Sexual assault survivors may find the Russell Brand, Danny Masterson cases triggering. Here's how they can get through it.
If you've been on social media this past month, your feed might have been flooded with reactions to actor Danny Masterson being sentenced to 30 years to life after being found guilty of raping two women, or the furor over his friends and former co-stars, Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, writing letters in his defense. Or perhaps you’re catching up on the sexual assault allegations against British comedian Russell Brand, the subject of a just-released joint investigation between the Times of London and U.K. broadcaster Channel 4. As more lurid details emerge and the social media discourse gets heated, some users — mostly women, many of whom have identified themselves as survivors of sexual harassment and/or assault — have voiced a need to step away from it all.
“Purposely ignoring the Russell Brand stuff,” wrote one individual, who called the allegations and the discourse surrounding it “very triggering.” Others shared that they were prioritizing their mental health by not watching the Dispatches documentary outlining the allegations against Brand, or by muting certain search terms on X so as to avoid being inundated with posts about the claims.
Such news stories aren't uncommon post-#MeToo, a movement that has called countless abusers to account. For many survivors, however, these cases can also spark a strong psychological reaction and painful reminders of their own experiences.
“Having all these stories come at you at once can have a big effect on people,” says Scott Berkowitz, the president and founder of Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN). “Sexual assault tends to be something [in which] the memories never go away. The effects of it never go away, but they ebb and flow in [terms of] how front of mind they are and how much they’re affecting a survivor’s life at that moment. So the inundation definitely can have a cumulative impact and bring up a lot of memories and experiences that have been pushed into the background for a while.”
Speaking to Yahoo Life in 2018 amid a “constant news cycle about sexual assault” and comedian Louis C.K.'s return to stand-up after his admission of sexual misconduct, therapist Samantha Manewitz noted that such scenarios could be “continually terrifying and exhausting” for survivors.
What’s going on when someone feels triggered by these stories? And what can survivors do to protect their mental health? Experts weigh in.
How emotional triggers work
Trauma can stem from any number of events: sexual assault, a serious accident or medical event, being in a war zone and so on. As trauma psychologist Karol Darsa told Yahoo Life in 2021, the impact from trauma often lingers for a long time and informs our reactions. Those reactions — like being “triggered” by something — are involuntary and outside our control.
“It affects us physically, emotionally and sometimes spiritually, and actually creates a sense of disconnect from yourself,” Darsa says. “Trauma gets imprinted on the emotional brain. It gets stuck on the emotional brain and the physical body.”
Manewitz explained that two areas of the brain are at play here: the limbic system, which stores emotions and sensations, and the prefrontal cortex, which controls executive functioning.
When you experience a traumatic event, your limbic system takes over and does what it needs to protect you and looks for patterns, and — when that is activated — your prefrontal cortex goes offline,” Manewitz said. “So while your limbic system is looking for — and recording — patterns to protect you, for example, a smell, a T-shirt, a voice, the rational part of your brain isn’t operating.”
Essentially, the brain is trying to “record” warning signs to ward off future threats, but because the rational brain is shut down, these red flags are imprecise and don’t always correspond with the actual trauma someone experienced.
“If there’s a smell or a T-shirt or anything that resembles what happened to you, your brain will respond as if the trauma is happening all over again,” explained Manewitz. “When you’re experiencing PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], your brain literally cannot gauge what is and isn’t safe and will default to ‘I am unsafe.’ As a trauma survivor, your brain cannot always tell the difference between something happening to you or someone else, so your brain will treat everything as a threat.”
For survivors of sexual assault, hearing about someone else’s experience — or reading comments online defending an alleged abuser — can be especially triggering because it's a reminder of their own crisis.
But not everyone reacts the same way
According to Manewitz, “Everyone responds to triggers differently depending on where they are in their healing journey.” And as Berkowitz explains, the effects of a sexual assault can “ebb and flow.” Not every survivor will be triggered by the same story; indeed, others will be empowered by seeing an abuser brought to justice.
“Depending on the specifics of the story, [this] can also be a positive thing for many survivors," says Berkowitz. He points to Masterson’s conviction and lengthy sentence. “I think many survivors looked at him and felt a sense of relief that it was taken seriously,” he notes. “And despite his wealth and prominence, they were able to get a conviction and a long punishment for him.”
How to get through it
Berkowitz tells Yahoo Life that RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline typically sees an uptick in calls when these stories break.
“These high-profile cases trigger a desire to get help,” he says. Callers, he adds, “tend to be looking for emotional support, for tips on self-care or ways to deal with the immediate effect that it’s having on them so that they can go on living their life and doing their job or going to school and tending to their family. They’re looking for that balance that has been upset by having to read or see so many stories that remind them of their own assault.”
Like Manewitz, Berkowitz sees a benefit in stepping away from the news for the sake of one’s own mental health.
“Media consumption is definitely something that comes up with a lot of folks,” Berkowitz says. “We particularly saw that during #MeToo. It was having a very positive effect on millions of people, but at the same time there were others who felt inundated and constantly reminded of their own experience. So taking a brief social media break, turning off the TV and talking about literally anything other than sexual violence can be a really helpful, restorative thing for a lot of survivors.”
The takeaway
Again, it's natural for sexual assault survivors to feel overwhelmed or anguished by stories of abuse, even if the ultimate outcome is a positive one.
“This isn’t ‘Oh, no, poor snowflakes having feelings’; this is physiology that is not within a survivor’s control,” Manewitz said. “The thing a survivor can control is coping systems to recover more quickly. But you can’t make fun of somebody for being triggered — that’s like making fun of somebody for sneezing.”
Berkowitz, meanwhile, is heartened by seeing cases like Masterson’s “taken seriously.” That, he says, should “give some hope to survivors that they have a real chance of obtaining justice.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, help is available. RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline is here for survivors 24/7 with free, anonymous help: (800) 656-HOPE (4673) and online.rainn.org.
