Die Betroffenen von sexualisierter Gewalt haben das letzte Wort – nicht die Täter

Zum Outing des Gitarristen der Band „Wolf Down“

Erst vor wenigen Wochen trauten sich betroffene Frauen, ein Mitglied der Band „Wolf Down“ als Täter sexualisierter Gewalt zu outen. Mehrere Frauen berichteten von verschiedenen Formen des sexualisierten Missbrauchs.

Kurz danach folgte ein Statement der Musiker, in dem sie die Auflösung der Band bekannt gaben. Die Erklärungen und Rechtfertigungen des Täters nahmen dabei viel Raum ein. Damit machte er sich für viele vom Täter zum Opfer.

Auch aus diesem Grund ist es uns vom FICKO-Magazin wichtig, nochmal auf das abschließende Statement der betroffenen Frauen vom 27. Juli 2017 aufmerksam zu machen und veröffentlichen in Absprache mit einer der betroffenen Frauen, diesen Beitrag.

Sie haben ein Recht darauf, das letzte Wort zu haben – nicht der Täter.

In mehreren Gesprächen mit einer der Betroffenen stellte sich heraus, dass der Druck durch die Mitwissenden und das Täterumfeld auch jetzt noch deutlich zu spüren ist. Zwar nannten die Betroffenen nicht ihre Namen, doch war im Umfeld des Täters und derjenigen, die ihn supporten, vielen bewusst, wem Gewalt angetan wurde.

Nach den Übergriffen, wurde einer der Frauen vorgeworfen, sie sei eifersüchtig, rachsüchtig und wurde als hysterisch abgestempelt. Ihr wurde von den Männern in dem Umfeld des Täters gesagt, dass der Täter irgendwann wieder rehabilitiert sein wird, ihr jedoch weiterhin das Stigma als Denunziantin anhaften wird.

Diesen Frauen muss Gehör verschafft werden.

Ihr Mut sollte weitere Betroffene von sexualisierter Gewalt dazu bewegen, sich zu wehren und andere, sich solidarisch zu zeigen. Es kamen nach dem Outing viele ermutigende Rückmeldungen bei den betroffenen Frauen an. Menschen, die selbst sexualisierte Gewalt durchleben mussten, bedankten sich und trauten sich ebenfalls, andere Täter zu outen und von ihrem Leid zu berichten.

Auch wenn diese Reaktionen nicht dazu führen, die furchtbaren Übergriffe ungeschehen zu machen, lindert es für Betroffene ein wenig den damit verbundenen Schmerz. Mit der Veröffentlichung des Statements und der damit einhergehenden Solidarität wurden die Betroffenen gestärkt.

Es wird mehr über sexualisierte Gewalt in linken Kreisen gesprochen und darüber, dass wir endlich mehr gegen missbräuchliches Verhalten in dieser Szene vorgehen müssen. Wir müssen Prävention betreiben. Sexismus und Rechtfertigungsversuche von sexualisierter Gewalt müssen bekämpft werden. Keiner hat das Recht auf sexuelle Handlungen ohne Konsens, auch nicht, wenn der Täter „sonst ein ganzer netter Typ ist“, weil er sich ja sonst ganz toll für Antifakram einsetzt.

Dank des Outings und der positiven Reaktionen der Menschen, die sich mit den betroffenen Frauen solidarisieren, gelang es der Band nicht, die Übergriffe zu relativieren.

Dafür danken wir euch.

Rosa

 

Hier nochmal das Statement der Betroffenen:

http://wolfdownouting.blogsport.de/

final statement by the victims of tobi

after everything that has happened during the last 48 hours, tobi’s statement and wolf down breaking up, we as the victims want to publish one last statement. we do not want to allow the perpetrator to have the last word. this time, we are publishing in english, because after our first statement there was a great demand for translations and we want as much people as possible to be able to read what we have to say.

we apologize for any mistakes – this is not our native language and as we both come from a working class, low-educated background, we are not practiced expressing ourselves in the polished lawyer-english that tobi uses. anyways, we want to spit out our anger again, even though our words are raw and clumsy.

reading tobi’s statement felt like a fucking joke for us. the fact that he was allowed to take up so much space, to explain and justify himself with so many hollow words leaves us shocked. it is a good decision the band split up – and in our eyes the only decent one. but instead of publishing our words on their facebook site, followed by a simple explanation that obviously these circumstances make it impossible to go on posing as a radical leftwing group, they tried to save what was left of their image. tobi’s words range from hypocritical to disgusting. he writes: “my sexual self-reflection concerning the right approach to consensual sex had not yet been brought to the same level as my otherwise radical-leftwing convictions”. we do not understand why he seems to believe that understanding how consensual sex works is a political/intellectual challenge. being a decent human being should not be something that you need a process of several years for, like forming an opinion on the correlation between state and capital or some other deep shit.

