(Photo, me at 22, just after moving to CA, when I believed escape was as easy as moving 2000 miles away)
The Cornell case has hit a little close to home. I have an intense history of abuse, but through the MeToo movement, the Epstein revelations, the Motherless unmasking, and so many other events, I have more or less kept it to myself. I know the pattern in my own body. I read the headlines, I feel a trembling glimmer of hope, and then the patriarchal claws come out to protect their own, and my hope collapses into a powerless mix of rage and utter helplessness that I drown with a few hikes and time in nature. I could do worse, I suppose, and be well within my rights.
I have been reading Rebecca Solnit’s powerful commentary, as well as Elayne Kalila on Substack, and yesterday something broke in me. Maybe it was the fact that there were 50 other men on the group chat that received those messages and did… absolutely nothing. Maybe it was the fact that she gave an incredibly difficult and painful statement of what happened to her, spanning over a hundred pages, and the campus police reduced it to 6 pages, somehow strategically omitting the actual crimes, and again, the grownups in the room did nothing about the horrific thing that happened to her. And now the claws have come out for her. This should be an open/shut case. And yet it will not be. And then I learned that NY has a law that says that if you intoxicate yourself, a man can do whatever he wants to you once you’re intoxicated, and you can’t call it a crime. I almost vomited.
The parallels with my own experience are just too stark. Nothing has really changed in the last 30 years. And I don’t know why, or what I hope to come of it, but I decided to tell my own story. As a therapist, I often try to help clients come into a different response to their old patterns. That’s a major sign of change – when the same thing can happen to a person, and for the first time, they do something different from what they’ve been doing the past many years. Maybe this is my “something different.” Instead of burning off my helpless rage on the steep hills of EBMUD trails (which I may still do, later), I will sit here, and tell my story.
The grooming began when I was 12. My home life was difficult, and the abuse that was happening there is not for this story, but it sets the stage for everything that came next. I was a troubled kid, trying very hard to be good. My very botched suicide attempt landed when both of my older sisters left our home within a week of each other. It was just me and my brother now, and I panicked. That’s another story, for another time, but I wore my pain very obviously on my body, in my poor hygiene, my ill-fitting clothes, the bandages. I glance back at her now, and I see a girl so crippled in shame that she could hardly stand.
And so he presented himself as a kind of savior, as they do. They always, always do. They find someone starving for a light in the tunnel, a way out, a single drop of what feels like kindness, and then they offer it, but for a high price. He was my teacher, a fact that I just groan under the weight of now, even as I write this. Of course he was, ugh…. I have to nudge myself out of the shame of feeling so textbook, so obvious, so cliché. I am able to nudge myself out of that shame by remembering that it is a sign of a very sick culture that something so awful, so horrendous, has become a cliché. It’s not my shame. It’s the shame of a culture. But the culture really enjoys it when I cloak myself in it as my own.
The abuse had begun in earnest by the time I was 14. I will skip over much of this part of the story. It’s too long, and isn’t really the story I want to tell today. What I will say, though, is that over the ensuing years, so many people knew or strongly suspected the abuse, including this man’s wife, who was also a teacher. My own family knew. His family knew. No one did anything. Most of them didn’t seem to see me as a child, but rather as an “underage woman,” and his wife at least, treated me as such. I had so much shame at the time, but now it makes me shudder with bewilderment. She saw me as “the other woman“- at 15 – because it was too awkward for her to see her husband as an exploitative predator. She took the easy way out. All it required was to put me and my soul on the chopping block. Easy peasy. A no-brainer, really.
One time, in high school, when I had dropped an alarming amount of weight and taken to dressing in ways I could hide in, particularly on the days I would not see this man, a teacher called me into her office after class. She was a senior teacher, probably 15+ years under her belt, and she knew my family through church. She told me that she couldn’t help but notice how much school I was missing (I missed a day a week through my entire senior year), and how thin I looked. I remember sitting there in an XL grey sweatshirt with a couple of stains on the sleeves, looking down at those sleeves and beginning to cry. I told her of the viciousness of my mother. How she called me lazy constantly. How nothing I ever did was good enough. I got straight A’s, I cooked, I cleaned, and none of it was ever enough. I saw some kind of alarm in her eyes. She knew that all was not well.
