Me Too, Emily
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, two cousins tell their stories for the first time
My cousin Emily grew up poor, on welfare, in a family of seven. Her biological father left before she was born, and she was raised by her mother until she was about two years old. Her stepfather came into the picture shortly after. Emily was the only child in her household that was not biologically related to the stepfather. She never felt prioritized when she was growing up, watching her siblings get everything she never had. Her relationship with her mother was rocky, lacking nurture, trust, and love. “I love my mother, but I’ve never really had a motherly figure,” Emily told me. “I feel like, growing up, my mom resented me in a lot of ways. Maybe I reminded her of my father.”
The family moved a lot. Emily remembers moving at least twelve different times within one year when she was thirteen years old. For a while, her mom lived out of their car, while Emily was passed around to relatives and babysitters, who all played a part in raising her. This seemed normal to her. So was the fact that her mother worked a lot.
When Emily was seven or eight, she was at the home of an uncle, who was babysitting her at the time. There, she was sexually assaulted by one of her cousins, whom I’ll call Benny. It was an evening like any other. The kids were watching TV. “I remember Family Guy playing, and he was trying to hug me,” Emily said. “I’ve never really been an affectionate person, so I wasn’t hugging him back, and he just kept pushing himself on me, and I eventually just stopped pushing him away. I just kept shaking my head and shimmying my body away as much as I could and moving his hands. I didn’t speak, I couldn’t find my voice, I couldn’t form a word. I couldn’t even open my mouth. I was just kind of super tense. I froze up.”
I realize now that Family Guy is not a show that a kid should be watching, but we watched it all the time. Our parents were immigrants who couldn’t make out what the characters were saying. For those unfamiliar with the show, it’s about a man who berates his family to no end and often uses casual violence, some of which did make us laugh. There are crude jokes about genitals, and a friendship between a talking dog and talking baby. But we watched anything that kept us glued to the TV and away from our parents’ sight, and anything on TV was fair game.
Benny’s dad was a raging alcoholic. Benny’s mother was, in retrospect, both clueless and complicit. They fought constantly, but mostly when he was drunk. Despite this dysfunction, Benny’s mom still stuck around. It could not have been easy on our cousin Benny. But his erratic upbringing does not justify what he did.
I didn’t grow up quite like my cousin Emily did, but we do share many things in common. We were both poor and both victims of Benny: I was six or seven years old when Benny violated me. I am from a relatively poor community in East Los Angeles, one that was rough in many aspects but managed to preserve much of Latino culture and beauty. Our neighborhood consisted of small single-family homes along poorly maintained asphalt and sidewalks. In the surrounding area are large warehouses and small factories, now mostly abandoned, that many community members work in to make a livable wage. Just a couple blocks north of us were miles of affordable housing units that many of my friends occupied. Everyone spoke Spanish, and mostly everyone we knew was Mexican. From a distance you could see the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles peeking through the tops of the homes in my community, but it felt like a separate world.
It has always been me, my sister, brother, and two parents. I am the “surprise” child of my family, born eleven years after my sister. Although my parents were present in my life, they, too, worked a lot. My dad has always been a machinist at an airplane parts factory. He worked long hours and was only ever home if he was sleeping or eating, so I never really saw much of him growing up. My mom did the best she could to raise three kids with the little she had. Like Emily, I spent a lot of my childhood being passed around from relative to relative, but my grandma was most responsible for taking care of me.
I was an energetic and playful child who was often mischievous and misbehaved. I liked to have fun, but sometimes not under the safest conditions. I broke all my teeth from running around and jumping from chair to chair, trying to make my own playground inside our house. I had silver teeth for most of my childhood until my adult teeth came in. (People on social media have coined the phrase “silver tooth child” to describe kids like me, which in a very literal sense means I had silver teeth, but also that I, as I’ve mentioned, often misbehaved.)
