Alexis Moore and Olivia Cowan were each abused by Nassar for ten years.
Jennifer Rood Bedford was assaulted by Nassar on an operating table. She forced herself to say nothing.
I assumed something like what happened to me would only happen if I wanted it to, she said, years later.
Jennifer was a child, but she was old enough to know she would be blamed. Old enough to know she wouldn’t be believed.
Madeleine Jones was eleven years old when Nassar began to abuse her.
I remember laying there frozen stiff on the table, utterly mortified, confused and scared, she said. Just like her body on the table, the words froze inside her throat and did not escape for almost twenty years. This experience, like the experiences of so many athletes around her, was unspeakable. Before every appointment, I cried in the bathroom. And after every appointment, I couldn’t wait to get home to shower because I always left his office feeling so dirty.
That’s how Madeleine described the abuse. She also described suicide attempts borne out of her need to escape him.
Now I understand that I lived because I’m meant to live. I’m meant to be happy, and I need to be alive to put abusers like you in jail, she told the court in 2018.
So many of the girls Larry Nassar assaulted said nothing, were imprisoned by silence. By a world that would not let them speak. But not all of them took this path – some girls did complain to their parents, to USA Gymnastics, to their coaches. The first disclosure was made to a coach in 1997. That’s a full two decades before Nassar would be caught. Two full decades before he would be stopped.
Girls came forward in 1999, 2000, 2001 and 2004. All of their allegations would prove to be true in a historic trial more than a decade later. All of these girls were telling the truth. But when confronted with the allegations at the time they were made, Nassar denied them, and everyone believed him.
The realization that my fellow athletes were being abused in the same gyms, the same rooms, as I was, made me think about what would have happened if we’d told someone back then, in the early 2000s, about our abuse. And the answer seems clear: though I don’t know for sure, I do wonder if it would have been the same thing that happened to Larry Nassar’s victims, the ones who spoke up thirty years before his conviction. It’s possible that we simply would not have been believed. That’s the truth, the long and the short of it. It is such a simple fact, and such a complicated one. I am only just learning that those two things can be true at the same time.
What it also forced me to consider, for the first time in my life, was what would have happened if I had reported my rape to the police. I never, ever considered doing so. Honestly, the thought never crossed my mind because I so quickly decided to dedicate myself to pretending it never happened. I knew – intellectually – that someone, whoever he was, had committed a crime that night. I knew – intellectually – that I was his victim. I knew – intellectually – that I should stop him from hurting other teenage girls. But to do that would be to accept, to concede, that he had hurt me, and I wouldn’t be ready to do that for another ten years.
So my rape went unreported, for the same reason so many sexual assaults do: I knew that shame could hurt more than the attack did. I knew that I lived in a world where the cost of speaking up could be much higher than any I had already paid. I had lost so much, and I was scared, and I was tired, and protecting myself from the blame of others was the only way I knew how to regain control.
I thought of the cross-examination. They could ask me why I didn’t come forward earlier. Why was I out drinking on a Saturday when I was only fifteen? Why did I lie to my parents about where I was going that night? What did you expect would happen? they would ask.
To admit, again and again, to a stranger in front of a room full of other strangers, that this had happened to me, and then to have to insist that it had happened to me when I was accused of lying? That seemed unbearable in a way that pretending it hadn’t happened didn’t, so the choice between the two was easy.
Where is the evidence? They would ask.
Their search would turn up nothing. Any proof of my rape was washed down the drain of the shower on that night in 2007 as I sat on the floor, bleeding, crying, scrubbing myself clean. It faded along with the bruises he left on my chest and stomach. The ones I lied about. The ones I covered up as best I could.
I buried the evidence. All of it. Because I wanted to make sure no one ever found out that I was the kind of person this happened to.
Like the majority of rape defendants, the man with the Swiss army knife would likely be acquitted. His defence lawyer would talk about the family he probably has now – I imagine he would be about forty-five – and beg the jury not to let a woman with a decade-old allegation ruin the life he has built for himself. They would talk about his career. About how far he’s come, about how sad it would be to take that all away from him.
What about my career? What about the Olympic gymnast I could have been? What about the small girl with the big smile and the relentless ambition? What about the writer, the girl who wrote tiny novels and poems but had her own story stolen from her? What about the lawyer, the one who wanted to change the world but can’t sit up for more than a few hours at a time even on a good day?
The jury wouldn’t hear anything about her. Except that she’s a liar, a rotten thing. I would have to watch as I was painted as the foolish, promiscuous girl whose night out went too far and was filled with regret the next day. Or as the girl who couldn’t admit to losing her virginity at fifteen, so she made up a story to excuse herself.
I wish I could say I had the strength to try. But I didn’t.
Some sexual aggressors amass fifty to sixty victims in their lifetime. If I had reported either of the men who abused me, if I had tried to beat the odds, would other women have been spared?
How am I to forgive myself for that?
