During the Waking Life protests, activists mobilized to fight misogyny and rape culture in our city. Here’s an inside look at what happened, and some important lessons

Above: Protesters outside the closed Waking Life coffee shop in September. Photo by Max Cooper.

In September, protests and organized action followed news of the owners of Waking Life Espresso’s predatory misogyny. Amy Hamilton, who was involved with those protests and organizing, offers this in-depth perspective on what happened, the larger context and what can be learned — D.F.

To the astonishment of Asheville, in a matter of 10 days this fall, Waking Life Espresso went from thriving local coffee shop to liquidated, empty storefront, with most of the town applauding this as a justified outcome.

Spanning a period of years, Jacob Owens and Jared Rutledge, known as two respected small business owners, had covertly operated as sexual predators, detailing their contemptuous and harmful actions in an anonymous blog, podcast and Twitter feed. They had groomed customers and even employees for sexual relations, published a degrading list of 50 supposed sexual partners with insulting descriptions and openly publicized their misanthropic opinions and activities in the “red pill” subculture and beyond.

Only hours after Asheville Blog broke the story about these actions in the media (following an earlier anonymous blog highlighting the tweets and podcast), many people were immediately moved to stand in front of Waking Life in protest. On Saturday afternoon, Sept. 19, a group assembled for the first time, most of us having known each other only by name, or not at all. For three of the next five days, a band of 20 or so people came together to maintain a street presence outside the coffee shop, representing no one except ourselves.

Most of us heard about the situation via word of mouth and social media. This was a purely grassroots response, as no organizations had put out the call to attend, and there were no stated leaders.

As far as protests or actions go, ours were on the friendly and non-threatening end of the spectrum: we self-organized to cover shifts, offered free coffee to passersby and passed out copied bell hooks literature about the patriarchy, compliments of Firestorm Books. We used sidewalk chalk to explain the situation to those who were still unfamiliar. The police, located a block away, were hands-off. As often happens at protests, even as some voiced disagreement with our tactics, especially on social media, there was a strong groundswell of in-person support.

People drove by honking and dropped off pastries, told us which was their favorite sign, brought their dogs by to say hello and gave us hugs and words of thanks. The fire station next door declared their endorsement of the street presence and said they would watch out for us. More than one person walking by asked if we had any literature on sexual violence, or information on where someone in crisis could go for help. We began to make this information available. The most controversial aspect of the first few days was the profanity on our signs — in many cases quotes lifted from the blog and tweets of Waking Life owners themselves.

The mood was both jubilant — perhaps from relief that people were addressing misogyny in the community — and extremely serious. Through their blog, podcast and Twitter account, Owens and Rutledge had disclosed some repellent acts, including laughing about Owens’ non-consensual sex with a hospital patient who was heavily medicated — an admission of rape that simultaneously acknowledged his extreme violation and made light of it.

Many in the community, having heard the news, were still unaware of the depth, length and seriousness of their activity, and the owners themselves seemed to think that approaching protesters with a friendly or sheepish demeanor would remove the threat felt due to their admitted actions. The general sense of danger extended beyond that — participants’ photos were showing up on red pill sites starting on the first day of protest, and some of us received online threats.

What prompted people to take time out of their schedules and mobilize outside a locally owned coffee shop for a period of days?

Erica Deaton, local mother of three, said “I was on break at work when I first read about Waking Life owners’ blogs. Reading their body shaming, their ageism, and their racist and dehumanizing words not only triggered me, but set my heart in a fit of rage. I did not want women I knew to set foot in that place ever again. I was there early the next morning.”

Small business owner Misti McCloud said she wanted to be an active presence outside Waking Life because, “I cannot in all good conscience be an armchair quarterback and sit on the sidelines while other women in the community stand up and protest. It’s my responsibility to stand against this kind of behavior.”

Student and activist Noah Morris attended with his mother. He describes his motivation: “[To demonstrate] a baseline of solidarity, really. To not just ‘talk that talk’ but ‘walk that walk’, and turn out. So I called my mama, and me and mom went to the protest.”

Within a day of the initial release of information, it became apparent that–street actions or not– Asheville’s antennae were up and this was an immediate hot button issue. Who had spent time at Waking Life? Who had taken their daughter there recently? Where were they planning on opening a new location? How dangerous was this red pill community? Were legal charges in the works?

In the first 24 hours after WLOS covered the story, local businesses who carried bottled iced coffee with Waking Life branding began canceling accounts. A petition started by “CT” that reached over 5,000 signatures asked all other businesses to sever ties with them, reading: “Our town does not support such people.” In the next few days, the business and community response continued to snowball, and more repercussions came quickly. Astonishingly, every single Waking Life employee quit their job within three days, many of them refusing even severance pay.

