For 24 years now (24!), R. Kelly’s behavior has been as essential to his place in the zeitgeist as his music.

Just hours after Bill Cosby was found guilty of three counts of aggravated indecent assault, his publicists were busy making the media rounds. Publicist Andrew Wyatt called his recent guilty verdict a “public lynching,” and publicist Ebonee Benson invoked the story of Emmett Till—whose accuser, Carolyn Bryant Donham,…

He was my dude, my nigga, my friend. The details of that night are mine to keep, a privacy I allow myself, even as I often openly share my childhood sexual trauma. This particular violation—rape—came at a crossroads in my life. I was figuring out two things: blackness and butchness, and trying hard to do “the most”…

If there’s a takeaway from the revelation of and the reaction to Fabolous’ abuse of Emily Bustamante, his longtime girlfriend and the mother of his two children, it’s that there are no fresh takeaways from it.

He liked me. I liked him back. I exchanged my phone number for his beeper information, and it was a go. In the days of analog communication—before inboxes and DMs—that is what a hookup entailed. His responses to my pages were timely, and he didn’t mind spending countless hours discussing hip-hop. I was digging…

I don’t know about you, but I’m mentally exhausted by the multitude of sexual assault stories surfacing over the last few months—as we should be. Some of the stories shared through the #MeToo movement have triggered a range of emotions and questions; some may have come off as “gray areas.” How do we actually know when…

If there were one word to accurately describe the now-much-discussed piece in which a young woman accuses Aziz Ansari of sexual assault on their first date, it would be “messy.” What’s laid in front of readers is an awkward and, at times, bare account of how the date devolved into a veritable tug-of-war of sexual…

I wanted to kill my boyfriend in ways that let me observe his suffering and return the power in our relationship to my hands.

It seems we can’t go but a few days without hearing about another famous man’s name being linked to sexual harassment allegations. This has led to conversations from well-meaning men who don’t understand the prevalence of the threat of harassment. Well-meaning men have asked everything from the stupid, “Do I need to…

The one thing I keep coming back to when thinking about Louis C.K. now isn’t the bizarre and abusive sexual habits revealed, in detail, last week by the New York Times—repeated forms of sexual misconduct that confirm the long-standing rumors about him and validate platforms such as Gawker, which first reported on this…

Gabrielle Union was raped while working at a Payless shoe store 25 years ago. She bravely details her sexual assault in her new book, We’re Going to Need More Wine. Union has been vocal about her assault since the beginning of her acting career and has become a leading voice for women of color in conversations about…

I am not a religious man by any measure, but there are universal truths to which I adhere. I believe that love is a byproduct of love. I believe that hate made love to an orange, had a petty-ass baby, and that’s how we got the grapefruit. I believe that cats were put on earth to kill things. And I believe the universe…

If you have ever questioned why some women choose not to come forward when they have been sexually assaulted or harassed, here is an example that may help you understand it a little better. A judge in Quebec presiding over a sexual assault trial referred to the victim as being “overweight” and suggested that she may…

One night when I was riding home to New York City’s Brooklyn borough on the C train, an older man started smiling, making kissy faces and, eventually, miming sexual acts at me. I pointedly tried to ignore him as my discomfort grew; there weren’t that many people on the train, and my stop was coming up. The nearest…

The other day, I got a notification on Snapchat that a man I wasn’t sure I knew added me. It said that he had added me by my user name, and his user name looked somewhat familiar, so, thinking it was possible we were already connected via social media, I added him back.

With days left of college, a close friend of mine was drugged at a party.

In May, California Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) introduced a bill that would define “stealthing” as a form of sexual assault, and on Tuesday the state Senate Public Safety Committee advanced the bill while acknowledging that it was unclear whether or how such a law would be enforced.

Editor’s note: Trigger warnings: rape, sexual violence, state violence, anti-blackness. Four police officers in a Paris suburb allegedly raped a 22-year-old black man, and protesters are seeking justice.