How I got myself into — and out of — being raped.
When I was 19 and in Surry Hills one evening, a man dragged me off a path at knifepoint and tried to rape me. I escaped by playing along.
I recently read the horrible story of the young Dutch woman who was raped in Surry Hills and her “Miraculous Escape By Playing Along”. Would we call it an escape? This woman was raped FFS. But it wasn’t this part of the story that prompted me to write the following.
This news story (sigh) “triggered” something in me. Side note: I get a bit funny around this “trigger warning” business. It started out like any well-intended sensitivity, but it’s been hijacked on one end by troll fuckwits, and on the other by weird tumblr extremists. It can sometimes cause an eye-roll and the reader to switch off. Anyhow, the article violently and with great detail jolted a memory I had cast off with orchestrated nonchalance over the last decade.
When I was 19 and in Surry Hills one evening, a man dragged me off a path at knifepoint and tried to rape me. I escaped by playing along.
I tell this story sometimes to shock people, or even laugh (yes I have a dark sense of humour) at how I both got myself into and out of that situation (leaving aside just how fucked up it is that I still believe I GOT MYSELF INTO NEARLY GETTING RAPED). I write a lot. I keep notebooks of all sizes around me, and use Google Drive and Keep to notate whatever thoughts I feel like I might want to remember, especially if I’ve been drinking. I write letters and texts that I never intend to send. I write song lyric snippets I’ve thought up and often never finish. I write because often-times my emotional responses are too extreme for me to be articulate in the moment and I am unable to communicate clear thoughts/arguments/ideas. I write and write and write, and yet I’ve never written this down. I’ve never written it because it feels like dirty laundry, something I’m not ashamed of per say… but also never really wanted anyone to know. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t want to assume a mantle of victimhood, which is often what is ascribed to women who are sexually assaulted; that double-edged sword of being “brave” for speaking out about it. It becomes you, and the last fucking thing you want is people thinking “Oh yes, Bethan Ellsmore, she’s that girl who narrowly escaped rape” rather than “Oh yes, Bethan Ellsmore, that ranty woman on facebook who looks like she drinks too much but damn can she sing!”
Anyway, that’s the prologue. Here’s the bloody story:
I was 19, living in Chippendale, Sydney. It’s odd that it’s classified as Chippendale, as I was around the corner from Redfern Station and our back gate opened onto the Block. (Yes, there was a more famous ‘Block’ before the reality show). Now completely gentrified, at the time it was still on the turn and very much considered a rough neck of the woods. Inner-city, diverse and there had been some horrific crimes in that neighbourhood. I shared a strange, cheap little terrace with friends in a very chaotic bohemian (read: trashbag) fashion.
On this particular evening, a school friend visited me and we thought we should show him the town, give him the Sydney nightlife experience (poor bastard was going to uni in Canberra) so we took him to the Cross. Kings Cross back then was a hedonist’s dream; before lock-out laws ruined its underbelly and foreign property investors cottoned on to the incredible location. We hit the clubs and it was fun. I was, however, broke-ass broke. I had my last $20 stuffed in my bra. I didn’t want to spend it, because I was pretty certain I’d need it for, I don’t know, food, or something extravagant like that in the following days, so I accepted generous shouts of beers from mates and at a certain point I thought “y’know what, I should probably head home, it’s a bit late and I have no money, so I’m going to disappear.”
I bid my friends farewell and set out for home. It’s a bit of a hike from Kings Cross to Chippendale if you’re walking, especially in the middle of the night wearing thongs; around 45 minutes, but more or less depending on the route you take. (Both the thongs and the route are relevant to my story.) I decided I’d walk for as long as I felt I could and then use my $20 to get a taxi the rest of the way home. I walked down Williams St, got onto Chalmers and that’s when I hit Prince Alfred Park. This is the fork in the road; the moment where I could choose the road less travelled by… at least at one on a Sunday morning.
I was tired. I was broke. It felt lazy to use my last remaining dollars to take a taxi (the trains were done), but I just wanted to get home and go to bed. I reasoned with myself that if I took the long way around I was giving into a paranoia that had been jeered at by my then best mate, who I’d chastised for cycling through the uni grounds at night alone with her headphones in. I fortified my defiant 19 year old mind with the idea that I was a tough, scrappy, little trashbag and could get from one side of this park to the other, and safely home by playing the odds.
