01. My Very First Cathartic Letter

A Letter to Andy McCluskey,

Hey Andy, how’s it going? Pretty good? Yeah, I bet. Well, I suggest you take a second and and enjoy that feeling, I’m pretty sure it’s about to change.

Andy, I just realized, this is the second time in my life I’ve sat down to write you. The first time was 1984 when I sent you a Christmas card. Because I was a kid in 1984, that was the first time I’d ever sent Christmas cards. I’m sure like most teens I thought I was growing up so I should send Christmas cards to my friends. Of course, it’s hilarious, but mostly sad, to think I was so naive, I actually believed you were my friend. You did reply though—you sent me a card for the New Year. I’ve always wondered why.

Andy, as you may have guessed, my feelings toward you have changed quite a bit since we met in Madrid in 1984. Let me explain why I’m writing this inaugural #CatharticLetter to you now.

OMD’s been on my mind for the last few years, but you and your band have been even more top of mind since I learned of your upcoming US tour kicking off in May in Pasadena, California. Andy, did you know that’s not far from my hometown of Glendale, California? I enjoyed so many great times spent in Pasadena when I was growing up—the same years I knew you. And some of the bands you’re scheduled to share the stage with are ones that meant so much to me then. Seeing their names on that bill evoked such fond memories of those long-gone days—real feelings of nostalgia when I think back to that era of my life and listening to their music. In fact, I might have planned to attend the Cruel World Fest—if only you and your band, Orchestral Manoevres in the Dark were not also on the bill. Alas, it’s just one of the many ways OMD continues intersecting in not great ways with my life.

It’s so strange to think I’ll never see OMD perform again. I remember when you guys got back together and played at one of our faves, the gorgeous Fox theater in Oakland, my partner and I were so excited the Weir Brothers were not touring with you so we could get tickets to see OMD together. Andy, did you know that like me, he was also at your show in San Francisco in 1984? He was 18, I wish I’d been there with him instead of Graham. Isn’t that such a bizarre coincidence though? Do you remember that show, Andy? It was at the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco’s Japan Town. You and Graham had bought tickets for me and another teen girl to fly there with you after your concert at The Palace in Hollywood. Remember The Palace, Andy? It was the first place in the US where you and Graham criminally exploited us girls. Andy, did you know I was just 14 years old when you purchased those plane tickets to fly me from Los Angeles to San Francisco? Did you know you and Graham concocted that plan without anyone asking me if I could go to San Francisco with you? Graham simply told me he’d gotten me the ticket and so I was going and therefore I needed to lie to my mom about it. He guided and coached me re: what to tell her, all so I could go with him, with you all, to San Francisco. (I mean, who am I kidding? A bird in the hand, am I right? All that prior investment made in grooming me in Spain and Scotland, absolutely had to be cashed in on in California before OMD left the States on a world tour, right? Why waste two nights with a perfectly groomed kid, right Andy?)

So, yeah, I’ll never see OMD again, but man, would you believe when I was 15, I’d seen OMD perform 8 times! That’s a lot considering I’d never even heard of you all until the day I met you the year prior at age 14. Within the first 4 months of turning 16, I saw OMD perform 8 more times! Andy, do you know what that means? It means the >absolute bare minimum number of times< I was sexually exploited by your employee, Graham Weir, before I was sixteen and a half years old was 16!

Of course, you and everyone else who knew Graham Weir absolutely know there’s no way it would ever have been just the bare minimum where he was concerned. Having sex with me when I was a child was sport for Alisdair Graham Dickson Weir—surely he reported the score to you and the other guys in the band and crew, right? Like that first day at the Palace, when upon seeing me he immediately dragged me up to the balcony, raped me on the floor between the rows of seats, and then directed me to scratch his back so hard I would leave red marks because he wanted to take his shirt off in front of you guys in the dressing room so they’d all be impressed and think he was a real stud—you know, with me—the 14-year-old, not-at-all-Lolita who didn’t even understand what he was asking of her when he suggested she intentionally hurt him and then made her do it over and over so the scratches would last long enough for him to get to the dressing room and disrobe to show them off.

I was 14 that day and my mom thought I was meeting girls from the school trip and then going to one of their houses for a sleepover—because that’s what Graham told me to tell her. Meanwhile, the guys in OMD’s dressing room thought at 14, I was an insatiable sex kitten so consumed by adult lust I couldn’t stop myself from scratching a child predator’s flesh so hard I’d leave him visibly wounded—because that’s what Graham told them.

I read yesterday that some of the shitty cops looking into crimes against British girls by so-called groomer gangs just dismissed the crime victims and called them slags. Did you all call me a slag after that day at the Palace? Did you all think we girls were fine to prey upon because you’d convinced yourselves we were just useless sluts? Also, 40 years later, you know none of us were groupies, a couple of us were virgins, and we didn’t sleep around with musicians, right? You know we all thought we were in romantic relationships with just one person—not sleeping around with multiple musicians for kicks, right? Slag is a filthy, sexist, misogynistic term in the way those cops used it to demean and wave off little girls, shame on them. None of the girls I knew in OMD’s orbit in the 80’s were anything at all like what that term suggests.

Girls are never ever worth less than the men who rape them—I hope the world is finally ready to agree upon this fundamental truth.

Andy, my mind reels now to think of how many times I was in Graham’s presence, facing his requests, his demands, his coercion when I was utterly clueless as to what was even going on. Because I was 14 and had never even been on a date, I didn’t know what sex was or how it worked when I met you all that day in Madrid. I didn’t know what people did with each other in the dark. In fact, before I left home for that trip, I’d heard about masturbation and I remember puzzling over trying to imagine how boys must do it and all I could come up with was that they must fill up a sandwich-sized plastic baggie with water and then put their wiener in there and shake it around. Damnit, Andy, I was a total blank slate and your pedo trombone player, your laddie, Graham, took every opportunity he could to mold me into a never-says-no, compliant little child sex slave. Can you, any of you guys in OMD, imagine Graham Weir being the man to teach your 14-year-old daughter what sex is? Yeah, it’s nauseating isn’t it? You, all of you, know damn well that predator raped me far more than 16 times before I was even 16 years old. FAR. MORE.

Andy, did you know I was just 14 and had never been alone with a boy when you and Graham insisted that first night in Madrid that we four school girls from California come with you and your band back to your hotel? How about later when you guys bought me my first alcoholic beverage at Rockola? Someone asked if I’d ever had alcohol and when I said no, they suggested a screwdriver because “you won’t taste the booze, just the orange juice.” Did you know I was 14 when you insisted we two girls go back to your hotel, the Melia Castilla, instead of home to ours? When we arrived and you again insisted that rather than go back to our own hotel, we must come up to your room—I was 14 then, did you know? I know that you knew we’d only been in Spain one day and had not changed money yet so we had no money for a cab and no way to go home without you giving us some. Very, very late in the night, after more alcohol and marijuana, you told Graham he and I had to leave your room because you were ready to get some action from the teen you’d plied with drugs and alcohol—did you know then that I was 14, had never been on a date, had no money on my person and no one to call to help me get back to my hotel? Andy, did you even think about what you were sending me off to? Did you think about the fact that insisting the girl I was there with stay with you in your room meant I was alone in the halls of a Madrid hotel, thousands of miles from home, with an adult man expecting me to go to his room at 4am? I was 14 and as far as my mom was concerned, not allowed to talk to boys until 15, and not allowed to date until 16. I was terrified walking down that hall. I walked slowly, much more slowly than a very alert, very eager Graham. Not knowing what else to do, I asked as we walked down the hall what the sleeping arrangements in his room would be. I hoped maybe he’d say there were two beds and, of course, because he was a gentleman, like in the movies, I would absolutely have my own. He didn’t say that though. He wasn’t a gentleman. He turned around from way up ahead, repeated my question back to me and then laughed heartily at me as if my question were coy flirtation not abject terror. I was so scared. I had no idea what was going to happen to me and no idea as to what to do about it. I was only 14, my life experience amounted to Saturday night skates at the Moonlight Rollerway. If I was lucky, my mom gave me $5 for a coke and a hot dog and she’d let me stay a half hour later than she did when I was a little kid.