In Leslie Jamison’s 2014 essay ‘The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’, she wrote:
I think dismissing female pain as overly familiar or somehow out-of-date – twice-told, thrice-told, 1001-nights-told – masks deeper accusations: that suffering women are playing victim, going weak, or choosing self-indulgence over bravery. I think dismissing wounds offers a convenient excuse: no need to struggle with the listening or telling anymore.
It’s that simple. The notion that women are not to be trusted is the balm we use to excuse us from struggling with the listening or the telling. We can’t afford to let it go. To open the floodgates. How, then, would we live with ourselves?
A 2011 study by Ohio University found that 66 per cent of respondents agreed with some combination of what the literature calls ‘rape myths’, including that women lie about rape, that women secretly desire rape and that victims ought to be blamed for their sexual assaults. Bear in mind that this 66 per cent are only the respondents who were willing to acknowledge explicitly their attachment to these beliefs.
We accept these myths in order to excuse ourselves from the burden of meaningfully engaging with the truth of abuse, the inconvenient fact of women’s suffering.
A 2007 study by the Australian Institute of Criminology found that one quarter of participants believe that false claims of rape are common. These participants may go on to become jurors in rape cases, and the same study also showed that jurors in sexual assault cases, unlike other types of crime, are likely to bring their own beliefs and attitudes about rape to bear on their deliberations.
On the other hand, we frequently hear about successful convictions for sexual homicide offenders – that is, perpetrators who both rape and kill their victims. This sheds a truly grotesque new light on B.B. King’s famous lines: ‘Don’t ever trust a woman / Until she’s dead and buried.’
The idea that women lie about rape also contributes to it being criminally under-reported in every jurisdiction. It is why the majority of sexual assaults go unreported for years, or decades. Some stories of assault are never told to anyone. They are forev
er unspeakable. They go to the grave with their victim.
How many truths have we lost to the myth of the duplicitous woman? How many stories of abuse are forever silenced when they are buried with the bodies of the girls and women for whom the indignity was unliveable?
In Bri Lee’s book about the legal treatment of sexual assault complainants, Eggshell Skull, she reflects on the warnings judges are obliged to give juries in relation to certain crimes. One of them is ‘Bear in mind this warning: the mere fact that the defendant tells a lie is not in itself evidence of guilt.’ I’d love to know how frequently jurors apply this sentiment to sexual assault complainants, for whom the slightest discrepancy in the recollection of detail is so often taken as proof of her assailant’s innocence, as confirmation that she is lying, that the whole story is nothing but a cruel invention.
On this point, Lee suggests that there should be a special warning for sexual assault cases:
Bear in mind this warning: there is a strong statistical probability that you will presume this woman is a liar.
In 2015, the New York Times reported four cases in which women made rape allegations and were prosecuted and, in some of these cases, fined and put on probation, for making false rape complaints. Years later, evidence surfaced confirming the men’s guilt in each case. Each of the rapes had in fact occurred. But that didn’t matter. The truth could not eclipse the fiction.
The 2011 Ohio University study also found that men’s belief in these rape myths is itself a predictor of sexually aggressive behaviour. When I say these myths are dangerous, I am not engaging in terms of abstraction: the attachment to these myths about rape directly correlates with increased prevalence of rape itself. So the myth of the woman or child who lies about abuse both silences victims and encourages perpetrators in one fell swoop. A potent poison indeed.
What the story of Larry Nassar tells me, and what the story of my own childhood tells me, and what writing this book has taught me, is this: the compulsion to presume that women and girls lie about abuse is systemic. It creates, and recreates, and reinforces, silence. It is the oxygen of shame. It cares little about the idiosyncrasies of our situation or the individual traits of any one perpetrator or victim. It is a gas that adapts to whichever container it finds itself in. It keeps everything in order. It ensures we do not have to bear the discomfort of the listening or the telling. It is a fatal convenience.
In April Ayers Lawson’s essay ‘Abuse, Silence and the Light That Virginia Woolf Switched On’, she reflects on why we are so committed to believing that abuse is imagined. She writes:
For quite some time, it has felt much safer to many people to attribute abuse to fantasy or the need for attention than to face the possibility that it’s real.
I think she’s right. It’s the desperate need for denial that makes enforced silence so powerful, so complete. It’s because the stakes are so high: if we allow ourselves to acknowledge the truth, even a fraction of it, the entire house of cards will fall. We will be forced to see clearly what I now see: that abuse has been accepted for so long that it has become a pathology. That violence is everywhere. That culpability is rampant. That abuse kills. That silence kills. That we as women are so unlikely to survive.
As a result, Lawson writes, the victims become encouraged to swallow the truth, to deny it even to ourselves. Especially to ourselves.
If Lawson has correctly diagnosed the compulsion to make abuse unspeakable, if she is right in suggesting that the thing that keeps it alive is our inability to face the fact of it – which I think she is – then there is only one solution. Face it we must.
