All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [103]
I didn’t realize it was anything out of the ordinary when one of the agency bosses singled me out for particular attention. He would seat me beside him at parties and would lie down with me and molest me without ever removing my clothes, on the sofa at his house, while someone on his staff remained present. I guess he was making sure that if it was ever his word against mine, he had someone to corroborate his story that there was no nudity to speak of. I really didn’t mind his attention, although I knew he was being patronizing and condescending, often scorning my best pal and me for our crude teenage manners and southern Americanisms in front of the others at the dinner parties he insisted we attend.
When the boss wasn’t demanding my presence, I was hanging out with the other models at bars that loved having us, as we drew large crowds. I spent many summer nights dancing to David Bowie, drinking sloe gin fizzes. There was a creepy Frenchman who hung out at that bar who offered me a ride home. He was much older and suggested we stop at his apartment first. I vaguely remember that he lived in a Japanese-style apartment he shared with others. I was so young and confused that I had no idea that what followed was rape, because of both my objections and my age, or that there was anything wrong with it, even when it happened again. Later, other models told me he was a scumbag and rumored to have something to do with gangs in Marseilles. Gee, thanks for letting me know. An adult male model who lived above me in my apartment building attempted to force me to perform oral sex on him, and I was able to persuade him to stop and leave me alone.
I think I told the other models about these incidents, and I suspect they passed on the information to the agency, because very soon after, I was abruptly moved out of that building and into a safer one, with an older girl from New Jersey as a roommate. My summer improved after that. She was very protective of me and good fun, and we did things like cook supper together (well, if spaghetti with cottage cheese qualifies as cooking) and dance around to music we liked … but in safety and in private, the way teenagers should. When I started to become homesick and shared that I yearned for the routine of classes, crisp autumn air, and Franklin High School football games, she yelped with joy. She had been fearful of what was going to become of me, and she was relieved when it seemed I would go home to Tennessee and resume school.
Those two months in Japan made me decide that modeling was not for me—at least not as a full-time occupation, although I didn’t have much of an idea of other ways to escape Del Rio and earn money to enable the independence I reckoned I would need. Piper met me at the plane in San Francisco, where I collapsed into the kind of hug I had been dying for all summer. I handed her my purse containing $10,000 cash. I didn’t share the sordid details of my summer, both because at the time I didn’t grasp that there was all that much wrong with what happened and because I was afraid I would be the one to be in trouble. I wasn’t far off. In the spring of the following school year, my mother searched my room, as I think she often did, and found my diary, which I had wrapped up in a sleeping bag deep under my bed. She read it, and unfortunately, her reaction was to sneer at me: “I read all about you and your boyfriend.…” As was so often the case, I was shut down, my own experience and reality invalidated and denied. I was punished once more for having been a vulnerable kid, when what I desperately needed was adult intervention, help, and support. My mom took the money I had earned and spent it on some self-improvements she had been wanting.
Mom and Sister had released their first album in the spring of 1983, and they were already recording their follow-up. By the end of my sophomore year, they had their first gold