I Confronted My Rapist Yesterday

(It Went Well.)

A Saturday.

Bright and sunny with wisps of clouds. I saw a coyote that morning on my walk.

In the morning, the animals were all in the living room, together. Georgie and Bly, together, a pair. Golly, off to the side, the Watcher.

That afternoon, when Drew went to the studio, I walked downhill to the bookstore.

Bookstores are different now. You look at that book in your hands, and wonder if this is the best book on this subject, or should you order a different one? Is this one more accurate, or this one? You protect your mind from the possibility of being fooled, or of seeming foolish. It is endless, isn’t it.

I walked to the bookstore, to get the book that speaks to me. The one from the shelf, whichever it is. New or used, whatever. The one that enters my world haphazardly, without my insistence.

A biker passed by.

Hell yeah! My PTSD is almost done. My blood pressure didn’t rise at the sound of bike gears!

I took a video, for my files. I have been studying my own PTSD. It has taken so, so long. Finally, I am beginning to feel free.

I have been obsessed with trauma for years now - a special interest I developed in 2011 at an “Organized Skepticism” conference - and I have a basic idea of how PTSD timelines work. I had always expected to have a typical one (a few weeks or months, and then you’re fine), but it didn’t go that way for me, at all. My recovery timeline was long (this is what's expected for autistic people), meaning it has taken years instead of months to understand what happened to me, contextualize it, and build a plan to make myself feel safe. My understanding was delayed, and so was my recovery.

In other words, my fast-thinking mind had always known I was in trouble; it had raised my heartrate every time my rapist reappeared (which was a lot), and it reminded me anew what he’d done. It begged me to pay attention to the assessment it had already made. In psychology lingo, my deliberative reasoning system was in misalignment with my intuitive system; and autistic people almost always preference the deliberative (slower) system, even at cost to their own safety.

Whenever I tensed around him, frightened, my slower-thinking mind (my “deliberative reasoning system,” which I think of as “me”) had talked back to it each time:

Hey wait, here’s another way to interpret what happened that day, and it allows you not to blow up your life.

But my avoidance of the truth had made my life implode anyway.

The pressure merely went the other way.

You’ve been right, intuitive system. I’m sorry.

Eventually, fear became anger, and helplessness became a relentless drive for personal justice.

First, I confronted my rapist via email, but he never even replied. Finally realizing he cared only about himself, I gave up on pouring my empathy into him. I had spent my lifetime trying desperately to understand my bullies, and I was done.

I reported him. Three times. To the sheriff, to the Department of Justice, to his licensure organization. I told an organization that hosted him as a speaker, and I called women. I emailed his wife. I cried to every person who answered the phone.

I told everyone I could think of to tell. Two agencies have opened investigations.

I have never been more proud of myself.

But yesterday, when I was leaving the bookstore, it was the first time I could say anything to his face in a very long time.

I had just bought a book about animals who free themselves from their own shackles.

I was walking along a very famous street, at a not-at-all-famous hour of the day: Sunset Boulevard, 3:40 pm.

That’s when I saw him. There was no chance it wasn’t him. My rapist, walking along Sunset Boulevard, listening to his earbuds, enjoying his Saturday.

My heart sped up. My eyes narrowed. I asked myself:

What do you want, kid?

For 13 years, I cohosted a podcast about con artists and the people they’ve fooled. I have confronted some of the most deceitful people imaginable, and now I was looking at the person who manipulated me, fooled me, took advantage of me.

Historically, religiously, I have been a person who protects others. In the last year, I have protected myself. I have trusted my anger, and noted how exacting, how purposeful it is most of the time. A careful weapon.

Don’t run with the scissors.

I have spent my life in full control. Unlike men, I do not get to express my anger directly, or I will be called crazy or aggressive. This threat alone had kept me wrapping up my anger in prettier bows, limiting it, pretending not to see what I saw.

Giving this up feels almost impossible. I have spent my entire life pre-planning my behavior so as not to appear crazy. I don’t remember ever not doing this. It has been a running theme since I had language.

