About a Girl
I am not the girl I write about. Even this is not my personal story, it is every girl story, and every person story. Because we are obligated to emphatize. And to hurt. With everyone. That’s, and only and precisley that’s what makes us humans.
Milena Radulović is a beautiful serbian actress. Theatar and film actress. Few days ago I saw her picture standing on the red carpet on Venezia film festival, in vintage dress, with old fashion hair style, surrounded with group of great and intresting acctresses from Balkans, looking like old time Holywood diva. And I was hurt. Like I am everytime I see her, and probably that feeling will last.
Milena is a educated actress. She gratuated on Faculty of dramatic arts in Belgrade, well known and highly respected college in countries that came out from former Yougoslavia, and, according to prizes and awards that directors, writters and actors born out of that faculty have won around the world, in Europe as well.
Before, entered the University, since Elementary school, she was a student of a well known private acting school with a reputation of elite school, that has high standards for enrolling, and tough competition. Only the most talented kids get to enroll in it, and became prepared for desired Faculty of dramatc Arts. And, so they say, most of them succeed.
Milena Radulović is one of those kids. She catched her dream.
These days she spends her time mostly at a Higer court where she testifies against her longtime acting teacher, whom she reported for rape. After her report, four more young women, students of the same school with the same accusation and five with accusations of sexual harassment, followed. What the defense of the acting teacher, whom I will not name mostly because of disgust, bases its evidence on, is the time that passed from the crime to the report filed by Milena Radulović. And I would say that this is a common practice when it comes to cases like this.
But time is such a illusive and deceptive thing.
First, time does not mean much to the victim. The wound is painful both on the first day and years after the crime was committed, and in a certain way, with the passage of time it becomes worse. The problem with time in such cases is reflected in the fact that the victim does not know that she/he is a victim. The acting teacher takes students under his care at the age of 11, he sets himself up as an absolute authority, someone who knows how to make an actor and in that no one is equal to him. In addition, he is also a father figure who leads children to confess to him because only he “understands” them. He rarely communicates with parents and creates a gap in students beatween trusting them and him.
Everything went well for him as “eccentric” and good at his job (which later turned out to be untrue as his connections with the Faculty of Dramatic Arts were exposed).
But the particular trigger of anger in my eyes, he used certain religious matrices to manipulate the youth. Everything in the school, sweetly and pathetically called “A matter of the heart”, was surrounded by an atmosphere of some kind of traditionalism and conservatism that corresponds to Christianity in the eyes of the “great” teacher. It helped in many way to create an atmosphere of fear of the “great priest” and absolute and unquestionable authority.
From 11 to 17 years is enough time to gain complete trust and even build a loving relationship with a young human being.
And quite enough time to betray that trust in the most brutal way, completely undisturbed.
When the defense asks for the umpteenth time why it took Milena more than ten years to report the abuse, forcing a superhumanly brave young woman to repeat the details of the brutal act over and over in front of her abuser and the incoherent crowd that stands by him, I am amazed with the fact that so many people are not able to see that she didn’t even know she was being abused. When he raped and beat her, she was in the hands of her “second father”, the best teacher, a Christian and a traditionalist who teaches her his knowledge. In a brutal way, yes, but only because success in the brutal world of acting requires it.
Nevertheless, the wounds took their toll, fortunately for all the participants of the “elite” acting school, and all future seventeen-year-old girls who, thanks to Milena, remained out of reach of the criminal.
I am waiting for the fair outcome of this trial and although I know that it cannot help much in healing the wounds, I hope that Milena will be able to realize within herself what she did for those whom she snatched from the claws of the beast in time.
And I sincerely hope that the attributes such as “elite”, “traditional” and “unconventional” that many schools and teachers ( in the arts, sports or general education), everywhere in the world proudly hang next to their names, make parents to stop and think.
Not twice, but much, much more.
