I realized that there was something deeply terrifying about my body when I was two or three years old. I didn't exactly know that I was a girl, I just knew that something was profoundly wrong. I didn't have the words to convey these feelings, so I used that terrifying body instead; refusing to eat or drink what the people who insisted I was a boy told me to consume and resisting the toilet training that felt like attempts to govern the most terrifying parts of my anatomy. The adults weren't listening. They used violence to subdue me and after my parents and my preschool teachers had already put their hands on me in anger, it didn't feel like I had any right to refuse the Catholic priests that same privilege in lust.
I was five when I was raped and molested by two grown men and I told no one for decades because I believed at the time that these were just things adults did to children who didn't obey them and the weight of that revelation was simply so colossal that I repressed those traumatic memories until the willful disobedience of my gender transition dredged them back up like a wraith from the flooded sewars of my subconscious.
I don't like telling this story. I hate telling this story. I can literally feel their hands and teeth on my body when I do. But I find myself telling this story a lot because it seems to be the only way for me to get 'normal' people; the untouched masses, to comprehend the full scope of child abuse as a systemic issue.
This is not something that happens because of a few bad apples in the bunch. Child abuse is frighteningly rampant even in a western society that bathes itself liberally in the shallow language of "universal human rights" because child abuse is a symptom of a culture that simultaneously celebrates its fealty to authoritarian institutions and these institutions very much include schools as well as churches, asylums, clinics and even universities.
Any top-down system where authority is sanctified will be codified into an elite class afforded the ability to abuse those beneath them while fostering a culture of permanent bystanders actively choosing to look the other way between cocktails at bougie galas and board meetings.
I saw this happen at my smalltown Catholic school where parents and teachers were well aware of a growing sex abuse scandal but still chose to put their children in harm's way and defended the accused because doing otherwise would force them to confront the culpability of a system which they built their entire identity around. I also watched in disgust as this same scenario played out again at Penn State University, just a thirty-minute drive from the rectory where my childhood was ripped to ribbons.
Jerry Sandusky was just one man: a retired assistant coach for a beloved rural Pennsylvania college football dynasty. But he was afforded the ability to prey on scores of innocent young boys for decades by an entire community that looked the other way over and over again. This included Coach Joe Paterno who had learned of the abuse from an eyewitness a decade before it was finally exposed and may have even known as far back as the 70s but chose to alert only the men who paid his salary who chose to alert no one else.
The people of Centre County know this story and an appalling percentage of them continue to defend and essentially worship Joe Paterno without comprehending that it was precisely this kind of cult of personality that gave people like Joe Paterno both the motive not to do the right thing and the belief that they could get away with it.
Sickeningly, this belief has been proven right. Decades after Paterno's death, his wife Sue is still considered to be a pillar of the community while stubbornly upholding her husband's non-existent honor and undeserved good name; declaring from on high that not only was her husband innocent but that he was a victim too; a feeble old demigod taken advantage of and unfairly pilloried for the crimes of another.
I can't help but make the connection between Paterno and Noam Chomsky. Much like my often-repeated confession of abuse, I don't want to do this. In fact, I very deeply wish I didn't have to. I adored Chomsky growing up. I knew the man through his work as a tireless crusader for the voiceless and the disenfranchised. His writings strongly informed my own writings and beliefs. But his relationship with billionaire child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has been exposed to be far more significant and far more sinister than a handful of chance encounters.
Quite the contrary, Chomsky appears to have been complicit in a garish attempt to rehabilitate this man's flagging reputation in hopes of allowing him to get away with his sundry predations a second time. And once again, there is a line of well-intentioned, thoughtful people curling around the block, waiting on bated breath to make the same tired old excuses.
The really depressing thing is that these people are so punch drunk on their own idolatry that they fail to recognize that their excuses only further expose Chomsky's complicity along with their own and in no case is this more garish than the recent explanations given to the Associated Press by Chomsky's current wife Valeria, speaking on the professor's behalf while he convalesces in Brazil after a recent stroke.
