There’s always one story that comes to my mind when I think of the #metoo movement. A story from my past. A story that I don’t talk about much. Maybe even some closest to me haven’t heard it, because I didn't like to think about it, so I pushed it out.
Now that Time Magazine has named The Silence Breakers, those willing to come forward with their #metoo stories, their people of the year, and now that I have a moment of quiet to reflect on my year, I think it is finally time I write this story down.
When I was 17, I had a party at my parents’ house. It was June, 2002. The rest of my family had gone on a trip to Houston for a few weeks. I stayed back because it was the summer between junior and senior year of high school; I wanted to be with my friends.
I had some friends over 21 that got me the keg, so I invited everyone I liked and told them to invite their friends too.
It wasn’t exactly like you see in the movies, hundreds of people in a huge, fancy suburban house, but it was about one hundred people mainly hanging out in my basement, where there was an old-fashioned bar built in the 70s, and plenty of space for the keg and all the keg stands that ensued. The basement was a good place even though it was summer, because I didn’t want the neighbors to complain.
I won’t pretend that I wasn’t getting drunk, albeit slowly (I had to try to keep the party under control, at least). The party was great. Tons and tons of people showed up, and I felt so popular. People that I barely talked to through all of high school were there, plus a lot of my friends from other schools, and even some friends in college. Obviously offering free alcohol might have contributed to that, though I didn’t think of it at the time. Why? People came to my party and were having a blast. The vibes were all right.
It must have been pretty late when I went up to my room to grab a secret stash of alcohol reserved for me and a few others. It was in my closet, way in the back. When I turned around and came out of the closet, a guy was standing there. His name is Adam.
Hey Jess.
Adam, when did you get here? What are you doing in my room? The party is downstairs.
What are you doing up here?
Nothing. Get out of here.
I heard about you and Luke.
Yeah, so?
So I was thinking you might be interested in me too.
God, Adam, what’s wrong with you?
Let me give you a little backstory. Adam was my ex Bill’s best friend. Bill, who I lost my virginity to in April. Bill, who cheated on me. Bill, who pretended like he had no choice but to cheat on me, since we didn’t go to the same school, and he was surrounded by other girls all the time. Bill and all his friends were bros. Even though they weren’t my type, most of them were pretty hot, and plus I had never really hung out with bros, so it was interesting to engage with that world for the first time.
All of Bill’s friends lived near my house, because they went to school near me, a school I didn’t go to, nor he. He went to the richest school in Milwaukee, University School, a private secular school. Anyway, Luke was one of his friends who lived near me, and he had the most beautiful eyes I had seen to date. I wrote poems about his eyelashes, actually, after Bill and I broke up. Bill wasn’t the brightest person I’d ever dated, but he was so hot. What I’m saying is that I actually wasn’t that hurt when I found out he was cheating on me. Or surprised. I gladly started flirting with his much smarter friend Luke, with the eyelashes that you could hide in. Luke and I had had sex a few weeks before my party. That’s what Adam was referring to when he said he heard about Luke and me.
What’s wrong with me?? Come on Jessica.
Does that ever happen to you, when guys say your full name to you like you have some special bond with them. Kind of like when they tell you good girl, as if you needed confirmation of their approval of your actions, as if you cared. This was that kind of Jessica out of Adam’s mouth.
That’s when Adam cornered me against the bed and I fell backward. He fell with me and started kissing me. I pushed his face away, though not his body, because he was way bigger and stronger than me.
Adam, get off me.
Come on, I know you want it. I know how you are.
He forced his face on mine and was holding my arms down.
No, gross. Get off me! GET OFF ME!
Adam pulled my pants down just enough, and then started to take his dick out. I tried to push him off me, but I couldn’t Aside from being kind of drunk, he was just too strong with all his weight on me. That’s when I started screaming, GET OFF ME, GET THE FUCK OFF ME, also letting out a high pitched squeal. The thing was, my bedroom was on the second floor, and everyone was in the basement. I was getting really scared that no one was going to hear.
Adam, please don’t do this. Come on.
I remember trying to plead with him, and he brought up Luke again. I screamed again. I screamed nothing. Just screams. And then suddenly, the man who would come to be my nephew and niece’s father stormed in the room, grabbed Adam off of me, and dragged him out the front door. Ed was a big guy, and a lot older. He wasn’t the one who got me the alcohol and the keg, but one of his good friends. They had all come to check up on the party and make sure everything was ok.