At the time when Benny violated me, his dad was staying at our house for a couple months. I don’t remember why, although I think it may have had to do with the fact that his family recently immigrated from Mexico to the U.S. and had nowhere to stay. I do remember there being a lot of us in that three-bedroom house. It’s the same house that I live in today. I was excited that I had more people to play with, one of those people being my cousin Benny. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what type of games he had in mind.
I remember a blue and red Spider-Man tent where we would play his version of “house”. I loved Spider-Man when I was a kid, but now, I resent it. (Up until Tom Holland became the newest Spider-Man — since then, I’ve liked it a little more.) “Let’s play house, you’ll be mommy and I’ll be daddy,” Benny said. I didn’t quite know what was going on at the time, I was just a kid and I thought that was how kids played “house.” As I remember it, his parents were in the room when it happened, just like Emily.
This was in either 2007 or 2008. For more than ten years after that, I didn’t talk to anyone about it.
A ccording to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, one in nine girls and one in twenty boys under the age of eighteen experience sexual assault or abuse. In ninety-three percent of these cases, the abusers are known by the victim. In thirty-four percent of them, the assaulters are family members.
In the late 1890s, Sigmund Freud developed a rather controversial hypothesis known as “the seduction theory.” In it, Freud argued that mental health disorders in adults were largely caused by repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse. He argued that such memories could cause psychological distress or symptoms when they sporadically resurfaced throughout the adult’s life.
Freud was also among the first theorists to analyze the role family plays in early childhood development. Early childhood experiences and relationships within the family, according to Freud, shape an individual’s perspective on the world and has a profound impact on their psychological well-being. Freud believed that unsolved conflicts and issues could impact relationships and shape an individual’s thoughts, emotions, and behavior far into adulthood.
Freud’s theory was ultimately disproved, but maybe he wasn’t so far off. Benny violated the role family played in our lives. Instead of providing security and reassurance or promoting positive social development, he stripped us of our innocence at a young age and left us to grapple with these feelings on our own, struggling to trust anyone, especially our own family, again.
In her 2019 memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, Jeannie Vanasco writes about what she endured after being sexually assaulted, at age nineteen, by a childhood friend whom she calls Mark. In the book, Vanasco decides to reach out to her assaulter. “I want to interview Mark, interrogate Mark, confirm that Mark feels terrible,” she writes, “because if he does feel terrible, then our friendship mattered to him. Also, I want him to call the assault significant — because if he does, I might stop feeling ashamed about the occasional flashbacks and nightmares.” Although Mark does admit to raping Vanasco, he defends his character by calling himself a “nice guy.” This isn’t exactly what Vanasco had hoped for, but it’s something. Still, despite her extreme efforts to heal, Vanasco writes that she continues sometimes to question whether her feelings fit the crime: “I often remind myself, He only used his fingers.”
Historically, conversations around sexual assault have been taboo. There are several reasons for this. For one, rape victims often hesitate to come forward because of the gendered power dynamics that have traditionally existed and, to a large extent, still exist today. Women fear being blamed for what happened and becoming socially ostracized. Men who have been assaulted feel as though they can’t talk about it either, for fear of their masculinity being called into question. This dynamic began to change, to some extent, starting in the second half of the twentieth century. According to Janet Gornick and David Meyer’s article from The Journal of Policy History, “Changing Political Opportunity: The Anti-Rape Movement and Public Policy,” the normalization and recognition of sexual assault survivors was first brought to light by the feminist movement of the 1960s and ’70s. After decades of suppression and subjugation, women slowly began speaking up about their struggles as second-class citizens. Many told stories of being physically violated by men and inspired others to come forward about their own experiences.
As a result, the silence surrounding sexual assault began to break. Women-built advocacy gave survivors the post-trauma resources they needed such as legal reform, education, and policy changes specifically meant to protect women. One was the Victims of Crime Act of 1985, which provided compensation and assistance services for victims of violent crime. Nearly a decade later, the Violence Against Women Act of 1994 further established sexual violence as a crime, punishable by law.
