Content note: this piece contains descriptions of sexual assault , sexual exploitation of a young person and self-harm.
Far from innocent, what the fuck's consent ?/Numbers told you not to, but that didn't stop you/Now I’m twenty-nine/finally just like you were at the time/thought it was a teenage dream, just a fantasy/but was it yours or was it mine?/seventeen, twenty-nine. –Demi Lovato, ‘29’
I liked the way he drove with his hand between my thighs, possessively. It made me feel safe. That, and the way he called me Babygirl. To me, it meant I was somebody.
Now, ten years later I think it meant that he did not remember my name even after one year of me coming to his house. Maybe it meant there were so many versions of me in rotation that calling us all ‘Babygirl’ was the surest way not to mix up names and mess up the sweet thing he had going.
He gave me a place to go when I felt I had nowhere. In him, I felt a sense of safety — until I didn’t — and security in my world that was very much otherwise. He said he would buy me a car, a new pair of Uggs; he put his favorite necklace on me and then a girl named Tricia stole it when I slept over at her house during a snowstorm.
His age didn’t matter to me. I had lived long enough as a girl to learn that men had things I needed: cars, homes away from mine I could sleep in, money for going to eat out at restaurants, power, and the ability to make other men leave you alone.
I was seventeen. He was thirty-four. I can see myself now; overly made up and overdressed every time. Always poised for some adventure that never went past an initial blunt, thick with cheap yet powerful weed, smoked inside or outside and the praise I received from him about my appearance as I sat on his lap.
Then, the suggestion, “Why don’t we head upstairs?”
I would nod my head silently and eagerly, expectantly, as though he were offering me some favor, inviting me to something special. I do not care anymore about what the sex was like; it was the kind that can be described best as impersonal, transactional, unreal, not happening to me but just to my body, so that it was easy for me to be so detached and cool about it all and therefore, easier for him to compliment me on my ability to separate sex from emotion.
Sticky. Wet. Painful. Uncomfortable. Dry. Emotionless. Tiring. Boring. Fake. Smelly. These are the words I use to describe now what I gave and pretended to enjoy. In a way, I did ‘enjoy’ the sex — it meant I was irresistible, desirable, and worthy of his attention, right? — before the final time at his house, the third of three homes we had fucked in during our year of courtship. I never questioned what such a level of instability and general disarray meant about the character or personality of this adult man. I only knew that he was “mature,” and he worked at a smoke shop everyone in my senior class and the senior classes of the neighboring high school frequented, therefore, he was cool. I had prestige, or at least I thought I did, because I slept with the manager of the smoke shop where making purchases was a rite of passage for the suburban cool.
I told people. I told a lot of people, in my high-school homeroom and in my meager social circle, that I slept with a thirty-four-year-old man, thank you very much, and that he was the manager of a smoke shop.
People were unsurprised, from the ways I so clearly had given up or was unable to even pretend to take part in high-school normalcy: the way I told my parents that pep rally days were half-days and just went home early; the way I skipped the Winter Assembly to lie down for a boy from Yearbook on his backseat spread with gym gear and Magick the Gathering playing cards at the ambiguous parking lot up the street from school.
I was known for leaving homeroom, saying I was going to the bathroom but taking my coat with me, and then appearing on the street across from school; smoking cigarettes alone in the blue cold, looking up at the brick building at my classmates inside who looked back at me, until I gauged that it was time to come back inside.
I would bang on the then-locked school doors until a teacher or administrator or junior faculty member too jaded or too green to say anything to me would come and wordlessly open the locked door, perhaps gaping open-mouthed as I streamed like a fish past them into the tepid warmth of the halls, finding my way back to class.
My teacher, a young white woman with dyed orange-blonde hair that was growing out badly and a grating voice, would say nothing about my absence nor the lingering smell of heavy cigarettes on my faded winter coat and heat-treated hair.
To them, I was already lost. A goner. A girl who was absent from school for two weeks mysteriously and lied through her teeth about being in Sweden and how cold it was there when she had really been in an adolescent psychiatric ward. A girl with constantly rotating and tenuous alliances rather than friendships, frequently getting caught in public drama which almost ended in physical altercations more than once but never quite did.
So, it must have seemed quite natural, to everyone, that this was my next step. They were unaware of how new it was to me too, this age difference, from the bright way I announced it, needing someone to tell. Looking for a reaction, someone to tell me this was okay. By the time I got to college, he was a fixture in my life. “Oh yeah, I have a boyfriend but he’s like thirty-four. He doesn’t care what I do,” was my casual refrain to the other students on my floor when they would ask where I was going at night and who was in the dark car idling out front. Sometimes, when he didn’t feel like driving, he would send a taxi for me and I felt very glamorous.
