I have been telling this story all my life. The problem was that no one believed me or cared enough to do anything about it. No one. Mother, family, friends, boyfriends. I wish I could say someone finally said, I believe you, I’m sorry — here is my undying support, but no one ever did. One friend had a similar experience but all we could really do was exchange stories and feel uncomfortable. Mostly, all that anyone ever did was attempt to avoid responsibility and/or act like it was my fault. Either for letting it happen (!!!) or for not telling them, even if I did. The most incredible part of this is where they act like had I said something, they would have done anything but tell me to stop talking about it. But they don’t get that. It’s a typical story of apathetic, selfish, and not very smart people deciding that it wasn’t their problem and not to get involved or take action. In a way, it’s a microcosm for our entire society. If you wonder why it is that so many famous men are being outed as rapists, misogynists, and serial sexual harassers regularly, it’s because our world is set up to not only allow that kind of behavior, but encourage it. Many men feel entitled to have sex with young girls or with women no matter what the women want. Is every man like that? No, but enough of them are to make being a girl or a woman distinctly dangerous. Many of them feel entitled to our bodies. To them, we are not people. We are things. Receptacles.
I’m going to tell you exactly what happened in as much detail as possible because this should appall you.
My mother was a child of the foster care system. She was a literal orphan since both of her parents died while she was young. I know very little about my mother and her family. She may not have known that much herself. I also take nearly everything my mother said to me with a grain of salt since she had a tendency to lie and simply make things up. She was, from what she said to me, horribly abused in foster care, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and withholding of food. Remember this when people like John Kelly tell you that kids that are unwanted will just be absorbed into the foster care system. For a lot of these kids, horrific abuse is what they have to look forward to. It’s a factory for creating generations of abused and angry children.
My parents had the basic shotgun wedding. My father, the genius and the idiot who couldn’t keep his zipper shut, managed to get two women pregnant at the same time. He chose to marry my mother, a fact that he would never let me forget. They hated each other and got into verbal and physical fights regularly. When they finally told me they were getting a divorce, probably when I was about five years old, I remember thinking, thank god, I thought you two were going to kill each other. I’m not kidding, the marriage was made up of some pretty rough shit. All I felt was relief. I was wrong.
If at all possible, my mother got involved with a guy who was even worse. His name is Sergio Ivan Olivera. He was mean and nasty and would hit me on occasion when he didn’t like something I did.
I get the feeling he thought he was pretty hot shit.
What happened is that he waited until my mom left me alone with him or was otherwise occupied and came into my room. He already had the advantage of being willing to intimidate me and use physical violence to control my behavior. I was alone and probably about seven years old. He didn’t make any promises, he just told me that he wanted to tickle me and proceeded to take off my pants and underwear and use his fingers on my clitoris. He would visit me, I’m not sure how many times, and do the same number, use his fingers on me until I started having the beginnings of an orgasm. It mostly felt like a pleasant tingling, not what I feel as an adult woman for those of you who will inevitably jump in to doubt my account because “girls can’t have orgasms at that age”. It wasn’t a full orgasm. He would stare into my face with a look of unpleasant concentration like he wanted to punish me. I can only assume he was enjoying it in some way, getting off on controlling me, “spoiling me”, getting back at my mother, or grooming me for sex when I was slightly older. Who the hell knows what this pedophile scum fuck wanted. He was raping me digitally when I was under ten years old, I don’t really care what his inner workings are. I would love to see him hanging from a light pole by his neck. That’s it.
I was terrified and I basically understood what was going on but what could I really do about it? I was in an old house that was turned into an apartment building where the other tenants weren’t around much. My useless mother disappeared. He also used the same tactic that they all use, “don’t tell or else”. This guy had already jumped to using me for sex and yelling and hitting me when I showed any type of defiance, so I couldn’t imagine that hurting me badly was something he would be above doing. He once bodily dragged me into an elevator when I refused to get into it (I had a fear of elevators because I am slightly claustrophobic). Message delivered.
