Saturday Slant

Targeted
Ever been targeted by someone—maybe an enemy you didn’t know existed? Or maybe it was friendship soured. It could even have been by a total stranger, cruel or vindictive, picking you at random or making you pay for an imagined slight. Because you threaten someone in some way, for revenge, or for a hundred other reasons you may have been targeted and the victim of some form of attack. In one way or another, at one time or another, we have all be targeted by someone, whether or not we ever knew the reason.

Who targeted you? What happened? How did you react? Do you know the reasons why?

What a horrible question, and a horrible truth. Yes, I have been targeted – on three or four memorable occasions, and always by women that I had mistakenly believed to have been friends.

Here’s the first example.

My mother and step-father were out of town – they had taken a trip to Arizona. A girlfriend of mine (KY) invited me to a party in my neighborhood. I was only 15 or 16 (I don’t quite remember) and I wasn’t allowed to go to parties because we were Jehovah’s Witnesses.

KY convinced me that if I went out my bedroom window, I could come to the party for a few hours and get back home with no-one the wiser. It was a bad idea, of course, and I knew that I had made the wrong choice, so for a long time I blamed myself too much for what happened.

KY’s cousin – JM – had convinced her to lie to me about the party. He said that he had a crush on me and just wanted to have a little time to talk to me alone. When I did walk into the house the door was shut and locked behind me. I have never had such a sinking feeling in my gut as in that one moment, as I immediately understood the enormity of my mistake. Instead of the “popular” people I was told to expect, there were a few older guys from my high school. They were all known to me, and some of their identities prohibited me from pursuing anything after the event. The first thing I said was, “I have to leave now.” They laughed and offered me some punch – which I didn’t accept, not knowing what it was spiked with, but pretty sure it would be altered in some way. They were all obviously drunk and/or high on something. I said that my family would be looking for me, that I left a note. They already knew that my parents were away – they knew everything.

The guy in question took me off to one of the bedrooms. While I was being assaulted and then raped, I stopped being a pacifist. I prayed to God (in my mind, it was “Jehovah God” – I was a devout JW) to allow me to find a weapon, but it didn’t happen. I won’t document all the details. At some point, it became clear to me that it was intended to be a gangbang – and then someone was at the door. JM told me to stay in the room and keep quiet or else…

It was his girlfriend SM at the door, a tough girl who terrified me. I can only surmise that KY had begun to regret her betrayal or even to worry about me. In any case, I took the opportunity while I had one. Naked, I went out the bedroom window, landing in some sort of scratchy vegetation – and ran home around the block. It was perhaps 1 or 2 in the morning. I dressed, and woke up my younger brothers, convincing them to sleep in the basement with me – I made sure everything was locked and secure. I don’t know why our caretaker wasn’t there – maybe she didn’t spend the nights, I really don’t remember.

The guys came to the house after a while, and tried to get in – banging on the windows, but after a while they left, perhaps fearing that someone would call the police. For weeks afterward JM would call my house, pretending to be “Steve.” I spoke to him once, just to ask him why he did it. I was naive enough to believe I might get an apology. He claimed that I had wanted it!

That made me so angry that I told my stepfather what had happened, and who was involved. He advised me to do nothing. He knew the people. My former “friend” KY didn’t take my calls. So I did nothing – but wait anxiously for a month to see if I was pregnant – fortunately not – and get tested for STDs – again with fortunate result. I didn’t tell my mother until many years later – it would have devastated her.

How did this change things? First, I was extremely angry at God. I thought that he was punishing me for disobeying my parents and the rules. I was also angry that I didn’t get a chance to inflict serious damage upon any of the participants. Then – the final straw – when I told my JW boyfriend what happened, hoping for some comfort from someone – he didn’t believe me. He broke up with me, in fact.

I came to the brink of suicide that year, partly because I didn’t trust anyone else enough to talk about it. For a while, I was actually in a quasi-fugue state I think – very aggressive, very provocative in certain ways, and yet moving around somewhat unconsciously in the world, in a kind of distance from everything. What was the point of being some religious submissive maiden anymore? But I didn’t know what else to be.

I felt guilty for being angry, too, and turned it back on myself. I became depressed. It was the beginning of the end of my involvement with the JWs, since I knew perfectly well that if I went to the elders for “spiritual guidance” they would blame me too. I started to think a lot about the way women and women’s bodies are controlled and dominated. And I read. I had been a bookworm for a long long time, and there was about a six-month period there where reading, playing piano, and painting were all I did.

Somehow, this betrayal by a female friend was even more damaging to me than the rape itself. So that while I was becoming in some ways a feminist, I paradoxically still trusted men more than women. I always seemed to understand where I stood with a man (and I am someone who thrives on knowledge), but there have been women here and there who utterly fooled me – who disliked me, or were threatened by me – and who were intimate enemies. Since I was trained by the JWs to think very little of myself in the first place, this scared me more than violence.

I never understood why KY would have participated in this plot to trap me. I thought she was my friend. Perhaps she too was deceived, but she had to have been the one to call in the girlfriend, so she had to have some inkling of what was happening. If she would have explained exactly what happened, I might have forgiven her. But once she had played out the betrayal, she ran away and hid from me. She didn’t have the courage to face me – she lacked any sense of honor or friendship.

Today, I would handle such a situation much differently. I am trained to inflict serious damage if I feel the need to do so. I wouldn’t be so easily intimidated, and I would have fought like hell from the very first moment rather than thinking that I would somehow be able to talk my way out of the situation. Once home, I would have immediately called the police, and insisted on being taken for medical evidence. I would stand up and point fingers, and to hell with what anyone thought.

But in those days, the young girl I was did not have those capabilites, nor did she perceive them as options. She thought that what happened was punishment from God for wanting to go to a party. She did what she could, and eventually came to (relative) peace with what happened.

They all got away with it, of course. I wonder what the drummer does for a living today? If I ever see him again, I’m going to be very tempted to break his nose.