by Alana Massey
In Paul Burrell’s memoir of his time as Diana’s employee and confidant, The Way We Were, he recalls how Diana filled a trash bag with a Prince of Wales china set and smashed it with a hammer in a fit of symbolic and real destruction of her marriage. “Let’s spend a bit more of his money while we can!” she had said gleefully in the days after her divorce, which netted her a lump sum of $26 million, in addition to a yearly allowance of $625,000 for her office.1 Armed with a freer schedule and a sexier wardrobe, Diana had a Vanity Fair photo shoot with Mario Testino scheduled. “With her unerring sense of the dramatic, Diana timed Testino’s stunning shoot to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair on the first anniversary of her divorce,” Tina Brown would later report in The Diana Chronicles.2
What all three of these women also share in common, beyond their early deaths, is a legacy of having encroached on the territory of men in their romantic dealings. Like Diana, Lisa earned a legacy as a crazy ex-girlfriend after she famously burned down the house of her boyfriend Andre Rison. Lisa died at thirty, just five years younger than Diana was at the time of her death. Dying at twenty-two, Aaliyah was the true baby of this trio of women killed in accidents over a five-year period in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Aaliyah is blessedly not remembered as much for her romantic relationships as for her music, but a now infamous marriage certificate for her nuptials to producer and R & B artist R. Kelly remains a thorn in the side of the predatory performer. The document reveals that Kelly married a then fifteen-year-old Aaliyah, a damning piece of physical evidence that he is a sexual predator targeting young women—more than even in the single incident featured in a tape recording of him sexually assaulting a teen. Whether she meant him any ill or not is unknown, but Aaliyah’s beautiful and quiet ghost undoubtedly hovers over Kelly’s reputation in the ink reporting the lie that Aaliyah was eighteen rather than fifteen at the time of the marriage. That she thrived even in the aftermath of that entanglement was its own kind of revenge. Aaliyah’s steely-eyed success and courage were not as pronounced as the intentional vengeance of Diana, and Lisa’s and Diana’s “baby girl” credibility is less sturdy than Aaliyah’s, but there is a connective tissue among the three. They are bonded by an attitude that said, “I am not the kind of bitch you can sleep on.”
“Bitches be crazy” has become modern shorthand for “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” This line itself is a paraphrase of “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorned.” Like its predecessors, it is a statement that seemed to be reclaimed ironically by women at almost the exact moment that it entered the vernacular as a way to disparage them. This line is repeated more often by a sage and mercenary woman, both in fiction and in reality, than it is by a man trying to insult one. It is a wink, an exaggerated shrug of the shoulders that women communicate preemptively, a shield against the accusation that their behavior is inherently irrational compared to that of men. The sentiment is ancient, of course. The Furies of Greek mythology who enact often merciless vengeance are all female. Herodias had her daughter Salome demand the head of John the Baptist for a slight against her marriage. Shakespeare’s Beatrice goes straight to suggestions of assassination when a man questions the chastity of her dear friend.
I was subjected to several stories of crazy ex-girlfriends and wives long before I became one. With what I would later realize was pathological patience, I listened to tedious and obvious revisions of relationship histories time and again from strip club customers or men who rebounded with me. In several ill-advised instances, they were a combination of both. I would reply with gentle but neutral responses like, “Well, it is for the best, then, that you two are not together,” or “I bet you’re happy that she’s not your girlfriend anymore.” When cushioned by a woman’s smile and touch, these vacant replies sounded like sympathy. More than once I’ve been asked what I would say to the many wives and girlfriends whose men I had stripped for if I were faced with them. And though I reject the notion that I owe them any explanation or penance, if I wanted them to know something it would be this: I was taking his money and your side every time.