My behavior started to change. I began acting out, doing the same thing to myself even when he wasn’t around because I felt the beginnings of pleasure. This is where people will start to judge me and say “SEE SHE LIKED IT”. Yeah, that’s the whole point. If a pedophile wants to have sex with you as a child, they make it so you kind of like it or it has some kind of benefit to you. They are training you. They also use threats to keep you quiet and keep their little fun going. Additionally, you should really look up the studies that say that the human body responds even if a rape victim is unwilling. It doesn’t mean you give consent, it just means the body’s automation takes over. My mother almost caught me a couple of times doing it and looked at me strangely, but said nothing. Thanks, Mom.
This bastard was so confident in what he was doing, so brazen that he finally got himself caught eventually. Even my supposedly clueless mother finally got suspicious. One day they decided to go and visit his brother and his wife in a nearby city and I had to go along. He was so hot to do it to me that he dragged me outside to his car and stuck his hand down my pants in broad daylight on a suburban street and started going at it. The Scarlet Child was wearing red pants, a minor detail that I actually recall. I was waiting for it to be over when mother dear burst out of the front door, stormed over to the passenger side door, ripped it open, clearly saw what was happening and shouted, “WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING?”
This phrase should be your first clue as to how this was going to go.
She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me out of the car and into the house. She threw me into the bathroom and said, looking at me like I had done something wrong, “You had better tell me what you two were doing.” So I did. I told her exactly what he had been doing to me. She got a look on her face like she wanted to hurt me and stomped out of the room. She acted like a teenage girl would act as if I had stolen the guy who she thought was her boyfriend. I didn’t cry, I stood trembling and frightened waiting for how I would be punished. I already knew. She didn’t come back. I don’t remember her saying anything about it again unprompted. When I finally opened the door and stepped out, he was waiting there — breathing hard with rage and he said, “You lying little bitch.”. I don’t remember what happened after that. I was Peter Gabriel, melty face.
It was about this time that my memory started to change. As an adult, I live only in the present. I already don’t remember what happened yesterday very well. Now is the only time I know. My past is a smooth black lake that nearly everything sinks into sooner or later. I remember big events in a disassociated fashion but I don’t have memories like I assume most people do. My mother effortlessly gaslighted me by pretending nothing had happened. I was Tommy. There I was. This is when you get to demand of me, a seven year old — well, why didn’t you tell someone else in your family? How was I supposed to trust another adult human being with this information? Maybe that’s what all adults did. Maybe no one cared. In that assumption, I was absolutely correct.
How was I, as a frightened and confused and traumatized seven year old, supposed to report this to the police on my own? Even now, some people demand proof as if proof of such crimes always exists. This didn’t happen after Me Too. This is back when no one believed this happened except on a few occasions when the crime was so egregious that they couldn’t ignore it or it happened to someone who was important. I wasn’t then and I still am not important. It was accepted as an invisible yet icky fact of life that was okay as long as it didn’t happen to you. People made jokes about it and it was common knowledge that pedophiles were at work in our neighborhoods. It was no big deal. On a certain level, it still is. Even now people refer to it as molestation which makes it sound minor. It’s not. Additionally, the rest of my family weren’t exactly bastions of warmth and understanding. My father was a man who, as I found out later, was slowly going clinically insane and loved to frighten me. My grandmother, while probably the most loving person nearby, was also emotionally unstable and tended to dramatically threaten to kill herself every couple of weeks. My mother, never very good at being a parent, had thoroughly abandoned me in favor of her new dick, so I was shit out of luck.
I began repressing this horror so successfully that the only thing that remained was a violent hatred of my mother and her soon to be second husband. That’s right, she stayed with him, married him, and had three kids with him after that. Message delivered. The only good thing was that all clandestine tickling activities stopped. Pretty soon afterwards, my behavior was so hostile that she asked what I wanted, I said I didn’t want to live with her and that she should take me to my grandmother. I refused to speak with her and interact with her for years and she became angry and tried to force me to come back in a dramatic middle of the night fight some time later. I ended up hiding in the laundry room of my grandmother’s house one night after midnight crying, unable to form words. Hilarious. My grandmother didn’t know what happened but she knew enough that I didn’t want to go back and refused to let that happen after seeing how frightened I was. This was probably when I was around 11 years old.
