Evan Rachel Wood's 2018 Testimony Before Congress EXPOSED

As waves of sexual assault accusations against powerful figures in entertainment, politics, and business surfaced, which led to a growing public recognition of the widespread nature of sexual assault in American culture, some activists went a step further and fought for legal protections for abuse survivors. On February 27, 2018 Evan Rachel Wood appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify about her experiences with sexual assault on behalf of the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights Act, which went into effect at the federal level in 2016 but still needed to be implemented in all 50 states. The law gives sexual abuse survivors the right to have their rape kit preserved for the entire duration of the statute of limitations (or up to 20 years), as well as the right to know their forensic results.

EVAN RACHEL WOOD'S 2018 TESTIMONY ABOUT BEING RAPED AND TORTURED BY UNNAMED ABUSER

My name is Evan Rachel Wood and I am an artist. But I am also a domestic violence and sexual assault survivor and the single mother of a young boy.

When I was 5 years old I started working in film and every day since then I have worked to reach the very privileged place I am aware I occupy. I am aware that I appear to be what a large part of society would deem as 'beautiful' and that I have a skin color that drastically increases my chance for success. But this is also what makes my story all the more disturbing, because I would be considered 'one of the lucky ones.'

I struggle to write this because I am not sure what words are appropriate when discussing this issue. As I type this I am worried about being very careful not to become too graphic and cross a line into what most people would consider inappropriate, simply for telling my story exactly how it happened from my experience, without sugar coating. I am also fearful of saying anything that may unintentionally spark arousal in people and in writing this, suddenly realize that is a part of the problem. If you can't hear the whole truth you will never know true empathy and I believe in the saying, 'If we have to live through it, you should have to hear it.'

We as women must always alter how we say things, to be heard, because we are mostly seen in a just a few ways: pure, or un-pure, property, weak, and, the most hurtful one of all, crazy; too irrational to be able to give a coherent objective thought about how we perceive the world. Our perspective isn't taken seriously because of hard wiring and conditioning brought onto us by a society that tells us what is acceptable or 'normal.'

This past year and the massive movements such as Me Too and Time's Up have been extremely empowering and validating for survivors, but also incredibly painful. While no one had to tell me that rape was such a worldwide epidemic, to see the flood of stories so similar to my own was both freeing and soul-crushing. Waves of memories and detail came flooding into my brain every time I read the words, 'I froze.'

I thought I was the only human who experienced this. I carried so much guilt and confusion about my response to the abuse. It made me realize I had believed the messages society as a whole sends women on a daily basis. It's almost as if my mind has been conditioned to believe it must have been my fault, I must have done something wrong, not him, he obviously couldn't help it. I accepted my powerlessness and felt I deserved it somehow. Why? After years of processing and looking back I see these experiences so clearly for what they are. So finally I asked myself, Why would you feel this way?

A quote I wrote down in my journal years ago from Ph.D. Ian Robertson and his book, The Winner Effect, comes to mind: 'Men are not systematically deprived of human rights of education, relationships and work by political and religious systems because of their gender in many countries, but women are. The resulting powerlessness of hundreds of millions of women fundamentally shapes their brains, reducing their capacity to change their situation.'

Sometimes we are held down, not just by our attackers, but of what we know about our place in the world. She may freeze because she is terrified but also because she knows, deep down, there is nowhere for her to go. An estimated 400,000 untested rape kits are sitting on shelves in the United States alone. Rape kits that not only help convict the guilty but exonerate the innocent. If that doesn't tell us how people feel about violence against women, I don't know what does.

After doing more research on this 'freeze' response, I found the following information on something called 'Tonic Immobility.' This is a trauma response that animals will exhibit during an attack, they will freeze or 'play dead,' perceiving it as the best option when the animal sees little immediate chance of escape or winning a fight. The animal initially reacts by struggling and attempting to escape, but after a brief period of continued restraint these reactions subside and it assumes a catatonic-like posture which persists in the absence of further contact.

A special issue of The Psychological Record, from 1977, was devoted to this topic and I have submitted it here today along with my full testimony.

There are two specific instances of sexual assault I have experienced that really stick out in my mind. In fact, they are burned into my brain. Branded there for life, a mental scar that I feel, every day.

My experience with domestic violence was this. Toxic mental, physical, and sexual abuse, which started slow, but escalated over time, including threats against my life, severe gaslighting and brainwashing, waking up to the man that claimed to love me raping what he believed to be my unconscious body, and the worst part, sick rituals of binding me up by my hands and feet to be mentally and physically tortured until my abuser felt I had 'proven my love for them.'