still, he has not understood a lot of things even though he claims to be magically enlightened now. “I did things to her for which I didn‘t ask for her consent, during otherwise nonverbally consensual sex” – doing things you don‘t have consent for makes the whole sex nonconsensual you prick. tobi also states that at least he kept the principle “no means no”, which is simply not true: a “no” always meant “try to convince me” to him, which build up a lot of pressure, especially with the imbalance in power that he produced with all of his abusive behaviour.

tobi is so afraid of losing his life as the “cool antifa dude” but doesn‘t even have the guts to write out the word “rape” and instead uses “type of rape”. he also lies about when he wrote me he felt “not guilty” of what happened because he was “brought up in a bavarian village” where nobody would teach him about consent. this happened on 20th of june and not “two weeks ago” as he claims.
furthermore he writes: “It feels surreal, that I‘ve been calling myself a feminist for years, but played a part in fucked up patriarchal mechanisms and rape culture. A culture that teaches men to take „what is theirs“ without asking and that blames women for the consequences. A culture that pressures men to take the active role and forces women to take the passive one.” it feels fucking disgusting and horrifying for leftwing women like us to read those lines. many of us joined the movement to escape the cruel environment that patriarchy produces and try to fight our way towards a world with freedom and without sexual violence for ourselves and our sisters. knowing that we maintain this struggle alongside male “allies” who are in no way better than the patriarchs and abusers we want to escape weakens and discourages us and the movement itself. lately we have been thinking a lot about all the amazing, talented women we know and how much time we all have to spend on recovering from trauma and dealing with the harm done to us by men who publicly claim to be feminists. THIS IS NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE. and we want to make clear that our greatest hope in this outing and everything we publish is not people burning their wolf down shirts (even though we appreciate it as an act of solidarity) but every man reading our lines asking themselves if they recognize some of their behaviour in the actions we describe and denounce. know that women are real people with feelings and shit and that more and more of us will speak up. you will be held accountable for your actions.

we could go on and on picking to pieces what tobi calls an apology. but there is other, more important stuff left to say and we do not want to carry on giving him and his opinion on what happened so much room. just another few words on the other wolf down members: dave and pascal are in no way clueless angels. they knew about tobi’s and sven’s behaviour regarding women all these years and they knew about the rape accusations since two weeks at least. of course they have no damn choice continuing a band with two people but they couldn‘t know we were going to make our stories with tobi public. what they call “respect to the victims” was really the hope of wriggling their way out of this without anything happening and continuing with the band as if nothing happened. both of them know us. they know our names, our faces, they have shared conversations and meals with us during times we were tobi’s girlfriends. they know ways to easily contact us on social media. but they didn‘t offer us any help or support at all since tobi confessed to them. besides, pascal and tommy watched larissa being maltreated until she left the band and her ex-boyfriend drummer sven and tobi starting to use wolf down as a way to hook up with girls. yesterday, the day the outing went viral, larissa posted a statement on facebook. for everyone who hasn‘t seen it yet, this is what she came out with after years of staying silent:

“I left Wolf Down about 3 years ago now and people still asking me as to why. I always referred to it as personal reasons which they were. The experiences that I had made shortly before I called it quits have been unbearable and I didn’t want anything more than escaping the toxic environment that had been created within this band. I have known Tobias and Sven to be bigoted sexist pricks with an ill perception of women. They never made it a secret and were openly objectifying women, sharing pictures and stories between them. Having been in a relationship with Sven, the drummer, for over 7 years I was abused in more than one way, it continued even after we were through. He tried to turn my family against me and called friends and friends of friends late at night to know about my whereabouts and so on. Sven is in no way the feminist he claims to be, he is a sociopathic patriarch through and through, and from what I know he has not changed a bit over the years. Enough is enough. I stand with the victims.”

we have to say that we are shocked about other women contacting us since we published the outing, telling us about bad experiences with tobi and sven. besides, we both have encountered so many more situations where their blatant misoginy was unbearable. some examples to illustrate a little what we‘re talking about:

– in fall ’15 wolf down were on tour and went swimming before playing a show in a german city (we believe to remember it was trier). in the swimming pool they joked and dared tommy to swim to a middle-aged woman and tell her that tobi would fancy her but wouldn‘t have the guts to talk to her himself. he told her they were a band called wolf down and that she could come to the show for free, that tobi would put her on his guest list. they laughed about the woman getting excited. when they returned to the venue they found she had contacted them on their official facebook profile. they hoaxed her and tried getting her to sext with them. when she asked about getting tobi’s private contact (because she believed talking to him all the time) they blocked and deleted her. later tobi bragged about this story to “woman 2” and showed her the whole conversation. he justified making fun of a random woman saying that “at least she had a bit of an adventure for once in her boring housewife life, writing with some hot tattooed boys”.

– sven as well as tobi are famous for contacting girls they find hot on instagram. sven once contacted a friend of ours telling her she should do a live video for him when he saw an instagram story of her running a bath. she felt disgusted by this and when sven was confronted about it he swore he didn‘t mean it “in a sexual way”, he just wanted “to make fun of her because some girls are so ridiculous posting everything they do on instagram”. he was convinced that this would make his behaviour any better.