Andy, when you and Graham sent us away the next morning in front of your hotel, did you know then that I was 14 as we stood there arms over each other’s shoulders—two girls and two adult men taking those pictures? When you and Graham turned to walk back into the hotel, what did you say to each other? What details did you share about how you’d each gotten what you wanted—though probably quite a lot less—out of us two teens you surely never planned to see again? Did Graham tell you what he forced me to do that morning after the alarm rang but before he’d let me leave? I had never even talked to a man who wasn’t a relative or a teacher before meeting you two the day before. I was so shy and embarrassed by my young body, I was utterly mortified that morning when he did what he did to me. Andy, when you two compared post-predation notes, did he tell you how many different ways I said no the night before but that he never listened and just kept insisting? Insisting, advancing, coercing, cajoling, laughing and grabbing, more advancing, and ever more grabbing because I was just one disposable girl and it was all just a game—not his whole life about to go careening over the edge of a very intentional path, a very hard-won trajectory his mom had so carefully crafted for him from sacrifice and all-consuming love. Andy, did you tell him things? About the girl you kept in your room when you sent he and I away in the wee hours? She didn’t matter to you either, I know. I was sitting next to her on the bus when we learned you and Graham were coming to Nice to meet us on our tour. She tried to hide her tears when she realized it wasn’t her you were coming for. And there I sat, between two girls whose young lives you were making your gross grubby groomer impressions upon. I was only 14 and had never known one before, but that was the moment I figured out you were an asshole.

Andy, I really want to know, when did you learn I was 14 years old? Did you care when you found out? Were you worried? Were you thrilled? Were you proud of Graham? Or were you jealous and unhappy the other girls you’d exploited from my school trip were both 16, rather than 14 like me? Or, were you just happy I was there so the 16 year olds were also there for you to exploit? When you allowed, encouraged, and helped your employee, Graham Weir, to rape and exploit me in Madrid and the many other cities where OMD and your record companies had booked hotel rooms and rental cars, did you ever worry about being caught with a child, actually, with multiple kids on board your bus, in your limos and dressing rooms, or in your hotel beds? What was it that made you act, repeatedly, with such shocking disregard for American laws? Was it, by an chance, insider knowledge that nothing bad would actually ever happen to you if you raped American girls and trafficked them around the country for sex? Had someone with authority in your life lead you to believe you could carry on raping American kids with impunity, for years? Who was that person, Andy? Whose job was it to find out how young a girl you could prey upon in Australia and Japan? There was no internet then, so who’s job was it to look that up and relay it to you adult men?

Andy, did Graham tell you when we were all staying at the Hyatt on Sunset—while you were writing If You Leave in the days prior to the start of the Swatch/Thompson Twins tour—that he and Neil took me to Disneyland for my 16th birthday and while there, Graham raped me on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride? You’ve been on that ride, right? Did he tell you that later that night, after giving me kid-friendly, Boone’s Farm, Strawberry Hill, Tickle Pink fruit-flavored wine, LAPD cops pulled up behind us as he raped me in the backseat of a rental car in the parking lot of Pan Pacific Park? Bright headlights suddenly burst through the back window as the cops shouted over their bullhorn “There must be a better place, move it along.” Did you worry when he told you about the cops? Did he tell you about the cops? Did you let anyone know? Like, who told you guys when you came to the US that you couldn’t legally exploit 16-year-old children here like you could back in the warped, girl-hating countries you came from? Did they give you a chart with a state-by-state guide to legal-age-to-hunt little girls details? I mean, if they did, you obviously ignored it, because several of us in California were under 18, right? But, whose job was it to tell you how young a girl you could get drunk and demand blow jobs from, in the US? Did you tell that person when Graham, my predator and I almost got found by cops? Did they know when we girls were flying and driving with you? Did they have to get an extra insurance binder for transporting kids across state lines for sex? How much are those? Who booked your rooms? How come when I was around, Graham had his own room, but when I wasn’t, he shared with his brother? Who absorbed the extra room cost? Who bought those plane tickets for you to transport two teens from LA to SF? The tickets from All Star Travel in London? Did you order them? Did a British record company order those tickets for a California flight from a London travel agency for two underage girls? Your label was called Virgin after all, right? And we both know they never did anything to thwart or abate your band’s criminal US pedophilia, so the obvious question is, in just how many different ways did they actually make it possible?

Andy, I don’t know when you learned I was 14, though I have my suspicions. I do know the answer to whether or not you ever worried about being found engaging in criminal child sex assault in California and around the United States is no. Because it was the 1980’s and you were just doing the same exact thing musicians and their record labels had done and facilitated, endorsed and even promoted for decades, right? No one was calling guys like you lot of new wave nerds, nonces or pedos, groomers, predators or rapists in the 1980’s, were they? No one was calling us girls sex crime victims either. So, what did you have to worry about? Almost nothing. It is somewhat shocking though, for such a forward-thinking genius like yourself, to never once have considered the future and how it might go for you all when at least one of us girls grew up and eventually developed the ability to look back over the wreckage of our lives with enough maturity and awareness to know exactly who was responsible. You dismissed us as dumb, inconsequential teens and never considered what we were going to become someday, when we finally grew up. And to that all I can say is, you silly stupid arrogant-as-fuck kid-sex-obsessed shit for brains:

Please enjoy this bed that ye hath made, oh so long ago.

And, Andy, do let me know if you need more hot coals and glass shards for that bed you now get to lie in, because I definitely do have them.

Imagine my surprise, Andy, when at age 47, I learned for the first time of the infamous Riot House and realized that in the 1970’s record labels intentionally booked their bands into the Hyatt on Sunset >specifically because< the Hyatt had branded itself as a hotel that “respected the (male) musician,” thus, Hyatt staff must have just eagerly looked away when those (male) musicians relentlessly brought teenage girls to their rooms to feed them drugs and drown them in alcohol, and to manipulatively marinate those half-ripe, mini women in the most dangerous of all drugs for teenagers—adult attention, adult validation, adult love and proximity to the most wild, fun, and excessive versions of adult life. Good job, Hyatt! (Male) musicians definitely deserved all that respect. But, hey, at least money was made! Capitalism wins, and as per usual, feminism and girls take it in the teeth. Rah!

Imagine how strange that must have been for me to learn about the Riot House and the Baby Groupies on the day that David Bowie died when most of the internet was inconsolable but some were damning him for having raped a child. What? No way! Not good a decent, lovely and suave Bowie. Lol. Sex with kids was as common for 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s rock stars as, well, it was for 80’s 90’s, and 00’s rock stars, right? Y’all are gross and always fucking have been. What’s so maddening to me is why, with as much money and institutional backing as y’all had, why not just hire professionals and reserve your exploitation for consenting adults? I keep banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why, oh why, did you all just have to have kids? What on earth is so special about kids, that generation after generation of adult male musicians have needed to have them available, essentially on tap? What ever could it be that makes an ignorant maleable child so much more appealing than a consenting professional you all had the money for? Gosh, it’s such a perplexing question isn’t it? I mean, why do non-human predators go after babies, and especially runts in the wild? Why are the smallest, weakest, least aware and experienced at life the easiest prey? Why? Why? Why? I guess it’s just too hard of 
a question for the serious folk in society to answer—lord knows their laws and their enforcement relentlessly, still, seem to suggest the baby is at fault for simply being a human runt and trying to live. It really is a Cruel World, isn’t it?

