I was sexually assaulted when I was 16. Penguin Random House Canada published a memoir by one of my assailants claiming it was consensual
Reading my words now, you see the combined efforts of a community. You see many people who have said, “tell the truth, we will stand with you”. Every survivor who raises their voice can only do so with the help of many. I am deeply grateful to all those who have supported me, and I feel them with me now: loved ones, friends, family, psychologists, lawyers, activists, advocates, journalists, fellow writers. I am especially grateful to all the survivors who have come forward before me.
The summer I turned 16 I was sexually assaulted by two of my friends. I was drunk. I was crying. I was barely conscious, on my back by the side of a pool. I didn’t want it. They both sexually assaulted me. He did, then she did.
My friendship with the boy vanished afterwards. It felt like I became invisible to him. Within weeks I found the strength to end my friendship with the girl, using the pretext of wanting to disband our little theatre club. Shortly after, she invited our friends over to a dinner party, and they stopped speaking to me. I wondered what she’d told them. To me, they’d always seemed afraid of her. I had no idea who to tell, who get help from. Somehow I figured out how to transfer to another school, and was lucky to find a wonderful alternative high school where I made new friends. But the sexual assault and social exclusion left me permanently changed. For decades, I lived with my trauma in a buried place that I could not fully access, sometimes telling loved ones, but never speaking of it publicly. Until Leah McLaren, the woman who sexually assaulted me when we were teenagers, published a memoir where she depicted their attack on me as consensual.
At first McLaren seemed to be following standard memoir protocol. A couple years before publication, she informed me I’d be depicted in the book, alongside the story of — how she put it — “what happened” to me. I was sickened by the idea of my sexual assault being portrayed by the woman who had sexually assaulted me. I’d remained cautiously friendly to her over the years, as many people do with their assailants; I wanted to believe she found healing from whatever it was that motivated her. Though our teenage friendship had been short, I’d accepted her invitation to meet her for dinner with her fiancé, and a later invitation to their wedding. I’d even shared my writing with her, and she had asked to include me as a subject of her journalism. I’d declined, uncertain she was trustworthy. But this time she wasn’t asking for permission to use me in her writing, she was telling me.
I decided to confront her privately, in person. There was a chance that she was confused about the impact of what she’d done to me. I was sobbing and barely able to breathe as I finally told her something I’d never said aloud: the reason I’d stopped being her friend when we were teenagers was because of that night by the pool. I told her I’d felt violated by her and the boy, and I couldn’t be her friend afterwards. To my surprise, McLaren immediately apologised. She said she was sorry for her part in it, “for being an active participant”. She said she “always knew that it was awful, that it was wrong” and it was “not nice” for me. She said she understood “when our friendship ended, it was because of that, and whatever happened that night was traumatic and awful”. I said I needed consent over that story, to decide whether or not I wanted it portrayed in public, and I needed my truth to be part of it. McLaren agreed, saying that it would ultimately be my choice. She said I could change whatever I wanted if I felt the need.
I was relieved I had confronted her. It had taken tremendous effort, and I wasn’t able to correct some of the justifications she made. But she had said she felt culpable. Her remorse appeared genuine. Perhaps she would gain more insight while writing this book and walk a path towards making amends. However, I’d been told in the past that McLaren had gained trust from people who had then felt harmed by her portrayal of them. I felt I needed to have some record of how she responded. So I made an audio recording of the conversation.
Two years later, McLaren emailed me the manuscript pages that she wanted approved. Introducing the pages was a description of the boy sexually assaulting me as if it was consensual. She wrote she’d had “a three-way” with her “best friend” who then “tearfully lost her virginity by the side of the pool”. There was no mention that I had experienced this as a sexual assault, no mention of how she herself was an active participant. McLaren portraying my sexual assault as the loss of my virginity — which it was not — was disgusting. The pages went on to invent a number of conversations between us, as well as ugly lies about my family, even an antisemitic joke. McLaren concluded with the suggestion that I was responsible for what she and the boy had done to me that night.
What McLaren was intending to publish was a complete contradiction from what she’d promised in our conversation. She was now asking me to approve her public denial that she had sexually assaulted me, and that I had been sexually assaulted at all. The shift from her privately expressing guilt and remorse to this highly public act of concealment was extreme, and the lies about my family felt deeply sadistic. I consulted with loved ones, therapists, friends, and sexual assault specialists, and we decided that with a matter this serious, the safest route was to inform the publisher directly. I found a highly regarded media lawyer who believed me, and we contacted McLaren’s publisher, Penguin Random House Canada. My lawyer shared my allegations with their legal counsel, respectfully requesting that my sexual assault be depicted truthfully or be cut from publication. We thought it should be easy for them to cut me out entirely; I wasn’t central to the memoir, and she was only asking me to approve a short excerpt under ten pages. Penguin Random House’s general counsel responded that McLaren did “not recall the specific act” she had depicted as the loss of my virginity. My lawyer then provided a transcript of the conversation I’d recorded where McLaren acknowledged the sexual assault, apologised for what she’d done to me, and promised I could alter my depiction in the manuscript. At this point, Penguin Random House ceased their communication with me.
