I didn’t know my story. Thankfully, culture and opinions have shifted so the language and frame for what happened to me is different now than it was in the 80’s, when it was simply deemed dating. Thankfully, I’ve lived the 40 years it took for new language and new frames to appear in my sight line and for me to have occasion to be exposed to, educated, and changed by them.

I finally learned my true story entirely thanks to Julia sharing hers. I will always be indebted to her. I am telling my story to pay it forward, in hopes I can help another woman, as Julia helped me.

Over the last year, I looked for more women like us but didn’t find them. Where are they? Do they not exist? Do we really believe in all of the 80’s—which followed the 70’s and its disgustingly named Baby Groupies—that I was the only girl an 80’s band groomed into believing she was some adult man’s 15 year old girlfriend, as opposed to his victim and prey?

Could it be the women’s stories aren’t there because they, like me, didn’t realize they’d been exploited, manipulated, groomed, preyed upon, and harmed? Lori Maddox, The “Baby Groupie” preyed upon by Jimmy Page in the 70’s, has said the #metoo movement and women she spoke to helped her see her circumstance as an exploited teen in a whole new way.

How many other GenX women like me have yet to receive the message they might want to examine their lives to see if they were groomed as a child into believing an adult man was their romantic partner? I didn’t find them when I was looking, but I know I’m not the only one.

Maybe, like with #metoo, when I share my story, maybe another woman will realize her own story and will come forward to share it and we’ll finally get #MusicsMeToo started in earnest. If the He’s Not Your Boyfriend Project can help kickstart a long-overdue investigation into the seedy, sexist, exploitative Music Industry, I’ll be incredibly grateful.

I hope my story, like Julia’s did for me, will help other women to realize they were groomed and manipulated as children into believing they could actually consent to sexual acts with an adult. Many groomed children never realize they were groomed. Knowing what I know now, my heart breaks for them.

But, I have some questions:

Let’s say some “lucky” women do realize they were duped as girls into believing a predator loved them or was a legitimate romantic partner, what then?

What exactly happens to these historic victims of child sex assault when they experience what the legal system calls a Delayed Discovery of Injury?

Where do these women go for help, guidance, and support?

How do they figure out what legal and civil options they have?

Where do they learn the new vocabulary they need to describe their situation and the man who expoloited them—the one they’ve mistakenly called “their first boyfriend” for decades?

How do they begin to create a new story, the truth, when it requires time and emotional fortitude and the ability to absorb new trauma as the truth unfolds?

How and where do they learn to navigate the puzzle of memories, pictures, diary entries, letters, gifts, and life events, like changes to school and health and relationships, they’ve never before realized, or had anyone suggest, were likely caused by their child sex assault?

How do they approach such a monumental effort as examining and redefining their whole identity because it was built around a cancerous lie—that they believed for a long time an adult loved them and that made them special and now they need to excise that tumor from their psyche and identity because they’ve finally learned the truth and accommodating a predator in the middle of their memory and life story is nauseating and enervating and traumatic?

Is there a place for these women? Once the world wakes them to the depressing reality of their past, their stolen childhood, their life labored under the burden of myriad misunderstood negative outcomes?

What about when their new view on their life’s earliest days forces them to view the horrors of today through a jarring new lens? How are they to contend with the fact that things are decidedly worse for girls today?

Or the fact that despite so much lipservice about helping women, empowering girls, supporting and believing victims, and demanding meaningful change from men and the assorted industries they exploit for their sex crime victims——there is no actual help being offered to women like them, like us?

Or worse yet, that the people employed in our government, people we pay to advocate for us to have better lives are at this moment in 2024 actively working to remove rights from women and girls along with autonomy, safety, healthcare, and thus denying any hope of equity ever being realized for girls and women in the US.

Spoiler: There is no place for these women to turn to with these questions and needs. I know, I’m her and I’ve been looking high and low for over a year and it has nearly wrecked me anew. I actually began therapy in October—not for dealing with the many many injuries from the child sex assault. I looked in vain for months for a trauma therapist, to no avail. I finally realized my more immediate need was support for the overwhelming nightmare that was seeking answers and support for questions and issues related to my Delayed Discovery of (child sex assault) Injur(ies). It was traumatizing all on its own and I was repeatedly reduced to tears and physical manifestations of stress-induced illness.

Why? Who decided this is what women who suffered crimes as children—and then suffered the fallout from those crimes over the remainder of their lives—should have to deal with once they read an article declaring lawmakers are changing laws specifically for them, to make justice available to them.

It’s cruel and shameful our society seems intent on frustrating and harming these specific victims of child sex crimes in a bumbling, insensitive, cruel, unholistic and disrespectful way. I decided I needed to write about more than just my personal story because it is not okay with me that other women, yet to discover their own true stories, may face a hellish journey like mine. I feel mocked and abandoned by a society that wastes so much air on claiming to care.

So, I will do what I can with my limited capacity to do what government and advocates have failed to do—smooth the way for the next wave of women who will be having these awakenings over the next days, weeks and years. Someone should have prepared a reception and resource center for us. Alas, we are still, decades after the fact—the inconsequential, invisible girls that no one ever thought would amount to anything so they didn’t have to care or take responsibility for the things that made that our truth, when it never had to be and never should have been.