After learning of the Riot House and the Baby Groupies, I wondered why the Los Angeles police, Los Angeles District Attorney, and Los Angeles Mayor would have allowed countless girls to be raped and exploited by adult men at the Hyatt on Sunset. It was the same crime in the 70’s as it was when it happened to me in the 80’s. It was obvious they had to have known because these girls were in magazines and had been given a name—The Baby Groupies. The musicians had all been photographed with teen girls on their laps, in their cars, on their hotel room beds and balconies, and out in the city’s clubs and bars. Why was all that 1970’s child rape so publicized and so glorified when it was all so egregiously criminal? And, why, oh why, was the >>exact same thing<< still happening at the >>exact same hotel<< a whole decade later when I was repeatedly taken by (male) musicians to the Hyatt on Sunset and no one said a word and literally every person working there chose to #LookAway rather than care all of you were walking in and out of their lobby, their rooms, their restaurant, and their valet with criminally too-young girls? WTF, LA?

I spent that day trying to parse and absorb half the internet’s contempt for David Bowie along with strange uncomfortable new feelings and questions about my own days and nights spent in Hyatt hotel rooms with musicians twice my age. People on the internet kept saying Lori Mattix was raped, but Lori herself wasn’t saying that. Lori sounded like I had always felt—it had been romance and love and wonderful memories of exciting and lucky-to-have-em times. In a comment, I awkwardly asked about the sexual agency of teens and got called a rapist for it, lol. What a confusing and uneasy afternoon. Needless to say, I didn’t figure anything out that day and ultimately I gave up reading about all those people and places and happenings—it was growing more and more uncomfortable and I didn’t have time or need of the additional stress.

In thinking of the man being memorialized that day, I remembered being 14 and having a band I’d just seen perform invite me and three other girls on my summer school trip to Europe to join them on their bus—a bus they told us had just been used by David Bowie on his tour. Andy, I didn’t actually know who OMD was earlier that day when we set out to buy tickets for your concert, but I did know who David Bowie was. I was so excited to be on a bus such a famous person had just been on. I remember going to the bus’s bathroom because even though I didn’t need to use the toilet I wanted to sit on it so I could tell my 14-year-old friends back home I’d sat on the same toilet as David Bowie.

Years later, when I was 22 and in the hospital with a rare illness—I would decades later learn was connected to my very first time being exploited by a member of your band, OMD—my boyfriend was in line at the drug store picking something up for me when he realized David Bowie and Iman were in line behind him. He introduced himself, said he was a fan and told them he was on his way to see his girlfriend in the hospital. Concerned, they asked him if I was going to be okay. He said they were very kind and sympathetic and asked if they could sign a card for me. He ran to get one while they held his place in line. My boyfriend said they were so nice and seemed genuinely moved by my unfortunate situation. I remember thinking that day in the hospital “that David Bowie is so nice!” And I’m sure he was, just like I and all of your musical cohorts have also believed about you at one point or another, right Andy? Someone can exploit kids and still be entirely lovely to the people they aren’t raping, right? It sucks for us fans of music to have to decide which means more to us—the music we love, that’s accompanied us through life like our own personal soundtrack or the belief that adults should not emotionally manipulate and sexually exploit children.

{Hey, musicians considering this point and not wanting to force this dilemma on your fans, may I suggest you #FuckMelonsNotKids. If all you need is a mindless, compliant, moist hole that’s always available and never needs a cuddle, #FuckMelonsNotKids. Some melons are even the size of a kid’s head so you can close your eyes and grab on to it and picture whatever you want in your gross child-hating mind, just so long as you LEAVE actual HUMAN BEINGS who ARE HARMED BY the aftermath of CHILD SEXUAL ASSAULT whether they know it or not. #FuckMelonsNotKids. $200 for my fave #FuckMelonsNotKids logo.}

It’s certainly strange that David Bowie has 3 times intersected with my life and my OMD story. In the end though, I realized, it was Lori Mattix and her story of having been a Baby Groupie taken by Jimmy Page to the Riot House, aka the Hyatt on Sunset, that I was meant to receive. Lori’s story of being kept there to be used and exploited by Page until he tired of her and discarded her in favor of a different teenager was the stuff of typical vintage (male) musicians, right Andy? Jimmy was not at all unlike you with the two teens you exploited over the month we girls were in Europe on that school trip: “Tired of your current teen? Trade her in for a New Teen! No worries required—after all, she’s just a powerless teenager! What’s she gonna do about it? Lolololololol!”

Learning about the Baby Groupies and the Riot House and realizing that well-known raping of kids by the music industry’s money-making bands was not something anyone in power felt needed to stop between when it happened to her and them in the 70’s and when it happened to me and us in the 80’s helped shift the previously solidified-like-concrete narrative I’d believed since I was 14. But it would be years before another illuminating fissure would appear.

Lori Mattix, Julia Holcomb, the women of the Runaways and the makers of the film Look Away all paved a path for me to begin walking down toward my own evolving understanding of what actually happened to me when I was groomed by an adult musician at age 14, in order to be primed & receptive to Graham’s sexual exploitation of me at 15, 16, and 17. The fact that Graham continued trying to coerce me into sex with him when I was 18, 25 and 34 are solid signs he believed the grooming he did when I was 14 was both foundational and durable enough that he should be able to reliably activate it throughout my life whenever he needed me to provide some sort of sexual service.

Pavlov the Deviant Pedo? Making me what? His trained, ever-ready, child bitch? He sure thought so.

Andy, would you believe I was 53 years old when I finally discovered I’d been raped as a child? Can you even begin to imagine how nauseatingly hard it was and how much effort and painful digging and reflection it required for me to transition from a lifetime of calling Graham “my first boyfriend” to calling him what he actually was; my rapist, my predator, and my groomer? It caused physical pain inside me when I first started speaking to lawyers and I’d practically gag in horror and shame when I’d catch myself calling him my boyfriend. It caused more, and far worse, physical pain when I had to stop myself, re-orient my brain, and say what I’d newly come to understand was the truth—not the big lie you and Graham, every member of your band, crew, management, and, because it was the kid-rapey 80’s, literally every adult and child peer in my life peddled about Graham Weir ever being anything close to a boyfriend versus the 100% predatory child rapist he absolutely was.

I’m so grateful the world finally started calling guys like you and Graham what you are—rapists, predators, groomers, and sick fucking criminals. If only I’d been lucky enough to be 14 in a time when those words were in regular rotation in the 9th grade. Alas, I lived in the world that glorified Elvis and Priscilla and Charles and Diana. I lived in the world where no leading man ever played opposite a woman more than half his age. I lived in the time when men chasing girls for sex was simply called dating and if those men were famous, those girls were called lucky. I’m glad the language has evolved so girls and parents today can talk about these things in meaningful ways that may prevent them from happening. I hope you and Graham were both able to talk with your own daughters about the need to avoid men like the two of you. I hope you were each able to spare your own girls the pain and suffering you narcissistically caused in lesser girls’ lives.

Speaking of language evolving, Andy, would you believe I was 55 when I first heard a term that correctly describes what you and Graham and the other child predators in your band actually are—it’s #GroomerGang, am I right? Your way of being a groomer gang is of course different from the headlines, but you worked together as a gang to facilitate each other’s predation. You benefitted when multiples of you in the gang each had a compliant teenager to fly around the country to service you—we girls could hang out and be friends and not be awkward around any adult women* one of you may have successfully pulled for the evening. Groomer Gang. Boy, what a difference a phrase makes, don’t you think? Yeah, #MeToo, Andy. #MeToo. As a lyricist, you know how valuable words are for conveying the details of our lives. Before we had the words, the world was bereft of means with which to describe your ilk, so girls got called slags rather than you getting called a gang of groomers.

