When Being Raped Is The Best Line In Your Resume

How to overcome perfection.

Today, we’ll tackle the question of why so many women insist on casting themselves as “survivors” even when—perhaps especially when—they have lives of glittering privilege.

Last fall, The New York Times published an article that ought to win a Pulitzer Prize (if that accolade still meant something) on Amy Griffin’s memoir of sexual abuse, The Tell. The gist of the story is: The wife of billionaire hedge fund manager claims she was raped from age 12 to 16 by a middle school teacher in Amarillo, Texas, citing details that are strikingly similar to the sexual abuse of one of her classmates.

Rather importantly, I think, Griffin only remembered her years of being violently raped during an illegal psychedelic-drug therapy session. Griffin says the problem she was seeking to resolve by taking MDMA was her incessant drive for “perfectionism”—apparently unaware that this is a joke answer to the interview question, “What’s your biggest weakness?”

Reporters Katherine Rosman and Elisabeth Egan never say the book is the work of a fabulist, but the facts they’ve assembled are, as a Smith College grad would say, troubling. On first reading the article, I recall thinking I wouldn’t want to be Griffin if the teacher or classmate ever decided to sue. Last week, the classmate did just that.

The first red flag about Griffin’s book is that it was gushed over by a string of female celebrities—Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, Gwyneth Paltrow and Drew Barrymore, among others. Griffin was also honored as one of Time magazine’s “most influential” people of the year.

There hasn’t been this star-studded a rollout since Somaly Mam’s widely celebrated—and completely fabricated—The Road of Lost Innocence, about her own sexual abuse as a child in Cambodia. She was embraced by nearly the identical coven—Oprah, Sandberg, Hillary Clinton, Meg Ryan, etc. She, too, made Time’s “most influential” list.

Among the oddities about Griffin’s story is the fact that she was the richest girl in school, but for some reason, the predator teacher chose her to violently rape. And I mean violently. Griffin says the first thing she remembered was the teacher smashing her head against the wall, then hearing his belt buckle hit the floor.

Or consider the Times account of this part of Griffin’s story: “In the book, she writes that the final assault happened when she was 16. She was en route to a tennis match and ran into the teacher. Moments later, she found herself following him ‘numbly’ into the team room at the tennis center.”

Maybe, but I’m not familiar with the solar system where a 16-year-old girl from a prominent family robotically follows her rapist into an empty room in order to get raped again.

The locals at Burrowing Owl Books back in Amarillo raised the same issue—even as they swore fidelity to the dogma of always believing women. One ventured, “You’re not going to target the wealthiest person in Amarillo as your first victim.”

Or your only victim. In 30 years, there were no other accusations against the teacher Griffin says raped her. (The Times, as well as the entire publishing industry, know the man’s name because she included it in her widely circulated book proposal. In the final draft, she gives him a pseudonym, but it was thinly veiled enough that everyone in town knows who it is. He hasn’t been seen in public since the book came out.)

The crowd at Burrowing Owl Books also wondered how it could be that no one noticed Griffin’s abuse. “If he brutalized her in those ways, did she not have bruises? Did she not have hair missing?” Another added, “She’s the only one saying this.”

The classmate suing Griffin for stealing her story is a more plausible victim. She grew up in a foster care group home, abused and neglected. Although she was too young to legally consent, she was a voluntary participant in the sex.

For example, after leaving a middle school dance with her abuser to have sex in the closet with him, she “recalled the shame she felt when she and the teacher rejoined the crowd, her hair disheveled and what she described as the smell of sex clinging to her. She felt certain at the time that other students knew why she and the teacher left and returned together….”

Unlike the teacher Griffin accuses, who had a 30-year unblemished record, the classmate’s abuser may well have racked up a string of complaints, but we’ll never know because he left the school decades ago.

Whatever the truth about Griffin’s story, female fabulists are not a rare breed.

The aforementioned Somaly Mam claimed she’d been raped by her grandfather, sold into prostitution, and tortured with electrodes. (What we in Mogadishu call “a charmed life.”) In fact, according to an extensive Newsweek magazine investigation, Mam grew up “a happy, pretty girl with pigtails,” who lived with her parents and attended village schools through high school.

Peggy Jones’s Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival is about her life as a mixed-race foster care child, raised by a black mother, running drugs for the Bloods in South Central L.A.—her “homies,” as she called them. Actually, her name is Peggy Seltzer; she was raised in an all-white, intact family in the affluent Sherman Oaks suburb, and attended private schools.

Rigoberta Menchu’s I, Rigoberta Menchu won the Nobel Peace Prize for her memoir about life as an illiterate peasant, forced to watch family members starve or burn to death at the hands of the Guatemalan military — funded by the Reagan administration!!! In fact, she grew up in a well-off farming family, attended prestigious boarding schools, and the military attacks she describes never happened. (Despite her book being proved 100 percent false by leftist Guatemalan expert David Stoll of Middlebury College, a debunking confirmed by the Times, the book is still sold on Amazon as an “amazing true story!” and is widely taught in U.S. colleges.)

What is the psychology of privileged women writing fantastical memoirs about their harrowing childhoods? I have no idea, but these are my working theories:

1) Everybody wants to be a victim. This is the same impulse that leads perfectly normal heterosexual coeds to claim they are “bisexual” or “queer.”

2) Everybody wants to be the star. Perhaps living in the refracted glory of a successful husband drives wives mad with a desire to be in the limelight.

3) I earned it! Instead of simply sitting back and enjoying having won life’s lottery, women living in a classic 6 on Park Avenue -- financed by their husbands -- are consumed with proving they deserve it by citing imaginary hardships. It’s the same phenomenon that compels every genetically blessed actress to claim that, as a teenager, she was an ugly duckling.

Having a fabulous life that somebody else pays for sounds great to me, but I guess the grass is always greener. If that’s not enough for the ladies, I suggest they try Christianity.