I'm not convinced he did the same for the head comedy writer who he accuses of rape. Either he always goes to sleep when he does drugs, or his distorting events, and pretending any time he forgets is him waking up. That's the difference between starting to have sex and forgetting it (drug-fueled memory lapse), versus waking up to sexual assault. He later says this man groomed him, despite Gadd being about 30 years old at the time. There's enough problems with his telling - and it is only his version of events - that I am suspicious he distorted things to remove any possibility he wasn't a victim, or anything mitigating for the other gay man (who never asked Gadd if he's gay in the story, which I find unbelievable).
Donny's comedy act was bombing but after after he started working with Darrien the jokes were landing and the bar the was packed. Darrien gave Donny GHB and sexually assaulted him. Donny realized what happened afterwards but kept going back because he viewed Darrien as a mentor and wanted his approval. Similarly, at times he enabled Martha's stalking and would masturbate thinking about her because she thought he was funny and handsome which his how he wanted to see himself.
Donny wasn't innocent. He definitely played a role in enabling his abusers and he could not understand why. I think that's why the show is such a hit because that's how abuse works in real life, but that's not how it is normally portrayed in popular culture.
Darrien called the combination of GHB and another drug the "highest of highs". Both of them took GHB, not just Donny.
When Darrien reaches down Donny's pants and starts jerking him off, Donny says "stop", and Darrien immediately stops. Does that sound like a predator?
Donny portrays Darrien as a Bill Cosby figure who sexually assaults people in their sleep. I asked myself which is more likely: Darrien is a regular gay man, or a predator. Given how much Donny lies, I can't accept the story at face value, because Gadd (Donny) wrote the parts for all the characters - he can change the narrative any way he likes.
I think Donny confuses losing memory (side effect of GHB) with waking up (when most people stop feeling continuous time). Either he is always going to sleep when he takes drugs, or he just has memory gaps. If it is the former, Darrien is a rapist like Bill Cosby. If the latter, drugs loosened up two men who had sex, both taking the same drugs.
Another area where I disagree is the value Gadd places on mentorship. He wants to be famous, which is why he tolerates everything. At one point he thinks Darrien is lying to him about his chances for fame, and hours later he claims he was raped. Isn't that timing convenient - that it is only rape when Donny is no longer getting what he wants?
Later in the show, Donny finds a note on the script he wrote: Darrien wrote that the script was amazing. It appears Donny was wrong to abandon him... and so later, he goes back to Darrien to work with him again. It's the same thing playing out - when Donny thinks he can get famous, he works with the guy he accused of rape.
All I can say is that after many, many years of working on various contexts with sexual assault victims and being a sexual assault victim myself, I don't have the same reaction as you do.
And I will say again, the response has been overwhelmingly positive that Gad's messy, complicated representation of date rape is incredibly accurate to a lot of people's experiences.
In fact, most victims are left extremely confused as to whether or not they even were assaulted.
I can see how you are conceptualizing this, and it sounds like you don't have a ton of exposure to real life SA victims. Which is why Gad is being so lauded because TV almost never portrays the messy, complex, contradictory, confusing reality of what SA actually looks like and feels like to a lot of victims, or the fucked up ways in which they respond.
Also, I agree, the use of the word grooming may or may not be ideal since people are using it in different ways, which is suboptimal. But the fact persists that predators in power do create situations pretty much identical to how children are groomed by predators.
Perhaps you haven't been in a situation where someone with extreme power in your world decides to target you for abuse. It's an extremely disorienting experience. A big part of it is that they start offering you what you want most and then make it really, really confusing as to what you owe them in return, and they often make it clear that substantial harm can come if you don't comply. All of this is typically done with a veneer of plausible deniability. Sometimes drugs and alcohol are used to create a lot of plausible deniability, but not always. So yes, there are often individual circumstances where an advance will be rejected and the person puts on a display of respecting the rejection. That's part of the process, but they fully intend to proceed once they can create circumstances to do so. ETA: This is
why Gad chose to include that scene of Darrien ostensibly appearing to respect boundaries. That was the whole point.
What makes it sexual assault is that the person absolutely does not want to have sexual contact with the person in power, but have ended up in a dynamic where they feel they have no choice, or where they lose capacity to enforce a choice.
Gad's experience strikes you as strange, but it strikes folks who are extremely familiar with this process as downright textbook.
There's a whole range of predators out there. There are the Weinsteins who lure and pounce, the Cosby's who lure and drug, the R Kelly's who lure and imprison, but those are patterns of extremely bold predators who evolved their tactics in an environment of extreme protection.
Most predators in positions of power need to be more subtle than that. The plausible deniability is a huge element of their own survival as serial sexual predators.