I didn’t see what he and the others did to Adam. I was sitting in my room, frantically putting on my clothes and crying and breathing and thanking the universe for bringing those boys, bringing Ed, to my house just in time.
I came downstairs, and I saw the boys, sans Adam, standing on the front lawn. They told me not to worry. They kicked his ass, took his ID, and told him if they ever hear of him trying to pull that shit or anything like it again, they would come find him and make him pay. They had his ID with his address on it, after all.
They asked me if there was anything else they could do, anyone else that should be removed from the party. I said no, and tried to enjoy the rest of the night. I felt such a mix of emotions. I had almost been raped, but I hadn’t been raped. Was it a cause for celebration? Why didn’t I feel like celebrating?
Still, my basement was crowded with people who were none the wiser of that any of that happened. Barely any of them even knew that guy Adam, so maybe they didn’t notice him, there or gone. I told one girl, Alex, and she hugged me, but I didn’t tell anyone else. I was embarrassed. For as much of a bad ass I thought I was, as much of a feminist, I was ashamed to tell people about what happened. Instead, I did what many others in my place would do: I started pounding shots and letting people hold my legs up for keg stand after keg stand until I was obliteratedly drunk. I pretended like it didn’t happen. At one point, the last thing I remember of the night, Alex asked if I was ok a few hours later, and I said that Adam wasn’t worth anything, and he wasn’t going to ruin my party.
I’m not sure I’ve ever actually told this story in full to anyone. Last winter, I saw Ed again when I was in Milwaukee, and thanked him for what he did that night. I’m not sure why in that moment I brought it up. Sometimes memories flood in for no reason, and that’s that. The weirdest thing is, until recently, when people, mostly women, started coming forward with their stories of harassment, assault, rape, it never occurred to me to tell my story. I didn’t actually get raped, so maybe my mind told me that there was nothing to tell. More likely is that, being born in 1985, growing up in the 90’s, unconsciously being fed that women get raped are sluts (see: Monica Lewinsky), I wanted to disassociate myself with the experience.
Not to mention, Adam denied it ever happened maybe a week later. He started chatting with me on AIM (AOL instant messenger) asking if I wanted to buy any weed. I couldn’t believe him. He said, what the fuck is wrong with your friends? What are they gangsters? Those dudes are scary. I told him to fuck off and never talk to me again. And he asked if he could at least get his ID back. I said no. After what he did, how could he think it was even ok to talk to me? To which he replied, what did I do? When I told him to fuck off again, he said, You were fucking drunk. You don’t even remember what happened I bet. I said whatever and closed the chat.
That’s the thing about how it has always been. The victims of rape aren’t really victims in the eyes of everyone else. Maybe they’re lying. Maybe they’re trying to cover up that they really wanted it. And in my case, I wasn’t even a rape victim, so what did I have to go around telling people what happened for? So they could think I was a slut and start talking about it behind my back? No thanks.
So it got buried, that memory. I barely ever thought about it, and so I never talked about it, not even to my close friends, because it was actually buried too far for it to ever occur to me. But in 2014, I remember I was living in Playa del Carmen, and one day a few friends and I went with another friend onto a yacht. Some rich guy’s yacht who had paid my friend for private diving and invited him and told him to bring friends. He was so rich, he even had his own private jet. He asked if my friend and I wanted to go to Puebla, another city in Mexico, with him for a few weeks. He said I could even bring Luna, my dog, on the plane. The idea of a private jet sounded awesome, and I knew the guy wanted to sleep with me (I didn’t want to sleep with him), so I actually asked myself, even called my best friend to ask, if it would be worth it to sleep with him a few times in exchange for having the whole private jet experience?
In the end, I didn’t end up going, but I wrote a blog that mentioned that story, and discussed rape a bit, last year. I said:
We were talking about rape because a friend made a joke that if I had a rape whistle, it would be much quieter than a normal one, because I’m not as likely to feel threatened by the prospect of having (even unwanted) sex with a stranger. Because it’s just sex for me. There are times that I’ve woken up in the morning thinking, man, I wish I hadn’t slept with this fucker. There was a time when I almost took a private jet and stayed in some guy’s extra apartment, even though he had a wife, even though he was 20 years older than me and fat, even though I didn’t want to sleep with him. The idea of taking a private jet and staying in a new city for a few weeks sounded kind of worth it to me. Because it’s just sex. And I would get to have all these new experiences if I just had sex with this guy a couple times, probably drunk. In fact, I could make sure I was drunk—so that makes it way easier too. At the very least, it would have been interesting. At the very worst, he might have been a part of the Mexican drug cartel, and I would have been entering into a world where there was much more than a little harmless sex on the line. That’s fucked up, I know. It’s like saying that I have no problem with being a prostitute. The difference is that instead of the direct exchange of sex for money, it’s sex for weird, new experiences.
