Brave Page 10

  He could be the bogeyman of your worst nightmares.

  He became mine.

  I sat on a far end of a couch and he sat about five feet away while he talked loudly on the phone. I stared at the ceiling so I didn’t have to look at his face. Eventually he finished up his phone call and we proceeded to have our meeting. I figured I’d do what I did best, use my intelligence and wit to prove I was different from the stereotype of an actress. Even being new in my career, I already resented being lumped in with the actress cliché. I was certain we would be working together for many years to come, and we were here to plot out the grand arc of my career. That’s how my manager had framed this very significant meeting. Those were my earnest, enthused expectations. I mean, if you were in the middle of your second extremely high-profile job for a company, would you not assume that you were already a valuable employee with a big future? Looking back, I want to hug myself for being so naive. I really thought that this was a business meeting and that this creep cared what I had to say. I was so wrong.

  Later I’d find out that other actresses had been warned about what could happen when this Studio Head summoned you to a meeting. Later I’d find out lots of things. Completely unbeknownst to me, an industry newbie, this hideous beast had a long track record of preying on young women. Turns out even in 1997, this was an open secret in the industry. Sadly, it seemed everybody in Hollywood on the business side knew that if you got summoned to a meeting, it was probably going to go differently than you expected.

  But I didn’t know the rumblings and the secrets, the gossip and the warning signs. As a street kid I had known to be on guard for the trolls. It just never occurred to me that the head troll would be in Hollywood. That these fancy people were in fact more dangerous than those on the streets. These people in their $3,500 suits could be far more evil than a guy who’s just cruising you to get ass one night on the street corner. You know why? Because these are the creeps who spread their rot to our world.

  The Studio Head asked about the kinds of projects I wanted to do. What a banal question, I thought. I said I wanted to do projects that mattered. He seemed like a smartish man, gruff, rough around the edges, not particularly well-mannered. Piggy, to be honest. I was taken aback by his size and ugliness. I covered it by talking about my love of classic films. Apropos of nothing, he said he had a Jacuzzi in his hotel room. Okaaay, non sequitur much? I figured the Jacuzzi comment was a brag about being rich and having a Jacuzzi, which I thought was tacky. I didn’t realize it was part of the setup. I didn’t know what to answer, so I continued with my story. At about 10:30 a.m. we wrapped up the meeting and he said he’d walk me out. I thought, Well, that went well. It was my first meeting with a bigwig. I couldn’t wait to tell my manager, Jill, all about it. I figured she’d be proud of me.

  I exited the living room and walked down a hallway. Walking behind me, his huge size seemed even more overwhelming. I’m five foot four. It seemed like he was six feet, four inches tall and six feet, four inches wide. He probably weighed three times as much as I did, if not more.

  My brain was already outside and onto its next task, the exit interview. The MTV camera was waiting for me outside and would be filming as I exited the building. I was hoping my makeup still looked good. In the hallway, we passed a door. Suddenly he stops me and says, “This is the Jacuzzi room.” I didn’t know what to do, so I politely looked in and told him it looked nice. I had no idea why I was being stopped to look at a Jacuzzi when we all know what they look like. I made the appropriate you have a nice Jacuzzi sounds. It’s superhot and humid.

  I feel a hand on my back and it pushes me farther into the tiny, dark, incredibly hot room. Everything at this point happens so quickly, and yet so slowly. I’m confused as to why I’m in this room. I can’t breathe. He is standing right in front of me, taking all the space in the wood-paneled room. It all happens so fast. My clothes are getting peeled off me. I back into the wall, but there’s nowhere to go. I freeze, like a statue. I don’t know what’s happening; my sweater is being pulled over my head and his hand pulls my pants down. He bends over and pulls my shoes off. I am now naked. This all happened in the space of about thirty seconds, it feels like. My brain is trying to play catch-up. Alarms are ringing loudly in my head. He takes his clothes off. What the fuck is happening? I’m picked up and placed on the edge of the Jacuzzi. I am naked, up to my knees in the hot water. I curl into myself. I did what so many who experience trauma do, I disassociated and left my body. I went up above myself. He gets in the water with a large splash. He pushes me up against the wall. My knees are pressed together. He places his hands on them and pushes my legs apart. I am open wide to a monster. Literally more naked than I have ever been. He places his monster face between my legs. Alarms keep blaring in my head, Wake up, Rose; wake up, Rose. But I was frozen like a statue if the statue’s legs had been spread wide.

