“Fucking Bitch.”

The cost of telling a dangerous man you’re not afraid

Renee Good didn’t die screaming. She didn’t curse. She didn’t spit back the rage being hurled at her by a man who had already decided he owned the moment, the space, the ending. Her last recorded words were gentle in a way that keeps echoing long after you’ve heard them, a soft human attempt to steady a situation that had already begun to tilt toward something dangerous. I’m not mad at you. Not sarcastic. Not defiant. Just a woman trying to lower the temperature in a moment where heat was building fast and fear was beginning to bloom.

And that matters. It matters because those words weren’t weakness. They were instinct. Women have been speaking that language for centuries, smoothing sharp edges with softness, translating danger into diplomacy because we know, in our bones, how quickly male anger can tip into something that can’t be walked back. We learn to offer calm the way you offer a glass of water to a shaking hand, hoping it will be enough to keep everything from spilling.

I’ve watched my friend do that in her own home. I’ve seen her standing in a kitchen with a bruise blooming on her cheek, whispering please don’t be mad, I’m not mad at you, let’s just calm down, as if her gentleness might absorb his violence. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But she kept trying, because women in danger are taught that survival depends on how well we manage the men who want to hurt us.

Renee was doing the same thing. And in my reading of that moment, through everything I know about abusive men and the way they move through the world, that quiet I’m not mad at you may have felt like a challenge to someone who needed to be in charge. Because some men don’t hear peace as peace. They hear it as a woman claiming ground that isn’t supposed to belong to her. They hear it as a refusal to be properly afraid.

You can hear the shift in the recording if you listen closely. Not just the words, but the way the air seems to tighten. The pause. The weight of something being decided. Anyone who’s ever been in a room with an abusive man knows that moment — the way everything holds its breath right before a threat becomes something worse.

It’s the moment when anger sharpens into something else — her wife had just insulted him, had just refused to play nice, and something in him bristled. That’s when he shifts the phone into his left hand, clearing his right side, the side where his weapon sits, and to me it looks exactly like what it is: a man preparing to enforce obedience when words didn’t get him what he wanted.

And then Renee is shot. Three times. Two of them after she was already essentially past him.

What comes next is the part that still makes my stomach drop. Not because of its volume or its violence, but because of how ordinary it sounds. Fucking bitch. A phrase flung like a verdict, sharp enough to turn her into the problem even as she was bleeding. There’s no wobble in it, no stunned silence, no hollow what-have-I-done. Just blame, immediate and reflexive, a story being told fast enough to make him the victim and her the provocation.

I’ve heard that tone before. My friend heard it after every punch, every kick, every hand around her throat. The same old sentence wrapped in different words: look what you made me do. You pushed me. You deserved it. This is your fault. It’s the logic of abuse, a kind of moral alchemy that turns cruelty into consequence and makes a woman responsible for her own pain.

Calling Renee a bitch after killing her wasn’t just cruelty. It was the beginning of that same story, the one where she isn’t a person anymore, just an obstacle, just something that didn’t behave the way it was supposed to.

The statements started rolling in almost immediately, slick and seamless and already certain, already circling him like a protective phalanx while her blood was still soaking into the cold gray pavement. Grief hadn’t even found its footing yet and the press releases were already marching, talking points already polished, and within an hour and a half Kristi Noem had decided the story was finished. No waiting. No reckoning. No long pause to sit with the reality that a woman was gone. Just a verdict flung out into the world: the agent was right, Renee was wrong. She’s held onto that version ever since, repeating it when she’s asked how she could possibly know any of this without the full truth in front of her. She just does, she says — as if certainty were the same thing as proof, as if speaking it fast enough and loud enough could turn it into fact.

And that speed is its own kind of confession. A woman is dead, and the machinery is already humming, gears grinding, scripts sliding into place, moving with the well-rehearsed urgency of a system that knows exactly how to shield a man with power while quietly laying the weight of it all back onto the woman he killed. It’s a reflex so old and so deeply trained into our politics you can almost hear it click into gear — close ranks, lock arms, protect the man, and if there’s any blame left over, make sure it lands on her.

We’ve seen it in Donald Trump, in the way he talks about women as if they’re props in his personal pageant, things to be graded, mocked, and publicly humiliated. Piggy. Dog. Stupid. Ugly. He bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and was rewarded with the highest office in the land. That kind of language doesn’t just vanish into the air. It settles into the soil. It seeps into the seams of culture. It teaches people, quietly and relentlessly, what they’re allowed to get away with.

When leaders model contempt for women, when they make cruelty look like confidence and dominance look like strength, it doesn’t stay confined to podiums and cable news. It leaks outward, into parking lots and traffic stops and ordinary moments where someone with a weapon decides a woman has crossed an invisible line simply by not shrinking.

Renee Good tried to live. She tried to speak. She tried to calm a situation that never should’ve existed in the first place. She offered the only things she had left in that moment — her voice, her steadiness, her refusal to let fear be the last word. And for that, she was killed, then blamed, then pressed into a story that made her death easier for powerful people to swallow, as if a woman’s life could be wrapped in official language and made to disappear.

I’m grieving her. I’m furious for her. And I’m thinking about my friend, and about every woman who has ever whispered I’m not mad at you while standing in the shadow of a man who might hurt her. I’m thinking about how we learn to do that, how early it starts, how often it fails. I’m thinking about my own children and the kind of world they’re inheriting, one where girls are still taught to soothe danger instead of being protected from it, and boys are still taught that their anger deserves room to breathe.

Renee’s last words were peaceful. They were human. They were a woman trying to keep everyone alive in a moment that was already slipping away from her. I keep thinking about that — about how often women are asked to be the calm in a storm they didn’t create, how often we’re taught to soften danger with our voices and our bodies and our fear, and how often it doesn’t save us anyway. We owe her more than silence and talking points and the rush to move on. Don’t let them rewrite who she was to justify what they did. Keep holding this in the light until the truth — not the convenient version, not the comfortable one — has nowhere left to hide.

And with that, today’s song. Not because it fits this essay, but because I know a lot of you reading this are sad today. ❤️‍🩹

So, today’s song is in honor of Bob Weir. May his memory be a blessing and may he forever Rest In Peace.

Stay safe, my friends. Stay strong and stay sane(ish) whenever and however you can.

💙 Jo