Episode 2, Part 2: When the Past Orders Wine: Harm, Accountability, and the Myth of “Justice Served”

Content notice: domestic violence, graphic injury, substance use, death.

In Part Two, I pick up from the kitchen tables and courtrooms and take you to a small-town patio where a woman who looks exactly like my ex–mother-in-law’s best friend sits down, orders sauvignon blanc, and, hours later, recognizes me. What happens next is not a courtroom scene; it’s the real place “justice” lives: at a table where everyone has heard a version of the story.

I trace how coercive control, self-hatred, and alcohol led to a negligent choice that began at three miles per hour and ended a man’s life; how prison and family court rearranged my motherhood; and how an appellate remand arrived too late to fix the decade-long record. I talk about building an internal compass when apologies and court orders aren’t enough: naming shame without drowning in it, choosing repair over self-erasure, and telling the difference between accountability and punishment, order and safety, discomfort and danger.

This episode argues what our institutions rarely admit: harm isn’t created in a vacuum, and most people who pass through “the system” are injured by it and then told to figure out how to live anyway. I’m not asking for pity; I’m asking for precision: about what reduces harm, what makes it worse, and what real repair can look like in ordinary rooms with ordinary people who suddenly see a “felon,” a “killer,” and the server they tipped 20%, all in the same person.

(Names changed. Views are mine. Upcoming episodes will connect these themes to public cases discussed in the series, including Luigi Mangione.)