Teenage Wasteland
“The predator wants your silence. It feeds their power, entitlement, and they want it to feed your shame.” –Viola Davis
Hearing that Epstein and his charming, British girlfriend were frequent visitors to Interlochen, an art school about an hour from my current home in northern Michigan, was both disturbing and made perfect sense. Interlochen prides itself on being “special” and certainly the two predators targeted “special” girls, God forbid they groomed someone who lacked talent, although beauty was the thing that they found especially enticing. Of course, Interlochen no longer functions as it did in the years when Epstein was able to visit his private accommodations so kindly provided by the school’s gratitude for his large contributions. Now there is security and possibly teachers who are not like several of the teachers who once taught at my own “special” school; a private school in Princeton, New Jersey that I attended during my final three years of high school.
Molly Moynahan, 1975
I started this school after the summer. I had my braces taken off and a much older man, a person who was the leader of a bicycle trip I took for a month, decided I was “special” and until the moment before we had sex and he came to his senses, treated me like a lover. I was fifteen and wholly ignorant except in a very literary way of the world of men and boys. But I had read Women in Love and Wuthering Heights and several novels by Joyce Carol Oates that indicated my role in life was to be a vessel for the fantasies of men who decided I was “special.” If they were violent that was a sign that they loved you.
After that month I was unable to see myself as free because it was communicated to me that my beauty and youth caused problems for men. After that month I started drinking and began to hate myself. Later that summer I went on a date, my first date ever, with a boy who raped me while explaining he was unable to control himself because I was so beautiful.
I was fortunate in that someone I decided to sleep with several months after that summer treated me with tenderness and when he discovered I was sixteen, I had inadvertently referred to taking a school bus, he was aghast and asked me who had hurt me so badly. I did not have an answer. Yes, my father was violent when drunk and I longed to be closer to him, yes, an adult man had groomed me and then told me I was a child who did not understand ‘animal’ urges, and yes, this older boy had forced me to have sex with him and then blamed me for being pretty, but I could not identify the hurt. The hurt went so deep and damaged my dreams of love and kindness so completely, I felt myself to be someone who would never love anyone. And, for the first time since I was a child, I hated myself. All the years spent running barefoot, playing games with my friends and looking forward to the future fell away.
In the new school I drank at a local bar with the gym teacher and heard stories about friends sleeping with teachers. Because I transferred into a culture of money and privilege, I soon found myself on the outside and without the help and care of certain wonderful teachers and my eldest sister, I may have given up. In college I was hunted by a professor who announced his intention to sleep with me and even though I begged him to leave me alone, my boyfriend at the time had transferred to a distant college, he would not. Finally, I gave in and while I cried throughout, he was triumphant.
No one understands how it feels to have sex with someone you actually hate unless this has happened to you. My survival is a result of getting sober in a twelve-step program, great psychotherapy, and the men in my life who were able to be my dear friends as well as my lovers. I survived on a mixture of rage and hope. When I consider the damage that someone like Epstein and his minions have caused, I can only hope these survivors know their innocence was not their fault.
–Molly Moynahan