As conversations about sexual assault and violence in public became more normal, high-profile victims emerged. In 1991, a law professor named Anita Hill accused her former boss, Clarence Thomas, of harassing her after Thomas was nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. This subsequently catapulted the term “sexual harassment” into the public eye. In a 2021 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Hill recalled receiving death threats at the time after speaking about her experiences. “There were other vulgarities that came through in the mail, terrible, nasty materials,” Hill said. “I’m talking about physical excrement, human excrement.”
The Hill-Thomas case dramatically increased public awareness of sexual harassment by spotlighting stories of survivors and publicly recognizing that sexual assault happens everywhere, even the workplace. Women began flocking in droves, modest droves, but droves nonetheless, to tell their stories.
But it wasn’t until 2016, with the election of Donald Trump — a man who has been credibly accused multiple times of committing sexual assault — that sexual violence became a nationwide subject of discussion. A year later, the New York Times broke the story that multiple Hollywood actresses had been sexually assaulted and harassed by the famous movie producer, Harvey Weinstein. In response, the actress Alyssa Milano encouraged survivors to share their stories on social media using “#MeToo.” (The term had first been used in this context in 2006 by the activist Tarana Burke, to support and empower survivors, particularly women of color.) Within days, millions of women (and some men) on social media were sharing their own stories.
I was in high school when the #MeToo movement exploded. I remember reading and watching interviews of survivors detailing their experiences of sexual abuse on my phone in between classes. I had never been more drawn into an issue, but at that point, I didn’t quite understand why. Suddenly, it was very clear: the widespread attention and accounts of survivor’s experiences had pulled what had happened with Benny from the basement of my mind. Prior to this, it had never occurred to me that what I experienced was sexual abuse. In fact, I hadn’t taken the time to consider what exactly it was that I had experienced. Now, I learned that it had a name, and that a lot of other people had experienced it, too. But that didn’t mean I was ready to talk about it. I wasn’t.
I have always been an overachiever. In high school, I was an honors student, constantly stressing about keeping my grades up for my college applications. I was way too busy with schoolwork and extracurriculars — cross-country, student government, and volunteering at the aquarium in Long Beach — to spend time rehashing things that had happened in the past. My future was always at the forefront of my mind. Future first, feelings last. As a result, the memories were never processed or considered.
Emily had more trouble than I did. She was violated more than once by other people than Benny. And even though we were the closest of cousins (we would not go to any family gathering if one was not in attendance; our parents knew not to go to each other’s houses without us; we were inseparable) we never talked to each other about what happened to us.
That changed in 2019. The aftereffects of the #MeToo movement were still very apparent. The conversation with Emily came up almost out of nowhere. We were at our aunt’s house talking on the couch, and we started recollecting stories we read about survivors in the recent weeks. Emily bravely broke the ice. She murmured, “Benny molested me.” I remember saying at the time, “Oh my god, me too,” and feeling relieved, in a weird way that I wasn’t the only one who experienced it. I hadn’t known.
After that, we didn’t speak about it again. I went off to college, where I did well and was rewarded. Emily stayed home in the Los Angeles area. Life continued to be very difficult for her.
I n March 2020, Emily attempted to take her own life during a schizophrenic episode. She was under an immense amount of stress and anxiety and had finally reached her breaking point. The intrusive thoughts took over her mind, and she struggled to find help.
The strenuous relationship Emily had with her mother deeply affected her experience with this. “It wasn’t tough love, it was tough,” she said. Prior to attempting to end her life, Emily begged her mom to admit her to a psychiatric hospital, but her mother refused. Emily’s mom believed that she was doing all this for attention. She called Emily “selfish” and called her suicide attempt “a load of bullshit.” Emily could not drive to admit herself to the hospital because of her obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), the driving triggered intrusive thoughts that made it unsafe to be behind the wheel, so she waited it out. Finally, under the pressure of one of Emily’s friends who expressed concern, her mom folded and admitted Emily to a behavioral health center. Eventually, she was transferred to an inpatient health center. Her mother never visited her there.
