How ‘Promising Young Woman’ Finally Made Me Comfortable Enough To Talk About My Own Sexual Abuse
by Britt Migs
TW: revenge porn; sexual abuse; sexual violence; suicide
Writer’s note: sexual violence comes in many forms. It is important to acknowledge and respect those who have endured and survived (and not survived) much worse.
For the last decade, I’ve tried unsuccessfully to put pen to paper to describe the agony that was my sexual abuse. The trauma has since subsided, but it has taken its toll on me for years, and the aftershock still rolls in now and again.
Any time I’ve written something down about it, I’ve thought, “Why would I bring attention to this? Why would I prompt new Google searches when I spent years trying to scrub the Internet of my name? Why would I want anyone who doesn’t already know to know about this?”
I’m thinking all of those thoughts right now. But Promising Young Woman—a film that recently came out and may be understandably triggering for some—made me feel understood and empowered in a way that I never have before.
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My story is one of stolen pictures. The year was 2011 and I was 19, long before ‘the fappening’ and before leaks of this kind were as popular as they are today. While the current commonality of this crime doesn’t make it any less reprehensible, it did mean that in 2011 it was generally unprecedented, which only added to the shock and horror. Terms like "slut shaming" and "victim blaming" weren't really in the lexicon just yet.
The day it happened I had my first panic attack. I sat in one of my classes re-reading an email to myself, over and over until I could fully comprehend the words. “If you don’t send me 10 more photos I’ll post these on your Facebook,” I received from an anonymous email address. They added a link to AnonIB: a site specifically made for revenge porn/NCP that was taken down in 2018, but has since made a comeback.
The email showed a collection of photos that I had once emailed to my long-distance boyfriend. My chest tightened and I lost the ability to breathe. I ran to the bathroom thinking I was about to vomit. I sat on the cold, tiled floor, hands shaking, trying to figure out what was happening to my body.
When my heart rate returned to (somewhat) normal, I got in my car and used the free campus WiFi to attempt to figure out just how fucked up my life was. As I scrolled, my face and body sat beside pages titled “Under 18 Anal Queens”, “Sleeping Sluts” and “Barely Legal Creampies”. I guess I should consider myself lucky enough to have ended up in “College Bitches.”
My veins ran ice cold as I read comments from men in the thread claiming that they had fucked me before (note: they hadn’t), that I was a disgusting slut who deserved to be raped, that they knew me, and that I was asking for it. Many asked for more photos, and the initial poster promised to deliver. I made a fruitless attempt at an anonymous comment asking for the pictures to be taken down, and was teased mercilessly.
Spoiler alert: I was never able to get them down for good. Anon-IB’s server was hosted in another country and conveniently had no contact information listed. But that was only the beginning. Not long after, my photos made their way to other sites, including the collegiate gossip rag disguised as an anonymous message board, College ACB. Someone told me that several fraternities’ private Facebook groups had circulated them, too. Like internet whack-a-mole, I would get them off of one site just to find them on another a week later. My life was a living hell.
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In the weeks to follow, I had to change my Facebook name and profile URL because the messages from creeps wouldn’t stop pouring in. The worst perhaps was when I was contacted by a girl who asked me why she had caught her boyfriend jerking off to my pictures. I wish I could have explained to her that I didn’t know—because I didn’t send them—but I was too weak. I was disgusting, I was filth, I had been reduced to nothing.
I eventually told my then-boyfriend and my parents, who tried to help me seek legal counsel. However, in 2011, there was almost no legislation regarding crimes of this nature—even if I did know who hacked into my email account, which I didn’t. Thankfully today, there are more laws to protect victims. But it’s often not enough, as the internet can be a bit like the wild, wild west; a lawless frontier. In a last ditch effort, I tried calling the police, who were largely unhelpful, and made me feel guilty for taking the photos in the first place.
Fast forward to 2021, and I’m sitting at home watching Promising Young Woman in the middle of a pandemic. I felt “seen,” for lack of a better word, for the first time. Cassie’s rage, Nina’s mother’s profound sadness, the cavalier attitude of Madison—it was all so familiar to me. Clones of these characters existed in my own life.
The way Cassie described Nina’s “Nina-ness” being slowly but surely drained out of her was so reminiscent of my year post-incident. I couldn’t bear to view my own naked form in the mirror. I was embarrassed of my body, what I had done to it, how many people had seen it. It was sitting on the phones and in the laptops of so many people that it no longer belonged to me. Parts of me that only myself and my boyfriend were privy to had been plastered all over what could only be described as the bowels of the Internet.