Instead of crossing to Broadway, or staying on Chalmers, I set off on the footpath through the park. I walked quickly, a little bit jumpy, but blaming my fear on the dark and an over-active imagination. I was about a third of the way across when I heard the sound of footsteps running up behind me. A shot of adrenalin-fuelled fear struck me like chemical lightening. Almost immediately I breathed deeply and reasoned “of course, it’s just a jogger”, and within the same second realised that it was highly unlikely someone would be casually attending to their cardiovascular health at approximately 1 o’clock on a Sunday morning in this inner-city park. I felt the *thwock* of dread hit me in my stomach. Real adrenalin. I turned and watched this figure coming toward me, brandishing something that looked like a knife and demanding money. I ran in an insane half circle, losing both my thongs and tripping onto the grass, where on my knees I surrendered, sobbing, and proffering my $20 note. I didn’t give up my mobile though. It was safe inside the pocket of my jacket. Even in that moment I knew I’d need it so badly after this, and I was already so poor. I guess you can call it uni-student poor, or middle class poor. I didn’t get any money from my family, but I still managed to eat, drink, and take recreational drugs without too much sweat. I just wanted to hold onto that goddamn phone.
He took the $20 from me and sprinted back into the direction from which he’d come. I sat for about 10 seconds lamenting my horrid experience, let some tears and self-pity escape my body and thought with peevishness how bad my friends would feel for letting me walk alone — selfish much?! I picked myself up, gathered my thongs, and set off down the path again, feeling very hard-done-by.
And then I heard the footsteps again.
He ran up behind me so much more quickly this time. He grabbed me from behind not unlike the way in which a lover might surprise their paramour from behind with a kiss on the neck; except he had a blade to my abdomen. I struggled briefly and he repeated the aggressive phrase “Shut up! Do you wanna get stabbed?” over and over again.
He frog-marched me to a building that was part of the tennis complex on the edge of the park closest to the train-line, and escorted me behind it to a place better suited to assault me free of discovery. He pushed me against the wall and demanded I take off my jeans. He was wiry and not much taller than me, so once the knife was not so handy I could grab his wrists and grapple with him. I remember knocking his baseball cap to the ground. I began to appeal to him with ridiculous sentimentality in a strange, made-up English accent because I didn’t want him to know me in any way at all. “Please, I’m a virgin. Don’t do this. You don’t want to do this. You aren’t this person. You don’t have to do this. I’m a virgin, don’t make it happen this way to me.”
I was not a virgin. But in some instinctive way, I knew I had to appeal to him as though I were a virginal, sweet young damsel. If he had an inkling I was a sexually-liberated loud-mouth feminist, I don’t think I would’ve appealed to his obviously entrenched, complex, toxic misogyny. I had to be pure, uncomplicated and non-threatening; I had to soften him, appeal to his desire not to conquer, but to protect.
I felt like this strange dance that consisted of me holding his wrists away from my body, my face, my throat, my crotch and the buttons of my jeans went for hours, and in such excruciating slow motion.
I don’t know what the magic words were. I don’t know how I held off his attack long enough for his impulse to rape me to pass. I am so thankful I was enough of a physical match to stay his advances. I am so thankful that he didn’t want to kill me. He just wanted to rape me. Hear that please. I am so grateful that he JUST wanted to rape me.
But he stopped.
He dropped his knife. I picked up his hat and handed it to him. He gave me the twenty back. He asked me my name and I gave him the name Amy, and continued using my bogus, strange English-esque accent. Then he offered to walk me home. To keep me safe. He walked me home.
He offered me a cigarette, which I accepted and smoked with shaking hands. I asked him why he had attacked me. He told me he had problems with drugs and an abusive father. I didn’t quite understand the relevance at the time, but I recognised he did have problems. I spoke with him and we talked about how the Black Eyed Peas would be playing at Martin Place the next morning — maybe we would catch it together? I held a warm and convivial conversation with the man who 5 minutes ago had tried to force himself on me at knife-point. I walked to my street, straight past my house and turned right down a lane a little further on to knock on the door of a home occupied by 3 male friends. I pounded furiously on the door, explaining with feigned frustration to my assailant that I had forgotten my key.
