WTF, True Blood No. 3: Why Did They Think Tr*fficking Sarah Was A Good Idea?

I hate Sarah Newlin as much as the next guy but ending it with her being trafficked is not a cute look...

Welcome back to another installment of WTF, True Blood with your favorite pop culture critic and scholar, Vie Darling! In this newsletter, we’re talking about Sarah Newlin because of course! I mean, cmon! The timing couldn’t be better, could it? Yes, of course because of evangelical Christian conservatives in the political arena fomenting and propagating hate and division — that parallel is undeniable –  but actually more so because of the collapsing celebrity cabalistic empires of human trafficking.

“Well, what’s Sarah Newlin got to do with human trafficking?” 

A lot, actually. 

The series ends with Sarah captured and locked up in the basement of Fangtasia where people pay boatloads of money to — at the very least — feed on her blood. This is, suffice it to say, human trafficking. 

Sarah may be someone we definitely would have seen on CNN, participating in January 6th but this still poses an ethical and moral conundrum because it forces us to ask, when is it ever okay to treat human beings as chattel or to exploit their bodies against their will?

There’s an obvious argument for why this isn’t that bad and that maybe it’s exactly what Sarah deserves. Let’s just recount some of Sarah’s crimes and transgressions:

• Turns her back on her sister for becoming a vampire and then lies about it to make herself look better

• Is not only a member but leader of the Christian Fellowship of the Sun cult, where hate and violence towards vampires is encouraged to the point of torture and execution

• Cheats on her husband with Jason which, okay, totally get that but it’s also super hypocritical

• Physically assaults Jason a number of times

• Creates vampire concentration camps where they do cruel science experiments on the vampires they capture

• Murders Willa in front of her father

• Gets Jessica captured and placed in the concentration camps

• Murders Ms Suzuki brutally

• Attempts to murder the… I guess protagonist vampires…? By making them meet the sun at the death camp

• Instrumental in the creation of the biological weapon of Hep V which is responsible for the loss of thousands if not millions of not only vampires but human lives

• Infects the entire supply of Tru Blood being manufactured at the camp with Hep V, spreading the disease globally

• Consumes the antidote to ensure genocide (another way this relates to this current moment 🇵🇸)

• Appropriates South Asian culture as “Noomi” whilst on the run from the Yakuza

• Thinks she’s the messiah (hello! Megalomaniac much? Especially considering that, b*tch! You’re the one who caused the plague!)

So that’s a pretty long list. Pretty, pretty, pretty long list.

It’s hardly exhaustive so I’m sure there are more items that could be added (you can comment if I’m missing anything), but with all that said… is her punishment of being trafficked in any way acceptable? It’s very poetic that this genocidal vampire hater who did almost succeed in her psychotic mission would end in such a way — devoid of hope, locked up in fear, her blood (the only thing that could cure the bio-weapon she helped create prior to its use in the creation of New Blood) being fed upon by the very creatures she attempted to eradicate. Ironic, even. But is it okay?

I can’t answer that question because I cannot ever in good faith stand beside or behind human trafficking, just like I can never stand beside genocide. I cannot remain true to my integrity and also be okay with a woman being dressed in lingerie and hung in chains to be sold for the abuse of her body nor can I support the infringement upon other people’s sovereignty, which is what trafficking is. I can, however, say this much — I can totally empathize with why this would feel like such a gratifying end to the show. 

Sarah Newlin or Sarah Crabtree or Noomi or whatever the f*ck she’s calling herself is a monster who committed massively scaled, heinous crimes against others. For obvious reasons, I can’t say she committed these crimes against other human beings or even living beings, which is exactly why she believed that what she was doing was okay. Those semantics are the very complicating factor at play because vampires are technically not alive — they are in fact the living dead, which is what makes them abominable within the scope of monster and  horror history. This doesn’t actually make Sarah special because any psychopathic eugenicist could say the same — that they do not perceive their victims as humans, so it’s okay to murder them without regard, remorse, or retribution. 

This begs the question, what qualifies a human? Vampires are biologically different from living, non-vampire humans — just look at the effect their blood has on non-vamps. As I stated, they are not alive but they are anomalous in that they do live lives. They have feelings, perhaps even more intense feelings than non-vamps. They have a degree of sentience that is at or above that of the average non-vamp. They have wants, needs, and desires outside of the carnal urges, even if the carnal sometimes overpowers the sophisticated. Hell, some of them live the exact same life they did before being turned. Many of them resent having to kill and in fact do not do it. Look at Godric or the otherwise insufferable Vampire Bill for instance. Meanwhile, plenty of non-vampire humans do all the evil stuff vampires do and worse. So where do we draw the line?

For those of us who identify as abolitionists, this is a regular moral dilemma we must face constantly. Prison abolitionists want to see prisons shut down for the very fact that they impede upon people’s human rights to bodily autonomy – the American prison system is a torture factory where slavery is legal and prisoners (some of whom are not even guilty of whatever crime they’ve been accused of) are forced to labor away creating consumer goods for mega-chains like Whole Foods. 