Valeria seems to be convinced that both her and her husband were somehow victims too of this man they spent years consorting with in the lap of luxury, speaking of being "encircled", "ensnared", and "manipulated", of "unknowingly... open(ing) a door to a Trojan horse." But her narrative very quickly disintegrates under basic water pressure.
Valeria admits that she and Noam met Epstein during an unspecified "professional event" in 2015, during which Jeffrey presented himself to them as a "philanthropist of sciences and a financial expert." Valeria also makes the absurd claim that she and her husband had absolutely no idea who this mysterious big shot in their midst was, claiming "most of the public- including Noam and I- was unaware" of Epstein's status as an untouchable convicted sex offender and that this only changed with the Miami Herald's damming report in 2018.
However, even I knew who Epstein was in 2015 because I read about him getting away with slavery in articles I read in the Guardian and Mother Jones; periodicals I followed in part because they published the work of Noam Chomsky. We are also supposed to believe that the Chomsky's schmoozed with fellow academics at the same "professional events" as this magic man with the deep pockets and that none of those notoriously chatty social vampires who attend these events made any mention of Epstein's well-known reputation as a bulletproof kiddie diddler.
But Valeria only digs the grave deeper by casually confessing to a lengthy globetrotting affair with this enigmatic gentleman suitor that is nonchalant to the point of almost comedic absurdity.
"We had lunch, at Epstein's ranch, once, in connection with a professional event, we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein's Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam's professional commitments..."
You see, no big deal, just a couple trips around the world on this anonymous emperor's private zeppelin and a gentle horse ride across the white shores of Bora Bora. Normal proletarian stuff, all strictly revolutionary. During which we are supposed to believe that neither Chomsky bothered to so much as even Google the name of this billionaire who opened the doors to all his mansions across the globe to them.
Valeria is essentially making the argument that she and her husband are fucking morons. I'm sorry, but I have no other word for this. Only two kinds of people accept these kinds of gifts without question: literal children and people who have chosen a life of willful ignorance amongst the kinds of monied elites who lurk amidst the "professional events" of Ivy League schools, and we know the Chomsky's aren't children.
However, the most despicable thing about Valeria's thinly veiled attempt to defend her husband's long running international affair with a well-known pedophile had to be her attempt to excuse the emails Noam made to Jeffrey Epstein well after the Miami Herald story supposedly woke them from their slumber; advice the professor gave the pedophile regarding the crimes he had apparently spent four years totally oblivious to.
Valeria commands us to read this exchange "in context" before reiterating her husband's long-standing support for "gender equity and women's rights" and informing us that "Epstein created a manipulative narrative about this case, which Noam, in good faith, believed in."
To quote Noam Chomsky word for word in this email exchange with Jeffrey Epstein: "I've watched the horrible way you are being treated in the press and public. It's painful to say but I think the best way to proceed is to ignore it... that's particularly true now with the hysteria that has developed about the abuse of women, which has reached the point that even questioning a critique is a crime worse than murder."
What context, Valeria? In what context is it acceptable to call the victims of sexual violence hysterical in a conversation in which said accusers were literally children? How are you and your husband still the victims here?
For the record, I don't believe your husband to be a sexual predator any more than I believe Joe Paterno or Pope Benedict to be. I believe that you and your husband are examples of the depths that money and prestige can reduce even brilliant people to. You allowed a monster to dazzle you with shiny things and now you want my sympathy because finally you have suffered too.
To which my only response is 'fuck you' and 'feel my pain.' Feel their pain. Thousands of them.
My sympathy is reserved for your gentleman caller's 'hysterical' victims who continue to be undermined by a federal government who refused to defend them, in part because of the culture of blind elitism that you and your husband have found yourselves servants to in the pathetic autumn of an otherwise commendable existence.
You can stop digging with your shallow little words now, Valeria. You and your husband's palatial grave is deep enough already.
Piss, Blood & Hysteria- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post
* You're So Vain by Carly Simon
* Hurt by Nine Inch Nails
* Lightning Man by Nitzer Ebb
* Shark Smile by Big Thief
* Rape Me by Nirvana
* Motion Sickness by Phoebe Bridgers
* Bruised Violet by Babes in Toyland
* The Captain by Kacey Chambers
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