Rape crisis center OurVOICE rejected, via public statement, a large donation offer from the coffee shop owners: “We were disturbed and outraged by what was posted by Jared and Jacob regarding women. We will not be taking their money because it is not our place to forgive. Our VOICE is not in a position of absolving them for their misogyny as it perpetuates a culture of danger to all women and girls.”

The wide condemnation of the actions and words of these two men was comprehensive. The breadth and speed of the reaction set a new precedent for Asheville, and national and international outlets began to report on the developing situation.

For those of us standing outside Waking Life, it became clear through our conversations and organizing that many had intensely personal motivations for wanting to maintain a physical presence of non-consent to the continuing operation of a neighborhood business by two admitted predators.

Photo by Max Cooper

Protester Julie Cormier recalled that “I went for my own personal reasons, having lived through sexual trauma as a child, being brought up in this society — and I have two sons. It was so important to me to raise them being self-aware.” Many people shared similar sentiments. I, personally, had been an infrequent customer at Waking Life, and my teenage daughter and her friend had spent time there alone on several occasions.

As the first week continued, protesters spent time getting to know each other and began to identify important points that united us in moving forward. An organized group to coordinate an ongoing street-level response emerged.

We agreed on the previously stated goal of shutting down Waking Life, with the added aim to contain these predators and remove their ability to both operate in the community and receive attention. We agreed that misogyny and sexism were the tip of the iceberg when it came to these men. In fact, their blog and podcast demonstrated open contempt of every target that seemed to occur to them. Race, body type, age, nationality, orientation, ability — nothing was out of bounds.

We agreed that in our response, intersectionality — the idea that all oppressions are interwoven, and that only together can we find liberation — was essential. We felt that the response should not be women-only, and that we wanted to maintain a completely inclusive gender framework, both because misogyny affects all people, but also because the swath of hatred they expressed was wide and varied.

We acknowledged that many of those drawn to attend protests felt triggered and less safe in our daily life since the Waking Life actions began. As protester Pamela Lalik said, “During the events [of this week], I felt unsafe. With all the online folks coming out of the woodwork with threats of violence, I did not feel safe. It made me realize how many people are misogynistic (including women).”

Other principles that united us were the necessity for a diversity of perspectives and tactics, the desire to interact with each other without making assumptions, the need to use terminology understood by everyone, our goal to focus on long term work and the necessity of creating organizing space both accessible and child-friendly.

We agreed to move forward using consensus process and operate in a non-hierarchical manner. We acknowledged that resistance to our efforts was inevitable and that not everyone would be pleased with our work. We decided that, unless otherwise agreed, we would avoid all personal interactions with known predators, including the owners of Waking Life.

The momentum was considerable. On their own, the horrified business community continued to act quickly to remove themselves from their dealings with the coffee shop, and to nullify agreements for future arrangements. Waking Life owners lost the lease on their second space downtown, projected to open in 2016. Creditor Mountain Biz Works rescinded a loan, citing violation of terms. Articles on Jezebel, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post and the UK Daily Mail, among many others, linked to AshevilleBlog’s content, ran photos of the protests, and comments on these articles were overwhelmingly firm in opposition to Rutledge and Owens’ actions. One commenter on Jezebel’s site summed it up: ”It’s not just an ‘Oops, my bad’ moment…. They aren’t sorry for what they did, they are just sorry they got caught. This is much deeper than they are letting on.”

As a now-unified group, our agreements on how to move forward with security and accountability to each other were progressing well. However, backlash continued to escalate as well.   

Some locals maintained that the protests — peaceful and grassroots as they were — were invalid. In a Sunday front-page article in the Asheville Citizen-Times (“Forgiveness in a digital age of public shaming”), Jubilee minister Howard Hanger relayed the opinion that these two men should be treated only with compassion and forgiveness. Hanger recently elaborated in an interview for this piece, “It’s a bunch of holier-than-thou crap. Yes, these two guys screwed up, but there are far uglier things going on in this world. Enough is enough! Picketing them — their career was ruined. If there’s not room for forgiveness and compassion, we’re missing the boat.”

How familiar was the forgiveness camp with the entire situation? Were they fully aware of all the owners’ admissions and the various allegations against them, which were numerous and mainly left out of mainstream press coverage? For his own part, Hanger said, “I don’t know the fellas; I’m not a coffee shop kind of a person. All I know is what I have read and what people have told me. I only read about it on Facebook.”

