CONTENT WARNING
Ongoing CSA + F-Words Galore
Cathartic Letters
Pink Flowers, Vomit, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — Avenging My Mother. Finally.
Dear Mama of Mine, today is Mother’s Day. Of course, I’ve been thinking of you for days and weeks leading up to this day. I so wish you were here with me. I wish I could have this conversation with you so we could cry together and hug each other now that the truth and weight of it all is something I’ve finally been given the tools to truly understand.
Despite your unfair and premature absence from this world, I know you are still with me, loving me and holding me in your fierce embrace through this epic transition that began so unexpectedly two years ago.
Because of all the wrong things you and I were made to believe and feel responsible for in the 1980’s, I unknowingly had 40 years of trauma buried deep inside when the actual truth of it all started unfolding for me in 2023. Surely, it will take some time for me to re-write that history—to literally write its wrongs—and for my body and soul to rebuild themselves around truth instead of atop a toxic foundation of lies and cruelty.
Today, I am beginning to tell my truth, for you, Mom.
#ShameOnOMD #KidsCantConsent
#ShiftTheShame #WriteTheWrongs
I am trying so hard, Mama. I really want to understand all of this for me and for my well-being. But Mom, it’s you I’m here to avenge today. I’m so incredibly pained by all your suffering, the guilt and responsibility so improperly forced on you, and the giant hole blown through the middle of our lives and our love when I was just a child. And all of it happening when you had finally just begun to see the results of your concerted efforts to make a better life for us? It’s downright infuriating, Mom.
We were about to take off, you and I. You’d worked so so hard to give me all you’d never had the right to dream of having when you were my age. You did it all with no help, all alone—a single mom in a sexist age. You did everything you could to raise your one precious daughter in safety and security while always, always focusing on my potential and my bright future—the one you were so carefully crafting for me. That future was going to mean that I, unlike you, would be able to go to college and build a giant, happy, productive, fulfilling life for myself and any family I might choose to make.
Two years ago, I started digging through the documents of my life. I found report cards and test scores. I realized, much to my heartbroken surprise, that in 1984 when I was in 9th grade, I was in the top 10% of US students. I met OMD that Summer. But, because I met OMD that Summer, 10th grade was the end of my educational career. Despite all my promise and potential, my school, Immaculate Heart, chose to push me out when I wasn’t performing the same as the other girls. Of course, those students hadn’t been repeatedly manipulated, trafficked and raped by an adult the summer before they started 10th grade.
But Mom, at least I’ve finally learned my dropping out of high school was NOT because I was a bad and useless girl, as I was told at 15. Instead of any support or compassion, any curiosity or care, my school—which was responsible for me being on that fateful trip—offered nothing but condemnation and a forceful invitation for me to leave. There was no help, no acknowledgment of what had happened, and zero accountability for our cruel and neglectful tour chaperone. Instead, my religion teacher, Mr. Leary, and the Principal, Sister Ruth Anne, called you in to tell you that I was an ungrateful burden, refusing to live up to my potential. Instead of care, the people you’d paid to teach me to be a successful, strong, capable, independent young woman told you—in front of me—that I was “useless and would never amount to anything.” I was a 15 year old girl who had just been sexually assaulted, repeatedly, by a man 9 years my senior. Prior to that I had been in the top 10% of students nation-wide, and they never thought to ask me what was wrong?
The first time I googled child sex assault and read what percentage of its victims drop out of school, I broke down sobbing. Turns out, it happens to the majority of us. But forty years ago, my small self internalized all the very worst things they said about me. For forty years, Mr. Leary’s lies about me being a useless girl who didn’t deserve anyone’s care, assistance, or compassion had made me feel so ashamed and humiliated, so undeserving, incapable and disappointing, over and over again. But, Mom it wasn’t true—none of it was true. He was a horrible man and an even worse teacher. I was NOT a bad girl. I was a victim of an adult man’s sexual exploitation and I was doing all I could to just cope and manage with how that had left me feeling. I was so out of sorts, so not myself back at school after the initial exploitation had happened. And I was struggling to keep it hidden from you because I wrongly believed it was all my fault and that I would get in serious trouble.
Mommy, I didn’t drop out of high school because I was a bad girl. I dropped out because I was a victim of a bad man’s sex crimes.
It was truly soul-crushing to realize my whole identity—the things I had believed about myself since I was a girl—were all lies. Clumsy, cruel, and woefully inept mishandling of my trauma and complete disregard for my vulnerability and innocence, went on to devastate my life for four decades.
But, Mama, would you believe, learning it was all lies and cruel contempt for a deeply injured child actually initiated a healing process in my body? It did! The incurable liver disease Graham triggered (the last time he tried to coerce me into unwanted sex) seems to have regressed—at least that’s what my last liver scans said. I’m still struggling to believe it wasn’t an error, but the potential for it to be reality is one more reason I want to share my story now.
I want other women to know this opportunity for healing exists for them too. Women who were raped as girls in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s but who, like me, never had anyone tell them: “Hey, you weren’t actually that grown man’s girlfriend, you were raped and exploited, taken advantage of, recruited for your innocence and what it allowed them to get away with.”
I want those women to know that they too may have wrongly internalized harmful and destructive untruths about themselves—when in reality, they were just innocent kids being exploited, same as me. They’ve maybe never understood the direct connection between the childhood exploitation they suffered and their educational failings, chronic illnesses, relationship and job struggles, ADHD, depression, or their self-medicating with alcohol, cannabis and other drugs.
They may have carried toxic, entirely misplaced guilt for decades, as I have.
