It was 6.30am on a Saturday when I found out Fred had died.
I was sitting by the window on the second floor of my friend’s home in Brooklyn. I had woken up early, buzzing from the adrenaline of a series of unaccustomed public appearances following the recent publication of my book.
Mindlessly, I opened Facebook and clicked on a message sent by an old friend.
I am writing to you with some sad news, it read. Fred died on Wednesday.
I looked ahead, to the morning light bathing me in warmth. I looked back down. I knew the message wouldn’t change, but I reread it anyway. Fred had died.
My throat seized up. I felt the curl of a smile – the kind that happens when emotions hit really, really hard. I felt confusion, disbelief, emptiness and an ominous weight. Was it lifting, or was it crashing down?
All the while, my mind was doing math. My age plus eight: he was 44 when he died. Then I counted back. How long had it been? I was 20 when we last saw each other. It had been 16 years.
•••
I was 14 when I met Fred. He was 22. I had braces, a bad haircut and the confidence of a teenager who had read too much and experienced too little. Fred was tall and handsome, with an athletic, distinctly manly build.
He wore 501 jeans, had light-brown hair and sideburns straight out of 90210, a show that had made it all the way from Hollywood to Belgium, where I lived. I had always had a crush on Dylan, a 16-year-old character played by a 24-year-old Luke Perry – coincidentally, eight years older than he was pretending to be.
It was springtime, and my basketball team was playing a tournament in the suburbs of Brussels. Fred and his best friend had shown up to support David, our coach. David introduced us in between games.
Fred was cheeky and spoke to me in English – the language I spoke at home. He had just returned from a university exchange abroad in Manchester, and my coach had mentioned I was British. We were chatting in a group, but Fred brazenly ignored his friends and my female teammates. His gaze sought out mine, and mine only.
My whole body became electric.
It would be years before I understood this as little more than a base strategy in which a man creates the semblance of a hierarchy within a group of women or girls by making one of them feel “picked”. But I was 14, and my child self thought this was love at first sight.
During warm-up, I felt the glare of his eyes on me. One blue, one green. There was something unhinged about his body language, like he was openly performing my having an effect on him, my captivating him. “Flattering” didn’t begin to cover what I felt.
Years on, I would come to see that this was the moment he set his trap. He acted as if he couldn’t resist, couldn’t help himself, as if I was the one controlling him. I can still hear him exclaim “what are you doing to me, Rose?” as we lay naked together.
But that was later, when it was all locked into motion.
•••
Over the course of the 16 years since I had last seen Fred, I had focused on moving forward. I’d completed college in London, moved to Italy, started a career in journalism, met my first husband, moved to Washington DC, completed grad school in New York, got divorced, moved to Detroit. I had just published my first book, a feminist tome I had poured all my intellectual might and wrath into.
But as far as I had come, the emotions that surfaced when I found out Fred had died made it clear that he was still with me. This was no coming-of-age tale in which the young princess identifies her powers and learns to harness them. This was something else entirely.
Remembering Fred caused an immediate, pressing need to vomit, a phenomenon I later heard described in a pop culture context as “getting the ick”. More recently, my therapist had explained that my urge to throw up was a trauma response.
Trauma. I had let the word sit, untouched. The term had been spreading like wildfire in the past few years, and I worried about serious trauma cases – persecution, destitution, violence – being undercut by its overuse.
Slowly, the water became clearer and I started to see the bottom. Eventually, I came to realize the magnitude of what I had been through.
•••
Fred’s life had seemingly been successful since I’d last seen him. Still in the Brussels area, he had a finance job, a wife and two daughters. The glimpses I caught from an ocean away revealed a life packed with international travel, ski vacations and other middle-class luxuries.
He was the embodiment of a white, male, western, financially ascendant dream. He had already been well on that path when we met.
The afternoon of our first encounter, he handed me a Kriek, a dark red beer that hides its bitterness with the sweet and sour taste of Morello cherries. It was clear my age wasn’t a concern to him. I’m not sure whether he knew I was 14 that day, but he indisputably knew that his friend was coaching a team of girls who were under 16.
The following week, he and a couple of friends showed up at the end of our basketball practice to shoot some hoops. Later, he would gleefully recount noticing my black panties under my white workout shorts. He found this detail titillating, and joked with his mates that teenage girls of my generation were “certainly different” from those of his.
