House of Mirrors
Start with the Introducton if you haven't read it yet.
Chapter 1
To Whom Should I Complain?
I was raped when I was 12. Whatever images or scenarios that sentence conjures in your mind, I can almost guarantee it happened differently than you imagine. There’s more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our imaginations about rape and sexual assault.
It was 1981. I was living with my dad and step-mother in San Ramon, California. My step-mother’s brother had a kebab stand at The Gilroy Garlic Festival, and somehow I got drafted to work for him. My step mother wanted me to earn money so I could spend a week with my aunt and uncle in Los Angeles while she and my dad took a trip to Alabama.
My dad was adopted when he was an infant, and he was raised in Alabama. My dad didn’t know he was adopted until he was 39. My mom was told my dad was adopted early in their marriage, but she kept the secret for more than 10 years. Keeping that secret destroyed whatever was left of my parents’ relationship when my mother finally told my father what she knew. It took another 2 years for both of them to realise the chasm between them was far too wide to cross. Even then, they hadn’t fully comprehended the abyss beneath all of us was fathomless. My dad and his new wife were going to Alabama to try and find out as much as they could about my dad’s adoption.
I was living with my dad because my mom and I had a terrible relationship. One fateful day, after she took my younger brother’s side in an awful argument that was my fault, I'd had it. Her refusal to even ask for my side pushed me over the edge. As the diabolical 11 year old I was, I crawled out of my bedroom window and ran away to my father’s apartment 15 miles away. When my dad finally came home, and he called her to tell her I was safe, my mother screamed at my father to bring me home. She was furious that I had escaped my punishment, and she railed at my father for rewarding my awful behaviour by allowing me to stay with him. It is oddly ironic that she thought going to my dad’s was a reward. My dad refused to return me to my mom, and the judge that was presiding over my parents’ divorce, allowed me to choose to stay with my dad. I lived with my him for the next 2 years.
My virginity was taken from me the summer between 7th & 8th grade. For a very long time I didn’t understand what had happened to me. I didn’t have a name for it. I had a crush on the guy who did it. His name was Mark and he was 18 or 19. I had only met him 2 days before. He was the heartthrob in a production of Once Upon A Mattress with my step-cousin, who was also his girlfriend, and I thought he was dreamy until he turned into a terrible nightmare.
The Christmas before I was raped.
Growing up in the shitstorm of my parents’ civil war, I got swallowed by rage, erased by circumstance, and emboldened by some of the most ludicrous parenting of the 1970’s. I craved attention and some form of acknowledgement, but sex was not something I knew enough about or understood in the least. I didn’t believe I deserved romantic attention because I wasn’t attractive or worthy of it. When the term ‘date rape’ was used on an episode of LA Law years later in the mid 80’s, I called it ‘date rape,’ because he wasn’t a stranger, but I was 12, there was no ‘date.’
The week before I went to Gilroy, my best friend, Debbie, paid the boy who lived next door to her $5 to make out with me. Until then, I had never been kissed. Debbie knew I had a crush on her neighbour, Sean. She also knew I was never going to be kissed by someone who wanted to, so she paid him.
I was standing on Debbie’s front lawn, and Sean walked by swooping my hand in his and lead me into Debbie’s house. I had no idea what he was doing. To this day I love it when a guy takes my hand and leads me off somewhere. There is something delicious in being overpowered by nothing more than a wisp of air – a breath, a smell, a taste – of almost nothing. The effortlessness of that allure still thrills me.
Sean deftly turned me around in front of Debbie’s couch and kissed me. It was glorious. He started with soft, gentle kisses. Lips barely touching, sweetly. Then he escalated to deeper, longer kisses, until he deftly touched my lips with his tongue. We made out for about an hour.
