This statement exist on the previous image of opened two pages, currently set to "private":

This page is consistent with my protest art that uses language, confrontation, and discomfort to examine power, coercion, reputation, and the rewriting of events. Many controversial artworks that use charged language try to distance themselves from the language through irony, quotation, or intellectual abstraction. What I am describing is the opposite. I am not neutralizing the accusation. I am amplifying it. The accusation of being a racist when I ran from his violence became so large that it obscured everything else. As an artist, I use art to spark critical conversations around difficult and often uncomfortable issues.

This journal entry contains a risk to myself as the artist. Some viewers will stop at the word and reject the piece outright. Others will accuse the work itself of being racist. In other words, the journal entry reenacts the very dynamic it is describing: I am once again willing to "take the heat." If this is the accusation being used to define me, I will examine it directly rather than allow it to operate invisibly.

These journal entries were direct responses to the perpetrator's attempts to assassinate my character. The drawings are rooted in a specific historical and personal context.

As noted elsewhere in this series, I was forced to revisit numerous emails and text messages while preparing my petition for an Order of Protection. In one email, sent after I fled his violent behavior for a third time and went no contact, the perpetrator referred to himself using the racial slur that appears in this work. During periods when he could no longer physically or emotionally control me, accusations of racism and threats of revenge porn increasingly became tools of intimidation, retaliation, and narrative control.

This work forces a confrontation. The claim becomes so large that it threatens to eclipse the violence, coercive control, and the reasons I ran and obtained an Order of Protection in the first place. This entry does not shrink "racist." It gives it monumental scale. The word fills the entire visual field. It becomes impossible to ignore. "LOVER" and "HATER" labels are dwarfed by the scale of the word. In that sense, I am allowing the accusation to become exactly as large and powerful as it felt in my life. It overwhelms lived experience, identity, context, history, and behavior, becoming an examination of how language, reputation, and accusation can come to dominate a narrative, obscuring the circumstances from which they emerged. The work does not seek to resolve the controversy surrounding the word. The controversy is not incidental to the work but part of its subject matter. The word consumed the page in much the same way the accusation attempted to consume the narrative.

Whether viewers agree with my conclusion is a separate question. But as a strategy, the power of the drawing comes from the fact that I am not trying to make the accusation smaller or safer. I am showing what it felt like when it occupied the entire narrative. Accusations of racism emerged when physical control ended. The perpetrator weaponized race, public perception, shame, social justice language, and threats, at moments when physical control was failing. I am not claiming words are harmless. Quite the opposite—I am acknowledging their power. I am drawing a distinction between the representation of a word in a journal and the lived reality of physical violence, sexual abuse, coercive control, intimidation, and retaliation.

This journal entry emerged from that reality. The work explores the social, historical, and emotional weight carried by one of the most volatile and contested words in the English language. It is a word that has been used to dehumanize, terrorize, divide, and control. It is also a word deeply embedded in American history, including the history of interracial relationships and the hostility often directed toward those who crossed racial boundaries.

With every line, curve, and stroke, I was keenly aware of the word's toxicity, and place in these times and history, as I drew each letter with my Magnum Sharpie. Pressuring each letter to fit, stretch tall and narrow to fill the page, I understood that I was giving form to an accusation that had become part of my lived experience.

The trauma I experienced cannot be reduced to a word drawn on paper. Yet the word itself became part of the mechanism through which intimidation, manipulation, and character assassination were carried out. This journal entry is both a record of that experience and an attempt to understand it. The existence of this work does not erase the circumstances from which it emerged. The violence, coercive control, and abuse remain the foundation upon which this entry was created.

Like much of OOP (ORDER OF PEACE), the work is not about revenge. It is about witness. It is about reclaiming authorship of the narrative, confronting what was used against me, examining it openly, and transforming lived experience into awareness, understanding, and dialogue.

The respondent later used a screenshot of this journal entry against me in court, inadvertently reinforcing one of the central arguments of the work: the accusation became the story.

When physical control was no longer possible, the focus increasingly shifted toward reputation, public perception, character attacks, accusations of racism, and threats of revenge porn. This journal entry examines that dynamic. Ironically, the artwork itself was later pulled into the very mechanism it sought to explore, becoming the subject of litigation and scrutiny. In that sense, the work touched the exact fault line it was intended to examine: how accusations and public narratives can come to eclipse the violence, coercive control, and circumstances from which they emerged.

Coercive Control

Trauma Bonding

A MIRror of DREAD

A MIRror of DREAD