A Rapist Not Often Known

The motives behind my attacker, and why he chose me.

Photo by Krista Mangulsone on Unsplash

I have firm boundaries about what I will and will not share, that won't change. I've omitted many details within the below reflection for my safety as well as reader safety. But please be aware, this is not an easy read. I do think, given my rapist's motives and actions are not the norm in typical assault stories, it's important to share. So, here I go…

It’s not an uncommon thing to wonder why a victim is chosen. The rhetorics around “what were they wearing, did they lead them on,” have been around so long they’re used now as evidence of how unfair it is to assume a victim is in some way at fault.

It’s never the fault of the victim. While we may drown asking what could have been done differently, how we could have saved ourselves, it’s ultimately not on us.

However, I know what I could have done differently. And it is entirely on me.

The vast majority of rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. We think of rapists as springing out of dark alleys, and that does happen, but more likely it’s someone you know.

I knew my rapist.

But he knew me in a far different way than I could have ever been prepared for.

We first met when I was four, then fell out of each other’s orbits and reconnected again when I was eleven.

We got on well, as we had before. I enjoyed his company. I enjoyed teasing him and joking with him. I enjoyed being his friend.

It didn’t last long.

He changed. Became brash and dismissive. He got annoyed at my jokes, refused to engage in conversations. Refused to acknowledge me at all. I remember it being one of the earliest rejections of friendship in my life, and it hurt.

He obviously hated me. I was too annoying, too loud. Had pushed someone away by being me – my eternal failing.

He never said any of this, of course. But I knew.

We were forced to be within each other’s proximity constantly after that. I avoided him as best I could. Why would I want to be around someone who clearly hated me? He would glare all the time, huffed when I was giggling and being stupid with friends. Grumbled and pouted on the rare occasions I couldn’t maintain the distance between us. The way he reacted made me feel tiny.

But despite that, in a way I only ever carried internally, I would root for him. We had been friends, after all. One of my earliest. He was bright and ambitious, and I was glad to see him succeed.

For years, we never shared a word, then, when I was sixteen, he showed up at a party.

And I was stunned.

My group of friends were overwhelmingly oddballs he had absolutely no connection to. As he walked in, he looked at me immediately, jacket not yet off, and I shrank.

He’d grown close to my friends while I’d had no idea of it. They’d grown without me. I felt shunned, a feeling I had known my whole life and had never quite managed to harden myself against. And given his enormous, obvious dislike of me, I knew I’d spend the whole night avoiding him.

But that wasn’t what happened.

He stopped me. Started conversation with me. Spent the night getting closer to me.

Then he started flirting. I remember the exact moment. How surprised and confused I was. Here was this boy – this lost friend – and we fell into the easiest dynamic. Just as we had all the years before. But now it was something new.

And he remembered all of these little things about me throughout the years. So many moments where I’d been stupid, made jokes, injured myself or vanished completely for a while.

Then he got jealous. I didn’t recognise it. Then he got possessive. And still I did not recognise it. Disguised as playful banter, as a joke.

It is only with hindsight that I see the danger my sixteen-year-old self could not.

He’d harboured feelings for me that whole time, it turned out. The glares had been of attraction, of obsession. The strong, disgusted reactions had not been that at all, but a boy overwhelmed by something dangerous growing inside of him. He sabotaged and damaged my things periodically to get my attention, and I’d never known it was his doing. He had these great plans and ways to tell me how he felt. I had inadvertently thwarted each and every attempt he made to be close to me.

So he created a new plan, one I couldn’t ruin.

He did not drug me that night to have sex with me. He raped me to own me.

To force me to be his. To entangle us in a relationship he craved and would see exist, regardless of what I wanted. Even when I fought and thrashed and used the last of my dwindling energy to shove and shout, he still had to see his plan through. Nothing would deter him.