We got as far as petting, which I had never thought of or knew anything about in the slightest. I just followed Sean’s lead. I had never felt an erection before. It was lovely and strong in my hand. It made some sort of physical sense even though I had no idea the male body could do that. My mind raced trying to comprehend everything, and then I would realize that I wasn’t paying attention to what my mouth and my tongue were doing and I’d come back to the wondrous physical reality of his lips.
His lips were big and soft and he knew how to kiss. His tongue filled my mouth which, again, I hadn’t known was a thing. I felt free and exhilarated, oddly powerful and confident. Every nerve in my body was receptive. Every cell came to life. I felt like I could devour him if he’d let me and if there had been time. At a certain point, Sean got up and left. He went outside to Debbie to get his $5, and he kissed her on the cheek when he left.
Sean never kissed me again, and he never said a word about what we did. He was infatuated with Debbie, who was the most stunning girl in town. She could stop traffic and she often did just because she could. We hitchhiked around the San Ramon Valley whenever we needed to. The men who would stop to give us rides were, thankfully, harmless.
We were Gen X latch key kids. During the day, while our parents were at work, we wreaked havoc. I smoked pot a few times, though I never liked how it made me feel. I preferred to nick travel bottles of vodka from my dad’s bar, buy orange juice in the school cafeteria at lunch and drink screwdrivers while I waited for the bus to take us home. The teachers at school told my dad how impressed they were with me being so healthy because I drank so much orange juice. I smoked cigarettes when I could get them. All my friends were stoners and fuck-ups. I was the nerdy gymnast/ballerina who did really well in school without much effort, and who somehow ended up in the company of the cool older kids – and except for sexually, I had more life experience than any of their pampered middle class lives.
The summer of 1978, before learning about his adoption, my dad won the top prize for selling computers for Basic/Four, which was a trip to Paris for a week in October. Since they were going to be in Europe, my mom wanted to visit her family in England and Ireland, so the company paid for them to extend their trip to London and Dublin. They did not take me or my brothers with them. They left us $100 for food and were gone for 3 weeks. They arranged for my younger brother to stay with a woman who babysat him occasionally. My parents realised that my younger brother, who was about to turn 5, was too young for me or my older brother to look after, especially while we were in school. I was 9. My older brother was 14. My older brother took my mom’s frog green Pinto before my parents even made it to the airport and spent 3 weeks with his girlfriend. I was basically left to fend for myself for most of October 1978.
In January of 1978, Ted Bundy brutally murdered two co-eds in their dorm rooms at Florida State. In May of that year, David Burkowitz pleaded guilty to the Son of Sam murders. That same month, the Unabomber sent his first package to University of Illinois. And on the winter solstice of 1978, John Wayne Gacy was arrested. Closer to home, on April 25, the Zodiac killer wrote a new letter to The San Francisco Chronicle stating that he was back in the Bay Area and on the prowl.
In March 1978, Richard Hovey abducted 8 year-old Tina Salazar while she was walking home from school in Hayward – about 10 miles from where we lived – she died 8 days after her abduction from multiple stab wounds. That same month, 16 year old Laura Beyerly was abducted from her school parking lot across the bay in Los Altos. Her body was found a year later in the Santa Cruz mountains. In April, 11 year old Cynthia Waxman was raped and killed while playing in a field in Moraga. The man who killed her was guilty of 6 other similar murders. In September, just before my parents left for their trip, a couple named Gerald and Charlene Gellego abducted two 17-year-old girls from a mall in Sacramento. The couple raped and executed them which began a series of rape executions the couple committed together over the next 2 years.
And in October of 1978, while my parents were gone, the East Area Rapist – who would become the Golden State Killer – began a series of rapes in Concord, San Jose, San Ramon and Danville. In 1979, he raped a woman in Fremont, just one town over from where we lived, in the town where my brother was staying with his girlfriend.
That there was general mayhem and murder throughout the country maybe shouldn’t have worried my parents. Maybe they knew with absolute certainty that nothing could ever harm us. Or maybe their lack of empathy didn’t allow them to consider how unsettling being without parents might be for young children.
