Inside Out

by Demi Moore

  Then one day when I got home from school he was there—inside the apartment, waiting for me. I felt the blood drain from my body. “What are you doing here?” I asked him. “Where’s my mom?”

  I have blotted out the exact sequence of events—the details that led from me opening the front door, to wondering if my mother had given him a key, to feeling trapped in my own home with a man three times my age and twice my size, to him raping me.

  For decades, I didn’t even think of it as rape. I thought of it as something I caused, something I felt obligated to do because this man expected it from me—I had let him expect it from me. I had eaten at his restaurant, and he had chauffeured me home from school. In my fifteen-year-old mind, I deserved what happened.

  I couldn’t see that—as someone with no guidance or grounding, no sense of worth, someone who’d spent her whole life contorting herself to meet other people’s expectations—I was an easy mark for a predator.

  And I had nobody to protect me.

  In recent years, I have watched in awe as woman after woman has come forward to tell her story of sexual assault—amazed both by the courage of these women and by the attacks on their character that have inevitably followed. And yet people ask why it takes women years or decades to tell others what happened to them. All I can say is that anyone asking that question has never been raped. When you are sexually assaulted in a culture that tells you over and over again that admitting your victimization makes you a suspect—makes you a liar and a slut who deserves to have your life put under a microscope for all to see—guess what? You keep it a secret. And as with any trauma, denial is a natural human response. Things we can’t handle, things that are just too frightening and destabilizing, the psyche suppresses until the day comes when we can deal with them.

  Unfortunately, even as we try to submerge our pain deep down inside, it finds a way to bubble up: Through addiction. Through anxiety. Through eating disorders. Through insomnia. Through all the different PTSD symptoms and self-destructive behaviors that assault survivors experience for years on end. These incidents may last minutes or hours, but their impact lasts a lifetime.

  LESS THAN A week later, my mother told me we were moving again. I was happy to be getting out of the space where this ugly thing had happened to me—maybe if I was no longer surrounded by the walls of the apartment, I would stop feeling so disgusting, stop flashing back to staring at those walls while he was on top of me. But to my horror, Val showed up to help us move. I sat in the back seat of the Mercedes of the man who raped me, my mother sat with him up front, and he drove us to the cluster of Mediterranean-style duplexes off La Cienega where we were moving. Now there was nowhere safe to go: he’d be able to find me.

  I felt like I was going to throw up as I got out of the car. Ginny was faster, plowing inside with her boxes, and in the seconds we were alone, Val turned to me and said, “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” I stared at him blankly. And he said it again: “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?”

  I’ll never know if Ginny accepted five hundred dollars from Val explicitly as payment for permission to fuck me. Perhaps it was murkier than that—perhaps he gave her some money under the pretense of helping out a friend, as a loan on the deposit for the new apartment. For all I know she’d already paid him back by having sex with him herself. But what is certain is that she gave this man the key to the apartment she shared with her fifteen-year-old daughter. I’ve mothered three fifteen-year-old girls: the idea of giving a grown man with dubious intentions unsupervised access to them is as inconceivable to me as it is repugnant. That’s not what a mother does.

  And what I knew that day—what I know to this day—is that though Val may have given Ginny money with no clear discussion of what he would get in return, it’s also entirely possible Ginny knew exactly what he wanted, and it’s possible she agreed he could have it.

  “How does it feel to be whored by your mother for five hundred dollars?” It feels like you are an orphan.

  SOON AFTER WE moved to La Cienega I met a musician in my acting class, a pedal steel guitar player named Tom Dunston who’d been touring with Billy Joel. He was an attractive twenty-eight-year-old, with a gentle presence. He immediately made me feel at ease. We started hanging out, and one night when we were alone I started to take off my clothes. Tom stopped me. “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “We can just be together.”

  I told him about my mother’s suicide attempts, and her using me as bait. I didn’t talk about what had happened with Val. I never talked with anyone about what had happened with Val. By the time I met Tom, I had already walled it off behind the thickest plaster my psyche could construct. But I told him about everything else, and he listened.