As a late bloomer in long-term relationships, I did not have the pleasure of being identified as a crazy ex-girlfriend until I was twenty-nine years old. By then I had already cultivated a worldview that elevated such women to hero status the moment the words escaped the lips of a man. I decided that being called “crazy” by a man was not an insult but a challenge. It gives the woman an opportunity to say, “Crazy? Oh, I’ll show you fucking crazy.” I was raised on a hearty media diet of women “going crazy” on the men in their lives and found it brimming with inspiration. It is in witnessing such women enacting revenge that I’ve come to see “Bitches be crazy” as less a statement by men that women are crazy or even a reappropriated statement by women defending their own madness. Instead, I see the phrase and imagine a colon after “bitches,” rendering it a command to other women, a battle cry. It is a way of saying, “We took back ‘bitch’ already. And now we have come for ‘crazy.’”
In the thick catalog of women who have been dismissed as crazy exes, there are a few standouts whose actions and subsequent treatment by media and in the public memory merit particular attention. Lorena Bobbitt was a private citizen until she cut off her husband John’s penis and threw it out a car window in 1993. Her name remains shorthand for the cruelest and most truly deranged revenge. Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes allegedly burned down Rison’s mansion after he failed to buy her a pair of sneakers on his own shopping spree. Taylor Swift shamelessly built an empire out of snitching on ex-boyfriends like Harry Styles and John Mayer, and she is hardly the first.
A knife-wielding nag. A greedy arsonist. A jealous trophy wife losing her shine. A childish, petty country girl. The public consciousness has effectively trapped these women inside their breaking points. These moments are told as the beginning, middle, and end of the stories we tell about them: isolated incidents in an otherwise serene, rational world. We like to define them with a single, larger-than-life anecdote rather than within the context of a relationship story. We like our ex-girlfriends and ex-wives one-dimensional. We like them to act alone. It is a function of both misogyny and fear to erase the men at the receiving end of these actions. In this, they become stand-ins for every man who might fall victim to the dormant madness that lies just beneath the surface of even the most collected of women.
If we began the story of Lorena Bobbitt during the years in which she endured physical, verbal, and sexual abuse at John’s hands, it would be far less fun to reduce her to the trope of the nagging wife gone mad or to an artless dick joke. But before Lorena Bobbitt was a national punch line, she was the twenty-four-year-old immigrant wife of a man named John Bobbitt, who she claimed raped and beat her constantly. In court, he could not have kept his story together if he’d had a stick of glue for the pieces, which helped Lorena avoid conviction. Though John was never convicted of raping Lorena, he would later be convicted of domestic violence and be divorced three times in under twenty years.3
Recognizing Lorena as more than a joke would also require that we acknowledge the reality that rational women can and will do violence to men. We punish such women not because they have crossed the mental border from sanity into madness but because they have crossed a gender barrier from being the object of violence to being the perpetrator of it. When men harm women’s bodies, we consider it an upsetting but inevitable result of the natural order. A thousand evolutionary psychologists doubling as apologists for violent men emerge from the woodwork to defend men’s actions. All that testosterone, et cetera. And when women like Bobbitt retaliate, even those women who are fluent in the language of male domination will say that violence is never the answer. But when a woman is raped repeatedly by a man, cutting off his penis is not so much an act of revenge as an act of self-defense. She eliminated the weapon to eliminate its potential to inflict more wounds.
The treatment to which Lopes may h
ave been subjected at the hands of Andre Rison is similarly left as an aside to the story of her burning down his multimillion-dollar home in Atlanta. One story persists that she was angry because he did not buy her a pair of sneakers when he went shopping for himself, while another claims that she burned a bathtub full of teddy bears. The story that Lopes eventually told Sister 2 Sister magazine maintains that while both of these details make an appearance, the fire was hardly a case of calculated, petty arson. According to her version of events, the night of the fire was the culmination of years of Rison’s possessiveness over Lopes despite being unfaithful and Lopes’s finally reacting to his hypocrisy. Rison went so far as to demand that she never go barefoot in her own home if there was company around and that she mostly stay home at night when she wasn’t on tour.4
Lopes said she decided to go out with girlfriends as a statement of independence, and Rison became enraged upon arriving home with several friends and seeing Lopes wearing a dress as opposed to her typical baggy clothes. Rison declared her “naked” and began ripping at her dress. “He never balled his fist up and socked me in the face. A lot of pushing, pulling, and knocking me down. He knocked me down a few times, where my head would hit the floor,” Lopes responded when asked how physical their altercation became.5
When two men began fighting, Lopes’s uncle pulled her away and she retreated to her bedroom, where she found twenty new pairs of sneakers, none of them in her size. She set several pairs on fire in the replacement bathtub that Rison had installed following a previous fight in which Lisa set several teddy bears ablaze after she caught him cheating. She said she did not realize that the new tub was plastic and unable to contain the flames, and the fire quickly spread through the rest of the house. “My vision was so blurry, I just remember: ‘You crazy bitch, you! Fuck you! Blah, blah, blah. You’re crazy,’” Lisa recalled Rison’s brother saying as they evacuated the house. Rison’s friends then immediately went about smashing Lisa’s car windows with pipes. She replied in kind by smashing the windows of his Mercedes-Benz and his truck.6 Yet, even with the enormousness of her talent as a member of TLC and the fraught dynamic of her relationship with Rison, Lisa is still best remembered as an arsonist.