If there was any fraction of truth to this, it was only insofar as teenage girls being presented in a different way. Just a couple of years earlier, Britney Spears had released … Baby One More Time, with an accompanying sexy school girl music video that crystallized a modern Lolita pop aesthetic. But his conclusions were wrong in assuming that my underwear choice had anything to do with me seeking attention from adult males – or anyone for that matter. I was a girl who had walked home from school, changed into whatever clean basketball gear I could find, and headed to practice.
Back in school, I told a close friend about Fred. I said I needed to get better, become a 10 out of 10 for him. Feeding my insecurities was a mixture of disbelief at capturing the attention of someone his age, coupled with cultural messaging that told me that being worthy of love required a girl’s transformation and self-sacrifice.
A few weeks later, classes broke for summer. I left a Friday night school house party early to meet up with a couple of basketball friends, hoping he would be there. He was. He leaned into me, and handed me a bottle of Smirnoff Ice. I tried to get the hang of flirting. Before I had to go home, he proposed a dare. I left “owing” him breakfast.
My mother, by then, knew nothing. My father had unexpectedly died two years before, and she had been left parenting three kids in a financially diminished situation, finding as good a new job as she could with a high school diploma and a résumé that wouldn’t count child rearing. And besides, a part of me thought there was nothing for my mother or anyone else to know – everything felt so exciting, so unreal.
When I returned from summer break in August, I sent Fred pastries in the post – breakfast, as promised. He sent me a text back saying I was special. I thought life had just begun.
I look back at the genuinely intelligent man that he was – completing his university thesis in political science, the first in his family to make it to college – and I still don’t get it. What was he thinking?
Perhaps that’s a naive question – a residue, no doubt, of that clever patriarchal conditioning that makes us over-empathize with those who hurt us. Because I do know what he was thinking.
Within weeks, I would introduce him to the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, my favorite. In return, he introduced me to porn – an accelerated initiation presented as a way of curing my ignorance. It was a jarring meeting of scripts.
The grooming would be disturbing if it wasn’t so mundane.
•••
Back in school, now 15, my braces gone, Fred took me to a bar one mid-week evening in the college area of the city. My mother was out of the country, helping my sister settle in at university, and still had no idea about Fred’s existence.
He bought me a Long Island iced tea – a cocktail that contains five clear spirits but tastes like Coca-Cola. “You like it?” he asked. I nodded enthusiastically, feeling – of all things – quite sophisticated. When I finished my first, he ordered me a second. I was too buzzed to worry about anyone noticing, or even caring about what was unfolding.
Not that anyone in those settings where we showed up together seemed to care about me one way or another – if confronted with it, they mainly remarked that I didn’t look my age.
For years, I thought I did look older. I was reminded of this last summer, when I finally watched the Jeffrey Epstein documentary on Netflix. Something clicked when I saw the photo of a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre with a markedly older Prince Andrew. She looked so young. I pulled up a photo of me at that same age. Big smile, round cheeks. A teenager, for sure, but also: a child. I was incensed.
Fred could operate with ease in this world – one that loves to tell teenage girls how mature they look. It’s the same world in which men routinely bemoan the loss of innocence in girls and women, while simultaneously lusting after them.
Our first time happened that night, after Fred got me blind drunk and brought me back to his parents’ leather sofa. There was no conversation that I remember, definitely no protection. He pulled out halfway through, feeling bad, he said. “It shouldn’t be like this.” But it was already done.
On the couch, my flopping body separated from my brain. How strange a penis felt, I thought. And then: you’re going to be okay, Rose. I love my brain for this – for staying with me, even as my body couldn’t.
Back in 2001, in Belgium, if you were an adult having sex with a 15-year-old, you were in a legal gray zone. Sex with anyone younger than 14 was considered statutory rape. Sex with anyone 16 or above, and you were good. But sex with anyone 14 or 15 was considered a euphemistic attentat à la pudeur, which translates literally as an “attack on modesty”.
What to do with that, I do not know. To me, it brings to mind the image of onlookers ready to exclaim in shock, horror, while breathlessly watching on.
