How Megan Duffy Played A Victim In A Film, But Is No Longer A Victim In Real Life

BY MEGAN DUFFY

Last New Year’s Eve, I went on a 2nd date with a guy I’d met through a close friend. He’d asked that mutual friend for permission to romantically pursue me, and after I asked "are you sure he’s not a psycho?" my friend assured me he was a "great guy."

Our first date was to Disneyland and seemed to go well. We kissed but I didn’t spend the night. On NYE I was loaded into a big limo with his closest friends and shuffled from party to party. He was my kiss at midnight but didn’t really talk to me much until the party was dying down and the sun was coming up.

Him, his best friend, and his best friend’s girlfriend and I, as well as the evening’s leftovers, landed back at his house around 9 in the morning. He made bacon for me/us and insisted I have a cocktail while he then did a bunch more cocaine. Having been up all night, and now drunk, I was tired and said I needed a nap. As I started to pass out he carried me off to his bedroom. I told him I wanted to just sleep but he was already aggressively pulling my clothes off and grabbing at me. My protests were admittedly weak, and since it was clear there was no stopping him, I tried insisting he put on a condom, to which he laughed and said something like "that’s cute" and then just shoved it in. It hurt a lot. He didn’t seem to notice the water coming out of my eyes.

I convinced myself that even though this wasn’t how I wanted our first time to be, I probably would’ve ended up having sex with him eventually anyway. And I’d been nude in a hot tub at some point in the evening so surely to him it seemed like I was asking for it. Some people don’t understand the difference between nudity and promiscuity. He was supposed to be a great guy--after all, my friend who introduced us said so. He’d even asked permission to ask me out. That meant he liked me, right? Maybe he was really excited, and this was probably just a misunderstanding. Also he was on drugs so I was he didn’t realize he was hurting me. I didn’t want to cause a scene, especially not with his friends in the next room. I wanted to be cool. I wanted to be tough. I was stronger than this.

So I took it like  an adult.

But it went on for hours. I would pass out and wake up to him shoving it in again. Each time hurt worse but I kept my composure. I attempted a few times to get up and leave, using the excuse that I needed to go home to feed my cat, but he’d pull me back down saying he wasn’t done with me yet. I considered that maybe I was inside of a bad dream. After about four hours when he wasn’t coked up anymore it finally stopped. I felt humiliated having to face his best friend who knocked on the door to suggest the group of us spend the afternoon ordering pizza and watching movies. I wondered if he had any idea of what I’d been experiencing, or if this was something normal in their world.

He let me leave to go home to feed my cat as long as I promised to come back.

When I got home I cried in the shower while cleaning my wounds. I shouldn’t have gone back, but I did. I desperately wanted to be comforted, like I was a girl he’d actually liked and hadn’t meant to hurt. We spent the afternoon and evening cuddling on the couch with his friends and his friend’s dog and he was nice to me. I felt soothed.

I continued dating him for half a year, partly because I was in denial that I’d gotten into a bad situation and wanted to feel like I had some kind of control over what’d happened and partly because the injuries he caused me led to so many infections (over $300 worth of medical bills AFTER insurance) that I couldn’t sleep with anyone else even if I wanted to. Also, every time he would be rough with me he’d justify it as passion and/or excitement, saying things like, "I’d been waiting for hours to do that." This was always followed by some gesture of kindness. Like one night when, while under the influence of a mixture of adderall, cocaine, and MDMA, he bit my arm so hard I started to cry. The next day he took me to meet his mom for the first time. It calmed the terror I felt and replaced it with a feeling of being cared about. I put on a sweater with long sleeves.

I found myself craving those kind moments like a drug. I needed them to feel good about myself, and about what had happened/was happening. I started thinking maybe something was wrong with me--that I was too sensitive, or I just bruised easily, or was a prude for not enjoying rough sex. I also thought that it wasn’t his fault my body was so delicate that I kept getting so sick, and that previous relationships had made me feel afraid to be vulnerable. Given my life experiences and age I didn’t believe there was any way I’d find myself in a relationship with a bad guy. That’s something that’s supposed to happen when you’re 23 and don’t know any better, right? Not to a smart successful feminist in her 30s.

