03/10/2026
I’ve covered a lot of terrible cases through The Famous Grave Co., and over the years I have stood at the graves of women who were killed by husbands, boyfriends, former partners, and men they barely knew. I have told the stories of women who were murdered because they tried to leave an abusive relationship, because they rejected someone’s advances, or because a man decided that his anger, jealousy, humiliation, obsession, or desire for control mattered more than a woman’s right to live. After researching enough of these cases, it becomes impossible not to recognize how often violence against women begins long before the violence itself, and how frequently there were warning signs that other people, including other men, either witnessed, excused, minimized, or simply chose to ignore.
That is one of the reasons the Cornell 7 case has affected me so deeply. The allegations surrounding seven fraternity members at Cornell University are horrifying, but beyond the specific accusations in this case, there is a much larger conversation that I believe men need to be willing to have with one another. We spend an enormous amount of time teaching women how to protect themselves from dangerous men, while spending far less time asking men what they are doing when they recognize dangerous behavior in the men standing beside them.
I am the owner of this platform, but I am also a man and the father of a 7-year-old daughter, and becoming her father changed the way I look at stories like these. Someday my little girl will grow up and enter a world where I cannot always be standing beside her. She will go to parties, restaurants, schools, workplaces, and countless other places without me, and she will meet men whose character I will never have the opportunity to judge for myself. As her father, I have to live with the reality that there may someday be a moment when her safety depends not upon me, but upon the character of another person who happens to be standing in the room.
If that moment ever comes, I desperately hope there is a man there who understands that what another man is doing is wrong and has enough courage to intervene, even when the person he has to confront is his friend, fraternity brother, teammate, coworker, roommate, or someone he has known his entire life. I hope he does not convince himself that it is none of his business, laugh along because challenging his friends would be uncomfortable, or protect another man's reputation at the expense of a woman's safety.
Men know things about other men that women are not always given the opportunity to see. We hear conversations that happen when women leave the room. We hear the comments about the woman who rejected someone. We see the friend who becomes angry when a woman tells him no, the guy who deliberately tries to get women far more intoxicated than he is, and the man whose behavior repeatedly makes women uncomfortable. Sometimes those moments are dismissed as jokes, drunken behavior, harmless bravado, or simply "how he is," but after telling the stories I have told on this page, I cannot pretend that those warning signs are always meaningless.
I have written about too many women whose lives ended at the hands of men who supposedly loved them, wanted them, or believed they were entitled to them. I have written about women who were beaten and killed by intimate partners, women who were murdered after trying to escape abusive relationships, and women who died because they had the audacity to tell a man they were not interested. The names, places, circumstances, and decades change, but eventually you begin to understand just how many graves exist because one man believed he had a right to control a woman and the people around him failed to challenge that belief before it became something far worse.
None of this means that every man is dangerous, and that has never been the point. The point is that decent men cannot continue treating dangerous behavior from other men as somebody else's problem, because accountability cannot begin only after a woman has already been assaulted, beaten, or killed. It has to begin much earlier, when a friend talks about women like possessions, refuses to accept rejection, deliberately tries to incapacitate someone, crosses a boundary, or behaves in a way that everyone in the room knows is wrong but nobody wants to be the person who ruins the night by saying so.
I cannot follow my daughter everywhere for the rest of her life, and neither can any other father. What I can do is try to raise her knowing that she deserves to be treated with dignity and respect, while also trying to be the kind of man who would protect somebody else's daughter when her father is not there. More importantly, I can expect the men around me to do the same, because if we genuinely care about the women and girls in our lives, then holding other men accountable cannot be something we talk about only after another woman becomes a victim.
It has to be something we are willing to do while we still have the opportunity to prevent one.