This gray zone was eliminated in 2022, after years of campaigning from human rights groups. Now, if you are more than three years older than someone 14 or 15 and you are having sex with them, it is considered statutory rape – no euphemism included.
•••
Fred and I remained together on and off for four years. Every now and then, he would break things off, or cheat. When he did, I stayed focused, waiting to be picked back up. I tried to be good. My eating disorder took hold.
By the time my mother found out – the porn initiation, the so-called gray-zone sex – so much of it and more had already happened. She had a conversation with him one-on-one, imposed limits that were agreed to in word only. She turned to the family doctor for guidance. He told her that having a steady older boyfriend was likely better for me than having non-committal sex with boys my age who didn’t care.
That this was the paradox presented to her by a doctor baffles me. For starters, it treated my sexuality as fully formed, which it wasn’t, and suggested the main areas of concern were commitment and respectability, which they shouldn’t have been. With hindsight, it is particularly striking to note how absent from any of these conversations the language of consent was.
Female sexuality was about access. It was “before her first time” or “after her first time”, “pure” versus “touched” – along with the presumption, and fear, of floodgates opening. But what of the human beings, the emotional landscapes, the physical bodies still shaping themselves, and being shaped?
The adults in my life who knew mostly opted for tolerance and support. It seemed preferable to moralistic patriarchal condemnation that would ultimately judge me as tarnished.
Any outrage tended to turn the lens of scrutiny not on him, but on me. Fred’s parents treated me like a manipulative, bad influence. As far as I know, they placed no limits on him, even as he was initially still living with them in their apartment, but they made sure to express disapproval of me. Nor would they have been the first to take this stance. After all, the expression “jailbait” places the power with the underage girl, and victimhood on the adult man who must resist the hook, her pull. It is the men who must be protected from girls.
Fred stood up for me against the whispers. I was grateful to him. In my adolescent mind, it was us against the world. That was all that mattered.
By the time I was 16 and he was 24, our relationship had become normalized. We had overcome indignation and acceded banality. I had reached my majorité sexuelle – my “sexual adulthood”.
We were the plot of a hundred movies, a thousand books.
Fred became a part of my adolescent routine, and a respectable-presenting one at that. He stayed up to date on the news and routinely impressed people with facts of the day. After finishing his thesis and graduating college, he got his first job in finance. He always showed up to the front door impeccably dressed – more often than not in a piece of clothing featuring the print of a polo player. He helped improve my basketball shot and eventually took over coaching my team. His close friends accepted me – some of them I truly adored.
His carefully maintained facade did little to quell regular, private sadistic outbursts. He had a love for fast, drunk driving that ramped up the more frightened I became. I can still hear him laughing as he swerved the corner, descending the hill towards the square I lived off, me begging him to slow down. “Is this better?” he would inquire, foot pressing on the accelerator pedal.
He sent me Winnie-the-Pooh apology cards, teddy bears and chocolates. A calorie book.
When I confided in a couple of close acquaintances that I hated sex with him, their feedback centered on problems with the female anatomy, not my body communicating its boundaries. One person suggested, of all things, that I return to Fred for more direction.
Fred, in turn, introduced me to the term “frigid” – a diagnosis that seemed, if anything, to pique his interest.
Later, when I finally formulated the word “no” and he kept going anyway, I remember sobbing in the bathroom by his sister’s room. From the pain, sure, but also – from relief. The charade had finally lifted. It was spoken.
I never did have a physiological problem, as it turns out – something I discovered, like many girls who become women, years too late.
But you knew that already.
•••
By my last year of high school, 17 and 60lb lighter than the healthy weight I am today, my patterns of numbing were fully locked in. I had learned to dissociate in dozens of different, sometimes creative ways. Some days, I would walk home from school, my mother still at work, binge on a pack of cookies from the gas station, and defy house rules by turning the temperature up. Drowsy from the overeating, from the heat, I would invariably pass out. Self-harm was my refuge back into myself, I believed. I didn’t have the tools to understand that it was only taking me away further.