At Valley Star’s Crisis Residential Treatment Center, called “The STAY,” in San Bernardino, Emily underwent intensive daily group therapy sessions for ten plus hours a day. She was heavily medicated, and bombarded with questions that made her feel more suffocated than she already was. Emily describes her moments in this facility as feeling like a prisoner in a place where she hoped she would get better. But, instead, it made her feel worse. She hated her experience, the nurses, the patients. She spent many hours a day thinking about what had gone wrong in her life for her to end up like this. The sexual assault was a big part of it–one of the many, many things that had happened to her, but one she kept coming back to. She was angry at her mother, for letting it happen; angry at her father for leaving; and of course, angry at Benny for doing it.
“I would constantly think to myself, if my father was in my life, would I be in this position?” Emily told me. “Would I have been assaulted? Would I have been able to get over things? Would any of this ever happen to me? Would we have been poor? A lot of what ifs.”
At the hospital, Emily was diagnosed with a myriad of issues, including schizoaffective disorder, depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder, OCD, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and others. She was prescribed Wellbutrin, an anti-depressant medication, and continued with her therapy sessions, but was more off and on, she said.
Emily’s experience with sexual assault deeply affected her ability to love and to trust. As a result, she struggled with her sexuality for years, truly believing that she could never love. “I would get a lot of PTSD from it,” Emily said, referring to the way her memory of the assault would intersect with attempts at intimacy with others. “I would really freak out and start to have a nervous breakdown whenever I’d think about it.”
She met her current boyfriend, Joey, in July 2020, a few months after she was admitted into psychiatric care. The beginning of their relationship was hard as she struggled with intimacy and being able to fully open to him because of everything she went through. After a while, Emily was able to open up to Joey about her past experiences with sexual assault and then finally was able to feel that sense of comfort she had longed for. He helped her find ways to cope and convinced her to seek help. When she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, he read a book to help better understand her diagnosis. Emily was finally able to find a sense of security and safety in a person other than herself. However, this was far from an easy journey. Emily has been with Joey for four years now and they currently live together in their own apartment in Las Vegas, Nevada. She works in the insurance department as customer service lead for BioWound Solutions. She is doing better.
W hen I was assigned to write a story for class about memoir and reporting, I took it as an opportunity to better understand the long-term consequences of child abuse. Needless to say, it has not been an easy story to write. I had to take multiple breaks throughout and sit with myself to see if this is something I wanted to continue.
Sharing our stories so publicly meant having to face some difficult questions, but Emily and I agreed it was time. To re-live something I have repressed for so many years is not an easy task. Sometimes I question if certain parts of my abuse happened and how much of it is made up. Interviewing survivors, especially my cousin, was especially tough. So much of our story is similar, yet hearing how she endured the pain was my biggest difficulty of the reporting process. But I thought it was a story worth telling.
Journalism and writing have been the medicine that has got me through the most difficult times. This innate feeling in me and passion I have for storytelling helped extinguish the flames of burnout and allowed me to keep going. I am in this field to tell stories of people who have been through immense pain and struggle just like I have.
I spoke with experts and activists on the issue. One is Rhett Hackett, the co-founder and president of Humanity Preservation Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to child abuse, domestic violence, and bullying prevention. Between the ages of twelve and seventeen, Hackett was sexually abused by a neighbor from his hometown in New Jersey. The experience provoked continuous flashbacks, nightmares, and night terrors. It was only at age forty-one that he first went to a psychologist to address these issues. Hackett says childhood trauma has shown direct correlations to social, emotional, and cognitive impairment. Not only are children who experience trauma at an early age vulnerable to varying degrees of mental illnesses, but they can be victims of physical diseases such as heart attack and stroke. According to Hackett, victims of child abuse will live in constant state of fight or flight for the rest of their lives. The challenge then becomes learning how to manage and overcome it when necessary.
“When trust is in the hands of somebody who is supposed to be responsible for assuming care over a child and that trust is broken, then it is devastating and impactful to the child,” Hackett told me.
