Raped at 6, she ‘very easily’ forgave her attacker for robbing her of her childhood
Last week, my principal when I was at the Assumption Convent High School, then a nun, broke her vow of silence. Dr. Pinky Valdes, now the first lay president of the Assumption College, broke her vow of silence about being raped by a teenaged cousin when she was six years old, and other abuses.
Now 74, Pinky talked about the abuse when she launched her book Educating Women Leaders: Transformation in
Women’s Colleges in front of the nuns of the Religious of the Assumption without shame or fear.
Why only now? I asked her in a one-on-one interview at the Assumption, not far from the classrooms where she would teach us.
“Because in our day we didn’t talk about those things,” she says. But now, wherever she goes, both men and women stop her to salute her courage. Why did she do it? “The reason why I spoke is to give other people the courage to speak up. I’m against extrajudicial killings, I’m against violence but I cannot ask you to go out and protest if I’m not going to step forward myself. I can’t say, ‘You go tell your parents!’ if you are abused, but I am in the shadows and I’m not saying anything. I have to be the first to show this is the way you handle it, because the best friend of abusers is silence. And all people who are abused, even domestic violence and physical violence, their best friend is silence. Because if the person who was abused — the wife or a girl, some of these girls have been abused by their boyfriends because they told us, they were not beaten up but they were slapped — the first thing that happens, 80 or 90 percent of the time, you freeze. Some people run right away, some people get really mad, but 80 percent of society, look at all those movie stars, they froze.”
Pinky, who was called “La Rubia” (the Blonde) by friends and family alike because of her golden hair, was raped at age six by her teenaged cousin, who lived in the house next to theirs. Traumatized by the experience, she wet her parents’ bed and her caregiver “Tita Sally” lit a match under her bottom while she sat over an orinola. When she was older, in the US, she was molested by a La Salle Brother, her dad’s favorite teacher.
Despite the string of abuses, and the fact that she had no one to turn to, Pinky didn’t cave in. She stood tall and straight.
“Spirituality is what got me across,” she declares. “Because spirituality is what gives you depth.” She tried to find meaning in life. It also helped that she had loving parents, and in their care, she found a safe harbor. Except at that time six decades ago, she just couldn’t tell them about what her cousin did to her.
During family reunions, she would see her cousin looking her way. But she would look away.
Then about 10 years ago, when she decided to write the book, she asked her friend Anna Valdes Lim if she should include that painful episode in her life in the book she was planning to write.
Anna then told her, “You have to, otherwise the secret goes on forever.”
Ever since the book was launched, Pinky says she got many text messages saying, “Me, too.”
*** But has she forgiven her cousin? To my utter surprise, she forgave the man who robbed her of her childhood, “very easily.”
She wrote her cousin when she was in her sixties and he, nearing his eighties. She let it all out, the hurt and the feelings of betrayal. “I don’t know how you feel,” she wrote him, “but I forgive you anyway.”
He wrote her back. It was a short letter with a bold message, “Thank you very much. I have lived with guilt all my life. All these years I’ve been wanting to apologize but I didn’t know how, and I’ve been wanting to approach you.” Pinky realizes that’s why he kept on looking at her.
He died not long after. *** After her traumatic experiences, Pinky turned to something that would give her a high. Not drugs, but a spiritual high. “Let’s say that the rape never happened to me, I still would’ve had this life. The dimension that it added was that from a very early age, I was looking for meaning. There has to be something there.”
It also gave her a third eye that made her see others who were also in pain. “The experience made me empathetic and very understanding of others’ pain.”
I asked her if she felt her revelation that she is a rape victim has diminished her stature as president of Assumption College.
“If you’re in a position of power, you cannot have been raped because that ruins the power? It’s kind of strange, isn’t it? I knew that those reactions would happen. But I said that’s par for the course and let the chips fall where they may. If you think that a person in a high position should be untouched by the world, unscarred by the world, and that’s your image of power, you have a lot of thinking to do because that’s not what it is. What makes a person strong is to grow through pain and transcend it. It can be cancer, it can be sexual abuse, it can be rejection, it can be ‘I’m not pretty as my sister,’ or ‘I’m not as rich as you are,’ ‘I’m not as educated as you are.’ All of them fall under the same category. It’s not just sexual abuse.”
She tells me the Assumption nuns were “very supportive” of her coming out.
“In other words, the people who can lead are the ones who have been to the trenches. You can’t stay in the trenches because then you’ve just allowed the trenches to swallow you. You have to pull yourself together, you have to transcend it and say ‘Now, what can I do to give back to society?’ You go up and you give it back. It’s not the end of my life. You go back to that pain to get the light.
“My book is about educating women. I put my story because I wanted to reach teachers, parents and girls to help them how to deal with these traumatic events and make them transformative.”
Pinky left the convent more than 30 years ago but her spirituality has not diminished. She says that whether a pearl is in an oyster’s shell or in the sand or mounted on a ring, it is still a pearl.
So now you see, it is more than just Pinky’s natural golden blonde hair that makes her shine.
Despite all her hurts and pains, or because of all her hurts and pains, she shines.