The Complainant

Maybe the seltzer was a bad idea on top of the cold brew. I have to pee but they are about to call.

I am alive. Staying that way requires telling a story.

What story, whose?

There will be questions. I’d better have answers.

Get the story straight, iron out the details. The past is a sheet I can pull on for protection.

Coffee, seltzer, pee, call.

How much did you have to drink? Did you pee before or after the call?

For how long? On what date? Did you tell anyone when you went to the bathroom? Is there any documentation you can provide for this alleged urination?

In my dreams Daniel chases me. I wake up and see that I am lying in my friend’s attic in Providence, Rhode Island.

I am having an “acute stress reaction,” the domestic-violence counselor says. Intrusive thoughts, racing pulse.

Historians like to talk about contingency — tears in the fabric of time when things might have been different.

I picture Daniel standing over my body. I am gone, and he is the only one left. He is crying — not for me, but for himself. I laugh. Spooky!

I laugh all the time. The counselor calls this “inappropriate affect.”

I can’t stop laughing because I chose a different thread. I am safe in the attic, and today I am going to talk to the Title IX office.

When I first met Daniel at admitted-students’ day in spring 2014, there was something about him that I found both disarmingly vulnerable and reassuring, as if he were a friend I already knew and had missed. As we progressed through Berkeley’s Ph.D. program in history, we grew close in a way that exceeded camaraderie. One night I sent him a text with a wink emoji, asking if he was on a date.

“Sort of,” he replied. “But always loyal to you.”

He told me that meeting me was a blessing; I called him my partner in crime. During our constant strolls, text exchanges, and dinner outings, I shared my frustration over my growing list of failed relationships, while Daniel aired his feelings of inadequacy and isolation over being a first-generation academic of color. On bad days, he said he wished he were an iron statue that could be melted down.

“Since that is not an option,” he told me, “I’m just gonna stuff my face.”

Though I urged him to have faith (and try therapy), I was also drawn to his melancholy, which seemed more authentic than the humblebragging or virtue signaling common among our peers. We repeated the mantra that neither of us would let the other go down.

Once we started dating, we shared an intimacy that was tinged with unease. Daniel said that although he knew “retrospective jealousy” was foolish and petty, he felt sick at the thought of me dating other men before him.

“Knowing it’s petty doesn’t make it any less difficult,” I said.

As I hastened to reassure him, Daniel began hurting me. His violence always came with a story: that he was the one who was really in pain, that I’d mistreated him and deserved to be punished, that nothing had happened at all. Under the weight of Daniel’s words, his actions drifted away. Even when his fingers were wrapped around my throat, I strained to see him as the victim he said he was.

While screaming at me one evening, Daniel punched himself in the face. The next day, he showed up in the history department with a split lip; his friends were concerned. They became his support team, always ready to lend an empathetic ear. Daniel warned me not to speak to them without him present, and when I did it was only to discuss what was best for him. After he started therapy and antidepressants, his mental health provided an indisputable new rationale for why he treated me the way he did and why I had no right to object.

During the last night we spent together, I begged him not to kill me. After a few minutes he fell on the ground, weeping like he always did when the wave of violence broke. Though I still wanted to protect him, I finally grasped what lay ahead. According to Daniel’s dramaturgy, I had to follow him to the precipice and wait for a push; the hero’s salvation required my sacrifice. The only narrator who could change the ending was me.

On the morning I depart Berkeley, my friend Rose suggests I leave Daniel a letter telling him not to contact me for at least six months. I sit at her kitchen table, choosing words to cauterize the growing rupture in my heart. I write that I will never stop loving and caring about him, but since his violence toward me will never stop, it’s better for both of us to be apart. After sealing the envelope, I block him on my phone.

As the plane ascends, euphoria fizzes in my chest. I escaped you.

After landing in Boston, I take a train to Providence, and finally sink into bed at my friend Cassandra’s house. She’s already finished her Ph.D. and carries herself with tenacity I’m desperate to channel.

Updates arrive from the other coast. Daniel’s friend Bella texts me that she gave him the goodbye letter as I requested. I’ve already blocked him on email and am about to proceed to Facebook when I see a message from my friend Hannah.