I don’t know what I thought she would do. It was one of those fantastical glimmers of hope that sometimes ripple through young people in desperate situations. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but maybe, just maybe, something could change. Nothing did. She never called me into her office again, my home life stayed exactly the same, and it was as if the conversation never happened. It was the only time anyone ever meaningfully checked in with me, and I quickly learned that when people did that, I was best off keeping it to myself. She apparently decided that the risk to herself was too great, and did some mental gymnastics to put the whole matter completely out of her mind.
As I reflect on it now, the number of mandated reporters that knew beyond a doubt that “all was definitely not well,” and yet did nothing, is astounding. Astounding. The number of ordinary people, not mandated by their jobs, who knew that all was not well and did nothing also defies belief.
When I was 18, I went to college, a 3 hour drive from my hometown and this man. He helped move me into my dorm. I made it through a difficult first year, managing his drunken answering machine messages, the manipulative guilt-tripping emails and cards he would send me. The flowers I would have to somehow explain to my dorm roommate. He had a 5 year old daughter. He used her and the connection I had to her to try and pull me back in. I was trying to get out, and he was trying to drown me on my way.
Finally, just after turning 19, facing another year of this, I went to the police. I started by showing up, in person, to the police in my home town. I wanted to file a harassment report, and have someone go and talk to him to get him to leave me alone. I was hoping that the mere presence of a police officer would be enough to scare him off. The police there told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction and there was nothing they could do because he didn’t live in that town. So I called the police in his town, and they told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction because the harassment was happening in Normal, IL, and so there was nothing they could do. So I called the police in Normal, IL, and they told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction because the harassment was happening on university grounds, and so there was nothing they could do. So I called the University Police, and they told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction because he wasn’t a university student, and so there was nothing they could do. They suggested I contact the police in his town. I lost it. I walked that person through the sequence of events in much the same way I did here. And with a sigh, they said, fine, and told me to come in.
I went in, a 19 year old, alone, and gave my statement. All along the way, each police department needed the context that I had been having “a relationship” with this man for years prior to the harassment. I couldn’t bear the shame and annihilation of calling it anything other than consensual, and every. single. police officer. just nodded as I did. But when I gave a statement, I had to provide more details. I also gave them the answering machine tapes, the emails and cards that this man had sent me over the last year. It was not a pretty picture. They said they would see what they could do and asked me for his identifying information, including his birth date. I gave it all, including the year – 1957. The police officer hesitated, shook his head, and said, did you say 67? I shook my head back, and said, “57.” He looked panicked. I don’t know how 67 would have made it better, except maybe for the optics. But 57 he could not massage out of his head as “maybe sort of consensual.” There was some discussion amongst themselves, and he came back and asked me if I wanted to press charges “for everything else.” I said no. I just wanted him to leave me alone. At 19 I carried the shame that to do anything about the abuse you received was a ruin the life of “perfectly respectable man.” It was clear to me that my life and body were not worth the “ruining” of this man’s life. And that was it. Someone called me a few days later and said they’d sent an officer to talk to him, and to let them know if I heard from him again. I never did. I rested in the relief, and worked really hard to put the whole affair behind me.
Four different police departments heard that a years-long relationship was happening between an older man and a 19 year old, and not a one of them said “wait, tell me more.” The one who finally felt like they had no choice but to hear me out, knew full well that a colossal crime had been committed, and then put the choice to prosecute that crime into my hands. The failure is staggering. When I hear about the Cornell case, I cannot help but want to scream for and with this 20 year old who was similarly failed.
My anorexia slowly morphed into bulimia as my system searched for ways to process the shame I was holding. Bulimia is an incredible repetition of the shame cycle. The eating representing your defilement, the purge a shameful punishment for your badness, which somehow returns you, blissfully, to an empty, peaceful state of cleanliness. That feeling of spent emptiness was the closest I could get to relief from the constant state of shame. When I could pull it off, I would try to return to a more restrictive pattern. If I could just stay consistently empty, consistently clean, then maybe I could feel a little free. But my treacherous body would always betray me eventually, and I would go back to eating, sending me into the other coping pattern. I went on like this for over a decade.
Eight years later, I was 27 and in a postdoctoral appointment at MIT, I got a call that would change the entire trajectory of my life. It was a police officer from my home county. Apparently, someone from this man’s family had filed a report that they had concerns about his relationship with his now 13/14 year old daughter, incidentally the exact same age when the abuse began with me. When they filed the complaint, they included the information that there had been another girl, and they gave the police my name. Would I give a deposition so that they would have the evidence they would need to protect this child? I said yes, because saying no felt like a horrifying failure to a child I once loved.