(*Shout out to the only, ONLY, OMD-adjacent adult that ever said a single word to me over all those years that could have helped me see the truth then instead of 40 years later—Maureen.) Summer of 1985, she found me wandering alone mid-day around an Illinois (or Michigan) venue. She asked me how old I was. When I told her I was 15, she was visibly shocked, maybe horrified even. I remember she threw her head back in disgust as she exclaimed “Oh my god, you’re just a kid!” Unfortunately for me, I took it as an insult. The men in and around OMD had been treating me like an adult who totally belonged for more than a year and I really liked the way that felt—much more than how it felt to be called a kid. Sadly, but predictably, the men of OMD, save for Paul, also saddled me with their Maureen-specific misogyny, which made it easy for my insulted little kid ego to dismiss her as I had heard them do “She’s just a bitch!” Maureen, I wish I’d been able to appreciate your appropriate disgust and let it guide me the hell out of there. I’m sorry you were the first woman male musicians used to teach me to favor and prioritize them over other girls and women.)

And now, back to you, Andy. The fact you weren’t worried about raping children in the 80’s, along with the fact the city of Los Angeles and state of California were not concerned with ending publicized child rape in the 70’s, 80’s, or frankly, since, and the fact that groomer gang is a phrase that’s only newly come into the global vernacular—you might be able to understand why little girls, like me, groomed and raped in the 80’s by a popular band, might only recently have come to understand those men giving us alcohol and drugs, telling us to lie to our moms, telling us to leave school, telling us they loved us, telling us they’d marry us might have so well convinced us kids that we were the recipients of something special, something we could justifiably call love, that it would take us actual decades to even begin to question “Was it love, or was I raped? Was absolutely all of it one huge lie being pulled over on kids too young and ignorant to life to even suspect nefarious intent?” or, “Can I continue to contort my brain and keep my soul squished up in a psychic vise so that I can prolong these many years of avoiding the disorienting, destabilizing, sickening reality staring me in the face?”

Luckily for me, Andy, I was so young and so naive and inexperienced when I met you and Graham and OMD that day in 1984, that I really did believe it was love. That was all I thought it could be when men did to women what Graham did to me. Of course, I wasn’t lucky in suffering the actual consequences of that misunderstood moment and the grooming that covered up the years of legitimate criminal child rape. No, in that I was very very unlucky and have suffered the whole of my life for the great misfortune that was going to see a band I’d never heard of perform on the first day of my school trip—the first time I’d ever been away from my mom or bought a ticket to a concert on my own.

The part that is lucky for me, Andy, is the part that came 40 years later, the part that is this moment now. Because I wrongly believed Graham was my boyfriend, my first love, I kept every letter, every postcard, every gift, every plane ticket, every backstage pass, every photo, and every diary and journal. All those decades those things sat in a box in my garage, I thought I had stored away the mementos of first love. Thankfully, luckily, they were all there when I needed them to help me excavate the reality of my own life out from under the years of lies and guilt and blame and sickening shame. All those “mementos” were just right there in a box for me to pour over like a detective looking for the truth in a pile of ephemera and detritus collected by a brainwashed child completely unaware what she was in fact storing away was not proof of life-altering first love but rather, evidence of sex crimes committed against her when she was just an innocent girl.

How lucky, Andy, for me to have had all those old pieces of the story there to guide me through the painful journey of examining this very strange life of mine—the one I was saddled with after I unfortunately met OMD at age 14 in Madrid, Spain.

Andy, did you know how much my single mother, who loved me more than anyone or anything else in the world, struggled to pay for me to go on that trip? Do you know that she agreed because she had wanted for her only child, her cherished daughter to have the experiences she had been denied because whatever money her family had when she was a girl was always spent on her older brother? My mom sent me to Immaculate Heart precisely because it was a college prepatory school and she wanted so desperately for her daughter to go to college. It was a dream she’d had for herself but which had been denied in favor of sending her brother who never cared about education. My mom, a woman who’d never left the country or been on an airplane spent money she didn’t have to send me on that trip to Europe with the greatest hope and aspiration for me to get so much enrichment and growth from such a unique and privileged experience—one she’d not ever even dared to imagine for herself. Going to Europe at 14 with the high school Spanish teacher from my small private Catholic girls’ school would surely help me get to college, right? My poor mom—she had no way to know predators would pounce on her sweet innocent daughter less than 24 hours after she’d arrived in Europe. [Her runt was out in the world, exposed, and within 24 hours, the predators had definitely noticed.] My poor, loving and dream-filled mother had no way of knowing that trip to Europe would be the beginning of the end of our charmed relationship, of my education, my health, my promise and my potential. The biggest regret of my sweet mom’s life turned out to be agreeing to send me on a cultural tour of Europe the summer after 9th grade. Andy, do you know that for the rest of her life, my mom referred to me as broken after I returned from Europe? Do you know that she, until she died, she talked about my life as if it had two distinct chapters—Before Europe and After Europe? My mom, who sent me to Europe with so much optimism and excitement to meet the daughter who would return to her 30 days later enriched and enlivened by all she’d seen and experienced, instead joked and cried about wanting to send the new, broken, dark, morose daughter back to Europe in exchange for the sweet, loving, innocent, happy daughter she’d sent. She had no idea what had broken me or that I was truly broken, not just a teen being a teen.

Of course, because I had been groomed and brainwashed by the Priscilla-loving times, I believed everything that happened with Graham was my fault and that I would get in trouble if it was found out. That meant my mom didn’t learn I’d been exploited by an adult man during that trip (and after) until almost a year after it happened. When my mom was lamenting the loss of the daughter she’d sent away, she had no way of knowing—nor did I, that the ways I was feeling and acting were entirely normal for a child who’d been sexually exploited. The 1980’s told us what you and Graham did to us teen girls from the school trip was normal and even good for us “lucky” girls. Without a proper frame for what had actually happened to me, all I could chalk my overwhelmed 14-year-old feelings up to was heartbreak—the only frame the sexist, warped 1980’s afforded confused, exploited girls like me. In the context of that miserably false and myopic frame, everything that happened to me after that initial exploitation was my fault and I should have just been able to suck it up, choose to be a good girl, and get on with life. There was no therapy, no counseling, no wise, compassionate adult to tell me it hadn’t been my fault, no one to tell me I was a victim of narcissistic, selfish, manipulative men who had no issue using children to get their sexual satisfaction and that there would be life-long consequences for me, and my mom, thanks to what they had thoughtlessly, carelessly, selfishly stolen from me. No one explained to me or my friends why our relationships had to change. No one told me I wasn’t to blame for the myriad ways life no longer felt comfortable or good, happy or normal. No one told me how to make it stop feeling the miserable way it felt, the way that had me more often than not feeling like I wanted to climb out of my skin and run out of my house. It was just all my fault, my responsibility, my burden, my bad choices, my being a “bad girl.”

That was something I’d never actually been, a bad girl. And I certainly hadn’t had the time to even attempt to become one by the time I met you all at age 14. I had been a good girl, a great girl even. I didn’t do bad things. I didn’t talk back. I didn’t ask for things. I loved my mom more than the world and I had no need for mischief. I got good grades and did extremely well on national tests, regularly placing in the top 10th percentile of US students. But after I met OMD, it felt like I became a bad girl in the eyes of most everyone around me. Everything I was supposed to become, everything I’d been on a trajectory to become evaporated that Summer of 1984 and from then on I carried the burden of that massive loss of all my potential and all my opportunities. I also carried, with great shame, everyone’s disappointment in me because I was no longer living up in the ways they wanted. My mom wanted a different daughter, my school wanted a different student, my friends wanted a different friend. I just wanted the misery to end.

