Author pulls no punches in sexual assault survival memoir
Karen Moe's life changed forever in 1994 when she was abducted in Prescott, Ariz., and repeatedly sexually assaulted by a serial rapist.
Rather than running away after escaping her captor, the 28-yearold Moe circled back to note the licence plate number and other details about her assailant, which would lead to his eventual capture and imprisonment after a trial in Ventura, Calif.
It was an act of bravery born out of having nothing left to lose.
“As far as I was concerned, I was already dead,” Moe writes in Victim: A Feminist Manifesto from a Fierce Survivor. “And, strangely enough, little did I know then, thinking I was dead was starting to give me power — I had nothing to lose.”
Much more than a memoir, Moe's book is a call to arms for women and allies to dismantle the system that she believes builds conditions for situations such as the one that she lived through.
The Vancouver Island-raised visual artist known for such photographic series as 2020's The Born Again Nature Photographer and assemblage pieces such as the 2017-18 series La Corteza de la Ciudad de Mexico splits her time between her family home in B.C. and Mexico City.
Calling upon her own meticulously documented experiences and a wealth of feminist writings dating from Italian writer Christine de Pisan's 1405 text The Book of the City of Ladies to contemporary scholars and activists, Moe pulls no punches in her portrait of the artist as a young woman — fed up and furious at systemic sexism and oppression everywhere.
This is not an easy read, nor is it intended to be one. Moe took decades to tell her tale and was not going to let it be left to the editing preferences of big publishing houses, settling on indie publisher Vigilance Press.
“I started sending out unedited copies to agents all over and, in the first week, had bites from some top six-figure book deal types in New York, one of whom also provided free revisions that just took the revolution right out of it,” said Moe.
“Huge agents have to be 100 per cent certain that they can sell to one of the big five publishing houses and profit, which isn't why I wrote Victim. Obviously, I'd like to be signed with a big deal so I could just get on with writing my next book, but when you've suffered extreme violence, your life changes and you have to address that and I think I am.”
The horrors experienced by Moe will affect readers deeply, and she admits that some will find it impossible to get through. Some of the most lyrical writing in the book critiques revisionist feminist scholars around issues of sex and inclusion. The bibliography at the back of the book provides a solid overview of feminist scholarship over history and the common themes that keep cropping up.
Certainly everyone who does finish Victim will emerge with a clear picture of what the author thinks is wrong and needs fixing. The justice system's handling of sex crimes is certainly singled out.
When she arrived in the U.S. to provide testimony in 1997, she was presented with a teddy bear wearing a pink T-shirt with DA Bear embroidered on its chest. Somehow, the district attorney and chief of police thought that being “armed with a teddy bear” was preparation to be “ready to do my duty as a superhero. Again.”
After Moe documents some of the bizarre arguments that the defence attempted in court to discredit her testimony, this strange stuffed animal offering seems to fit perfectly into the deeply flawed legal framework for trying sex crimes.
“These kinds of things should not be happening, they should not be escalating, but they are,” Moe said. “My experience gave me an embodied awareness of injustice, so I'm turning the whole notion of victim as a defeated, discarded entity into something positive. Ironically, because there are so many thousands of victims, we have a ready-made activist force to commit to justice in dismantling the system. I would never wish anyone to come to this place the way I did, but once there, use it.”
Moe's trauma is threaded into those of others in her book. The latter section of the book introduces research she has done around the child sex trade and sex tourism while residing in Mexico.
“For me, the ultimate evidence that the system we live in — exploitation, patriarchy, hierarchy, individualism — is completely wrong, is children enslaved in the sex trade,” she said. “So that is why I'm going to write that book. First I have to do the cross-canada tour for this book, working with sexual assault non-profits and donating some of the proceeds to them as I just finished doing on the book tour of the states.”