Acts of Violet, page 29
And then, of course, there’s what Violet did to her niece.
Remember how Violet never performed with any female assistants? There was one exception to that: her seven-year-old niece, Quinn Dwyer. Let’s set aside whether this was nepotism or mere hypocrisy and get right into the illusion. Quinn was a little girl who loved angels and mermaids, who dreamed of being both. Volk was the fairy godmother who’d turn her into one and then the other, making both her dreams come true right there on that stage.
You know what little kids generally don’t love? Being suspended from a great height before they’re dropped into a tank of water and nearly drowned. That’s a good recipe for traumatizing a kid right there. Take another look at that LateFridayLive performance. When Violet rushes to the tank in a panic, that isn’t her acting—that’s a deep-down dread that yet another person has fallen victim to one of her dangerous illusions—this time, a family member.
Is it any wonder that the sisters have been estranged ever since?
Maybe it’s just me, but I find it ironic that someone who’s been hailed as a feminist icon treated the females closest to her with such disregard.
But what about how brave she was being openly bisexual? There’s no denying that took guts during a time when the LGBT community wasn’t as readily accepted and fought for certain basic civil rights (a fight that continues to this day). You’d think Volk would’ve made a bigger contribution as a member of this community. Yet she barely showed up. She didn’t speak up for legal rights, social acceptance—hell, she couldn’t even be bothered to attend a single pride parade. She was far from resembling anything close to an activist.
And if you’re about to argue that Violet being openly polyamorous was also gutsy, I’d counter that only helped build her allure further. An allure she took great pains to cultivate.
It’s one thing to stand up for who you are—it’s another to openly brag about your promiscuity and treat your romantic partners like props. Volk was eager to be seen anywhere and everywhere dating anyone and everyone, but she never said much about what these partners meant to her. Whether or not the emotions were sincere, it’s hard not to view her “throuple” with Mayuree Sakda and Benjamin Martinez, as well as other romantic entanglements, as nothing more than a series of publicity stunts. Frankly, it’s hard not to view much of Volk’s life through the same lens, her entire showbiz existence based on chasing and basking in the limelight.
Does this not make a mockery of the very thing Violet arguably sought to normalize and celebrate? Doesn’t it blatantly reveal her as disingenuous, willing to exploit both men and women in the interest of expanding her fame? Doesn’t this make Violet a deeply problematic symbol of women’s equality?
Maybe I’m being too harsh. After all, she helped so many people with her books, right? Ah, yes, let’s talk about the inane drivel that passed for self-help penned by Violet Volk—if she even wrote her own books (for all we know there’s a ghostwriter under an NDA floating around somewhere). If you consider platitudes you could find embroidered on a pillow dressed up in f-bombs to make them “edgy” in any way helpful. None of the ideas she presents in her books are particularly groundbreaking. They’re mostly cribbed from the New Thought spiritual movement, which went on to influence The Law of Attraction, The Secret, and countless other philosophies that claim you can manifest any reality. All Volk did was add a dash of Rocky Horror’s subversive vibe and “don’t dream it, be it” motto to be more on-brand for her.
The books and onslaught of motivational seminars (insert cash register noises here) basically had Volk doing a handful of magic tricks while proclaiming the key to getting the life you want is to visualize and dream really, really hard. Yeah, because it’s that simple.
Dreams are all well and good, but once in a while you need to wake up and stop visualizing an idealized reality. Same goes for people. Sometimes you need to see an individual not for who you want them to be, but for who they really are.
Open your eyes and take a good look at Violet Volk. This is not a quality person worthy of so much adulation. This is an overvalued person who has based her existence on lies and manipulation.
Violet Volk has cemented her place as a cultural icon of the 1990s and 2000s, but let’s finally see her for what she really is: a trickster, a phony. A fraud.
Strange Exits
Episode 10: “Sasha and Quinn Dwyer”
CAMERON FRANK: When I started this podcast about Violet Volk, there were a lot of people I hoped to interview, but none more than her sister, Sasha Dwyer.