Andy, when I was 17, Graham spent a night in San Francisco aggressively attempting to coerce me to return with him to his hotel room at the Diva for sex. I repeatedly put him off. I was hungry and focused solely on trying to find some food. He had offered to come along to help, but he was really just exploiting the opportunity to create a scenario for him to once again sexually exploit me. Somewhere over the course of that evening—after having bought me a camera and told me he “still” loved me, as a further ploy to get me to go with him, he told me that he wrote a song for me. I was flattered, I admit, my 17-year-old ego was affected. I wondered if there really was a romance there and if he really did love me and truly want me to be his girlfriend or his wife as he’d previously said. I asked him about the song, he said it was called Shame. I felt sick. Why would he write a song called Shame about me? Did he think that would make me feel good? I was embarrassed. I was ashamed. I felt humiliated. He kept talking. He said he’d written the song but that you’d taken it and ruined it so it was no longer his song, no longer a song about me. I think he was likely lying. These days, I think he must’ve been lying 99% of the time he said anything to me. But, it’s always struck me the name of that song and the amount of shame I have carried since I was 14 because of him and because of you—the man who made it all possible. As bad as it felt, it also seemed entirely right that if someone in OMD was going to write a song about me, it should be called Shame.

Well, Andy, it’s 40 years later, and you’re going out on tour like you’re not one of the guys/bands deserving of being canceled and that’s just straight bullshit I can no longer bury inside me. I’m finally sick of carrying this burden of shame all by myself. It’s your turn. You and Graham, Martin and Neil, Paul and Malcolm, you all should carry this shame from now on—you all did hideously shameful things and I hope my pointing that out to you makes you suffer one tenth of the pain it’s made me and my loved ones have to endure over decades. What I really want to say to you Andy, is FUCK YOU! Fuck you specifically and, of course, FUCK GRAHAM WEIR to hell and back and back to hell again he’s an utter failure of a human being—a blight upon the species, same as you. And then I also want to say FUCK ALL of YOU DICKS—the whole band and the entire OMD entourage. I was a goddamned child and you pieces of shit ruined my life or at least watched and laughed while it got ruined. You scum helped a predator steal my innocence, my chance to develop like a normal kid, my right to have an actual first date and a real first love, an innocent first kiss, and a first dance with someone my own age instead of some fat, balding, old, kid-creeper, 9 years my senior. For fucks sake, you guys, when you were playing with the Thompson Twins, he was driving me to 11th grade in the morning and taking me backstage to rape me at the Universal Ampitheater in the evening. No wonder I never returned to high school after Graham took me out to fly me to New York for Madison Square Garden. I was in the top 10% of American students when I met you turds at 14, but because I met you at 14, the year that followed, 10th grade, was the end of my high school life and the end of my education. There aren’t words to convey how much I hate you fuckers for just this ONE piece in the 1000-piece puzzle that is “How Did OMD Ruin Your Life?”

Did it never occur to you that I was a kid, and a whole human being, and what was happening wasn’t just not good for me but was arguably the worst goddamned thing that could be happening to me >>right in front of your pasty faces?<< Careless, smarmy, selfish assholes. Every last one of you. Fuck you all and fuck the record labels, like yours, Herb Alpert, and yours, boorish Branson, and the hotels—like yours, especially, Mr. Pritzker. And fuck all of the venues, and the staff at Disneyland, and fuck absolutely everyone employed at my shitty school, Immaculate Heart.

I started this, Andy, asking when you learned I was 14. It’s a vexing question I’ve pondered these last years as I’ve wrestled to unlock the truth buried deep within the strangling grips of the lies you all told us girls. Before you answer, let me save you some effort at mental gymnastics. I know the lie Graham told me via letter that first year, about when he supposedly learned I was 14. I know he, and perhaps even you as well, may be initially inclined to think offering that lie up as a pathetic defense against all I’ve shared may seem like your best move here. Trust me, it is NOT.

The confusion around my age the day we met and while we were in Europe is an interesting story but before you entertain sharing it as some kind of defense of all I’ve laid out, please know these two things: 


A) I have more of these letters to write and I fully intend to tell that story myself and 


B) even if that is your, and Graham’s, and the band’s defense, let me make clear Graham’s story—a likely lie—will have him saying he didn’t find out until >after the concert at The Palace in Hollywood< the month after we met you in Europe.

The thing is, if that was when he learned, which I sincerely doubt, we were in Los Angeles that night, my hometown. Graham could have easily put me in a cab and sent me home. We were in my hometown, Graham could have gone to sleep and put me in a cab home in the morning. In either case, he could have said “Now that I know you are 14, you’re simply too young for me to be with. Not only is it criminal, but it is otherwise entirely wrong. You’re a sweet girl, but you have to go home, I cannot take you to San Francisco.” But, Andy, can you believe he didn’t do either of those things? Do you know what your employee Graham Weir did instead >after he claims to have learned my actual age of 14< and then feigned shock and horror and unhappiness? Andy, he put his penis in my mouth for the very first time. And, Andy, after that, he fell asleep. And when he awoke in the morning, he didn’t tell me he’d stayed awake all night and due to conscience and care for morality and right and wrong, he could not bring himself to take me to San Francisco with you and the rest of the band—as he and you had planned when you bought plane tickets for me and another teen from our school trip. No, Andy, Graham let me pack my bag, shower, dress, and leave the Tropicana Motel room with him and the rest of the band piled into taxi cabs headed to LAX where we all together flew to San Francisco and where we all together took limos from SFO to your hotel in SF’s Japan Town.

Andy, do you know what else Graham did on that trip—after he learned I was 14? Well, for one, once we got to the Kyoto Inn Hotel in San Francisco, he put his penis in my mouth again and that time he ejaculated into my—as per his lie re: having only learned the night before of my age—then 100% known by him to be my 14-year-old mouth. I remember being so shocked and scared, horrified and disgusted, wanting to vomit over how gross it all was.

You know what else happened, Andy, before Graham put me in a taxi to make my own 14-year-old way alone through the city and beyond to San Francisco International Airport, through the large airport to the terminal, on to a plane and then into Los Angeles International Airport—all without any money to call anyone, to take a cab home to Glendale, or even a single fucking quarter to catch a damn bus all the way across the city from LAX once I’d landed? Yeah, you guessed it, it was the same thing happening in your room with your teen prey. Both of us girls were where we were that morning due to your and Graham’s coordinated advanced plotting. Before my groomer sent me away like Jimmy Page’s teen trash deposited at the curb, before he dismissed me to fend for myself as a naive 14 year old traveling through a strange city penniless and alone, Graham Weir—who claims to have learned the night before that I was 14, not 16, put his penis in my vagina for the first time. Andy, this was >>AFTER HE CLAIMED HE LEARNED I WAS 14!<< I was 14 so I thought what happened meant what was going on between us was love. I thought it meant he was my boyfriend. I thought this must be what boyfriends and girlfriends do. It took me 50 years, Andy, to figure out it was child rape, entirely void of romance and in fact, full of contempt for me, an innocent kid who didn’t deserve any of the bullshit you all appearing in my life created. Andy, I wonder, how long did it take you to know it was never love and was always child rape? Day one, I presume?

Andy, I still have a lot to say. These last years, plus the 40 I lived before the revelation that upturned my life in entirely new and fresh, wholly unexpected ways have been very hard. I’m tired of being the only person saddled with the burden of knowledge around just how hard. You groomers in your gang need to carry this shame now—it’s #NotMyShame, it’s yours—and you have the song to prove it.