“Did you see his post?” she asks. “Sorry but you should know.” She sends a screenshot from our community Facebook group.

“It is with a heavy heart that I post this. I am leaving the history program. I came to this decision on my own. I am like an extra, who had missed his cue to leave the stage. Well now I am exiting.” Daniel will miss everyone terribly, he says, and hopes there’s a chance they might miss him, too; he looks forward to reading all their books.

I know that Daniel is not really planning to leave the department; this declaration is for my benefit. But the supportive, unsuspecting responses are already coming in from our colleagues.

Though a domestic-violence counselor from my hometown helped me see what I denied about Daniel, her domineering style doesn’t let me think for myself. A few weeks ago, I started meeting with a therapist in Oakland whose vibe is less Appalachian straight shooter, more Bay Area yogi. Our sessions continue online after I leave.

When she asks me how I feel, I can only say how Daniel does. She suggests that caretaking composure is a habit with a history and excavates secrets I’m not ready to reveal.

“Your issues fit together like puzzle pieces,” she says.

Now the shape that fits my edges is gone, along with my ability to pretend like everything is fine. I have no idea what to do next. This fall Daniel and I are both supposed to be abroad, doing research in the same archives, away from all our support networks. A country separates us for now, but it might not for long.

I reach out to Berkeley’s Path to Care Center and have a phone call with a confidential advocate, who explains my options. I could make a report to the Title IX office without requesting that anything be done about it, or the office could issue a “no contact directive” asking Daniel not to talk to me. Actions that carry weight require more effort. On a call with the head of the Title IX office, I learn that due to my accusations’ severity, Daniel could be put under an “interim suspension” that would bar him from following me overseas. To issue it, however, the office would have to launch an investigation. While it’s impossible to predict how long the investigation would last, she says, they would aim to complete it within 60 days.

I ask if the investigation could proceed without me. The head of the office says no: Their team has determined that this is a “targeted,” not a community, risk. Since I am the only one in danger, an investigation can happen solely at my behest. Daniel would know that I betrayed him and become my direct adversary in the case. I ask if he would be able to keep his fellowship and health insurance while suspended. She says yes.

At the end of July, I tell her that I would like to move forward.

To decompress, a friend of Cassandra’s takes me to a shooting range. She’s a Zen Buddhist with Sanskrit inked down her arms. After loading her rifle in the trunk, she says that target practice is a form of meditation.

“Why should the right-wingers have all the guns?”

After a brief training, I stand with my legs in a pyramid and feel the click of finger on trigger. I like the revolver’s heft as my weight rotates the barrel and releases, in a mechanical maneuver as neat and precise as the ticking of a clock. The semiautomatic handgun unnerves me with its recoil — a motion that, once initiated, generates momentum beyond my control.

With that, I assume a new identity: “the Complainant.” The nomenclature of the Title IX system — or as it’s paradoxically called at Berkeley, the Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) — numbs discomfort with bureaucratese. Daniel is not the accused but the “Respondent”; he will not be found innocent or guilty but “responsible” or “not responsible.” The Notice of Allegations parcels out the mess of experience into specific “incidents of concern” that are in potential violation of the UC-Berkeley Code of Student Conduct and the University of California Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment Policy. This terminology places the rot of our relationship at an anodyne distance, as if it were an abscessed tooth that could be uprooted and set under the bright lights of the dentist’s tray.

Complainant — a part I will play for who knows how long.

I am unable to spell it. Shouldn’t there be a t after the first n? An i after the second a? My brain refuses to remember what letters come in which order; it covets its customary role of the one who determines what happened. But the director has posted the cast list, and that part has gone to someone else: the case resolution officer, or “CRO.” As for the Complainant, well — nothing she says can be trusted. All her statements are rephrased as a passive proposition:

It is alleged.