– when sven found out i (“woman 1”) was befriending his current girlfriend he continued asking her about what we were doing together, if we met just to talk or to have a sexual relationship/watch lesbian porn together. only because we both happen to be bisexual women. he also told “woman 2” that he felt repulsed by me because i “talked too loud”, sit and walk “like a man” and happen to be interested in football.

– tobi showed me messages of an acquaintance of his asking when they could meet (for a certain purpose i forgot but that had nothing to do with any interest in him), telling me how “desperate” she obviously was to get him to date her, and that he felt pity for her.

we could go on for hours with this list. but instead we choose to let another ex-girlfriend of tobi speak, who approached us in solidarity with her story whose parallels to what we experienced with him made us weep. these are direct quotes of the messages she sent us:

“Hi, I dont know you but Larissa gave me your number. I , unfortunately, am a victim of Tobias as well. It was [year censored because of privacy concerns].It breaks my heart to see that He went on abusing women. I am shivering while reading his statement on Facebook because I cant believe a single word of what he is writing.I think everyone should have a chance to change but I Seriously believe he wont.i am terrified that he will be able to abuse more women in the future,and still be able to hang out in the hardcore scene as if nothing happened. I wish I could hug the women who wrote their Stories because for the first time I felt understood and it is terrible to know that others went through the same suffering I did. Thank you”
“it is very important for me to know that at least someone believes me. Since now I had to struggle against him completely alone as most of my former „friends“ kept thinking he is a „nice guy though“. He manipulated me constantly, made me feel like a crazy person for just being angry at what he did. We had a long distance relationship for one year. After we broke up he never left me alone. He was literally stalking me for all these years and about every 4-6 months writing me some stupid messages about being friends again that i NEVER replied,still he never stopped. Two times I found him standing in front of my door asking me if he could stay at my place. Another time i was at a show in [city censored because of privacy concerns] and he wrote me „i am here“ and there he was with some fucking flowers,even though He knew I didnt want to see his face again and I even had a boyfriend then. I had two long relationships after him and all he did was talk shit about my boyfriends and to make me feel ashamed for even being with them. For him,the biggest poser of all times, they werent cool enough.I guess i also don‘t need to say that he cheated on me more than one time. Still,while we were together he didnt even want me to hang out with only men or stuff like this because he was jealous. One month ago he wrote again trying to apologise for all that he did to me, for manipulating me and for making me go to bed with him when I didnt want to and then disappearing for months,leaving me there lonely and abused like a piece of meat. All he ever wanted from me was sex. His reason for doing this is that he’s just a poor guy coming from a sexist german family and he now learnt what feminism is.then the stories of the other two women came out and I understood what it was actually about. I wasnt surprised but surely disgusted and terrified he will forever go on like this.I met many bad people in my life but Tobi is for sure the worst human being I can imagine,under every aspect. There is no single thing in him that I would save because he’s literally just a pile of thrash. I wish people believed me back then ,when I was telling them he is an abuser and a lier because maybe all that happened afterwards wouldnt be a horrible reality. Sven tried the same with me until I realised he was just like Tobi. The two were literally sittig together asking me for nudes (that fortunately i never sent) and laughing behind my back. A former friend of them warned me that they were exchanging other girls pictures and making fun about how stupid but hot they are. Sven is just as bad as Tobi,I want the people to really see that too. I stood alone and powerless until now”
“I am really so sorry about it. This is so fucked up. Sadly, you are definitely not alone in this. I am quite sure that there are other just like me that didnt come out because of fear. […] Actually I don‘t know if I can articulate myself strong enough to make people understand, I am definitely not „well educated“ like he is. I get very nervous when I have to write something for the public as a reply to something so well written like he did. If it is okay, you could write a new post where you can also mention my story. This could be very important, I feel many people still don‘t believe a word of anything and are just sad that wolf down are now over.”
“I feel like I kept these things too long for myself.”
“What I read in words is another attempt at showing that he’s still the nice educated guy everyone knows and that he’s so smart that he will change soon. Again he wants people to defend him. […] I think the general facts that he acts like a stalker, spying you even after the relationship is gone is definitely my main point, together with the manipulation and the mental abuse followed by the physical abuse. I was lying when I was letting him into my place. I was doing it only because I was scared he would attack me mentally again. He always said I was overreacting over everything. He was lying when he was saying „i will just be next to you in bed without doing anything sexual,trust me“ and then crawling against me saying „i can‘t resist“ and touching me without my consent.It’s incredible I could go on forever, even if it hurts to take out all these memories.”

we both share the third ex-girlfriend’s concerns about tobi never changing. that is the ultimate reason why we write this final statement. and because we couldn‘t let tobi get away with his phony excuses. and because we want closure now. and because we want to show every woman who was ever abused that if you speak out, you don‘t just help yourself. you most likely help so many more women to stop feeling alone, “crazy” and broken.

we want to thank every single woman that has stood up in solidarity with us. may we never forget that sisterhood is our main weapon.

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