I was sixteen years old, and was with friends just hanging out downtown on a weekend night. During the evening, I met this person who was an older friend of my boyfriend (who wasn’t with us that night). He hung out with all of us, others seemed to know him.
My friends all walked each other home, but I lived further away and had planned on staying at my sister’s house, but she wasn’t home. The older man (nineteen, twenty) said I could use his phone to call my Dad to come pick me up. I thought, since he knew my boyfriend, it was safe.
Once we were in his apartment, he locked something like six locks on his door, and he was looking at me funny. So I started to unlock them, saying I could go to my sister’s house and wait for her after all, but he laughed and kept locking them as I tried to unlock them.
I kind of went numb while he raped me, I even tried to pretend it was okay, that it wasn’t so bad, that what was happening wasn’t really happening. He was very strong, there was no way I could have stopped him, and I was afraid he’d hit me if I tried to resist. I weighed about ninety pounds back then, he was probably 180, and there were barbells all over the living room.
Afterwards, I tried to tell my sister when I got to her house, but I was in a kind of shock, and didn’t know what to say or how to deal with it. My sister also didn’t know what to say to me, so I just buried it. I never told my parents or the police; I thought then (and I still think so) that my parents would not have handled it well.
This was forty years ago! and I think it affected me my whole life, in that I have always had a hard time trusting men.
I just watched the movie Brave Miss World, and it inspired me to write my story to you. Thank you for encouraging women (and men) to tell their stories; I agree with you that we need to shed lights on these atrocities, and silence only encourages these monsters to keep on raping. Thank you for letting me tell my story.
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