Accountability for Danny Masterson is good.

But very triggering for me at the same time.

In the unlikely event that you haven’t seen this story on the news— Actor Danny Masterson, who starred on That '70s Show, has been sentenced to serve 30 years to life in prison for raping two women.

He was convicted after three women testified that he had sexually assaulted them at his Hollywood home from 2001-03 - during the height of his television fame.

I honestly didn’t know about this story at all until his sentencing, which is very strange to me, but I’ve been reading about it since Friday, when he was sentenced, and while I’m very glad he is being held accountable for his horrific crimes (and already in prison), I also have to admit that the victim’s impact statements have been very triggering for me at the same time.

I was raped at the age of 17. By someone I thought was a friend. Someone I thought I could trust. In fact, that is how I lost my virginity. I’ve mentioned it here or there. I’ve written about it a little, but I don’t talk about it nearly enough. And I think know why that is…

I have spent a great deal of my life running from my own trauma. Most of my life to be honest. I would push the pain down, or brush past it altogether. It was how I survived. How I kept going. How I didn’t let myself succumb to the grief and the sadness. Or so I thought.

When the truth was that the more I pushed away the pain, the more metasticized the trauma and everything associated with it became. It was taking up resisdence in my brain. So much so, that I was exhibiting dangerous, self destructive and self sabotaging patterns of behavior all while allowing myself and my life to mirror some of the past trauma I had known. Repeatedly re-traumatizing myself. Looking back at it now, I think it’s because that was what I thought I deserved. What I was worthy of. Because that’s what not ever dealing with my pain was manifesting.

I wasn’t dealing with it at all. I wasn’t naming it. I was just allowing it to swallow me whole. And any time I had a moment of clarity about whatever it was that I was running from, whenever I temporarily let my guard down from battling my own subconscious and actually felt the pain, I would stop myself. I’d brush it away like always and say to my reflection in a mirror: “You’re fine. You got this. Everything is fine.”

Nothing was fine. I didn’t “have this”. Things were bad, very bad, and getting worse. Quickly.

It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve decided to stop running from the truth, and start dealing with it instead. At some point in 2019, something snapped in me. But not in the viral video of some Karen losing her shit over a rainbow lunchbox at a Costco. I think I mentally hit my bottom up until that point in my life (which is wildly ironic given how much worse things would get). I was miserable. I was lost. I didn’t want to live anymore. I didn’t think I offered anything of value to the world. I even convinced myself that the kids would be better off without me, when the truth is that they’re what saved me.

I didn’t then know what was truly at the core of all of that, so I attributed most of it to a terrible marriage. One which had devolved into a cycle of perpetual anger, abuse, self-loathing and pain and inevitably drove me to making wildly reckless choices. But it was all that not dealing with what was at the center of my brain for so long that had opened the door for me to allow myself to remain in an incredibly dark and destructive marriage.

I knew I had to get out of my marriage if I had a chance of surviving. At the time, I thought that would fix all that ailed me. Of course, my marriage was both one cause and one symptom of the much bigger issues I was repressing.

But it was in fact, a start. A tumultuous one. One which resulted in me spending an entire summer worried that I wouldn’t have enough money to feed the kids and pay for the oil we needed for hot water. I have never been lower in all of my life than I was then. But that time, I never wanted to die. I never thought about it at all. Because it simply wasn’t an option. I had to feed my kids. I had to push through. I had to be here. For them.

I had just ended my marriage, lost my big brother and our 12 year old dog, all in the middle of a pandemic, and I had to push through all of it. And when I began to emerge on the other side, after occupying what looking back was essentially the basement of my life, I felt as though I had been forged in fire. I felt resilient. Powerful. Independent. Strong. But I also knew that I had to take real time to go back and deal with what I had just come through, and all of the trauma I had been carrying up until that point. I knew I was a mess. I knew I was raw. But I felt strong enough at that point, to go there. It was the first time in my life I’d ever been willing to truly acknowledge what had happened to me. To recognize the choices I MADE in response and was ultimately responsible for. I wanted to start dealing with it, so that I could retrain my brain to become accustomed to living without it. To stop repeating the same unhealthy patterns which seemed so adept at self-sustaining.

And one of the first places I wanted to go, was back to that night when I was 17. That night in the woods with all my friends. That night I had been given alcohol when I had never had a drink. That night I cried to a boy named Eric about how I was worried I would have to move to a new town as a result of my dad’s job. That night when he “comforted” me, while handing me more alcohol. That night I woke up to him on top of me. The razor blades burning and scraping the insides of my body excruciating pain of him being inside of me. That night in the dark, on a sleeping bag, when I couldn’t scream. When I just couldn’t seem to summon a scream. Not even a whimper. That night I was frozen in fear and panic and confusion all while trying to process a real life nightmare unfolding on top of and inside of me. That night that feels like it lasted an eternity and mere seconds all at once. That night my virginity was taken from me. Violently.

I had to spend some time back there in my mind. I had never allowed myself to do that. And what I realized in looking back was that there was much more trauma than the physical rape. It was what happened to me in the aftermath. That damage seared itself into my soul. It changed me. And it fed right into the same bullshit narrative my brain has been feeding me since I was a little kid being hit by her mom. ‘It’s you. You’re the problem it’s you.’

I woke up alone. Disoriented. Hazy. I was probably still drunk to be honest, it wasn’t a sensation I was accustomed to. My mind was focused on finding a place to pee. I could hear the voices of my friends off in the distance, so I knew to go deep enough into the woods to avoid being seen. I pulled my shorts down, not yet realizing that my underwear were missing. And when I urinated, the pain doubled me over. And that’s when it all came flooding back. In frames and bursts at first. And then all at once. The pain, the sight of him on top of me. Feeling paralyzed. It was so overwhelming I nearly threw up.

