Be Best. Be Quiet. Or Be Bankrupted.
For the first half of this year, Melania Trump was doing everything in her power to get me to shut up.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about this. I didn’t know how to talk about it. And if I’m being ******* honest, I’m scared to talk about it right now.
But I’m sick and tired of carrying it around, and I need to put it down.
And watching my ******* feed turn into a propaganda pageant for that self-anointed patron saint of women has exhausted whatever restraint I had left.
If you’ve followed me for a while, you know something was happening earlier this year. I was trying to keep doing my work while worrying about my children, our home, my livelihood, and whether telling you what was happening could cost us everything.
Here’s what I didn’t tell you.
The president and the first lady of the United States of America were threatening to sue me.
Me. A single mother of two in New Jersey.
At first, the letters were about things I’d said about both of them, although mostly her, but over the next several months it became entirely about Melania. She wanted me to retract what I’d said and apologize, and when I wouldn’t, another letter would come, another accusation of defamation, another demand for money I didn’t have, until this woman’s wounded feelings had become something I had to consider every time I thought about my family’s future.
A prominent attorney who wasn’t able to help me told me I should do everything they asked because otherwise they would ruin me.
They would take my home.
And I don’t know how to explain what those words do to you when you’ve already had to rebuild your life from scratch, when the home somebody is telling you to be afraid of losing is the place you made out of everything you managed to save of yourself. There wasn’t some other fortune underneath us. There was this house, my work, and two children who depended on me to make it enough.
I cried every day for months, but I kept going because I had to keep going, because I didn’t have a choice, because my kids need me and their lives don’t stop to indulge two petulant narcissists who can’t stomach being criticized. There’s still dinner and soccer and baseball and laundry and life—the life I’ve worked so hard to make ordinary for them. They get to have that. They get to need things and forget things and go on being children without having to make room for whatever the first lady thinks she’s entitled to take out of their mother.
And I never told them. They still don’t know.
I didn’t want to scare them, didn’t want to give them a reason to look around their own home and wonder whether they would get to keep it, so I kept it from them, even as this constant background noise ran underneath everything else: two of the most powerful people in the world, with all their money and lawyers and access to the levers of power, had targeted me.
My livelihood. My family. The life I was right there in the middle of trying to live. And I couldn’t make the enormity of that fit with how ordinary we were, how little we had to spare, how much damage they could do without it costing them anything they would miss.
She was swinging a ******* wrecking ball at a mosquito, and my children lived in the building.
For months, I told only the people closest to me and some incredible, heroic human beings—elected officials, people you might recognize from television—who showed up when I needed help. I sat on the rest because I was scared, and I hate that for me, but I ******* hate it for my country, too. I was afraid to tell you what the president and first lady were doing because I didn’t know what telling you might make them do next.
She never had to set foot in our house to make her presence felt in every room.
That’s the brutal, grotesque, ******* disgraceful truth.
And let’s be clear about what I do: I have never intentionally lied about her. When I’m talking about what these people say and do, I’m working from my understanding of the truth, what I can see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears. But a hell of a lot of my work is mockery and ridicule, because I’m a satirist and they’re public figures, and I have a right to point at the ridiculous ******* spectacle they’re making of this country and laugh.
They don’t have to like it. That couture-clad, cash-cushioned control freak was trying to turn free speech into a luxury item and price me out of my own ******* voice.
I don’t need to make **** up. With these two, the problem has never been a shortage of material.
Matt Platkin, New Jersey’s former attorney general, helped me for free, spending hours on the phone with me, giving his time and expertise at considerable personal cost, shepherding me through something I could never have begun to navigate alone. And he listened to me. He advised, explained, helped me understand what I was facing, but the decisions stayed mine. I still cry when I think about the sheer luck of somebody that good showing up in the middle of something that ugly, when I needed help I couldn’t afford and didn’t know how to find.
He’s an extraordinary ******* human being, and I owe him in ways I’ll never be able to adequately express, let alone repay.
Having him beside me felt like somebody putting a hand beneath a box I’d been holding so long my arms had started to shake. I still had to decide where to go with it, but I could finally take a breath without being afraid I’d drop everything. I kept returning to Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in On Tyranny: “Do not obey in advance.”
I wouldn’t comply. I wouldn’t capitulate. I wouldn’t cave.
That thin-skinned, trophy-wife tyrant wanted me on my hands and knees begging forgiveness for something I hadn’t done wrong, and every refusal brought more pressure. I was told, more than once, that I needed to do what other people had done, retract and apologize, or risk losing everything.
And Jesus Christ, I understand why people do it. I know what it feels like to weigh your refusal against the roof over your children’s heads. But I also know how a bully takes the inch you give them and starts measuring for the rest of your life, how the apology you hope will buy you peace becomes something they wave at the next person who resists.
She wanted an apology she could mount like a hunting trophy, something to point at when the next woman needed reminding of what happens when you open your mouth.
I wasn’t going on that ******* wall.
So I kept doing my work, and she never got what she wanted from me. I guess it got boring for her, because at some point the emails stopped, the letters stopped, the phone calls stopped. The silence felt like a smoke alarm shutting off before anybody had told me whether the fire was out. I don’t know what changed on her end. I know I hadn’t changed my answer.
She went away right around the time she gave that weird-ass statement about Jeffrey Epstein, that press conference that wasn’t a press conference, and read off the names of people who had retracted and apologized.
Mine wasn’t among them.
Matt advised me against going public after they’d backed off, and I understood why: their silence came with no promise that they wouldn’t start again. I’d kept criticizing her through all of it, but revealing THIS story meant opening the closet where I’d shoved that ****-flinging bogeyman and finding out whether it had gone away or simply been waiting for my hand to close around the ******* handle. And after months of trying to protect my children from something they didn’t even know was happening, I wanted so badly to believe we were done that I left the door alone.