In this moment, while I was tied up and being beaten and being told unspeakable things, I truly felt like I could die, not just because my abuser said to me, 'I could kill you right now.' But because in that moment, I felt like I left my body. I was too afraid to run, he would find me. I was too afraid to fight back, he had threatened to kill me before.

I was too afraid to have him turn on me, I knew what would happen if he got angry.

Once I realized what he was going to do, I froze, and it was as if I could see myself from the outside and for the first time in months I felt something, utter shame and despair. I had no idea what to do to change my situation. So I went numb, soon I couldn't feel anything. I wasn't alive.

My self-esteem and spirit were broken.

I was deeply terrified and that fear lives with me to this day.

What makes me more hurt and more angry than the actual rape and abuse itself, was that piece of me that was stolen, which altered the course of my life.

Because of this abuse and my already spiritless person, when I was pushed onto the floor of a locked storage closet by another attacker after hours at a bar, my body instinctually knew what to do—disappear, go numb, make it go away. Being abused and raped previously made it easier for me to raped again, not the other way around.

Not a day goes by when I don't hear the words this man whispered into my ear over and over, 'You're going to be fine, you're going to be fine, I promise, you're going to be fine,' and my small voice saying back, 'No, no, no, no, no,' until it faded into nothing. I remember the feeling of shutting down or 'freezing' and utter shock taking over. I couldn't even make a sound. I felt a piece of me disappear, a piece that has never returned. In other words, I was not fine. I am not fine.

As of right now, the definition of 'consent' does not cover this very common response to trauma, or fear. As of right now, a woman can say no 50 times, but when she reluctantly gives in because she feels she has no other choice, or 'freezes,' that is considered 'consent.' Not an animalistic instinct which kicks in, not an automatic response or what our bodies and fragile minds do to try and protect us, but consent that is protected by law. As of right now, even if I went after one of my attackers, it wouldn't matter, because under law what happened to me was considered 'given,' with my full consent. I think a vast majority of woman can relate to the feeling of walking into a situation, realizing what it is, and thinking, Oh no… here we go, it's me today.

The things my attacker whispered stand out to me as someone experiencing a starkly different reality than mine. His words were a 'You'll thank me later' statement, and if I am distressed, I should trust him. Imagine for a moment what his testimony would be, of the same 'sexual encounter.' He would get empathy and I would get questions. We still victim-blame because we don't realize there are two victims of rape. The women who are being raped and the young boys who are growing up to be rapists. Their entire lives led them to this point. So what is happening? Why are men and women so conditioned in this way?

I was told the signs. My mother is also a survivor, but even she couldn't protect her daughter from the messages women and men are fed by society that plays a role in determining our fate, or the dark magic of gaslighting.

The aftermath of rape is a huge part of the conversation that needs much more attention, and in this case I can speak from my own experiences. So often we speak of these assaults as no more than a few minutes of awfulness, but the scars last a lifetime. I cannot stress this enough.

Even though these experiences happened a decade ago, I still struggle with the aftermath; my relationships suffer, my partners suffer, my mental and physical health suffers. Seven years after my rapes—plural—I was diagnosed with long-term PTSD, which I had been living with all that time without knowledge about my condition. I simply thought I was going crazy, which is also how we commonly refer to a woman's distress: lunacy.

Post-traumatic stress syndrome is more widely known in relation to vets returning home from war, but by definition it is 'a mental health condition that's triggered by a terrifying event—either experiencing it or witnessing it, or other threats on a person's life.'

I struggled with depression, addiction, agoraphobia, night terrors; so many times, a sleeping partner of mine has awoken to their love screaming in the night and gasping for air in a pool of sweat, after having some sort of vivid dream of my abuser or hearing them say my name so loudly in my ear, or hallucinating a vision of them standing in the corner of my room. The feeling of paralysis returns when there is a loud noise and I am home alone, convinced someone is coming to hurt me. I stay awake all night clutching a baseball bat, which began to replace my distraught and absent partners, as trust and touch became increasingly more difficult. I struggled with self-harm, to the point of two suicide attempts, which landed me in a psychiatric hospital for a short period of time. This was, however, a turning point in my life, and when I started seeking professional help to deal with my trauma and mental stress. This was the beginning of a very long road to recovery. I am incredibly fortunate because I have the means to pay for such treatment and care which I still utilize to this day. Others are not so fortunate, and, because of this, rape is often more than a few minutes of trauma, but a slow death.

