A Rupture in the Courtroom: Collective Rhetoric, Survivor Speech, and the Subversive Limits of the Victim Impact Statement

Abstract

In 2018, 156 survivors took over a small courtroom in Lansing, Michigan, to deliver victim impact statements at the sentencing hearing of Larry Nassar. This article argues that the survivors collectivized their voices and mobilized the subversive potential of the victim impact statement (VIS) to disrupt courtroom norms, hegemonic scripts, and generic expectations that contain and diminish testimony of sexual violence. This article also argues that white supremacy animated this moment of rhetorical rupture and demonstrates how racist logics of worthy victimhood infect the rhetorical potential of the VIS genre and restrict opportunity for disruption within its form. This case study explicates the counterhegemonic promise of survivor speech, the subversive limits of generic rupture, and the role that race, power, and privilege play in the mobilization of collective rhetoric.

Keywords:

• Collective rhetoric
• genre
• legal rhetoric
• racism
• survivor speech
• victim impact statement

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Women’s Studies in Communication’s two anonymous reviewers and editor Claire Sisco King for their generous feedback. She also wishes to thank Hailey Otis for her research assistance.

Notes

1 My article follows the lead of the women who testified and described themselves as survivors throughout Nassar’s sentencing hearing. For discussion that troubles use of the term, see Freitag.

2 The testimony of the survivors cited in this article is archived here: https://inourownwords.us/.

3 While Larson’s essay refers to Chanel Miller as Emily Doe (her pseudonym), Miller has since published a memoir titled Know My Name and has spoken publicly about her desire to be known and be named.

4 There are important concerns expressed in the VIS literature that point to the dehumanizing effect of the VIS “to cast the defendant from the human community,” especially those already subject to the racial biases of our legal system. While Nassar was a white man of considerable privilege, this remains an important consideration (see Bandes, “Empathy” 410).

5 For discussion of the promise and perils of feminist militancy, see Southard; Boor Tonn.

6 Critical legal scholars have also raised concern that the generic boundaries of the VIS may encourage a logic of retributive justice that doubles down on the status quo and further entrenches logics of domination and exclusion that live in our justice system. Retributive justice certainly echoes in the characterization of the survivors as an “army.” A logic of retribution also punctuated statements that Judge Aquilina made following the seven days of impact statements. Aquilina said, “Our Constitution does not allow for cruel and unusual punishment. If it did . . . I would allow some or many people to do to him what he did to others.” For critical discussion of Aquilina’s comments, see Jeltsen.

7 Balfour et al. tell us that this script of the unstable woman emerges quite regularly in the texts of victim impact statements (53). There are many reasons for this, including VIS guidelines that explicitly ask victims to narrativize their suffering and norms of courtroom communication that “[prefer] narratives of helplessness and tales of victimization to narratives of human agency and capacity” (Minow 32).