  So, when Tom invited me to move in with him, I said yes. He was waiting for me in his car when I walked out of my mother’s apartment the day after my sixteenth birthday. I never went back.

  Chapter 6

  Years ago, I sat in on one of my daughter’s sex-ed classes. The girls were told to be careful. They were warned about getting pregnant, and getting herpes, and all the other dangers of unprotected sex. But nobody said anything about pleasure. Nobody told them about the gift of intimacy and sensuousness that sex can offer. There was nothing to help them understand how their bodies even worked, let alone how to love them.

  Which seems like such a mistake. I feel that if I’d had some of that—some information, some education, some sense of what would constitute healthy and desirable sex—I would have been better equipped to protect myself from sex that was exploitative. I would have recognized unhealthy or abusive encounters, because I would have had some idea of a version of sex that was mutual and pleasurable. I might not have been so quick to assume that anytime something happened that made me feel terrible, it was my fault and meant there was something wrong with me. I might not have felt that if a man demanded sex from me, it was my obligation to give it to him because I’d put myself in a position that made him think he was entitled to use my body.

  Granted, I didn’t exactly have the kind of parental support that would lead me to value myself on that level. But I wish I’d been taught—by someone, somewhere—about my body, what was possible in a sexual relationship, how to consider my own desires instead of seeing sex as degrading or something I owed someone. Or as a way to get male validation of my worth.

  THOUGH TOM DUNSTON was twenty-eight and I was only sixteen when I moved in with him, we had a surprisingly healthy dynamic. He never treated me with anything but care and respect. His mom, an executive assistant to one of Aaron Spelling’s top producers—Vegas was his big show at the time—got me a job as her receptionist at Twentieth Century Fox, even though she disapproved of my living with her son, what with our age difference. (It wasn’t just out of the goodness of her heart. I always thought she did it to make sure I could pay my half of the living expenses.) But Tom and I had a stable, comfortable routine: he dropped me off at the continuation school at Fairfax High every morning, then I went to my job, and he picked me up in the evenings on the way to our acting class. He also got me into the L.A. music scene, which was exploding at that time: we hit the Troubadour, Starwood, the Whisky a Go Go, Madame Wong’s, seeing at least two bands a week—The Go-Go’s, The Knack, The Motels, Billy Idol, The Police. It was very much about the music and the excitement of the scene: I didn’t drink, partly because I was underage and partly because I saw it as a way of separating myself from my mother.

  For maybe six months, I had barely any contact with Ginny. I was angry at her for being a train wreck; she was angry at me for “abandoning” her. My dad was almost entirely absent from my life, too: he had moved back to Roswell with Morgan to live with my uncle Buddy. But Tom and I were like our own little family.

  Still, against all odds, I felt drawn to my parents. When my mother begged me to go with her to visit my aunt in Albuquerque, I was unable to resist.

  �
�Don’t go,” Tom said. “You can’t trust her. It isn’t going to be any different than it was before.” He tried his best to tell me—to protect me. But it had been months since I’d seen my mother.

  Tom was right, of course. Only hours after we’d arrived in Albuquerque, my mother started a screaming fight with my aunt—I can’t remember what set her off, but I can tell you for sure it was unimportant, some perceived slight that could have been easily resolved with a calm conversation. “We’re out of here!” she shrieked, and told me we were going to my grandmother’s in Roswell. I was disgusted with her and angry at myself. The trip had been a mistake. I just wanted to get back to L.A. and my calm life with Tom.

  Ginny wouldn’t give me my plane ticket. She was furious that I wouldn’t do what she wanted—she accused me of being a terrible daughter, of thinking I was too good for her, of taking her for granted. She slammed the door behind her and plowed out of my aunt’s driveway in a rage. So there I was, stranded in New Mexico, without the money to get back home. I had to ask my aunt if I could borrow the seventy-five dollars for a new plane ticket. The guilt I felt—for years—for owing her that money would be difficult to overstate. It seemed like something my parents would do: show up at someone’s house and then, instead of thanking them for their hospitality, ask them for money. It was the opposite of who I wanted to be.

