Yep

Me too.  When I was 12, my orthodontist, Richard B, sexually molested me.  While confined to his chair, I would recoil as his hand "slipped" farther and farther down my chest until it was resting on one of my breasts.  Panic-stricken, I tried to tell myself he hadn't done it on purpose, but he had and I knew it.  And all the while, my mother -- who thought Dr. B the most gorgeous thing ever -- was sitting blissfully unaware in his waiting room.  Did I ever tell her?  Not on your life because I assumed it was my fault for being too cute. 

Even when he would tell me to stand up against the wall, because he said he couldn't see into my mouth properly (as if!!), and pressed his groin on me I still didn't say a word to anyone.  Again, it must have been my fault. 

Years and years later, I was invited to the Britannia Yacht Club and whose picture was on the wall in all its glory?  Yep, Richard B's.  He was the Commodore and I was sorely disappointed he hadn't been there because I would have confronted him in all his public splendor.  What still amazes me is that no one has ever charged him -- at least to my knowledge -- because I could not have been the only one he had done this to?!   

With everything that's cascading out about women and girls having been assaulted, these incidents come back to me.  So too did another that took place at a cottage when I was about 20, where a young man forced himself upon me.  In spite of my protestations, he would not desist and I, not wanting to wake up his parents by making a scene, eventually succumbed.  "Don't make a scene," was the watchword back in those days.  God!

When the phone rang in my hotel room late one night in Vancouver in 1976, I sleepily picked it up.  "Could you please come to my room, I want to go over the speech," said a prominent Quebec minister in Trudeau senior's cabinet.  Turned out that wasn't what he wanted to "go over".  Having just had a baby and no job, I was freelancing as a speech writer, hoping to get a permanent placement in a government department.  Knowing this minister was key in securing me one, I had to comply.  While not technically "rape", it was not consensual.  Or maybe it was rape, even though I did not physically fight his advances.  I felt obliged to succumb because he had the power and I needed him to use it for me.  That's just the way it was.  So much for Trudeau junior's "feminist" claims.  Please.       

The next day the cottage guy and his mother were laughing uproariously about it.  A few years later, when attending a parent-teacher event, I ran into Bill M again.  He was the chair of the association -- a supposedly upstanding citizen.  What a laugh!  This time I reminded him:  "Hey Bill, remember when you raped me at your parents' cottage in 1967?"  His adoring audience was dumbstruck, as he tried to laugh it off, but you have never seen anyone run away so fast in your life.

All this to say that so many of us have been subjected to sexual assault.  The key is to not let it ruin your life.  We all need to get over ourselves and get on with it.  Never be a victim.
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p.s.  I don't know why I haven't used these men's last names?  I should have more courage.  Google Pierre Trudeau's minister of Supply and Services and you will find one of them.