by Andrea Scrima
In many ways I was lucky: I was neither raped, trafficked, nor bitten on the genitals so hard that I bled, an image that emerged from a trove of emails recently released from the Epstein files detailing alleged acts of abuse by billionaire Leon Black, who was forced to step down as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2021. I wasn’t groped or forced to undress or perform a sexual act on myself or my predator. I’d incurred no physical injuries or bruises; the damage he did was of a different kind.
When his name turned up recently, attached to a prestigious new prize for young artists, I was sure I was mistaken; after a quick internet search revealed that it was, in fact, the same man, it took me some time to process the discovery. From one moment to the next, I found myself staring at the college graduation photograph of a man I’d done my best to forget, and although he was in his late thirties when I met him, I recognized the face immediately. I was an eighteen-year-old painting major writing long-form poetry, he was the head of the poetry seminar I wanted more than anything to get into. I see him standing opposite me in a turtleneck sweater. He’d already heaped praise on my work; he had, in fact, chosen me from that year’s crop of young art students. Not as a prodigy to mentor, as I would soon discover, but as a sexual interest. When I turned down his advances, he refused to let me into the class.
He’s been dead for three or four years now; a rather sizeable legacy funds at least two major awards in his name: one in the visual arts, the other in literature. Staring at his obituary, trying to make sense of my emotions, I was haunted by memories I hadn’t had access to in decades. I let a few days pass, and then I mailed an editor at an art magazine I work with, briefly outlined what happened, and asked if this was just another one of those countless #MeToo stories and if there was any point in writing it—as far as pitches go, it was hesitant, reluctant. As it turns out, there are several fairly serious sexual abuse scandals connected to the art school I was enrolled in at the time, and so the editors were indeed interested and I did, in fact, wind up writing the piece, which will be published in the aforementioned magazine in March. But this essay is a different essay, one about writing that essay: the uncertainty that suddenly nagged at me, the sense of not being believed or even particularly believable, the lingering feeling of shame that nearly all victims of sexual predation carry with them, years and even decades later.
*
We exchanged mails for a few weeks before we finally set up an appointment to talk over WhatsApp. When they called from their Brooklyn office, it was already evening in Berlin; my son had just undergone a second operation the day before, and I was sitting in a darkened hospital lobby in a state of suspension, counting the days until the final lab results were in. Can you do this, would it be better to postpone, the editors asked. It’s OK, I said, I’m glad to finally talk about it. They wanted to know if I’d told anyone at the time—a department head, a counselor? I had a boyfriend, I said, I can ask him, but I’m not sure—I tended to keep things to myself. If I said anything, I probably pretended that I’d put him in his place, or something similar. As I heard myself say this, I realized that there are people in this world who make these things up, presumably to be interesting. I could just as easily be making this all up, to be interesting. Is this what they were thinking? I don’t need to publish this, I assured them, it’s enough to tell you and know you get it and understand what it means and what it can do to a person and that it was rampant back then and rampant to this day—and then move on. It really hasn’t been an issue for me and I wouldn’t have thought about him again if it hadn’t been for his name on the prize—I’ve never considered myself traumatized by what happened—but seeing his face again is messing with my head. I was trying to be as transparent as possible, but I was starting to feel confused. Look, I said. It took me many years to admit that I’d been the target of a sexual predator—I was too proud to see myself as a victim and too unaware of my own innocence. Oh, we believe you, they replied. We just need to do due diligence.
Was I damaged by the experience? To cut to the chase, I never wrote poetry again. The seminar was the only one of its kind at the school; my predator’s poems had been published in the New Yorker and The Paris Review, and so his was the necessary, indispensable class for anyone who took their poetry seriously. As an artist and writer, I’m persistent and even dogged—you have to be persistent and dogged and immune to rejection to maintain any kind of creative practice—but I have to confess: he took that from me, although of course I wasn’t able to admit it. One of my sisters got married that fall, around the time I’d begun sleeping late and skipping classes; peering out from a wedding photograph with flowers and matching bridesmaids’ gowns and tuxedos and happy smiles, my eyes have the haunted look of a wounded animal. I’d learned something I hadn’t known before: that egregious acts can occur with impunity, and that it’s no big deal and no one cares all that much. The world had suddenly revealed itself to be a calculated interplay of coercion and transaction negotiated within a web of asymmetric power relations, and I’d lost faith: in the way merit naturally attracts recognition to itself, in the likelihood that I could succeed on my own terms, in my ability to foresee danger and remain safe.
I wrote to the boyfriend and another close friend from the time and asked if lecherous teacher/poetry seminar/banishment rang a bell. As it turned out, they each had a dim memory—did he have a beard? Or a scarf he wore all the time?—but it was all so long ago and they weren’t really sure. That entire autumn remains a black box: among the few things I’ve been able to make sense of in retrospect is that I dropped out after having what can only be called a nervous breakdown; that I eventually found a job at a design firm on Madison Avenue that needed someone to fill in on paste-ups and mechanicals that week, saw that I was good at it, and decided to keep me on; and that I—bafflingly—failed to draw any connection between the abrupt end to my education and what had happened to me. My recollection kicks in again several months later, when I resumed thinking about my future as an artist. I’d pinned a large sepia drawing of a nude to the textile divider of my cubicle, which drew an occasional lecherous comment from my neighbor, a Vietnam War veteran; after work, I lugged my portfolio and supplies downtown to a figure-drawing workshop. A return to art school would have required earning enough money for a year’s tuition and repeating my sophomore year before I’d be eligible for another student loan, and so I applied to another art school in New York City, the one that used to give full scholarships, but without success. I recall a handful of individual moments with odd clarity: sitting at a desk in an English literature class, trying to take an exam and watching the letters float up from the page; having coffee with a friend who’d also decided to drop out that semester and who gave me a mimeographed copy of Jenny Holzer’s first truisms. I remember visiting my boyfriend’s sister-in-law and her two little kids somewhere in the Bronx, and that I had the poems with me and was planning to ask the art director of the design firm I worked for to read them, although I don’t believe he was all that interested in literature or read much. It’s embarrassing to admit that I was such a slow learner: still yearning for validation from someone in a position of authority, still asking for permission to do what I already knew I was very good at. But I am still, it seems, blaming myself.
