In 2016, I was asked a simple yes or no question that unmoored me. That was the year I essentially “came out” as a survivor of a multiple assailant sexual assault in a widely read essay. In the aftermath, I felt a little like a woman who had just given birth, fielding questions from well-meaning relatives about when she’ll start trying for baby number two while she’s still recovering in a hospital bed. A day or two to eat my Jell-O in peace might be nice.
In my case, one of the first things well-meaning people wanted to know was if I’d found it in my heart to forgive the boys who hurt me when I was in high school. I knew what everyone wanted to hear. Forgiveness, in our culture, is a prized piece of the healing process, the inspirational part of the story where we shed bitterness and anger, get out of the proverbial hospital bed. Though I never answered with a yes, I would offer some sunny equivocation about how I was working on it, a performance that internally inflamed my bitterness and rage. Forgiveness sounded akin to saying that what had happened to me wasn’t so bad, to letting people off the hook at the exact moment they were finally (albeit, anonymously) being held to account.
Now my feelings on the matter are clear: No, I have not found it in my heart to forgive the boys who hurt me, and better yet, fuck forgiveness. The unlikely person who led me to this conclusion: Ted Bundy.
Let me back up a moment. I started researching Ted Bundy around 2019, after binging the documentary series that featured previously unheard audio recordings of the killer before his execution in 1989. It wasn’t him I was interested in—I found I could not stop thinking about the young women whose lives he interrupted. Could there be a version of the story from a perspective we hadn’t heard before? Countless books featured his pointy profile on the cover and handsome leading men from Mark Harmon to Zac Efron have donned a turtleneck and attempted his phony transatlantic accent on screen. But what did we know about the victims?
Though information was scant, I found that the women he targeted were mostly young women with promising futures—graduation, careers, engagements, parties. “The future,” said an aunt of one of the FSU victims in an article that appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat two days after the attack, “she was looking forward to it very much.” I felt her devastation fresh, forty-two years later. (This research formed part of the inspiration for my new book.)
And yet, when Bundy was finally convicted in a Miami courtroom in 1979, it was the loss of Bundy’s future that the judge lamented:
You re a bright young man. You d have made a great lawyer, and I d have loved to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner.
The judge’s speech turned on a light in a dark room of my subconscious—one where public misdeed or violent crimes were all too often refashioned into occasions for us to turn the other cheek: forgiveness modeled by men, showing grace to other men, grace that was never theirs to give.
It’s not that I won’t forgive, it’s that I can’t. Forgiveness is a proprietary thing. It is the injured party’s right to give or not when—and this part is key—the transgressor asks for it. Without the cooperation of the perpetrator, it’s a carrot dangling in perpetuity, eluding me and others like me, who don’t want to live with bitterness and anger but who know that the people who hurt us won’t ever take responsibility for what they did.
This is why I take umbrage with forgiveness—it’s been corrupted beyond recognition. But it is possible to graduate from anger without excusing the behavior of those who refuse to admit any harm has been done.
Integration is the lesser appreciated cousin of forgiveness; more sophisticated than acceptance, less saccharine than gratitude. It’s the practice of living well with your pain by training your eye on all the ways you’ve been able to make meaning out of unresolved trauma and grief. For me, that’s recognizing that writing has given me the opportunity to make sense of what happened to me and to help others do the same, to immortalize the truth in print. In that way, I go through life with purpose, not in spite of what happened, but because of it.
Asking for forgiveness when I have wronged someone is uncomfortable, but nowhere near as uncomfortable as reframing myself as someone who expects others to make amends. I suspect I am not the only woman who can relate to this. Sometimes I wonder if this accountability imbalance has contributed to an online mob culture that disproportionately targets women for failing to do everything right, oftentimes to a degree that is also disproportionate to the offense. I worry women take the brunt of our rage because so many more grievous acts by men go unpunished and unrepaired.
I will be the first to admit I am guilty of demanding more of women, of exploiting our capacity for introspection and humility—a capacity some may say is a superpower, though it could just as well be a survival skill in a world where women both apologize and are the victims of wrongdoing more often than men. My wish is not for us to shutter our ability to perceive harm, but for men to become more perceptive, and, in turn, have the courage to show remorse.
Years ago, I walked out of a bar with an old boyfriend. We were looking for a cab and standing far enough apart that I appeared to be alone. A man walked by and made a lewd comment about a part of my body and what he wanted to do to it. I jerked a thumb and said, indignantly, I’m with my boyfriend. He looked at my boyfriend, legitimately mortified, and said, hey, man, sorry. Over his shoulder, my boyfriend tossed off a breezy no worries.
I’ve stewed over this chummy resolution for years, a real-world example of the nebulous nature of a woman’s visibility—enough to be harassed but still too dim to warrant an apology. Only recently did it occur to me that I was so turned around when it comes to who gets to be hurt and who gets to be forgiven that I missed something critical about that moment, which is that I set up the pass. I’m with my boyfriend, I said to the street creep without missing a beat. Translation: he is the one who has been disrespected, not me.
Do I think the guys who assaulted me will ever have the guts to admit what they did and ask for my forgiveness? No, but that does not mean I can’t see myself as someone who is worth that extraordinary act of courage.
Jessica Knoll is the author, most recently, of Bright Young Women: A Novel, out this week.