And to be honest, it wasn’t all bad. We got along pretty well, and there was an electricity between us that sometimes felt magical. Sometimes the sex was fun and I would initiate it, (though I was never able to finish). We were spending every weekend together, often with his friends who were warm and kind to me and I liked them a lot. Some would reiterate what a great guy he was while expressing their hopes that I wouldn’t break his heart like the previous women in his life had. We would make dinner together, and had a TV show we were watching. The more I opened up to him the better he treated me. There were a lot of things I liked about him--like that he was smart and funny and talented and seemed to work hard and would bend over backwards to be there for his friends. We never had any arguments. I stopped questioning whether or not he was a good person and began to trust him.

Then one Saturday afternoon, he showed up at my house and told me that he had to end things because he didn’t have feelings for me. He told me he’d known when he met me that he was never going to love me, that he had been telling friends that since the beginning, and that this game he’d been playing with me had gone too far. He cried three times before I did, swinging back and forth between sobbing like a scared child-victim, and a vicious evil stranger. I kept telling him it didn’t make sense, asking him to tell me what was really going on. Why would he take a girl he didn’t like to meet his family, or ask her out in the first place, especially with the fanfare of asking for permission? Instead of answering he’d spin the conversation in another direction, feigning sadness, or pulling out more waterworks. In one derailment he just started to cry about how his roommate wouldn’t let him adopt a cat. This went on for an hour. I felt so confused and scared and knew there was a giant missing piece he was leaving out. It was the most emotionally violent experience of my life. The bruise, still on my arm from his bite a month before, stayed for 2 more weeks after he was gone. I had to look at it in the mirror everyday. Regardless of whether he was gaslighting me or being "honest," I finally had to admit to myself that I had been in a relationship with an abuser. 

It turned out what actually happened is he’d hooked up with another girl the night before, and rather than admit to being a bad guy (and arguably a cheater), decided to attack me and negate our entire relationship. Once I found out the truth I started doing research on him (as well as ex-girlfriends of his that I knew about), It turned out his ex-girlfriend before me, a girl whom he and all his friends referred to as a "crazy bitch" (and who I’d been assured was out of the picture), hadn’t really been an ex yet when we started dating. I discovered he had a history of gaslighting, cheating, and being physically violent with women he had dated. He’d label them as "crazy" when they reacted to his mistreatment, and then manipulate them into believing it was somehow their fault. He was definitely not the good guy his friends all believed him to be.

I wasn’t going to be a victim anymore. I got the chance to stand up to him two months later, calling him out on his abuse of not just me but other women as well. I made sure it happened in a public place with people around. The scars were still going to take some time to heal, but I finally felt empowered. 

So when I was offered the role of Mandy in the upcoming film "Holidays," a girl who is tortured and abused by her New Year’s Eve date, I immediately said yes. While Mandy doesn’t make it out alive, in real life I continue to heal and am living a life full of amazing people, good work, and fulfilling adventures. I’m thankful for everyone who’s been a part of it. And I donated a portion of my paycheck from the project to Planned Parenthood. They do a lot of good work saving vaginas from harm. 

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Nurturing a body of work that encompasses film and television, Megan Duffy has not only carved her own path in Hollywood but her career continues to evolve with exciting and challenging projects.

Megan garnered attention for her standout role as "Lucie" starring alongside Elijah Wood in the remake of 1980’s horror thriller "Maniac," which debuted at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. Her next film "Holidays," directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer and produced by Kevin Smith will be released in 2016. 

A former professional dancer as well as music video producer, segueing effortlessly between the big and small screen, Megan has had guest starring roles in some of primetimes most popular shows including "Criminal Minds," "How I Met Your Mother, “Mad Men" and "Gilmore Girls," and has appeared in over 50 national commercials. She was the recipient of the "Best Guest Actress in a Comedy" award at the 2015 Indie Series Awards for her role as "Piper" in "Dating Pains," and will next appear on the show "Pretty Vacant" from Maker Studios. 

A native of Enfield, Connecticut, Megan currently resides in Los Angeles.

The Week's Reading List: Transcendental meditation, home funerals, tiny houses, selfies & tarot

We read a lot of good stuff this week. What are reading, or what did you write? Leave it in the comments below, and we'll consider it for our next roundup. 

