Karly Morgan
The legal battle between Kesha and Dr. Luke is the talk of the music industry right now. It’s an
extremely disturbing, sad, and troubling story. Worst of all, it’s an all too
familiar story.
Kesha Rose Sebert filed a lawsuit against Lukasz Sebastian
Gottwald, aka Dr. Luke, in 2014. The lawsuit stated that Dr. Luke, her music
producer, emotionally and physically abused her. He allegedly gave her a pill that he told her would “sober her up” from a night of partying. She woke up the next morning in his bed,
naked, sore, and without memory of what had happened that night. She called her mother and told her she had been
raped.
Just recently her case reached the New York Supreme Court,
where the judge denied Kesha the right to break her contract. This means Kesha has two options: she can either never make music for profit
again, abandoning her life’s career and leaving her indefinitely unemployed, or
work for her abuser until the end of her 6 album contract. She understandably erupted into tears in the courtroom.
Since the verdict, she has received an outpouring of support from fans and
artists alike, notably the #FreeKesha hashtag, a GoFundMe account set up by
fans, and a $250,000 donation from Taylor Swift. (sidenote: I tweeted support
to Kesha and she retweeted me, I’m so glad a platform like twitter exists where
strangers can lend each other emotional support.)
As a result of this case, once again, a woman was told
by the justice system that her body is not her own. The justice system told
Kesha that her producer had not done wrong. The justice system sent a message
to rape victims to keep their mouths shut rather than accuse a powerful man
like music mogul Dr. Luke, lest they leave the courtroom in tears, lost for
money and lost for options. To make matters worse, Dr. Luke is Kesha’s
producer. This specific role in the contract means that he has enormous say in
the direction of her music, and reaps a huge profit from her talent. He is
literally keeping her in her contract, even though he raped her, so that he can
make a profit off of her. This is a tragic representation of the
Capitalism/Slavery pillar of the heteropatriarchy. To quote the reading, Kesha’s
own person had become, “a commodity that one must sell in the labor market
while the profits of one’s work are taken by someone else.”
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