I was forever changed by these experiences, not just because of the violation, the loss of ownership over my body, the actual physical pain, but what it meant about the world I called home. I don't often think of how I wish my rapists would be punished, although true justice would be a miracle, but I think of the children they once were. I wonder what must have happened to them, what they were taught, what trauma they endured that led them to these inhumane acts.

I view the world differently after knowing what darkness lurks underneath the surface of sometimes even your most trusted partner, and what human beings are capable of without unconditional love or lessons in empathy.

I would like to say to my attackers, that I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you. I am not here to shame you, I want to understand you and want you to understand me, but you have to listen first. We all have to listen and we have to be brave enough to have the conversation and ask the 'why's. The whys are what connect us.

This makes me think of my son, the world he will be raised in, and the day I will have to explain to him what rape means and why it happened to his mother.

When I knew I was to become a mother, I prayed for a boy. Not because I wouldn't have wanted a girl, but because I would have to protect my daughter too much, and many things would unfortunately be inevitable in her future. Then I realized, it could be just as easy for my son to fall prey to the lies society tells us about men. Things like, 'They have uncontrollable impulses to hurt people.' Because, let's face it, a man having an uncontrollable impulse to engage in a sexual act is not what sexual assault is. Sexual assault is an uncontrollable act of violence, against someone else's body, mind, and spirit. How cruel to tell a child this is just how all men are, and how cruel to turn a blind eye to all the ways we perpetuate this lie. Since men are often told to hide their emotions, this very behavior could be a cry for help. While women seem more prone to cry out by punishing themselves, the opposite seems to be true with a majority of men. And this deserves a much deeper look.

So I am also here to advocate for men, and especially my son, who I hope grows up knowing he is much more valuable than that, and who I can only hope I will set an example for by continuing to fight for him, myself, and all the people affected by abuse, because that is our job as parents and as leaders. The way we change starts with proper education, not just about the medical terms of sexual intercourse and how it works, but about true connection with another person. How can we begin to talk about rape when we barely even teach people what good, healthy, safe, and loving sex really is?

But above all, it starts with the rule of law. It starts with people leading by example and coming to the aide of our girls, but also our young boys, who are just as susceptible to the toxic messages we send THEM to break their spirit and change their fate. This bill is just one step in the right direction of setting the bar higher for what is right and what the standard will be that we set for society. It's the safety net that may help save someone's life one day. It's called progress and it starts here.

 

 

Commentary

1. The fashion choice of Evan Rachel Wood at this testimony before congress is utterly shameful. She is widely known as one of the most stylish actresses of Hollywood, who never gets criticized for her choices of fashion because she has a keen sense of what looks good on her. During this time she was being praised in fashion magazines for how good she looked in a pant suit. For her testimony before congress, she chose not to dress in any type of pant suit or dress, nor wear any makeup, but she chose to, seemingly, shop at a local thrift shop and buy the most plain looking clothes you can imagine. Usually she is at least one of the best dressed in the room, and here she is clearly the absolute worst dressed in the room. Why did she do this? The only reason I can think of is because she wants to appear like a woman who just emerged from a relationship of sexual assault and domestic abuse, who has been so depressed that she hasn't even had the time or energy to think of her fashion choices, because all her days and nights are spent in bed crying over the ordeal she has just gone through. Meanwhile at this point it had been over ten years since everything took place that she recounts in her testimony, and never up until this moment did she dress like this, and never after this moment has she ever been seen dressed like this again. She is already presenting herself as a liar, a propagandist and a manipulator who is stereotyping abuse survivors in a very elitist condescending way.

2. "We as women must always alter how we say things..." Only a woman with a victim mentality would say something like this. Evan is also telling us that whatever she says, she says with a spin. She feels she cannot be honest. But this statement tells us more what she thinks about men than what she thinks about women. As if she is saying that men cannot think outside of how they are conditioned to think, which means that if you don't believe this testimony Evan is about to give, then you are still backwards in your thinking, enslaved to how you were conditioned by society. The reality is, Evan is the one conditioning us to think such thoughts in order to receive her absurd testimony as truth.

3. "I thought I was the only human who experienced this." You thought you were the only woman that has ever been raped, beaten, tortured or whatever you want us to believe? This is the point where Evan thinks her listeners are so stupid that we are going to just accept this as true. No one listening to her actually does believe this, but almost everyone listening is being conditioned by Evan to believe this, because if you don't believe she was an innocent, naive, weak-minded, weak-willed, manipulated little girl from the beginning, then her testimony is going to fall apart. This sentence is so absurd, that I feel like highlighting it is more than enough for everyone to see its absurdity.