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Kenneth Anger: Film As Magical Ritual’: Jaw-Dropping German TV Doc From 1970 - Dangerous Minds
"Anger’s interview segments were shot as he sat behind a makeshift altar, lit in magenta and inside of the magical “war gods” circle seen at the end of the film."

On Refugees and Refusing To Be Scared - The Rumpus
"Bring them here for as long as they need refuge, and if they want to make a home here, even better. I’m not scared. I refuse to be scared."

On Pandering - Tin House
"What did Tina Fey say about sexists in the workplace: over, under, and through. The problem with responding to sexism with Sesame Street is that if you read that e-mail as I read that e-mail, as I was being trained to read—that is, carefully and curiously, over and over—you’ll see something more than the story Stephen told himself about me as a writer or, in this case, not a writer. I saw, in the form of paragraphs and sentences, my area of expertise, how it took only a few lines to go from professional dismissal to sexual entitlement to being treated as property to gaslighting."

David Lynch and the Second Coming of Transcendental Meditation - Motherboard / Vice
"Practitioners of TM engage in two 20-minute meditation sessions per day; once in the morning and once in the evening. They access this field by silently repeating a mantra given to them by a certified TM instructor. By connecting with the Unified Field, meditators purportedly feel calmer and more at peace."

Iskra Lawrence’s Favorite Black Friday Deals for All Sizes - Runway Riot
"Forever 21 has deals starting from $4, and with Macy’s door-busters, you will definitely bag a bargain. For fresh fast fashion, take a look at Boohoo. They have 20% off the entire range, and Old Navy has the code: early bird for 30% off or 40% if you spend over $100."
(PS: Luna Luna is a huge fan of Runway Riot.)

Our Bodies, Ourselves:  A funeral director wants to bring death back home. - The New Yorker
“'People are afraid of death,” she said. “Do you want to go sit with the corpse or do you want to party? If you put it like that, it’s not a very hard question.” She is not denying that people can find great comfort in a personalized funeral ceremony. “But I would still argue that it doesn’t give you the full engagement with death and grieving that you need,” she says."

The Deck Of Cards That Made Tarot A Global Phenomenon - The Atlas Obscura
"Suddenly, worlds of knowledge, coupled with current thinking on the psychology of the human mind opened up, and people of all walks of life became enamored with contacting the spirit world to find out the future or to commune with the dead. Christians began reading the Kabbalah. Interest in photographing ghosts rose."

On Pandering - Tin House
"What did Tina Fey say about sexists in the workplace: over, under, and through. The problem with responding to sexism with Sesame Street is that if you read that e-mail as I read that e-mail, as I was being trained to read—that is, carefully and curiously, over and over—you’ll see something more than the story Stephen told himself about me as a writer or, in this case, not a writer. I saw, in the form of paragraphs and sentences, my area of expertise, how it took only a few lines to go from professional dismissal to sexual entitlement to being treated as property to gaslighting."

David Lynch and the Second Coming of Transcendental Meditation - Motherboard / Vice
"Practitioners of TM engage in two 20-minute meditation sessions per day; once in the morning and once in the evening. They access this field by silently repeating a mantra given to them by a certified TM instructor. By connecting with the Unified Field, meditators purportedly feel calmer and more at peace."

Iskra Lawrence’s Favorite Black Friday Deals for All Sizes - Runway Riot
"Forever 21 has deals starting from $4, and with Macy’s door-busters, you will definitely bag a bargain. For fresh fast fashion, take a look at Boohoo. They have 20% off the entire range, and Old Navy has the code: early bird for 30% off or 40% if you spend over $100." 
PS: We LOVE Runway Riot.

Our Bodies, Ourselves:  A funeral director wants to bring death back home. - The New Yorker
“'People are afraid of death,” she said. “Do you want to go sit with the corpse or do you want to party? If you put it like that, it’s not a very hard question.” She is not denying that people can find great comfort in a personalized funeral ceremony. “But I would still argue that it doesn’t give you the full engagement with death and grieving that you need,” she says."

