I have written about my rape online more times than I can count. And I wrote about it once, in my novel All The Things We Do in the Dark.
And one thing continues to be true: people will always judge the victim, but go out of their ways to justify and mitigate the rapists’ crime.
So today, while Jane Doe goes through the gauntlet of judgment after she was raped at Cornell, today, while the man who raped hundreds of women and children on the US Olympics’ gymnastic team gets removed from the Sexual Offenders List, while a rapist sits in the White House, and his victim has still yet to be paid for the lawsuit she won against him, while IDF soldiers are praised for raping Palestinians in their custody, I have to speak again.
Something evil happened TO us. Not because of us. Not because of our clothes, or our attitude, or our race, or the three drinks we had before going to visit a friend, or the fact that we’re transgender, or that we were too scared to say no! stop!
I refuse to use the passive voice anymore. I wasn’t raped. Someone raped me. And I will keep talking about it until people are safe from sexual harm, or I die. I’m afraid I know which one will come first.
