“There’s so much
power in truth...
Bella personifies that.”

But then the rest of my life I just have to make sure is really simple. And I go to therapy, I call my friends, I walk my dog, I’m in the studio most days, making my own music. I eat well, sleep well, and have really wonderful people surrounding me. Then I’m getting more involved with the Joyful Heart Foundation, which is a foundation I’ve been obsessed with and supporting from afar for years now—they have done such incredible things with survivors.

When the show ends, Bella is getting to go to trial and tell her story, but it is not clear what her future holds.

Bella is a girl with no money, no promised future, no fall-back plan. Her mom is not around. Her going to trial is going to wipe out any finances she has. It’s going to have her reputation torn to shreds. It is going to have every possible level of dignity she has left taken away from her. So that’s Bella’s future at the end of the show. It’s not a happy story. She is brave, and by telling her story we are helping people. But for Bella, she has got a long road ahead. Even if she wins the trial, she still carries this trauma with her.

This is still something she is going to have every single day. And there will be days when it’s better. There will be days when it’s worse, but it’s hers forever. There’s so much

power in truth and in not accepting shame or blame. Bella personifies that. She knows it’s not pretty. She’s already had the cop tell her she was drunk and it doesn’t matter. She’s already had every member of her community call her a slut. She’s now at the point where she feels—you can call me whatever you want, it’s still not right. Regardless of how messy it is, by not saying something, she would be condemned to a world of shame. I think in her brain that would be a lot harder for her to work through. She has this self-imposed isolation in the beginning and this community-imposed isolation in the middle. By the end, it’s her finding power not in her isolation, but in herself and in her ability to believe her own story.