I certainly didn’t know any of this when I was alone nights in my room that October. It was only after reading I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, a book about the Golden State Killer, that the extent to which we were left completely vulnerable in a very dangerous place at a very dangerous time hit me like an anvil. Maybe those dangers never occurred to my parents, but surely they had to know we could also be dangers to ourselves just going about our daily lives. When I was 3, I inhaled pieces of carrot I was chewing when the neighbour’s dog jumped on me. I had to have my lungs vacuumed and I recovered in a plastic bubble for a month. I had been hit by a car when I was 6 just walking home from school breaking my left femur. I spent more than a year in traction, in a body cast, and on crutches. The doctors weren’t sure I’d be able to continue dancing or compete as a gymnast again, but thankfully, they were wrong. I see parents these days afraid to leave their kids alone for an hour, and I laugh to myself at the madness of being on my own for weeks.
My parents arranged to have one of the older neighbour girls, who was 16 or 17 come and stay with my older brother and me during the week. And my mom’s sister was supposed to come and take us on the weekends – at least I think that’s what was supposed to happen.
When the neighbour realised my older brother wasn’t around, she spent most of her time fucking her boyfriend in my parent’s bedroom. She didn’t give a fuck about me. She gave a lot of fucks about him. A lot. I didn’t know what sex was at that point. So I was just confused and miserable that they would come over and go into my parents’ bedroom, lock the door, and leave me alone to watch TV or read. Maybe that’s why when Debbie would take her boyfriends into her bedroom, locking her door, and leaving me downstairs in her living room watching MTV, it felt familiar to me.
Debbie had terrible taste in guys, but I got along with most of them. They would fuck her and come downstairs and talk to me. I enjoyed that arrangement. I understood that they were using Debbie. She didn’t seem to care, but there was something about it that seemed cold and mean to me. Why didn’t they stay upstairs and talk to her? She was the one they wanted. They were always older than she was by a few years (so they were older than me by more) and I was smart and I loved football and music and books, and we had great conversations. I don’t think they ever noticed the disdain I had for them for how they treated my best friend.
About 5 days after my first kiss, I was staying with my step-mother’s brother in Gilroy. My step-cousin, Cindy, was this really cute, talented singer, and she had won the Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival or had been a runner up or something. She was in the musical with Mark, and she took me to the cast party or she was forced to take me, I’m not sure which.
The month before.
Mark spent a lot of time with me at the party. I assumed he felt sorry for me because I didn’t know anyone there. I was comfortable and unguarded because, I assumed, like with Debbie’s boyfriends, I was a non-entity. With them I wasn’t an option, I wasn’t desirable, I was neuter. I treated Mark the way I treated them, but Mark saw me in a way that I never considered.
When Mark handed me my second beer at the party, he said, ‘You’ll be in trouble when I give you a third,’ and it dawned on me that he didn’t need to be paid to kiss me. The thought that he might be interested in me made me feel amazing. I left the party before I got a third beer, and I thought I would never see him again.
I spent the rest of that weekend working at the festival helping my step-uncle sell BBQ kebabs. I worked 10 hours on both Saturday and Sunday and on the Monday, he let me go in the afternoon so I could look around. Nothing would have thrilled me less than the prospect of walking around the Gilroy Garlic Festival, but off I went with nothing better to do and absolutely no interest in a festival about garlic.
Somewhere on a hillside, Mark found me – not that he was looking for me. I said hello and was about to walk off when he asked me where I was going. I didn’t know so he offered to show me around. His attention made me feel attractive and worthwhile in a way I never had before. It turned out that he was performer at the festival and he told me had a dressing room there.
His dressing room was only a tent behind the stage, probably made to sleep 4 comfortably in the woods, but it was a place where we could be alone in the middle of 15,000 people. That’s where he gave me that third beer.