That year, Fred and I “weren’t together”. I was the side chick to a woman he had met at work, who was his age. He took to showing up, unannounced, to places he knew I would be. “Your boyfriend is here,” the assistant basketball coach for the new team I was a part of would flatly tell me, pointing to the balcony above our practice court. I would look up, adrenaline pumping, and lock eyes with him. “He’s not my boyfriend,” I would retort. A small act of defiance, if only for myself. By the time I looked up again, he would be gone.
He lurked at night, too; gave me rides home, after detours via parking lots. It wasn’t exciting any more, but I felt desperate. I was desperate for my fix – a fix that would, for a brief time at least, I believed, make me feel like I held value, like I was alive, like I was seen. My loyalty was ghost-like. I saw no alternative.
•••
I broke up with Fred at 18. Months after I formulated the word “no”, full repulsion finally set in. I couldn’t take him coming close to me. This time, I had my body to thank. There was no going back. Four years in, I was an adult, and I freed myself. But how much had already been shaped? How much was left to be mine?
So many men have written versions of my story as tales of female sexual awakening. But Fred’s normalizing of what can be summarized as a rape dynamic had a lasting impact on my ability to affirmatively be present with the partners that came after him – those I did consent to. It was, at best, a sexual darkening from which my own sexuality emerged decades later, in spite of – not because of – it.
•••
Conservatives will have you believe the sexual revolution was a failure – that more sexual agency hasn’t made women happier, or more free. But men barraging their way past basic consent; men having sex with teenagers – that was never part of any liberation agenda.
Our sexual revolution has always been a fight for basic human rights, self-determination and full bodily autonomy for all. It is a fight for more consent, more respect – a fight for freedom and for safety. There is no logical reason we should have to pick between one or the other.
Girls and women, like all human beings, should be afforded the space to form their own sexuality on their own terms in their own time. That involves some protection, like enforced consent laws that recognize developmental differences. It also involves insisting on shifting mores to accurately confront scripts that are only in place to manipulate and exploit.
•••
After I left him, I mostly didn’t think about Fred. We didn’t speak. He wrote for the first few years. Drunkenly left messages, sent emails. I changed numbers, addresses, countries. Over the years, the messages dwindled. I liked it that way.
Towards the end of 2022, when I made my Instagram public in preparation for my book coming out, he was one of the first to follow me. He was often among the first to watch my Stories.
I wondered whether I should block him, but decided against it. No, I thought, let him watch me thrive in spite of it all. Let him download my freaking book on Audible and listen to me tell him about feminism.
Anything more he would get out of me would be on my terms.
The only time I had ever referred to him in my writing, I had called him Eric. He was a brief detail in a story about a formative conversation I had with my mother in my book’s opening chapter. I portrayed him briefly and haplessly, and didn’t use his real name – not to protect him, but to deny him a place in the narrative of his favorite hunt. Even in an unflattering light, my gut told me, he would have felt a thrill from being named. An arousal.
Now he is dead, and the string is cut, and I can let the feelings live.
•••
A couple of months after Fred died, I watched a film on a plane – Neruda, by Pablo Larrain – about the Chilean revolutionary writer and politician, who is chased under the rise of fascism in the 1940s by an obsessive and pathetic police officer, Oscar Peluchonneau.
Towards the film’s end, Neruda comes face to face with his human tormenter as the latter is dying in the Andes Mountains. Speaking to their strange bond, he can finally reclaim his own reality. Something in me clicked. I took out my computer and furiously typed out Neruda’s character’s words.
“Yes, I know him. He’s my inspector. My persecutor. My phantom in uniform. I dream of him, and he dreams of me. He watches me. He knows my back. Look at what you wrote, policeman. You wrote the snow, and the horses.
“You created me. Now you can’t even feel the cold.”
In the darkness of a red-eye plane to Europe, finally acknowledging the sickness and intimacy of the cat-and-mouse bond between Fred and me, I came crashing into my own reality – into our collective one.
We raise generations of Barbie dolls to believe they are lionesses, when so many of us are still being shaped into lambs ready for the Jeffrey Epstein slaughter. Only if we make it through can we renegotiate the ending.
A society that takes on the logic of a predator, that defends, even glorifies, the chaser, has set a foundational rot. A world that loves its men not just far more than it loves its women, but more even than it loves its children, its girls, can never be just.
The weight lifted, Fred. You died, and like so many others, I made it through.
Now you can’t even feel the cold.