*
Like all artists who grow accustomed to persevering in adverse circumstances, I learned to give myself that permission. I wound up returning to the same art school a year later, on full scholarship; two of my wall-sized paintings remained hanging in the department head’s office several years after I graduated. I learned German and won a scholarship to the art academy in Berlin to do graduate work. But I’d grown wary, disgusted by power and position, uncomfortable with attention and success, withdrawn—I’d been injected with a skepticism that had crept into every pore of my being, and it’s never left me. The question remains: what do sexual harassment and the gaslighting that inevitably follows do to a young woman seeking the recognition she needs to advance in her academic and professional career? I’d met with an act of gratuitous spite on the part of a person whose job would have been to mentor and not groom me, someone who retaliated with all the power at his disposal when I didn’t give in to his proposition. To be clear: he was a paid member of the faculty; I was a tuition-paying student with a right to an education. Yet it felt like a personal failure on my part, something I’d managed to botch. How could I have been so silly to think it was the brilliance of my work and not my glowing skin that singled me out? I was ashamed, as though it had been my own lack of sophistication that had gotten me into trouble. As many young women do, I deceived myself. I was tough, dedicated, and serious about my work. Despite that—and I believe I’m speaking for many young women when I say this—I most certainly would have lost my nerve if I believed that sexism applied to me in any way. If we failed to navigate the perils and social complexities of the New York art world, it was our own fault. I’d seen other young women being pigeonholed, shunned, marked as attention-seekers. We’d internalized the expectation that we would not be believed to the point of self-censorship—and even, occasionally, to the point of not believing each other—and it carried into every situation in which we remained silent but nonetheless knew, in our gut, that the scholarship, the award, the job, the exhibition we’d hoped for and deserved and didn’t get had to do with our sex and not the quality of our work.
The Epstein files are being released at a time when so much is at stake: with sex offenders running the US government, it doesn’t take a genius to point out the connection between a male fear of ridicule and the rule of brute force that’s currently tearing down the international world order. Think of the ICE officer who felt justified in killing Renee Nicole Good because her lesbian partner dared poke at his vulnerable spot—his identity as a tough guy—and told him to “go get some lunch, big boy.” Is it really all that far off from my own predator, who couldn’t handle the fact that I didn’t swoon at his advances, that I wasn’t, in short, curious about his penis—and felt compelled to retaliate? The rage of a man when a woman chastises or sexually rebuffs him deserves closer scrutiny, but what we also don’t often talk about is the ordinary everyday misogyny that continuously robs women of their credibility and authority. It can be flagrant—why did it take Epstein’s emails to sway public opinion, why were the sworn testimonies of the women directly impacted by the crimes and willing to name names worth any less?—but also so subtle that it often only registers in retrospect. One part of a woman’s shame in calling out sexual harassment and sexual abuse, especially if she’s older, is the claim of being or having been so sexually desirable that an older man singled her out, fixated on her, badly wanted her, and when he didn’t get her, lost his composure. A common claim among offenders is “But I’m not attracted to her.” It shifts the burden of credibility to the victim: was she ever pretty enough, slim enough, sexy enough? Or is it wishful thinking on her part that she could have ever inspired that kind of desire?
As a society, we are habituated to misogyny; for the most part, men, even well-meaning male friends, don’t notice it. When we point it out, we are sometimes accused of being oversensitive, or we’re exaggerating, dramatizing. Incidentally, there is a particular brand of misogyny reserved for mothers, one I’d nearly forgotten about but was recently reminded of again as I advocate for my son’s recovery. Occasionally, I make a preemptive attempt to forestall the disrespect headed my way by offering a mildly self-deprecating joke, and I almost always regret it—suddenly, I am the worried mother wringing her hands in needless anxiety and not the published writer and experienced researcher with a list of crucial questions and information the doctor has neglected to address. Yet experience shows that assertiveness and sound argumentation fail to yield better results: suddenly, we’re the raving lunatics who either have their period or are currently in menopause or post-menopause or “need a good fuck”—reduced, as always, to our bodies, our degree of desirability, and our role in the reproductive cycle.
Everywhere you look, women continue to be stymied in their development, objectified, denied education and employment, trafficked, dictated to about their bodies and what they are allowed to wear or show or do in public, forced into servitude or prostitution, battered, and killed, for the most part by the men closest to them. If it sounds like a global conspiracy, it’s because it is. As for me, I got off far more easily than most, but I sometimes fantasize that if we could gather the rage of all the women who have been wronged throughout time—abused in all the ordinary ways, in all the myriad forms misogyny assumes on a daily basis—and mobilize it, concentrate it into a force for change, for all-encompassing reform—we might finally shift the distribution of power in society, bring about a fundamental redefinition of values, and direct shame at the behavior that truly warrants it: the fantasies of omnipotence and unaccountability that have been victimizing women, immigrants, refugees, people of color, and the planet—and every other group that has suffered at the hands of male power—for ages. But doesn’t that sound too naïve, too feminine, too maternal? It’s your choice whether or not to consider the evidence.
*