4. "I carried so much guilt and confusion about my response to the abuse." Never trust a radical activist, and statements like this in the context she gives it are precisely why. Here Evan is continuing to condition us away from how society has allegedly conditioned us. But before she can do this, she has to admit that she also was falsely conditioned by society. In Evan's mind, society always blames women. As an activist, Evan wants to change society. Evan is basically presenting herself first as a victim of society before anything else. She cannot convince us that her abuser, who she later claimed to be Marilyn Manson, did all the horrific things he did to her over the course of three years, and then convince us why she never talked about it for almost a decade, unless she was a victim of this conditioning by society. But here is the problem - why do we assume this is true? If Evan is going to make such a sociological claim, upon which her case rests, she needs to prove it through sociological research. However, she doesn't do this nor has she done this till this day, because she is assuming we are as naive as she is.

5. "After years of processing and looking back I see these experiences so clearly for what they are." How do we know you are seeing things more clearly now than you did then? There is another way of thinking about this. Perhaps Evan is processing and looking back at something through altered lenses that reflects a worldview of women as always being victims, that interprets a slight joke as a form of abuse, that has an alternative agenda that reflects a radicalization she just underwent. Many conversions come with regrets over things we never regretted in the past, and often years later conditioning is blamed for not regretting that thing that was done. Why should we believe Evan is really seeing things clearer now when in fact it can be clearly demonstrated she underwent a process of radicalization in 2016 which could give an entirely different and even false meaning behind what she thinks is clarity. Perhaps the clarity itself is an alteration of facts.

6. "Ian Robertson and his book, The Winner Effect..." This is an odd book to quote from, since it has to do with why successful people continue to be successful, and she as a successful person is now quoting it to talk about how women around the world are often not successful. In fact, she is twisting and manipulating this quote to identify herself and other American women with one of the many women in the world who are unable to change their situation, which we know is not true in the Western world for the most part, and more so in the case of Evan Rachel Wood. Evan here is trying to reinforce her victimization by society to manipulate us into thinking she was conditioned to stay in an abusive relationship.

7. "My experience with domestic violence was this." Everything she describes in these paragraphs are not necessarily violence. Perhaps they are when you interpret them to be so ten years later, but the reality is Evan makes everything sound so ominous that it is only her tone that makes it sound bad, not the actual description. The only thing she mentions that really is a red flag is where she talks about threats made to her life. I have gone over this in detail in another article, so I will not repeat myself here. She describes Manson as performing "sick rituals" on her, but does not explain why these sick rituals took place, at least from his perspective, and what was the context. As I described in my previous article on whether or not Manson wanted to kill Evan, this "sick ritual" was in fact Manson filming a movie with Evan, either for one of his film projects or his music video for the song "I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies", the videos of which can be seen in the linked article that show Evan bound, but it is clearly fake and she is acting. Now she wants us to believe these things are real? This is the detail Evan leaves out of the story - that it was all fake and acting and done with mutual consent as she reveals in interviews from the time. Evan has claimed to have mental illnesses, among which are cognitive dissonance and dissociation, which could explain her confusion between falsehood and reality, and which is why her testimony needs to be scrutinized and distrusted.

8. Evan likes to legitimize her claims of what happened to her by identifying an experience with a psychological word or condition, and one she presents here is "Tonic Immobility". She seems to think that the image of being a "frozen" victim is powerful, so she runs with it. She uses the word six times in her testimony, and whenever she says it there is a quiver in her voice. She loves to run with something she thinks validates her to the world, when in reality they show her to be an amateur psychologist who read a few books and now is able to see things "clearly". In fact, it is perhaps by reading all these psychology and self-improvement books that led her to be radicalized in the first place, a radicalization which led her on the path of searching for a political platform on which to base her activism, most inspired by living in the Donald Trump era, as she has gone into length on in previous writings. Now she is using all this "deep analysis" on herself and giving us an "interpretation of the facts" based on her studies instead of the actual facts which will allow us her listeners to make the decision on what she actually experienced. This is precisely what she doesn't want, however. She wants you to think how she thinks, not how you think. She has taken the pains of doing all the interpreting needed, so all we need to do now is sit back and listen to her commentary while being presented no facts. Remember, Evan thinks we are stupid.

