With everything going on in the news, it’s made me wonder: why haven’t “I” ever come forward with the names of those who hurt me?

The only reason I’ve come up with is that it’s because I’ve been healed from everything, but still, many things happened…many.

Like the time I was sixteen, when the manager at Burger King told me to sleep with him or I’d be out of a job, I lost my job.

Or when shortly after that, a forty year old man seduced me for months…I didn’t know any better. If you aren’t raised right, chances are, you’re not going to choose right. Anyway, there’s more.

How about when I was drugged and raped at sixteen by a different forty year old friend of the family?

How about the time, in sobriety, I was drugged and raped by someone I knew, someone I trusted, but was too scared to tell anyone because I thought I’d lose my sobriety date?

In my life, a lot has happened, but the one time that hurt most was when I tried to report it, and nothing happened.

It was 2008: a couple months prior, Katie had come home from a treatment center, and I’d just been hired at a new job. I was working for a private investigator, who knew more about my past than I did and used it against me.

A few weeks after telling me he erased some of my shady past from my record, he touched me inappropriately. Because I was strong at the time, I confronted him and told him his touch wasn’t welcome. He denied it and made my every work day a living hell, until I couldn’t take it anymore and walked out. I went straight to a lawyer and found another job.

After meeting with the lawyer a couple times, he told me I didn’t have a case. He said that a judge would’ve looked at my past of being a stripper and a prostitute and wouldn’t believe it’d bother me to be touched. And to top it off, he said my kids would get pulled into it. I couldn’t handle that.

“I” was prepared to fight but didn’t feel they should have to, so I dropped it all and never looked back.

Even now, I won’t give out any of the names above. Some names, I don’t even remember, but most of them I do, but I feel like God is the Judge and Jury, so I leave it all in His Hands, trusting Him along the way.

There’s even more I could list, but I think you get the picture.

During most of those times, there’s no way I could’ve come forward. I just didn’t know how to or that I had the right to. To be honest, I thought it was my fault for being pretty. Maybe that’s why I used to struggle to see my beauty.

Anyway, all I know is that I understand why women don’t come forward, and for the ones that do, I hope they’re being honest.