They may have suffered unfair stigmas and debilitating shame around how the exploitation they endured as children has impacted their lives. It may have made them sick, given them heart disease or cancer, lupus, rare liver or blood diseases, rheumatoid arthritis, eczema, suicidal ideation, shortened life span, or more. I want them to know that if my incurable disease did, in fact, reverse its course and start regressing, it did so because I finally learned the truth about my life. I didn’t take a new drug, or get a new therapy, or go to the Amazon and take ayahuasca. I just took in the truth. Finally. And that truth simply displaced all the despicable lies I’d believed since I was 14. Lies so many irresponsible adults had so carelessly laid like pieces of kindling at my feet 40 years ago. Over time, the fire they started went on to burn my spirit, my self-esteem, my future, my potential, and my joie de vivre. Maybe my story can help ladies like these begin to heal, as I have.
The day you told me you had read my journals and found out about Graham—almost a year after I met OMD—was the day I broke out in chicken pox, for the second time. Or so I believed, for 40 years.
I’ve recently learned the overwhelming stress I experienced during that time of my life kept me in a protracted state of fight or flight. Something none of us knew anything about in 1984—but which we now know wreaks havoc on a body. And, the younger the body, the more intense the damage.
Once I learned more about stress’ harmful impacts, I became curious about that second bout of chicken pox. I reached out to a few medical professionals and they told me we don’t actually get chicken pox twice, we get it once—everything after that is Shingles. That’s a grandparent’s illness, not a 15-year-old kid’s. Unless, of course, that kid’s immune system was broken by sexual assault when they were 14. Go figure.
OMD’s lifetime impacts to my health, or lack thereof, began less than a year after I met them. But it took me almost 40 years to put together the many pieces of this nightmare puzzle so I could finally see the whole, true picture come into focus. I never ever could have conceived of the entire story in 1984 because I was a child who did not yet know how eager some adults are to exploit kids—or how that exploitation can wreck entire lives.
Mom, after I returned home from that trip in 1984, and from then on, you referred to my life as having two distinct parts and me being two different girls—Before Europe & After Europe. Neither of us knew then what you were actually seeing and experiencing was Before OMD & After OMD.
Mama, I’m so sorry for what happened to our tiny, two-person, micro family. Just as we were finally finding our way and becoming able to stand on our feet, heads held high—despite the pain and betrayal so many of your kin had meted out in our life. It all got ripped away and ruined in just a month’s time. I’m so sorry we were never the same again. I’m sorry it stole so much, over and over and over from the remainder of our life together. I’m sorry I never got to say I’m sorry before you died. I’m sorry I didn’t figure out all the lies and bullshit before you left, so I could cry these tears with you. I’m so tortured by the fact I never got to beg for your forgiveness for what happened to us, because of me.
I love you, Mom. I hope you know just how much. I hope you know I never meant to hurt you. I never meant for you to be dropped to your knees, time and time again, from the misery and pain that stole what we had, what we were to one another, and what we were supposed to become. You were robbed. You were wronged. So was I. Now it’s time to #WriteTheWrongs.
I’m so sorry I was just 14, and I didn’t know. I was so young and so naive, I didn’t know. God, I wish I could go back and do anything, do everything in my power to keep it from happening. But I was just a baby and I didn’t know. So, now all I can do is scream to the heavens and hope you’ll hear when I say: Mama, I’m so so sorry that I got raped by an adult man when I was just 14 and that it broke me so badly, it broke you too. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.
If I could go back and do anything differently to take away all that was forced into your life, all that was wrecked and stolen from your life, I would do it. If I had a time machine, Mama, I would go back and kill that man rather than let him do what he did to me that in turn did all that it did to you—for the rest of your life. You didn’t deserve any of it, not one second and yet, my god—you endured so many seconds, so many days and weeks and years of suffering because of that man in that awful band full of men just like him.
Mom, I wish Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark never existed. I wish I never met them. I wish someone had been there that day to care about me and my life the way only you did. You would have protected me. You would have kicked those narcissistic child predators in their lecherous dicks before letting them put their vile hands on us innocent girls.
Mama, I’m writing this letter and starting this project to avenge all the pain they caused us. But, I’m also writing for every other mother and daughter in the world. I hope they can learn from our suffering. I hope they can do everything possible to avoid the kind of life-altering destruction that happens when adult men tell young girls that they love them. When they tell girls they are their boyfriends—so they should do things for them and with them that they’re too young, both of mind and body, to even understand.
I want mothers and daughters and the world to know that so-called “statutory” rape is regular rape, but worse. FAR WORSE. It’s not a lesser, less-harmful, or non-injurious crime like our culture, our laws, our legislators, and more still pretend. No, to be statutorily raped is not simply to be assaulted and have your body used and exploited by a predator. To be statutorily raped as a child is to be manipulated, lied to, brainwashed and coerced by an adult that child regards, loves, and trusts. It often involves adults plying children with drugs and alcohol. It is NOT a spontaneous crime. It involves intention, forethought, conspiracy, and inculcation—OF A CHILD, by AN ADULT. When adults dupe and coerce children into becoming their crime victims that is the MOST heinous crime, not the least.
I know this now, Mom. I see clearly now—it took almost 40 years, far too long. But I am grateful to have finally been given the chance to take in the big picture with my adult eyes, with my many years of life now lived. I am grateful for this nascent understanding of how all the bad things that kept happening after I met OMD were because of them and their crimes against us girls—not because of me, and most certainly not because of you.
We were perfect, Mommy—those shit men stole our chance to show that to the world and now that I fully understand, I hate them so much. So. SO. MUCH.
