CLARE STEPHENS: Kristen Bell, a bad joke, and the age of 'moral ammunition'.

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

This article originally appeared on Clare Stephens' Substack, NQR. Sign up here.

It was, it must be said, a very bad joke.

On October 17, actor Kristen Bell shared a photo of her husband, Dax Shepard, on Instagram, with a caption about their wedding anniversary.

"Happy 12th anniversary to the man who once said to me:

I would never kill you. A lot of men have killed their wives at a certain point. Even though I'm heavily incentivised to kill you, I never would."

A few things.

Why would he be heavily incentivised to kill her?? I don't understand. And when he says 'a lot of men have killed their wives,' is that meant to be funny? Like ha-ha? To me, that line evokes the horrific image of one of the most disturbing domestic violence cases in Australia's recent memory, where a man set his wife and three children alight. They were in the car, the perpetrator's wife attempting to drop her kids at school.

So, no, the glib mention of lots of men killing their partners 'at a certain point' doesn't make me laugh.

Watch Mamamia Out Loud discuss Kristen Bell's controversial anniversary post. Post continues after video.

It's unsurprising, then, that the immediate response to Bell's post was one of confusion and frustration. Comments accused her of being "tone-deaf," of "making light" of women's suffering. October is domestic violence awareness month in the US, and advocacy organisations released statements weighing in on the way Bell was "trivialising" a very real, very painful issue.

Now, almost two weeks after the post was uploaded, Bell hasn't responded, and she hasn't taken it down. It's still there, with thousands of comments that offer a mixture of sentiments: some say the joke is romantic, it's dark humour, it's relatable, while others say it's pathetic, it's weird, or it's actually evidence that Bell's husband has been "abusing her for years".

On the surface, I find it interesting that it hasn't been deleted. If it were me, I think, the anger would've forced me to cower, whether or not I truly believed I'd done anything wrong. I'd want the criticism to go away. I'd want to show that I hadn't meant to be offensive, that I wasn't a monster, that I didn't think domestic violence was funny.

But the more frenzied the outrage against Kristen Bell becomes, the more I understand her response.

Most of us who are only giving this story a tiny fraction of our attention will have seen a) a joke that seems a bit tone-deaf, b) some comments pointing out that it's tone-deaf, and c) a person who refuses to acknowledge their own tone-deafness. We assume Bell is choosing to ignore the criticism directed towards her. How arrogant, we think. How entitled. She must really not care about women who are killed by their husbands.

But when it's you at the centre of mass outrage, you're seeing far more than just what's on the surface. Despite how it might look from the outside, you're paying closer attention than anyone else. Yes, I'm sure Bell is aware of the statements issued by domestic violence advocacy groups. I'm sure she knows people think she was making light of the literal crime of murder. But at the same time as those arguments were emerging, other commentary was emerging, too.

Somehow, an interview of Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard from 2012 was unearthed, and quickly went viral. In it, they're promoting a movie called Hit & Run, and Shepard jokes about being "offended" by Bell and hitting her "several times."

"And then I got beat up and guess what? I never opened my mouth again," Bell says.

It's a short clip, devoid of context, but more significantly – it's over 13 years old.

Should we all be held to account for what we said in 2012? I'm viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of unearthing old content online. If it's offensive, why dig it up from the grave and breathe new life into it? Why give it the opportunity to cause offense all over again?

The practice is also fundamentally anachronistic. Judging a 2012 interview by 2025 standards isn't righteous – it's unfair.

Of course, the 2012 interview is just the tip of the iceberg. There have been analyses of the vulnerable disclosures Shepard has made on his podcast. People pouring over the details of Shepard and Bell's 'volatile' relationship. The tabloids are now relentlessly running stories about how Bell's inner circle are turning on her, how she's 'refusing' to apologise, how she's entirely 'oblivious' to other people's feelings.

So, from Bell's perspective, if she takes the post down, if she concedes to being wrong, what exactly will she be admitting to? For her, at the centre of the outrage storm, I'm sure the criticism of being tone-deaf has become indistinguishable from the accusations that she's a monster. The anger is so loud and so contemptuous that what she sees – rightly or wrongly – is a mob of people demanding she hang her head in shame. And I'd hazard a guess she doesn't think she deserves it.

