Writing this stark and powerful about sexual assault tends to be tucked away.
One afternoon, after an appearance I made in Hilton Head, S.C., an elderly woman came toward me. Gingerly, she took both of my hands into hers, looked at me knowingly and, without saying a word, gave me a folded note. I slid it into my pocket, to read it later in private. Back in my hotel room, I read the note and called the number she had left me. She came to my room a couple of hours later.
This woman told me a story that I’ve heard many times before. Her father began molesting her when she was 3. Three. How can we begin to wrap our minds around that? He continued throughout her teenage years, using the familiar threat of shaming her and even hurting her if she told anybody. This was their special secret, he told her. Those words chilled me to the bone: their special secret.
Our conversation in my hotel room was the first time that she ever told anyone what had happened to her. She shed bitter tears, and I held her frail body, crying also for all these long years she had lived with the burden of these unspeakable events. There’s the irony. These events we have suffered are at once unspeakable and yet need to be spoken.
An interviewer once asked me, as many do, “Where did your confidence, your iron will come from?” That person didn’t know that just hours earlier the same day, I’d flown into an uncontrollable self-rage. Approaching my door, clutching several bags of groceries, I’d fumbled with the keys, lost hold of the bags and started a self-destructive rant as apples rolled down the driveway. The same words the coach had used while molesting me came screaming out at me, from my own mouth. “You little bitch!” “You worthless little ….” That wounded young person inside believes, on some cellular level, that these words sum up exactly who I am at the core.
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