I don’t know if he knew I was only 12. I look at 12-year-olds now and I can’t imagine ever being that young. I had been through so much by then, and I had the body of a 16 year-old because my breasts had developed early. I could have been a bombshell, if I had the face for it, but I didn’t so I wasn’t. I was the girl boys would later say they would do if they could put a bag over my head.
Mark kissed me and put his hand up my shirt. He was on top of me and had his hand down my shorts before I even realized I was on my back. I was trying to get my bearings when I felt him penetrate me. I hadn’t even realised he had dropped his pants. He had pinned my left leg with his knee so I couldn’t move. I tried to say no but his tongue was in my mouth and he thrust into me hard and fast. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening, it was so painful. No one ever said it would be that painful. By the time I could catch my breath to say ‘no,’ it was too late.
It was so painful it felt like my torso was being cleaved in two. I thought my hips would rupture from the force. His thrusting got faster and it felt like my lungs were being pulled down into my pelvis every time he pulled back. I couldn’t breathe from the pain of it. When I got enough breath to say stop, he asked if it hurt. When I said yes, he said he was just trying to make it good for me. I couldn’t comprehend what that meant. I don’t remember him finishing but it seemed to go on beyond what I could endure. I’m not sure if I passed out, but time lapsed or slowed and elongated like a car crash.
I must have been in shock because I couldn’t grasp what had happened. I couldn’t believe that was what sex was. It was nothing like I saw on TV or in movies, but it had to have been sex because that’s what sex is. It couldn’t have been rape because I liked him, but I never wanted to have sex with any one until I was married. Debbie and all my friends knew that. All their boyfriends knew, too. I was off limits. So what was this? What had just happened to me?
He was quite bloody and offered me something to wipe up the blood on me. I don’t know what it was about the way he threw a towel at me or the way he spoke but there was no question he didn’t care about what he had just done to me. If it mattered to him that I had been a virgin before, it didn’t matter to him now that it was over. He was cold and distant and he didn’t touch me after that.
When I had composed myself and pulled my shorts up, my body felt completely broken. Every part of my body ached. I hadn’t even had time to untie much less take off my shoes, which stuck out to me for some reason. I had slipped off my shoes before getting on the couch with Sean. Having my sneakers on made me feel cheap. Beautiful people who love each other don’t have sex with their ratty tennis shoes on.
Mark offered to walk me out of the festival. We didn’t speak as I stumbled to keep up with him. He walked me to within a few blocks of my cousin’s house, he gave me a peck on the cheek and took off. I walked the rest of the way alone, climbed the stairs and crawled into my step-cousin’s bed.
I slept for 7 hours. I couldn’t move. There was a party going on down stairs. I could hear them but I couldn’t wake up. I felt like I was at the bottom of the ocean with the weight of all that water crushing my whole body and I felt wave after wave of despair. If I hadn’t slept, I would have drowned from sobbing.
At some point, I heard Mark’s voice downstairs and I wanted to go to that sound. I wanted to wrap myself inside the sound of his voice but I couldn’t move. Somehow, I thought if I could go to him, if he could see me, it would be like all those fairy tales that get shoved down our little girl throats and he would realise I was a princess and he would love me. But my body wouldn’t wake up. My arms wouldn’t move. And the harder I tried, the later it was getting, and I knew that the moment had passed and I knew I had missed it. Like missing the last lifeboat on the Titanic, I was left to go down like the captain of my own doomed, sinking ship.
My dad and my step-mother had come to collect me and someone woke me up. I dragged myself into the back seat of my dad’s car for the long drive back to our house in San Ramon. I was still half asleep but I could hear my step-mother say what a cute couple Mark and Cindy made and how well Mark treated her – he was so charming. The tears on my cheeks were so hot, they felt like they were scalding my face.
