There’s nothing new about the sexual exploitation of young female stars.
Last week, the Huffington Post published an account of a rape so callous, it was hard to read.
What made the story even more shocking was that it was alleged to have happened to a former teenage rockstar in an iconic “girl” band. While her bandmates watched on.
Runaways’ bassist Jackie Fuchs says that she was assaulted in front of her bandmates, the feminist icon Joan Jett and lead singer Cherie Currie.
In fact, Fuchs says she was raped by Kim Fowley, the band’s manager and producer, in front of a hotel room full of people at an after-gig party, while Jett and Currie watched, snickering, in a corner.
It was 1975 and she was 16 years old.
The entertainment industry is rife with starry-eyed teens – and adults ready and waiting to take advantage of them.
In the past few years alone, pop star Kesha, child actor Corey Feldman and Lady Gaga have come out with allegations of rape and abuse by men in positions of power in their early careers.
And the Bill Cosby, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile sex-abuse stories need no elaboration. Back in the 1970s, when these men were at the peak of their powers, they were using their clout to take advantage of girls and young women – and no one said anything about it.
This same silence surrounded the shocking behaviour of Kim Fowley.
The piece by Jason Cherkis, called The Lost Girls, describes how Fowley conceived of the idea of an all-girl rock band (unheard of at the time) and actively recruited the members, grooming the girls and sometimes their parents to allow them to play in the Runaways and tour overseas with him as their sole guardian.
Fowley was a songwriter and producer, a band-manager and hustler who managed to get his name on the liner notes of hundreds of albums from Helen Reddy to hair-metal. His last appearance, in a wheelchair, was in Beyonce’s video for Haunted.
He was openly interested in teenaged girls, and what he called “young c*nt” or “dirty pussy”.
A friend of Fowley told Cherkis that the two of them used to drive to high schools to try and pick up teenagers.
The rape of Jackie Fuchs allegedly happened in a hotel room in Orange County. The Runaways had played a New Year’s Eve gig there at a tiny club called Wild Man Sam’s and Fowley had invited a group of people to celebrate back in their dingy hotel room.
Fuchs was feeling elated after this gig – she finally felt part of the band.
At the hotel, a man who she thinks was a roadie approached her with a Quaalude and told her she was to take it, no questions asked. She did. A witness, Brent Williams, says she was given up to five or six Quaaludes that night.
“It was a date rape situation,” he told Cherkis.
Fuchs never discussed what happened that night until now, 40 years later.
Friends of Fuchs at the party were concerned by how out of it she was. Fuchs wasn’t a drinker and never took drugs, preferring to be in control.
She eventually had to go and lay down, unable to remain on her feet. That’s when Fowley offered up her body for sex to a roadie, who declined the offer.
“You don’t know what terror is until you realize something bad is about to happen to you and you can’t move a muscle,” she says. “I can’t move. I can’t speak. All I can do is look him in the eye and do the best I can do to communicate: Please say no. … I don’t know what it looked like from the outside. But I know what was going on inside and it was horror.”
Fowley began undressing Fuchs, unbuttoning her blouse and pulling off her pants. Fuchs’ friends, unable to bear it a moment longer but too intimidated by Fowley to stop him, left the party.
He began having sex with her, while others crowded in to watch.
On the bed, Fowley played to the crowd, gnashing his teeth and growling like a dog as he raped Jackie. He got up at one point to strut around the room before returning to Jackie’s body.
Fuchs says her last memory of that night is looking up and seeing Joan Jett and Cherie Curry staring at her.
The Runaways… post continues after gallery.
After that night, Fuchs remained in the band. She never discussed the rape with her bandmates and they never talked it over with her.
“I didn’t know if anybody would have backed me,” she says. “I knew I would be treated horribly by the police — that I was going to be the one that ended up on trial more than Kim. I carried this sense of shame and of thinking it was somehow my fault for decades.”
Watch The Runaways performing Cherry Bomb… Post continues after video.
Finally, while on tour in Japan, Fuchs broke down. She called her mother and arranged a trip home.
She was still only a teenager. She’s never played in a band again.
Fuchs was replaced by Victory Tischler-Blue on bass, and she says that despite never talking about it with Fuchs, Jett and Currie discussed the rape openly among themselves.
“I heard about that nonstop,” she says now. “They would talk about Kim fucking Jackie like a dog. It was kind of a running joke.”
Fowley, in his 2013 biography, denied ever being sexually inappropriate with the Runaways.