I never heard from Penguin Random House again. I had thought publishers verified the memoirs they promoted to be certain they were truthful. I was never contacted by a fact-checker to corroborate any of what was published. I was never informed whether my sexual assault would be depicted honestly, or my trauma handled with sensitivity. It seemed to me that even though I had provided them with the credible allegation of a sexual assault, Penguin Random House didn’t care. And they didn’t care what kind of harm they were causing by amplifying McLaren’s deception and marketing it as fact.
For me, being sexually assaulted felt like an echo of earlier experiences of physical violence. Except the blows fell on my most sensitive parts. Not just physically sensitive — the most sensitive parts of my consciousness. Many survivors know the effects are so psychologically damaging that we spend years disassociating, trying to hide the trauma from ourselves. As a result, it feels agonising to disclose the experience to others. Our understanding of neurobiology has advanced a lot since I was in high school, and we now have a more empirical picture of why people have such a difficult time describing what happened to them. fMRI images of the brain show that it’s not only self-worth or the social environment that are impacted by sexual assault; the structure of the brain itself is changed by trauma. And while the long-term impact of trauma on the brain and body is still being mapped, we do know that a teenager’s brain is not yet fully formed. When someone is sexually assaulted, it is so terrifying and overwhelming that the survival response takes over: the well-known fight, flight, freeze, and fawn reflex. In my case, I froze. Froze and could not stop what was happening. Under the weight of the horror of what my friends were doing to me, my survival response was forever bent, fused into a singular pattern inscribed on my brain. This is the source of my flashbulb memories — stark images that raise feelings as fresh as when they first happened three decades ago. Any time my mind touches on the memory, my brain leaps to make the same bent circuit of movements, only knowing this one choreography : panting, nausea, fear, anguish, terror, grief, helplessness, bewilderment. This is why it is so hard for survivors to disclose. If you see a middle-aged woman broken down and sobbing, unable to control her speech, needing to be held, terrified of being touched, gasping for air: that’s what happens to me when I think about what happened to me. It’s as if it’s still happening to me, over and over again. Any time or place that I think about it, I fall to pieces. Afterwards I’m drained.
And lately, before I even attempt to talk to anyone about what happened to me, I’m also drained. Holding back memories of the event used to be something I could handle. Now they’ve become a constant. I managed to communicate to this powerful corporate publisher that I was living with the trauma of being sexually assaulted by one of their authors, and they published her claim that I welcomed her and the boy’s sexual aggression. The scar has been ripped open, as I live with the feeling that every time someone reads the passage where my rape is made to seem like I wanted it, they believe that I did. The pain is similar to the original wound: being told by the person sexually assaulting me that I wanted this, that it was my choice for her to do what she was doing to me. And then the additional violence of her shouting to the world that I invited it on myself. Every day I wake up to this reality, every day I struggle with intrusive images of my rape as a teenager, the horrific replay of being unable to defend myself, now magnified by the indifference of Canada’s largest publisher.
I work hard not to dissociate. I want to be present in my life. I practice mindful self-compassion to stay whole, to move my attention away from the choices these people are making into my own sense of self-worth: I know I am able to love and be loved. I have a dedicated therapist who holds space for me to find my way. I focus on healing in my community — there are many survivors in the private spaces of civil society, each of whom can teach ways of living with a wound. I draw a lot of sustenance from the hope that I can one day help others as a psychologist. I’m a full-time student. I’m a writer. Also: I’m a mother to a school-age child. I will do whatever I can to stay healthy.
It was shortly following the publication date of McLaren’s memoir that a friend from that same high school reached out to me. We hadn’t spoken since we were teenagers. He messaged to say he had read the memoir and hoped it wasn’t re-traumatizing. I was deeply moved by his reaching out, but also confused — I hadn’t told anyone back then, so how could he have known McLaren’s memoir would be re-traumatizing for me? He explained that the boy who sexually assaulted me had told him and another classmate of ours about it shortly afterwards. A shock went through my body. Hearing that the boy had verbalized what he had done to me and told others. Now I could live knowing there were more out there who knew the truth. This was validating and also painful to learn. My friend said he wanted to apologise for not supporting me afterwards. I told him I didn’t expect him to have been able to support me — we were teenagers, and in those days, we had no education about sexual assault. Now he was a father. He reached out to me. His compassion changed my life. I could feel the world changing.
Unfortunately, McLaren has continued to misrepresent my sexual assault in mass media. She marked the publication of her memoir with an article for the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper. Leading the article was the description once again of my sexual assault as a high school “three-way”, and the additional erroneous allegation that I’d ended our friendship by saying it was “too intense”. I’ve never said I ended our friendship because it was “too intense”, I said ended it because of what she did to me by the side of the pool, and she said she knew that in our recorded conversation. But McLaren seemed intent on shoehorning her claim into another paid publication, this time knowing the Toronto Star was unaware of the allegations against her.