It was a difficult deposition, filmed as evidence. They try to hide the camera so you’re not stressed out by it, but it’s there, in the room. A person can only be tried with a crime if an exact action, in an exact location, on an exact date, is known. There are some exceptions to this, but they require a different burden of proof that would not have been possible in my case. I had burned and deleted everything from that era of my life as I attempted to scrub it clean from my past. 8-12 years had passed. There were only a handful of memories that could come close to fitting that bill. I would have to triangulate a memory of abuse with a holiday or event that could give it a specific date. It was awful. I kept saying “I’m sorry” over and over again to the officer. She was warm and kind. They chose well when they chose her. They do not always choose well.
It was an awful time. I had direct numbers to the Cambride police department because my safety was of some concern. I began taking Ativan to get through the days without completely collapsing. They informed me that he had a bulldog lawyer and they were spinning a tale that painted me in a very bad light. There was exactly zero evidence of their story, but they spun it anyways. It was clear to me, even then, that the story they were spinning would involve a very real paper trail of phone records at the very least, and I knew no such evidence existed. So all I had to do was rest in the truth, and trust that the rest would take care of itself. It was still awful, though, as their tale circulated anyways. I was told that they hired a private investigator to look into the details of my life. The patriarchal claws were out and they were seeking to discredit me in exactly the same way they discredit every woman who tried to report her abuse. 90% of the time, it works exactly as planned. Women are forced into bearing the burden of men’s appalling behavior time and time again.
This was before the days of social media, but of course my name was leaked into the comments sections of many online newspapers. The papers did their best to redact things, but it was all too late. I cannot fathom going through this in the days of social media. As it was, it was a scandal that rippled through my small town, and I only got whatever blowback happened to make it the 1000 miles over to Massachusetts. If I wanted to hear what people were saying about me, I would have to read the comments sections on my own accord. No one in my immediate vicinity had any clue what I was going through unless I chose to tell them. That’s a level of privacy and power rarely afforded anyone these days. At least one friend would make me promise not to read the news for weeks at a time. She didn’t really know what to do or say to help, but she knew that much. That’s just not as easy an option today, and my heart breaks for the young Cornell woman, and so many others, who are dealing with the court of public opinion, full of grotesque patriarchal conditioning seeking to cover its own shame, on a scale unlike anything I ever encountered.
The DA was shocked when I told her that I had filed a complaint when I was 19. Apparently the decision to press charges is never left to the victim. Apparently, if a police officer has any reason to believe a crime has been committed, it must be elevated to the DA’s office, who then decides what to do. This never happened in my case. The failure is staggering. I imagine that everyone found it much more comfortable to think of me as an “underage woman” and then promptly tried to put it out of their minds. But in the most bizarre twist of fate imaginable, because I had filed that report when I was 19, it stopped the clock on the statute of limitations. I don’t think I could have survived this ordeal when I was 19. It would have been too much. But by the time I was 27 and could have survived it, it would have ordinarily been “too late.” “Oh, sorry, we can’t prosecute a pedophile because simply too many years have passed. Too bad, so sad.” It made my case a bit of a unicorn case, and it went on being a unicorn case, which never ceases to be utterly gut-wrenching for me. I am going to need that EBMUD walk later…
We never made it all the way to trial. The bulldog lawyer watched the tape of my deposition, the private investigator did whatever their dirty work is, and they all collectively decided that their odds were too poor. I was told that his lawyer advised him that I was too articulate, and would be difficult to cross examine “effectively.” The private investigator turned up nothing because I was squeaky clean. I had a PhD and postdoc from incredibly prestigious universities and they just couldn’t tell any kind of believable story about me. So they said they would consider a plea deal. The DA asked me what I wanted – it was up to me. I was already on Ativan and crumbling. I would have done the trial if I had to, but I was relieved to agree to the offer she suggested making. He went to prison. For far too little and far too short a time, but he did go. But let me be astonishingly clear – he went to jail because I was unimpeachable. I was articulate, very well educated in logic and reason-based fields, and my focus on absolving my shame with perfection meant that I was spotless. That is the bar. That bar makes me want to rage-scream for the many women who can't reach it. And I have, more than once, into the night sky with my fellow wise and powerful women walking the difficult path back to health. With other strong women committed to purging the patriarchal wounding and the shame it hoists upon them from their beings.