I was an unusual kid, with weird artistic and academic gifts no one could account for. I danced around in the back yard in a tutu by myself, and called myself Sarah.

I wrote the school plays starting in third grade (How does that even happen? I don’t remember).

Teachers regularly singled out my writing - only mine - to read to the whole class. It didn’t make sense to me.

When do we hear the others?

I learned that my written words were my way forward - to being understood - in a world built for speakers.

When I spoke, people found me funny, goofy, strange, kooky, fun, someone who sees things sideways. I leaned into it, enjoying the playfulness of their misunderstanding, but in some ways I was a Serious Person, with Serious Concerns, trapped alone behind a wall.

Alone in this awareness, I tracked every word for accidental signals of my own insanity, always afraid that someone would really misunderstand one day, and I would end up in an asylum, “babbling” about my special interests. I pictured all my favorite mental illness movies, but especially Girl Interrupted, about a woman with borderline personality disorder (now thought by many to be autism in an inhospitable environment!). I pictured brilliant women, trapped and lost. Frances Farmer, who was chained to the asylum walls in my hometown. Brilliant, feminist too soon, and medicated out of her brilliance.

In high school, I wanted to write plays about insanity. I thought it was all just perspective; how can anyone be “insane”? Isn’t it all point of view?

But I didn’t get into Tisch. I went the other route - the rigid, epistemic route - knowing I was a theatre kid at heart, asking isn’t it all point of view?

Clearly, I was struggling with some awareness that I was unusual, and that this could be used against me. Later, I volunteered myself for psychological evaluations, and learned I had obsessive compulsive disorder and an attention deficit, but these pieces of awareness only confused me more, and made me ashamed of habits I liked: what others viewed as obsession, I viewed as skillful attention. What some viewed as oversensitivity, I viewed as being un-calloused.

Ten years into knowing him, my rapist finally called me crazy.

I stared at him in wide-eyed wonder. I couldn’t believe it was finally happening, after all those years of preventative measures. The one thing I could not be. He saw my horror, and thought it was cute. He began to use it over and over.

That same day, he told me he had been accused of raping someone (someone else).

It was a false accusation, he said. One he made go away by sleeping with her again.

“Why would you sleep with someone again after she falsely accused you?!” I shouted.

“Why would I?!” he screamed. “Why would she?”

He was 50% bigger than me, and towering over me. He had alcohol in his hand. He had raped me a while ago, but I kept letting him hang around, because the alternative was unbelievably bad.

I knew what his story meant: “I will use everything I can against you, if you ever tell the truth about what I did and how I did it.” I was frozen, petrified. I didn’t tell anyone for another year or more. He called me crazy the whole time, being cute about it, poking me. He used it the way you would call a person quirky. Until he turned on a dime and meant it.

Last year, I had a full psychiatric assessment at the Semel Institute, one of the best places in the country. They told me I had autism, and “a history of trauma.” That explained everything left to understand. I had overcomplicated the issue, and it was pretty bloody obvious. In the last year, I have worked (with my therapist and my social supports) on giving up this fear entirely. That people will call me an unreliable narrator, daffy, crazy, manipulative. The things I have worked my whole life not to be.

If they think you’re crazy, they’re definitely wrong.

You are righteously mad, and it’s obvious to anyone with a modicum of the story.

You are the wronged party.

My rapist saw me at the stoplight.

Stick up for yourself, as if you were anybody else.

He pretended not to see me.

What do you want, kid?

I pretended not to see him.

(I had my headphones on.)

What do you want, kid?

A history of tiny phrases, reminders, things I had learned, shot through my visual cortex:

Shakuntali and Kimberly Meredith and Lori Spagna and Bessel van der Kolk and who is George King and why should I believe him and that’s not how this works and just do the next thing and the truth happens in order.

You can do this.

I thought of two things I could get out of this:

1. Find out if he blocked my cell phone number.

2. Tell him to his face that I want him to surrender his professional license.

I came up with a plan, quickly. We were headed the same way anyway.