“They can talk about it until the cows come home but, in my mind, I didn’t make love to anybody in the Runaways nor did they make love to me.”
Cherie Currie and Joan Jett have also addressed the issue.
After Cherkis’s HuffPost story was published, Currie took to Facebook to deny she’d witnessed the rape.
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. If I were guilty, I would admit it. There are so many excuses I could make being only one month into my sixteenth year at the time that people would understand but I am innocent. When I return from Sweden I will seek a qualified polygraph examiner to put to rest any and all allegations. I will make public the questions, answers and results of that test. I will prove I am telling the truth. I will not allow anyone to throw me under the bus and accuse me of such a foul act. I will fight for myself. It is the only thing I can do and I’m glad to do it.
Her protestations and willingness to undertake a lie-detector test are really strange. In addition, such a test, after 40 years, would be rendered inaccurate.
Jett also posted on Facebook about the story, after being bombarded with demands for a comment. The Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee wrote:
“Anyone who truly knows me understands that if I was aware of a friend or bandmate being violated, I would not stand by while it happened. For a group of young teenagers thrust into 70s rock stardom there were relationships that were bizarre, but I was not aware of this incident. Obviously Jackie’s story is extremely upsetting and although we haven’t spoken in decades, I wish her peace and healing.” – Joan Jett #JoanJett
Fuchs has addressed the lack of support from her former bandmates in her own Facebook post.
“I know some people watching the online drama unfold have been discouraged by the lack of support I’ve received from my former bandmates. To which I can only say that I hope you never have to walk in their shoes. My rape was traumatic for everyone, not just me, and everyone deals with trauma in their own way and time.
“I only wish that 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 when I decided to tell my story.”
Fuchs, emboldened by other sexual assault victims coming forward in recent times, finally spoke to her attorney about her rape last year.
She wanted to meet with Fowley, to tell him “he is not forgiven”. She never got her chance because he died in mid-January.
In February, Fuchs finally told her mother about the rape.
More like this?
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Corey Feldman reveals sexual abuse he and Corey Haim experienced in Hollywood.
Top Comments
I can't believe how unsupportive some of the comments are. Of course I don't know either if what she is saying is correct, but if it is then I can understand why it has taken her so long to tell her story. You just didn't talk about these things years ago, because the stigma on the woman, of course judging from these comments there still is stigma on this woman.
Considering her replacement has backed her up though saying that Joan Jett etc used to talk about it makes me think that this really happened.
What I personally think probably happened is that the others didn't think of it as "true" rape. We all know that rape is having sex with someone without their consent, but you can intellectually know this and still think that "well it wasn't really rape", particularly from that time era when a lot of date rape type scenarios would have been thought of the guy was just being a bit forceful and hey she was stoned/drunk etc so what did she expect! Especially there was a lot of wild stuff going on in bands, still is. I have no doubt they knew she was not consenting, they may or may not have known that she was purposely drugged, though if she was normally sober then you would think they would have realised she may have been drugged, but they may have thought, yeah she has got herself totally stoned and well what does she expect obviously some guy is going to take advantage of her. They would have felt pretty uncomfortable and known deep down that what he was doing wrong but they would have just written it off as "he took advantage of her, but she was a bit of a slut anyway to get so stoned/take drugs etc."
You have to remember also, they quite likely had similar things happen to them, guys not taking no for an answer or they were off their face drunk and some guy has just landed on top of them at a party and done the deed. They wouldn't have thought of any of this as being rape. And it is not that they wouldn't have been traumatised by it, but the thing is society didn't view it as rape (even if legally it was), if they spoke up they would have been labelled sluts. It was probably much better for them mentally to pretend to "own it" and tell themselves that they are just a sexually liberated woman who likes to get stoned and get it on with guys, rather than face the traumatic reality of how all of them were most likely treated like dogs by guys in the industry who just wanted to have an excuse to do whatever they liked to young vulnerable girls.
When I look at their photos, every single one of those girls, as pretty as they were, have that hard look in their eyes, like they have seen too much and have cut off their feelings, because that's the only way they can cope with it. They may have been even grateful that Jackie was now experiencing the misery they had been through. I know this can happen, because a friend of mine, quite innocent, had her friend pretty much help stage manage her rape. My friend was a virgin, her friend was not, people compared them not favourably, like the latter was considered a bit slutty etc, and I'm sure that the latter was very grateful when my friend was raped so that she would no longer be considered the "good girl". Quite possibly this girl had had the same thing happen to her and so wanted my friend to go through it too.