I. Will. Not. Bear. This.
He lost his job, pension, and all of the benefits that come with being a tenured teacher. It became very clear that his wife knew of the abuse, and they began proceedings to strip her of her job, pension, and benefits as well since she was a mandated reporter. But they would need me to cooperate with them if they wanted to do that, and I was both trial-ed out, and his daughter laid guiltily on my conscience. I had already caused her to lose her father and that financial security, did I want to do the same to her mother, and have the ruin and hardship that followed resting on me and the choices I made? Still, at 27, I felt so responsible for it all. Look at the language in that sentence. “I had caused…. choices I made...” I declined to participate with the sole intention that his daughter keep something constant in her life. I have never really regretted that choice, but now, as I look back on it, with clearer eyes and a lot of healing under my belt, I can’t help but ask, “where was everyone else’s conscience through this whole thing?” I still ask that question. To every one of those 57 young men on the group chat. To the officers who took her statement. To the administrators that thought an essay was adequate justice for r*pe. To the people on the internet leaking her name and turning her into a disgusting mockery. My heart breaks with it all, and then it howls.
I have dedicated my life to helping people. To extend a hand to the men just as much to the women. I have always thought that in so many ways, the men have the harder road to walk in the patriarchal wound recovery. I'm inspired by the many men in my practice that are trying, truly, to do better. To grant themselves the depth and emotional complexity and true intimacy that our culture robbed them of. I have borne two sons through this body, married a man who is trying to do better, and together, we are doing our best to fight what feels like a cultural tidal wave as it threatens to engulf our sons. We are seeking to teach them better. But I am not naïve to what they face every time they leave our home. Every time they turn on the television. And we try to keep them as far away from the internet as humanly possible. We won't be able to for very much longer.
Whenever something like this Cornell case comes to light, the glimmer of hope that arises within me is for the cultural reckoning that might save my kids, that might save your kids, that might heal our society. And today, while I hike those EBMUD trails and rage-cry, I will keep that hope held high.
The Cornell case has hit a little close to home. I have an intense history of abuse, but through the MeToo movement, the Epstein revelations, the Motherless unmasking, and so many other events, I have more or less kept it to myself. I know the pattern in my own body. I read the headlines, I feel a trembling glimmer of hope, and then the patriarchal claws come out to protect their own, and my hope collapses into a powerless mix of rage and utter helplessness that I drown with a few hikes and time in nature. I could do worse, I suppose, and be well within my rights.
I have been reading Rebecca Solnit’s powerful commentary, as well as Elayne Kalila on Substack, and yesterday something broke in me. Maybe it was the fact that there were 50 other men on the group chat that received those messages and did… absolutely nothing. Maybe it was the fact that she gave an incredibly difficult and painful statement of what happened to her, spanning over a hundred pages, and the campus police reduced it to 6 pages, somehow strategically omitting the actual crimes, and again, the grownups in the room did nothing about the horrific thing that happened to her. And now the claws have come out for her. This should be an open/shut case. And yet it will not be. And then I learned that NY has a law that says that if you intoxicate yourself, a man can do whatever he wants to you once you’re intoxicated, and you can’t call it a crime. I almost vomited.
The parallels with my own experience are just too stark. Nothing has really changed in the last 30 years. And I don’t know why, or what I hope to come of it, but I decided to tell my own story. As a therapist, I often try to help clients come into a different response to their old patterns. That’s a major sign of change – when the same thing can happen to a person, and for the first time, they do something different from what they’ve been doing the past many years. Maybe this is my “something different.” Instead of burning off my helpless rage on the steep hills of EBMUD trails (which I may still do, later), I will sit here, and tell my story.
The grooming began when I was 12. My home life was difficult, and the abuse that was happening there is not for this story, but it sets the stage for everything that came next. I was a troubled kid, trying very hard to be good. My very botched suicide attempt landed when both of my older sisters left our home within a week of each other. It was just me and my brother now, and I panicked. That’s another story, for another time, but I wore my pain very obviously on my body, in my poor hygiene, my ill-fitting clothes, the bandages. I glance back at her now, and I see a girl so crippled in shame that she could hardly stand.