  Anybody who’s a sexual assault victim will tell you: the trauma does strange things to your sense of time, your memory. There are details you remember with uncanny accuracy—the shape of the tiles, the yellow quality of the light, the obscene bulbousness of a nose out of all proportion to the rest of a face—and then there are gaps in the timeline where there’s nothing, nothing. Every second extends for a hellish eternity, but it all happens in a flash. And your life is never the same. My life was never going to be the same.

  Detached from my body, I hover up under the ceiling, watching myself sitting on the edge of the tub, against a wall, held in place by the Monster whose face is between my legs, trapped by a beast. In this tiny room with this huge man, my mind is blank. Wake up, Rose; get out of here.

  I try to make sense of what the fuck is going on. How did I get pulled into this position and pushed up against this wall? When did my clothes come off? I don’t know what to do. It goes on and on and on. My skin feels like it wants to fall off. His disgusting tongue is INSIDE of me. Oh my God. Tears roll down my face. The water is splashing because he is grabbing himself underwater. One hand holding me, his other holding it. His tongue stabs inside of me again.

  Wake up, Rose. My brain starts to scramble. Survival instinct kicks in and I am desperately trying to figure out how to get the fuck away and make it stop. He is slurping and smacking his disgusting lips on me. His fat tongue wet all over my most private parts. Oh my God, stop. I don’t know how else to get out of this situation, so I remember the When Harry Met Sally movie with its big fake orgasm scene. So I did that. I pretended to have an orgasm. I moan loudly, over and over and over, tears falling down my face, mingling with the sweat of the room. He moans loudly; through my tears I see his semen floating on top of the bubbles.

  The fake orgasm works. He seems satisfied, and he sets me down; my legs feel like jelly. He tells me to get dressed. I grab a towel and hurriedly dry myself as best I can. My whole body is shaking.

  I try to find my clothes. I’m in total shock and moving somewhat mechanically. I’m still hovering up above, not quite in my body, and I’m trying to put my clothes on and make sense of what has just happened. It’s like a race you can’t keep up with. My life has been rerouted. I just got hijacked.

  Later, as I replay what happened over and over, I flash back to those men I saw on my way to that fateful meeting. The grim-faced restaurant host, the assistants who wouldn’t look at me: they did this to me just as much as he did. And I hate them for it.

  I stumble out of the hotel in a state of shock. The MTV camera crew is out there filming, the camera rolling. The first thing I see when I come out is them with their microphone held out in my face asking me how it went. That footage exists somewhere. I hope I never see it. I immediately get taken to a photo op with my costar for Phantoms. I am shaking and my eyes fill with tears; I say where I’ve just come from, and my costar says, “Goddamn it. I told him to stop doing that.”

  I don’t remember much else from that day other than getting a plane ticket and going home. I wanted to go home and see my friend Ingrid who had also bee
n sexually assaulted. I knew I could talk to her. She was my best friend.

  The Monster heard I left town and kept trying to call me. He left me messages telling me I was his new special friend. He named other big actresses who worked with him, who won Oscars, and said they were his special friends, too.

  I threw up when I heard his voice. There was no way I was returning his calls.

  I felt so dirty. I had been so violated and I was sad to the core of my being. I kept thinking about how he’d been sitting behind me in the theater the night before it happened. Which made it—not my responsibility, exactly, but—like I had had a hand in tempting him. Which made it even sicker and made me feel dirtier. I know other victims feel this way too. We replay the tape of the event over and over, blaming ourselves. If only, if only, if only.

