The Most Disrespected, Unprotected, and Neglected Person In America Is the Black Woman

Doechii, Cassie, Halle Bailey, Megan Thee Stallion, and Angel Reese do not share a lawsuit, but they share the burden of a gaze that scrutinizes their scars more than their assailants’ actions.

Our love extends to Andre Gee, who also wrote something similar to this column we’re about to discuss.

Trigger warning: This story contains mentions of domestic violence and sexual abuse. We encourage you to reach out to The National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-SAFE (7233) or https://www.thehotline.org) if you experience or see domestic abuse.

Black women warned us—Malcolm X did, too—that their pain is routinely discounted in the American public square, a call first sounded in his 1962 Los Angeles address and still distressingly current today. This year, four seemingly separate flashpoints—Doechii enduring a streamer’s public tirade after her Met Gala debut, Cassie Ventura reliving a decade of abuse while testifying in Sean “Diddy” Combs’s federal trafficking trial, Halle Bailey seeking a restraining order to shield herself and her infant from alleged domestic violence, Megan Thee Stallion battling fresh waves of harassment even after Tory Lanez’s conviction and recent prison stabbing, and Chicago Sky’s Angel Reese became the target of racist slurs from Fever fans, prompting a WNBA investigation on the very night she was mocked on social media as “classless” for a hard playoff foul against Caitlin Clark—have converged to expose the particular blend of racism and misogyny that communication scholar Moya Bailey long ago named “misogynoir.” Taken together, these events chart a single pattern: when Black women speak of harm, the institutions that should protect them instead sift their words for inconsistencies, amplify narratives of their supposed complicity, and ultimately re-center male power, leaving the women at the story’s core bruised by both violence and disbelief.

Misogynoir is more than a portmanteau; it is an operating system for a public sphere still calibrated to distrust Black women. Bailey coined the term in a 2010 blog post to capture how racialized gender stereotypes—the angry Black woman, the hyper-sexual Jezebel, the invulnerable matriarch—fuse with misogyny to shape coverage, commentary, and policy. In mainstream media, these stereotypes translate into a toxic evidentiary standard: Black women must furnish proof of harm in volumes that would overwhelm any legal archive, yet even satisfying that burden rarely secures unquestioned belief. The result is a persistent choreography in which survivors are forced to narrate their own woundings on repeat, as if recital alone could coax empathy from systems designed to invalidate them.

Doechii (Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris via Getty Images)

Doechii’s collision with livestream culture illustrates how swiftly misogynoir metastasizes online. Minutes before stepping onto the 2025 Met Gala carpet, she was filmed barking for “four fucking umbrellas” to keep photographers from stealing an early look at her Pharrell-designed Louis Vuitton ensemble. The short clip, uploaded to TikTok, sparked predictable chatter about diva tantrums, but the outrage escalated when Adin Ross, newly unbanned from Twitch and chasing viral friction, broadcast a profanity-laced monologue branding her “entitled,” “unintelligent,” and “talentless.” Ross’s rant pinged across YouTube re-uploads, Instagram reels, and Reddit threads, each repetition sharpening the racist edge—commenters sniped that she was “an industry plant” whose only skill was “yelling at staff.” Doechii responded with a wry TikTok—“God forbid a girl needs more umbrellas”—but her levity became fresh fodder for critics, who were certain that a Black woman displaying anxiety at fashion’s most surveilled event was unforgivable arrogance.

Strip away the gloss of influencer spats and the fault-line is clear: a young Black artist’s moment of vulnerability is reframed as proof of innate unworthiness. Ross’s language—“zero talent,” “entitled brat”—draws on the centuries-old notion that Black women must earn public respect by performing deference; any slip, even the rush of Met Gala chaos, invites open season. Because livestream platforms thrive on provocation, Ross’s invective was not merely opinion but content—clips monetized through advertising, algorithmically boosted by outrage, and preserved in endless circulation long after apologies would fade. The digital marketplace thus transposes misogynoir into profit: humiliation becomes a revenue stream, and the woman at the center cannot log off from her own denigration.

Across the continent, Cassie Ventura’s ordeal unfolded not in thirteen-second clips but in four full days of testimony. On the witness stand, she described “freak-offs,” beatings, and a 2016 hotel assault caught on surveillance video, narrating how Combs allegedly drugged and filmed her with other men while she pleaded to stop. Combs’s lawyers countered with a familiar script, pointing to text messages and a 2023 civil settlement to suggest that Ventura was a willing participant who later sought a payout. She answered that compliance under threat is not consent and offered to forfeit the settlement if it would erase the trauma. Yet, headlines lingered on seized sex toys and cash stacks, draping her allegations in voyeuristic titillation that risks eclipsing the core charge: a decade-long pattern of coercive control enabled by wealth and celebrity. Even in federal court, where evidence is sworn and stakes are life-sentence high, a Black woman’s credibility is still tried in the court of public spectacle.

The same spectacle shadows Cassie outside the courthouse. Social feeds swarm with men defending Combs as the genius who “made her a star,” insisting that her grievances amount to career-killing ingratitude. Alongside them, thousands of users share memes that splice courtroom sketches with old music-video clips, reimagining the violence as pop-culture trivia. The undertow is misogynoir’s most durable theme: a Black woman’s suffering rendered secondary to preserving the myth of a powerful Black man, lest white society seize on his downfall as racial indictment. Cassie must therefore argue her humanity on two fronts—against her alleged abuser and the fear, voiced even by supporters, that believing her might hand ammunition to racist caricature.

