I already know how this ends, because I’ve watched it play out my whole life.
Someone pulls the alarm on something rotten, a crime, an abuser, a man who should never have been welcomed in, and instead of putting out the fire, the community turns on the person who pulled it.
They don’t even have to doubt the fire is real. Saying it out loud, where outsiders might hear, is treated as the real offense, because the group’s reputation matters more than the wrong being done inside it.
Calm down. It’s not that deep. Don’t make us all look bad.
And more often than not, the one told to calm down is a woman, and the word for her is emotional, as if her reaction, not the crime, were the thing that needed managing.
So let me say it out loud anyway.
When speaking up becomes the real offense
I’ll start with the easy part, because he is the easy part. This week, American influencer Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, flew to Tel Aviv.
In January, he was filmed in a Miami nightclub singing along to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” beside the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, and refused to apologize. He is being sued over the alleged rape of a minor. He came for content, and his content is the exploitation of women.
On livestream, in Tel Aviv, he told one of his Israeli hosts to tell the Israeli women he was offered that he was “looking to have sex in a bathroom for five seconds, 10 if they’re lucky.”
The criticism, though, is on his hosts, the Israeli and Jewish creators who were warned, clearly, who he was, and dismissed it because the warnings mostly came from “women,” too “emotional about sexual assault” to grasp the broader PR “strategy.”
The women were right; the weekend detonated exactly as they said it would, and now they’re told to stop making a big deal of it, for the sake of “unity,” or “lashon hara” (malicious gossip). The demand to stop talking always arrives right when there’s something someone would rather we didn’t talk about.
It’s a soundtrack I know by heart, played on repeat since the beginning of time.
It’s compounded by a second, more “respectable” instinct, the one used to justify the first: don’t air our dirty laundry. Don’t hand the antisemites ammunition. It’s the Three Weeks; we should be kind to one another.
Whether it comes from fear or from “holy” aspirations, silence is not neutral: it’s the exact condition an abuser needs. He offends because he’s judged, correctly, that the community will protect its reputation before the girl in front of him.
The cost of protecting reputations
Growing up, I watched it happen in my own community in Australia. I was about 12 years old when I first heard of the rampant institutional sexual abuse across the Melbourne and Sydney Chabad communities and saw that the first instinct was to bury it so we wouldn’t look bad.
Leaders treated going to the police and secular news outlets as a chilul Hashem (desecration of God’s name) and aimed their anger at the victims who spoke, like Manny Waks, whose family was hounded until his father left the country.
It was lashon hara, I was told, to speak badly of these men, who’d “probably done teshuva” (repentance), we assumed for men who never apologized, not stopped abusing. But more so, it’s a sin to shed a bad light on our community.
A rabbi later admitted to Australia’s Royal Commission that there exists “a culture of cover-up, often couched in religious terms,” which has “pervaded our thinking and our actions.”
In a neighboring community, Malka Leifer abused girls at Melbourne’s Adass Israel school; when it surfaced, the school flew her to safety in Israel, beyond the reach of Australian police.
Her victims were shunned, and she fought extradition for 13 years before her 2023 conviction on 18 counts, including rape, while parts of the community kept defending and funding her. One of the victims, Dassi Erlich, told Tablet that the community accused her of “throwing Adass under the bus.”
Years later, at Beis Rivkah seminary in New York, my school hosted a convicted predator as a speaker. When we confronted the school, they refused to apologize, claiming they “had no idea” (as if vetting weren’t their job).
They warned us against lashon hara about a man who “still has good qualities” and the importance of loving every Jew. They kept sending girls to his home for Shabbat meals.
It’s a decade later, and we’re still running the same machine. As people denounce Clavicular, many are worried first about our national reputation, about outsiders seeing us fight and “tear down our own” for hosting and cozying up to him.
Mostly American, male, self-appointed hasbara influencers are attacking Israeli women for being angry at the Jews who welcomed this predator into our home. Same priority as ever: protect the image, punish the one who spoke, let the predator keep his cover.
Lashon hara is not a shield for abuse
But lashon hara was never a gag order. The Chafetz Chaim, whose name is synonymous with this halacha, codified the exception himself: speech for a protective purpose, to’elet, is not just permitted; his laws of rechilut (gossip) oblige you to warn anyone about to be harmed.
He roots it in Leviticus 19:16, which opens with “do not go about as a gossip” and, in the same breath, commands: “Do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” Two halves of one verse, set so no one could quote the first to bury the second.
Invoking the Three Weeks is the lowest move of all: the Temple fell not because people spoke up against injustice, but because of sinat chinam, baseless hatred. If anything brings the Messiah, it’s the courage of women (and righteous men) who risk everything for their values.
It doesn’t matter what the world thinks of us. The wrong is there whether or not anyone names it, and it always comes out. And when it does, the shame belongs to the man who did it and everyone who built him a shield, not to the woman who refused to look away.
So no, we won’t calm down, because the desecration of God’s name was never the exposure; it was the abuse, and the cover-up.
It is a community deciding, one more time, that the reputation of the powerful matters more than the safety of the girl in front of them, and then blaming her for the noise.