Welcome!

Welcome to So Sue Me! I’m Stephanie Krehbiel. I’m a writer, a former academic, a nonprofit co-founder and executive director, and a survivor advocate. I work primarily with sexual abuse survivors who have experienced betrayal from churches and other faith-based institutions.

You can read examples of my previous writings here, here, here, and, if you have a stomach for dissertations, here.

Why this newsletter, So Sue Me?

The most edifying moments of my advocacy career have been when survivors have told me that I helped give them language for what they’ve experienced, or when I’ve had that same experience listening to one of them articulate something I’ve struggled to name. I have a PhD in American Studies and the argument-driven world of academic scholarship is where I learned to write, but the reciprocity of advocacy work has been the most intellectually fulfilling experience of my life. That reciprocity is the spirit and intent that I bring to this newsletter.

But in this advocacy work, unfortunately, legal threats are omnipresent. If you have experienced sexual abuse by a religious leader, or you work in advocacy spaces, I suspect you understand.

And y’all? I get so tired of thinking about defamation lawsuits. Tired of reading about them, tired of being threatened with them, tired of trying to avoid them, tired of trying to figure out when the threat is real and when it’s overblown.

I’m weary of parsing words to find the least incendiary descriptions of incendiary truths, so that no one can call me a liar on a technicality.

I’m exhausted from watching survivors being bullied into silence in exchange for a reprieve from legal terrorism.

I’m calling this newsletter So Sue Me because sometimes, when a perpetrator or an abusive institution is hellbent on using the legal system to impose their narratives, all we can do is endure, and keep vigil with the truth.

But please be clear on this: I’m not a lawyer, and my paltry legal expertise is characterized mainly by an ever-expanding appreciation of my own ignorance. Layered over that is grief and rage at the regimes of oppression that the law often empowers at the expense of suffering people.

If this sounds familiar or relatable or interesting, please stay and keep reading. We’re in this together.

Liability Culture

My fatigue with everything I described above is a product of something I’m calling liability culture. Among other things, this newsletter is my attempt to make sense of it, and to be in conversation with other people who are making sense of it.

I can’t sugarcoat what we’re up against, but we won’t let it crush us.

In the United States, legal norms (ha! What even are norms right now?) strip survivors of agency while at the same time placing nearly the entire social burden of accountability for sexual violence and abuse onto their shoulders. Our society demands that survivors report abuse and blames them when they don’t. We also blame them when they do, doubting their word, giving them armchair legal advice about how they best be careful not to say something that lands them in court.

Everywhere I look, I see institutions depriving survivors of options, of even basic human dignity, while simultaneously proclaiming “zero tolerance” for abuse.

Survivors of church-based abuse have a tremendous body of collective knowledge, and they’re often intimidated and bullied out of sharing that knowledge. Or, they end up feeling like they’re screaming into a void about the tedious details of institutional fuckery, the re-abusing that so often comes after an initial abuse report. It can feel like no one has the patience to hear about the fuckery, or the context to understand why it’s so traumatic.

And of course, part of why it feels that way is that many people really don’t have the context. Our institutions, no matter how many sexual harassment training modules and “healthy boundaries” trainings they mandate, continually steer us all away from opportunities to learn about what actually happens. Their insurance companies and legal counsels stifle curiosity and replace it with a de-contextualized anxiety about liability.

This is the context in which survivors experience liability culture. I define liability culture as all the ways, both overt and hidden, that the legal system and insurance industry shape our collective perception of sexual and other forms of abuse in institutional settings.

While confidentiality is of incalculable importance for survivors and their advocates, liability culture obfuscates the distinction between confidentiality and institutional ass-covering. The effect is generalized, hypervigilant silence. It cuts institutions off from creativity and compassion, and it cuts survivors off from solidarity and support.

When “zero tolerance” starts feeling like a thought-terminating cliché, aggressively incurious about evidence to the contrary, that’s liability culture.

Because liability culture isn’t just about what we’re allowed to write or to say without getting sued; it’s also about how our legal environment shapes what we allow ourselves to know, and what kinds of knowing we’re willing to integrate into our understanding of the world.

Many of us fight back through writing. But writing about abuse for any kind of public reading audience feels exceptionally fraught in 2025 America. Liability culture feels more quelling than ever, because everyone is scared. Abusers run the country and generally piss all over everything.

The most empowering response to this shit show, for me, is still to write about it. Even when I’m furious, burned out, scared, and overwhelmed by the vastness of the problem and the smallness of my voice, I keep at it. This newsletter is my commitment to refuse the temptations of silence.

Other stuff, like joy (and cats)

Lately, I’ve been frustrated with the fact that the subjects I’m most experienced at writing about are so heavy, because dear gods, everything is so heavy already. Not because I want to stop writing about those things, but because I also long to write about the things that bring me joy and help me survive my life.

I am, in my not-so-professional hours, a bookish introvert who raises a small legion of compost worms in my basement, has too many fermentation projects going (my recent attempt at tepache ended up in a worm bin), eats dandelions and lambsquarter, gardens badly but with conviction, dilutes mediocre wine with fizzy water (don’t judge me), listens to the same sci-fi podcasts a creepy amount of times, plays dumb iPad games to my ergonomic detriment, has attempted to bake almost every kind of flatbread I’ve ever learned about, and would do basically anything for my cats, Xander and Inej, and my kind, dry-witted spouse, Eric.

I’ll probably write about some of that stuff. I thought for months about making this entire newsletter about liability as it pertains to sexual violence, but the aforementioned need for joyful survival drove me towards something that is hopefully more balanced. I’ve decided that my entire sphere of interests is fair game for subject matter.

It’s going to be a little bit of everything that gets my brain moving. Survivor advocacy, yes. Liability culture, yes. Growing things, yes. Cats, yes. Bread-baking, yes. Writhing piles of compost worms—-uh, no. I’m being told that is gross. If you promise to subscribe, I promise I will not get too vivid about writhing compost worms.

But I’ll probably still write about them. As one of my awesome writer friends said to me recently, “I wish I believed in anything as much as these people believe in compost.” It’s me. I’m people. I don’t believe silence will protect us, and I really believe in compost.

That’s probably enough for now. Upcoming posts will have more details about output, subscription plans, etc. For now, I’m just glad you’re here.

And if you like what you read, please help me grow my reading community by sharing this email with someone else who might be interested! Thank you for reading and supporting my work.