It Doesn't Matter

In January of 2003 I’d been living in Los Angeles for two years. I was thirty-one, and my constant companion was my dog, Bogie. I’d moved to Los Angeles with a guy who turned out to like cheese a little too much (longer story there), and it had ended in a shocking twist at Whole Foods one afternoon. I was still homesick for the place where I grew up and the people I missed, and went back to New York City a few times a year, but Los Angeles was feeling more and more like home. 

There was a story in the news at the time - maybe you’ll remember it - about one of the heirs to the Max Factor fortune. His name was (is) Andrew Luster and he was thirty-nine years old, living in Ventura County in a mansion right on the beach. His net worth was $30 million. He spent his time surfing by day, and slipping GHB to young women by night. He’d go to this nightclub frequented by UCSB students, close to his sprawling home. (I want to pause here and say if you’re a survivor of sexual assault and need or want to stop reading, this is the time. It isn’t a pretty story. I am sending you all the love and hugs and here is a picture of Bogie at Runyon Canyon. I have a million other essays you can read. Red Flags and Stolen Cheese is about the cheese guy, and you’ll get the whole story and maybe laugh. You won’t laugh here.)

Bogie.

Okay, so Andrew Luster. He’d go to this nightclub and spike girls’ drinks with GHB, the “date-rape drug.” Then he’d bring them home, wait until they’d passed out, and film himself raping them. He did this to dozens of women - as evidenced by the dozens of videos found when police searched his home. Many of these women could be heard struggling to breathe. One of these women was seventeen years old on the unfortunate night she crossed paths with him, just a girl, really, and she and two other women who’d also been victims came forward and accused him of exactly what he’d done to them. One of them was a woman who’d gone on to have a relationship with him, having no memory at all of what had happened the first night she met him. He put her clothes back on and told her she’d passed out and nothing had happened. She didn’t know what he’d done to her until she saw it on the tape the police showed her, years after their relationship ended.

Photo by Sérgio Alves Santos on Unsplash

So he was on trial, and for reasons that are hard to fathom (but not really, because a lot of judges seem to have a soft spot for white rapists - especially if they’re good-looking and from “good families”), he was released over the holidays with an ankle monitor and instructions for house-arrest, along with bail the judge set at $1 million. The prosecutorial team objected and said he was a flight risk. The judge sent him home, anyway. He disappeared in mid-December, over the holidays, and therefore didn’t show up for his trial when it resumed in January. He was found guilty and sentenced in absentia to 124 years in jail. A worldwide manhunt ensued, and the story was in the news cycle with pictures of his face plastered in newspapers and magazines all over the place. 

In early June of that year, while he was still on the run and Dog the Bounty Hunter had not yet caught up with him in Puerto Vallarta, I found myself out to dinner in New York City at a big table with family and friends. My mom was there. I didn’t think about the case unless it came up, or I heard a snippet on the news, but people were talking about it everywhere. It might be more accurate to say that I actively tried not to think about the case. My heart broke for these women, and I felt sick to my stomach when I thought about it. It was not so different from what I’d been through myself, at sixteen. I hoped Luster would be found, and that the women he’d hurt would at least get that much peace of mind.

At some point during this dinner, I started to hear bits of conversation floating down from the other end of the table. A man, a friend of the family, was saying that he didn’t believe these women. Why would a good-looking young guy worth millions, a guy who lived in a mansion on the beach no less, need to drug and rape women? He could have anyone he wanted! Obviously, these women were after his money. They’d gone there willingly, maybe they’d been a little tipsy, and decided in the morning they ought to rake this guy over the coals. 

My stomach flipped over and my heart started racing. It was hard to breathe. This was the same horrific thing people said when Jennifer Levin was found in Central Park, and Robert Chambers’ face was all over newspapers and magazines. I felt my jaw clench and my shoulders tense. I waited for someone to object. I wasn’t participating in the conversation at my end of the table anymore, I was listening like some kind of wild animal, fixated. I was listening especially hard for my mother to say something, because surely she would. She was only a seat away from this guy, and she was in the conversation, she’d heard what he said. He continued, shaking his head and saying now Andrew Luster’s life was over, he’d be on the run forever. With all that money he’d be fine, he’d just set himself up somewhere and maybe get some reconstructive surgery done or something, but what a shame for him. He’d never be able to come back to his own country, or enjoy holidays with his family, or lead a normal life. He had it all, and these money-hungry women had ruined it. 

No one was saying anything. No one was telling this man he was fucked in the head and that made no sense at all - that there were tapes of dozens of women. How could anyone doubt that this pig of a person had, indeed, done exactly what they’d said? He filmed it for fuck’s sake. And now he was on the run. What more evidence did anyone need to just - believe women?? Suddenly, I realized someone was saying all these things - loudly - and that everyone at the table had frozen, and was now staring at me. I realized I was the one who had said all those things, that this family friend was now looking at me with his stupid mouth hanging open and a weird look on his face, like he wasn’t sure if he should feel angry or embarrassed - and everything had stopped.

My heart was beating so fast and hard it felt like it was going to burst inside my chest. Maybe I’d die, right there at the table. My hands were shaking, and tears were spilling out of my eyes and down my face. I looked at my mother. My mother who always cared about manners and how things looked, who always told me to be polite and not to talk back. But I was a grown woman now, and even she seemed to realize the days of telling me to be polite were over. She didn’t look angry, either, she looked stricken. I stood up abruptly, knocking my chair over, and fled. It wasn’t like me to yell, it wasn’t like me to express rage or get confrontational, I wasn’t even entirely sure what had happened. 

I know now, though. It’s that feeling of being assaulted again, by a person’s utter lack of understanding, compassion or basic awareness. It’s one thing when you’re overpowered. Someone decides they’re going to take what they want and you can’t fight it off. In my case, I blamed myself for a very long time. I’d put myself in a stupid situation. I’d had way too much to drink, and I shouldn’t have been drinking at all. I’d flirted, I’d thought he was cute. But I was sixteen. I was a girl, not a woman. I’d never been with anyone. I really didn’t want anything more than to act like a grownup, flirt all night, kiss in the parking lot and go home to bed. Maybe put his name in a heart in my journal. 

That isn’t what happened, and it doesn’t matter anymore. It was a lifetime ago. I got counseling and a few people were incredibly helpful - not the ones you would have thought, but as long as someone shows up and tells you it wasn’t your fault - you’ll probably be okay. Or maybe you won’t, or you will be sometimes but not others - and if you aren’t okay, there are people who will understand, people you can talk to, people who can help. Unless or until some asshole says Jennifer Levin liked it rough and you think about her grieving parents reading that despicable lie. Or some jerk at a table full of people suggests women make this up so they can get money. Or you’re watching the Olympics, and realize there’s a guy - Steven van de Velde - competing in Men’s Beach Volleyball who is a convicted child rapist, and somehow that doesn’t disqualify him from representing his country.

He was nineteen at the time, and the girl was twelve. When the judge in the case sentenced him, he mentioned Steven van de Velde’s “shattered Olympic dreams.” The guy served 13 months, went back to training, and did, in fact, end up at the Olympics. He’s twenty-nine now, which means the child he raped is a twenty-two year old woman, undoubtedly aware that he did not, in fact, have his dreams shattered. People will talk about his age at the time, and what about rehabilitation and redemption? My answer to that is maybe there’s a line where he serves more than thirteen months, and his life goes on, but he doesn’t get to call himself an Olympian. And she gets to feel that what happened to her, matters. That people care. That society does not just shrug it off, because you - as a girl or a woman - have at least as much value as a guy who would do something so unthinkable. Wouldn’t it be great if you had more value than that?

I made the mistake of watching Betrayal: A Father’s Secret on Hulu last week. I shouldn’t have - god knows I’m enraged enough - but I did. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail, but picture this: a single mom (divorced) with a young son and daughter, meets a guy who seems terrific. Great to the kids, great to her, coaches softball or soccer, I don’t remember and don’t want to check because it doesn’t matter. The kids call him Dad because their own dad isn’t in the picture too much, or he’s inconsistent or something. Struggling with drug addiction. Eventually they have a baby together, a daughter. Years go by. One day, the wife discovers a secret file on her husband’s computer, and it contains “child sexual abuse images” - hundreds of pictures and videos, some of them of his stepdaughter. A girl he’s known since she was four or five. A girl - again - who calls him Dad. The wife goes to the police. There’s a brief period of time where I was yelling at the television because she was listening to her sicko husband when he said it all happened because he was on Prozac and Adderall and I thought I might lose my mind. But she came to her senses and wrote him out of her life and directed her attention to her daughter and her other two children, obviously devastated by the entire mess.

The guy was sentenced to 329 days in Salt Lake County Jail, and two years of supervised probation. He wasn’t allowed access to the internet and had to complete a cognitive behavioral program and a mental health evaluation. Wait until you hear how much time he actually served. Ready? 10 months. Then he was released for good behavior. He continues to live in the same town as his estranged wife and kids, so his stepdaughter has to live with the possibility of running into him at any time on any day. He’s fighting for half the assets. And his biological daughter? She’s now ten years old, and currently has supervised visits with him - but because of the reunification laws in the state of Utah, it’s likely he will be allowed unsupervised visits soon. Someone please talk me off the fucking ledge. What are we supposed to understand here? Men can do whatever they like to girls and women and the law will make them pay, but probably not very much, because….why??? I’m waiting.

This is the same kind of narrative that always exists when a girl or woman comes forward after an assault. It’s one of the reasons girls and women don’t come forward, because they know what’s going to happen. What was she wearing? How much had she had to drink? What’s her sexual history? And these days, they add social media to the mix. How does she present herself? Does she party a lot? For as long as I’ve been alive, the questions never change. Chanel Miller went through the same thing at twenty-two, when she was assaulted by Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old student-athlete at Stanford. I know he was a student-athlete, because every article about it at the time always described him that way. He served 6 months in a county jail because, after all, he was from a good family, and he was interrupted as he assaulted her - unconscious next to a dumpster. The judge was worried about Brock’s promising future. Here’s a nineteen-year-old who thinks he’s somehow entitled to assault a woman who is unconscious, and the fucking judge thinks he has a promising future? You can read more about Chanel here, in her gorgeous, devastating memoir about healing and rage.

Photo by Norbert Braun on Unsplash

You know those rape exceptions we keep hearing about with the restrictive abortion bans in the states that have passed them? Well, in order to qualify for a rape exception in five of those states - Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, and West Virginia - pregnant people have to report the rape to law enforcement, or sometimes “just” their family physician before they can qualify to have an abortion. They have forty-five days to report. If it’s a minor who’s been raped, sometimes CPS will come and take the report. I want you to know I wrote that as a wave of nausea swept through me. (In Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas there are no exceptions for rape or incest). It doesn’t matter if the pregnant person is twelve and a family member raped her. It doesn’t matter if she’s sixteen and thinks it might have been her fault. It doesn’t matter if she’s a woman, walking alone at night in her own neighborhood. Her doctor has to question her, or ask for her police report.

Have I mentioned how hard it is to come forward at all? Two out of three rapes go unreported because of fear of retaliation, or fear of being attacked again, by all the people around you - the fear of having your character attacked, and your sense of being safe in any way, shape or form in this world. Then you look at the rapes that are reported, the way the perpetrators are treated, the messages society is feeding you about your worth, and the way so many of these rapists serve so little time and are back out again, and it’s a wonder anyone reports it at all. 

My eyes welled up when I watched Kamala Harris talking about reproductive rights in Pennsylvania the other night, though she could have been anywhere. Is it possible that anyone is missing the fact that this is about so much more than reproductive rights? It’s about girls and women being made to suffer, being told they’re less than, being assaulted regularly with no recourse, being shown that men can do anything, and not pay much of a price. I don’t know if you can understand how emotional it is to see a candidate running for president saying all the things you feel with fire in her eyes and a steady voice, unless you’ve been raised to question your value. My eyes welled up again when Tim Walz started defending the most obvious thing in the world - a girl’s or woman’s equal standing as a human being, deserving of as much respect, dignity and trust when it comes to making deeply personal decisions about her own body as any boy or man, and especially so when we are so often the survivors of violence committed by the very kind of men who want to vote our rights away. 

It doesn’t matter how much you had to drink. It doesn’t matter if his life is now ruined. And it sure as shit never mattered what you were wearing. 

If you’d like to meet me in real time to talk about healing and rage, and how sometimes you need one to find the other, I’ll be here 8/9/24 at 11:15am PST, or you can wait for the Come As You Are podcast version. As ever, I’m so grateful you’re here. Thank you for spending time with me. Come As You Are turned one last week, so here’s to another year, together.