In 2017, Reah Bravo was one of eight women who accused her former boss, the US journalist and talkshow host Charlie Rose, of sexual misconduct. After initial reports in the Washington Post, a further 27 women came forward with similar allegations. Complicit is not a straight memoir about working for Rose. In fact, Bravo, now a speechwriter living in Brussels, opens with a bold and distancing statement: “Enough time has passed that I can say I regret calling Charlie Rose a sexual predator,” she writes. Like the title of the book, this is a provocative and arresting place to begin.
In a 2018 article for the New York Review of Books, Bravo, who was a producer on Rose’s PBS show, detailed unblocking her ex-boss’s clogged toilet. When people responded with outrage, “I knew I had failed to accurately convey my message,” she writes here. She had not been “forced”, as readers assumed, but saw her acquiescence to Rose’s demeaning requests as evidence of her “unflappable” nature in the workplace. She argues now that this was a form of complicity, and a “brutal recognition that the soft power of the patriarchy had its way with me”.
There are more examples, not just from her own experience. Bravo describes women who blame themselves, and women who blame victims for putting themselves in harm’s way, for not running away, for not fighting back. She claims that such behaviour, conscious or otherwise, is a form of complicity, and that this plays a part in enabling predatory men.
When broken down, this starts to seem relatively uncontroversial, despite the showy packaging – and Complicit starts to feel like a misleading title. Bravo says that Rose was “a kind of predator, and I had been his prey, but I was starting to see an ecosystem that we had both done our part to sustain”. This, like the opening line, is attention grabbing, but as a central conceit it soon drops away. The tone becomes much more tentative and cautious. Of course, she writes, in one of a number of passages that appear written to preemptively combat criticism, women are not to be blamed for their abusers’ behaviour. “Why do anything that risks calling women’s behaviour into question when such questioning is the very MO that has kept them down for millennia?” It is a point well taken but Bravo sometimes boxes herself in with equivocation.
Complicit is about workplace abuse in a post-#MeToo world, but it largely takes the form of a potted history of the explosion of the #MeToo movement into the mainstream. Bravo re-examines some of the biggest cases of sexual misconduct, including those of Charlie Rose, Louis CK, Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer. She interviews some of the women who came forward with stories about these men, and is able to discuss and disseminate their experiences in greater depth than a newspaper exposé, for example, might afford them.
This comes alongside a smorgasbord of pop-feminism and psychology. The culture of the 1990s, Wonderbras, neoliberalism and individualism all shoulder some of the blame for institutionalised misogyny, though many of her examples feel specifically gen X. When she attempts to broaden her scope, touching very briefly on Andrew Tate, it feels as though she’s on less steady ground.
Bravo’s attempt to understand the complexities of abuse, rather than pointing a finger at the abusers and leaving it there, is a useful endeavour. Yet there is a flaw in the project, which is that it relates to a very particular set of circumstances. It concerns ambitious young women working for powerful, famous older men, in the US, in “entertainment, journalism, politics”. This is Bravo’s experience, and of course it is valid to keep asking questions about it, but I wonder if this specificity is why, for all of its provocations, Complicit lacks a convincing, broader diagnosis.
• Complicit: How Our Culture Enables Misbehaving Men by Reah Bravo is published by Gallery (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