  I thought of how I had turned to the MTV cameraman and said I thought my life was finally getting easier. I wondered if in that moment I’d cursed myself, I’d jinxed it, even though I know logically none of this is my fault.

  It was criminal on every level: he was my employer, I was his employee; he was a tremendously influential and powerful player in my industry, and I was a newcomer just barely making a living. He was a huge ogre of a man, and I was a girl. I am crying while I write this.

  “I told him to stop doing that.” That comment has haunted me. How fucked up that everyone shook their heads and just looked the other way. But the cover-up was just beginning.

  During the immediate period afterward, I couldn’t stop crying. One of my calls was to my manager. It was so fucked up, she counseled me to see it as something that would help my career in the long run. I threw up. I felt like I was in a fun house and all the mirrors were reflecting my horrors. And my manager’s instinct was to squash everything, which just freaked me out more. How could she not have known? And if she did, how could the woman I trusted with my life set me up? I was terrified. I had fallen into a backward, fucked-up world.

  I called my management agency. The man who answered was a player, a powerful guy in town at the time. I told him what happened to me. And he said: “Goddamn it, I just had an exposé about him killed in the LA Times; he owes it to me not to do this.”

  Oh my God. This man could have stopped this Monster from hurting me, but instead chose to do him a solid. It’s okay, right? I was just a girl. My brain was stunned into silence. Who were these awful people?

  I wanted to press charges. Someone connected me with a brusque female criminal attorney who said, “You are an actress. You’ve done a sex scene. You’ll never win. You’re done.” I went cold all over. I was alone. I was all alone.

  I knew if I came out publicly with this, nothing was going to happen to the Monster, but I—I would never work again. If I lost work, I wouldn’t be able to support myself, and once again, I was terrified of being homeless. No work would land me back on the streets, and homelessness was a death sentence. I knew if I died I’d be remembered for revealing my rapist, but not for my achievements. I didn’t want his name next to mine in my obituary.

  I thought a lot about death during this time. Mine. His. And everything felt dirty in my world.

  I got a call from the head of my then law firm. I had to tell him the truth once again, feeling violated by sharing a deep open wound with some industry creep I didn’t even know, which felt violating in and of itself. The big lawyer urged, “I really want you to publicly come out against the studio head. It would be a great thing to do.” But it wouldn’t be a great thing to do. As battered as my spirit was, I instinctively knew that I would become a minor player in some kind of power game between two powerful men. Thanks for nothing.

  Even in my traumatized state, I realized that even this powerful man couldn’t do anything that would help me. Maybe if there was enough of an incentive, a financial or political win, they might consider breaching the “honor code” that protects these fuckers. But probably not. And as it turned out, no one did. Not for twenty years.

  Because it’s okay. It’s the business. And it is just. a. girl.

  So I knew better than to say anything. I was not going to be used as a pawn by these people. Even in my messed-up state, I refused to be a pawn. I didn’t realize yet that I already was one.

  I was so disgusted. I’d worked so hard my whole life trying to survive. I’d already been groped, grabbed at, hollered at, diminished, fetishized, but this was a whole other level of violation.

  Traumatically, I had to go back to work and finish Phantoms as I was in the middle of filming when I fatefully went to Sundance. I played a sixteen-year-old in the film, but now I felt like I was around a hundred years old. I was so disgusted with Hollywood, but I was under contract and I had to finish. I had to hear his pig name every day, over and over and over.

  So what could I, a young powerless woman, do? I wanted to put him on notice that I was not okay with what he did. I was pretty broke still. I said to my attorney, “I’m going to need money for intensive therapy. And I’m going to need money to donate to a rape crisis center.” My lawyer got me a hundred thousand dollars. That money felt dirty, anyway. I largely gave it away. It brought me no solace. But it was the only way I could put the pig on notice that I was not okay at all with what he did.

  I started to hear rumblings around town. Snippets here and there. The Monster was blacklisting me. I heard he called every other studio and independent producer in town and said, “Don’t hire her. She’s bad news.”

