Dearest Unravelers and Unravelers-to-Be —
This is a big one, friends. I’m about to tell you a story I’ve held in silence for 25 years.
A note before you read: This piece includes discussion of sexual assault. Please be gentle with yourself as needed. I’m sharing this because as a journalist — and as a woman — I honestly don’t know how not to. I feel compelled. Missionized.
This week I spent an hour with Jennifer Wilenta. She held nothing back, sharing the deeply disturbing discovery of what her husband did to her for years: drugging, violating, and filming her without consent. Other than a single night in Rikers Island jail in New York City (his own mother bailed him out), this man agreed to a plea deal… He hasn’t served a day in prison.
Despite massive flaws in the system, Jenn is “offering herself justice,” as she puts it, through vulnerability, fierce truth-telling, dance, motherhood, advocacy, her Tiny Movements film and urging men to “step in” to this conversation:
Jenn and another survivor I recently interviewed, Zoe Watts, both possess breathtaking courage. And I want to say plainly: what I’m about to share is not a comparison to either of their experiences. There is no equivalence. None. Their stories are their own. Their bravery, however, stirred something in me. It opened a door I had slammed shut.
While preparing to interview them — reading, reporting, immersing myself as seriously as I would have for any interview on my CNN show — something happened.
My body remembered.
If you’ve read trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk and his book The Body Keeps the Score, you know what he means: our hardest experiences don’t live only in memory; they imprint themselves in the body. The body remembers what the mind has minimized or outrun.
Suddenly my body took me back.
First, to a monologue I delivered on my show in 2018. Do you remember this?
For context, Christine Blasey Ford, a psychology professor, had been testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her allegation that then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager — testimony that ignited a national reckoning around belief, memory, and sexual violence.
Her testimony brought the country to a standstill.
I remember going home that night after our wall-to-wall coverage, buzzing, sitting in front of my computer. This monologue just poured out of me.
The very next day at work, with my heart pounding, I closed my show with this:
But there was something I did not say that day.
I wasn’t ready then.
I am now.
There was a very important pronoun I deliberately left out of my monologue.