And so I must forgive myself. I must release myself from the spectre of the victims I didn’t protect. Because now I know I couldn’t have kept them safe, even if I tried. If the shame hadn’t silenced me, others’ disbelief would have done so in its place. Our culture of shaming and disbelieving women is bigger and more powerful than any one of us. Because I lived in that world, there was nothing I could do. I know that now.
Once a fellow gymnast was sitting down on the gym floor next to me, stretching, her legs out in front of her, toes pointed to perfection. But she seemed bemused, as if she was daydreaming. I sat down next to her and asked her what she was thinking about. I just realized my legs only go out to here, she said, touching her toes. I just realized how small I am. I can’t believe this is where I begin and end.
I now know, all these years later, that during this time in her life she was being abused by the same man who was abusing me.
I thought at the time these were the internal musings of an athlete who spent so much time thinking about her body and its functionality. But now I wonder if I had in fact intruded on a profound moment of her own loss of proprioception: whether her abuse had caused her physical form to disintegrate, to become disembodied, right there in front of me.
VII
Acceptance is a small, quiet room.
Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things
REFLECTIONS
As I write this, my tremors have returned and I am terrified that someone might notice. Sometimes I have to take breaks because my fingers won’t hit the right keys. The pain is still debilitating at times. Some days I still brush my teeth with blood. Like trauma itself, the process is cyclical and uncertain, lacking clear boundaries, clear finish lines.
There are some days I still want to die; some days I still wonder if there is something cold and rotten inside me that will condemn me to a life of cruelty. There are some days when my Crohn’s disease is so bad I can’t get out of bed, and I get so lonely, and so angry at how little people try to understand, and I feel like giving up.
On those days, I think about the concluding words of Bri Lee’s memoir about her own disclosure of sexual abuse:
What do you do in the months and years that follow? When winning the battle has only opened your eyes to the breadth of the war? You cry and you cry, and when you’re done crying, you wipe your eyes, and slap your cheeks, and you get angry, and you get to work.
So this book does not necessarily have a happy ending. But it does have a hopeful one: I know I am capable of wiping my eyes and slapping my cheeks, and getting angry, and getting to work.
Here’s what I’ve learned from that work. Violence is a systemic disorder that ruins life after life after life. It is pathological. It is as ubiquitous as it is veiled. This is not just a failure of any single predator. It is a failure of the grandest scale. But more pathological still is our compulsion to ignore it, to erase it, to make it invisible. The truth is that silence is the darkest of captivities. It is ruinous and gratuitous and wretched.
So what do you do, when you discover how much culpability there is, just how many layers this disappointment has?
What do you do when winning the battle has only opened your eyes to the breadth of the war?
There are so many structural problems facing victims of violence and many of them will take years, decades, generations, to fix. Failures of the law and the justice system, of education, of the healthcare system, of the government, of our culture. I do not have any of these answers. I don’t know where to begin.
But I have a head start: I am lucky that in some ways what happened to me was a blinding anomaly, a random act of violence committed by a stranger in the night. Statistically, most acts of sexual violence are not isolated; they are visited upon us by people we know and trust, in circumstances where social and interpersonal dynamics may complicate a survivor’s understanding of their trauma, or the boundaries of consent may feel harder to determine clearly.
I have the incalculable fortune of being born into a body that I wanted; the one that aligns with my gender identity and feels as though it fits me the way it’s supposed to. I was born middle class and white and the impact that has had on my ability to get help, to be taken seriously, to recover, cannot be underestimated.
If just one of these factors had not aligned in my favour, I might not have been able to get better. I would not h
ave been able to choose Elena. I might, by now, have been dead and buried. Because I am so fortunate in these ways – because I am still alive – it is my duty to testify. To prove that x does not always equal x.
It is harder to be seen than it is to be invisible. It is harder to bear witness to suffering than it is to analyse it. Until we are ready to do that, change will evade us.
As Sally Rooney’s protagonist tells the reader in the closing moments of Conversations with Friends: You have to live through things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.
A few years ago, Peter Levine was on his way to a friend’s sixtieth birthday party. It was a clear winter’s day in southern California. As he stood on the side of the road, he was hit at high speed by a teenage driver. He held his breath and waited for help. Somehow, he was wrenched out of the rubble and into an ambulance. The paramedics tried to sedate him.
No, he whispered firmly.
He lay on the stretcher and felt his body shake uncontrollably, as if from the inside out. His mind replayed the moments before the accident, again and again, as if it were still happening. He watched this like a videotape and he let it consume him. He let his legs and arms swing violently until the panic started to fade. Until his muscles finally registered that it was over.
After some moments, his body became still again.
Peter Levine has been a psychiatrist his entire career and has specialized in trauma studies for thirty years. Because of his own trauma research he knew that if he stayed conscious, he could treat his trauma symptoms immediately. While there was still time. He knew exactly what to do to discharge all the fight-or-flight energy that had built up in his muscles in those moments. He let himself relive it, let his body lurch, again and again until the panic left him.
I Choose Elena Page 8