I’ve long felt an inexplicable connection to Sasha. Here was this woman living through a turbulent time in her life and having to do so in a media spotlight. Sasha showed a level of poise few of us would be able to muster under such duress, and she was criticized for it. Not only that, the few times she’s spoken about Violet honestly and was … let’s say, less than effusive, not only did she receive additional public criticism but she was also the target of threats and acts of vandalism to her home and business. And while both law enforcement and armchair sleuths have dismissed Sasha as a person of interest in her sister’s disappearance, her reputation among the Wolf Pack is still tainted, as they remain convinced she wrote the “Violet Is a Fraud” takedown. What evidence do they have to back that up? Nothing solid I could find. Baseless hunches more than anything else.
If you ask me, Sasha’s been getting a bad rap. It’s been said many times, but it bears repeating: there is no right way to grieve. Just because she doesn’t break down in front of news crews doesn’t mean she isn’t feeling the pain of losing her sister. And if she prefers to avoid the media altogether, that’s her prerogative. After all, it’s not like Sasha has been shown in the most sympathetic light. Who could blame her for being press-shy?
I certainly can’t, and that’s why I wasn’t surprised when Sasha turned down my numerous interview requests. What did surprise me was when she finally said yes and when her daughter, Quinn, also said yes. It’s my great pleasure to welcome Sasha and Quinn Dwyer to Strange Exits.
SASHA DWYER: Thanks. I know the right thing is to say I’m happy to be here, but I’m still in immediately-regretting-this-decision territory. No offense.
CAMERON FRANK: None taken. Quinn, how are you holding up?
QUINN DWYER: Better than I was at the vigil. Though I’m still keeping an eye on the door. That was a nice intro you did for Mom. So nice, I didn’t even mind being mentioned as an afterthought.
CAMERON FRANK: I didn’t intend that—I just know how protective Sasha has been about keeping you out of the media—
QUINN DWYER: Relax, I’m just messing with you. Consider it payback for how much you hounded us to come on this podcast.
CAMERON FRANK: Fair enough. I’m sorry if my enthusiasm was too much and I went a little overboard trying to get you to participate.
SASHA DWYER: And I’m sorry if my desire to live a normal life with some semblance of privacy was getting in the way of your career objectives.
CAMERON FRANK: Right … [clears throat nervously]
QUINN DWYER: Hey, Mom, I didn’t fully get it before, but you’re right. Apologies that begin with “I’m sorry if” do sound totally insincere.
CAMERON FRANK: [nervous laughter] I see neither of you are going to make this easy for me. Okay, how about this. I’m sorry, truly sorry, for any discomfort or disruption I caused either of you in pursuit of this story.
SASHA DWYER: That’s a much better apology. You can hear the difference, right, Quinn?
QUINN DWYER: Oh yeah. Not just in what he’s saying, but how he’s saying it. Definitely more sincere this time.
SASHA DWYER: Night and day. Hey, Quinn, how long do you think it’s gonna take before he asks if I wrote the takedown?
QUINN DWYER: I think he’ll get you comfortable with some easier questions first, like fun childhood stuff about growing up with Aunt Violet. Right, Cameron?
CAMERON FRANK [STUDIO]: When both Sasha and Quinn agreed to appear on the podcast, I was thrilled. But at this point, I was thinking it might’ve been a better idea to interview them separately. I couldn’t help but wonder if they’d concocted a strategy ahead of time to disarm me and take control of the conversation.
At the same time, historically, some of the most successful interviews I’ve conducted have occurred when I let the subject set the tone and pace, letting the discussion progress organically. I figured my best bet here was to go with it, even if that meant asking a thorny question sooner than I’d anticipated.
CAMERON FRANK: Actually, Quinn, I’d like to ask you about being in Violet’s act. What do you remember about performing with your aunt on LateFridayLive?
QUINN DWYER: Not much. I was only seven.
CAMERON FRANK: There must be something you could recall about it.
