Why We Still Don’t Believe Cassandra

“I speak the truth, but truth is never welcome.”
— Aeschylus, Agamemnon

We’ve seen this story before. It starts with a woman speaking into the dark. She says names, powerful ones. She describes rooms that were never supposed to be seen, and the men who moved through them like gods. She tells the truth, again and again, until her voice hoarsens with repetition. But still, the world blinks back at her, unmoved.

Now we wait for the Epstein files to be released, as though the truth is still buried. As though the women hadn’t already spoken the names. We wait for an archive to make it official, for paper to validate what voices have already testified. The evidence, when it comes, will not be revelation, it will be confirmation. Because if we had believed the women when they spoke, we wouldn’t be waiting for files at all.

We have always needed the archive to sanctify the woman’s word.

Cassandra knew this pattern first. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, she’s the foreign woman dragged into the city as a spoil of war. She warns of the blood that will soon spill, of the knife glinting just beyond the door. She is right about everything, and it changes nothing. Her curse is not madness, but clarity without credibility. To see clearly and be dismissed is a peculiar form of torment.

The myth has endured not because of the prophecy, but because of what it reveals about the listener. Cassandra doesn’t fail; the people around her do. They hear, but they don’t believe.

We like to imagine ourselves as more enlightened now, but disbelief has simply become more polite. We “wait for all the facts.” We demand corroboration, documentation, “due process.” We call it caution when it’s really the same old habit of distrust, dressed in civility. The curse remains: the more a woman insists on the truth, the more suspect she becomes.

Across centuries, Cassandra’s daughters have kept warning us. We burned some, we institutionalized others, we called them hysterical, delusional, angry, unwell. Witch. Whore. Wife. Witness. The labels change, the architecture of dismissal does not.

In the seventeenth century, midwives were accused of consorting with the devil for knowing too much about the body. In the nineteenth, “hysteria” became the medical term for female unrest. In the twentieth, when women named their abusers, we called them fame-seeking or confused. Every age invents its own way of saying, she must be mistaken.

That’s the secret power of Cassandra’s curse: it shifts its shape to survive us.

Literature, for centuries, has staged this disbelief as tragedy. Antigone buries her brother and is condemned for moral conviction. Ophelia warns of rot in Denmark but is remembered only for her drowning. Bertha Mason screams behind the attic door and becomes a metaphor for madness rather than evidence of cruelty.

What makes these stories endure is not just their artistry, but their accuracy. They understand something we still can’t bear to face: that truth is often easiest to ignore when it comes from the wrong mouth.

The modern woman writer inherits this awareness like a haunting. We know that to tell the truth is to risk being called dramatic, bitter, damaged, or difficult. So we learn to fold our warnings into story, safe containers that allow readers to approach what they otherwise might turn away from.

Carmen Maria Machado did this in In the Dream House, turning an abusive relationship into a kaleidoscope of form, each chapter a different genre, as if one language alone could not contain disbelief. Natalie Haynes reanimates Cassandra herself in A Thousand Ships, giving her the one thing the gods denied her: a chorus of other women who finally listen.

Still, we keep writing her.

In my own work, she slips through the centuries. In the projects I’m still building, she becomes mythic again, Cassandra reborn among the women who warned, who were right, and who were left to watch the world burn anyway.

We don’t resurrect her because we crave tragedy. We resurrect her because we keep seeing her shadow in the news. Because disbelief still feels safer than disruption. Because even now, when a woman warns us, we look for the loophole that lets us stay comfortable.

The myth endures because it is elastic. Cassandra is not just one woman; she is an archetype of the epistemic double bind: too emotional to be rational, too rational to be sympathetic. Her story reveals that disbelief is not a lack of information but an act of preservation. To believe her would mean we have to change something. Change, historically, has always been more frightening than cruelty.

We treat the archive as redemption, but it’s really our collective alibi. The call for records, receipts, and files, these have become our modern temples of absolution. We no longer burn women; we simply wait for their evidence to be notarized.

Cassandra didn’t need files. She had sight. We just refused to look where she pointed.

Belief is not passive. It demands risk, empathy, imagination, the very things the world discourages in its powerful. To believe a woman requires accepting that harm can coexist with charm, that power rarely looks monstrous until it’s too late. Belief disrupts the comfort of not knowing.

Maybe that’s why we prefer the story after the fact. When the men are already unmasked, when the evidence is filed neatly away, when the women’s pain can be quoted without consequence. It is safer to believe them now.

We keep waiting for the archive to catch up to what women already know.

But we are starting to see something shift. Each retelling gives Cassandra a new language: trauma-informed, plural, defiant. We are learning to listen not just to one voice, but to the chorus. The testimonies multiply, overlap, harmonize. Disbelief begins to crack beneath the weight of repetition.

When we write her now, we do it not to warn of what is coming, but to name what has already been. We turn the curse inside out. The very thing that once damned her—her insistence—is what redeems us.

We are not her audience anymore. We are her echo.

We keep writing her. We keep believing her, and one day, perhaps, that will be enough.