It Was Rape

I know everyone and their dog is asking you for money right now, every indie band, filmmaker, and of course Obama, which is why I’ve tried my hardest not to link to a ton of kickstarters/indie a go-go’s etc… BUT my friend Jennifer is making a movie called ‘It Was Rape’ and she has less than 40 hours to raise $10,000.

This project is important to me for a myriad of reasons but mostly because I was raped by a stranger when I was 15. I never reported it because I was drunk and had accepted a ride from him. He said he was taking me home but instead he pulled onto the freeway and took me to his apartment. I tricked him into not doing certain things by acting like I liked him as I had a big instinct that he had not only done this before but that some girls may have not left his apartment alive. I’ll never know if that was true or not, it was just a gut feeling. I’ll never forget him throwing a box of kleenex at me after he was done. I could see he was trying to think of fake reasons to get mad at me so his violence towards me could escalate, but I stayed calm, even laughing and pretending I was excited for our next “date”. Even though I didn’t fight back in a traditional way, I DID fight back, it’s not a passive thing to read a situation and figure out the best plan to stay alive. I did it, I got out. I blamed myself for a long time and lived in fear for years that he would come back and finish me off.

I have a feeling if you’re still reading this you know what I’m talking about, and if you don’t, it probably sounds pretty familiar, drunk teen taken advantage of by an older man…but try this one on for size. I was raped a 2nd time,ten years later, during my band Bikini Kill’s heyday. Strange as it may be to believe, I, the outspoken feminist who was in a militant punk band, was raped by a friend. Again I didn’t tell anyone, not even my band (at first) because I didn’t think anyone would believe me (the guy had read more feminist books than I had and seemed like the nicest person in the world) I was also nervous that if the few riot grrl types around at the time did believe me they might take matters into their own hands and run the guy out of town or something…..and that would’ve just made me feel even crazier and like I had lost all control over the situation. Because I was leaving for tour the very next day, I told myself what had happened was akin to a natural disaster, a tornado, I had survived it and was gonna just block it out, which I did for many years. I finally wrote him a confrontational letter and we agreed to meet and he admitted that he had been angry at me and basically acted that anger out in the worst way he could possibly imagine. It’s taken me a long time to get over what he did because he was not just a friend, he was my bestfriend.

So why am I sharing all this super depressing information with you now? Because this movie is important. If one girl sees it and feels less alone, it’s worth it.

If you can contribute just a dollar it would mean a lot.