Meanwhile, we have people like Sean “Diddy” Combs who cannot even be trusted to be let out of jail before their criminal trial because of fear that he will attempt to intimidate witnesses in the massive legal cases against him for racketeering and trafficking (amongst a plethora of other things). As a person whose body exists within the framework of this Western social paradigm as an ideological warzone, it’s especially challenging when we have to consider how to keep ourselves safe from those who are indoctrinated into thinking that it’s their right to exploit, oppress, or harm us. As a survivor, I do not believe someone like Combs can be reformed which is why I do believe that he needs to be kept away from the general population for everyone’s safety (because if you think that his crimes don’t impact regular, everyday people, read my piece entitled The Culture Must Change). But how do we do that without the existence of prisons?

Similarly, how do we handle the issue of someone as psychopathic (or at the very least, sociopathic, although I think to commit genocide, you have to be a psychopath) as Sarah Newlin, who is absolutely spiritually, emotionally, mentally, morally, and ethically compromised? What do we do with people who commit these kinds of catastrophic crimes? Do we guillotine them, like the French bourgeoisie in the late 18th? Or hang them by the neck publicly, like Sadam Hussein? Or do we keep them in maximum security prisons like Jeffrey Dahmer? Jason let Sarah Newlin go, which ultimately ended up being a godshot since her blood contained all of what remained of the Hep V antidote. Had he decided to take on the role of executioner, her blood would have been rendered useless to all. Kind of like how Gandalf told Frodo that it wasn’t his right to decide that Gollum should die just because he found him pitiful and disgusting (even though he was pitiful and disgusting as well as a crazy murderer) and that maybe he had a part to play in their story after all, which turned out to be true since Gollum ended up being the one who destroyed the One Ring by biting Frodo’s finger off and falling into the lava of Mount Doom after Frodo was unable to resist the power of the Ring and ended up trying to keep it.

Anyway, I don’t have the answers and I understand that complete abolition is an ideal that we work towards, understanding that within this present paradigm, it’s not a practical reality that can be readily implemented at a moments notice. We maintain the hope that maybe one day, it will be. The unsatisfying truth is that the level of criminality that exists as a byproduct of the system is exactly what necessitates prisons – which is precisely what the architects, engineers, and controllers of the system want. Any sane person comprehends that some people’s actions are so inhumane, that the only way to contain the unmitigated savagery caused by their insanity is to do things that are perhaps somewhat inhumane. It makes more sense to kill – or at the very least, imprison – one person who is attempting to harm and even kill millions of people than it does to just let them be at large, murdering indiscriminately. Anyway, neoliberals may not get this, but sane people do.

Unfortunately, this is exploited by the plutocratic, eugenecist overlords of the globalized colonial paradigm to wield social constructions to create a slave class of prisoners from specific ethnic and class backgrounds with the excuse that they are “criminals”. Whether they are or aren’t becomes erroneous in the face of the much greater, white collar crimes against humanity that these wannabe autocrats proliferate, like poverty, hunger, child labor slavery, cisheteropatriarchy, environmental destruction, and genocide – and that’s not even the half of it. 

According to the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal (a hub for conservative theory and praxis), “conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.”

What does any of this mean when the criminal legal system is unjust, when the foundation of the civilization is fundamentally unjust, when every institution and structure is unjust because the very DNA of the empire is unjust? Is a young Black man selling marijuana in order to feed his family and meet the bare minimum of their needs really a criminal within the grand scheme of the purposeful, historic socio-economic oppression and exploitation of the Black community? 

Perhaps the answer isn’t so black and white. Perhaps binary oppositional thinking is the enemy of true, embodied comprehension and therein compassion. To the degree that it is criminal, it is vastly less so than the system in which the crime took place. It is a direct ramification of the not solely unjust but felonious, dastardly DNA from which this culture and the society in which it enlivens exists.

Given this context, is Sarah Newlin’s state of affairs in the series finale of True Blood in any way permissible? Personally, I don’t think so. That she’s wearing lacy, white lingerie genders the punishment in a way that is simply intolerable for me. Were she wearing a prison jumper, that would be one thing but the implication of her attire while she is chained up and physically abused by creatures supernaturally more powerful than her transgresses the ethical boundaries of keeping someone like her from causing any more devastation than she already has. Being held prisoner by vampires for the rest of her life would have been fine enough, but I find this attempt at being edgy lazy, gross, and disturbing, implying a deep level of misogyny that doesn’t deserve to exist, even as a punishment for a crime. 

Within the cisheteropatriarchal context of our present reality, do I think that female handlers for sex trafficking rings like Ghislaine Maxwell should be turned into sex slaves themselves? No. Because that lacks wisdom and wouldn’t be about justice but revenge. Nor do I think that the IDF soldiers who sexually assault prisoners should in turn be sexually assaulted. But I do believe that they forfeit their civil rights when they do things like this and that they should be kept away from others and not allowed access to full liberty since they clearly do not know how to handle it. I do not feel they should be subject to punishment per se because we know that punishment does not usually lead to true reform, and besides – people who do things like this are generally beyond reform anyway. I believe as Seekers of Justice, we have to accept these truths and put ourselves in positions to keep ourselves safe without tipping the scales too far in the other direction. Balance is the key and while I’m not going to just allow someone to slap my face on both cheeks, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. 

We as a Collective need to evolve beyond such primitive, base means of handling both microcosmic and macrocosmic problems and seek wisdom in our crafting of solutions. Perhaps then we will actually have fewer problems (or at least the same amount of problems) rather than our current situation with catastrophes mounting daily. Maybe we start by giving Noomi a pair of pants and a t-shirt if she’s going to be fed on by the living dead in the basement of a vampire strip club.