A Celebrity Assaulted Me. I Never Told. Here’s Why (An Anonymous Guest Post)

No one was more surprised than I was at how the trauma of the event that I had long brushed off and forgotten suddenly came rushing back so many years later.

Then I felt shame. Embarrassment. Why HADN’T I come forward? Why DID I display the stuff he’d given me? Why on earth had I ever willingly reached out to him again after all those years? Why did I continue to refer to him as a “friend”? What was I thinking?

And I knew that’s exactly what everyone else would ask, too, if I ever spoke up. So I continued to say nothing.

Why Abuse Victims Wait so Long to Tell–Or Never Do

So why did these women wait until now?

Like me, they still have a career and life to think about. Family and friends that they fear would be affected … and even disappointed in them. They have a reputation that they don’t need dragged through the gutter.

Trump and his defenders have asserted that the women he allegedly abused would have sued the self-proclaimed billionaire for lots of money years ago if he were actually guilty. I would counter that while there may be those who make false allegations for monetary reasons, those of us who were actually assaulted don’t even think of such a thing. It’s not worth any amount of money to put ourselves or our loved ones through the circus that will follow if we go public.

But then, the man who assaulted me is not running for President, nor did he just have a tape reveal in his own words, on national television, that he does the things he did to me. If that were the case, if the stakes were that high—I would hope I would be brave enough to come forward.

In my case, yes … I’m still afraid. Afraid of all the things that kept me silent back then and keep me silent now.  Even if I were to come forward at this point, one of two things would likely happen—I either would be dismissed and not believed after putting myself on the line (and the statute of limitations has long run out anyway), or it would start a cascade of other women coming forward to say the same thing had happened to them. I honestly don’t know if I can live with knowing that, had I said something decades ago, someone else’s trauma could have been avoided. Intellectually, I know the guilt is his burden to bear, not mine, but I still fear the devastation of such a revelation.

He’s still occasionally on TV, sometimes locally, sometimes nationally. Seeing him does not raise my anxiety level. It grabs my attention, but I immediately focus on something else. I still dissociate the event from him. It’s how I’ve learned to cope and deal. I’ve never heard a peep out of anyone else ever accusing him of something similar.

These may seem like stupid reasons. These may seem like cowardly reasons, and I admit they are. They are all the reasons and justifications for why men get away with what they do. But in a world where victims are retraumatized when they report, it seems wrong to blame women for failing to report.

I implore you to respect and listen to the women who are brave enough, years later, to come forward and say, yes, this happened to them. You have no idea what it takes to come forward. What a woman risks when she admits this happened to her and names her abuser.

For the rest of us who still have never come forward, we watch stories like the ones that have been plastered across the news in recent days, and we see our worst fears being played out on national television. We feel the trauma all over again. The guilt, the shame, the embarrassment, but mostly—the violation. The fear. The anxiety that we know how helpless we are when faced with someone who truly wants to do something despicable to us, with impunity, because he is famous. We shudder, knowing that the horrendous risk of coming forward may not yield positive changes and results, knowing that we could put everything on the line only to have the person with the power and the money destroy us all over again in a much more public way. We watch their supporters cast doubt on the women who speak out, saying all the things every woman fears will happen if she comes forward.

So we speak out on behalf of others, but not ourselves.

We stay silent about our own trauma and pain because the alternative seems so much worse.

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Image source: Public Domain Pictures, Pixabay