Mom, I have to tell you how this all started: I found out I have a sister! I discovered her via ancestry at the end of 2022. She’s a few years older than me. My dad never knew she existed because her mom was unable to raise her and so arranged for her to be adopted. Isn’t that amazing? I was an only child my whole life and then I got a surprise sister at 52! She grew up on the other side of LA from us. She went to school with my friends Christy and Nicole and Gwenn. Can you believe that? Her first boyfriend was someone I knew and he and his sister were even at my 21st birthday party. Isn’t that wild? We hit it off immediately. I think our first phone call was hours long. She asked about my dad, our dad, and, sigh, that was complicated. But, I wanted to give her something, anything, to show her who he was. So, I started going through old boxes of pictures and memories, looking for pics of Paul, for the daughter he never got to know. But, Mom, while I was looking I found other things—things I wasn’t looking for, things that were hard to look at once they’d been found again after so many years.
I remember the first pile of pics I came across of me with members of OMD. I showed one (⬇) to my partner of 25 years. He recoiled and exclaimed “Um…you were just a kid!” I felt so embarrassed. Shame washed over me. Of course, he was right, so I didn’t bother to tell him that pic had actually been taken after I’d “broken up” with Graham, at age 16.
I did manage, at least, to say: “Yep. Some day, somebody will have to go after the record labels. They paid for all this stuff, they helped it happen, and they need to be held accountable. That’s the only way it’ll ever stop.”
I’ve recently learned sexual assault, especially in childhood, affects memory. It’s not surprising then that I don’t remember how I went from being at this San Diego concert, with my teen boyfriend, to being in Graham’s Los Angeles hotel room at the Hyatt On Sunset. (The infamous former “Riot House,” aka, the Sunset on Hyatt. It was OMD’s preferred hotel in LA. Likely because their label and management knew that Hyatt had been willing to #LookAway for decades when musicians regularly rolled in with criminally too-young girls.)
Graham spent that night insisting I have sex with him but I repeatedly refused. That was the night he learned he’d given me an STD—HPV! He was horrified. He no longer wanted to have sex with me. He told me if I stayed the night, he’d take me to the clinic the next day. I did stay, but he didn’t take me to the clinic. He went shopping instead and let me go by myself.
Mom, I recently found his letter to me from after he’d arrived back home from that tour. In it, he described the things he bought at the mall—while I was sitting alone in the free clinic waiting for my first-ever vaginal exam and STD treatment. Reading that letter in my 50’s was when I first realized that, of course, he’d not gone with me to the clinic. I was 16, he was 25, and, unlike me, the clinic would have noticed the obvious sex crime staring them in the face. He knew that.
A few weeks later, my partner sent me an article—Steven Tyler and Aerosmith’s record label were being sued by Julia Holcomb who was alleging Tyler had raped her when she was a teen. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, I had just said that exact thing weeks prior. How could it be? I read more. California had changed their statute of limitations laws to allow historical victims of child sex assault to sue their abuser and their abuser’s employer or associated institutions for crimes committed long-ago. Before these changes, child victims of those types of crimes really had no path forward in pursuit of long-overdue justice.
I looked into these laws, trying to understand what was going on. Confused and wondering if what had happened to me—crimes wrongly labeled “dating”, “love”, and “entirely normal” in the kid-rape-endorsing 80’s—was the same as what had happened to Julia, in the kid-rape-endorsing 70’s. I started to feel very uncomfortable. Sleeplessness came. Head and stomach aches accompanied a total absence of appetite. A fixation on reading and understanding took all my focus and energy. 2023 was the first time in my life that I googled child sex assault. It was also the year I stopped calling Graham my first boyfriend and instead started forcing myself to call him what he was—a child predator and my rapist.
I was 14 in the first 3 places, 15 in the next 5, and had just turned 16 the day before Pepperdine—where Graham raped me in the stall of the backstage bathroom during a 2-song break he had in OMD’s set.
I read through so many websites for law firms disingenuously soliciting these types of cases. I discovered the legal change that allowed Julia to sue Tyler was a temporary “look back window”, which, of course, had closed before I learned of it. But, I also learned there were other laws changing in other states—states I’d also been raped in. I vaguely remembered some news item about President Biden removing Federal statutes of limitation. I knew I had been trafficked around the country by OMD to be raped by Graham Weir. And I knew that was a Federal crime, not state. So I tried to learn about those laws too, but again it seemed, for one reason or another, that they didn’t apply to me.
Frustratingly, the cases I read about being brought under these new laws seemed to be for victims that hadn’t suffered nearly as much injury and loss as I had. Most of those victims had been older than 14. Many had suffered just a single incident of abuse, again, unlike me who suffered ongoing child sex assault over the entirety of my adolescence. Most of the cases being brought were from women who also didn’t have years’ worth of proof and many, many witnesses to the child-rape they endured, like I do. It didn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense.
Alas, the ongoing failings of our legal system, of lawyers and legislators cosplaying as advocates for victims of child sex assault is a whole other letter, or book, I’ll have to write someday. Suffice it to say, it was news of Julia’s lawsuit that finally broke the psychological dam that had been holding back my story’s truth for decades. For that alone, I will always be grateful, even if I never get to sue Graham Weir, Andy McCluskey, OMD, Virgin Records, A&M Records, Interscope Records, or Universal Music for the crimes Graham Weir committed against me as a child. Crimes Andy McCluskey was instrumental in helping bring from conspiracy to fruition. The crimes every member of OMD, their crew, their management and assorted entourage saw taking place and were, therefore, accomplices to.
Of course, they all know I know it wasn’t ever just me. Mom, you know, I was not the only teen girl criminally exploited in California and around the US by a member of OMD. I have recently compiled all the pics and letters one would need to validate this claim. Of course, OMD dudes and I all know why those won’t be necessary for that. This is one sexual assault story involving a band where it’s legit impossible for them to say: “Nuh-uh, that didn’t happen.” But the stories of OMD’s other victims are not mine to tell.