And then a girl from my grad school commented, accusing me of not really understanding rape, telling me that rape and sex are not the same. She said:
I encourage you to seek out the stories of those who’ve experienced this distinction first hand so that you might become an ally for victims of sexual assault, and so that you’ll understand the difference. I can only assume from your post that you are writing from a position of being able to consider your reaction to sexual assault as a thought experiment, rather than a lived experience.
At first, I responded with paragraphs about my experience, but I deleted the whole thing, and wrote something kind of generic as a response instead. Feel free to read that here if you're interested.
Why did I do that, delete it? Why didn’t I want to talk about it, still, last year, 2016, 14 years later? It was the perfect opportunity for me to open up about the story. I don't know. But that is when it became an active part of my memory again, what happened to me at that party in 2002, which certainly also affected why I brought it up to Ed a few months later.
And it has taken for all these other people to come forward, for the whole #metoo movement to have become a part of the mainstream, for me to finally tell this story. I am such an open person, so what was the block, long after I had any fear of being accused of being a slut (or really, caring if people thought it anyway)?
After re-reading that blog I wrote last year, and thinking deeply about that experience with Adam and how it impacted me, I do think it changed how I behaved and thought about sex for so many years. I adopted a philosophy that sex is just sex. Intercourse is humans acting instinctually and like animals. That was my way of being for so long. I had lots of causal sex, and I felt glad about it, powerful even. No one could hurt me through sex alone. I would never be deceived by someone’s intentions simply because of sex. Now I am realizing that it seems like that philosophy may have developed as a defense mechanism. If my view of sex is that it is part of our animal side, not our human-er side, then if someone raped me of sexually assaulted me in any way, I could push it aside as meaningless, thereby protecting me from becoming hurt if it were to happen. That’s just a theory, but after that happened is when I started behaving that way, thinking that way. And especially after reading this segment of the 2016 blog, where I confess to having some fucked up and unusual feelings about rape and how I would deal with it, it seems not far off:
Regarding rape, I have perhaps a more fucked up confession. If someone raped me, could I just add him to that small selection of people I’ve woken up beside and felt some form of regret, and move on with my life? I think I could. Instead of fighting back, could I just kiss him back, touch him back, fuck him back? Likely. I get it that it wouldn’t be my choice, and that I might not want to do it, but if it’s going to happen anyway, could I make the best of a bad situation, considering that I have had sex with people by choice and then fairly immediately felt remorse?
I still feel this way, that I could deal with rape in that fashion if it happened, but why? How do I think that I would be capable of this? So many years of forcing this philosophy about sex on myself that it has just manifested into reality? I obviously can’t say for certain that I could deal with it in this way, as it has never happened to me, but it does seem probable given what I know of myself. Only now am I realizing that that feeling about how I would/could react to rape is the result of having had that experience at my party, almost being raped by Adam.
That article by Time, about the history of sexual abuse that women have been facing forever, and about why they name the Silence Breakers their People of the Year for 2017, is so meaningful to me. It is for that (it seems) that I finally felt compelled to talk about what happened to me. Right now.
2017 will be remembered by a lot of people as a turning point in how sexual harassment and assault is treated. Men will hopefully think twice before engaging in that behavior now, because the consequences are real. Women are no longer being ignored and defamed for coming out with their stories and accusations, at least not to nearly the same extent as before. 2017 will be remembered by me for this as well. For so many of us, sexual harassment and assault has touched us personally, and we just sweep it under the rug. For me, it feels so much better now because I have unswept it from the rug, and even in just telling this story, swept it into the wind, no longer hidden. What happened will never be erased from my memory or my life, but now it is no longer a burden, a burden I didn’t even realize was weighing on me all this time.
(this is a pic of the friend I told about what happened that night and I a few weeks before it happened, the last weeks of our junior year of high school. I still remember that girl I was; she's somewhere inside of me.)