~ by Katerina Lorenzatos Makris

When I was three or four, a distant relative drove me to a park near my family’s home and sexually assaulted me with a kitchen implement.

When I was ten, an employee of my father’s took me to school every day for months. One day he drove me instead to a dead end on a street of abandoned homes, parked the car, and attempted to sexually molest me. Luckily—very luckily—he stopped as soon as I tried to run away.

When I was 16, a male relative sneaked into the bathroom and snapped a nude photo of me as I stepped out of the shower. His response to my outraged fury was, “Shut up. You’ll be grateful for this picture when you’re old and wrinkled.”

Most of my closest friends have never heard me talk about these incidents, nor the many additional sexual assaults and insults I’ve experienced in my five-plus decades, some of which are listed below.

Why reveal these painful experiences now?

My cancer and Donald Trump

My ongoing battle with gynecologic cancer brought me halfway to the point of wanting to spill these very personal stories. I’ve just begun two months of external and internal pelvic radiation for recurrent endometrial carcinoma. Although I’m an animal rescuer and a writer focusing primarily on animal welfare issues (in fact I probably became a rescuer and a writer in large part because of those assaults), I’ve now become keenly interested in reporting on the topics of women’s physical and emotional health too.

Ironically, it was Donald Trump who pulled me the rest of the way out of the abuse survivor’s closet. His barrage of hate speech against women, not to mention against Hispanics, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled, and others, along with his supporters’ excuses for it, have made it impossible to stay quiet a moment longer.

As a journalist, I keep my political opinions to myself. But this has little to do with politics. It cuts through party lines—Republican, Democrat, and all the others.

In just one Democrat example, let’s not forget the antics of San Diego ex-mayor Bob Filner, sentenced to three years of probation for “placing a woman in a headlock, kissing another woman and grabbing the buttocks of a third,” according to KPBS. Reportedly, some of Filner’s backers knew for quite a while about his disgraceful and criminal behavior, yet did little to stop him.

It’s a pretty safe guess that former presidents Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and other Democrat leaders made their share of salacious comments and unwanted advances toward women.

So this is is not just about Trump. This is about arcane, oppressive, and frightening misogynistic attitudes held by both men and women clear across political and social spectra.

I’m done with silence. I need to give testimony on how it feels to be at the receiving end of sexual violence. I need to voice my anger at the cavalier trash talk spewed by Trump and others against females. I need to document its reinforcement of the already too-prevalent attitudes that it’s OK to humiliate and hurt women, children, elders, LGBTQ folks, animals, and others considered to be lower in the power hierarchy—whether it’s with actions or with “just” words.

It is not OK. It is never OK.

‘Grab ’em by the pussy’

“You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful— I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” said United States Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump during a taped conversation with an entertainment show host in 2005. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In other instances over the past decade or two, Trump has bragged that as owner of beauty pageants such as Miss USA and Miss Teen USA he was allowed to go backstage to “inspect” while the “incredible-looking” contestants were in the dressing room “standing there with no clothes.”

He has publicly and repeatedly discussed his own daughter Ivanka in a a sexual way, commenting that she has “always been very voluptuous.” He speculated that if he weren’t happily married, and if he weren’t Ivanka’s father, he might date her. He assured a talk show host that he didn’t mind Ivanka being called “a piece of ass.”

Facing criticism, Trump apologized for his lewd comments, but repeatedly minimized the significance of such language by calling it just “locker room talk,” and just “one of those things.” He insisted that there are so many more important issues in the world that this one does not deserve further attention.

He also insists that the many women who have come forward with allegations that he did indeed assault them in similar ways to what he himself had boastfully described are “liars,” part of a “smear campaign” and a “global power structure” conspiracy to bring him down.

Those who support Trump argue that his off-color musings are meaningless, and must not be counted against him, because he maintains that they were “just talk”–not actions—and because so many other men say and even do things just like that.

Boys will be boys… and will be president?

Certainly it is correct that some men say and do things just like that. And certainly many of the supporters of those men have defended their abhorrent words and/or actions exactly as Trump’s posse is doing now.