Of course, if Andy is out there saying it himself, well, that’s not me…
The night of the pic above with Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins was the night OMD got their preview copy of the video for If You Leave. Everyone piled into the tour bus to watch it. What I’m saying here is, I knew the 17 year old. I knew her in 1986 when Pretty In Pink came out. I knew in her in 1985. And I knew her in 1984. Make of that what you will because it’s not my story to tell. Oh, and still, we weren’t the only ones.
If their label, their management, or they themselves had cared the tiniest bit about the well-being of literal kids, they would have had a basic policy requiring IDs to go backstage, on their bus, and into their hotel rooms. But they didn’t—care about kids or have a policy to protect them…and from my personal experience, I’m pretty sure I know why.
Mom, all this time, I was digging through stored-away boxes of photos and mementos. I gathered everything I still had relating to the story that was my ongoing criminal child sex assault. (And, of course, the rest, which he did once I became “legal”—twice trying at age 18, and then again and again at 25 and 34. He was, by then, a married father who strangely sent me pics of his wife and new baby. Truly gross.)
I was pulling so many long-forgotten bits and pieces from boxes I’d wrongly believed—for 39 years—were filled with mementos of my life-altering “first love” and my “first boyfriend.” Since 2023 though and this awakening I’ve had thrust upon me, I’ve been moving those mis-perceived “souvenirs of love” into a new appropriately-labeled box: EVIDENCE.
I didn’t know what would become of any of this effort, but I couldn’t stop it. Once I read about Julia and her lawsuit, my understanding of my own life began changing rapidly. It was all I could do to try to keep up with the flood of memories and the tsunami of crushing emotion. There was grief and sorrow mixed with rage and an expanding desire for vengeance against those who caused so much destruction in my young life. Destruction that would continue to metastasize and worsen over my, and your, lifetime. It turns out, Mom, so much of what happened to me and to you was, I’ve come to learn, entirely predictable after-effects of child sex assault. The impacts on our lives played out for decades without us knowing their origins. And those impacts continue to drastically affect my daily life to this day, 40 years later. Much to my horror and disbelief, science now tells us that those after-effects get even worse later in life. What?? How fucking unfair is that?? God, I hate them so much.
I never experienced anything like it. Each day, I learned something that liberated me from the agony and lies of the past. But each new bit of clarity also brought new anguish, as it revealed how miserably thwarted and distorted my life had became and remained after I met OMD.
Mama, I was struggling. I was alone. I ached so much for your presence, your comfort, your memories, your wisdom, your assurance that we, together, would get through it and come out better and stronger on the other side. I wanted to talk to you, but since I couldn’t, I looked for a therapist in hopes of getting some expert guidance. That was as futile an effort as seeking out a lawyer. We were at that point, 2+ years into a global pandemic, people needed therapists. Therapists needed therapists. There were no therapists with the expertise I needed. No help for what I was so painfully deconstructing and trying to parse through the correct lens I’d finally been gifted—the one that screamed daily at the back of my mind: “Hey lady! You weren’t loved, you were raped! You weren’t ever his girlfriend, you were always his ignorant child prey being lied to and exploited specifically for your naiveté. You were not special, you were the victim of an ongoing, years-long crime.” Sadly, the dearth of therapists has meant that, to date, what re-parsing of my young life I have managed to do, was done by me, alone, sans any professional support.
In lieu of therapy, I’ve followed your example and tried writing when I needed to vent the grief and process the overwhelming feelings. I’ve written so many angry, rage-filled letters and journal entries over these last two years.
I found one of your journals when I was looking through the mementos. Inconceivably, the one and only journal of yours that remained after you died was the one from the era of my exploitation. For the first time ever, I was able to read your words about what that felt like for you, the turmoil and anxiety it left you in the grips of. I was able to read of what you were struggling with at work and in your adult life—things I had no sense of when my life was getting tumbled about by a heartless sexual deviant. I could finally see the harrowing overlap in our timelines when I put my miserable poems and your journal entries together. And when I then overlaid OMD’s tour and travel schedule, the picture that developed in front of my eyes made me audibly gasp in horror and sadness. The way things broke down at the start of the Summer of 1985 is a real tear-jerker. Maybe I’ll tell you about it some time.
Mom, I have sobbed over and over again for all that I did not understand when it was happening because I was an actual child, not the adult woman the men of OMD tried to make me believe I was. I hate reading those pain-filled journals, as they’re artifacts of the worst time of our lives. But I’m grateful—so very grateful—I had them when I needed them. When I was finally ready, when I had a place of safety to work from, and the time—the epic amount of time—it has taken to do just what little I’ve done. Which feels, some days, like hardly anything at all.
A couple of weeks ago, I found out OMD is kicking off a US tour in Pasadena this month. I started feeling anxious again. I started not being able to sleep again. My mind kept racing with thoughts and memories. I started snapping at my partner. And after all he’s been through because of these men whose music he used to love and who he used to admire, I knew I could not let that continue. I took a day to write, to vent the noxious energy that was expanding inside my chest and my abdomen and my brain. I didn’t know what would come out, but in the end, it was a long, expletive-filled letter to Andy McCluskey. I decided I would publish it. I built a little blog and named it Cathartic Letters. I added pictures and other stuuf, things from the former memento, now evidence, box. I gave it to some people to read. My partner suggested some changes to “make it effective.” He meant take out some f-words and maybe turn the rage down to 9 from time to time. I hadn’t worked to that end because I’d not originally sat down to write for anyone but myself. But, I knew he was right. I set the letter aside though because I needed a break. It’s so hard to sustain ongoing effort in this arena—it’s truly heartbreaking, soul-crushing work.