When the investigation begins, I have a hazy understanding of what is about to happen. Only once it’s over do I fully grasp all the steps. After interviewing both me and Daniel, the CRO will ask each of us to submit evidence and provide the names of anyone who might be able to corroborate our stories. Once the CRO has interviewed these witnesses, along with anyone else whom she decides to contact, she will ask us to review and comment on whatever they said, as well as on the evidence submitted by the opposing side. The CRO will then compare all these words and, in a “timely, thorough, and impartial manner,” write the official version of what happened with the power vested in her by the University of California. Her report will conclude whether the Respondent violated any university policies, but it won’t determine the institution’s response. For this, the case will go to the Center for Student Conduct, which will decide what (if any) “sanction” he will receive. Either of us can appeal the outcome.

Complaining entails loss: of a love that had run to poison, my belief in always turning the other cheek. Grief, according to Sigmund Freud, threatens to overwhelm the sufferer. Through stylized reenactment, the mourner gradually releases the love object and re-creates a coherent identity. As a visual, Freud invoked the fort/da games played by his grandson, who threw objects away and back again to cope with separation from his parents. Failure to perform the work of mourning leads to melancholia, that sense of loss so vast and vague it latches onto the self.

Sometimes I look in the mirror and wish I could change my face, as if altering my exterior might mend the schism between the part of me that sympathized with Daniel and the part that saw what he was doing and wanted to save myself. If I can’t have a new body, maybe a bureaucratic title will do. While the rituals of complaint offer some comfort, however, they inflict an equal amount of pain.

Once Daniel receives the Notice of Allegations, institutional mechanisms swing into motion. Under the interim suspension, he can do research in another country but not where I’ll be studying. He is also not allowed on campus. To keep receiving his fellowship payments, he must submit housing and travel receipts that show he is complying. He is invited to participate in a hearing to determine whether the interim suspension will be upheld. It is.

All I had wanted was to be free from Daniel while I was abroad. Yet the process required to make that happen rips open new vulnerabilities. For the case to proceed, I will have to submit text exchanges with my friends. They will then be turned over to Daniel to read. After seeing a single message from Hannah warning that he might use therapy to manipulate me, Daniel furiously quoted her words to me for weeks while following me, throwing my things, slamming me against walls. How will he respond when he sees her texts begging me to get a restraining order and calling him “fucking unhinged”?

Members of our department will be asked to reveal what they have seen or heard about Daniel: not the courageous battle with depression he presents on social media, but the way he acts when he thinks no one is looking. I remember Daniel sitting in Dwinelle Hall on the Berkeley campus, silently tapping his highlighters as he monitored conversations and glances, filing everything away for future use in his internal ministry of justice. So far, I am the only one who has seen him erupt. I am not as confident as OPHD that the risk is targeted exclusively at me.

In the court-restraining-order office in Rhode Island, a woman sitting near me is talking about her daughter’s violent husband. I look down at the blank affidavit in front of me. I have two pages in which to tell my story well enough for a judge to grant me protection.

My head swims. I used to be a reporter; I’m doing a Ph.D. Words are what I know. Still, they barely come. Finally, I turn to my phone and open an email I wrote about Daniel, relying on the typed sentences to guide me.

After glancing at the affidavit, the judge approves a temporary restraining order (TRO) with a court date to decide whether it will be extended into a three-year one. A staff member in the history department helps me figure out how to serve it to Daniel. The TRO exposes the state I’m staying in, but not my address, and I feel reasonably sure that Daniel wouldn’t fly to an unfamiliar city across the country to track me down. He would wait until I came to him.

In the meantime, my Path to Care advocate puts me in touch with a detective at UC-Berkeley’s police department. The detective tells me that if I file a police report, it could help persuade a judge to approve the long-term restraining order. The latter wouldn’t be any use while I’m overseas but would at least be in effect when I go back to Berkeley.

Daniel talked a lot about the police. Back when we were friends, he told me about how the cops would cruise around his neighborhood when he was a kid and stop him and other boys when they were looking for a suspect. When we started dating, the police stopped being a real presence from his past and became a menace that emerged only to manipulate me. Daniel would dare me to call them in the same tone that he told me to go fuck other men.

On my last night in Berkeley, as I bought time to prepare my departure by texting him that I just needed a little longer to be alone, Daniel sent me a photo of a squad car. He claimed he’d just seen a man hit someone with a baseball bat and made a report to the police.

“It’s kind of weird to hear about you talking to the cops after the kind of stuff you were yelling at me on Sat,” I replied. “But it sounds like it was stressful/scary.”

