someone with no guidance or grounding, no sense of worth, someone who’d spent her whole life contorting herself to meet other people’s expectations—I was an easy mark for a predator.
And I had nobody to protect me.
In recent years, I have watched in awe as woman after woman has come forward to tell her story of sexual assault—amazed both by the courage of these women and by the attacks on their character that have inevitably followed. And yet people ask why it takes women years or decades to tell others what happened to them. All I can say is that anyone asking that question has never been raped. When you are sexually assaulted in a culture that tells you over and over again that admitting your victimization makes you a suspect—makes you a liar and a slut who deserves to have your life put under a microscope for all to see—guess what? You keep it a secret. And as with any trauma, denial is a natural human response. Things we can’t handle, things that are just too frightening and destabilizing, the psyche suppresses until the day comes when we can deal with them.
Unfortunately, even as we try to submerge our pain deep down inside, it finds a way to bubble up: Through addiction. Through anxiety. Through eating disorders. Through insomnia. Through all the different PTSD symptoms and self-destructive behaviors that assault survivors experience for years on end. These incidents may last minutes or hours, but their impact lasts a lifetime.
LESS THAN A week later, my mother told me we were moving again. I was happy to be getting out of the space where this ugly thing had happened to me—maybe if I was no longer surrounded by the walls of the apartment, I would stop feeling so disgusting, stop flashing back to staring at those walls while he was on top of me. But to my horror, Val showed up to help us move. I sat in the back seat of the Mercedes of the man who raped me, my mother sat with him up front, and he drove us to the cluster of Mediterranean-style duplexes off La Cienega where we were moving. Now there was nowhere safe to go: he’d be able to find me.
I felt like I was going to throw up as I got out of the car. Ginny was faster, plowing inside with her boxes, and in the seconds we were alone, Val turned to me and said, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” I stared at him blankly. And he said it again: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”
I’ll never know if Ginny accepted five hundred dollars from Val explicitly as payment for permission to fuck me. Perhaps it was murkier than that—perhaps he gave her some money under the pretense of helping out a friend, as a loan on the deposit for the new apartment. For all I know she’d already paid him back by having sex with him herself. But what is certain is that she gave this man the key to the apartment she shared with her fifteen-year-old daughter. I’ve mothered three fifteen-year-old girls: the idea of giving a grown man with dubious intentions unsupervised access to them is as inconceivable to me as it is repugnant. That’s not what a mother does.
And what I knew that day—what I know to this day—is that though Val may have given Ginny money with no clear discussion of what he would get in return, it’s also entirely possible Ginny knew exactly what he wanted, and it’s possible she agreed he could have it.
“How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” It feels like you are an orphan.
SOON AFTER WE moved to La Cienega I met a musician in my acting class, a pedal steel guitar player named Tom Dunston who’d been touring with Billy Joel. He was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old, with a gentle presence. He immediately made me feel at ease. We started hanging out, and one night when we were alone I started to take off my clothes. Tom stopped me. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We can just be together.”
I told him about my mother’s suicide attempts, and her using me as bait. I didn’t talk about what had happened with Val. I never talked with anyone about what had happened with Val. By the time I met Tom, I had already walled it off behind the thickest plaster my psyche could construct. But I told him about everything else, and he listened.
So, when Tom invited me to move in with him, I said yes. He was waiting for me in his car when I walked out of my mother’s apartment the day after my sixteenth birthday. I never went back.
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