I had almost decided to forget it, to set it aside and to not publish the letter. But then we sat down to watch Hacks, which has always made me think of you and me. There was a scene in the most recent episode where the two female leads were seemingly at the end of their devastated relationship. Both suffering, both questioning, both knowing that despite it all, they still loved each other, deeply. Sigh. I already had tears in my eyes when my partner stopped to rewind so he could Shazam a song in the show. It was John Cale, we knew that. He hit play to restart the show and as that song faded, another began. And, again, we both knew it—OMD—right there, spitefully playing in the middle of this show I love with my whole being. It felt like a hot, glowing, red spike just pulled from the fire being shoved through my chest, past my ribs and into the very center of my battered heart. And just like that, I was no longer considering setting anything aside. I was screaming at my TV about how unfair it was that those damn men were always showing up where I wasn’t looking for them, where I didn’t need them, where I just wanted peace and respite and reprieve from the disproportionate amount of space they specifically are occupying in my mind and my existence.
Mama, you’ll be glad to know my partner was so kind. He is taking good care of me and I know you will be happy to know that. He could see the pain unfolding in me right before his eyes. He knows it well. Of course, he feels it himself, in his body now. I know he has his own fantasies about avenging his beloved and the child she was when the men of OMD selfishly inserted themselves into her young life. He listened. He empathized. He held me. He understood when I said I needed to vent and went to my laptop to write yet another cathartic letter.
That letter, another one written to Andy, explained how that song in that episode of Hacks was one that had been so influential in my young life, it felt as if it had been carved like grooves into my still-forming little girl’s bones. I told him how after I’d been raped multiple times by his band member Graham Weir the summer I was 14, that I’d spent the following months sitting alone in the dark in my bedroom listening to Dazzle Ships on repeat through my mom’s headphones, plugged into my little kid’s blue plastic record player. I wrote poems by candlelight then—my miserable poems. I even wrote one with some lyrics from the song Of All the Things We’ve Made—the song in that episode of Hacks.
That year, 10th grade, was when my life fell apart because I’d been repeatedly raped by an adult the summer before. At the time, no one was calling men like Andy and Graham groomers, or predators, or nonces. They also weren’t calling what happened to me and the other girls on the school tour of Europe victims of child sex assault, or exploitation, or rape. No, instead, they called us lucky. They told us what those men did to us was normal, was simply dating and that if those special, important men chose us, then that made us special too. Bullshit.
This warped, cruel lie wrecked my entire life. But, when I was 14 and I believed all my culture, my predator, and his accomplices were pretending was true, I had no choice but to use their misogynistic, girl-hating frame for what had happened and how it had left me feeling. That meant all the overwhelming disorientation we now know commonly happens to victims of child sex assault was, for me, waved off as puppy love, childish infatuation, and first heartbreak—me problems, not predator problems, not entirely normal after-effects of child sex crimes. So, I sat in that dark room, night after night, not knowing the feeling that was my insides wanting to crawl out of my skin and run away fast down the street as far as they could go was due to my normal child development having been turned inside out and upside down by a greedy, sick, selfish man. Because there was nobody to tell me otherwise, at 14, I could only assume the crushing pain I felt was just heartbreak. So I wrote poems about that—wrongly believing heartbreak was why I felt so awful and why my young life was so epically falling apart.
Mom, do you remember that day you were my ultimate Defender and Hero? When we sat in the Dean’s Office as Ruth Ann, and Mr. Leary told you I was an ungrateful, unserious girl who did not deserve your huge investment in me, in my education? Do you remember how you shot up out of your chair, enraged, when Mr. Leary said I “was useless and would never amount to anything” and that he’d “spoken to my other teachers and they agreed with him”?
OMG, MOM! It was the greatest thing ever. In a hot second, you were across the room towering over that shitty, tiny leprechaun seated with that smug, self-satisfied expression on his face. You laid into him with so much fury for having the audacity to say such a harmful and stupid thing about your child, about any child he was charged with educating and caring for. He turned beet red. You absolutely trounced him with your compassion and decency and defense of me—your baby girl, who you knew was not what he was so cruelly trying to make me out to be. I loved you so much as you stood there yelling at him, making him shrink from fear, embarrassment, and shame. My HERO! My MAMA!
OMD’s song, Of All the Things We’ve Made, is a song that always makes me feel devastatingly sad, lonely, and broken. Then it started playing on top of that scene in Hacks. My two favorite characters were also each feeling so sad, lonely, and broken. One was driving through the dark L.A. night, searching for the other, before it was too late—reminding me of you, looking for me, knowing if you didn’t find me, I might get lost forever. Oh my god! Why did they have to choose that damn song?
Deep breaths, Chris…just keep breathing, girl. Just keep breathing.
Mom, Hacks isn’t necessarily a gay show—not like your fave, the L Word. But everyone’s represented and there’s def more gays than straights so I know you, especially, would have loved it. Do you remember how when I moved away and I’d come back to visit, you would have a list of gay films we had to go see? Every time? I miss that, our art house movie dates and our nights spent watching L Word. (By the way, remember that new season I told you was coming back when you were leaving this world? Well, your fave character bought a bar and put your name on it! You know my heart swelled up so big that night. I definitely took it as sign you were saying “HI!” from some heavenly gay bar you were enjoying with Lonnie, and Tim, and sweet, sweet Michael.)
Anyway, I’m bringing this all up to say, you really were such an amazing parent. And I’m so grateful for the way you raised me and taught me to be a human. You showed me, by your example, that everyone we knew, and everyone we didn’t, was the same—all equally deserving of our respect and consideration. And I love you so much for modeling this proper way to be human for me.
Mom, I found something terrible in a letter I unearthed and it really highlighted for me how significant your good influence upon me was. Graham said something absolutely wretched in a 1984 letter—something hateful and so so homophobic. Finding it after all these years was shocking. I couldn’t believe I’d ever thought he was a good person. I realized I must have forgotten the awful words in the time between when he first exploited me and when he came back to California a year later and began doing it again. But, seeing those words made me remember he said almost exactly the same words at Disneyland on my 16th birthday. That time it was Rock Hudson that inspired his venom, not gay porn.