And as bad as I thought all of that was, as nauseating and irreconcilable as all of that felt, it wasn’t over. Not by a mile. Because what I thought was MY own private shame, became Scarlet Letter public scorn. In the blink of an eye.

I was walking back towards the group who were all gathered in one spot away from the still smoldering fire. They were laughing and pointing at something. I cautiously approached and as I got closer, the laughter stopped. They turned to look at me, and just then I realized what they had been laughing at.

It was the sleeping bag. Streaked with blood. My blood. Slung over a tree branch. And on the ground in front of the sleeping bag, were my underwear. My rapist’s trophies for all the world to see. My best friends couldn’t even look at me. The boys were high fiving each other, and trying to suppress their laughter.

‘Wait, wait… what? Were my friends mad at ME? Did they think I wanted that? Did they think I consented to what he did to me? Surely they couldn’t think that. Surely they knew me better than that. These were my BEST friends!’

I learned later that day over the phone that they simply couldn’t be friends with me anymore. They couldn’t be friends with someone so… slutty. No matter how many times I tried to tell them the truth, no matter how hard I cried and begged for their forgiveness for being raped of all things, they didn’t believe me. They had been drinking too, and the last thing they remembered seeing was Eric hugging me by the fire. So, that was all they needed to turn against me. To take his word over mine. And by then, he had told EVERYONE all the lies. That I had begged for it. How badly I wanted it.

The pain of what he did to me physically took a very long time to pass. The emotional toll never went away. And a month or so later, when yearbooks came out, every single boy that was there that night, including the one who raped me, had included the words “sleeping bag hag” in their “memories”. And I had to watch entire classes of kids erupt in laughter upon reading them, because by then the whole school knew Eric’s version of the story. My rapist was a hero. And I was the school whore.

A slutty punchline. Because a teenage girl who had never had sex and never even thought about having sex, was raped in the woods. And that made her bad.

Even writing those words hurts. I can feel the physical pain all over again. It’s also really hard to relive being ostracized, laughed at, name called and vilified for being raped. I felt like I was losing my mind. Everything was upside down. I wasn’t a slut. I was Tom boy and a nerd. I didn’t know the first thing about sex. I had no interest in sex. And yet, my choice to have sex was taken away from me. And he took every shred of my dignity along with it.

And he got away with all of it. I never pressed charges. I never told my family. Anyone who did know made me into the bad guy, so what was the point. High school ended soon after and time did what it does and we all went our different ways. And I never had to see Eric or any of those girls again.

It’s always haunted me that he was celebrated for raping me. I heard somewhere years later that he became a police officer, although I’m really not sure if that’s true. But it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Especially since one of his pals (now police officer), a few years later thought to himself at a party, ‘Let me shoot my shot with this girl.’ And if not for an incredibly brave male friend rescuing me, I could have been raped again. By someone I once again foolishly mistook for a friend.

My rapist took my virginity. He took my friends away from me. He took my dignity. And I was the one who paid the price for all of it. And he walked away triumphant.

So when I read this particular victim impact statement from the Danny Masterson trial, it hit me like a brick wall.

“The Masterson accuser described how she was not able to find her underwear after the rape and how she smelled of vomit. She said that after reporting the sexual assault she lost “pretty much everything,” including many of the people who were once her friends. She said at age 29 she had to start over.”

I too had to start over. As I’d have to again many, many years later when even more trauma came a knocking on my door.

I went a very long time without telling a soul about being raped. To this day, I still haven’t told my sisters. I was too ashamed and embarrassed. Even though I knew I shouldn’t be.

But that wasn’t all I carried from that night. My brain put that trauma somewhere I couldn’t reach, and then it stayed there, guiding reckless choices and hardwiring an idea in me that being wanted sexually by men meant I had value. That I had worth.

And until I really dealt with that, until I did the work to get to that trauma and stop it from manipulating me in that way, it was never going to stop. And so that is why I started there when I started therapy. So much of my adult life had been directed by that unendingly acute pain. And I’d been ignoring it. And I wasn’t going to allow that to happen anymore. I wasn’t going to allow it to have that power anymore. And I’ve been working really hard to make sure it doesn’t.

And one way I can do that, is by sharing my story. By being open and honest about it. By naming it and what it did to me. By naming my attacker and what he did to me.

And that is why when I read that victim statement about a sexual predator whose actions went far too long without consequence, I felt compelled to share my truth here.

I’m less interested in my rapist being punished for his crime now than I am in releasing myself from what I’ve carried around as a result of his crime.

And I have. Well, I’m working on it. I’m getting there. I’m not all the way there, and I may never be all the way there, but I’m never going to stop doing the work of getting there.

I know that I am worth it.

And I also know that in sharing our stories we reclaim our power. We reveal our true selves. And we help others feel seen and hopefully they can feel less afraid and less alone.

It’s easier to run from trauma than it is to face it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We owe that much to ourselves and to each other.

Danny Masterson’s victims have inspired me to speak my truth. Their bravery has made me feel brave enough to share my own story.

It’s taken me all day to write this, but I did it. And I feel much better now that I have.

Thanks for being here, for making me feel safe, and for listening.

And to anyone out there grappling with trauma of any kind and feeling afraid to share, I see you. And you are not alone. A whole world of wonderful strangers caught me, and we can and will catch you too.

❤️

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