When I hit high school, I forgot enough of this so that I tentatively started spending a little time with mommy dearest but my feelings were always of loathing and I actively used her to get what I wanted. She always seemed to have men around who would stare at me hungrily. I kept getting angrier and angrier and would walk endless circles around the back yard. This lead to a break down at 16 where the memory came back and I ended up in the bathroom pounding my fists against the sink and screaming.
My mother, ran in and said, “What’s wrong!” as if she cared. For the second time, I told her what happened, in a distinctly less nice way. Her response? “Why didn’t you tell me.”
For the rest of her short and pathetic life, she would ask me why I hated and ignored her and I would respond in the same way. Every time she would act like it was the first time she heard of it and give me the same reaction. She would show up at family funerals, of which there were plenty, to get an opportunity to try and buttonhole me. Every time she registered shock and dismay when I told her yet again. She died of two massive strokes about five years ago and ended up on life support, but brain dead shortly before Thanksgiving. Happy Holidays. I ended up calling the hospital and demanding, as her next of kin, that they pull her off the machines. Even though I hated her guts, no one should have to go on that way. The drama went on for a couple of weeks and this inflamed my eldest step-sister’s hatred of me. Unbeknownst to me, my mother, the eternal clueless wonder who could never acknowledge that her second husband had raped me, told my step siblings all about it and how that’s why I ignored her and made sure that they blamed me for it all.
So much for the sweet innocent mother routine.
I got a phone call from the step sister, Cintia, where she just started screaming at me about how I never loved them and I told her exactly why I had no reason to. That’s when she told me she knew all about it. Amusingly, she told me that it both never happened and was all my fault. Our society in a nutshell. Her father was innocent and I was to blame. O seven year old Jezebel. The conversation was brief and violent and I will never speak to or acknowledge any of them ever again. They made their choice. It’s very possible that my mother lies in the local Potter’s Field somewhere in San Bernardino County and I couldn’t be bothered to care less about that. I’m glad she’s dead. Does that make me the monster? I guess, but if so, I am the monster that they created.
My rapist, Sergio Ivan Olvera lives in Highland, CA, from what the Redlands PD tells me. They have refused to charge him because of statute of limitations laws. Even after all this time, it took everything I had to make the report and that’s what I got. When the whole Me Too thing blew up and I finally realized I could report it and possibly be taken seriously, I sat in my chair in front of my computer and my ear drums throbbed and I couldn’t breathe. I burst into tears. When I managed to get myself to my car to drive to the police station, I was unable to fit my key into the ignition for a good 5 minutes. I could not manage this basic function that I did every day. On the way out, I told my aunt that was what I was going to do and she tried to discourage me. No surprise there. Support, it’s what makes families great. It took me a good half hour to find the police station even with the help of Google Maps. If anyone tells you that this kind of crime doesn’t affect people well into their adult life, they are lying to you. The mere thought of reporting turned me into a shell of a person who could barely perform simple everyday tasks. I was, once again, seven years old and full of fear and self doubt.
In so many ways, people, even those that supposedly love you, find ways to blame you for the crime. Their disgust makes you the target, the perpetrator. I can only think that maybe this is their shame trying to find a way to wriggle out of any responsibility. They know they should have helped, should have done something, and the only way to absolve themselves is by making it your problem. It becomes more complicated when a family member or close friend is involved because, like my mother, they feel forced to make a choice and as a female child, I was the disposable one. I get the distinct feeling that the few close relatives that I have feel much more sympathy for my mother than they do for me. They feel I should just shut up and accept it, because that’s what they did.
It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
People also think they know how you should react and they tell you. You should just let it go. You should forgive. Fuck that. I am telling the truth. I am the injured party. I deserve justice. I did nothing wrong. Fuck anyone who doesn’t think that is true. I don’t need therapy, which doesn’t work on me anyway. I need to see that inhuman piece of shit in jail. I don’t want revenge, I want him to be punished. Statute of limitations on sex crimes should not exist. They exist only to absolve the criminals of responsibility and do not take into account the severity of the crime and the effects on the victims.
If I am a monster for not accepting this quietly, so be it. I’m not afraid of you. Come up and get me. Bring your pitchforks and scream at me how I’m a slut. It’s nothing new. I’ll be waiting for you. I am that bitch.
I am the monster that you made me.
