Historical Sex Crimes

I was 14, he was 31. He told me it was love and who was I to argue?

I wonder if he watches the news and thinks his time might come. Men have gone to jail for much less than what he did. I wouldn’t seek that, but I don’t mind the idea of him worrying about it. I don’t mind that at all.

Some years ago, he contacted me on Facebook: “Look at you all grown up, with babies.” He sent me a friend request but said he understood if I didn’t want it. I didn’t.

It rattled me to hear from him out of the blue. I told him that perhaps it hadn’t been his intention, but he’d been mean. Nasty. Controlling. Once, after a trip to the movies when my conversation was lacking, he told me it was like going to the movies with a dog. He insisted I’d misremembered. “I never would have said that. I’m not that kind of person. I loved you.”

He’s nowhere online now. I wonder if he’s worried. Or dead.

It was 1985, in the school hall, at night. He was the martial arts instructor, and I, the conscientious student. He was 31, and I was 14.

“There’s something between us,” he announced, putting his arm around me. He pulled me close and kissed me. I felt the strangeness of his mustache and smelled his grown-up cologne. I wondered what was happening and what would happen next. It didn’t occur to me to object; I didn’t even have the words. He told me it was love. Who was I to argue?

It was a normal age to start having sex, he told me. And that was that. It was a thing. For the next two years, I would visit him after school, ride on the back of his motorbike, have sex in his shitty flat, internalize his constant stream of criticism, and carry a secret that weighed on me like a stone.

Carl didn’t really have a day job. He was studying photography and lived in a ramshackle upstairs room with a shared bathroom and an old gas shower that looked like it might explode. He taught tae kwon do, but he was such a bossy perfectionist, he never managed more than a handful of students. He did lighting at a venue on Friday nights for $70. He was on financial assistance and usually broke. Sometimes I used my babysitting money to pay for us to go to the movies.

It has taken me this long to try to find words for my experience with Carl.

He took artsy black and white photos. He had studied composition at Juilliard in his twenties, though I can’t remember what came of that. Something didn’t work out. Things often didn’t work out for him. He was seriously into macrobiotic food, refused to eat tomatoes, and told me there was trouble in the Middle East because their diet was too yang.

The man was all red flags.

He gave me a lot of “advice” for my own benefit. He took me to the gym, gave me special exercises for my “thick ankles.” He advised me that my clothes didn’t hang well, that my hair cut made me look inconveniently young. “You look your age now, you looked older before.”

I developed an eating disorder, exercised obsessively, stopped menstruating.

We went to the doctor together for a prescription for birth control. The physician, another of Carl’s martial arts students, said, “In a few years, it won’t seem like such a big age gap.” Bullshit: 17 years is 17 years. Though that’s hardly the point. The same doctor ran endless tests for my constant nausea, concluding that I just needed to eat more.

By 16, I was starting to think that love wasn’t meant to be like this. That it should not be so painful. So unhappy. I was growing up. I told him it was over. He was devastated. Could I just leave the door open for the future, he asked. Are you fucking kidding?

Somehow, I found my power, and I wasn’t letting it go. I gave up tae kwon do. I ate. I hung out with my friends and drank cask wine and vomited. I got a boyfriend my own age, and everyone knew about it.

Even 30 years later, I feel exhilarated thinking about my young self standing up to him—my own liberation, embracing normal, messy, age-appropriate teenage life. But it has taken me this long to try to find words for my experience.

Over and again, young women say they carry deep shame about exploitative and abusive sexual experiences. This is painfully true for me. The secret I carried so heavily for those two years has cast a long shadow over me.

I’ve watched case after case of high-profile men prosecuted over sexual activity with underage people, and I feel ill. How should I think about what happened to me? Was it a crime? It was certainly against the law. I was 14. It’s hard to find the words for how ill-equipped I was to handle a sexual relationship with an older man. I had no experience. No reference points. No tools. No one to talk to. The adults who knew just accepted it as a relationship. No-one intervened. The law wasn’t much use.

If there’s a legacy, my fighting spirit is part of it.

I feel immensely sad for the lonely, stressed young girl I was, trying to navigate a critical, controlling older man. And I’m so proud that I busted out, reclaimed my life. If there’s a legacy, my fighting spirit is part of it.

But I shouldn’t have needed to do that on my own. All these years later, I watch experiences like mine play out in the courts and think, in the same breath, I wouldn’t have wanted to go through that / Was I not important enough for the law to protect me?

It’s all so long ago now. I wonder if his perspective on what happened has changed over the decades. I wonder if he thinks he committed a crime or that it was just “love.”

I don’t know if he’s worried, but I don’t mind the idea of it. At all.