Two decades later, I wondered if the finale of Taylor Swift’s music video for the 2014 hit “Blank Space,” in which she sets her lover’s mansion ablaze in a jealous rage, was a nod to Lopes. “Got a long list of ex-lovers / They’ll tell you I’m insane,” she lilts in what would become the second-most-viewed video of all time on YouTube. The song and video are satirical takes on the media’s treatment of Taylor as the model of the embittered, crazy ex-girlfriend and is largely responsible for 2014’s being declared “The Year of the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” by Pitchfork.7 But it was a slow climb to that reclamation.
“Taylor Swift is a nutcase,” Harvey Levin said of Swift’s alleged propensity to buy property near her lovers in Vanity Fair in 2013.8 “Her career depends on her getting laid and having her heart broken. That’s what 99% of her songs are about. If we don’t know who she’s sleeping with, what else is there to really know about her? It’s practically her job to always be in love with someone,” wrote Ryan O’Connell on Thought Catalog in 2012.9 Such statements litter the media coverage of Swift in her first few years as a pop singer, prompting first the question “Who the fuck are those dudes?” followed quickly by “What the fuck else do people write songs about if not who they’re banging and having break their hearts?” Men certainly write on similar themes without being identified as insane.
Musician John Mayer owes much of his career to singing about heartbreak and famously wrote “Your Body Is a Wonderland” about onetime lover Jennifer Love Hewitt long before Taylor Swift was a household name. But Mayer told Rolling Stone in 2012 that he was “humiliated” by the song “Dear John” that Taylor wrote about him, which includes such damning lyrics as “Don’t you think nineteen’s too young to be played by your dark twisted games?” in reference to her age when they dated. “I will say as a songwriter that I think it’s kind of cheap songwriting,” he told the magazine two years after “Dear John” was released.10 He would turn around and release the least thinly veiled response track, “Paper Doll,” the following year. To date, however, he has not addressed whether or not nineteen is indeed too young to be played by his twisted games. Mayer is not the only ex who has let Taylor’s success as a professional ex-girlfriend get under his skin. After nearly three years apart, even Taylor’s fairly private ex Harry Styles of One Direction penned the lyrics, “If you’re looking for someone to write your breakup songs about, then baby I’m perfect,” on the 2015 single “Perfect.”
The ascent of Taylor Swift and the reclamation of the “crazy ex-girlfriend” moniker as a term of power are indeed triumphs for women who have been unfairly labeled insane for even the slightest act of retribution. But she is not the quintessential crazy ex-girlfriend. Her particular madness is something most of us can relate to. We, too, have fantasized about the public humiliation of our exes and building reputations and fortunes out of the slights they have visited upon us. These types of “crazy” all seem so pedestrian when compared to the more substantial forms of retribution visited upon deserving husbands and lovers. It is a madness characterized not by brazen outbursts but by calculated silence. Their cunning and ability to play the long game to get what they want goes undetected. Their patience is formidable and their fortunes end up far more vast and real than the momentary pleasure of their ex’s humiliation. But first, a close runner-up in the insane ex hall of fame: the espionage ex.