My friend finally leaned over the balcony, obviously annoyed and perplexed at this 2am house-call. I called to him urgently: “Hey babe, I forgot my keys!”
I will remain ever-grateful, bless this man, that he clocked the stranger to my left and played along immediately. I bid my attacker farewell — maybe we even hugged — and I waited til he was out of earshot to run inside my friends’ house to their couch and fall apart in a chaos of sobs, hysteria and relief; just crying with such guttural shock: “He tried to rape me.” Over and over again.
My friends called the police. I had to go back to the scene of the crime immediately. I had to walk the path of the crime and show the detectives everything and tell them everything I could remember. I had to try to find the butt of the cigarette he’d given me. They took my last $20 into evidence. I had to stay at the station into the morning light giving my statement. I had my still-drunk and confused friends find me at the Redfern precinct, and register their shock and guilt and other strange reactions.
I had less than two hours sleep before a detective came to pick me up to take me into Martin Place and spend the morning searching for this man, the man who thought he’d managed to score a date with the girl he’d tried to rape in a park the night before. No luck.
I was a wreck. I fulfilled a promise to drive my friends to a concert the following afternoon and was pulled over by police and fined an extreme amount for having a license that had expired on the Friday (it was Sunday afternoon). The police officers knew me, because some had interacted with me in the aftermath of the assault. I guess it seems petty, but I was so hurt that they couldn’t give me a break at the time. I had no recollection of the license expiry and was running on empty.
I dropped my friends at their concert and went home. Just as I got home I got a call on that mobile phone I’d so riskily held on to. The assailant, deluded as he was, almost endearingly thought we really did have a connection. He’d shown up at my friends’ house — the decoy home I’d made to escape — asking for Amy. My shrewd, quick-thinking and loving friend said “she’s not here right now, but back soon — here’s my card. Where you headed now?”
The police picked him up at Redfern Station holding my friend’s business card. He went to jail. My male housemate slept in my room with me for about a week while I recovered from the immediate manifestations of the trauma.
He was charged with aggravated sexual assault and armed robbery. He pleaded not-guilty and the trial loomed some months later. I was briefed by the prosecutor for a trial that made me sick to my stomach, but I was determined to stay calm and pursue justice. As the date drew closer he made a deal to plead guilty to sexual assault and ‘demanding money with menaces’, a much lesser charge, and with time served he really didn’t have to stay in jail for very long. None of it was up to me, nor was there any consultation in the process of making this deal. Oh well, maybe it’s for the best. I wasn’t exactly going to be objective, was I? And it took forever to get that twenty dollar note back.
He wrote me a letter while he was in prison that was delivered to me via the prosecutor, who stressed I didn’t have to accept or read it. I both accepted and read the letter. My assailant apologised, and cited his heroin addiction as a factor in the assault. I was skeptical about this, as I can understand heroin addiction driving one to extreme actions to procure enough money to support the crippling habit, but I questioned its relevance to attempted rape of a 19 year old girl in the middle of the fucking night. He said he’d found Jesus and was reformed. I scoffed, as it stunk like the biggest, shittiest cliche I’d ever heard, but I do hope he has made good on his life and has finally cottoned on to the strangely obscure idea that robbing and raping people is profoundly wrong, even if you are addicted to heroin.
I let it go, I told the story at parties, I appeared unphased. I survived and got to move on with a lot of ease.
Then the mother-fucker added me on facebook. He added me on FACEBOOK. I deleted the request straight away. I had forgiven him, I pitied him, but I had wanted him to be properly reprimanded and re-educated. I think it just sucker-punched me with how mundane the whole thing was/is. Terrible things happen to all of us and right alongside how terribly normal our Facebook and Instagram accounts are. He is still there, living his life, part of the matrix and mire of humanity.
I finally wrote this motherfucker down. It took an eerily similar account to prompt it, but I’m writing it down for you guys. I cried a lot writing this. I cried mainly for the 19 year old girl who thought she had to be glib and cool and compassionate for the perpetrator, instead of being angry and loud. So, y’know #notallmen, but also more pertinently, #yesallwomen.