Hackett came out with his story publicly in 2010 when there was little discourse surrounding male survivors who suffered child sex abuse. He was inspired to tell his story after a weekend retreat in the mountains of Georgia with an organization called Male Survivor. He said there was an instant camaraderie and validation from this experience, since he was surrounded by men who had gone through very similar things as him. He decided that it was time to speak out. Hackett heard that “The Oprah Winfrey Show” wanted to do a segment about two hundred men who had been sexually abused and submitted his story to be told on air. Out of the two hundred men in the audience, Hackett, along with five other men, had their stories publicly highlighted on the show. “My best medicine has been advocacy,” says Hackett.
I had first heard of Hackett when he came to my college for the yearly presentation that he gave to the fraternities. Every year that he came to talk, I found myself captivated by his story. One year, he came on “picnic day,” the one day of the year when prospective students and community members come together and host events at school. For the student body, it becomes an all-day drinking event. Hackett’s presentation was at 6:00 p.m., and after a full day of drinking, I started to silently sob as he told his story. I had already heard it before, but it felt different, maybe because of the alcohol that was rushing through my body, nevertheless, it touched me. It made me feel sad that this happens to so many people, and that he wasn’t able to tell his story until a much later age. I didn’t want that to be me.
Jim Struve is another man who has dedicated his life to supporting men who have been sexually victimized. Through his organization, MenHealing, and his own private psychotherapy practice in Salt Lake City, Struve is an expert source on male sexual abuse treatment. I spoke with him about the potential long term psychological effects child sex abuse can have as adolescents transition into adulthood.
Struve said that people who have undergone chronic abuse for a longer period may develop medical and other physical health issues. Victims can become prone to hard-to-diagnose illnesses, like immune disorders or chronic headaches. The mental health system is based on diagnosing disorders, Struve said. The term “disorder” suggests that one can never really heal; disorder has the framework of “unrepairable” and “unfixable.” So, Struve calls them “injuries” not disorders, and advocates that others should refer to them as such. But other mental health experts often diagnose survivors with disorders, not injuries, like in the case of “post-traumatic stress disorder” rather than “post-traumatic stress injury.” The solution to a disorder is typically medication. But Struve warns that medication only numbs the problem rather than heals it. Medication, according to Struve, should not be used to avoid the harm; instead, what the mental system does is treat the symptom instead of the harm.
“It’s like taking aspirin if you have a headache. But if you start living on aspirin, that doesn’t become helpful,” he said.
Those who don’t rely on medication may look for other coping strategies. Struve told me that the longer a person takes to come to terms with what happened to them, especially in their childhood, the more dire the psychological consequences can be. Coping patterns can then manifest in many ways — from addiction to habits one might not even acknowledge as unhealthy, like TikTok doom scrolling — all of which serve as a way to not really think about what happened. Another seemingly harmless but actually very destructive coping strategy, especially common among male survivors of abuse, is being hyperfunctional. Men who struggle with trauma often use high achievement and success to hide the fact that the “demasculinizing” event happened to them and to compensate for what they couldn’t heal, Struve said. As a result, they can become hopeless, depressed, and then eventually, severely under-functioning.
I resonate a lot with what Struve said. My whole life, I’ve lived under constant pressure to keep working and grinding or else I would never amount to anything — that was how I coped. Taking a break was a foreign concept for me. On top of this, I also felt the need to be in control after what had happened to me. Growing up low income and queer, I had no choice. I always had something to prove to myself, my family, and my friends. When a part of your identity isn’t validated, you overcompensate in any way possible.
In this way, my story differs from Emily’s. I coped with things a bit differently than she did. But we ended up in a similar place. I started going to therapy in 2022, and I finally spoke about my experience with Benny for the first time. I was diagnosed with OCD, anxiety, and depression.
Our experience with Benny affected us deeply in different ways. I suppressed it due to the stress of school and life, while Emily struggled to deal with it in her everyday life. I never knew. I wish I had known.
Despite what we have endured, Emily and I have found ways to cope and recenter ourselves. We both appreciate this newfound feeling of personal freedom and being comfortable, finally, with saying the words “me too.”