I used to love OMD, now I hate you. All of you. None of you are good. I want to vomit sitting here remembering how I thought you all were my friends who liked me and were happy to have me around. I now realize I was the emptiest little kid, I literally had nothing to talk to you about. What the fuck did you all talk to us kids with no life experience about? We hadn’t done anything yet. We didn’t know anything. We were not exciting. We were not at all interesting. We had nothing to bring to the “party” except our compliance and eagerness to please in exchange for your attention and love. Did you guys just laugh at us all the time behind our backs? Were we like confused cats human assholes put tape on the feets of and then make shitty videos while the cats freak out because tape on their feet is not normal and their reaction is hilarious comedy for heartless fucks who think cats are just there to entertain them? Did you guys give Graham ideas for things to try to get me to do? Did you all make requests or wager bets? Did he keep a list. He said he talked to me that first day in Madrid because I represented an item on his list yet to be checked off—a girl with braces. Ewww, fucking total vom. Ick. I was so awkward, I can’t think of a single interesting thing I could have ever said to you all. Did I show you my John Taylor centerfolds from Tiger Beat? Did I tell you about the mean teachers and principal at my high school? I know I made you my favorite food on the tour bus—Frankenstuff Hot Dogs in Cuddles buns in the microwave. Every hot dog making 15-year-old thinks they’re a gourmand, right? I sure did. I’m sure I was so proud of myself finally having something to show you guys, something to contribute. I’m sure you laughed after I shared my exemplary culinary triumph.

You all watched me get defiled and you never once tried to make it stop or help me. I hope you don’t, any of you, still live under the delusion that a 14 year old backstage and on tour buses is a good, wholesome, sound and positive thing for her and/or that she’s capable of A) knowing or B) understanding why she’s truly there. Kids can’t consent because the world has never bothered to actually tell them what they’re consenting to when adults ask them for sex. Kids can’t consent because they’re too innocent and inexperienced to know they need to be skeptical cynics, around men generally but around famous men, especially. Until a kid gets used and taken advantage of, manipulated and lied to in order to be coerced into acts demanded for an adult’s pleasure and benefit, they don’t know adults are willing, able, and often all-too-eager, to use that kid’s youth and ignorance of evil against them. When kids believe they are being loved, they’re not actually consenting to becoming sex objects for sociopaths who intend to squeeze as much use as they can get from them until a more interesting, pretty, or less-used new kid comes along. Andy, you all took everything from 14 year old me. And so, in the end, decades later, as the fog lifts and the clarity finally comes, even the music I spent my youth and my life loving and feeling was an integral part of my story and my makeup got stolen from me, mangled, ruined and shit on by you selfish trashy narcissistic predators. Fuck you, you shitty thief—you dicks stole from kids—like creepy vampires desperate for our youthful blood and energetic life force. #Shame

And, to be clear here, Andy, Graham Weir is the biggest piece of human shit to ever intersect with my life, for sure. I hope my future letters will make him hurt like he never has before. I hope my words about the life I lived after he took what he wanted from my child self will make his insides burn and smolder and rage in protest of the man they’re consigned to exist inside of. I hope he lies awake at night unable to sleep, vexed by anguish and shame, and more regret and so so much SHAME and soul-crushing misery. I hope he feels the red hot stares of his neighbors and the rejection of his family and friends because whatever he loses of their fondness and grace will pale in comparison to the lifetime of suffering he saddled me and my entirely innocent mother with. I hope he rots from the inside out, and quickly. And I hope I get the chance to kick him when he’s down. I hope I can ensure he never knows peace again. I hope if he isn’t already suffering anxiety, that he develops it in response to this soul-baring, truth telling scream of consciousness project I’ve begun here in hopes of beginning to heal my body and my soul. I hope my desire to reclaim my time, unearth my truth, hand off the shame, and heal all that was broken restores balance to a woefully lopsided 40-years lived post-child sex assault and grooming by shitty, willing adults. Graham should carry the weight of this forever more, not me.

But Andy, while all of that is 100% true, you are the recipient of my first letter because Andy, the day we met, you were the boss. It was your band. Graham and Neil were the newest, youngest, most eager members of the band hoping to make that gig go on and on—as it did—for years. You sent someone to retrieve us girls and bring us into the Niza Palace during your soundcheck that day. Graham didn’t do that, certainly he wouldn’t, couldn’t have done it without your consent. You were the oldest both in age and time in and he was the newest. You got us brought inside. You dedicated a song from the stage. You, not Graham, instigated getting us onto your band’s tour bus. You wanted us to go dancing at Rockola with you. You insisted we go back to your hotel. You took the four of us to your room, not Graham’s. You sent me away with him when there was nowhere else to go and I was so obviously out of my depth. You decided to come to Nice and only you came. You arranged for those tickets from LA to SF for two underage girls. And, here’s the thing, Andy, the only—ONLY—times Graham Weir of Edinburgh, Scotland had access to 14, 15, 16 year old me from Los Angeles, California for his grooming and raping were when he was on tour with Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark, working for you, Andy McCluskey. He could never have gotten initial or subsequent access to me if he were not employed as a member of your band, touring around the world, and acting entirely in accord with his employer’s consent to bring along a 14, 15, and 16 year old girl—on the planes, on the bus, in the hotels, in the rental cars, at dinners, and breakfasts, and pubs. Andy, had you ever said “She’s too young, it’s illegal, you can’t do it—you put the whole band in jeopardy.” he would have had to stop. He would have chosen his job over continuing access to exploit me in a heartbeat. Especially because no one would have asked him to give up sex entirely, just the criminal sex with a child, with me. Andy, if your band or your label or any venue had had a basic, bare minimum standard for the care of kids that would have required ID checks for backstage, bus, and hotel visitors, my life would have been spared all the crappy shit that musicians being selfish, willful kid-rapists placed into my life. A 14 year old trying to walk into the shittiest dive bar in the US is more protected against one night of potential drunkenness than 14 year old concert goers are against a life derailed by predatory sex crimes and a lifetime of subsequent suffering. The bare minimum of care for another person—an innocent kid, innocent kids in OMD’s case, was too much to expect of you wrongly-perceived good guy grandaddies of electronic music. Andy, you could have intervened and stopped my life from getting wrecked but you didn’t and we both know why. Graham was responsible for wrecking my one life, but Andy, how many lives are you responsible for wrecking and letting get wrecked because it would have been too hard to prevent 14 year olds from ending up in your dressing rooms and buses?

Andy, one last bit of curiosity before I sign off…what happened to your teenager in New York? Where was she? Why did you insist she leave school and fly to New York only to forbid her to come to the concert? She was in New York, why wasn’t she in any of the pics with me and that other girl from her hometown? She’s nowhere to be found in our pics out in the city, or from backstage, or in the pub after with all the other guys and the three other teens that had been flown to NY and, unlike yours, were allowed to leave their hotel room. Where was your teenager? Why did you consign her to your hotel room? I remember that night in the pub, someone mentioned her and then a joke I didn’t understand got made. I don’t remember all of it, but I do remember it was something about you getting a large-breasted black prostitute and a bag of cocaine? I was just a kid and child sex assault really assaults the memory—so do you remember where she was, why I never saw her in NY, or what was meant by that “joke”?

Oh, one last last thing, Andy. I decided to look you up on the internet to see what people might be saying about you. I noticed a list in the search results, I saw the Blue Nile in there and got annoyed. They’ve always been my special band so it bugged me to see them on your list of fave albums. Of course, they’ve been a very important band for me since I turned 16 precisely because Graham gave me their album for my 16th birthday—so again, it sucks when a victim of child sex assault grows up and along with her culture evolves an understanding around the fact she was definitely exploited and raped not special and loved and then over and over again as she just tries to make her way through her life, her favorite things, the things that have always made her her, her memories, her stories, her identity, her feelings about her salf and the special things in her life all now have to be re-parsed through the lens of YOU WERE RAPED NOT LOVED. God, Andy, it really fucking sucks. Maybe I’ll put on the Blue Nile and try to figure it out, all by myself.