Then I learned that writer and director Sarah Polley was quoted on the cover endorsing McLaren’s memoir. For such a prominent survivor advocate, whose work has brought me to tears, to endorse a memoir by the person who had assaulted me — it was intolerable. I felt sure in my bones Polley didn’t know there was an allegation of assault against McLaren. Polley’s own memoir was recently published by an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. McLaren is a little-known writer with a limited fanbase. Had Penguin Random House Canada intentionally kept my allegations from Polley, a beloved figure whose endorsement indicates quality and integrity?
It is one level of trauma to be harassed by an individual person, it’s another level for a publisher to enable it. I don’t believe that the corporate leadership at Penguin Random House LLC, which includes 250 divisions and imprints, was made aware of my allegations. I think they would agree that using their commercial property to conceal credible sexual assault allegations is not a good idea. I do wonder about the relational climate at Penguin Random House Canada, McLaren’s imprint, and whether they authorized a decision to disregard my credible allegations and support McLaren. I feel profound disappointment that Penguin Random House approached their responsibility to survivors so callously. It suggests they consider survivor testimony to be a frivolous matter for entertainment purposes, something like the chattering of little dogs with bows in their hair, and not the gravely serious documentation of social corrosion, criminal acts, or systemic abuse. Serious Canadian writers like Polley, Eternity Martis, and Robyn Doolittle, who invest their time and intellect in bringing awareness, have been seated at the same table with a gassy, self-serving denialist.
What does it mean to teenagers to learn that a major publisher supports one of my alleged perpetrators, enabling her efforts to represent my sexual assault as something I wanted? Allowing McLaren to conceal my alleged sexual assault doesn’t only harm me, it broadcasts a message of impunity — even reward — for perpetrators of sexual violence. Penguin Random House Canada writes on its website that they are “committed to expanding [their] role as a cultural institution that serves society”. They have the resources to handle narratives of sexual violence in a way that lives up to their commitment. I also feel publishers have an obligation to behave responsibly towards the real human living people whose trauma they depict and monetize in their products. Penguin Random House may have considered my allegations beneath their legal concern, but I think their decision-making is out of step with the culture.
Our charter right to free expression is damaged when publishers only show up for those who deny accountability. I don’t believe Canadians want publishers to disregard trauma survivors. I believe we want media that responds ethically to the myths about sexual violence that damage lives. We want to know we aren’t being manipulated by individuals with toxic agendas.
As many survivors know, part of what makes us strong is our ability to express that we were harmed. For years now, I’ve been living in fear that if I spoke publicly about my sexual assault, or the way my allegations were disregarded, that McLaren or her publishers would retaliate. But while I’ve struggled, I also began to feel that by keeping that struggle private, I was contributing to the cover-up of my own sexual assault. There are times throughout the day — and they come at any point, with no warning — when the re-ignited trauma flares up and threatens to engulf my entire emotional landscape. My coping mechanism when I was 16 was to bury it deep within. But I’m a grown woman now, and I have a voice. Even if I am afraid I will be attacked for it, I must speak for myself.
A survivor’s ability to speak is also facilitated by our stage of healing and our social standing. It is important to share my position and acknowledge my voice exists within a racial and socioeconomic context. I am white, middle-aged, divorced mother who has recently returned to undergrad studies, supported by Aide financière aux études Québec. I have been treated for years in therapy to be able to write about what happened to me. I am also living in the country of my birth, and fluent in the dominant language. I believe these privileges, in addition to a web of support, have enabled me to speak my truth. In taking this risk of personal exposure, I intend to also hold space for those who have less opportunity.
There are now mandatory reporting mechanisms in place for adults in certain roles to report sexual offenses against minors. If you are a teenager suffering in a situation, here is a safe place: you can text the Kids Help Phone at 686868, or call 1–800–668–6868, anytime. No issue is too big or too small for them to listen, and they are open 24/7. When I was a teenager, I was certain that if I told anyone about being sexually assaulted, that I would be blamed. Now many people know that I was harmed, and they know that I was in no way responsible for what happened to me. People listen to survivors.
Consider that little teenager, recently sexually assaulted, who is being whispered about in the halls at school, who feels that no one will believe her, that she will carry the shame that belongs to her perpetrators for the rest of her life. She sits beside me now, safe and sheltered. She is surrounded by a community that loves and protects her.
Every survivor’s testimony is a powerful tool for healing. Every witness and supporter of that survivor is also part of that healing. Regardless of the people who dismiss survivor testimony, the change that has happened in society, fueled by ‘me too.’, will not be stopped. I am certain this transformation will uplift us all. I am grateful to Tarana Burke, activist and advocate, for her wisdom and tireless bravery in guiding a movement.
