Lilly Marlena
The USA robs many people of their freedom to hope for safety. I was conscripted into the role of “whore” at birth.
No one has any choice if an unknown stranger can take down their information in a hospital. My family agrees that this happened to me. It happens to countless other innocents. The cycle will not stop unless we investigate and actively combat it.
My family did everything that they could to protect me. Friends kept me safe. Teachers rescued me, neighbors were kind, and so many people were indeed amazing presences in my life. They could not stop the suffering I experienced. I know many other families grieve the way my family grieves. No village can completely protect a child if wicked people with the powers of modern-day emperors intend to hurt kids. My nation could have helped me but instead continued the cycle of sorrow.
I was fourteen when I gave my Papa’s eulogy.
Ray took the “unavoidable tragedy” arranged after someone well-connected knew I’d passed age 12 and enough of puberty. That accident could not be avoided - more “accidents” would simply pursue the license plate someone spotted at my school or me myself. That crash could, to the police, be called “an accident” even though the damage came from a speeding automobile barreling into the side of a parked car in the parking lot. My parents and the doctor I spoke with confirmed the nature of the crash.
A young man named Sergei warned my father so that I would not be inside the truck. The details of Sergei’s family remain mysterious to me but I know he tipped off my father so that I could not be further maimed or killed.
Thank you, Sergei. Wherever you are I hope you are safe and happy and free.
America: I want you to know what you have done.
Look at me here. Did I seem, then, like a child who deserved a chance to hug both her parents at her high school graduation?
My own nation denied me that dream.
The United States of America values wealth so much more highly than human souls that I must live with the knowledge that my own country condemned me to this pain.
68,000 people in the USA die every year due to causes that could be prevented if they had access to medical care.
It shreds my heart to pieces that my own nation would not defend me from being mutilated as a child. For saving my life, the United States called him “disabled” and therefore unworthy of unemployment and eligible for discrimination from health insurance plans. He was executed for the sin of saving his own daughter from further mutilations by the cruelest powerful people on the planet.
I remember being in the hospital in Boulder, Colorado as a doctor told me why my own father’s life might be too expensive to save. Not because he was dying - because the costs would be exorbitant because of his insurance plan.
The United States of America forces families to bargain about the monetary value of their loved ones in the hospital. I was 13 when I tried to convince a doctor that my Papa’s life was worth any amount of money to us.
The United States of America condemns heroes like him to an agonizing death in hospitals. Corporations exterminate human lives in America. Employers can and do flagrantly discriminate against people outed as “disabled”, leaving us with few options to live. We can die or undertake work of desperation. Given how old I was the first time I remember being raped, America saw me as nothing more than a little meat doll for the wealthy and cruel to torture.
I was never allowed to be a human being. I was placed on more than one list of people who deserved nothing in America. For the lusts of strangers, I was labelled “disabled” - “less able than others.” Less able, perhaps, to stop rapists. Am I less able as a soul? Judge me, my nation. You have already punished me.
Here is part of the poem I wrote to say good-bye to my father at age 14.
If you are concerned about my welfare, please know that the best way to help someone in the USA is through money. The United States values human lives at nothing. I am “less employable” by birth and saddled with high medical bills as a result of being judged an inhuman genetic defective. The trauma of my rapes and the death of my father generated massive medical expenses.
If you would like to forward this link to any politicians or charities who compensate survivors of state-sanctioned genocides, please let me know. I would happily accept money to find a temporary living arrangement. Many renters including me live in dehumanizing and unsafe conditions which worsen every time our landlords feel an excess of greed. As of press time, I’m dealing with an apartment infested with blood-sucking fleas by a billionaire landlord. This is common in New York City and I’m currently unemployed in a bad job market.
Please contact this email address with serious inquiries only: lilly.marlena.art@gmail.com
Please do not
call any emergency numbers about me. I have lived with the pain of knowing my nation exterminates people like me for my entire life. Hospitals are violent detention centers for people whose lives are deemed “subhuman” by the USA.
I feel I’ve never had a chance here.
Today, even though I built my life back up from feeling wounded in my heart, I am once again unsure how to survive.