QUINN DWYER: It’s funny, because I’ve seen that clip of me and Aunt Violet so many times, but I don’t know how much of it is me remembering it versus creating memories based on watching it. I can picture myself doing the act with her, but I can’t bring up anything that was going through my head at the time. I don’t even remember rehearsing it. All I remember is how afterward everyone told me I did such a great job, how convincing I was when I was pretending to drown. But I must’ve not been convincing enough, because things got shitty not long after, and I stopped hearing from Aunt Violet. I thought I must’ve messed up badly to drive her away like that. Years later, I started getting panic attacks, and I’ve had issues with anxiety ever since. This irrational part of me became scared that if I did the wrong thing, I’d drive other people away.
SASHA DWYER: Honey, you didn’t drive Violet away, I did. And your panic attacks didn’t start years after you performed with her, they began as soon as you got back from LA. Along with the night terrors, and your aquaphobia. I could barely get you to bathe because you were petrified of the water. You weren’t convincing in Violet’s act because you were good at pretending to drown—you almost did drown. But I was worried bringing up the trauma would make it worse somehow, so I denied it. Not the best move on my part.
QUINN DWYER: I knew something went wrong, I could just never pinpoint it. So I blamed myself. Like, if I performed better, maybe Aunt Violet would call once in a while, or at least send a postcard.
SASHA DWYER: Quinn, you have absolutely zero fault in all this. I hate that you ever blamed yourself for any of it. Maybe I went too far cutting her off completely, but the more time passes, the more you don’t know how to fix things.
QUINN DWYER: I get that now. You kinda had to shield all of us from her toxic side. Though it never fully made sense how weirdly protective you were of her reputation around me. Especially when that takedown came out. Even while you were being accused of writing it.
CAMERON FRANK: Actually, since you brought it up, why not get into it now. Sasha, were you responsible for creating or writing the content for violetisafraud.com?
SASHA DWYER: I was not, but there’s no way to prove a negative, so I don’t expect people to believe me.
QUINN DWYER: I didn’t always believe you. But I believe you now.
Aunt Violet was a phenomenal magician. But she was … careless in a lot of ways. That’s why Dad protected you from her worst and you protected me from her worst—and kinda the rest of the world, if you think about it. Someone who makes that much of an effort to save her sister’s legacy would’ve never written that takedown.
SASHA DWYER: That means so much to me.
QUINN DWYER: Are you being sarcastic?
SASHA DWYER: Fifty percent. Force of habit.
CAMERON FRANK: So hang on, just to confirm some of the specifics in that essay—
SASHA DWYER: We’ve gone into enough specifics. Airing out our dirty laundry is bad enough, I’d appreciate it if we weren’t forced to describe each tawdry item in detail.
CAMERON FRANK: Understood. Just one last question about the takedown: Do either of you have any ideas about who might’ve written it?
[long pause]
CAMERON FRANK [STUDIO]: As the two women go quiet, Quinn shrugs and sits back, a stunned look on her face, like she said way more than she expected to. Sasha gnaws at her lip and bears a more intense expression, as if waiting for the right words to surface then debating whether or not to speak them.
SASHA DWYER: I have no way of proving this, just like I have no way of proving I didn’t write the takedown … I think Violet wrote it herself.
QUINN DWYER: Seriously?
CAMERON FRANK: What makes you say that? This was not only damaging to Violet’s reputation, but also something your sister fought hard to suppress and remove from the internet.
SASHA DWYER: That’s what makes me believe she was behind it. Violet was an expert at publicity—getting it as much as avoiding it. If she wanted that takedown to go away, she would’ve done what she did every other time something nasty was written about her: she would’ve ignored it. Violet survived the bad PR of accidentally killing a person. She would not allow herself to be brought down by one little website. The fact that she went to so much trouble trying to get it taken down—she went to court over it when she didn’t even sue other magicians for stealing her material!—tells me she wanted more eyeballs on it. Not to mention, she got to live out her own personal Streisand effect. I could see it being a perverse way of paying homage to Barbra.