“I don’t like cops,” he wrote back. “I found it stressful and emotionally wrought. But I was the only witness. I had to do what was right.”

The cleavage between right and wrong always seemed to correspond with whatever made him look good.

Though I don’t want Daniel to be arrested, I do want to create a paper trail in case he hurts me or anyone else again. My complaint to Title IX could vanish into the bowels of the bureaucracy; a police report would be harder to make disappear. I hear Daniel’s voice in my head as I wait for the detective to call.

Go ahead and talk to the cops. Tell them how I couldn’t possibly live up to the standards of privileged women like you and your friends.

While the people from the Title IX office speak in stiff euphemisms, the detective’s tone is casual in a way that makes me wary. As we talk, I stare at the red-and-white quilt on my bed in the attic, rearranging its permutations like a chessboard. At the end of a two-hour conversation, I ask what kinds of offenses I’ve just described. Even though I’m not interested in trying to press charges, and the report I’m filing is only to increase the odds of turning my temporary restraining order into a long-term one, I want to know.

“Felony assault, for starters,” the detective replies.

As I head downstairs and stand over the sink washing dishes, I feel a strange sense of relief. All the lies and obfuscations — none of it matters anymore. What I experienced finally has a name, a tidy five-syllable label that I can repeat to myself while scrubbing out a glass.

When I receive a copy of the report, I encounter unfamiliar acronyms and numbers.

The text blocks strip away Daniel’s excuses and expose his beliefs (Bias motivation: anti-female). I look up the penal codes listed, which address domestic violence and threats to kill. However, the report’s blunt wording does not endorse the contents of what I said, which unfolds over the following pages as a “narrative” taken down in the detective’s notes. The narrative mentions non-existent witnesses and leaves out major events. I email corrections, which the detective tacks on as a “supplemental narrative.” Let it go, I tell myself. It’s not like you’re actually trying to prove anything.

As I stand in the shower, hot water blasting over my estranged body, I address Daniel.

No one will know about this police report, I promise. This is my act of mercy for you.

A couple of weeks later, I show up in court for the restraining-order hearing. In the proceedings before mine, landlords try to evict tenants behind on rent. Though the judge gives people another chance to pay rather than forcing them onto the street, the long-term outlook isn’t any less bleak.

When it’s my turn, the bailiff, who has a court-jester vibe at odds with the surroundings, jauntily calls out Daniel’s name. As I’d hoped, Daniel is nowhere to be seen.

As the judge reads my affidavit, something creases his forehead — either concern for me or irritation I’m in the wrong state. Maybe both.

“Have you reported this to the police in California?”

I say yes. He approves the restraining order.

Back in the attic, I open my computer and see an email from the Title IX investigator. During our intake interview, she says, I mentioned that I might have some documents connected to the case, like texts and Facebook messages.

“Joy, could you forward those documents and any other relevant evidence to me?”

For three years, Daniel and I trained to be historians together. We marked up each other’s research papers, quizzed one another for exams, stored our books on adjacent shelves, exchanged notes and reading lists, sat side-by-side in working-group meetings. Now we will compete to combine narrative and evidence into a superior version of our shared past. After downloading message histories onto my computer, I start to scroll through the detritus of the past eight months. At first, my texts with Daniel seem hollow — empty shells stranded far from the sea. As I keep looking at the screen, they fill with fresh life, until I’m immersed in the waters I just escaped.

It’s just material, I tell myself, trying to slow my breath. Review the sources.

I note down striking quotations and take screenshots of texts, Facebook posts, and phone logs (April 29: 24 calls from Daniel in a row). I highlight my assuaging words to him: “I want to show you that there are other ways of doing things, that you have the strength for them.” I capture my messages to friends (“He was saying how he realized he just needs to get over jealousy etc.”) and their incredulous responses (“‘Just needs to get over jealousy’ sounds not that hopeful”).

My cheeks burn as I read Daniel’s constant questions about the sex I had with other men.

“I want to know all of it, in detail,” he wrote me, “so that I can take it all in like fuel, have my anger, frustration and sorrow light it up and I can explode into a million little pieces so that I may never be found again.”