While we continued to receive messages of thanks from women and others far beyond Asheville, we were accused by some locals on social media of being “an angry mob,” a “witch-hunt” and “pitchfork crew.’ Some people thought we were being overly harsh, or vengeful.

One woman who had been one of the sex partners described in Rutledge’s blog responded publicly to that characterization in an article on Ashvegas, saying, “I disagree with news articles written about them that use terms like ‘mob mentality’ and ‘pitchforks’ to describe some of the community response to what they did. That’s an easy cop-out. The horrible, misogynistic comments made people angry. It’s a deep issue that affects not only the awesome women they wrote about, but other loved ones and family members. Their anger is justified. There were peaceful protests last week, not angry West Ashevillians with pitchforks.”

Owens and Rutledge seemed at times to be enjoying the attention. There was a discrepancy between their public statements (a show of contrition but still missing the point) and their demeanor towards us on the several occasions when they approached us outside (smiling hostility and outright refusal of accountability). It appeared to us that rather than accepting full responsibility and starting serious work towards personal growth, these two men were intent on minimizing their financial losses and molding public opinion in their favor.

On the fifth day of protests, Owens and Rutledge attempted to pressure protesters to craft a “joint statement” with them for broadcast on WLOS, which protesters refused after discussion. Not long after this, Owens commented on a blog stating that “…businesses, artists, non-profits [are] all giving us a good kick while we are on our knees with our hands behind our heads.” This statement to a smaller audience directly contradicted the tone of his and Rutledge’s earlier mea culpas. Owens seemed to completely miss the fact that their own actions had created this situation.

Some of us observed that, in a way, they seemed to be actually enjoying this notoriety, albeit negative. Perhaps they had considered trying to milk this situation in an attempt to profit, reality-TV-style? Behind their flowery statements and public repentance, their actions led us to wonder if they were still continuing to covertly operate in the red pill crowd. We agreed that it was highly unlikely that two people who had conducted themselves for many years in such a manipulative and hateful way towards women and others could immediately, deeply understand the error of their ways. Perhaps their motivations and goals were unclear to even themselves.

Asheville-based therapist Shannon O’Neill followed the chain of events from afar and is also familiar with the red pill philosophy. “We saw in the Waking Life debacle an example of rape culture: institutionalized sexual narcissism,” she said. “This is a culture that attracts a particular sort of predator — narcissists. These predators ‘feed’ on others by employing games and con artistry to trap women. They are sexual predators because they are strategically misleading women to have sex, which is denying them of giving informed consent.”

Some community voices chided protesters for not accepting immediate reconciliation. Hanger delineated a path: “The key is, getting it out on the table, and then figuring out, where do you go from here?” But the question remained, whose table? A local K-12 school refused to hold a forum for these men when approached, and the only table the owners seemed to be welcome at was their own, which was no longer open for business after the day the owners were exposed.

Furthermore, after several days of press coverage, Rutledge and Owens decided local media was not invited to sit with them. From their Facebook page, they scheduled “open” discussions in their shop and arranged for a local company, Three Flames Production, to exclusively film them, while preventing other media from entering. Participants who came for these so-called community discussions were surprised that a “documentary crew” (as described by the owners at the event) was going to be filming them. Three Flames Productions’ website states their mission–marketing– more plainly: “Inspiration is ignited by your story as specific actions are taken that support the intended outcome of your audience’s better understanding of who you are, what you do and how you do it.”

Photo by Max Cooper

Away from both the public relations struggle and the street actions, some of those women who were detailed in the blog and podcasts and others affected by the owners’ actions were coming forward. A number of women made contact with individual protesters and with media; Asheville Blog published statements from two of these women. It became apparent that “getting it out on the table”, as far as all the allegations against Owens and Rutledge, was not yet over and done with.

Another concern of protesters was problematic people, often men, who showed up as aggressive “helpers,” only to create further chaos. Those of us involved in the day to day unfolding of events wondered: why did Waking Life, and the protests, as a physical location, seem to magnetize individuals who turned out to have records of violence and predatory behavior? Outwardly positioning themselves as friendly peacemakers or facilitators, they instead, through their actions, destabilized our organizing. After a few days, the difference between real allies and these types of “helpers” could not have been more clear.

“Some of the ‘peacemakers’ clearly struggle with covert narcissism, which always presents itself as ‘helping,'” O’Neill says. “When the motivation to help is driven by one’s own personal gain, that is an impairment in empathy. True compassion and empathy is a mental, spiritual and physical state of integrity.