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In Promising Young Woman, Nina dropped out of school. If I wasn’t already graduating early, I would have left and finished at another university. I became anxious, depressed, and at my very lowest point, suicidal. I couldn’t bear to be alive in the reality I was in. I believed my career prospects shattered. I imagined explaining the situation to any new dating partners and decided quickly that no one would ever be able to love damaged goods like me. And this was all before the photos made their way back up the east coast to my hometown.
I once again saw my story on screen when Promising Young Woman’s Madison showed Cassie the video. She defended herself, adding that people “thought it was funny” at the time. I thought about the bystanders who hit “send” on my photos with no more than a giggle and a passing thought. Girls and guys alike who would revel in the joy of hot gossip without a care about my suffering.
The words of an old high school ‘friend’ are seared forever into my brain. “Of course I fucking shared them, I sent them to everyone I know,” he chuckled to my own sister, who promptly took off her heel and tried to jam it in his leg.
For every “If Nina wasn’t so drunk…” I heard echoes of the countless, “if she didn’t want her photos on the Internet, then why’d she take them?” message board comments. Each one of those posts pierced my stomach with the sick realization that I was alone, that I was to blame, and that nobody pitied me. As it turns out, victim blaming can cause powerful, secondary trauma.
For the students involved in Nina’s assault, it was just one weekend of medical school that they were able to walk away from, wiping their hands clean from any association or guilt.
But for victims, the trauma can seem never ending.
For years, every so often, my pictures would pop up on a new site and I'd have to extinguish yet another internet fire. I had become very familiar with the DMCA, which I tried to threaten site owners with, having no other path for recourse. Whenever I received a text message from a friend-of-a-friend that I wouldn't normally hear from, my stomach turned. I knew that this poor person probably spent an hour trying to find the right words to tell me that they'd seen my tits on some website and they “just wanted to give me the heads up”. I survived suicidal ideation, but many, like Nina’s character, don’t.
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Even now, a decade later, as I sit here with a career, a fiancé, and a restored sense of self, I still suffer from an anxiety disorder. I still go to therapy. I’m still paralyzed with fear of these photos resurfacing. I still wince whenever someone says they’ve looked me up. I haven’t Googled myself in years since it was only ever an exercise in masochism, knowing I would find something new and horrifying. I still feel nauseated when an old acquaintance messages me. I still worry about garnering any success in my field, because success often means notoriety, and then it will only be a matter of time before my photos make the rounds again.
Revenge porn. That two-word phrase has been rolling around in my anxiety-ridden brain for the last ten years. “You’ve been the victim of revenge porn” can only play on a constant loop so long before that first word starts to lay roots down.
A faceless, nameless perpetrator has become my mortal enemy; I’ve spent so much time trying to find out who did it. It had to be someone who knew me, someone who knew my email address. I’ve spent so much time thinking about what I would say and do to them, different ways that I would ruin their life in return for how they ruined mine.
And perhaps that’s what it was; why this movie sunk it’s teeth into me and gave me the ‘burn it all down’ feeling that I have right now. I watched Cassie living out my wildest dreams, taking down not only the assailant, but everyone who stood by and watched. I finally felt like somebody articulated the rage that has been bubbling inside of me, threatening to boil over, since 2011. It was cathartic. It filled my veins with adrenaline.
Upon my third viewing of Promising Young Woman, I realized: if I could ‘Al Monroe’ every last person who hit Ctrl+C Ctrl+V on those photos, I would.
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It’s important for me to make the distinction between what happened to Nina and what happened to me. While writing this, I combed through resources and consulted several people before choosing the right terminology. Assault indicates something more physical, so we settled on abuse.
Unfortunately, survivors of revenge porn or non-consensual image sharing suffer from many of the same post-trauma symptoms as survivors of physical sexual assault. Sexual trauma in any form is, at its core, an individual losing control over their own body. What Nina and I shared was the compounding force of public shame and humiliation.
For resources for victims of revenge porn and non-consensual pornography, check out Cyber Civil Rights Initiative
1-800-Victims, and March Against Revenge Porn.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Britt is a comedian and TV producer living and working in NYC. You can find her performing sketch comedy around the city and online for the foreseeable future. Her writing can be found in Reductress, FlexxMag, Slackjaw, and others. When she’s not doing all of that, you can find her annoying her dog.