He held me, caressed me, told me he loved me, all while I rotted on the inside in the single most terror I have ever known. He gripped fistfuls of my hair, almost ripping them from my scalp in the height of his fervour, then twirled those same locks gently in his fingers when he was finished. He moaned heavily in my ear, touched and squeezed every part of me, kissed me over and over and lived a moment he’d dreamt of for I can’t imagine how long, while I had become nothing beneath him. I was an empty doll, only aware I was crying because I could feel my tears escape the outer edges of my eyes.

He worshipped me with grotesque gentleness and catastrophic violence at the same time. Devoured me, brutalised me, and adored me all at once.

While he saw a moment long-sought after realised, I thought I was going to die. I truly believed he was going to murder me. I couldn’t breathe under the weight of his collapsed and exhausted form on mine. I couldn’t understand why he was doing that to me, or how I got into that room, or why I couldn’t move my body.

I still feel the way his heart raced against my bare chest.

I still see the way he stared at me throughout.

Then I slipped further and further away. Sinking into a place you can’t rise from, and I do not mean that figuratively. It felt like dying. And I knew it. I already felt dead when he delicately redressed me, treating me like I was the most precious object in the whole world. But what I felt was something far beyond emotional death.

Then the vomiting started, and it’s what saved me from him in the end because I know his pursuit of me would not have stopped that night. Saved my life too, as the poison was purged from my stomach. My body’s last, life-saving tactic.

But there were witnesses to my distress. My hysterical tears, half-naked body covered in vomit. I remember the noisy chaos, the screams thrown at him, the lies he defended himself with. Even then, he refused to let me go while I tried feebly to scrape myself across bathroom tiles to get away from him. He was thrown out, punched in the street. He never came near me again. I owe more than I can repay to the only friend who stood up for me that night and who finally got him away from me. But in the morning, I remembered none of it, and whether or not anyone doubted me when I said nothing happened, they didn’t press it.

So many never knew why their rapist chose them, did that to them.

But I know why.

I wasn’t unlucky. I wasn’t in the wrong place at the wrong time. A boy wanted to take me because of who I am. And yet, it is so farcical that I struggle daily to believe it’s at all possible. To know that there is nothing I could have done that would have changed the outcome, because he’d already decided it long before he showed up at that fucking party. My sin in all this was being me.

And I don’t know how to live with that.

My rape was a premeditated, targeted attack by a teenage boy who wanted more than he was ever due, so he took what he decided he was owed. If he hadn’t succeeded that night, I have absolutely no doubts he would have another night.

I repressed seven years of sexual violence before it. That I can fold away and understand. This I can’t.

I felt insane when it first came back to me. I remembered the conversation, the way he was furious and pained when I teased him for hating me, and when he finally admitted the truth. But how could that have been real? How could something so unbelievable be my story?

I couldn’t find any stories like this. It had never even occurred to me someone might use date rape as a means of forcing a relationship, for that had been his final plan. To fall asleep beside me, to tell me how we’d had drunken sex in the morning, to use that as an excuse to keep me in his hold. He wanted to be my first and for me to be his, as though it would somehow make it special. As though the story in his head, the fantasy he conducted of me, was destined.

And he got so close to it, too. But in the end, it was just another of his plans I thwarted.

Not all rapists lurk in alleys. Some use drugs and stalk and hunt because they’re too afraid of rejection. Some wait years, planning, watching. Some invite themselves to parties with people they barely know just to get their hooks in someone they want beyond anything reasonable. And maybe one day I’ll be able to accept that beyond the violence and pain he subjected me to. But I doubt I’ll ever be able to fully let go when the reason the violence happened at all is so intertwined with me as a person.

It wasn’t my fault. But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened because of me.

And the greatest tragedy? While the drugs he’d spiked me with already started working their way through me, I was excitedly planning to give him my number before the night’s end. He could have had what he’d wanted, if only he’d been human.

Rape is so cruel that we often need to make sense of the motives to make any sense of it at all. But I know the motives. I know the why. I know the method and the planning, and it makes less sense to me than anything I have ever known.