot com. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Christopher Cowan, Evan Friedley, Marc, Sarah Shelby, Dennis Smith, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like my episode from last week about Tax Resistance 101.