As I thought about it and remembered more of that day at Disneyland—my 16th birthday—I began to realize his horrific words had mortified and repulsed me in a way that translated to that being the day his grip on me began to loosen. I still didn’t know he was a child predator exploiting me and that that made him a very bad man. But I did know when he said we’d all be better off when all the “homos” got AIDS and died, that he absolutely could not be a good man and say those kinds of repugnant things. Because you taught me so differently from what his and his brother’s parents had obviously taught them to be, I was able to recognize he was not a good person that day. I would continue being exploited by him for a while more, but that was the day I started questioning why I wanted to spend time with him. I have you to thank for that, Mom. I want you to know it was actually your character and spectacular parenting that gave me a tool, a measure, a standard I could use to take stock of him. And when I did, it didn’t return a result I was interested in. You helped me get myself away from him by teaching me we don’t hate people, and the people who do, are always the lesser people. I love you, Mama, for being so good and decent that your admirable qualities shone like a beacon guiding me away from the dark place.
Given all this, I sure hope whoever’s picking the music and wardrobe for Hollywood productions, stops picking the crap made by #bandsofpredators and #bigots and #homophobes. Whoever you people are, I’m telling you my story today so you can add OMD to the no-go list. They don’t deserve your consideration. If you wouldn’t put Harvey Weinstein in your production—these guys are WORSE. Weinstein didn’t exploit children.
Mama, I vomited this morning. Four times! It was the first time in years. I honestly can’t remember the last time. As soon as I’d filled the toilet the final, fourth time, a smile came across my face. It occurred to me it was you. It was a sign from you, wasn’t it? Well, I heard you, Mom. I got the message.
When what I can only refer to as “this OMD thing” started two years ago, it was very hard on me. Eventually it became very hard on my other half too. I was being consumed by a million-piece puzzle that was trying to figure out the worst things that had ever happened to me. It left no room for normalcy, for lightness, for life. Unfortunately, coupled with the stress of the pandemic and ichiban kittysan dying, he and I found our relationship pushed right up to the edge of a cliff—twice. I’m so grateful we both railed against it and managed to rally to hold onto our precious, decades-long partnership. But, Mom, I am, of course, so fucking livid with Graham for being the source of this darkness inside me that has caused me to hurt my ever-loving man as I did over these last two years when no therapists were around. I hate Graham even more when I realize how similar the pain in my relationship was to how I pained you 40 years ago. Both of you, my most beloved people, got bonked over and over simply because you loved me. Because each of you was willing and invested in being the closest human standing next to me at the time the bad things came. It’s not fair. His life has already been so compromised by those piece of shit men from so long ago. And they are clueless to all of it, to all of my injuries, to any of yours, and, of course, to his. Well, that’s about to change.
But, let’s get back to the vomit, shall we?
A while back, but during the darkest of those days, there was an accident involving some rich people in a submarine that exploded. I saw a TikTok about a psychic who had predicted that accident. I was impressed. I don’t necessarily believe in psychics but I also don’t necessarily think the help they can sometimes offer has to be a literal prediction or message from beyond. I was missing you. I was unsettled and I remembered the things you and I used to do to address those kinds of situations in the past. So, without any expectations, I made an appointment. Just for fun. She’s a popular lady so it was months away, near my birthday. I figured, if you or our babycat wanted to say hi, or anything else, you could use that lady as a conduit. But, again, no actual expectations.
When I spoke to psychic lady, I was days away from a deadline I’d set for myself to publish the first effort I’d made at telling my OMD story. I was trying to build a website and it was just too hard and the stress was really taking a toll. The nice psychic lady told me it didn’t matter. She didn’t know what it was, because I hadn’t told her, but she said it didn’t matter if I got the project done or not. I instantly felt so much relief and decided right then that I could let myself set it aside without feeling like it would mean I could not ever tell my story. I asked her about you. She checked in with her “guide” and came back saying she felt intense love being sent my way, enveloping me. She said it was like an overwhelming abundance of huge pink flowers everywhere. She said you were embracing me and loving me with all these beautiful pink flowers. She kept saying you were sending waves and waves of love toward me. It felt like a pretty obvious thing to say to a consumer of psychic services. But who doesn’t want to hear their mom is sending love-filled flowers from the great beyond? She said she asked about those myriad struggles I was intensely suffering at that time. You quickly replied, almost shouting “Hard parts! Hard parts! Hard parts!” That made me feel like that awful time was just a part that would end—not the rest of my life. That too made me feel so much lighter of spirit. If those were the hard parts, that meant there were good parts to come after them, right? She said she was getting more. I hadn’t asked for more, but she said you wanted me to know you could have been a better mother. You immediately followed up saying if you had it to do all over again, you would have kicked him in the hm hm. I knew who you meant. And I knew if you were saying it, you said dick but that she wasn’t going to say that. This also made me feel better. It made me feel great, actually.
Despite our 1990’s mother-daughter floral business and our deep love for flowers, pink flowers, specifically, had never been a particularly special thing for us. So, while I loved the sentiment, it didn’t spark a certainty that it was indeed a specific message from you. Though it did sound like something you’d say and do. But a couple of weeks ago, I was reading over the letter on that first blog post I’d written to Andy when I found out they were kicking off this upcoming tour at the Cruel World Fest in Pasadena. I hadn’t noticed it the whole time I was writing that letter, but the concert poster, which I’d included in the post, was covered with pink flowers.