  The next day at the airport waiting to fly home, I thought about what a complete mess my parents were and felt very deeply alone. Your mother and father are supposed to act as a kind of touchstone along the path to the future—offering insight on what to reach for, what to look forward to. For me, that picture was dismal.

  I went out onto the tarmac to board, and as I was walking toward the plane with the other passengers, I heard my name. I turned and saw a police officer in uniform approaching me. “Are you Demi Guynes?” he asked. I nodded, confused, and he said, “You need to come with me.” He took me by the arm and led me away while the other passengers gawked like I was a criminal. “Your parents are here,” he told me, as he walked me into a little room where, sure enough, Ginny and Danny were waiting for me.

  I stammered, “What the hell is going on?”

  My mother gave a triumphant little smile. “You’re under eighteen,” she replied with satisfaction. “We reported you to the police as a runaway.” I could tell from her speech that she’d been drinking. My father was so wasted his eyes were completely glassy. I turned to the cop who had brought me in. “Can’t you see they’re drunk?” I asked, furious, adrenaline pumping through my body. I don’t know that I’ve ever been angrier: the complete injustice of the situation was just too much. And the dishonesty! Like they cared about my well-being? As if they were these concerned, normal parents? “You’re making a huge mistake! You don’t know what you’re doing,” I told the policeman. “I haven’t lived with either of them in over six months!” I could tell he was starting to recognize that something was wrong with this picture. Ginny and Danny had probably been sitting there getting more and more inebriated while he’d been out looking for me. Of the three of us, I was clearly the closest thing to an adult. “I’m so sorry,” the cop said quietly. But I was under eighteen, and he didn’t have much choice.

  So I was stuck with them. These two lying, alcoholic, divorced people—who last I’d heard weren’t speaking—were my parents; they had ensnared me, and they demanded I return to Roswell with them. The hours while we waited for that plane—and they continued drinking at the airport bar—felt endless.

  After we landed, we got in the car they’d left at the airport in Roswell, but my dad was so wasted he got pulled over by the police on the drive back. Unbelievably, he managed to sweet-talk his way out of a ticket. (My brother always says my dad could sell ice cubes to Eskimos, and that incident was proof.) It was the middle of the night when we reached the house my dad was sharing with my uncle Buddy, who, it became clear, was every bit as drunk as my father—Buddy was just getting home after the bars closed. Morgan wasn’t there, and I couldn’t even look at my mother, who was barely paying attention to me at this point anyway: she had only been interested in winning a power struggle, and once she was victorious, she went back to focusing on herself. Before long, Buddy and my dad were fighting, lurching drunkenly through the house, everything becoming violent and out of control. When I saw my dad pull out his gun and start waving it at Buddy, I thought, That’s enough. It was very late, and the sky was black and moonless, but the world outside that house was less frightening than the one inside it. I walked out the door and kept going for four miles along the unlit roads until I reached my grandma Marie’s house.

  It was one thirty in the morning. I was so sorry for my grandmother: that I was waking her up in the middle of the night; that my parents had obviously weaseled money out of her for their plane tickets to go and “save” me at the airport in Albuquerque; that she had to put up with these people and their insanity altogether. I was apologizing and telling her what had happened, and she wanted me to call Ginny and tell her where I was so my parents wouldn’t worry. “They don’t care about me,” I said, and at that moment, I knew I was telling the truth.

  Forty years later, I no longer think of it in those terms. They loved me. But they loved me the way they loved each other, the only way they knew how: inconsistently and conditionally. From them, I learned that love was something you had to scramble to keep. It could be revoked at any minute, for reasons that you couldn’t understand, that you couldn’t control. The kind of love I grew up with was scary to need, and painful to feel. If I didn’t have that uneasy ache, that prickly anxiety around someone, how would I know it was love?