  So many people heard about what had happened. It had spread like wildfire through Hollywood. One assistant tells another assistant, one producer tells another producer, and on and on. It seemed like every creep in Hollywood knew about my most vulnerable and violated moment. And I was the one who was punished for it. It’s like being assaulted over and over and over.

  People think that you can get over being assaulted. The thing with trauma and rape and sexual assault is that it freezes in your mind as if it happened yesterday. It’s very, very hard to get rid of, because a large part of you, the you that was whole, has been murdered. I’ve come to a certain peace with it, but my life will always be irrevocably tied to this Monster because of what he stole from me. Because his desire to dominate superseded my right to bodily integrity, my right to be whole. Sexual assault takes away our ability to be who we were and steals who we were meant to be. Now we victims are cast in a role we didn’t want to play. Girls grow up being terrified of rape because it’s allowed to happen. Girls are told in health class, just like I was, that it’s best to submit and be pliant, that way you can live. Yeah, my body might be alive, but who I was is dead. I’m now a live body carrying a deadened spirit around. And it’s allowed to go unpunished. Everyone just wants it to go away so they can feel better. But what about us? How do we feel better? Who cares for us? Don’t you dare teach us girls to be pliant; teach your boys not to rape. To me rape cannot be defined by a law a man wrote. How would that man know what rape is? Rape to me is any violation of my body. If you enter my body via tongue, fingers, penis, object without my consent, that to me is rape and I need no law telling me what I know to be true.

  I wanted to go back to before when I was a whole person. I wanted to go back to being a strong badass, but I was now in a million pieces. I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stop the screaming nightmares. I couldn’t stop Hollywood. I just wanted out and away. My body kept having its own flashbacks.

  THE PREMIERE

  After two hours of being turned into a plastic doll-like version of myself, I get driven in a very cold air-conditioned car to the red carpet. As I get closer, I can hear the people on the sidewalk screaming. My stress level is going through the roof. My hands shake, my legs shake. I know I’m going to participate in a massacre of sorts by opening myself up to being bullied on a global level. That’s really what it translates to. It’s not so much, “Oh, let’s go celebrate the opening of this project that I worked on,” but more about getting savaged by trolls online for daring to exist.

  I know
that whatever photos are taken of me today will be on stupid gossip sites and magazines. They’re going to say nasty things about me on all the message boards. I know this is going to happen, but here I am anyway. Getting ready to pose. I feel nauseated. I hate this.

  I step out of the car and smile, a ridiculous expression on my face that in photographs reads strangely; sometimes I’d even laugh out of sheer hysteria. I have to wait with my publicist to signal me for my turn to walk the gauntlet, aka the red carpet. The celebrities having their photos taken are staggered so you’re not in front of the cameras at the same time. I’m shaking harder now because of the yelling and noise, and I can feel my knee twitching and bouncing underneath my uncomfortable gown. It’s now my turn. In little mincing steps—my stupid high heels are already killing my feet, my fake eyelashes are heavy every time I blink, and with voluminous hair that’s puffed out to God knows where—I make my way to the first photographer. It’s usually anywhere from ten to a hundred photographers, mostly men, screaming, raging, yelling your name as loud as they can to get attention, my body absorbing their yelling as aggression. Mince mince mince, three steps down, stop, hand on hip, smile, flash, repeat. The photographers yelling “Over the shoulder, over the shoulder!” because that way they can get both my ass and my face in the shot. I do what I’m asked to do and turn. There, now you have my ass, too; I’ve done my “job.” This part of my job entails being a piece of meat to be consumed and savaged and judged. Fun times.

  Now I’ve successfully made it to the end of the photographers’ line and I move on to TV press like Entertainment Tonight or Extra, shows that glorify banality. Their cameras pan up and down my body. They ask me to turn around, and once again, like the good brainwashed girl I am, I oblige. I do a slow twirl, feeling ridiculous, not knowing I could’ve said no.