It was a very poignant and sweet moment for me. I felt my sadness over not having had this awakening to the truth of this story before now, before you died, was shrinking in size. While you are not here to have this conversation with and not here to do this rebuilding and healing with me, seeing those previously unnoticed pink flowers on the poster for the event that sparked the Cathartic Letters project, made me feel like maybe you are here. Maybe you are doing this with me. Maybe you are even the reason I am doing this at all. Heck, maybe you’re even the one who helped me find my sister because you knew I desperately needed to uncover this long-hidden truth and her wanting a picture of our dad would send me to those stored-away boxes.
The ever-present-of-late pinch in my chest relaxed a bit after I had the thought that maybe those pink flowers were you making me see the announcement for that concert, maybe you had embraced me with love while also making me feel emotionally overfull and desperately in need of shifting the burden of this unprocessed and unhealed trauma that has continued doling out more and more trauma and suffering—long after the original injuries were sustained. ⬇
It feels like this world—barely evolved enough to have shrugged through a few months of #metoo discomfort and for me to have had my own decades-overdue awakening—is now backsliding into an even worse era. Contempt and rage against girls and women seems to be metastasizing like some post-Covid turbo-cancer. Rapists and misogynists, boastful child traffickers and predators are all being elevated, celebrated, and platformed everywhere I look now. Meanwhile, victims of assault are being threatened, harassed, doxxed, and even sued for trying to access the new laws advocates say are meant to help them. And others, like me, can’t manage to access the legal system at all. (Tyler sued Julia for $115,000!)
It’s an enervating time for a historical victim of child sex assault to be experiencing what lawyers call a Delayed Discovery of Injury.
Sometimes, Mom, I just stop writing altogether because I look at who occupies the screen on the nightly news and I think no one’s going to care about the injustice of predators and child sex criminals getting to continue living their lives, making scads of money, and receiving all that endless praise and adoration while their victims whither and struggle to simply survive the aftermath of the crimes committed against them.
When I first started reading articles about child rape, there was a story about a Scottish police man found guilty of a historical sex assault against a young girl years prior. Since he’d gotten away with his crimes, he’d become a regarded police man and member of his community. I loved what the judge said to him at his sentencing. None of what that man had done since he raped that girl mattered at all. The judge said if he had been jailed when he committed the crime, as he should have been, he would not have been free to do or be any of those things people were using to plead for leniency. This is what the legal system should be saying to all the predators who stole other people’s lives and futures but got to go on and make so much of themselves and their unmolested lives that people would use those accomplishments to champion that criminal over their victims. (Hey, Ashton and Mila, hi! You two did what you did in the middle of this and in case you don’t know—you suck so incredibly much for it.)
I miss you, Mama, but sometimes I’m so glad you’re not here to see the shitshow this world is becoming. I truly fear for girls and women now. I never ever thought that would be something I’d have to be concerned with in my lifetime.
I love you, Mama. I want to tell the world—before I tell them anything else—you were an incredible mother and I was so very lucky to have you be mine. Whether it was you or some energetic form of your pink floral love for me, or not, I’m telling myself it means it’s not too late to tell you I’m sorry, or to avenge you, your parenting, and your general decency. I’m grateful to have been spurred on to this opportunity—by all your signs. I’ll take the flores de amores and a belief they are, in fact, love radiating from you to me and I’ll let it lift and buoy me in the hard times still to come.
Despite the feeling the pink flowers on the festival poster gave me, I did come very very close to deciding to set this idea of sharing my nascent catharsis aside. After I wrote the first rage-filled letter to Andy, I was a bit uncorked. I was no longer feeling the same bubbling impetus to shout my painful story from the rooftops-especially if it meant having to go back and edit for a reader I’d never written for in the first place. Revisiting these writings after they’ve been vented from my psyche is not exactly pleasant. So, I was gonna say f-it and let that one lie—knowing full well another moment of cortisol and adrenaline coursing through my body and the related stress and tension expanding again in my chest would come. And it did, via Hacks, just a day after I’d started considering not posting the original Cathartic Letter. So, I wrote another, entirely different, letter to Andy yesterday. But I didn’t finish it. By bedtime, I was again considering not posting it. But then I started feeling sick.
I was in bed with a heating pad on my torso, trying to distract my nervous system from the pain I was feeling. I got up and wobbled to the toilet, thinking that might help my issue, whatever it was—I hadn’t felt that way in such a long time. I stood from the toilet and began to wash my hands. I was overcome by sweat and heat rising from somewhere, a dizzy, disconnected feeling, a burning in my chest. I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t lie down, I didn’t know what was happening or what to do. I hunched forward over the sink and my mouth suddenly, shockingly, filled with chunky, hot vomit. I leaned over the toilet just as it all spewed forth. As soon as it was out, my stomach clenched, my body lurched, and my mouth filled again—three more times! In that first moment, after the last bit of it had been purged from my body, I felt two things: physically better and bemused.
I caught a glimpse of myself bent over the toilet now full of my dinner and I instantly recognized the logo I had chosen for my Cathartic Letters project—a stylized woman vomiting. Catharsis literally means to create a new, improved state via purgation. The logo was the epitome of what I felt the website would allow me to do—renewal via purging what had been wrongly stored deep inside my child body four decades ago.
There was no reason for me to be sick this morning. My partner and I ate the same food and he was not sick. I have not been sick since the mid-night purge, neither has he. When I stood there over the toilet suddenly, bizarrely bemused, I saw the vomiting woman logo and in my mind. I added it to the prompt that was the Cruel World poster, and later, its pink flowers. I added those to the OMD song in that scene in Hacks. Then added in the decision to hang it up and not pursue posting either of those letters. And finally I added all of that to myself vomiting for no good reason in the middle of the night and suddenly it all added up. It felt like my mom making me barf four times at the very tip of Mother’s Day was a pretty huge cosmic nudge to not put anything down—to just do it, to go ahead and push the button, publish the letter, barf out the bad stuff, or start to, at least and finally begin this process of much-needed, long-overdue catharsis.