What seems unusual this time is to have a standing presidential candidate and his multitudes of followers pass off his descriptions of sexually assaulting women as nothing more than lighthearted chitchat. Not important. Same-o, same-o. Yawn.

Trump’s wife Melania said she was “surprised” to hear the recording of her husband’s 2005 remarks, but explained them away by saying, “I heard many different stuff—boys talk. The boys, the way they talk when they grow up and they want to sometimes show each other, ‘Oh, this and that’ and talking about the girls.”

Yes, folks, it’s once again time for the age-old “boys will be boys” excuse, but what’s startling these days is that it’s being extended to a man who seeks to become the leader of one of the mightiest empires the earth has ever seen, and whose unabashed use of that handy little pardon threatens to usher in a whole new era of making light of violence toward woman. Of laughing at it. Laughing. And thereby encouraging it.

Several assault and harassment incidents

When I was in my twenties and thirties working as a wire service reporter, I conducted hundreds of interviews with men of all backgrounds and professions—from astronauts to senators to circus owners to Academy Award-winning actors. Most were meticulously respectful. A few were lecherous. One of them, who later rose to high government office, inched closer and closer, grinning, with his arm on the back of the bench where we sat, nearly entrapping me, while I inched farther and farther away, still trying to ask my questions, until the bench no longer held space for me. A cub reporter afraid of losing my hard-to-get job if I bailed on the assignment, I jumped up and finished the interview while standing six feet away.

When I was in my forties, strolling down the sidewalk as a tourist on the main street of a small town, a group of teenage boys on mopeds whizzed past, slowing down just enough so that one of them could grab my butt before zooming away, all of them roaring with laughter.

Last month, a long-time, close male friend told me he believed it would be a crime to do the type of groping of women that Donald Trump boasted about. I replied that I wasn’t sure if it would be considered a crime in all 50 states, since laws can be rather lax on such matters. He said, “Oh yeah? Well, how would you like it if somebody did this to you?” Then he did it to me. I was stunned.

Reporting incidents doesn’t always work

I wish I could say that I reported all these violations, and that all the violators were punished. Instead, here’s what happened in each case:

My childhood sexual assault went unreported because I was too little to understand that it was a crime, or even something I should tell my mother, and by the time I did understand it, the person who had done it was dead. Decades later when I tried discussing it with one family member, the reaction was to question my memory.

I did report the attempted molestation by my father’s employee to two trusted adults immediately after it occurred. To my great shock, both of those adults laughed and said the employee had probably “just gotten disoriented” when he drove to the dead-end street, and couldn’t possibly have intended to harm me.

In contrast, the clerk at the photo processing shop where my male relative always took his film rolls was deeply sympathetic when I showed up requesting the prints as well as the negatives of the nude images of me. He handed them right over while saying that he would be horrified if anything like that ever happened to his wife or sisters.

The politician who chased me off the bench back in the 1980s went on to enjoy two terms in elected office and probably never gave a second thought to the novice reporter whom he had sexually harassed, and who took days to emotionally recover. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have objected to his behavior right then and there—job be damned. I would have reported it to his campaign manager, to my editors, and tried to include a description of it in my article about him. But then was not now. Back then, he may or may not have stopped inching me down the bench. His handlers were probably well aware of his behavior and would have taken no action. I think my editors would have been sympathetic and comforting, but they almost certainly would not have removed any such description from my article.

In retrospect, what troubles me most about that incident is that although I may have changed over the decades, our society has not. Considering the “boys will be boys” pardon that was automatically granted to Mr. Trump about his rape culture language, it seems we still live in that same rape culture, and it might be getting worse.

In the small town where the teenagers grabbed my butt, the police officers to whom I immediately reported the incident replied that I mustn’t file a complaint because the boys were “just kids,” didn’t mean any harm, and it could “ruin their lives” if I tried to press charges. The next day I went to the mayor’s office, demanded to speak to him, and ended up meeting with both the mayor and his wife. The mayor was courteous but noncommittal. His wife was visibly upset. She took me aside afterward to tell me that she was pretty sure she knew who the boys were and was appalled but not surprised. She doubted there would be any formal action taken against the teens, given how things worked in that town, but vowed that she would personally speak to the suspects’ parents, and also that she would bring the matter up at the next school association meeting to make it clear to all students and their families that such behavior must not be tolerated.