What Bell is experiencing is a phenomenon that seems to come hand-in-hand with any kind of online criticism: the crazed search for moral ammunition*. When we see a person who we believe is guilty of a social transgression, it's not enough to simply discuss that action, or that behaviour. We seem determined to build a case about the person as a whole. To paint them as ubiquitously cruel or callous, to gather enough evidence about their badness that we can find them to be irredeemable, unworthy of empathy, deserving of limitless public shame.

They become a symbol of the very thing we're angry about, such that Kristen Bell has – in this moment – become synonymous with the plague of domestic violence. It's such a maddening and complicated issue to confront, and usually, it feels like our hopelessness and our sense of injustice have nowhere tangible to go. But now they do.

Listen to this week's Mamamia Out Loud episode, where Holly, Amelia and Jessie discuss the controversy. Post continues after audio.

Kristen Bell doesn't get it. Why doesn't she get it?! If we destroy her, we'll show everyone just how much we really care about women.

And that, I'd imagine, is what Bell is refusing to give in to.

After all, she's not a perpetrator of domestic violence. In fact, within her own family, there's a deep understanding of the life-long impacts of domestic violence. When Dax Shepard was a child, his step-dad was abusive, physically assaulting his mother in front of him. He was also molested as a seven-year-old, and believes his experiences of abuse during childhood predisposed him to his destructive struggle with addiction as an adult.

You'd have to imagine that Kristen Bell does not, truly, find any of that funny.

Perhaps she's indignant that if we want to tackle men's violence against women, there are far more appropriate ways to direct our energy. Last month, the President of the United States (who, it should be noted, was once accused of assault and rape against his ex-wife) suggested the "lesser" crime of domestic violence shouldn't be counted in crime statistics.

"If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say 'this was a crime'," he said. And this is the President speaking in Washington D.C., not an actor writing a caption on Instagram.

Perhaps Bell, also, finds the media and social media backlash so vitriolic that apologising would seem like a tacit acceptance that it was justified. One Daily Mail headline reads:

Kristen Bell torched over disturbing new detail in Dax Shepard anniversary post referencing men who kill their wives.

Kristen. Bell. Torched.

Is that not a clunky use of words, in the context of domestic violence?

I can't help but think the anger towards Kristen Bell is a distraction. While we're yelling at her, debating exactly how offensive her joke was and why she won't apologise for it, trawling through her personal history so we can destroy her in protest, we're not really doing… anything. Are we? Except subliminally suggesting that a woman's tone-deafness is what we really need to police, rather than, say, violent behaviour.

A friend who works in advocacy recently told me, anecdotally, that she worries about this sense of faux activism. She often sees loud online outrage about the area she works in, but watches as fewer and fewer people volunteer to be involved. There's cynicism around the reality of messy progress – whether that's imperfect policy or charities that can't solve all the problems at once – and where we can practice moral purity is on the internet. With our fingers. Using a celebrity as a scapegoat.

We like to prosecute moral questions through the prism of a two-dimensional figure we see through our phones, particularly when that figure is a woman. It gives us a sense of certainty. A sense that we can all agree on something.

But a bad joke is not the same as a man setting his family alight.

And if we want people to own their mistakes and apologise, we need to be clear about that distinction. We also need to be able to engage in criticism in good faith – not create an environment where no apology will ever be enough.

The more frenzied our outrage becomes towards Kristen Bell, the more we pile on, the more we conflate her bad joke with a sickening crime, we have to ask: maybe she has something to say sorry for, but what if we do, too?

Clare Stephens is the author of The Worst Thing I've Ever Done, you can buy here. Sign up to Clare Stephens' Substack, NQR.

Read more from Clare Stephens:

• CLARE STEPHENS: 'The first chapters of my book "The Worst Thing I've Ever Done".'

• CLARE STEPHENS: 'Charlie Kirk, and the one thing we should all be able to agree on.'

Feature image: Getty.