Anyway, the point of the list—lol, this really is a scream of consciousness, isn’t it? Good thing I’m only doing this for me—no one can criticize my writing because A) I’m not doing this for them and B) I write pretty fucking good for a high-school drop out, and since OMD made that happen—you all can eat a bag dicks before you even thinking about criticizing my run on sentences, k?

So, back to the damn list, Andy, do you remember who was on that list and what you said? Are you feeling queasy and dumb right now as you start to realize? I know I was shocked to see it, given what I was in the middle of writing, but you know, it’s not like I don’t have the pics and letters to prove it, I just hadn’t planned to put them out there. I guess you decided after all this time, it didn’t matter? Such an epically weird post-#metoo move, but thanks? Btw, “babysat” was such a nauseating word choice—also, so weird on your part, but, again, thanks?

Alrighty, I’m exhausted so this’ll have to be all—til next time!
~ Chris

PS, I hope this letter found you well. And I sincerely hope it leaves you suffering. All of you.

PPS, tell Graham letter #2 has his name on it. It’ll be titled “Did You Know You’re the Reason I Didn’t Have Kids?” I sent him cards asking him to email me because he owed me a conversation. Of course, he’s too much of a fucking coward to talk to me now that I’m a goddamned adult with memories and new clarity and hard questions. This all could have been avoided if he hadn’t been such a fucking nonce in the first place and a piece of shit coward in the second. Be mad at him, sure, please, but never forget, none of it could have happened without you giving the thumbs up, Andy. Buck stops there, my guy. You were always such a boss, right?

PPPS, Oh my god, Andy, I almost forgot one of the most important parts! I’m not giving legal advice or anything, but you should know two things:

There is no statute of limitations in California for >ongoing< child sex assault. And, while I’m not terribly concerned about law enforcement actually making an effort on behalf of historical child sex assault victims—despite how gravely our lives were impacted by your criminality, you should at least be aware:

Our current US President seems very focused at the moment on people coming to our country from other countries and committing crimes here. When asked about accidentally deporting a father with 3 American kids to an El Salvadoran gulag, from whence he shall never emerge, he specifically mentioned criminals coming into our country to commit rape. He mentioned an 80-year-old grandma in that case, not a 14 year old raped in the 80’s, but as regards that you should also know:

Elon Musk is our current President’s current sidekick. I believe Elon Musk took a particular interest in your country’s #groomergangs headlines and got himself involved via various expenditures and online incitements. I can’t help but wonder how everyone will feel once they realize, before Pakistanis were emigrating to your country and raping British girls, you lily white British & Scottish men were coming to America to rape girls. Minds will be blown, am I right?

So, make of it what you will, I would just hate for you to find yourself suddenly shocked and surprised by the unexpected circumstances you find yourself in. I know that uncomfortable feeling well. And I also know how it can be a real slippery slope leading to being forced into anal sex you never wanted, in a room where other men are “sleeping.” Just some friendly food for thought, boss man.

Cathartic Letters
My name is Chris. This #ScreamOfConsciousness project I’m beginning is my attempt to start healing via writing letters. This exercise is for me, not for money, not for clicks, not for anything other than my extraordinary need to heal my body and mind from the destruction believing a cruel lie for 40 years wreaked on my life, my mom’s life, and my partner’s life.
If I’d not lost my spleen at 22 to the first rare illness my child sex assault led to, maybe I could have vented said spleen sometime before now. Alas, I am spleenless and coming face-to-face with my childhood trauma at a time when trauma-informed therapists with expertise in historical child sex assault are not actually growing on trees. I’ve never been to therapy for the things I’m about to finally purge. Lucky me, I get to figure it all and try to heal it all by myself.
If you must read, please let it be with empathy and if you must say anything, please let it be kind. Other victims of predation and sex assault will be reading, we all deserve the world’s gentleness and compassion. If you are one of those fellow victims, please accept a sincere apology from me for the things our society allowed to happen to you and the ways in which you can never be made whole. You were deserving of safety and respect for your humanity—however nascent it was. I hope my letters can help you know you aren’t alone, it wasn’t your fault, and you are amazing for having endured and made it this far. Let’s keep going forward, together.

Captions
Your 1985 New Year’s card to me. Why on earth did you send it?
When I re-discovered this, I showed it to someone we both know. They asked, “Why did he send this to you? Do you think he was trying to keep you quiet?” I laughed and said, “I don’t think he was the least bit worried about a couple of powerless, besotted, wholly-groomed girls tattling on him.” I’m right, right? You didn’t care in the least about us girls, did you? Honestly, I’ve always wondered how many more of us you all had scattered around the world.

This is me in 1984. This is what I looked like at 14 on a school tour bus in Spain. Look at me, you fucking creep. WTF were you all thinking, you sick, selfish, sick fucks?

This is you talking with the guys from Cook Da’ Books after their set at Rockola, after your show at the Niza Palace. I took this picture when I was 14 and had never before been to a nightclub.

Graham and his brother, Neil, took me and another girl to Disneyland for my 16th birthday. It was a weekday so the park had few visitors and Graham and I were put on a Pirates of the Caribbean boat by ourselves, no other guests. Not far into the ride Graham realized how dark it was and insisted I remove my clothes so he could rape me on the ride. You know, to celebrate my 16th birthday. This was the day I learned Graham was a hateful homophobe. It was the day I began to think he might not be a good person.
The leather motorcycle jacket Graham gave me for my Sweet 16 birthday gift. That’s how it looks now—brand new because I never wore it. I never knew why, but I always hated it.

I understand completely why Lori didn’t know she was raped as a child 
by adult men. I’m glad to see that she, like me, and like our finally-evolving culture, has had an evolution in thinking. I hope she and I can talk someday about how all of us can very certainly be harmed by something we don’t 
know the name of, don’t know the specific workings of & may not even 
believe is present in our lives.

When I was diagnosed in 2018, I didn’t know I’d had a rare autoimmune liver disease for 10+ years. Unfortunately, my ignorance to the disease’s presence and did not mean the illness spared my body its destructive nature, it didn’t. We have all of us at one time or another been harmed, or seen someone harmed, by an illness or circumstance working against us in the background. This is what child sex assault leaves its victims with—a quiet destroyer of vitality, potential, & life.
How many of us end up as hermits with our weed or our wine and an overwhelming desire to just be left alone? How many of us disappear entirely, never to have our absence noticed? We were the insignificant girls after all. But even when people bother to tell the stories of these child victims, they mostly fail to understand, as do the victims still—and, of course, owithout any cultural frame to support this truth—that their alcohol and drug addiction, their weed and porn addiction, their abusive spouse, their broken relationship with their parents, their lost chance at education, their chronic illness and their chronic poverty from difficulty holding jobs, their depression and anxiety, their disregualted nervous system and the tension they hold in their shoulders that they smoke too much weed for, their failed businesses, their back taxes and overdue parking tickets is all part and parcel of the constellation of symptoms and thwarted development that befall a majority of child sex assault victims. Though, if you asked any that are GenX or older, they’d not think to connect the dots. If they were left to grateful groomers but cynical folks who mistook their natural youhtful eagerness to do fun things in service to learning about the world, getting thrills, being validated by adults, in some cases loved by a male adult in lieu of a father figure in the newly divorce-crazed 70’s & 80’s.
Just because we haven’t had a vernacular, and agreed upon frame, a universal contempt for the sexualization and explpoiotation of children does not mean the children who sithey does not mean it didn’t harm me, grievously. It did, same as the child sex assault and its exceedingly common—but entirely unknown to 
me—after-effects that had harmed me, significantly, for four decades, before I came to know it had all been festering inside me, wreaking havoc on every aspect of my life since I was 14 years old. And though I knew the havoc I did not know my child sex assault was the casue, I belived I was the cause, I was the problem,