I spent my eighteenth birthday with him, getting all dressed up at his promise of going out for drinks—only to end up going nowhere but his house, again, slicking off my leather jacket for another night of the same. At midnight he smacked my ass and sang off-key, “Birthday’s over!” and I suddenly wanted to cry.
The months after that were colored by the rapid growth of the seed of newfound resentment he planted in me on the dismal night of my birthday. I became demanding. This was now a transaction. I threatened to never see him again if he failed to give me $250 cash and a pack of nitrus oxide canisters to me the next time I came over. This was a trick I had perfected in senior year of high school after successfully extracting vodka and cigarettes from a local police officer under threat of me bringing my phone, with all his flirty texts to me on it, to his precinct. Like the short, dumb, policeman, my guy delivered.
I began to feel in control, a little bit. Chastened and insecure, he took me for a shopping trip, unasked, to the Victoria’s Secret at the mall near his house. I felt important and dramatically tossed my hair at the shopgirls skeptically watching me and the man waiting outside the dressing room for me. Somebody thought I mattered enough to spend $140 on me. Who did the girls exchanging looks behind the cash register have in the world like that? I felt like I was the lucky one.
Then came one night.
Rape is strange and confusing. I was not quite sure what was happening to me, but I knew that I was upset and that this was unwanted. We had already had sex, why did he want more? Why did he keep going even when I hit him and tried pushing him away? Why was he still inside me when I became so still and unresponsive, my face turned to the wall?
He eventually stopped without finishing. When he tried to hold me, I slapped his hand away, pulled back up my underwear and stared at the cut of the streetlight through the white blinds until I heard his familiar snoring. I tried to call a friend I knew with a car who could pick me up. The tone rang and rang in my ear until I realized she was asleep, safe and sound in her parents’ house with her dog and two cats, shielded by a permissive mother; a mother who was smart enough to let her free-willed daughter feel free at home instead of forcing her to scrabble for the crumbs of life in dark houses and dirty apartments.
In the morning, I got dressed for class in my yoga pants and tired green cardigan. I tied my hair up in a tight bun and felt the strain pulling at my temples. I had a headache. I felt sick, looked pale.
We shared what I remember as being a wordless ride in his car from the house to my school. I had an early morning class. He pulled the car over on the icy road into the drop-off circle and leaned in for a kiss. I numbly gave him my closed mouth, still rank with unbrushed teeth, and swung out of the car for the last time.
Somehow, I see me from his perspective, walking away stiffly through the cold with a black backpack and stretchy black pants towards class, practically shuffling in stained brown sheepskin boots and a cardigan too thin for the weather. Him, lingering in the car, with his eyes tingling on the back of my neck until I ducked inside a building and he pulled off.
It is easier for me to see that moment from his perspective because that is where things get hazy from me. I am unable to remember attending that class or how I got back to my dorm room after. These are now symptoms of what I know to be traumatic stress; my brain trying to protect itself and my body so we could survive. I remember sleeping, for what I believe to have been three days but may have just been one, in the same underwear and clothing he raped me in and then waking up, suddenly, to finally shower and throw away that purple pair of panties with the neon pink stripes.
There was a text from him: Sorry about last night
There were calls.
Then more texts: Babe are you ok?
When I responded: You raped me, he stopped reaching out.
I went to paint in my journal. A razor to my veiny wrist released blood, my blood, from which I was oddly detached, like paint from a tube. I painted a smiling mouth with a dab of blood clot, the refrain to a Lana Del Rey song: He hit me and felt like a kiss.
He had not hit me, but he had hurt me badly. In a flooding release of childish innocence, I saw that it had not been for the first time.
After moving back to the area I grew up in in 2019, I saw him twice from a distance, when I was twenty-four, seven years after that night. Walking down a dark street in his old neighborhood near the mall, I saw his figure in the distance walking towards me. I didn’t know if he saw me. I froze, then darted down a side street. Emotionally, I was undone.
Expected at home by my parents, I texted my mother what happened, that I had seen someone who had assaulted me, and she and my father let me go out with friends without their usual restrictions and questions. That night, I went out with two acquaintances and did poppers for the first time in five years despite still being in the early stages of a very white-knuckle sobriety. I tried to find coke to make the bad feeling of him go away. I am happy I failed.