And so he presented himself as a kind of savior, as they do. They always, always do. They find someone starving for a light in the tunnel, a way out, a single drop of what feels like kindness, and then they offer it, but for a high price. He was my teacher, a fact that I just groan under the weight of now, even as I write this. Of course he was, ugh…. I have to nudge myself out of the shame of feeling so textbook, so obvious, so cliché. I am able to nudge myself out of that shame by remembering that it is a sign of a very sick culture that something so awful, so horrendous, has become a cliché. It’s not my shame. It’s the shame of a culture. But the culture really enjoys it when I cloak myself in it as my own.
The abuse had begun in earnest by the time I was 14. I will skip over much of this part of the story. It’s too long, and isn’t really the story I want to tell today. What I will say, though, is that over the ensuing years, so many people knew or strongly suspected the abuse, including this man’s wife, who was also a teacher. My own family knew. His family knew. No one did anything. Most of them didn’t seem to see me as a child, but rather as an “underage woman,” and his wife at least, treated me as such. I had so much shame at the time, but now it makes me shudder with bewilderment. She saw me as “the other woman“- at 15 – because it was too awkward for her to see her husband as an exploitative predator. She took the easy way out. All it required was to put me and my soul on the chopping block. Easy peasy. A no-brainer, really.
One time, in high school, when I had dropped an alarming amount of weight and taken to dressing in ways I could hide in, particularly on the days I would not see this man, a teacher called me into her office after class. She was a senior teacher, probably 15+ years under her belt, and she knew my family through church. She told me that she couldn’t help but notice how much school I was missing (I missed a day a week through my entire senior year), and how thin I looked. I remember sitting there in an XL grey sweatshirt with a couple of stains on the sleeves, looking down at those sleeves and beginning to cry. I told her of the viciousness of my mother. How she called me lazy constantly. How nothing I ever did was good enough. I got straight A’s, I cooked, I cleaned, and none of it was ever enough. I saw some kind of alarm in her eyes. She knew that all was not well.
I don’t know what I thought she would do. It was one of those fantastical glimmers of hope that sometimes ripple through young people in desperate situations. I don’t know what I thought would happen, but maybe, just maybe, something could change. Nothing did. She never called me into her office again, my home life stayed exactly the same, and it was as if the conversation never happened. It was the only time anyone ever meaningfully checked in with me, and I quickly learned that when people did that, I was best off keeping it to myself. She apparently decided that the risk to herself was too great, and did some mental gymnastics to put the whole matter completely out of her mind.
As I reflect on it now, the number of mandated reporters that knew beyond a doubt that “all was definitely not well,” and yet did nothing, is astounding. Astounding. The number of ordinary people, not mandated by their jobs, who knew that all was not well and did nothing also defies belief.
When I was 18, I went to college, a 3 hour drive from my hometown and this man. He helped move me into my dorm. I made it through a difficult first year, managing his drunken answering machine messages, the manipulative guilt-tripping emails and cards he would send me. The flowers I would have to somehow explain to my dorm roommate. He had a 5 year old daughter. He used her and the connection I had to her to try and pull me back in. I was trying to get out, and he was trying to drown me on my way.
Finally, just after turning 19, facing another year of this, I went to the police. I started by showing up, in person, to the police in my home town. I wanted to file a harassment report, and have someone go and talk to him to get him to leave me alone. I was hoping that the mere presence of a police officer would be enough to scare him off. The police there told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction and there was nothing they could do because he didn’t live in that town. So I called the police in his town, and they told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction because the harassment was happening in Normal, IL, and so there was nothing they could do. So I called the police in Normal, IL, and they told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction because the harassment was happening on university grounds, and so there was nothing they could do. So I called the University Police, and they told me that it wasn’t their jurisdiction because he wasn’t a university student, and so there was nothing they could do. They suggested I contact the police in his town. I lost it. I walked that person through the sequence of events in much the same way I did here. And with a sigh, they said, fine, and told me to come in.
