Victory Tischler-Blue, who replaced Fuchs as the Runaways bassist, said the rape was referenced by other members of the band. “I heard about that nonstop,” she said. “They would talk about Kim fucking Jackie like a dog. It was kind of a running joke.”
Krome escaped to the adjoining room and began drinking. She was confused why nobody did anything to end the attack. She recalls that Jett and Currie were sitting off to the side of the room for part of the time, snickering.
Maybe she just doesn’t want to come forward because there’s been a rocky legal past between Fuchs and the Runaways. Or maybe Jett was too shitfaced to remember it herself.
Jett, through a representative, denied witnessing the event as it has been described here. Her representative referred all further questions to Jackie “as it’s a matter involving her and she can speak for herself.”
I just…uh…I don’t doubt that she was a victim, but…something feels weird about this, you know? Like we still don’t have the full story. I don’t mean for any of this to take away from the important part of the story, that their manager was a real shitstain on the face of humanity. But…something doesn’t smell right.
It’s really Judith Herman’s point. You may already know about her work.
She is a veteran of the anti-rape movement and a psychiatric researcher at Harvard Medical School who synthesized work on different types of trauma, including rape trauma, in Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence — From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992).
She (and others) proposed inclusion of the complex PTSD diagnosis in the DSM. Her insights are amazing and her writing is very clear.
If someone could read only one book on trauma from gender violence, many would suggest this one. It’s quietly changed how everyone asks questions in and out of her field.
While I feel that a high age of consent ends up being patriarchal, I cant decide if the 70s was a big national pedo-fest or people just let it out thinking it was like the ‘worse’ gay people coming out and had been normal behavior for all time.
What’s the likelihood of getting excused from a sentence through justifiable homicide if you stab a rapist in the ear with a splintered drumstick when you walk in on something like this?
I feel uneasy with age of consent below 18, but I assume that protective patriarchy training is informing that feeling. It is a strange situation considering the patriarchal morality crusades which created the current system. The danger is IMHO the age of consent directly creates a major power imbalance and dependence which can be exploited, especially in cases where a minor separates from their family but doesn’t have the resources to become legally emancipated. Then the situation actively promotes illegal but difficult to find alternatives to survival sex work.
I am open to intelligent arguments from both sides as it is tricky to be protective ‘for the children’ without also being patriarchal especially with the double standard applied to gender.
My 70s question was if the drugging and rape of minors was worse in that decade or just talked about openly at that time.
Was it not clear that’s how I feel? Nevertheless, we don’t need to read about every rape that ever happened, nor every horrible thing.
@dobby, yes that’s tricky. Ethics would be so much simpler if it was black and white, if a Lawgiver would just tell us the rules. Thankfully we have the internet, where thousands of people will happily argue one side, and thousands the other, angrily typing into the night.
That something is called bystander effect and is key to explaining the horrendous things humans have been doing to each other for Millennia. It also explains why some bystanders prefer not to remember such incidents… The memory is a fickle thing.
And it is most importantly the reason why discussing such public violations of human dignity are crucial, not just for the sanity of the victim, but also for a better society in general.
Have you never been in a situation when you witnessed the unacceptable and struggled to speak out because you didn’t want to isolate yourself from the apparent safety of the group condoning the not ok? In my experience failure to intervene makes public acknowledgement of the event near impossible. So Jett’s reaction is rational within her own context.
Finally, too many people who have nothing to gain, and who are independent of each other, are corroborating the story for it not to be in core true.
Kim was a sexual predator. He took naïve young women, separated them from external support and abused the emotionally before he abused them physically. Let’s face if if any of the band members had showed enough resistance to him in the first place, he wouldn’t have made them members of the band. So we have the bystander effect and what I call the “freshman” effect. When you’re in a completely new situation you really don’t KNOW what normal, expected behavior is so you look to those around you to see what reasonable behavior is. So “in front of people” serves both as a lesson in the power dynamics AND as a way for Kim to believe that what he did was “opportunistic and clever” rather than “rape.” Because most predators DON’T believe that they are rapists. The band members joking about it afterwards can be seen as a sort of PTSD gallows humor and as a way of minimizing their own culpability.
Playing into this was the fact that not only were these young women trying to figure out what “adulthood” and “rock and roll” were like, but to some degree, American society, having thrown away the old rules of sexual propriety with the sexual revolution was searching around, trying to figure out what the new rules were. And in this uncertainty, predators like Kim and Polanski and thousands of others whose names we’ll never know had a feeding frenzy. Predators will ALWAYS be there, looking to take advantage, but having thrown away the old patriarchal rules people weren’t really sure what the new rules were…So they can fall into the idea that abuse is “the new normal.”
“Was it not clear that’s how I feel? Nevertheless, we don’t need to read about every rape that ever happened, nor every horrible thing.”
If an article was devoted to “every rape that ever happened” (nice hyperbole by the way), then we’d never have time to read about anything else!
Though it would be extremely interesting (and depressing) to see just how overwhelmingly horrendous it would be if “every single rape that ever happened” were discussed…
My reaction to the thread – having lived through the decade myself – is that FINALLY we’re starting to acknowledge that so much of what society has been euphemistically calling “free love” from that era was actually coercive and terrifying to the victims. We need to know MORE, not less. This is only the tip of the iceberg.
I understood your feelings, the ‘your’ I was referring to was the readers of the story, whoever they may be. And you are correct, we don’t need to read about every single one, but this was her story to tell, and she obviously wanted it to be heard.
I suppose if it were true that nobody would care it would be worse, but many people can empathize (sad, but true) so people DO care. Not everyone of course, but enough people to let others know that they’re not alone. From what I read in the article, Jackie speaking to Kari about their similar experiences was empowering for both of them and the comment sections I’ve read seems to indicate that there are plenty of people who care.
I think that the “this is our secret don’t tell anyone” route is so insidious and effective in part because the victims know on some level that at least some people will indeed care. Too often though that “caring” results in the person who told being put in situations that are also dangerous and filled with abuse: http://rights4girls.org/wp-content/uploads/r4g/2015/02/2015_COP_sexual-abuse_layout_web-1.pdf
Horrible story. It’s too bad this didn’t get more publicity before he died. Googling about him there was a lot of hagiography around his rock-n-roll rogue image and how wide his imprint was. All looks rather disgusting in this light.
“Tell everybody, because nobody will care,”
“I would say that’s the implicit message of raping somebody in a room full of people…”
Except no one is “telling” anybody about anything, the people in the room are now participating as observers and that makes everyone in the room who doesn’t speak out complicit…