9. Evan then goes on for two paragraphs to talk about her "other rape" at a bar by someone she has still not named till this day. Whether this actually happened or if it happened as she says it did we don't know yet. But it doesn't really matter. She talks about it in light of her alleged rape by Manson and how numb and "frozen" she felt the second time around because she was used to it by then. Why he has not been named demands an explanation if we are to believe her. Also, the way she says "no, no, no" in her testimony indicates to me that she did not say "no" audibly but mentally. A mental "no" is not equal to an audible "no".

10. "As of right now, even if I went after one of my attackers, it wouldn't matter, because under law what happened to me was considered 'given,' with my full consent." So Evan is admitting here that she was raped not according to the law, but raped according to how she interprets her experience. Furthermore, this is just more about Evan being not only victimized by society, but by the law.

11. "The things my attacker whispered..." It should be clarified that she is not talking about Manson here, but about her second rapist who has not been named. The way she describes her second rapist in this paragraph seems as over the top as her accusations about Manson, so it makes me lean towards her continuing to fabricate the facts. But it is a good opportunity for her to reinforce how she is a victim of the law, because she knows she has no legal case, no matter how much she wants to make things up.

12. "We still victim-blame because we don't realize there are two victims of rape." In my opinion, this is one of the more disgusting parts of her testimony and it shows how mentally ill Evan is. Simply put, in her mind women are conditioned to be raped and men are conditioned to rape. This falls in line with Evan's ignorant activist platform wherein she wants to bring about change. This is almost as crazy, perhaps more so, as her equating all Trump supporters with victims of abuse (Yes, she does believe this!). All of Evan's accusations are based on the worldview that women are conditioned by society to be raped while men are conditioned to rape. No wonder she has such a warped view of her relationship with Manson, which bears no resemblance to the actual facts and the evidence supporting those facts. Moreover, her claim is a personal theory, and not a fact, and therefore she should present scientific studies confirming her theory, if there are any.

13. Evan goes on to legitimize her victimization with more psychological terms, like PTSD, gaslighting, lunacy. Anything that will make her sound like she knows what she is talking about, and anything to make her condition sound as horrible as possible. The more horrible the better, because the more horrible helps build a better activist platform. As for her PTSD, I would like to know who diagnosed her, and why she was diagnosed that way if she does in fact suffer from it. PTSD is actually something quite common in different forms. For example, if someone falls down the stairs by accident, they may have PTSD in association with stairs and may avoid them altogether. Just because someone has PTSD, which we associate with war veterans, does not mean they suffer from the same level of PTSD as a war veteran. But just hearing the word to some makes them think, "Oh, if she has PTSD then she must have gone through something really bad." Perhaps, perhaps not, it really depends. The way she goes on in some detail to legitimize her claim of having really bad PTSD also begs for some evidence. Why haven't any of her previous partners corroborated anything she says here? She is bringing other people up, without naming names, but offers no corroborating evidence. This would actually offer some legitimization that she is experiencing something. However, as I have shown elsewhere, Evan suffers from paranoia. It is the one diagnosis that she doesn't give herself, because she knows it would work against her. When I hear the details about her PTSD, I hear about someone who is paranoid at the very least and who knows what at the very worst. Paranoia can also trigger PTSD.

14. We will talk about her suicide attempts and treatment in a separate article.

15. "I would like to say to my attackers, that I don't hate you, I feel sorry for you. I am not here to shame you, I want to understand you..." So when Evan Rachel Wood gave Marilyn Manson the middle finger at one of her music performances after he appeared at the Donda listening party with Kanye West, this was not an act of hatred, but an act of empathy? This is how Evan would spin it, like everything else.  

16. "This makes me think of my son, the world he will be raised in, and the day I will have to explain to him what rape means and why it happened to his mother." It's all over the internet, so I'm sure he will find out sooner or later. It makes me wonder however how she is conditioning her son to not be a rapist like every other man. By bringing forward her son as a single mother, she is winning over mothers, so it's a smart emotional move on her part.

17. "When I knew I was to become a mother, I prayed for a boy." Evan goes on to explain to us how paranoid and delusional she is as to why she preferred having a boy over a girl. Just read it. It shows how warped her view is of both genders.

18. "Sexual assault is an uncontrollable act of violence..." No, it's not. Sexual assault and any act of violence can be controlled if one chooses.

19. "So I am also here to advocate for men..." Of course you are, because this is also part of your activist platform. Men need to be changed!

20. "How can we begin to talk about rape when we barely even teach people what good, healthy, safe, and loving sex really is?" It sounds like Evan's son is going to have a lot of sex talk with his mother.

Tearless tears without a blush.

Selfie Evan posted for her Instagram page.