I went in, a 19 year old, alone, and gave my statement. All along the way, each police department needed the context that I had been having “a relationship” with this man for years prior to the harassment. I couldn’t bear the shame and annihilation of calling it anything other than consensual, and every. single. police officer. just nodded as I did. But when I gave a statement, I had to provide more details. I also gave them the answering machine tapes, the emails and cards that this man had sent me over the last year. It was not a pretty picture. They said they would see what they could do and asked me for his identifying information, including his birth date. I gave it all, including the year – 1957. The police officer hesitated, shook his head, and said, did you say 67? I shook my head back, and said, “57.” He looked panicked. I don’t know how 67 would have made it better, except maybe for the optics. But 57 he could not massage out of his head as “maybe sort of consensual.” There was some discussion amongst themselves, and he came back and asked me if I wanted to press charges “for everything else.” I said no. I just wanted him to leave me alone. At 19 I carried the shame that to do anything about the abuse you received was a ruin the life of “perfectly respectable man.” It was clear to me that my life and body were not worth the “ruining” of this man’s life. And that was it. Someone called me a few days later and said they’d sent an officer to talk to him, and to let them know if I heard from him again. I never did. I rested in the relief, and worked really hard to put the whole affair behind me.
Four different police departments heard that a years-long relationship was happening between an older man and a 19 year old, and not a one of them said “wait, tell me more.” The one who finally felt like they had no choice but to hear me out, knew full well that a colossal crime had been committed, and then put the choice to prosecute that crime into my hands. The failure is staggering. When I hear about the Cornell case, I cannot help but want to scream for and with this 20 year old who was similarly failed.
My anorexia slowly morphed into bulimia as my system searched for ways to process the shame I was holding. Bulimia is an incredible repetition of the shame cycle. The eating representing your defilement, the purge a shameful punishment for your badness, which somehow returns you, blissfully, to an empty, peaceful state of cleanliness. That feeling of spent emptiness was the closest I could get to relief from the constant state of shame. When I could pull it off, I would try to return to a more restrictive pattern. If I could just stay consistently empty, consistently clean, then maybe I could feel a little free. But my treacherous body would always betray me eventually, and I would go back to eating, sending me into the other coping pattern. I went on like this for over a decade.
Eight years later, I was 27 and in a postdoctoral appointment at MIT, I got a call that would change the entire trajectory of my life. It was a police officer from my home county. Apparently, someone from this man’s family had filed a report that they had concerns about his relationship with his now 13/14 year old daughter, incidentally the exact same age when the abuse began with me. When they filed the complaint, they included the information that there had been another girl, and they gave the police my name. Would I give a deposition so that they would have the evidence they would need to protect this child? I said yes, because saying no felt like a horrifying failure to a child I once loved.
It was a difficult deposition, filmed as evidence. They try to hide the camera so you’re not stressed out by it, but it’s there, in the room. A person can only be tried with a crime if an exact action, in an exact location, on an exact date, is known. There are some exceptions to this, but they require a different burden of proof that would not have been possible in my case. I had burned and deleted everything from that era of my life as I attempted to scrub it clean from my past. 8-12 years had passed. There were only a handful of memories that could come close to fitting that bill. I would have to triangulate a memory of abuse with a holiday or event that could give it a specific date. It was awful. I kept saying “I’m sorry” over and over again to the officer. She was warm and kind. They chose well when they chose her. They do not always choose well.
It was an awful time. I had direct numbers to the Cambride police department because my safety was of some concern. I began taking Ativan to get through the days without completely collapsing. They informed me that he had a bulldog lawyer and they were spinning a tale that painted me in a very bad light. There was exactly zero evidence of their story, but they spun it anyways. It was clear to me, even then, that the story they were spinning would involve a very real paper trail of phone records at the very least, and I knew no such evidence existed. So all I had to do was rest in the truth, and trust that the rest would take care of itself. It was still awful, though, as their tale circulated anyways. I was told that they hired a private investigator to look into the details of my life. The patriarchal claws were out and they were seeking to discredit me in exactly the same way they discredit every woman who tried to report her abuse. 90% of the time, it works exactly as planned. Women are forced into bearing the burden of men’s appalling behavior time and time again.
This was before the days of social media, but of course my name was leaked into the comments sections of many online newspapers. The papers did their best to redact things, but it was all too late. I cannot fathom going through this in the days of social media. As it was, it was a scandal that rippled through my small town, and I only got whatever blowback happened to make it the 1000 miles over to Massachusetts. If I wanted to hear what people were saying about me, I would have to read the comments sections on my own accord. No one in my immediate vicinity had any clue what I was going through unless I chose to tell them. That’s a level of privacy and power rarely afforded anyone these days. At least one friend would make me promise not to read the news for weeks at a time. She didn’t really know what to do or say to help, but she knew that much. That’s just not as easy an option today, and my heart breaks for the young Cornell woman, and so many others, who are dealing with the court of public opinion, full of grotesque patriarchal conditioning seeking to cover its own shame, on a scale unlike anything I ever encountered.