The Thing All Women Do That You Don’t Know About - Drifting Through My Mind
"Maybe I’m realizing that men can’t be expected to understand how pervasive everyday sexism is if we don’t start telling them and pointing to it when it happens. Maybe I’m starting to realize that men have no idea that even walking into a store women have to be on guard. We have to be aware, subconsciously, of our surroundings and any perceived threats."

The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation - The Establishment
"And it’s not just the Tiny House Movement that incites my discontent. From dumpster diving to trailer-themed bars to haute cuisine in the form of poor-household staples, it’s become trendy for those with money to appropriate the poverty lifestyle—and it troubles me for one simple reason. Choice."

Selfie: The revolutionary potential of your own face, in seven chapters - Medium
"I think about Francesca Woodman; the lovely, doomed Francesca, the daughter of two bohemian artists, a plaintive blonde who spent summers in Italy and learned to take photographs of herself in an old farm house. She started noodling around with a camera when she was only 14 in 1972, fully committing herself to her work when she went off to study at RISD three years later. She sent her shots to fashion houses and magazines, but couldn’t really get much traction; she applied for grants and residencies with mixed results. She was in such a rush to become a success that any slowness in the process felt like a deep insult. Her depression rolled in like an unshakable fog. She tried to kill herself once, then again, and in 1981, when she was only 22, she succeeded by leaping out of a window of a building on the East Side of Manhattan."

Ridin' Dirty: A Sweeping Look At Witches Mounting Their Broomsticks - Broadly
"There is very much a sense that women are the weaker vessel—that they are more sexually voracious than men, more susceptible to sexual sin and therefore more likely to lead men astray." Take women with basic medicinal knowledge; add domestic implements, hallucinogenic properties, and conscribed female existence; add a healthy dose of male anxiety, and you may very well make witches."

Culture Throwback: Thinking Back On How Charmed Captured Contemporary Feminism

BY SOPHIE MOSS

First airing on The WB in 1998, Charmed is the story of three sisters who discover they possess powerful magical powers and fight to defend their home city of San Francisco against the demonic population. As a curious and defiant fourteen year-old woman trying to make peace with myself and the universe, the three sisters in Charmed represented all that I looked to: they were ordinary women who possessed extraordinary mental and physical capabilities, thereby illustrating a fantastic resistance to the hegemonic gender roles that characterised much of contemporary television. For me, the sisters represented a unique brand of witchcraft, feminism and fantasy, and they did so with wisdom and flare. I saw myself as a fourth Charmed One, fighting both the demonic underworld and the gendered power structures it represented.

What is fascinating, for me, is the way the three sisters encapsulated the tensions of contemporary femininity, and they did so fiercely and unapologetically: They are desiring and desirable. They are independent and dependant. They are superhuman and human. They see and are seen. They are imperfect. They sleep with men who are rotten. They save humankind in high-heels. They are both dependent on, and dismissive of, traditional feminist ideals. It is in this historically specific period that I discovered Charmed, as a young teenager trying to figure out my own identity as a woman.

Prue, Piper, and Phoebe (and later Paige) are as much human as they are super-human. They struggled. Relationships failed. Jobs were lost. Just because Piper inherited the power of molecular manipulation, that didn’t mean her business wouldn’t threaten to go bust; while Prue could astral-project to be on two planes at any given moment, this didn’t give her the power to forgive her father for abandoning her and her sisters when they were young. Yes, witchcraft is here to protect us, and it does. But, as Almásy writes in The English Patient, “the heart is an organ of fire”, and no magic can protect that from being broken. The sisters knew that. In fact, they grappled with it frequently -- most of all, perhaps, in the season three finale, when they learned their hardest lesson to date: that magic could not save the life of their sister, Prue. It was at this moment that the audience were to understand that the Halliwell’s are not defined by their magic, or by their power, but by their humanity: they are sisters first, witches second. It was this display of solidarity, this unwavering loyalty to sisterhood, that played an important role in how I see myself as a woman, sister, and feminist.

