What Rolling STone Gets Right

Taking a different approach than Vulture, Rolling Stone interviewed survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin in order to gain her perspective on the new fanfare surrounding Ted Bundy, who nearly murdered her in her Florida State University bedroom. The article highlights how Kleiner has moved on, how the incident stays with her but does not control her. It opens with a scene of her joking with her husband in a bookstore upon finding a book about Bundy.

Author Tori Telfer reports that Kleiner has read every book about Bundy that she could find, attempting to figure him out. She thinks it is important to remember that Bundy was real, to know that “there’s evil out there, but they can control it.” However, she is troubled by the fanfare and the fact that all conversations center only on the man himself.

Kleiner’s story will be discussed more fully on the Survivor page of this website, but what is important to note is Rolling Stone’s commitment to honoring the stories of survivors. The article tells the story of the incident, but it also tells the story of Kathy, an FSU sorority girl who decorated her room with incredible attention to detail. More importantly, it tells the story of her assault from her perspective, with little attention to what Bundy may have been thinking. The article tells how she tried to scream when the paramedics arrived but was so injured that she was unable.

Telfer writes that Kleiner felt alienated in the aftermath, alone in her experience of having survived such a brutal attack by such a prolific murderer. While families of victims were harassed by media and begged for silence, Kleiner was left alone. She seldom heard from media outlets or journalists, and she seldom heard from her sorority sisters who did not return her calls. However, she found the strength to recover from the attack, and Rolling Stone tells the story not of an unimaginable evil, but an unimaginably strong woman who was not defined by the violence committed against her. Whereas articles such as that published in Vulture seek to understand Bundy, articles such as this one help the reader learn how to cope with him. Media portrayals such as this help the narrative to move along, not to dwell too long on a person too toxic. They honor victims as individuals and reorient the world to what it should be; strong people, and strong women who cannot be erased.

As Telfer writes, “Bundy’s story is, at its core, the story of Kathy, Karen, Lisa and Margaret, and all the other young women he attacked and killed.”

What is missing, still?

However astute Rolling Stone's analysis may be, the article fails to answer or mention concerns of intersectionality. It is important for the reader to keep in mind that, had Bundy himself possessed different social identities or had his victims, the conversation may have developed very differently.

Virtually every analysis of Bundy or his crimes makes some mention of his charms. He was a college-educated white man who had worked in politics and knew how to behave politely. Because of this, he is often afforded credit for his social genius, for his expert manipulation both of his victims and of everyone around him. His victims, all young white women, are typically portrayed as innocent children, incapable of understanding the magnitude of evil they had encountered. The social privilege of both murderer and victims can be illustrated by asking, what if he had only murdered black women? What if Bundy was a Muslim man, and his victims were low-income women? It is almost certain that if any of these were the case that we would not hear much at all about Bundy's supposed cunning cleverness, or his victims' exalted purity and innocence. The media would not spend quite as much time admiring the strength and bravery of his survivors and detailing their entire lives after their attacks.

Indeed, media portrayals feed on and reinforce the privilege of Bundy's victims. In doing this, they reinforce rape myths (Britto et al, 2007) by placing on a pedestal the image of the stranger, the deranged man who appears out of nowhere with a weapon and snatches the pretty white girl from plain sight, only to enact horrible violence on her. This was true of Bundy, but the reality in most cases is much different. One UK study found that in over 400 rape cases reported to police, not a single one met the criteria for the social myth of "real rape" -- a stranger, a weapon, an outdoor attack, and serious physical injuries (Waterhouse et al, 2016). Most violence against women is committed by an acquaintance, friend or loved one (Fisher et al 2005). When the media places Bundy at the center of the discussion of violence against women, it reinforces the idea that Bundy is an accurate portrayal of what violence against women is. He isn't.

In reality, gender-based violence is experienced at similar if not higher rates by women of color, queer women, and women of lower socioeconomic status than by middle-class, straight, white women, but these kinds of women are not prioritized, and no attempt is made to learn their identities and stories. If media outlets aren't equipped to address this issue head on, they should at least acknowledge it when writing the 500th piece speculating about Bundy's psyche. Instead, the media tends to A) portray serial killers as abstract monsters and B) turn them into celebrities for consumption (Wiest, 2016). Both of these approaches are often entangled with one another, and this shapes our collective framework for understanding what violence looks like. Media pieces that ignore this issue are irresponsible at best, and must be more careful about the content they are creating.

It is crucial not only to prioritize the narratives of victims and survivors in stories of violence, but also to deny the enactors of violence the notoriety that they and their admirers desire. This can be done by ignoring them entirely, or by making mention of the fact that they do not have the right to define violence against women in the first place.

In this project, I'll do the work of humanizing his victims, but I acknowledge that these narratives are rife with privilege. Victim-defined advocacy is important in all work, and victims with other identities should be acknowledged and prioritized in this way as well.