Terry Crews and the Discomfort of Masculine Anxiety
On Tuesday, Brooklyn Nine-Nine star and former NFL linebacker Terry Crews testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to advocate for H.R. 5578, the bill often referred to as the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights. In a stirring, vulnerable account, Crews detailed the profound impact of the sexual assault he first alleged last October in a series of tweets.
“The assault lasted only minutes, but what he was effectively telling me while he held my genitals in his hand was that he held the power,” Crews said (without naming Adam Venit, the William Morris Endeavor agent against whom he has filed both a police report and a lawsuit in conjunction with the alleged groping incident). “That he was in control.” (Venit issued a general denial of Crews’s claims, and Crews’s lawsuit was eventually rejected by prosecutors per the statute of limitations.)
In his testimony, Crews that he had chosen to leave the franchise to “take a stand” in the wake of his lawsuit against Venit, a high-powered agent who represents the likes of Adam Sandler and Sylvester Stallone: “Theways his account had already been minimized, and reiterated that sexual abuse is neither laughable nor uncommon:
