Anatomy of a Rape Survivor

So, you know, my name, at one point, was Natalie Durkin. That name was given to me by the first trans woman I met online. She nurtured me when my life was a bleak abyss of being sexually abused as a child, tormented by my peers, and brutalized by my blood relatives. I used that name for 15+ years, because I was indebted to her for helping me realize how I felt was called being transgender. But that name, and what it’s become, doesn’t represent me as I am today. I’d like it remain in the past, where it belongs, in a dark chapter of my life, full of despair and unending agony. That identity deserves to rest after all it endured to help who I am today be birthed into the world.

I was thrust into the modern trans community on social media after the space I knew that trans woman from ceased to exist in it’s previous form. And so I wandered onto reddit around July 2012, and I found a neat little community to be a part of, at least for a time, before I realized how profoundly disturbing of a place it was. One leader of it, at one time, laughed about how they’d dress as a murdered black trans sex worker for Halloween, and her wife would be a stubble faced trans woman in a red dress. But the real monster was obfuscated by the efforts of several members of that community. An Encyclopedia Dramatica article largely written by her ex girlfriend was waived around as a means to lull people like me into putting our guards down, after all, poor Laurelai! So cruelly harassed by such a prominent, and dubious community! Right?

Well, I eventually got to hanging out with Laurelai Bailey offline. The first two times were relatively okay, so I began to trust her, and the third time was when she and I would be alone in the home she stayed at for a week. Things were relatively okay for most of the week! We hung out, played Minecraft, drank lots of alochol, ate a bunch of pizza, and enjoyed ourselves! And then one night, I got very drunk with her, beyond the point where I could consent to anything, and I could barely walk too, so Laurelai led me into the basement bedroom in which I was staying, and then proceeded to force me to have sex with her, and that was among the worst moments of my life, because I felt extremely uncomfortable, and I became exceedingly depressed the following morning.

The person whose house she stayed in came back the next day, and I was on my way home that same day in the evening. I cried in the car to her, about how I’d never get to hang out with them again, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth of why I knew we couldn’t, instead I suggested that the winter season’s weather would be too inhospitable to drive so far to ferry me to and from my home. You can’t exactly put such trauma into the appropriate words so soon after such a fucked up experience, you know?

But hey, I proceeded to have a nervous breakdown that started in late October 2012, and didn’t, truthfully, end until 2016 if I’m being really honest. It was just one long chain of my mental health constantly getting worse for a variety of reasons. Bad choice in girlfriends too affiliated with my rapist. My family disagreed with my transition, and tried to get me off HRT based on what my rapist had told them when she called them in December 2012 to disparage me.

There were a few moments where I recanted what had happened to me, although neither person who bullied me into doing so has the strength of will to come clean about how their position of power inside the groups I socialized within made it hard to maintain what had truly happened, as they were my rapist’s good friends, and had at one point enabled that same rapist to infiltrate and obtain power within a community that had loudly expressed their discomfort with her presence within it, due to past misconduct towards other members, but I feel like the back drop of this point in time is largely disregarded because it doesn’t serve the popular opinion that I am a liar most foul at all.

But here’s the thing. I outed Laurelai Bailey, who goes by Laurelai Bailey on Medium, and the following handles on Twitter: bailey_laurelai, stuxnetsource, LaurelaiBailey1, and so on, as having raped me, at great personal cost to me, because I felt compelled to alert people to a sexual predator in the trans community. A sexual predator who I had been raped by, and who others later came forward as having also been hurt by.

But I guess one of her survivors also recanted for the sake of maintaining their well-being, just as I had at one point to attempt in vain to save my presence in a community that I wrongly felt I had to maintain, even though it’s leader had transgressed to the point of bullying me into recanting using their immense power/influence in the communities we were both a part of. Maybe he did so indirectly, but that perceived influence/power certainly had a massive effect on my judgment. It’s funny that also, another good friend of Laurelai’s, would also terrorize me into recanting that I had been raped to her because I had opened my mouth while drunk after she mentioned my rapist. And those are the two prime examples that are used to discredit me, on top of the dubious character assassination I am regularly subjected to, but let’s turn that into an addendum of what I’m saying about being raped.

Laurelai Bailey is a rapist beyond a shadow of a doubt. I stepped away from defending myself for over two years because of how outing her took an extreme toll on my stability, and left me with reduced functionality as a person. Peter Coffin, her white knight, can shill for her, he can platform her, he can deny her victims the dignity and peace they deserve. Her friends, associates, and people she shares a mutual hatred of me with can all come by and disparage me if they want to, but I was raped. That traumatic experience is forever seared into my mind, and Laurelai played a direct role in the further ruination as a person I endured by such actions as telling my Nazi memorabilia collecting parents that I was being an embarrassment to them online, how they needed to shut me up or face “legal repercussions”, and so on! I was chemically lobotomized by a cocktail of medication that my current psychiatric care team describes as “excessive and unnecessary”. But you know, I’ll never know peace, because I live in a society obsessed with glorifying rapists. My old community as a trans woman discouraged me from acting against sexual predators, even though they posed a direct threat to the support groups I moderated/administrated. And what can I say about that? Look with your own eyes. Listen to the people who have been tremendously hurt by my rapist and her followers. Accept their pain as objective reality, because their fight for recognition of their woes may never begin if you don’t.

This post was made so I could speak my full mind on the subject. I can’t really keep the Natalie Durkin identity going anymore, because it is extremely painful to embrace, because of everything I suffered/endured under that alias, so now I need to rest, and as such my Twitter will be going inactive. Please respect my desire to be left alone. I suffer from a really terrible case of PTSD, in part because of being raped & terrorized by Laurelai, so please let me rest in peace. I can’t handle this anymore. It’s why I disappeared for the past 2+ years. It’s why I’m only going to leave this post up, because I can’t handle doing anything past that with how I am today.

Addendum:

I am an imperfect human being, much like anyone else. I am capable of making mistakes, especially during the period of time following when I was raped to when I began recovering some of my sanity. I can’t go and speak on every single perceivable mistake I made, but I am as culpable as the next person for the mistakes I’ve made. But you know, some interesting things have been said since I was forced to defend myself on 8/15/2018. An ex of mine implied that I am responsible for my violent, abusive older brother calling her a “f-g in a wig”, and threatening to wreck her car. Hey, Terra, you know, I am not responsible for his conduct towards you. I know you failed to mention how I defended you from him. I know you enjoy leaving seemingly unnecessary bits of information out to imply falsehoods about me. Such as that you “wrestled a knife out of my hands”, but you left out that you knew damn well it was never directed at you, more so at myself, because hey, living with you and my blood relatives was a goddamn nightmare, and the latter failed me just as badly as you repeatedly did. You leave out how you gaslighted me.

How you refused to contribute to utility bills/groceries even though you consumed those resources as much as the next person. I believe you actually went to your goddamn mom to whine about me asking for help, and she told you to fuck off and contribute to the household? And hey, if you were so unsafe in my home, why did you try to stay there beyond the point of where you were welcome? Why did you psychotically scream at my 5 year old niece and nephews because their dad was a reprehensible jerk to you? What the actual fuck was going through that twisted head of yours?

Why did you use my computer to talk shit about me to people I begged you to abstain from communicating with while we dated because they had raped or sexually abused me? You weren’t even a close friend of theirs at the time, you were more of a stranger to them than anyone else! But you felt compelled to transgress against me and violate what I needed of you to feel safe. You were such a shitty partner that I was sick of you no later than after the first month you moved in, and had you living in the spare bedroom in the house, because I resisted kicking you out for months before I finally did so, because I wanted to give you an opportunity to start your life in Chicago, for all the good it did me. And hey, yea, I did get around to reading the full laundry list of rumors about you, and there was mention of inappropriate communications with minors in your past, so naturally I removed you from my life with extreme prejudice to protect the minors who lived/stayed in that home. I’d do it twice as hard as I did back then if I’m being completely honest! NO REGRETS.