“One can care more authentically by not allowing predators to participate in a relational dynamic than to allow them to,” O’Neill continues. “When people are calling on members of the community to pull these men up, this is indicative of a highly disorganized neurobiological state. People intend well, but we all know the saying, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ Nature’s equivalent to this would be for the bears to reach out to the predator and to endeavor to teach it not to eat the cubs. Narcissists are predators.”

These challenges notwithstanding, our organizing group continued to move ahead. We created and adopted the Asheville Agreements, a set of points of unity to be used as an organizing framework by us, and available to other groups. These agreements created a foundation for strong coalition work, including both rapid response, and slower, more gradual culture shifts. Apart from working towards the goal of shutting down Waking Life, we discussed a wider vision for the future. We agreed there was a lack of grassroots women’s organizations in town. Although the street response in this instance was effective, it was extremely challenging, as there had been no previously existing group on the ground to help facilitate it.

After nine days of coordinated action and outrage resonating at a global level, Waking Life announced the sale of their business (their assets, that is, since their brand was now worthless) and moved out of their space on the same morning of their announcement. What was the reason for this unprecedented and swift chain of events? One reason was that these two men self-incriminated themselves thoroughly and publicized such disgusting statements affecting so many that it was almost impossible for entities and individuals to keep a professional relationship with them intact.

Often it is the case that, if a predator is in a position of power, there is not evidence that can be presented to the community other than the report of a victim or survivor. Unfortunately, the effects of rape culture often silence and condemn those who do speak out about violations. Many of us involved had witnessed the reaction to various incidents in years past come to nothing, time and time again. In some cases the survivors chose to move out of town because of the focused negative reaction on themselves.

Many of the protesters had never had such a clear and immediate successful outcome to our organizing in any arena. The international news coverage and the community and business response had resulted indisputably from the initial story on Asheville Blog combined with the protests in front of Waking Life.

The initial anger and disgust had now been joined by surprise and pride at the huge groundswell of effective outrage that had created results. The business community seemed almost dumbfounded by its own participation in the rapid shutdown of a once-respected, very local storefront.

Had Waking Life owners now reconciled themselves with the community? Was it time for forgiveness?

Morris shared his opinion that, “I don’t think it’s on me to forgive them, nor will I ever really trust them. It’s not really my opinion as to whether or not they still make women in the community feel threatened by their presence. If the women and others I am in alliance with, and many of the folks who have been victimized by them decide, ‘Ok, these two can be welcomed back, they have done the years of re-socialization and breaking down some of the poor socialization they got’. If those women feel, in overwhelming numbers, that they have turned a new leaf, then I would forgive them.”

Deaton agrees that it will take more time: “Personally, I will never trust Jared and Jacob. Instead of allowing the women they mistreated and the community as a whole to take time to fully process the situation and to naturally forgive in due time, they pressed forgiveness as if they had an underlying agenda. For many, I think it will take more than verbally and publicly denouncing the red pill community. I think it will take time and introspection based on their actions to reverse the perpetuation of the cycle of misogyny in the community.”

How is the Waking Life shut down connected to the wider struggle against violence against women and others? How can we continue to work to ensure the safety of all?

Cormier described what she would like to see prioritized: “I would love to see communities being more self-aware in knowing how to identify predatory behavior. I would love to see support groups for men who are wanting to be more self-aware. I think that is what will affect society–very basic changes, educational history on the pressures of male ego and how that affects their treatment of women, the effects of sexism.”

Other priorities that have emerged during our organizing: support for those who speak out, free self-defense classes for those at risk in the community, a network to ensure the accountability of those that commit violations, activism around rape culture–including school dress codes, militant and street level defense, and preventing predators from doing further harm, especially those who are abusing positions of power. The positive side of these events is that it has galvanized many people to move forward in strength and the results of this will continue developing.

The collective that has emerged around the protests, now calling itself ‘Empower Asheville’, agreed that there was the potential for extended, networked organizing around this issue in various forms, and that violence against women, queer and trans people, and others is an important focus for continuing organizing efforts and coalition work with other groups, using a wide variety of tactics available to us.

There were many motivations for participating in the protest, but what continues to unite the group is the desire to protect our families, friends, loved ones, ourselves and the entire community from predators in positions of power and influence, whether business owners, prominent individuals, or people with access to youth — a problem that, even though Waking Life has been closed for months, is still very much on our minds.

As for the future community response, McCloud spoke for many of us when she said, “You cannot prey on people in the community and think we will look the other way. We will no longer be silent, we will no longer support you with our dollars, and we are not afraid to stand up against misogyny, hate, or oppression in any form, regardless of what costume or face it may show to the public.”

Amy Hamilton lives and works in Asheville. You can contact Empower Asheville via email if you have concerns that they can help address.

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