I left the next day, and never followed up. I don’t know if the mayor’s wife ever fulfilled her promises. I do believe she was sincere in her horror at the boys’ behavior, and that she wanted to prevent it from continuing and worsening. I pray that she did.

As for the man who groped my genitals last month, we’ve been friends for more than a decade. His wife is also a dear friend. She is facing her own rough battle with cancer right now. I’ve opted not to report him to anyone other than his wife. After talking at length with us both, her husband humbly and apologetically has begun seeing a psychotherapist, so as to try to understand why he did what he did, and to prevent it from ever happening again.

Sexual assault is commonplace

I wish I could say that my experiences with all these sexual assaults are unusual. Unfortunately they are not.

According to the United States Department of Justice:

• One in four girls are sexually abused before the age of 18.
• Approximately one in five female high school students report being physically and/or sexually abused by a dating partner.
• 18% of American women have been raped during their lifetime.

A 2014 survey of 2,000 people commissioned by the nonprofit group Stop Street Harassment found that 65% of the participants had experienced street harassment—“23% had been sexually touched, 20% had been followed, and 9% had been forced to do something sexual.”

We live in a predatory environment where “locker room talk” fosters the easy acceptance of sexual violence. I believe that such snickering, tacit approval contributed at least in part to the assaults on me, and to countless more assaults on other girls and women.

I believe that as we speak, Donald Trump’s gleeful description of grabbing women’s “pussies” is leading to copycat assaults of exactly that type on countless females all over the world, just like the one on me last month.

Wink and look the other way?

We stand at a crossroads. Will we just wink and look the other way while Trump and others like him get away with sullying our bodies and desecrating our souls? Or we will we take action to stop them?

All women and men with a shred of conscience must demand that trash talk against females be acknowledged for what it is—a precursor to violence. A testing of the waters. If they accept my talking about it, the prospective predator must ask himself, well hey, why won’t they accept me doing it?

Where there’s derisive badinage about committing violence, where there’s verbal exploration of the concept, where it’s portrayed as fun and titillating, there’s only a small step to actually committing it.

If we don’t stand up and denounce “boys being boys”—especially those who propose to lead our hearts, our minds, and our country into the future—when they casually banter about sexual disrespect and violence, we run the great risk of allowing such talk to subtly condone, to insidiously normalize, and to subliminally encourage that disrespect and violence. Its perverse path to acculturation can only lead to more and more vile behavior toward girls and women like me, many of whom have precious little voice with which to object, and who will be forced to suffer it in silence.

Sick and dangerous

I, for one, have endured plenty of the emotional as well as the physical effects of violence aimed at females, and I will no longer tolerate it. Nor will I tolerate the cavalier “locker room banter” about violence—the banter that we are being told is normal and harmless.

It is not normal. It is not harmless. It is sick. It is dangerous.

I will no longer look the other way. I will no longer bear it in silence.

How about you?

Katerina Lorenzatos Makris is a career journalist, author, and editor. Her fiction includes 17 novels for Simon and Schuster, E.P. Dutton, Avon, and other major publishers (under the name Kathryn Makris), as well as a teleplay for CBS-TV, and a short story for The Bark magazine. She has written hundreds of articles for regional wire services and for outlets such as National Geographic Traveler, The San Francisco Chronicle, Travelers’ Tales, NBC’s Petside.com, RescueDiva.com, AnimalIssuesReporter.com, and Examiner.com (Animal Policy Examiner).

Together with coauthor Shelley Frost, Katerina wrote a step-by-step guide for hands-on, in-the-trenches dog rescue, Your Adopted Dog: Everything You Need to Know About Rescuing and Caring for a Best Friend in Need (The Lyons Press).