Jackie Fuchs' bombshell claim that she was brutally raped in 1975 by the Runaways' manager while bandmates Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and a host of other people watched was met with immediate denials by both Jett—who said she "was not aware of this incident"—and Currie, reports Vulture. In an emotional Facebook post over the weekend, Currie wrote, "I have been accused of a crime. Of looking into the dead yet pleading eyes of a girl, unable to move while she was brutally raped and doing nothing. I have never been one to deny my mistakes in life and I wouldn't start now." Early today, Fuchs continued with her own Facebook response, a lengthy post that calls out Jett and Currie for claiming they would have intervened had they thought she was being raped, but that also offers a surprising amount of empathy for her bandmates and for other young people she says witnessed the attack.
"One person wrote that I had given her a gift: 'the ability to see that the people in the room were victims too. ... They were afraid and didn't know what to do,'" she writes. She goes on to say that her rape "was traumatic for everyone, not just me, and everyone deals with trauma in their own way and time. … My bandmates were children who'd witnessed something criminal and tragic. ... They had no responsible adults to guide them—only a rapist and his apologists." She adds she doesn't necessarily blame witnesses for not taking action ("being a passive bystander is not a 'crime'"), but she says she wishes "if my bandmates can't remember what happened that night—or if they just remember it differently—they would stick simply to saying that. By asserting that if they'd witnessed my rape, they'd have done something about it, they perpetuate the very myth I was trying to dispel." (More rape stories.)
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