Anything You Say Can and Will be Used Against You

Why women who have been sexually assaulted don’t speak

Trigger warning — Anyone who’s been hurt.

#MeToo

My father abused me. For the sake of the squeamish, let’s stick with the clinical “inappropriate sexual touching” and throw in years of verbal, mental, and physical abuse to go with it. I’m only speaking for myself — my other family members know their own stories; they’re not mine to tell.

The abuse began when I was 14, and I said nothing to anyone. Every waking moment I was within his reach, I lived in fear.

And still, I said nothing to anyone.

I bring this up because the legal fall out from the #MeToo movement continues in the national news right now, as celebrity trials are in progress with sexual abuses that occurred years earlier. Careers are being ruined. Politicians, movie and television stars, movie directors, all kinds of people in the public eye are under the microscope.

There are an awful lot of women out here remembering.

What always puts me on tilt, though, is when I hear both male and female reporters and lawyers questioning the length of time between what happened and the reporting of it. They use this as a way to speculate that the motives of the alleged abuse victims are political, or vengeful, or self-serving — anything other than guilt on the part of the accused.

Dams sometimes break

A few months past my 17th birthday, I was just a week away from signing papers to go in the Air Force, and escape was nearly within my grasp. The hell that had been my last three years was finally almost at its end.

However, one of my father’s favorite games was to taunt me by holding up whatever he thought I wanted most. Then he’d whisk it away from me, like some giant cat playing with its prey.

He asked me, in front of my mother, what I was going to tell the recruiter was the reason why I wanted to leave home.

He must have underestimated how much I wanted to escape.

I could feel the escape hatch closing — he was going to stop me from leaving. I was gulping air, trying to stop the tears, and my chest began to vibrate. The vibration spread through my body, rushing blows slamming into a crumbling dam.

And I broke, finally and forever. The words he thought I was too terrified to say came tumbling out of my mouth, beyond my power to control, all the words.

I truly believed the saying of the unspeakable would lead to my death and my mother’s. I was much more sorry at the thought of her death than mine.

He threw my mother and me into chairs at the old metal worktable there in the backyard and walked over to the porch to get the shotgun.

As he leveled the weapon at my face, my mother asked him, “Is it true?”

His answer: “I had my reasons.”

The business end of a .410 shotgun is wide enough to swallow your entire soul, but by that time, I welcomed the blast, as it would finally stop the pain.

Why did it take so long to say anything?

Remember what I just said when you wonder why it takes us so long to speak.

It took me three years to get past my fear and shame before I said it out loud in front of my mother, the person I loved and trusted most in the entire world.

Had I not been at the brink of despair at seeing my escape route closing, I would not have said it then, or possibly ever. I tried with everything I had not to think about what was happening to me, much less say anything about it. I hoped if I ignored it, if I never said anything to anyone, then the serial, nonstop, soul-crushing abuse from my father wasn’t true.

For those who say, “Well, you’re talking about it now,” you should know I’ve been vocal over all the years since about my abuse — perhaps because the dam broke for me that day.

Because I have been open about it, I have been gifted with far too many stories of other women’s abuse at the hands of family and strangers.

So many had never told anyone else, but it was safe for them to say to me — I‘d been through the same battles, lost the same wars.

Why didn’t you go to the police?

Here’s another I see a lot in the news, “If it were true, they would have gone to the police.”

If you’ve been abused, you know there is no proof. My father very carefully left no visible marks on me, ever. Lack of evidence is not a lack of crime. There was never and would never be enough proof.

At the time of my torture, in the state of Texas, the first question out of the defense lawyer’s mouth would have been, “Well, what were you wearing the first time your daddy allegedly touched you?” It would not have gotten better after that.

True or not, that’s the thought my terrified, beaten, and cowering mind told me the few times it occurred, skittering across my mental landscape. I was only 14 years old, and I had sense enough to know that none of the power in that equation was on my side in a public arena.

I will say that for years before, and after I left, I dreamed of killing him — of walking in his bedroom and blowing his head off with that .410 shotgun.

I wasn’t afraid of going to jail.

I was afraid I’d miss.

Why didn’t you tell someone who could help?

I adored my mother, and I know she loved me — but the first words out of her mouth to him were, “Is it true?” Not to me. She wasn’t asking me. She was asking him.

I asked her, many, many years later, “What if he told you right then that I was lying?” She thought a moment, and because she was an honest person, she said, “I would have probably believed him.”

My own mother wouldn’t have believed me

We were just one family among the millions, known to none. The fear of not being believed when your terrorist is famous or influential must be multiplied beyond any imagining.

That’s why it takes us so long. Fear at levels I hope you can only imagine. The reason so many women believe those of us who speak is that so many of us have been there.

Some of us will never speak

I can guess, but I honestly don’t know why I’m different. I believe it’s because, in that final spasm of despair, I was able to say the truth out loud, and even though it came far too close to an unthinkable ending, I survived that final conflict.

Being able to talk about it didn’t mean that I had healed. It was, however, the first step toward realizing I no longer had to view me or my world the way he saw me. It took five long years to get to that realization. It still echoes.

All these things said, and as forthcoming as I have been, I never told the police, never alerted any authorities. After that first time, I told my stories where I was safe, where I was loved, or where no one wanted to hurt me.

For instance, I did tell a psychologist in the military, and she reassured me that “normal people don’t settle arguments with guns.” The irony of the fact that we were both in the U.S. Air Force, which by definition, owns all the biggest guns, was lost on both of us at the time.

However, many of us will never speak. Each person’s healing takes its own path, not one we choose, but theirs.

I believe anyone who’s been abused, whether man or woman, has the right to remain silent. Because after all, in this country, everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, and the headlines of the media.

Even if you were the one abused.

Disclaimer: All thoughts and opinions expressed here are those of the author. While she is employed by a nonprofit association, neither they nor the national organization which issues their charter endorse her articles. Nor does her employment by the organization or, by extension, the connection with the national association, imply or constitute either organization’s approval or endorsement of the opinions expressed herein.