You can do this.

I began to talk loudly, to no one. I had my headphones on for noise reduction, but it could have been a phone call.

“Ha! OK, and so then what did she say?”

[I am really good at fake phone calls. Wait a while, imagine the other person responding, really get into it, let lots of time pass.]

“Are you fucking kidding me?! Wow. Okay. Just send her the invoice, I guess. I’m sorry she’s being like this. Hey can you hold on? There’s something in my shoe. I’m walking home from the bookstore.”

[And so on.]

During this wild charade, knowing he would be distracted by it, I texted my rapist, walking ten feet ahead of me: “Oh hey.”

Ding.

Without a second thought, he looked at his phone. His shoulders fell. He tried to pretend to scroll around for something else.

Oh, please. Bingo. Goal 1 complete. Not blocked.

I continued my loud, fake phone call.

“I’m… sorry… can you hear me? I’m actually walking behind my rapist.”

[Imagine the friend responding. What would they say? “Oh my god, Carrie. Are you okay?”]

“Yeah… yeah… thanks.”

[“Are you sure? Is it ___?”]

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m OK, thank you. Yeah.”

My rapist sped up his gait a little. (Not a lot. Can’t act scared. He’s a real Tough Guy.)

He turned a corner, and I hovered there, still having my fake conversation. He went left, and I would ordinarily go right.

Could I seem crazy somehow if I go left? Stalking him? Harassment?

I know that protesting injustice is my right, and I have felt that right in my bones since I was four. That day I first held a piece of bacon in my hand and understood what was happening. I was disgusted by what the people around me were putting up with.

America is currently a horrifying land of unspeakable horrors to its own people, and to its guests. But one thing we have are free speech statutes, and free speech case law, which a person can read. And study. And even memorize.

In the last ten years, I have read quite a bit of free speech case law. I know what forms of protest people get away with - what is their right - and what will get you arrested, sued, or worse. I know that telling someone what you think about them, out loud, from the sidewalk, is not harassment. That’s just protest.

As two winning lawyers wrote, defending their birddogging client, “Sidewalks are quintessential public flora.” Ban speech there, and you’ve banned speech. After defending many victorious protestors, one of those lawyers said that in America, “You can say kind of disparaging things that somebody might find very subjectively upsetting.”

It’s your right; you simply should mean it. The situation should be worth it to you. The fallout is high for telling the truth, especially if the other person has more power.

I called to mind California’s stalking and harassment statutes, which I had poured over before in journalism school. I was taught to know my rights exactly so I could go right up to the edge of them, for justice. And now, overruling that impulse, I was self-monitoring:

Will it come off crazy?

To be angry on my own behalf?

I paused on that corner, and pivoted on my heel.

God dammit, Poppy!

You’d never think this if you were defending anybody else.

This is about justice. Come on!

I went left. I walked right up to him.

“Hold on,” I said to the fake person on my headphones.

I looked my rapist dead in the eyes.

“Hey!” I said, “Surrender your license.”

(Goal 2, check!)

He closed his eyes, drew in his breath, shook his head slowly, pursed his white lips. He bent his long body down into his red car, where he has harmed me.

He got in the red car.

“Do you remember me?” I asked, sarcastically, intensely, through the sun roof.

I bent down; it feels as if this part happened in slow motion.

Politely, like a tiny English butler, I rapped on the window.

“Are you not my _____ any more?” I asked, through glass.

His head shaking stopped.

He couldn’t even indicate yes or no.

He had been advised.

He had spoken to a lawyer.

He was taking this all seriously.

Good. Because I am telling the truth.

He locked eyes with me,

as if to prove or show something.

He looked at me with disdain, contempt.

A look that says: “I can’t believe you fucking exist.”

But he could not hold my gaze;

he broke as I stood there.

He could not stop his own hands from betraying him,

quickly managing the gearshift and

continuing to flee.

It all lasted under a minute.

He drove off in the red car.

And I walked home, exhilarated.