The reason I know all this is because it was a different era, and I grew up not long after that and I know the attitudes people had about these things at the time.
The thing is with this band, these girls seemed that they were all very young. I really think if I had been 16 and some girl was stoned out of her mind on a bed and some guy started having sex with her at a party, I would have been pretty shocked (and I was quite sheltered, certainly not a seasoned rock chick) but I hate to say this I doubt I would have done anything either. In my heart I would have known it was wrong, but because everyone else would have considered her just a slut who deserved to get what was coming to her, because she had let herself get stoned (it wouldn't have ocurred to me that she had been drugged), I would have thought to myself, well it seems wrong but everyone else thinks she is to blame so what would I know. Because trust me the adults thought like that too. Too many times I heard of young women being raped at parties and then maybe I was in the company of adults at a BBQ or something and you would hear them saying, "yeah well she was off her face drunk/stoned and she already had the reputation as being the town bike, so yeah what does she expect, obviously young guys have hormones, fair enough they shouldn't have done it, but really she was to blame." It's not that they wouldn't have doubted the story that she was forced to have sex, they just wouldn't have thought it was rape, because she was a drunken slut. When you are a young woman and people say all these things, you think, well I am young and inexperienced, these people are middle aged and understand how the world works, so even if I don't feel comfortable with this I must be wrong. This is added to the fact that the same people would always say to me, I was a "nice girl", and give me veiled compliments about my innocence. So of course i could get to feel superior to these "sluts" also. It was very clear to me that you didn't put yourself in a situation where you got too drunk etc because you could either be a good girl (me) or a slut.
I would like to clarify that these are not my attitudes, but I am trying to explain what the attitudes were at the time. I felt uncomfortable with some of these attitudes but I didn't question it, because when most of society hold an opinion then it seems to a young unformed mind that probably they are right. I would like also to mention that my own parents didn't hold these attitudes, my mother was a feminist, but here is the thing too, is that anything sexual wasn't really discussed by adults with young people (you just overheard things when they talked to each other), and even amongst themselves their was a line they wouldn't have crossed in polite society, so my mother would not have discussed much of this in front of me, even though I know from the odd thing she said she didn't agree with it, but people were very prudish, including my parents so it would have been very difficult for my mum to have spoken indepth to me about such a shocking topic, or even to others. She would have spoken up for sure (because I overheard her the odd time) but the prudishness would have stopped her from talking about it at length, and also my mother like a lot of women was raised to be a polite good girl, so it wouldn't have been nice to have argued to much with people anyway, and in any case if she had protested too loudly they may have started questioning her virtue, (even though she was respectably married) because why would a nice woman be defending a slut?
These were all the attitudes of the time. But a lot of people did know in their hearts it was wrong, but they were too frightened of what others would think if they spoke up. You can even tell this because the roadie in this attack passed up the opportunity to have sex with her, he knew it was wrong, Also I know this too because occassionally I would hear of some girl I knew having something done to her, perhaps not rape, but some other similar degrading thing, and there would be some guy in our group of young friends who would be boasting and calling her a slut etc, and you could see that everyone else in the group, even all the young guys looked uncomfortable. I remember one particular incident like that, when I could just tell that the guys all thought that their friend was in the wrong when he was boasting about something he did with some girl, I felt horrible too, but none of us spoke up, but we all just had this look in our eyes of disgust. I didn't dare say anything and neither did they because being part of the group was more important to us then speaking up, and also we were so ingrained to believe that the girl secretly wanted it anyway, or deserved it.
I really don't blame Joan Jett and the others then if they did watch this because they probably didn't know any better, but I do wish that now with changing attitudes and the maturity of age they could speak about it and support her. Of course there is a chance that what she is telling is not correct, but what with her other band member backing her up, and apart from that I'm sure these things did go in, it just rings true to me.
Im wondering what her motive is after 40 years. It seems odd to go public with such trauma after such a long time. No usefull purpose to it unless shes just after publicity.
Maybe it's part of the healing process for her, maybe she knows a lot of people have talked about it over the years and wanted to set the record straight, maybe lots of things, I don't know but i would not have thought if she was after publicity going public about a brutal rape was something you would do. Her rapist is now dead, I am sure in some way that plays a part in her coming forward. Most women find it very hard to debate the rape with their rapist.