Months later, I would see him again, this time from a moving car I was driving. He was walking around the back of the store he was still the general manager of, all these years later, with a teenager, a boy this time. I knew enough of him now, having heard from an ex of mine, that this grown person exclusively hung out with young college students from the university up the street and local high schoolers.
Like I was, they were all young enough to be flattered that an adult wanted to hang out with them, and thought he was cool. He smoked weed with the local teenage boys and impressed them—“We thought he was so cool,” a boy who went to the high school nearest the smoke shop where this man worked once told me. Like me. I watched this now forty-something year old man laughing and walk a teenage boy back into the alley behind the store, opening the back door of the store.
My hands and feet guided the car automatically to the local police station. I never before that moment thought about reporting what happened to me to the police. I was Black, first of all, and so I avoided the police like the plague. Secondly, I did not want to get in trouble. Third, I was humiliated. I just wanted to forget. Lastly, back then I was too young to see the predatory nature of the situation, the complete imbalance of power in having a sexual relationship with someone who may be the age of legal consent in a state but is half your age and not yet a legal adult.
The police officer on the phone who I called as I waited in my car outside seemed to have the same opinion. It was now 2020, still COVID-19 lockdown time. You couldn’t just walk into a police station; you had to call them from outside, tell them what you wanted to report, and they would decide if it was worth sending a masked officer outside to take your story. The officer on the phone was very disinterested in what I had to say, going “uh huh…uh huh…” as I was describing being sexually assaulted so many years ago until I said, “he was thirty-four and I was seventeen.” Then, the officer interrupted, saying “WHAT!” I repeated what I had just said. He began audibly huffing and puffing, asked me for more details, and then told me to wait for another officer outside.
I was lucky to get a nice BIPOC police officer, a former security guard at local mental health clinic where I had once spent some time, who was sensitive to issues like sexual assault. He came out with a folder, spoke to me gently and took my story down. At one point, he told me he was going to show me something and he opened the folder. Inside, was a picture of the man who once called me his babygirl. The officer asked me if that was him, and I said yes.
It turned out he was already known to the police; had had some run-ins with the law before, things I never knew about. I was able to report what happened to me, and have it taken seriously. It was added into this folder, full of mysteries about the person I had seen naked too many times to count. Rather than opening up an investigation, my statement was recorded and added to this person’s file. The officer assured me that if the police ever arrested this man again, it would be on his record. If anyone else reported this man sexually assaulting them, my statement would support their case if they decided to prosecute him.
I had kept what happened deep inside me, in the hurt place where my low self-esteem lived side-by-side with my traumas. It was seeing, most of all, that he still spent his time with teenagers which gave me the courage and the resolve to report him raping me almost seven years later. Until then, I also felt complicit — hadn’t I, after all, pursued him too? Up until that point, I felt that I had been his equal, making decisions based on my own desires.
Part of the #MeToo movement, in my view, means that the exploitation of teenage girls by older men has begun to be taken seriously. Large age gaps in apparently consensual relationships is also being looked at with a more critical eye. Singers like Cassie have come forward to report their exploitation by powerful older men; Cassie was only nineteen years old and P.Diddy, her abuser, was thirty-five years old when they first met. Her deposition, which detailed the decade of his abuse and control over her, notably describes a process of being groomed by him and being initially impressed by him due to the obvious power imbalance derived from his advanced age, wealth, and status.
In 2022, Demi Lovato quietly released her song ‘29’ describing a relationship between a seventeen year-old and a twenty-nine year old. The song is largely believed to refer to her public relationship with her ex, actor Wilmer Valderrama, who is now married to a woman also twelve years younger than him. Like Demi, I now know better than to be flattered when a man far older than I expresses interest in me.
I am only twenty-seven years old, but the idea of being with a seventeen year-old even at this age is deeply disturbing.
The amount and type of experiences I have had in the past ten years mean that I am worlds away from who I once was as a seventeen year old. Reporting what I experienced was only a part of my healing; in between the night he assaulted me and the present moment, there have been other traumas. Other mistakes. Other times I was young, seeking safety in other (older) people, and was hurt. Therapy, spirituality, and the slow building of self-esteem through developing my own hobbies and talents, have helped. Now that I am older, I can have sympathy for myself and see a thirty-four year old who is interested in a seventeen year old for what they are: a loser, a predator, and a creep, likely incapable of having a relationship with a person of their own age—someone who any seventeen year old should do their best to stay far away from.