My skills are in industries that aren’t hiring. I tried to go to grad school but am currently suspended “excessive lateness” and “too many absences.” It’s easy to get suspended if you live too far away from a university and must navigate a train system built without elevators. I had a persistent leg injury. That got me suspended for “unprofessional conduct” - lateness on paper. In reality, the crime of being an unappealing sight. A woman walking with a cane in a city built only for beautiful and extraordinarily privileged bodies.
Here’s me holding a cane that I used to need to walk. Leg injuries heal slowly -- especially if your employer and school decide that they can and should insist on their underlings commuting to a mostly-empty building.
I am treated as an animal that must be ejected from workplaces, universities, and spaces of dignity. My body offends the eyes of others and so I am again punished for their thoughts about me. My leg healed but I live with the memory of how New York City treats a woman seen as a cripple.
Here’s my face and my phone. I want people to see what it feels like to know your own nation let people pay to rape you, told you your father’s life was worth less than corporate profits, and allows a landlord to inflict blood-sucking fleas on you for the crime of being too poor to afford safety and dignity in America. (I worked in design for years, so I have marketable skills. I just found tech miserable and wanted to do something more meaningful to me. Things I really wanted to do, I’ve never been rich enough to dream of here.)
Here is how much work my neighbors and I have been trying to do just to get safe pesticide control. I blurred out my neighbors’ names: here’s how much work we’ve been doing to try to stay in our homes. It doesn’t matter: the landlord is kicking us out for three days. The person who brought in the infestation refuses to let in an exterminator so the rest of us suffer. Now that I’m out of work I have no way to find a place where I can sleep without being gnawed by fleas.
Goodbye, Papa
To me, this song is about loving someone so much that you take the pain intended for them.
Like all lovers of art, I see my own story in many works. Sometimes it’s there by accident and sometimes by design. I think that human history whispers of so many parents who sacrificed everything in order for their children to even hope at a real life. That real life still doesn’t feel here for me. I’m still not human in the eyes of my nation.
I feel that I cannot talk about my grief. Too many people question me as if they are trying to divine how many tragedies were accidents and how many were planned and how many griefs I deserved.
Risks to vulnerable people accumulate from many sources. For people like me who ask for help, we find ourselves in the impossible position of explaining exactly “what caused what” confusing hurtful event.
Innocent people can’t tell you what was a terrible accident and what was a targeted attempt. If someone seeking a child to sell into sex work says that they accidentally struck a parked car or sped into the oncoming lane, then they can indeed repeat the word “accident” over and over. How can my family prove anything else? Some of the terrible things I remember were doubtlessly independent bad actors who know that America looks the other way when it comes to sexual assault and lost little kids.
Now that I’m a woman I know I’ll be shamed for what other people do to me without my consent.
I can’t prove what was an accident and what wasn’t. Only the pain and the memories remain with me.
A stranger harassing me about the going rate of a blow-job at age 14 feels exactly the same regardless of why he thought I was a sex worker who’d lie about her age.
A car accident an empty road from the oncoming lane at night feels the same regardless of motive. The driver wasn’t drunk, though: there was a long debate about how much that driver thought my mom and me needed to go to the hospital for our injuries.
Once I was born blonde, green-eyed, and hopeful it was game over for my family. The most heartbreaking thing for me personally is that, although 99.9% of doctors find this heinous: some doctors mutilated me by choice. Doctors taught me to disbelieve my own body. I cannot begin to describe the soul-ripping agony of waking up in tears, explaining that there’s no reason for your ear surgery to hurt like that, and then a gang of doctors convinces you that the strange awful fluid leaking from your body is “normal” and you are just “a bad little girl” who is “disobedient” and “sensitive.”
My Mama clarified that I wasn’t born deaf. Like many kids do, I had awful ear infections. By age 3 or 4, I was between 80-90% deaf. It was an acquired deafness. It happened because my ear infections went untreated for so long that I lost my hearing.
All a doctor needs to do to place a child in the position I was in - getting many surgeries or else become fully deaf -- all a doctor needs to do is prescribe a child a placebo. My parents aren’t pharmacists or doctors. They could not test the placebo or get antibiotics themselves legally.
Did the doctor who robbed me of my ability to hear naturally enjoy the sight of me crying for mercy? Did the doctor delight in my suffering? Was the money simply enough to overcome the usual human hatred for torturing children?
