I am going to run for office. Not today, and not because I found my courage on a stage somewhere, but because I ran out of patience for a system that let harassment reach my children and then told me the mature response was to forgive it. I learned exactly what my speech is worth to the people supposed to protect it. This is what I’m doing about that.
Not yet. She has decided she will eventually seek elected office, with a platform centered on free speech and institutional accountability. She is not a candidate right now.
Harassment that reached her children, and the expectation that she absorb it quietly and be the one to extend forgiveness.
That has not been decided. This piece explains the decision to eventually run and the reasons behind it.
Yes. The investigative work continues without interruption.
The Harlequin’s Bargain
There’s a scene late in a movie about a woman clawing her way out from under someone else’s shadow where she explains what a harlequin actually is. Not the clown makeup. The job. A harlequin performs for an audience and answers to a master, and outside of that function, nobody cares who is under the paint. That’s the whole arrangement. You serve, and your identity is whatever is useful to the person you’re serving. Ask for anything back and you’ve broken the terms nobody wrote down but everybody expects you to honor anyway.
I have been playing that role for institutions that will never once play it back for me. Courts, agencies, the whole choreography of being told to stay composed, stay reasonable, stay quiet, while the people supposed to hold the line let real harm reach my kids. I served. I performed the patience. And when I asked what I got in return, the answer was more of the same request: forgive it, move past it, be the bigger person. A harlequin’s role is to serve. Nobody asks what the harlequin needs.
What “Be the Bigger Person” Actually Means
Here is what that phrase means in practice, when it’s said to someone whose children were harassed and who is still waiting for anyone with actual authority to do something about it: it means absorb this. It means your outrage is the inconvenient part, not the harassment itself. It means the burden of grace gets assigned to the person who was harmed, and the people who allowed the harm get to go on with their day.
I have spent years documenting exactly this pattern for other people, judges who face no consequence, prosecutors who face no consequence, institutions that understand that if they wait long enough, the person they hurt will be expected to let it go for the sake of looking reasonable. I built a whole platform around naming that pattern. I did not expect to be living inside the sharpest version of it, watching harassment reach my own kids and being handed the same script I have watched handed to a hundred people I’ve written about. Be the bigger person. Move on. Don’t make this ugly.
I’m done being handed that script.
The Price of Speaking
Free speech does not mean much if exercising it gets your children pulled into the blast radius and the system’s only advice is patience. People who speak publicly about power are too often expected to carry the full cost of doing so on their own, while the institutions responsible for protecting that speech treat the fallout as someone else’s problem.
A community that wants to call itself a place where people can speak honestly about power needs elected people willing to say so out loud, not just journalists absorbing the cost of saying it for everyone else.
Clutch Justice was built to track what happens when institutions face no consequence: judges, prosecutors, and agencies that understand waiting out the person they harmed usually works.
The pattern I’d documented for years stopped being something I reported on and became something happening to my own family.
The same script I’d watched handed to sources and subjects for years got handed to me: absorb it, stay composed, let it go.
Documenting the failure from the outside stopped being enough. Eventually running for office is the answer.
Clutch Confidential members get behind-the-scenes investigative access and full course access for $10 a month, and directly fund independent accountability reporting in Michigan.
Join Clutch Confidential ?Why I’ll Run
I’m not running today, and I haven’t picked a seat. What I’m sharing is the decision, and the reason for it. I’ll run because free speech protections mean nothing if the people enforcing them treat retaliation as a private matter between citizens to be worked out through exhaustion. I’ll run because families who get targeted for speaking up deserve someone in the room who has actually lived it, not someone theorizing about it from a comfortable distance. And I’ll run because I am tired of documenting institutional failure from the outside when I have twelve years of federal program management, a graduate criminal justice background, and a doctoral capstone built on exactly this problem, sitting right there, usable.
No More Performing
A harlequin is nothing without a master, the line goes, and no one gives two damns who you are beyond the service you provide. I spent a long time being useful to a system on exactly those terms, patient for it, composed for it, forgiving for it, while it gave my family nothing back but more of the same. That arrangement is over. I am not interested in being anyone’s well-behaved petitioner anymore. I am interested in being someone with the authority to change what the petitioning gets you.
So, what are harlequins good for? Apparently, eventually, running for office.
This piece is a first-person editorial.
APA 7: Williams, R. (2026, August 5). What are harlequins good for? Clutch Justice. https://clutchjustice.com/what-are-harlequins-good-for/
MLA 9: Williams, Rita. “What Are Harlequins Good For?” Clutch Justice, 5 Aug. 2026, clutchjustice.com/what-are-harlequins-good-for/.
Chicago: Williams, Rita. “What Are Harlequins Good For?” Clutch Justice, August 5, 2026. https://clutchjustice.com/what-are-harlequins-good-for/.
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