AFTER THIS BOOK WAS PUBLISHED I WAS OFTEN ASKED, with incredulity, if the sexual abuse really happened, why did I continue to have a relationship with my father for so many years? But that question misunderstands the nature of the shame victims of sexual abuse carry and how much we need and want for our abusers to take the burden of that shame. We keep going back because the abuser is the only person who can really, in some twisted way, relieve us of it. When a friend said, “If your father were to read your book it would change him,” I wanted that to be true. However, I soon learned how stupid I was to think it could ever be.
Kristina, my childhood soulmate, called from France, frantic. She received a letter from my father’s British lawyers. Unless she retracted the statement she made to Sonny Kleinfeld in the New York Times, that I told her about the abuse when I was twelve years old, my father would sue her in a British court for defamation. She was scared, and I felt a punch to the gut. I should have known better. I had taken my father’s year of silence as a kind of truce, but in fact he had been planning, plotting. He was Hydra, one head cut off but growing another, breathing fire and spitting bile more viciously than before. Utterly deflated I asked Kristina, “Do you want to retract what you said? I will understand if you do.” Kristina said, “No. I don’t want to do that, Jess, because what I said is true.” “Okay,” I said, “in that case I will contact a lawyer and find out what our options are.”
The next day, I was up at one in the morning Los Angeles time on the phone to London with a solicitor. He explained that my father was engaging in “libel tourism” by bringing his suit in Britain where the libel laws are more in favor of the claimant. Rather than sue me, or the New York Times, my father was suing Kristina because he knew she had no money. His strategy was to get a retraction from Kristina, and then use that to undermine the account in the New York Times and, ultimately, my book. In order to bring a defamation suit in the United States my father would have to prove not only that Kristina was lying, but also that she had intentionally sought to do him harm. In Britain, Kristina would have to prove she was telling the truth that my father molested me. The solicitor’s next words literally brought me to my knees. “The cost of a defense in this kind of a case could be enormous.” “How enormous?” I asked. “Upwards of five-hundred-thousand pounds—about one million dollars.” I was speechless. The solicitor continued, “Of course if Mr. Hendra lost his case he would have to pay for any fees amassed on behalf of your friend. But for you to win a litigation like this would be very difficult.” He had done it again, my father had beaten me again. I went back to bed and tossed and turned until the sun came up bringing with it another call, this time from my mother. She, too, had received a missive from London, she was being sued for defamation.
That night, my husband, Kurt, and I talked it over. We did not have a million dollars for a lawsuit. We are not reckless types who rush into what we can not afford, we consider for months if we really need a new washing machine before we finally cave in and buy one. But Kristina had spoken up for me, she could not be left to the mercy of Tony Hendra. Kurt and I made a crazy decision, the only thing we could do, we would hire a solicitor, take out a line of credit against our house, and fund a defense in the hope that we would win and the fees would be paid by the other side. It was insane, absurd—we did not have that kind of money, we had children, college tuitions in the future, a household to keep together, bills to be paid. Yet conviction pushed us to jump hand-in-hand into the void. My mother felt the same, staring at ruin, she and her husband, Bill, also took out a line of credit.
My father and I began the most protracted act of our shared tragedy. Instead of giving in to his bullying, I fought back. The lawsuit was a chess game, our moves against each other made by proxy. Technically, I was not being sued but I knew, and he knew, that I would have to be the one to make decisions. For months witness statements flew back and forth over the Atlantic, I was on the phone daily, addressing each of my father’s claims, defending my sanity, my account of my life, my truth. I submitted letters, emails, any trace of my past. I handed over journals from my teenage and young adult years in which I wrote about the sexual abuse and its impact on me. My father’s legal team suggested the three-hundred-and-something misspelled and blotted entries were forgeries. They demanded the diaries be ink-dated and the paper be chemically analyzed. I jokingly told our solicitor that if I was that good at forgery I might actually have the hundreds of thousands of dollars we already owed him. I said if my father wanted to pay for the diaries to be examined by an expert then by all means. The expert was never called in.
At the pretrial hearing the entire text of my father’s National Lampoon piece “How to Cook Your Daughter” was read aloud in the High Court of Justice Queen’s Bench Division. The black-robed, white-wigged judge shook his head in disgust as my father’s solicitors tried to pass the piece off as “innocent fun.” Old friends came to my aid and gave statements supporting my story; all my psychiatric records were divulged to disprove my father’s claim that I had been hypnotized by my therapist and a false memory implanted in my brain.
Only weeks before my father and I were to face each other in the High Court of Justice Queen’s Bench Division, the demands for retractions were abruptly dropped and the legal fees we had amassed—a stunning amount of money that my mother, Kurt, and I did not have—were quickly paid off. My father had gotten cold, icy-cold feet about going to trial. Despite relief that our stupendous legal debt was erased, part of me was disappointed. I wanted my day in court. The statute of limitations had long passed for me to be able to bring charges against my father in the United States. This British proceeding would have been my opportunity to take my place in the witness box, my only chance to publicly address, in a court of law, all the falsehoods my father would tell. But there were other people involved—Kristina, my mother, and Kurt: it would be selfish to insist on going to court. I took solace in that my father’s most grandiose attempt to ruin me had failed. He was out a million dollars with nothing to show for it, and the whole ill-gotten enterprise had only made me stronger. If I had any hope of a reconciliation with my father I lost it in the months I countered the lies he told about me and anyone who defended me.
Victims stay silent because of shame, shame that belongs solely to their abusers. Yet that shame is almost always heaped on the victim. In the press, my story was called “stomach turning,” “icky,” “scurrilous,” I was accused of “airing my dirty linen in public,” and “engaging in repugnant he said, she said.” During the lawsuit every aspect of my life was scrutinized by my father’s legal team through the warped premise that only a psychotic liar would make a sexual abuse claim against her father.
The experience of sexual abuse isolated me for decades and bound me to my father with the most terrible kind of exclusivity. Keeping his secret burdened me, kept me small and quiet under the enormous weight of silence. Only when I spoke out did it begin to fall away. Because of the #MeToo movement society is finally beginning to understand that sexual abuse victims do not speak out for attention or because they are vindictive, but because they can not bear their burdens any longer.
The number of women and men coming forward may shock those who greet accusations with an instant “It could never happen.” Those of us who have been victims of sexual abuse are not surprised by the explosion of stories—we know sexual abuse happens, and with horrible frequency. It is the rest of the world that must now accept the truth.
In this new moment where victims are finally being believed, I hope that the past routine of degrading and vilifying the abused is over. I hope women and men will never again keep their abusers’ secrets because they fear embarrassment, legal retaliation, stigmatization, being beaten into silence by lawsuits and harassment; that no one has to face the humiliation of their truths being summarily condemned as fake, icky, disgusting, and stomach turning.
Traveling around the country talking about my book and interacting with survivors, I constantly encounter those desperate to heal. At the end of a reading in a small-town library an eighty-year-old women pulled me aside; when she was a girl her uncle took her to the basement, put her up against the washing machine and raped her. She asked me if I thought it was too late for her to get help. I said no.
After everything that has happened with my father—the accusations, the reprisals, and the lawsuit—I am still convinced it is never too late to speak out, to share your truths. My experience, though harrowing, has shown me that there are numerous forms of redemption and justice, and, despite everything, your story deserves to be heard.