Charmed existed in a sort of mid-90s golden-age of the super-powered female lead on television. There was Buffy. There was Sabrina. There were the Charmed Ones. What remains so unique about the latter, for me, is the show’s postfeminist values and the way it challenged traditional notions of what it meant to be a ‘strong woman.’ They were attractive, fashion-forward, individualistic, and sexually experimental. They kicked demonic ass and raised babies. They held down demanding jobs and threw fireballs at ex-boyfriends. The sisters were multifaceted, powerful women with a ‘girl-power’ rhetoric, though never entirely paradoxical to second-wave feminist ideals. What Charmed did, and did very well, was create a whole community of powerful, unique women, or, as Susan Latta writes, “[represented] the interconnection of empowered individuals and collective action.” Power, style, sin, sisterhood, desire: suddenly, these tough girls with innate supernatural capabilities found themselves understood within the wider context of contemporary feminism.

But Charmed wasn’t merely concerned with a popular mediation of femininity. Rather, the show is unique in its representation of an alternative, often marginalised religious paradigm in contemporary media. Focusing specifically on Wiccan philosophy rather than ‘witchcraft’ as an umbrella term, the sisters’ magic is rooted in the beliefs, structure and limitations of Wicca. Granted, there was glitz, glamour and special effects to-boot, but Charmed worked hard to represent the Wiccan faith with respect and accuracy. As Michaela D.E Meyer notes in her essay “‘Something Wicca This Way Comes’: Audience Interpretation of a Marginalized Religious Philosophy on Charmed”, the show’s writers were particularly skilled at weaving Wiccan philosophies into the narrative, such as not using magic for personal gain and an understanding that magic comes at a price.

For me, though, as a young woman obsessed with locked doors and unknown worlds, I found this popular representation of witchcraft entirely accessible. It was as though everything suddenly clicked into place. I devoured all that I could on Wiccan philosophy and Pagan cultures. I created my own Book of Shadows, a grimoire full of awkwardly written spells and uncomfortable rhymes. I would lay an atlas on my bedroom floor and scry for family members. I would stare at glass vases and wait for my powers of telekinesis to kick in. I can still recite “Dominus Trinus”, the spell to invoke the sisters’ powers (In this night and in this hour / We call upon the Ancient Power). As fervently as I waited for my Hogwarts letter, I waited for my powers to come.

But, eventually, that curious young girl would grow into an adult woman with a registry for darkness. While I follow no set religious path, I recognise and honour an innate spirituality. Witchcraft, ritual, spell-casting, the Occult -- these are all important to how I see myself as a woman and writer. I practice the tarot. I collect moon water. I celebrate the seasons. I’m constantly learning to better work with my own spiritual source. Constantly learning to be a better feminist. A better person.

It is this sense of constant growth and personal reinvention that characterises much of Charmed. A recurring theme throughout the series is that of reconciling their witchcraft with their personal selves, their womanhood, and the consequences that come from this. They aren’t perfect versions of themselves, by any means. They make bad decisions and have been known to choose themselves over the Higher Cause. They can be selfish. Piper chooses to marry Leo in secret, against The Elders’ rules. Phoebe falls in love with Cole, a half-demon and later The Source of All Evil, despite her sisters’ disapproval. In many ways, Phoebe is the most feminist of the three sisters, in spite and because of her many imperfections. We see her evolve from a reckless young girl with few prospects into this fierce, successful, loyal woman with great spirit. She put herself through school, worked hard to get a job she loved, and she did it entirely on her own. She grew up fast and hard and well, and did so in a universe filled with demons, death, and madness. But for me, it was her imperfections that made her who she was. She screwed up. Routinely. Fantastically. Sure, she married the Source of All Evil and became the Queen of the Underworld, but she sure as hell came to her senses and vanquished his demonic ass, too.

That’s what’s so great about the Charmed Ones: they never claim to have it all figured out. They’re always learning, questioning, struggling, and they take responsibility for their actions. They know that what’s coming will come, and they face it when it does. That is what I took from Charmed: that to be imperfect is okay. To be human in a world of chaos is okay. I might not be the best version of myself, but I am, much like the Halliwell sisters, an unstoppable cyclone of female strength and femininity, and that’s all my fourteen year-old self could ever have asked.

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Sophie E. Moss is a dark witch & literary maven. She writes essays for Luna Luna and poetry for all the people she used to be. @Sophiedelays