I’ll never know. For what a doctor did to me, I’ve spent the rest of my life feeling as though my tears were lies. My body was not mine to own nor protect. Y’all don’t need to hear about every time I cried and begged a person to stop hurting me.
If you recognize my face or voice, please never call “in concern” for me again. There are currently multiple diagnoses that can be legally used to forcibly commit anyone raped as a child. You will place me in a position where the mayor of New York allowed doctors to detain me for up to 60 days in a hospital. Would you like to know what happens to women and girls like me in hospitals?
Basically the events of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. I never met the awful fate that Jack Nicholson’s character did, but emotionally I relate deeply to being tortured by sadists in a hospital. I remember looking into my parents’ eyes as I desperately tried to convince them that I was sane enough to go home, please.
As a young woman in Colorado and in New York City I’ve been dragged to a hospital against my will. A cruel therapist in Colorado called me “anorexic” even though I’ve never met the diagnostic criteria. I’m skinny but that’s because I love dancing. Even though I never restricted my eating, that therapist forced my parents to hospitalize me against their will.
A therapist lied to my parents in front of me. She said I was suicidal because I’d memorized the weight limit to be labeled “anorexic.” I told that therapist she couldn’t hospitalize me at my skinny but healthy weight.
There’s a broad range of healthy weights. I’m not a dietician so I won’t go on too long about this. As a 13 year old who loved dancing, of course I was a bit skinny. I’d hit my growth spurt around 10 or 11, so I was a “chunky kid” or a “stocky little girl” or a “big-boned little lady ain‘t you” and then BOOM I was 5'6. That’s not anorexic that’s just puberty for me personally: a girl who loved dancing.
So many doctors in Colorado hauled me over to scales to check for ANOREXIA that I’d memorized the height/weight and BMI chart. I wasn’t, as that horrible therapist and a few really scary doctors asked, trying to “trick” the doctors. I was desperately trying to stay out of hospitals which were horrible places. No one believed me why I hated hospitals so much. I never wanted to starve, I just wanted to eat how I please and dance. My love of dancing doomed me to rapes in hospitals I can remember. Since the ear infections went on for so long that I became mostly deaf as a toddler, I was indeed born condemned to life as a rape victim.
The therapist threatened to put me in foster care unless my parents complied. She gave my family no choice. I’ve never been placed in foster care but I know quite well what would happen to me in a foster home.
If you’re convinced that yup, I do indeed need to be moved to a safe new apartment pronto: please contact me or my family.
Email listed is for me only. I’m sending this link out to people I know. Lilly Marlena is not my legal name. I’ve used many pseudonyms. The rest of this page is for anyone who’d like a bit more explanation on why I think I should probably relocate to a new apartment.
Email me at lilly.marlena.art@gmail.com
Serious relocation offers only, please. I’m nervous about answering the phone so ideally contact a trusted family member of mine or email.
Ideally, in some kind of complex or arrangement where friends/family can stay nearby.
My boyfriend likes the idea of condos and I just think “wow it’d be cool to keep our apartment but let everyone who wants the building to be treated for burnt asbestos stay somewhere else for a while.” Followed by “if only there was a place with an in-building pool/gym open that would accept someone who accidentally is a rare singing mutant.”
🛡
Yay protection!
People who know me will see me often. If I do get kidnapped someone will notice. It’s unlikely but -- look, I am the stereotype that the KGB uses for “spies” and “assassins” and “politicans’ secret murderable-mistresses.”
🏝
In a perfect world...
We’d live together in a nice spot with studio space. I love swimming and dancing so one or the other nearby would be amazing.
In a perfect world I would have had the chance to live a life where I could have only been raped once.
01
Why couldn’t my Papa save me?
Anyone who wanted to pin their crimes on an innocent would know to blame my father. A court would convict a man like him.
02
Why couldn’t my Mama protect me?
This one was hard for me to let go of - I’ve remained angry for a long time. I think now it was because whoever stuck their hand inside me at Boulder Creek was in Colorado. We’d had to move because my parents’ little business got audited FOR SOME REASON - I think because my parents turned down an offer they wasn’t supposed to refuse.
Martha Jefferson believed that her rapist husband raped people with absolute impunity and wanted to stop that horrible rapist.
I think Thomas Jefferson was a serial rapist and a torturer who got away with it because he was rich. His writing was... acceptably okay. But, more importantly, importantly he had a lovely wife who believed other women about his rapes.