The DA was shocked when I told her that I had filed a complaint when I was 19. Apparently the decision to press charges is never left to the victim. Apparently, if a police officer has any reason to believe a crime has been committed, it must be elevated to the DA’s office, who then decides what to do. This never happened in my case. The failure is staggering. I imagine that everyone found it much more comfortable to think of me as an “underage woman” and then promptly tried to put it out of their minds. But in the most bizarre twist of fate imaginable, because I had filed that report when I was 19, it stopped the clock on the statute of limitations. I don’t think I could have survived this ordeal when I was 19. It would have been too much. But by the time I was 27 and could have survived it, it would have ordinarily been “too late.” “Oh, sorry, we can’t prosecute a pedophile because simply too many years have passed. Too bad, so sad.” It made my case a bit of a unicorn case, and it went on being a unicorn case, which never ceases to be utterly gut-wrenching for me. I am going to need that EBMUD walk later…
We never made it all the way to trial. The bulldog lawyer watched the tape of my deposition, the private investigator did whatever their dirty work is, and they all collectively decided that their odds were too poor. I was told that his lawyer advised him that I was too articulate, and would be difficult to cross examine “effectively.” The private investigator turned up nothing because I was squeaky clean. I had a PhD and postdoc from incredibly prestigious universities and they just couldn’t tell any kind of believable story about me. So they said they would consider a plea deal. The DA asked me what I wanted – it was up to me. I was already on Ativan and crumbling. I would have done the trial if I had to, but I was relieved to agree to the offer she suggested making. He went to prison. For far too little and far too short a time, but he did go. But let me be astonishingly clear – he went to jail because I was unimpeachable. I was articulate, very well educated in logic and reason-based fields, and my focus on absolving my shame with perfection meant that I was spotless. That is the bar. That bar makes me want to rage-scream for the many women who can't reach it. And I have, more than once, into the night sky with my fellow wise and powerful women walking the difficult path back to health. With other strong women committed to purging the patriarchal wounding and the shame it hoists upon them from their beings.
I. Will. Not. Bear. This.
He lost his job, pension, and all of the benefits that come with being a tenured teacher. It became very clear that his wife knew of the abuse, and they began proceedings to strip her of her job, pension, and benefits as well since she was a mandated reporter. But they would need me to cooperate with them if they wanted to do that, and I was both trial-ed out, and his daughter laid guiltily on my conscience. I had already caused her to lose her father and that financial security, did I want to do the same to her mother, and have the ruin and hardship that followed resting on me and the choices I made? Still, at 27, I felt so responsible for it all. Look at the language in that sentence. “I had caused…. choices I made...” I declined to participate with the sole intention that his daughter keep something constant in her life. I have never really regretted that choice, but now, as I look back on it, with clearer eyes and a lot of healing under my belt, I can’t help but ask, “where was everyone else’s conscience through this whole thing?” I still ask that question. To every one of those 57 young men on the group chat. To the officers who took her statement. To the administrators that thought an essay was adequate justice for r*pe. To the people on the internet leaking her name and turning her into a disgusting mockery. My heart breaks with it all, and then it howls.
I have dedicated my life to helping people. To extend a hand to the men just as much to the women. I have always thought that in so many ways, the men have the harder road to walk in the patriarchal wound recovery. I'm inspired by the many men in my practice that are trying, truly, to do better. To grant themselves the depth and emotional complexity and true intimacy that our culture robbed them of. I have borne two sons through this body, married a man who is trying to do better, and together, we are doing our best to fight what feels like a cultural tidal wave as it threatens to engulf our sons. We are seeking to teach them better. But I am not naïve to what they face every time they leave our home. Every time they turn on the television. And we try to keep them as far away from the internet as humanly possible. We won't be able to for very much longer.
Whenever something like this Cornell case comes to light, the glimmer of hope that arises within me is for the cultural reckoning that might save my kids, that might save your kids, that might heal our society. And today, while I hike those EBMUD trails and rage-cry, I will keep that hope held high.
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