Yet Daniel was careful not to put anything too damning into writing, and so was I. Though some of my messages to friends said that Daniel insulted me or talked about how I “neglected/betrayed him,” I provided few specifics, and framed whatever he had done as an expression of anguish that required my love and support.

February 6, 2:04 p.m. Text to Justine.

I am thinking more and more about how he really needs mental health help (which he refuses). Something happened this weekend that confirmed that.

I didn’t specify what that “something” was, and now I struggle to remember which events took place when. When Daniel was violent to me yet again, on April 29, I texted Hannah that he had damaged my things but said nothing about how he harmed me. Every time, I collaborated with him in the cover-up.

After I started seeing the domestic-violence counselor, my messages to Daniel began to refer to how I had been “hurt” and felt “fear,” how I needed “boundaries” to ensure that “these moments” “will never be repeated.” Daniel didn’t admit to anything:

“After walking home early because I felt alone and alienated, I am treated to this. Thank you and goodnight.”

Within days we were back together, and my attempts at self-assertion ceased.

In a seminar that Daniel and I took together, we read Revolution on My Mind, a book about Soviet diaries written under Stalin. The author, Jochen Hellbeck, quoted enthusiastic entries by various people — a worker who aspired to be an intellectual, the wife of an esteemed engineer — who tried to bring revolutionary ideals to life. Another historian, perhaps more steeped in Cold War thinking, might have read the same materials and concluded that Soviet citizens were brainwashed, or too afraid to admit their thoughts even to themselves. Hellbeck, however, framed their words as sincere attempts to align their souls with the spirit of history.

With the untested certainty of a third-semester grad student, I wrote a paper that critiqued his approach. “Hellbeck remarks that it is important not to quote diaries out of context, as vital content may be missing,” I observed. “But in surrounding fragmented lines with a profusion of commentary, the book is reluctant to let readers form alternative interpretations.” I argued that “such interpretations are not only possible, but necessary.”

Though I didn’t keep a diary during my relationship with Daniel, my phone screen became a similar stage for harmonizing dissonant impulses and purging the heresy in my head. To Daniel, I professed a devotion that in my messages to friends was tempered with panic and frustration. For all my audiences, however, I strove to present Daniel as sympathetically as possible. My mission to preserve our collective of two was antithetical to my current aim of assembling a case against him. My most eloquent opponent is my past self.

After a couple of weeks, I have fat files of screenshots but don’t know how to make them cohere into an account. I worry whether they’re enough to keep moving the case forward. The investigator is the historian here; all I can do is try to guide her hand. So, I surround fragmented lines with a profusion of commentary, starting with the first message I find that suggests there is something amiss.

December 16, 2016. Text from Daniel.

It’s 7. Did you run off with one of your white men? Knew this would happen.

Haha we got to talking 🙂. Heading to you from starry plough!

Above this exchange, I explain what was happening at the time — “I was having a drink with [Hannah] and had agreed to come to his house around 7 pm” — and what it will come to mean later: “After Daniel and I began dating, he became fixated on imagining me with men I had gone out with in the past. Initially, this was presented as a problem that he was struggling with and would soon overcome. However, the narrative rapidly shifted to accusations that I was a whore.”

I arrange all the shots in chronological order and accompany them with captions that identify context and key themes (“jealousy,” “controlling behavior,” “stalking,” “threats”). I end on my recent text exchange with Bella, in which she said that Daniel was still planning to follow me abroad.

Telling this story, I’m coming to realize, entails not only countering Daniel’s narrative but rewriting the one I had told before. When we were together, I thought my love could banish his demons. I hoped that disaster might be averted, and that tragedy would turn into a marriage plot. Now, as I labor to persuade the Title IX investigator to accept my revised draft, my mind keeps raising its customary objections in Daniel’s defense. My former truth will never align with, or fully yield to, my current one. I’m not sure who’s more sincere: my past self, professing my love and admiration for Daniel while hiding how he harmed me, or my present one, trying to excise my affection and show only hurt.

This essay is adapted from A Survivor’s Education: Women, Violence and the Stories We Don’t Tell (PublicAffairs, 2024). Some names have been changed.