  Chapter 7

  Tom took me to see a new band called The Kats; they were a big deal at the time. The star was a guitarist from Minneapolis named Freddy Moore, and he changed my life—or at least my name.

  Freddy wrote most of the band’s songs, and played guitar and sang. He was absolutely electric onstage, with his shaggy blond hair, sharp features, and wild blue eyes—a totally magnetic performer. I went back to the Troubadour to see the band again on my own. Watching Freddy, I was blown away: if I could be with someone that captivating, then maybe I would be captivating, too. Between sets I maneuvered Freddy into the bathroom. Within a month, I’d left Tom to move in with him.

  Our instant attraction reflected the spontaneity and free-spiritedness you feel when you’re young and your whole life is stretched out in front of you, and you don’t focus on the consequences of your actions. Unfortunately, when I broke up with Tom, I didn’t treat him with anywhere near the consideration he’d shown me, and I glossed over the fact that Freddy was twenty-nine and still married to his high school sweetheart from Minnesota. When he left her for me, I was only sixteen. I was a self-absorbed teenager who hadn’t been raised with a lot of respect for the institution of marriage, and I jumped into life with Freddy without, I’m sorry to say, much concern for his wife. Then again, he was almost twice my age, and he was the one who was married. But age is confusing: throughout my life I’ve been in relationships where power and maturity don’t necessarily lie with whoever is older.

  Offstage, Freddy was a different person: quiet and focused and very disciplined, carving out time every day to sit down and write his music. He encouraged me to be creative, too—I wrote a song with him called “Changing,” which he ended up recording with Mark Linett, the engineer who had worked on all of Brian Wilson’s music. The Kats had a small-time manager when Freddy and I first got together, and they used to tour in this really old Chevy Suburban that pulled a trailer with all their equipment in it. I’d go along, either in the Suburban with the musicians and their wives or girlfriends, or I’d drive in the beat-up old Volkswagen I’d bought, with lawn chairs for a back seat, a hole in the floorboard, and a bad paint job. We slept late and went to gigs every night.

  I quit school. Obviously, when I left Tom, I’d lost my job working for his mom. Freddy’s manager had warned him that I might just be a
fter his money—which is pretty funny, considering they didn’t make any—so I was eager to prove that I could pay my own way. When a friend I’d met through the music scene told me about a guy she knew who took nude photos and sold them to magazines in Japan, I was curious. “Nobody sees them here, and you can make some money,” she told me. “Just lie about your age.” I went for it.

  The shoot took place in a dark, old industrial building in West Hollywood. I was uncomfortable, worried that I would be confronted with a bad situation, but I had committed to doing it. I found my way to a cheesy faux living room, with couches, chairs, and throw pillows. Fortunately, the photographer turned out to be very professional, even as he was encouraging me to strike all sorts of provocative poses. I was comforted when he told me about a Japanese law prohibiting photos showing pubic hair—I could tell myself I was only posing seminude, which seemed much better than the alternative. The session went well, but I felt weird about it. I never did those Japanese nudes again.

  They were my ticket into more modeling, though. Soon after my photos began circulating around Japan, I got another offer to do some pictures for Oui magazine. Playboy had originally imported Oui from France to attract a younger readership. It was a legitimate magazine, and I had to sign a proper release that specified that because I was underage, I could be on the cover and show cleavage, but I couldn’t pose nude for the inside of the magazine—which was a total relief from my point of view.

  I was very lucky that I happened to get paired with the well-known fashion photographer Philip Dixon for the shoot. Philip asked me to work with him again, modeling for a swimsuit catalog he was shooting. I was anxious because I didn’t think I had a great body—no waist, still carrying some baby fat—but Philip made me look beautiful. I started to think maybe I could make a living as a model instead of having to get a regular job to pay the bills while I was pursuing acting.