Halle Bailey’s petition for protection exposes a parallel dilemma. A Los Angeles judge granted a temporary restraining order after Bailey alleged that former partner Darryl “DDG” Granberry slammed her face into a steering wheel, broke into her home, and incited followers to threaten her online. Court documents detail chipped teeth, destroyed property, and fears for their 17-month-old son—allegations that in any other context would provoke unanimous concern. Instead, Twitter spaces and YouTube commentary quickly framed the order as calculated drama ahead of Bailey’s next single, suggesting she “weaponized” the courts for content. In this inversion, preserving an R&B princess’s public image becomes her own responsibility; the man’s alleged violence slips offstage while users dissect whether her wording was “too scripted.” That shift from actions to optics is misogynoir in real time. The urgent plea for safety flattened into a referendum on market strategy.

Online disbelief also endangers Bailey materially. She told the court that DDG’s fans, emboldened by his streams, bombard her social accounts with threats; even granting a finalized five-year order in June may do little to restrain digital affiliates operating beyond jurisdiction. Thus, the protective order, society’s standard remedy, feels provisional—an official stamp that does not stop the scroll of hostility. The gap between legal recognition and lived security resonates across all four stories. Black women may secure court orders, verdicts, or settlements, yet still navigate a culture that continually re-litigates their worthiness day after day.

No case demonstrates persistence more than Megan Thee Stallion’s. Tory Lanez is serving ten years for shooting her in 2020, but on May 12, he was air-lifted to the hospital after being stabbed fourteen times at California Correctional Institution. Within hours, the nonprofit Unite the People held a press conference floating a new affidavit that blamed Megan’s former friend Kelsey Harris, an affidavit not filed in any court. Lanez’s supporters amplified the claim through a Change.org petition urging Governor Gavin Newsom to pardon him, a petition that Drake reposted with the caption “come home soon,” which was soon joined by Kodak Black, Joyner Lucas, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie, and others. By Friday, the petition topped 160,000 signatures, its momentum fed by screenshots rather than new evidence.

What the petition lacks in legal substance, it gains in symbolic weight. Each celebrity’s repost signals that a Black woman’s corroborated trauma remains negotiable if enough men insist on her unreliability. Lanez’s appellate team promises “missing forensic data,” yet California’s attorney general confirms no such filing exists. Meanwhile, Megan’s lawyers, weary of smear campaigns describing her as a lying “bitch,” secured a five-year restraining order in January, citing “psychological warfare” orchestrated from prison via bloggers and influencers. Still, she watches the narrative reboot every time a larger platform lends it oxygen; her public silence counts against her, her statements are parsed for shady motive, and the crime for which a jury convicted Lanez remains, in pockets of the culture, an open question.

Angel Reese’s week illustrates misogynoir in sports’ most lucrative growth market. In her first pro matchup against rival Caitlin Clark, Reese absorbed a flagrant foul, a 35-point blowout, and then racist taunts from Fever fans—slurs loud enough that the Chicago Sky and Indiana Fever lodged an official complaint. The WNBA invoked its “No Space for Hate” protocol and opened an investigation, yet league social feeds the same night amplified jokes calling Reese “classless” for fouling a white star during garbage time. Those jeers echo last year’s viral outrage over her NCAA taunt; the policing of a Black woman’s competitive swagger while the identical gesture earns a white peer Wheaties endorsements. Sports-media scholars already flagged the WNBA’s bump in viewership as correlated with a spike in misogynoir, noting that Reese, Chennedy Carter, and DiJonai Carrington receive disproportionate online death threats compared with white teammates. Racist heckling from the stands simply migrated digital contempt back into physical space, underscoring how seamlessly the hostile script jumps platforms.

Across these five stories, the choreography remains largely consistent. A Black woman asserts harm; male power marshals money, platforms, or fan armies to dispute her account; the media frames the conflict as spectacle; and the woman’s credibility is placed on trial anew. Misogynoir thrives on repetition: each new case resets the evidentiary bar higher, conditioning audiences to believe that certainty is forever out of reach. Yet the facts are already on the record—Cassie’s sworn testimony, Halle’s documented injuries, Megan’s jury verdict, Reese’s unwarranted racism, Doechii’s real-time humiliation. Treating those facts as provisional is not journalistic skepticism, but it’s a cultural reflex that keeps Black women in a perpetual audition for empathy. The Abuse and Misogynoir Playbook thrives because each participant profits where platforms gain engagement, defendants gain plausible deniability, and bystanders gain vicarious thrills.

If there is an antidote, it begins with refusing to monetize Black women’s pain, refusing to elevate spurious “evidence” for clicks, and refusing to let celebrity allegiance outrank documented harm. It requires newsrooms to foreground the woman’s humanity rather than the man’s brand; it requires courts to recognize cyber-harassment as a continuation of violence, not a parallel discourse; it requires audiences to interrogate why a livestreamer’s racist invective sounds merely “edgy” until a Black woman’s dignity lies in shards. And the wounds catalogued this spring will be reread, repackaged, and resold the next time they dare to speak.

Until those refusals take root, Malcolm X’s grim diagnosis will remain accurate, and the most disrespected, unprotected, and neglected person in America will continue to be the Black woman.