I look uncomfortable. I was. This is in a NY bar after OMD’s Madison Square Gardens show. There were four of us girls flown from So Cal to NY for this show. 4 of 6 OMD band members flew teen girls across the country for…love? No.
I was her one and only precious and beloved baby. Her Squirt. Her Shrimp Boat. Her favorite person. Her family, the one she made, not the cruel, abusive one that’d been forced on her when she was a baby. I was the promise that made her want to live when everyone else made her want to die. She put everything she had into me. She was determined she & I would have a better life, but OMD wrecked it before it had barely begun.
To you, Andy, Graham, and the men of OMD, I was nothing, just a disposable kid and my well-being didn’t deserve your consideration. To you, I was worthless. But, to her, I was priceless and irreplaceable. You groomers broke me and never even bothered to notice. In turn, my mom, like me, was never the same. The deep wounds created in each of us and in our relationship from age 14 never healed. And Graham trying to access me again in my 20’s & 30’s created such stress and havoc in my life, I’m confident it was the beginning of the end for her.
After my mom died, I found this water-damaged notebook in her things. I have no idea why she had decided to type over the illegible, water soaked pages, but I was so grateful she had. When I was 15 and my life was falling apart as I’d been sexually exploited a year earlier—but no one knew that was why I was falling apart because nobody back then called what Graham did to me grooming, predation, child sexual assault, or rape—I ran away from home twice during my very difficult 10th grade year. It was so bad and the outcome so devastating, it would turn out to be the last year of school for me. My mom was completely in the dark as to why any of it was happening. You can see the pain it was causing the both of us in her note written 11 months after I’d met you

I was 16 the last time I was in a hotel bed with Graham. That is not to say he stopped trying to make it happen again and again and again. I’d turned 17 a month before the pic above. I’m in OMD’s dressing room at the Warfield in San Francisco. I didn’t go to SF for Graham. I went for the girls—OMD’s other girls—who were my friends, the only friends who truly understood my life. I craved them and their company so I agreed to go to SF for the OMD show, but I made it clear I didn’t want to be left alone with Graham because I didn’t want to end up stuck with him pressuring me to have sex with him. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. That note in the middle is from my 1986 Day Planner. It says “Went to dinner w/G. Talked. He still loves me. Bet $50 with Girl E about sex. Back to his hotel, talked, BAD. Walked back to my hotel. Called my mom, ended BAD. I’m really upset nobody believed I wouldn’t have sex w/Graham. I didn’t! I won’t! Slept alone.”
The $50 bet was that neither of us would have sex with an OMD member while we there in SF. We had all discussed that none of us wanted to, I was the only one that actually avoided it. “He still loves me” was obviously a lie because he never loved me to begin with. He simply told me, a kid he had nothing in common with that he loved me to keep me believing the predation he was always engaging in was actually romance and love.

Being a teen and suddenly getting thrust into an adult world of lights and cameras, music and fans, VIP rooms and limos where adults are all around clamoring to get close to the popular, desired people that have >chosen you< and put you in their closest spaces is mind-boggling and overwhelming in a way that makes those two words an horrific understatement. Andy, I never tried heroin. I’ve heard it’s quite addictive in part because it feels so amazing people will let it take over and ruin their life just to feel it one more time. When I, a kid who’d only ever roller skated at the rink across from the train tracks had this bunch of popular, desired adult men choosing me to hang out with them, it was the headiest drug, the highest high, the most magical, intoxicating, spell-binding stupor I’ve ever been so enveloped and nearly smothered by. I was only 14 and I’d never felt so special. People told me I was privileged to have such unique “opportunities” at my age. I, along with so many girls before me and after me, were told we were lucky and so we felt lucky to be able to have access to you men and your special places which most people never got to see. We were always responded to when people learned our stories with some version of “No way! You know the guys in OMD? Oooooh! Tell me all about it!” Insert whatever band/actor/famous name here because it’s the same for anyone whose ever know anyone on the spectrum of celebrity. Americans, especially, are dangerously infatuated with celebrity. Y’all get so starstruck and goofy, you’ve been just giving your kids away to these entirely predictable predators for generations. FYI, everyone, famous people are not to be presumed good people simply because they are famous. People who get catered to for long enough, unsurprisingly, can become really big assholes who only care about their immediate needs, everyone else be damned, even, or especially, kids. Americans, humans, I beg you, please stop being gaga for garbage people just because you’ve heard of them before. Alas, fame and regular people’s desperate fondness for it is why predators in entertainment are never hungry for prey. They have __ to harvest preferred girls, or boys, from the crowd at the venue’s front or back door, or right out of the audience. America, if you didn’t know before, please hear me now—this is an actual job in the music world. That’s why its so easy for musicians—all of us know what it is to want to be chosen. And I’ve seen the way you all act around famous people, even the most minor C-list celeb causes people to turn into starstruck, mush-mouthed toddlers fevered with base desire to be chosen, to get that attention, to have a famous person validate them and invite them into their inner sanctum. Adults at least know they’re being dorks and the celebs do not care about them. Kids aren’t savvy though. Kids fall in love with these narcissistic, plotting, conniving, sex criminals, instantly, just because they looked at them. Have you ever known a teen who was madly in love with someone they didn’t know? Did it make any sense to your adult mind? And yet, it so common it’s a well-worn trope we all recognize—that kids don’t know common sense, repercussions, or restraint—they’ve not learned that part of being human yet. Up until adolescence and sex and love, anything a kid is interested in, their parents and teachers push them to do more and more and more of until they become young masters. But then, when what they think is love appears at 13 and 14 as crushes and fixations on famous people, everyone is surprised when that kid wants to experience more and more of this new hobby, this new interest, this thing no one ever told them about that is suddenly flooding their bodies with hormones so powerful they can make adults fall for people who literally beat them nearly to death. Have you ever tried to teach a kid how to drive? Did you notice how, in the beginning, when they are brand 
new and just learning—they don’t know how to >lightly press< on the gas, so they stomp it, to the floor and everyone in the car dangerously lurches forward into the unexpected future an inexperienced kid just drove them into? Expecting kids in sexual “relationships” with adults to actually be the responsible party and have 
the ability to parse all of what is going on, including potentially criminal conspiracies against them that they 
are completely ignorant to, is stupid, cruel, derelict of our obligations to children, willfully ignorant about children’s capacity to understand, let alone consent, to what those adults are USING THEM FOR. Predators want kids because they are stupid to the ways of predators. Everyone who thinks 16 year olds can consent is a predator’s best friend. Keep giving your kids to predators, because they’re famous. And when it comes to sex with adult men who have cynical, cold hearts, constant access to drugs, alcohol, and money to buy kids toys and clothes, and take them to Disneyland, you somehow convince yourself that a 14, 15, or 16 year old girl has the maturity and understanding to consent to being a glorified fleshlight, but not to drink a beer, buy cigarettes or sudafed, join the military, cast a vote, see a movie, or rent a car. OK, deviant, weirdo accessories to child sex assault. You ever seen pics of kids running behind trucks billowing out clouds of DDT? They consented, right? I mean, come on, they literally >ran right into those cute and funny puffy white clouds< over and over! Clearly they wanted it, clearly they loved it. “They enjoyed it! They ran toward it! Therefore, there was consent!” Whatever may have come from it, cancer, Alzheimers, whatever, it’s not the responsibility of the men pumping it out all over town, it’s the kids’ fault for running toward novelty and naively believing adults would never hurt them.