Why #MeToo didn’t stop Diddy

Close your eyes and imagine yourself back in 2018. Bill Cosby has been found guilty of sexual assault. At his confirmation hearing, Brett Kavanaugh faces a grilling about allegations of the same. Charlie Rose is out at CBS and Aziz Ansari disappears into the shadows after similar accusations from named and anonymous sources.

Now, with your imagination still in 2018, imagine that one of the biggest names in entertainment has been accused by a fellow celebrity of the most depraved kinds of sexual acts. Imagine that there is video footage of the accused ruthlessly beating women who try to escape his clutches. Envision that this powerful man admits to hiring prostitutes to perform degrading sexual theater with his friends and partners, and to filming it.

And there are no hashtags, no activism, no searing op-eds about it. There is no social media uprising. There is no organized campaign to remove this man from public life. News wires update America from his trial, but there is hardly a ripple in the public consciousness.

A lucid imagination would have rejected this last scenario as laughingly implausible. And yet, this isn’t a hypothetical. This is the reality of 2025 and the trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs.

What Combs is accused of, primarily by a former girlfriend and business partner, is the stuff of #MeToo fever dreams. Emerging from FBI investigations and courtroom testimonies is a picture of an unimaginably powerful entertainment mogul who knows almost no bounds to his sexual appetite and who does not and will not take “no” for an answer. Everything that drove the engine of grassroots justice against arrogant and predatorial men is present in the Combs saga.

But you’d hardly know this. Combs and his “freak offs” are not the subject of intense gender discourse the way that Kavanaugh’s and Charlie Rose’s alleged actions were. In fact, there is no evidence that the late 2010s cultural scrutiny on the sexual entitlement of powerful men did anything to thwart or slow Combs. His humiliating sex parties continued apace while the worlds of journalism and activism weighed the conversations and text messages of many others for their own misdemeanors.

Why couldn’t #MeToo stop him?

Diddy’s case illustrates how #MeToo’s feeble foundations doomed it to impotence. From the get-go, the movement was so preoccupied with the perceived political implications of its activism that it simply declined to pursue robust justice in the cause of sexual abuse. The very public case between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard revealed a thoroughly dysfunctional relationship—but also highlighted Heard’s sly manipulation of #MeToo sentiment and the degree to which late 2010’s activism uncritically accepted questionable allegations.

More importantly, within #MeToo there has been an unwillingness to confront the materialism and careerism that made victims willing to offer themselves. Cassie Ventura, the ex-girlfriend, whistleblower, and chief witness against Combs, acknowledges that she returned to him even after a series of degradations and abuses. Ventura’s singing and modeling career had been heavily promoted by Combs.

This timeline parallels many others in the #MeToo universe, in which victims of exploitation nevertheless kept themselves in relationships and partnerships with their abusers. The point is not to pass harsh judgment on anyone in the very vulnerable position of having to turn against a lover. The point is that the sustained pattern of willing victims, allured by money or opportunity, has undermined the moral authority of our supposed “reckoning” with sexual abuse.

Much of the #MeToo movement also siphoned off its anti-exploitation principles from a broader ethic of sexuality, so that eventually the only thing that mattered was consent, and then enthusiastic consent, and then consent with no regrets afterward. The world since 2018 has seen the ascent of OnlyFans, in which thousands of women around the world sell themselves virtually. A narrative of culture that focuses on male predators and female victims feels less plausible in the digital sex work economy. To this, #MeToo has nary an answer.

The reality is that the social justice movement of the 2010’s has failed. Its quest for racial equity burst into flames on the streets and mismanaged its funds in the ivory tower. Its vision of intersectionality ran aground on campus antisemitism and the 2024 rainbow coalition of Donald Trump. And its reckoning with sexual predators has yielded no genuine cultural change. It’s not stopped men like Diddy from evading its scrutiny or women like Cassie Ventura from succumbing to self-exploitation. True, it exposed a few genuinely bad people along the way. But as the Diddy case demonstrates, a once a generation reckoning with the easiest targets lets scores of victims fall through the cracks.

What comes after #MeToo? It’s an urgent question, one that might have much to do with the crisis in American fertility and marriage rates. My humble suggestion: Perhaps covenant can do what consent alone cannot. Perhaps the way out of both predatory behavior and polarized gender war is an ethic of love that forsakes all others, including the “other” of money and power. And perhaps Christian marriage, with its vertical obligations toward God and horizontal obligations between man and wife, really is the best way to achieve a sexual wholeness.