Haha, mom. Very funny. I got the message. Here it is. I’ve done it. I’ve begun to transform this massive wall of pain into something better, something healthier, something liberating. Something you and I both deserve. I love you and your pink flowers, and vomit, and morose lady comics helping to get me to this place. I know now there’s no need to be sad we can’t do this together because you are here, in my heart and in my corner, always and forever just like you said you would be.
Mom, it turned out I kept putting those letters to Andy down because what my soul needed, before anything else, was to tell you these things. To tell you of my love and my sorrow, my regret and my gratitude. I needed to tell the world we were people who mattered before OMD wrecked our lives and created this story I’m now going to tell. We come first, as a mother and daughter who loved each other so totally and completely, so perfectly and purely before the daughter got broken and then their love broke in ways they never could have imagined—ways that would never be able to be repaired.
In my version, unlike theirs, you and me, Mom, we aren’t the afterthoughts and secondary characters. In my story, we matter the most. We were the smart, determined, industrious, enterprising, and amazing women that could (and should!) have been so much more to and for the world than we got to be. Because OMD and all they came to be in my life committed theft from both of us. They stole what we had and what we had the right and potential to become. You, Mama, who always came last in this horror story, you are first in my heart. You are what matters most to me. You are who I will make any reader who wants this story meet first. You were the love of my life and I will grieve until the day I die for the time and chances that were snatched from us when I was just a girl who had no idea what was going on or what would come of it all. You were so innocent, and kind, and gentle and injured from all the ways the world had harmed you before it began harming me. You didn’t deserve any of the extra pain that my life put into yours. You only ever wanted to keep my life free from the pain and suffering yours had been riddled with. I only ever wanted to bring you joy and give you the safety and loving family you deserved—the family you had not yet had in life.
Mama, I hate Graham Weir so much for making me into the girl that hurt you again and again and again and again. I hate Andy McCluskey for helping Graham Weir commit sex crimes against me again and again and again. I hate Andy McCluskey for the many lives I know he harmed besides mine with his own narcissism and child predation. I hate the whole band—but especially the 4 of 6 that flew girls from California to New York for their concert at Madison Square Garden with the Thompson Twins.
Why didn’t their labels just give them money to hire professional, consenting adults? Why’d they need so many girls to copulate with? Are musicians all incapable of appropriately and successfully mating with their age and intellectual peers? Are women their own age too much hassle when they can just have kids that don’t know they can say no, or express themselves as independent human beings, and who have literally no power to use against them when they do wrong? Adult men pursuing girls who live with their parents and attend high school and go home at 3pm with homework and who, as in my case, don’t even get an allowance or have a driver’s license is so fucking gross and creepy and foul.
Why are children the fuel this dastardly industry needs to pump out the hits? It feels like a nauseating Disney version of wartime “comfort women.” But these conscripted kids aren’t helping the men raping them to kill an enemy. They’re just keeping these loathsome men “comfortable” so they can get loaded and write stupid songs? What the Fuck, America? What the Fuck, World? What is this utterly disgusting bullshit at the core of our popular culture? I wish I could vomit hot, chunky piles and piles of never-ending vomit on the music industry as a whole right now.
Mom, for Mother’s Day, and in honor of the other mothers affected by OMD’s sex crimes, and all the mothers affected by their children being preyed upon by the world’s very worst men, I’m going to begin today, via this first Cathartic Letter, to #WriteTheWrongs and #ShiftTheShame. Neither of us should have ever had to carry the shame of what was done to me and what happened to me on the years that followed because of it. No victim of crime, and no one who loves those victims should ever have to carry the shame of what criminals did to them or how their lives went after the narcissistic predators finally left them alone.
Mama, I feel so much better for having the chance to share all of this with you. Thank you for loving me, for wanting the best for me, for doing all you could to give me all you did not have. You were the greatest gift. And I’m so grateful for your signs—the pink flowers and vomit both, and that they helped me start re-writing our story. I’m grateful it isn’t over, our story goes on, and now it won’t end without us getting to edit and purge OMD and Graham Weir and write ourselves a sweeter, far-pinker, love and peace-filled ending.
Happy Mama’s Day, Mom. ❤️
Love, your Squirt
To Graham and Andy and the other men of OMD, I was nothing, just a disposable kid so my well-being didn’t deserve their consideration. To them, I was worthless, save for my innocent ignorance and the compliance it rewarded them with. But, to you, my beautiful Mama, I was priceless and irreplaceable.
Predatory groomers broke me and never even bothered to notice. And you mom, like me, were never the same again. The injuries created in each of us and in our relationship, from age 14, never healed. And throughout the remainder of our life together, their wounds opened unexpectedly like vast chasms, bursting wide in the ground beneath us, swallowing us up whole, violently tumbling us about, destroying us in entirely new ways, and then spitting us back out to miserably try to pick up the pieces and put our life back together, once again.
Graham attempting to access me for coerced sex again and again in my 20’s and 30’s created such stress, havoc, and brand new suffering and disorientation in our lives, I’m confident it was the beginning of the end for you, Mommy. (And I won’t say here what that disgusting potential makes me want to do to that loathsome turd of a man.)
I was precious. I had value. You loved me. And I loved you more than anything else the world ever had to offer—but we never again loved each other without the hole punched through the middle of our lives by OMD in 1984—when I WAS ONLY FOURTEEN.
And now—now that I finally understand as an adult—those men should at least have to know what they did. They should have to bear the burden of the years and years of harm they caused.
As feminist icon, Gisele Pelicot, has so perfectly said, “Shame Must Change Sides!”
Cathartic Letters
Healing In Purging