Debbie didn’t believe me when I told her I lost my virginity. She thought I was making it up to try and make it seem like I didn’t care about Sean. When I told her about how much it hurt and a few of the other more gory details, she knew I wasn’t lying. But the mere fact that I had to work so hard to convince her, should have helped me to understand how wrong it all was.
The Christmas after.
Three weeks later when I had missed my period, any doubts Debbie had that I made it all up went away. I was terrified. I wasn’t pregnant, but I missed my period for a few months. I found out later, during a gyno exam, that Mark had damaged my cervix.
I tried to get Mark’s phone number from my cousin, which got me into a lot of trouble with my step-mother and her family, but they wouldn’t give it to me. It was 6 weeks before I saw Mark again. I thought I was pregnant and I ran up to him and threw my arms around him. He pealed me off like I was a disease, and he pretended that he didn’t recognize me. It was more humiliating than the sex.
I was not heartbroken about Mark. I did not love him. I was humiliated and rejected. I was heartbroken about myself because I knew no one could ever love me. I knew how easily I was duped because I needed his attention the way a junky needs a heroine fix and I hated myself for feeling so empty and being so weak. I wasn’t as upset about what he took from me as I was about what he left behind.
None of those memories ever left me. In fact, my body remembered more than my brain. 40 years later, a former lover, Tom, helped me and my friend with self-defence training after Ashling Murphy’s murder in Tullamore, Ireland. Tom pinned me with his knee on my left thigh, and I was immediately back in that tent at the Gilroy Garlic Festival helpless and unable to move or breathe. In all the years since my rape, no one had ever pinned me like that. Tom was pinning me like that because he was simulating an attack. It was a revelation.
I knew at every turn that I had not wanted to have sex with Mark. I had known that he was brutal with me. My body had the damage to prove it, but I hadn’t been 100% sure that it was Mark’s intention to rape me until that day with Tom. The way Tom pinned me was meant to incapacitate me, to hold my pelvis in place so that I couldn’t fend off the inventible penetration. There’s only one reason to pin a pelvis that way. Mark pinned my left leg in that tent. He pinned my left femur that had been broken at my hip socket when I was hit by the car when I was 6. The way my leg was pinned made it impossible for me struggle.
I was never able to forget the physical pain or how worthless I felt for decades. Except for Debbie, I never told anyone else what happened until I was in my late twenties. If I told my parents, they would have kicked me out of the house. I’m not speculating about that. Before I went back to live with my mom, my dad and step-mother went to Tough Love and gave me a contract to sign. One of the items on the contracts was that if I had sex, I would not be welcome in their home. I knew I deserved all the don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t do drugs rules, but the one about sex broke me. Not because I knew I was a raped, even then I didn’t know what to call it, but because I felt they would punish me for having endured something so awful. I also knew that if I told my mother, she would have been worse.
So I never told on myself. I never reported it. When I thought about telling anyone, I would have panic attacks because I knew that the dress I was wearing at the cast party was too revealing, even though my step-mother had bought it for me at the Gunne Sax outlet in San Francisco. My mom was livid that my step-mother kept buying me low cut dresses so she added extra layers of lace to every dress to cover my cleavage. My step-mother used to say, ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it,’ when she bought me dresses made for 20 year olds. But it was the beers Mark gave me that scared me most. I had been drinking screwdrivers most afternoons so the alcohol didn’t hit me the way it would have any other 12 year old, but if my parents found out I was drinking, they would blame me for everything that happened.
There have been times when I’ve realised that not saying anything was cowardly, but I needed to survive not only what happened with Mark. I needed to survive my mother, who had narcissistic personality disorder; my dad, who is probably a sociopath or was so damaged by his adoption, by the betrayal of my mother, and the lies she told afterwards to cover her duplicity that he could never trust anyone including his own children; and I had to survive the emotionally savage war my parents waged against each other using me and my brothers as either fodder or booty. I just didn’t have it in me to do anything other than get through it, and there were times when I almost didn’t. I made a serious suicide attempt when I was 16 and spent 30 days in the locked wing of a mental hospital because of it. I still have the scars on my wrists more than 40 years later.
