September Publishing

The past and present, I have come to realize, are in constant dialogue, acting upon one another in a kind of reciprocal pressure dance.

Some sexual assault victims may continue to date their assaulters in an effort to neutralize the trauma or regain some control over an event that left them powerless. In fact, many reach out to their attacker again specifically to try to regain power in the relationship. While others explain that they believed he may acknowledge what he did and apologize.

At one point I refer to myself as “completely oblivious to everything in the world, it seems.” It’s not just self-deprecation; it’s self-flagellation. I am thirty-three in this interview, not a sixteen-year-old actress, and I haven’t interacted with anyone, press or otherwise, in this flighty mode in a long time. I am, in interaction with him, no longer someone who makes their own films or has a voice. Somehow his very presence has taken who I have become away from me. To someone watching the interview, I would look happy to be there as well as deferential and almost obsequious. What I don’t look like is a woman being interviewed by a man who assaulted her.

All I know for sure is that we all occasionally have difficulty with the truth—especially when we are ashamed or traumatized. To say that we can’t start from the premise that people sometimes lie even as they tell the truth is to ignore an important truth about human nature.

Elaine Craig, in her book Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession, quotes a woman who, after a year-long trial that resulted in the conviction of her attacker, said, “The bulk of my rape trauma is not the result of the sexual assault itself but of the brutality of the legal system. This trauma is difficult to understand for those who have not lived it.”

I can already sense how I will feel when I remember it years from now. I’m nostalgic for the present, mourning its passing even as it happens.

Human beings are basically a disaster.