CAMERON FRANK [STUDIO]: Ironically, several years prior, Volk’s favorite performer, Barbra Streisand, went through something similar when she sued a photographer for displaying a photo of her Malibu home online, claiming it violated her privacy. The suit was dismissed, but the publicity surrounding it resulted in more unwanted attention for the photo than it would’ve gotten otherwise. The resulting social phenomenon has been known ever since as “the Streisand effect.”
CAMERON FRANK: But why would Violet want so much attention on something so negative?
SASHA DWYER: I don’t know. Maybe it was the closest she could get to actually apologizing for any of it. Or maybe she wasn’t sorry but just wanted us to see her as she really was, before we never saw her again.
QUINN DWYER: [murmurs] Like a deathbed confession.
CAMERON FRANK: Sasha, do you think you ever saw Violet as she really was?
SASHA DWYER: I think the better question to ask is whether Violet ever saw herself, if she knew who she really was. She was always looking to escape from something or into something. When we were kids, she couldn’t wait to get out of Willow Glen and then she couldn’t wait to get out of New York and go on tour, and then she couldn’t wait to stop touring, and so on. Wherever she was, it was like she wanted to be somewhere else. And someone else. She decided early on she didn’t want to be Varushka, so she became Violet. When we were kids, she also wanted us to be Goonies, searching for buried treasure. In high school, when I started dating a boy she liked—one I happen to be married to today—she became a goth, dyeing all her clothes black, blasting Siouxsie and the Banshees nonstop, wearing all the eyeliner. Then there was her Rocky Horror phase—she already had Magenta’s look down, all she really needed was a maid costume. Oh, here’s a fun fact: she briefly considered using Magenta as her stage name, but my husband convinced her the double V of Violet Volk was more powerful—he was a marketing whiz even back then.
CAMERON FRANK [STUDIO]: As she continues to reminisce out loud, Quinn and I look on with cautious surprise. It’s nice to see Sasha this relaxed and open.
SASHA DWYER: Anyway, I think Violet was always playing with identity. I don’t remember if she said it in one of her books or someone on this podcast said it, but she didn’t believe in finding herself so much as creating herself.
CAMERON FRANK: But you must’ve seen beyond the person she wanted to portray.
SASHA DWYER: Sometimes.
CAMERON FRANK: Quinn, what do you want people to know about your aunt?
QUINN DWYER: How much she loved nature. It’s strange she hid that part of herself from the public. I don’t have a lot of memories with my aunt, but my favorite was camping at Joshua Tree with her.
SASHA DWYER: Camping? When did you go camping with Violet?
QUINN DWYER: When I stayed with her in LA. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It was something special. But she could even make a walk in Cordova Park special. Aunt Violet said she couldn’t live without the energy of a city for too long, and she didn’t have the patience for gardening or any of that stuff, but she felt the most at home being in nature.
CAMERON FRANK: Sasha, what about you? What do you want people to know about your sister?
SASHA DWYER: How painfully human she was. There’s this contingent of people who want to see her as a heroine or some kind of … I don’t know, ultraterrestrial, or something. I understand the appeal in seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary—Violet had a gift for giving people that vision. It was the beauty of her artistry. But when you mistake a trick for the real thing, you’re not being taken with an artist, you’re being taken in by a con artist.
CAMERON FRANK: That’s a little harsh.
SASHA DWYER: Harsh truths are our love language.
Yes, Violet was talented, and yes, she had phenomenal charisma. But she could also be self-serving, conniving, even downright spiteful. Violet had flaws. It’s fine if people appreciate her work, but it’s time to demystify her.
CAMERON FRANK: It sounds like your sister had a special ability to get under your skin. Are you still angry with her all these years later?
SASHA DWYER: Of course. We were estranged for years before her disappearance, but I always thought we’d hash things out eventually. I actually thought it would happen on the night of her last performance. But it didn’t. I got nothing. No reconciliation, no resolution, just silence. It hurts. There’s a reason our family hasn’t moved in the last ten years. There’s a reason we’ve kept the same phone numbers. Yeah, I’m still angry, but there’s a part of me that’ll always be waiting for her to come home.