Now, I’m a theatre director who specialises in directing Shakespeare. My favourite of his plays is Measure for Measure. After being manipulated to give her virginity to Angelo, Isabella speaks directly to the audience and asks: To whom should I complain? Did I tell this, who would believe me? Those lines reverberate in me like chords from a song I learned that day on my back.
There would have been more than few issues if I had come forward. I’m going to take my parents out of the equation because there’s no point debating that they would never have supported me – neither of the them. I had no proof. Nothing except my word. There was no rape kit, no DNA, no witnesses – except that one of the other performers had been in the tent, and Mark asked him to leave when we got there. I have no idea who that person was though, and I wouldn’t have known how to find him. Mark could have said it was anyone and I wouldn’t have known the difference. It was my word against his, and I had no ground to stand on.
Mark could have denied it happening all together or he could also have said that we had sex and that I wanted it. Everyone at the cast party saw me with him. If they saw the way I looked at him, they could easily assume I would want to have sex with him. My step-cousins and my step-mother would have blamed me. They were furious when I wanted Mark’s phone number. They didn’t know I thought I was pregnant. They thought I was being inappropriate about my step-cousin’s boyfriend. The rebuke I received for asking for his phone number was enough to scare me away from even mentioning his name to them again.
Even if I filed a police report, I would have been an unreliable witness because of all the rules and laws I’d broken as a 12 year old. Being that young drinking, smoking, and experimenting with drugs, it would have been too easy to paint me as a fuck up no matter how much ballet I’d done, how many ribbons I’d won as a gymnast, or how many straight A report cards my mom kept in a drawer to brag about.
No matter what scenario I imagined, the only conclusion I would come to every single time I thought about it was that I deserved it. It wasn’t until I understood date rape, and until I had a lot of therapy that I accepted that it wasn’t my fault and I couldn’t have wanted to have sex no matter how much I wanted Mark to like me. Wanting to be liked doesn’t mean wanting to have non-consensual sex. Not only was I too young to ever consent to such a thing, my body was too young, and was damaged by Mark’s thrusting and the way he pinned me down.
After I saw Mark for the last time, I vowed to myself that I wasn’t going to let what he did define me. I was not going to be a weepy, needy, victim - no matter how much I cried when I was alone. I kept seeing those types of stories on TV, and I refused to let anyone see me like that. I was going to take it, be strong, and persevere in public. I had survived a lot by then, and I was wiser and more experienced for it. There was a reason I could be in the company of adults and hold my own. I was smart and experience gave me depth. I was hungry for the meaning of things, of life, of struggling, and you have to have experiences – good and awful – to fully grasp the meaning of existence. On really good days, I almost felt like I willed what happened into being because it set me apart from people who took life for granted. It set me apart from my step-mother whose entire existence was shopping. It set me apart from my hedonist friends who just wanted to get high and have sex. My experience pulled me into the world of philosophical meaning, and for that I was grateful.
Do you believe me? After the ‘Me Too’ movement, ‘believe survivors’ became a mandate. Not believing survivors came with a threat, ‘believe or be cancelled, bullied, judged’ – sometimes more harshly than the rapist. I welcome a certain amount of discernment rather than blind acceptance. My own mother assumed I wanted it. You not believing me will never hurt as much as that. So please scrutinise what I wrote and question your own thoughts and feelings about it. Believing survivors without engaging your conscience is almost as dangerous as not believing out of hand. What is indisputable is that I was 12. In this day and age, that’s all that matters.
Chapter 2 release date: 19 November 2026
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House of Mirrors is a memoir about the chaos and confrontations that erupted during Sascha Barros Riley's stay in my bungalow in Ireland. I will be releasing a chapter each week. If you would like to receive chapters via email (so you don't have to rely on social media to find them) please join the mailing list.