But I am so glad it is deleted—because the next day, I am barraged with the most racist email I have ever received in my life. I’ve been put on some white-supremacist site with the headline “Unattractive Post Reporter Dates N—er Rapist.” The disgusting emails and even letters pour in. I am a ruined, filthy, disgusting woman, my corpse should be spit on, they tell me. I am a race traitor.
But dozens of women also reach out, thanking me profusely and confiding in me their stories. The emails that I have quoted from Hugues in my story were used word for word and sent to them, too. His TV show does not exist. The footage of the interviews he got was stolen from Charlie Rose. These women’s stories matched mine: charmed initially—and then things got scary. Stalking. Abuse. I’m floored.
Shaken, I call my father. We talk for a while, and I tell him how much all of this has upset me. I read him one of the letters from some deranged bigot railing at me, saying he wishes he could spit on my corpse because he is so revolted that I dated a black man. I’m crying as I read it aloud. I don’t know why I am letting this into my psyche. I don’t know why I am digging deeper into the wound, but I can’t seem to stop. I want to show how alone and scared and alienated and attacked I feel. I want to feel protected. I want to feel nurtured and defended and tended to by my daddy, who will guard me from the evil in this world. My father listens patiently. He expresses his disgust. But I do not feel the concern I am so desperately seeking. Instead, I feel distraction, almost indifference, and a practicality that taps into something deeper, younger, rawer inside of me—it’s an ancient wound, and I feel like a neglected, self-pitying child. Is he just purposefully being withholding?
“Please,” I say to my dad at one point, “ask me if I’m feeling okay.”
My father is quiet. And then he speaks.
“You sound okay,” he says flatly.
Of course—I understand, my dad has been through so much. He sees the world through a lens of combat vet brutality. He is right, for sure. I do sound okay. Because I am breathing. Because my eyeball is not dangling out of my head. Because I am not being left for dead in the Vietnamese jungle. This too will pass. And my feeble attempt at trying to express my needs in this moment makes me wish I was a combat marine myself—and not his daughter.
When a Manhattan assistant district attorney gets in contact with me, I’m able to connect her with countless women, which is one good thing that does come out of the experience. But when I go down to talk to the ADA in a corporate conference room on the third floor with Post lawyers present, going point-by-point through what happened (“And what did you do when he pulled out his penis the third time?”), something unexpected happens.
I can’t even speak in coherent sentences, my sobs choke me so much.
“I feel so stupid,” I tell the ADA. “I said no, but I still let him do what he did.”
“No. Don’t feel bad,” she tells me. “One woman resisted, and he punched her in the face.”
It turns out he terrorized hundreds of women. I am one of the lucky ones.
Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered how disassociation works, consider this: I only remembered stomach-churning details (“I want to show you a trick”) from finding my original reporting notebooks. When I went to write this, I still could not remember it, even though I had just typed up the notes.
Pain is a funny thing.
Giving my testimony to the lawyers after the piece runs summons up every shitty experience with men I have had over the course of my lifetime, and suddenly, I am drowning. I feel so much grief for myself and how much danger I put myself in. There is no denying it. I devalued myself so much, and I lost myself in the process.
Later that night, after meeting with the ADA, I attended some stupid publicist party with one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey. I think the one who flipped the table. It is held at the strip club Scores. A shy young bleached-blond girl comes up to me and asks if I want a dance. She tells me it’s her first day as a stripper. I see deep cuts on her arms that are probably not visible to most people in the strip club’s flashing lights.
“What are those?” I ask.
“I used to be really depressed,” she says, smiling at me with empty eyes.
I look at her, at the blankness in her expression, and my heart goes out to her in such a profound way.
“From one girl to another, will you promise me something?” I ask her. “You cannot tell these men about the cutting thing. Just say it was a car accident. You need to protect yourself, okay?”
She nods and proceeds to conduct her business. It’s like I’m getting a lap dance from my goddamned psyche.
THAT NIGHTMARE DATE is, thankfully, the extreme exception. You don’t end up getting legally deposed after most dates—or having to compartmentalize the trauma they inflict on you in order to move forward in daily life. (One therapist of mine calls these incidents “little t’s,” and I find that such a spunky way to talk about trauma.)
My dating is now kind of a job—and it becomes hard to even keep track.
Winning the award for most bizarre date during this time is the lawyer who after a nice night spent walking around
