My friend was visiting town for Thanksgiving. I was sitting on her couch, as the sun set, when I told her the story I’ve told you … I talked not so much about the violation years ago, but how he had remained a friend of my mother’s, and I had asked him not to come to the public celebration of my mother’s life.
All the energy drained from my friend’s face. She put her hand on mine and told me her story, which is different from mine in many ways, but these details are structurally the same:
- The pain of repeated violation.
- The perpetrator being someone who was known and close to her family.
- When she told her mother, her mother did not take her side.
- And, much later, close to the end of our mothers’ lives, each of us had a reckoning of sorts with our mothers about not helping us at the time.
Jeffrey Epstein was in the news that day, and I’d been thinking about the role Ghislaine Maxwell and other affluent white women played in finding young girls to serve Epstein and his male colleagues and friends. As Molly Jong-Fast and others – including the girls themselves – have described, the girls were almost an afterthought to the Justice Department. It was as if images of the girls – and the girls themselves – remain a currency exchanged among powerful elites, as if they still do not have voice and agency for themselves.
“I feel like we were both trafficked,” I said to my friend. “It takes so many people denying what is right in front of them for these crimes to happen again and again.” We sat talking for more than an hour. When I got up to leave, the sky was dark; streetlights reflected off recently fallen snow. Opening my car door, I noticed that someone had clipped the mirror off the driver’s side.
***
A week ago, we went out to brunch, and I told her I was trying to write about our conversation. I was taking a bite of a stringy grilled cheese when she said, “I don’t think it’s right to say we were trafficked. When I hear that word I think of something much worse. I think of people being taken against their will, taken across borders, maybe even sold into sexual submission.”
Since then I’ve felt that it’s both dangerously imprecise and directionally useful to think about the many instances – as many as one in four children is sexually abused before the age of 18 – in which a child is touched against their will and the people who should be stopping it know that it’s happening and do nothing.
When I first started writing about my own experience, over 15 years ago, many friends from high school shared their own, similar stories.
I think of my own mother who – when she finally sat quietly and listened to what I’d tried so many times to tell her – wanted to run out and “do something.”
That’s how storytelling works … it’s as if you are there with the person who tells their story. The past comes to life in the present, and you remember, in your body, similar things that have happened to you or that you have seen happen to others. Mirror neurons in our brains allow us to feel empathy and compassion for the person who shares their story in simple, honest words.
It takes a tremendous amount of denial, cover-up, and treating young men and women as if they are not fully human, for this process to go on. Every time another trove of Epstein papers is about to drop, the MAGA machine goes into full dissembling mode, trying to make us not see what is right before our eyes, again and again.
When my perpetrator apologized, after so many years, my sense of who I was sat atop this wobbly edifice of my family’s and community’s denial. It was only when I read about the crimes committed against young girls by Epstein and his powerful cronies that I saw how our system of privilege and entitlement holds up a whole range of atrocities, from groping and touching on the school bus, to sexually charged jokes at work, to the crime of trafficking human beings from one place to another for use by someone who pays to abuse them.
Who I am now is a person who speaks up even when it feels like everyone they know won’t listen. I am the person who listens when your sense of who you are is crumbling, and you are ready to tear it down to repair yourself and others who have felt the shame and loneliness of holding a terrible truth on our own.
What is something in your own life that is linked to larger structures of domination and control? If you think about what happened to you in relation to these larger, repeated patterns, what shifts in your thoughts, feelings, and words to describe what happened to you?