Are We Allowed to Question Those Who Represent Us?

On Friday, in a private written conversation that I had not initiated, about something I had recently discovered concerning the lawyer who represented me during the first part of a criminal investigation into domestic abuse, I wrote a sentence in a matter of seconds. I knew exactly why I was writing it, but only afterwards did I realise how much those few words contained.

“Jag behöver inte redogöra något mer här.”

I don’t need to explain anything more here.

I wrote it for three reasons.

The first was the simplest: I needed to protect myself. The subject we were discussing was connected to a deeply traumatic period of my life, and I could feel that continuing the conversation was beginning to come at the expense of my own wellbeing. Whatever the conversation was becoming, I did not owe it unlimited access to something that painful.

The second was that, by that point, I felt I understood where the conversation was heading. I could see the position the other person was beginning to take. If I continued, I would no longer simply be sharing something I had discovered. I would be defending why I was entitled to question it.

But there was a third reason, one I understood more clearly only afterwards.

I had recently come across an idea from Yuval Noah Harari that stayed with me: truth is costly. Producing a truthful account requires research, evidence, fact-checking, time, effort and sometimes money. Truth is also complicated, because reality is complicated. And it can be painful.

I recognised something of my own experience in that. What I knew at that point had not appeared effortlessly. I had spent months obtaining documents, reading records, reconstructing dates, comparing accounts, finding communications and trying to understand a legal process that I had once trusted other people to navigate for me.

That work had a cost.

Some of it cost money. Much more of it cost time. And some of it required returning to experiences I would have preferred never to revisit.

So when I wrote “I don’t need to explain anything more here,” I was also drawing another kind of boundary:

I am not obliged to hand over the product of that work simply because someone asks me to prove, in a private conversation, why I have reached the conclusion I have.

Evidence matters. If I make an allegation in a forum where it must be substantiated, I should substantiate it. If I ask a court, authority or professional body to act, my conclusions should withstand scrutiny.

But a private conversation does not automatically create an entitlement to my research, my documents, my time or the painful work through which I came to understand what happened.

The boundary was never: you are not allowed to disagree with me.

It was: your disagreement does not create an unlimited obligation for me to explain myself to you.

And that distinction has stayed with me.

Because underneath that conversation was a much larger question:

Are we allowed to question those who represent us?