“I’ll put you in a fucking rose garden, you cunt! You understand that? Because I’m capable of it. You understand that?” are among the more terrifying words that Mel Gibson had for his ex-wife Oksana Grigorieva in a 2010 phone call she recorded. During the call, he more or less admits to hitting her while she held their baby. Grigorieva recorded several conversations with Gibson, each one riddled with racial slurs and sexually violent degradations he fantasized about visiting upon her during the prolonged ending of their relationship. Gibson accused Grigorieva of editing the tapes and he pleaded for the public to understand the context of his anger, as though threatening murder and vocalizing gang rape fantasies is part and parcel of a typical breakup.11 Many commentators agreed with Gibson and derided Grigorieva as an opportunist and a sexual manipulator. She was branded as the deeply loathed type of crazy ex-girlfriend concocted in the minds of men who believe that the mere fact of being a sexually desirable woman is a hostile act against men.
“Who anticipates being recorded? Who anticipates that? Who could anticipate such a personal betrayal?” Gibson would ask the following year in an interview with Deadline Hollywood.12 The answer, of course, is a woman who knows that her word and even her wounds might be insufficient evidence at trial. A more reflective question might consider who anticipates having their safety threatened by someone they love. But Mel Gibson apparently had little time for logic or empathy. He would go on to plead no contest to a battery charge against Grigorieva, who was awarded a $750,000 settlement and a house to live in until their daughter turned eighteen. It was a paltry settlement compared to the size of Gibson’s fortunes and an anticlimactic ending to the chaos of the preceding years. Throughout this turmoil, Mel Gibson’s first wife lingered quietly off the radar.
Robyn Moore has a face that is familiar but difficult to place on its own. Few people would recognize her in a photograph if she was not standing next to Mel, the man to whom she was married for thirty-one years and with whom she had seven children. Mel Gibson enjoyed decades as a Hollywood favorite, accruing a massive fortune and a firmly rooted position on the A-list. That image began to fall apart after he was recorded spewing misogyny and anti-Semitism during a DUI arrest in 2006.13 During the rant, he famously blamed all of the world’s troubles on Jews and called a female officer “Sugar Tits.” He then appealed to his own power when he sneered, “I own Malibu… I am going to fuck you.” When news surfaced tha
t he’d had two previous encounters with law enforcement that were dismissed by local police, it became clear that this was not a sad one-off but the case of a man accustomed to getting what he wanted and raising hell if it was not given to him.14 He and Moore quietly separated after the incident, the emphasis on quiet belonging to Robyn entirely, as Mel made the media rounds apologizing and excusing his behavior.
Though many were shocked by the recording, Mel’s bigotry and the cheap shots and bullying in which it manifested were not well-kept secrets so much as they were tolerated truths. In 1991, he made homophobic comments that were printed in the Spanish newspaper El País, pointing at his own ass and saying, “This is only for taking a shit.”15 Four years later, after considerable time for reflection, he told Playboy that he would apologize for this and other comments, “when hell freezes over.”16 When Frank Rich at the New York Times gave The Passion of the Christ a negative review, Mel said he wanted to have Rich’s intestines on a stick and to kill the man’s dog.17 Yet Moore stood by her man throughout this time, smiling on red carpets and presumably running an impeccable household. After three years of separation, Robyn filed for divorce when news of Grigorieva’s pregnancy became public in 2009.
From the outside, it appears to have all been a quiet, dignified proceeding. Moore has been a paragon of silence except in one instance where she signed a sworn statement, declaring that Gibson had never abused her or their children during their marriage, that was presented in proceedings for Grigorieva’s case against Gibson.18 During their own divorce, Gibson and Moore made joint statements about maintaining their family’s privacy and integrity in a difficult time, but the final judgment was certainly a blow to Mel Gibson’s finances. Robyn walked away with $425 million, half of her ex-husband’s fortunes, making it the largest divorce settlement in Hollywood history. Robyn is also entitled to half the film residuals Mel Gibson earns for the rest of his life on films made during their marriage.19 Once the divorce settlement was finalized, mentions of Robyn vanished almost entirely from news media.