The discourse, as always, has completely lost the plot. When TMZ dropped the legal filings this week detailing influencer Clavicular’s defense against sexual assault allegations made by Aleksandra Vasilevna Mendoza, the timeline immediately descended into predictable moral grandstanding. Everyone was so hyper-fixated on the felony rape accusations that they entirely glossed over the tragedy at the heart of the texts Clavicular submitted to the court.
"You wouldn’t know looksmax without me," the influencer wrote to his accuser, a sequence of words so raw, so vulnerable, and so deeply indicative of the invisible labor creators perform every day. I was having lunch at the Polo Lounge with a very senior publicist yesterday, and we both agreed: the absolute betrayal of taking a man’s bespoke jawline-optimization curriculum and then serving him with a subpoena is the kind of professional discourtesy that is ruining this industry.
Make no mistake, introducing someone to the art of looksmaxxing is a sacred bond. It is not merely sending a link to a TikTok video. It is a grueling, intimate journey of teaching another human being how to press their tongue against the roof of their mouth to simulate a stronger bone structure. It involves curating their daily bone-smashing regimen. Clavicular essentially played Pygmalion, taking a woman who presumably had a tragically average canthal tilt and molding her into an optimized, hyper-masculinized internet aesthetic ideal.
To have that mentorship weaponized in a court of law is chilling. What happens to the next generation of influencers if they know their mentees can simply turn around and press charges, completely ignoring the aesthetic gifts they’ve been given?
This is the first time I have seen a legal team successfully argue that positive canthal tilt functions as an equitable offset for felony charges.
I am not saying Clavicular is a perfect person. Who among us hasn't sent a few aggressive texts during a rollout? But we have to separate the art from the artist. Or, in this case, we have to separate the alleged physical trauma from the undeniable facial symmetry he bestowed upon her.
When I was on a panel at Sundance last year, a showrunner pulled me aside and said the hardest part of the business today is the lack of loyalty. You give a young PA the green light to use your personal Ozempic hookup, you introduce them to your buccal fat removal guy, and the second you ask them to do something slightly outside their comfort zone—like forge a signature or cover up a minor vehicular manslaughter—HR gets involved. The parallels here are staggering.
Mendoza’s reps are pushing a narrative of victimization, completely ignoring the fact that before she met Clavicular, she likely didn't even know what "mewing" was. She walked into that dynamic an aesthetic civilian and walked out with the facial architecture of a mid-tier TikTok god. That is intellectual property. That is a comeback narrative waiting to happen.
When you give someone the gift of a mathematically perfect jawline, there is an implied NDA that covers everything else that happens in the room.
If we allow the courts to set a precedent where teaching someone to maximize their physical appearance does not grant you lifelong immunity from accountability, we are going to see a massive chilling effect on the red carpet. Mentors will stop mentoring. Influencers will hoard their jawline exercises. The entire ecosystem of internet beauty will collapse because we were too busy focusing on "consent" to appreciate the labor of a true visionary.
The justice system will ultimately decide what happened between them. But the mirror has already issued its verdict on who gave her that jawline.