But for the last week and a half, my feed has been full of Melania Trump on Fox, promoting some ******* seminar about empowering women as though the rest of us can’t remember anything that happened before her last wardrobe change.
She’s for women’s empowerment, and I’m a ******* natural blonde.
And I’m watching this woman congratulate herself while remembering what it felt like to open those letters, to hear that I could lose my home, to cry and then pull myself together because my children needed something and they couldn’t know what was wrong.
I was a woman trying to support her family with her work, and she wanted to make continuing that work so frightening, so expensive, that I would do whatever she asked just to make it stop. Now she gets to go on television and tell other women to believe in themselves?
**** you, Melania. I believed in myself enough to tell you no, and you kept coming.
That’s why I’m telling this now. I’ve already spent years helping somebody look good by swallowing what they did to me, and I know how much of yourself disappears while you’re making sure nobody sees an unflattering side of them. I’m not doing that for her. She can explain how threatening a mother’s livelihood fits into her ******* seminar.
And all this talk about how focused she is on helping the American people—Jesus Christ, you would think she had more pressing concerns than what a single mom in New Jersey was saying about her on Twitter. But she found time for me, and she really, REALLY didn’t like it when I made fun of her for being robotic, especially around the time they brought actual robots into the White House.
The material came with ******* wheels, Melania. What did you expect me to do?
In case anybody wanted some free advice on which buttons to push.
A women’s empowerment seminar from her is a bear trap with a ******* gift bow. That Fox-fluffed faux-feminist fraud wants applause for telling women to find their voices after trying to make using mine cost me the roof over my children’s heads, and I’m supposed to admire the ribbon without mentioning the teeth. You don’t get to sell women the courage to stand up for themselves while trying to ruin the ones who stand up to you.
Her enthusiasm for women speaking up ends the second one of us makes her the punch line. Authoritarians hate mockery, and she and her meal ticket are no exception. They expect us to handle their egos like borrowed Waterford, to tiptoe through our own country apologizing every time one of these vainglorious assholes hears a clink.
And spare me the story about that Be Besting birther bitch being some helpless captive. She isn’t Rapunzel. She’s charging admission to the ******* tower. She knows who he is, supports him, and benefits from every bit of it. Save your sympathy for women trying to escape men like him; she tried to silence one.
And while she was doing that, you were here, surrounding me with love even though all you knew was that something was wrong. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you more while it was happening. The honest-to-God truth is that I was afraid. Every time I considered going public, I thought about what it might mean for my children if I made things worse, and I didn’t know how to get past that. You kept showing up for me anyway, letting me bring whatever I could put into words without demanding the rest. I spend so much of my life trying to find something funny, something useful, something that might help somebody else get through the day, and during those months, you were helping me get through mine.
Your kindness came through like light beneath a closed door; you didn’t need to see the whole room to make it less dark.
I’ve written about the things I’ve survived, about what bullies can take from you and what it costs to get yourself back. Donald and Melania Trump are the biggest ******* bullies on the planet, but I know their kind.
There was the Halloween I stood on the blacktop in my Hefty bag witch costume while kids called me the “Hefty bag hag,” my face burning, tears gathering in my throat, and I smiled anyway. They’d had their fun with the costume. I wasn’t handing them my tears to play with, too.
And there was my first day at a new school, when a boy stepped on the brand-new white high-tops I was so proud of and I punched him in the nose, right in front of the principal. I didn’t give a ****. He never bullied me again.
For so much of my life, I was that girl—the one who stood there and smiled, who swung back, who didn’t assume the biggest asshole in the room got to make the rules. But somewhere along the way, she was whittled down to something brittle and afraid, and I learned to swallow whatever I was about to say before it could upset somebody else’s ego. I learned to keep up appearances, to make the adjustments, to accept a smaller and smaller version of myself as the price of getting through the day.
Nice girls stay quiet. Nice girls shut up.
And I did, until there was so little of me in my own life that I didn’t think I wanted to live it anymore. I have a scar on my upper lip, one small place where the past still shows through, but there is so much you wouldn’t know by looking at me. I’ve been punched in the face, kicked in the stomach, strangled, and I wish I could reach back through those years and put my arms around the woman who kept making herself smaller, as though there were some version of her small enough to be safe. I know how far inside somebody else’s control you can get before you realize you’ve been negotiating for your own oxygen.
I spent years living like a tenant in my own skin, asking permission to feel at home in it. Getting out meant learning to trust my own judgment again, finding the voice I’d spent so long treating as something that would get me in trouble, and remembering that somebody being angry with me wasn’t proof that I’d done something wrong.
That girl found her way back, and for the better part of the last decade, she’s had a ******* microphone. I use it because I care about the country my children will inherit, because they deserve more than instructions on how to stay out of a bully’s way. I didn’t fight that hard to hear myself again just to let her sit there with her hand on the ******* volume knob.
I’m 52. I don’t know how many years I have left on this rock, but I know there are whole stretches of my life I can never get back—years I paid out in little installments of silence so somebody else could keep feeling powerful. What’s left belongs to me and the people I love, and I’ll be goddamned if some malevolent bitch in Manolos thinks she gets to collect another ******* minute.
So let them come. Let them threaten me again.
It means I’m over the target. It means I’m hitting a nerve. It means all that money and all that power still can’t make a single mother in New Jersey shut her ******* mouth.
And they’d better get used to it.
Because I am never, EVER going to stop.
***
I love you guys! I mean that from the bottom of my heart! I wouldn’t have been able to get through this year without you.
Stay safe out there, stay strong, and stay connected to each other. You mean more than you’ll ever know.
💙 Jo
