8/27/18
When 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was found dead near her Iowa hometown, President Donald Trump quickly seized on the tragedy as a political talking point. The reason: The man charged with her murder, Cristhian Bahena Rivera, may be an unauthorized immigrant. Now, a member of Tibbetts’s family is pushing back on Trump’s narrative. Rivera’s immigration status is irrelevant, Tibbetts’s cousin Sandi Tibbetts Murphy wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. “He could have been a citizen, born in this country; he could have been an older, white man from anywhere; he could have been a man from Mollie’s world.” What really matters, Murphy argues, are the apparent circumstances of Tibbetts’s death: “Mollie was murdered because a man denied her right to say no.” For Murphy, the tragedy isn’t about the supposed dangers of illegal immigrants, as Trump has claimed. Instead, it’s about toxic masculinity. Tibbetts’s killer, she wrote, “is a man who felt entitled to impose himself on Mollie’s life, without consequence. He is a man who, because of his sense of male entitlement, refused to allow Mollie the right to reject his advances — the right to her own autonomy.”
“We must be willing to address the way we raise our boys and young men, so that violence is not a part of their response to this world,” she wrote. “Like the recent murders of the Colorado family or the similarly tragic homicide of Kate Steinle, Mollie’s death is further example of the toxic masculinity that exists in our society.” Other members of Tibbetts’s family have also resisted attempts to turn her death into anti-immigrant propaganda. “I’m a member of Mollie’s family and we are not so ****ing small-minded that we generalize a whole population based on some bad individuals,” Tibbetts’s cousin Samantha Lucas tweeted last week. Murphy closed her post with a similar sentiment. “You do not have permission to callously use this tragedy to demonize an entire population for the acts of one man,” she wrote. “No. We reclaim our Mollie.”
