Protect Him

A couple of months ago, I had a phone conversation with a woman I have known for well over a decade.

Our paths first crossed when I was working at Tatsuda’s in an ownership capacity and doing much of the marketing for the store. She was younger than me, earlier in her career, rebuilding her life after having lived through the consequences of some very difficult choices.

Over the years, we kept crossing paths.

We ran in similar professional circles. We had similar drive, similar ambition, similar internal wiring. We both carried this deep sense that we were designed for an unconventional life. Neither of us was particularly interested in simply going to work, coming home, paying the bills, and repeating the whole thing until retirement.

We wanted to build things.

Create things.

Become things.

She has a fierce entrepreneurial spirit, and although we hadn’t talked in quite a while, there had always been a connection between us.

Then one day, out of the blue, she messaged me on Facebook.

Hey. How are you? Do you have time to chat? I hope this isn’t weird, but would you like to catch up?

Absolutely.

We ended up talking for nearly two hours.

We talked about where life had taken us. What we were building. What had worked and what hadn’t. She had moved away. We talked about ambition and struggle and our spiritual journeys and what happens when the life you thought you were going to live stops fitting you.

And somewhere in those two hours, I told her what had happened to me.

I told her about the relationship that became the catalyst for so much of the writing in this space.

And I told her who he was.

She knows him.

There wasn’t a moment of disbelief.

There wasn’t a question about whether I had misunderstood something or exaggerated it or somehow contributed to what happened.

She understood exactly what I was telling her.

And she said something like:

Holy shit, Katherine. That completely changes the way I see him.

I know.

Same.

Then the conversation turned.

Years ago, she had told me something about her own life.

She had once been in a relationship with an influential, high-profile man. Not simply someone well known in Ketchikan. Someone with stature throughout Southeast Alaska and beyond. He was successful. Charismatic. Respected. The kind of man people knew and trusted.

And in private, he beat the shit out of her.

Multiple times.

I remembered when she first told me. I have never been beaten by a man who claimed to love me, but I have known abuse in other forms. There was enough shared language between us to understand something about what the other had survived.

During our recent conversation, I told her about this blog.

About the hundreds of pieces I have written.

About how desperately I needed to write after what happened to me.

I needed somewhere for the pain to go.

I needed to understand what had happened. I needed to metabolize it instead of allowing it to live inside me indefinitely. I needed to turn it over and examine it and name it and eventually make meaning from it.

I wanted what happened to become fuel for my growth rather than something that left me dysfunctional, bitter, or toxic.

And she said:

“Katherine, that is so fucking badass of you. I wish I had done that too.”

She wasn’t saying she wished she had written five hundred essays.

She meant something much bigger.

She wished she had told the truth.

She wished she had said publicly what this influential, respected, charismatic man had done privately.

Because while the world knew one version of him, she knew another.

The man who could be admired in public could also go home with a woman he claimed to love and beat the shit out of her.

And she had never told anyone publicly.

“I was so worried about protecting him,” she told me.

That sentence has stayed with me.

Because I understood it.

God, did I understand it.

For a long time, I was terrified when I wrote about what happened to me.

Even though I never named him.

Even though I never tagged him.

Even though I never identified his profession or handed readers a map to his front door.

I was still afraid.

I would publish something and feel fear wash over me.

What if he reads this?

What will he think of me?

What will other people think?

Will this hurt him?

Will this embarrass him?

Will people figure out who he is?

There were pieces I took down. Some eventually went back up. Others still sits in my drafts.

And when I look back at that now, there is something almost surreal about it.

Because this man had not simply hurt me.

He had groomed me.

He had deliberately built a relationship around words of safety and trust while withholding the very truths I would have needed to decide whether I wanted to be in that relationship at all.

He told me I was safe with him.

He told me I could trust him.

He spoke the language of love and intimacy and commitment. He gave me expensive gifts. He gave me his time and attention. He created rituals and memories and all of the ordinary evidence a person uses to understand the relationship she is actually living inside.

And all the while, he lied to my face.

He withheld enormous pieces of reality from me. He maintained double lives. He allowed me to make emotional, relational, and sexual decisions based on information he knew was false or incomplete.

That wasn’t simply dishonesty.

He took away my informed consent.

He violated my trust. He violated my body. He abused me. He treated my humanity with a staggering lack of respect and dignity while continuing to look me in the eyes and tell me things designed to keep me believing in the reality he had constructed for me.

And then I found out.

And he disappeared.

In public, he behaved as though nothing meaningful had ever existed between us. As though I had simply ceased to exist. As though the intimacy and promises and declarations and shared experiences could be erased by his refusal to acknowledge them.

But in private, I had every reason to believe he hadn’t disappeared at all.

That he was consuming my work.

Reading what I wrote.

Watching me try to understand what he had done to me.

Watching me bleed.

Watching me reconstruct the reality he had shattered.

Watching me write my way out of the wreckage he helped create.

I couldn’t know with absolute certainty that every visit I believed was him actually was. But I knew enough to believe he was there.

So when I say this man devastated me, I don’t mean he broke my heart.

I mean he systematically manipulated my understanding of my own life while asking me to trust him with it.

And somehow, after all of that, part of me was still worried about protecting him.

I worried that my words might hurt him.

That the truth might embarrass him.

That people might recognize him.

That they might think differently of him if they knew.

Think about the insanity of that.

I was still trying to protect the reputation of a man who had shown so little regard for my dignity while he was harming me.

My friend had done the same thing.

The violence against her was physical.

Mine wasn’t.

The details were different.

But somehow we had both absorbed the same message:

Protect him.

Protect his reputation.

Protect his career.

Protect the way other people see him.

Protect his family.

Protect his feelings.

Protect his future.

And carry what he did to you quietly.

There is something profoundly fucked up about that.

Because silence doesn’t erase what happened.

It only determines who has to carry it.

And far too often, the person carrying all of it is the person who was harmed.

I don’t believe anymore that telling the truth about someone’s behavior is the same thing as harming them.

I don’t believe a man’s reputation is more sacred than a woman’s reality.

And I don’t believe women have an obligation to preserve a public version of a man that exists only because nobody knows what he does in private.

That doesn’t mean every survivor has to speak publicly.

Absolutely not.

There are countless reasons someone may choose silence. Safety. Children. Financial dependence. Legal concerns. Trauma. Privacy. Survival. Sometimes saying nothing is the safest and most loving choice a person can make for herself.

No woman owes the world her trauma.

But neither does she owe her abuser her silence.

Those are two very different things.

For me, writing became part of taking my life back.

At first, I was scared every single time.

Then I became less scared.

And eventually I understood something I wish I had understood from the beginning:

I wasn’t responsible for making him look good.

I was responsible for doing what I needed to take care of me.

If the truth about what someone did makes people see that person differently, the truth did not create that problem.

Their behavior did.

My friend told me she wished she had spoken.

She told me what I had done was badass.

And you know what?

I think she was right.

I am glad I wrote.

I am glad I published.

I am glad I refused to carry everything quietly so someone else could remain comfortable inside a reputation his own behavior did not deserve.

And I hope more women understand this.

Especially when the man is powerful, influential, wealthy, or respected.

Especially when everyone else thinks he is wonderful.

His status does not make your experience less true.

His reputation does not become your responsibility because you know something about him that other people don’t.

And his comfort is not more important than your healing.

We are allowed to tell the truth about what happened to us.

We are allowed to name abuse as abuse.

We are allowed to stop protecting the people who harmed us.

Because it was never our job to caretake the feelings of our abusers.