P.S.: Here’s a friend in college warning me about the danger for me personally as people who are WEALTHY AS SIN and willing to start wars over it remain in power. I’ll just get Marie Antoinette’d because I’m a convenient wife to pay a hit-man to end when America needs to be blamed for everything. Thanks, America.
I am treated as a “rare breed of human” because so many blondes die so-called “tragic” deaths.
The KGB, Hollywood, and generations of European royals present an image of beauty that whispers of tragedy. For thousands of years people instinctively accept that women who look like this are simply “born to die.”
I’m not a historian but I’ve taken quite a few classes on how psychology, sociology, politics and power operate. Europe, Anglo-America, and Russia over-poach the same sort of lovely woman. Many lovely stars vanish far before their time.
You deserved life.
Assassins regularly target beloved figures for assassination. Some of the stars who died, I think, turned down a politician or powerful person.
So Many Innocents Encounter Violence in America.
We hear about celebrities, public figures, wealthy people and folks with influence. Who knows how many people know they’re not safe or completely free? Those stories are rarely told.
Stereotyping sounds like paranoia to some people I talk to, and that’s frustrating for me.
I know not every person experiences other people’s assumptions in a frightening way. Personally, I am scared of how often people try to bully me into sex. (Yes, a tiny fraction of people still grab strangers they find attractive. It’s not a comet that strikes once every 70 years - people willing to treat others horribly usually rove around repeating the behavior.)
Rest in Peace, Jon Benet Ramsey. I’m so sorry.
Judith Eva Barsi, the voice of “Ducky.” A sweet child who loved to sing and joke and make people laugh.
Trayvon Martin: I’m so sorry. You have the same last name as my Papa. I cannot restore your life. Here is how I imagine you’d look as an adult on a sunny day.
I cannot bring back innocents whose lives were stolen unjustly. I cannot breathe life into the family members I’ve wept over nor sing a funeral song beautiful enough to restore people who didn’t deserve to die. A long time ago, I delivered the funeral eulogy for my Papa. I somehow lost my ability to sing after that.
To be honest: I’m scared for my own safety now. It’s not without cause. I don’t encounter people who try to grab or hurt me every day. Every once in a while I do. Most of the time I can get out of a bad situation, but I run into threats often enough to be scared. I don’t feel I’ve been protected in places where I’m supposed to be safe - like the doctor’s office and at school. I hope that one day innocents will not need to know the sadnesses I’ve known.
To people who worked to liberate future children: Thank you for standing up against a powerful person willing to hurt others.
It’s impossible for me as a generic “random Marilyn lookalike (or close enough)” to picture how much work it took to convict a famous director. To people who don’t match this stereotype -- please know that I’ve heard what friends say about what can happen to them if they say “no” to the wrong person. People can be shamed along any axis of identity for no reason other than declining someone willing to abuse their power.
Thank you to the brave activists who helped stop a serial rapist who happens to have a medical license in New York City.
Despite my anger at how I was treated at grad school, I recognize that universities are complex and large organizations. It’s clear that I don’t fit in at my chosen institution but I’m aware that our institutes of higher education accomplish worthwhile goals. Activists in New York City, particularly in universities, worked together to stop a rapist who targeted patients for 20 years. Dr. Robert Hadden now cannot hurt other people who might trust him with their medical care.
Thank you for showing me that it was possible to speak out. I thought that it might be impossible to change the way things seem to always go. It might perhaps be possible for later generations: I must now focus my energy fully on survival because my nation gives me no choice but to think only of what I must do not to be thrown out onto the street knowing how people treat me.
I ought, I know, to be grateful to be alive. Instead, I am angry and heartbroken that I’ve never had a chance at a free life. Still, thank you to the people who stopped a powerful predator. Thank you to Hillary Clinton, Chelsea Clinton, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, and my mom. Thank you to my professors and to the committed activists at Columbia University.
Our lost loved ones cannot be brought back to life. It is nothing to a politician to issue a public apology. My soul was scarred for the sake of others’ wealth and cruelty. I have every right to demand that a nation pay for crimes against civilians. Others have the same right - please join me if you wish.
I am dangerous, I suppose - because I am honest. Thanks U2, this song describes how I feel right now: both honest and haunted.
Sing
with me
with me
