Who Gets to Be Called "Eccentric" Instead of an Abuser?

Like it or not, Sinead O’Connor’s career will forever be linked to Prince, thanks to the massive success of her rendition of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” But the Irish singer has spoken out again about the abuse she suffered at the hands of the man who wrote her biggest hit, revealing some details from her forthcoming memoir in a new interview with the New York Times.

O’Connor claims that Prince summoned her to his Hollywood mansion in 1991 after the song became a hit and “chastised her for swearing in interviews, harangued his butler to serve her soup though she repeatedly refused it, and sweetly suggested a pillow fight, only to thump her with something hard he’d slipped into his pillowcase. When she escaped on foot in the middle of the night, she writes, he stalked her with his car, leapt out and chased her around the highway.”

“You’ve got to be crazy to be a musician,” O’Connor told the Times, “but there’s a difference between being crazy and being a violent abuser of women.”

She’s got a point. Too often, abuse of women (or anyone, for that matter) in the entertainment industry gets written off as the eccentric behavior of a temperamental genius. Prince’s reputation as a controlling artist with notoriously odd demands is no secret; should we be at all surprised that he’d get mad at O’Connor for swearing, force-feed her soup and then try to beat her up? Does his bad behavior get dismissed as a personality quirk simply because his music is so great?

As the Times writes, “‘Crazy’ is a word that does some dirty cultural work. It is a flip way of referencing mental illness, yes. But it’s also a slippery label that has little to do with how a person’s brain works and everything to do with how she is culturally received. Calling someone crazy is the ultimate silencing technique. It robs a person of her very subjectivity.”

That is, of course, what happened with O’Connor, who has struggled publicly with mental illness but also been dismissed as “crazy” for some things that, nowadays, seem completely reasonable, like calling out the Catholic Church for covering up the sexual abuse of thousands of children. Why is “crazy” a career-killer for women like her while it’s also something meant to endear us to men like Prince and excuse their abusive behavior?

O’Connor has spoken out about the way Prince treated her many times over the years, long before he died in 2016. “He invited me to his house in Los Angeles and started to give out to me for swearing in interviews,” she told The Mirror in 2007. “When I told him to go fuck himself he got very upset and became quite threatening, physically. I ended up having to escape.”

“He can pack a punch,” she added. “A few blows were exchanged. All I could do was spit. I spat on him quite a bit.”

Those allegations did absolutely nothing to hurt Prince’s career back then, of course. Those were different times — pre-Me Too — but it still feels totally egregious that an artist like O’Connor could make such an accusation and have it barely register as a blip. Regardless of who they are, men who beat women aren’t simply “difficult geniuses” or “tortured artists.” They are abusers, and we should describe them as such — no matter how many hit songs they have under their belts.