AUTHOR CATHY KELLY ON #METOO
When author Cathy Kelly heard the Harvey Weinstein story, it triggered her to reveal her own #MeToo moment. A few months on, far from regretting speaking up, she’s just hopeful her honesty has helped other women
What a difference a year makes. The last time I spoke to bestselling author Cathy Kelly it was pretty lighthearted, covering her ‘Duracell bunny’ personality, reliance on vitamin drink Berocca, bronzer and advice on her necklace to ‘breathe’.
She spoke of her guilt at being so wealthy, dishwasher rows with her husband, former Sony Music MD John Sheehan, and keeping a close eye on the smartphone usage of their teenage sons Dylan and Murray. Her background in journalism meant Cathy would always give you entertaining tidbits to write about. Yet despite her mile-aminute delivery and the kind of engagement that sees her remember your children’s names, there was always the sense that she was a deeply private person holding plenty back.
That last chat was when her book Secrets Of A Happy Marriage was out in 2016. This time it’s The Year That Changed Everything, novel number 19. And what a prescient book title that has turned out to be. This time when we meet in the same venue – the Powerscourt Hotel near her ➤
home in Enniskerry, Co Wicklow – Cathy, 51, is more reflective, serious and open.
The #MeToo campaign which swept the world in recent months inspired her to break a decadeslong silence about her own ‘devastating’ experience in her first job, aged 20.
‘I have to be very careful when I talk about it because there were a lot of people in this place where I worked and I don’t want to tar anyone with this brush,’ she says, slowly.
A man in a position of power assaulted Cathy on her very first day. Details she gives off the record are so shocking, they bring tears to my eyes. Back on the record she says: ‘He drove me home and I remember going into my mother and shaking. I couldn’t even explain that I couldn’t say what it was. I had to go into work the next day.
‘He is now dead. My mother told me one day that she had seen his death notice. I was going to pick up the boys and I nearly puked and said, “I have to get off the phone.”’
This man followed up his initial assault with a long campaign of blackmail and intimidation. ‘This whole thing went on for six months and I blamed myself because I hadn’t known what to do. This person tried this on somebody else and they were a more experienced human being and knew what to do. But I didn’t. So I blamed myself for that too.’
In the aftermath Cathy struggled to cope and sought help. ‘I went to my GP and I got tranquillisers. I think I just said I was having issues at work. You feel such shame that you have somehow invited this. For years and years and years I thought it was my fault. I’ve had therapy over this. When you’re 20 and your boss does this to you it’s not really your fault because it’s an abuse of power. But I thought it must be my fault because I didn’t know the right thing to say.’
Her abuser was indiscreet too and Cathy was horrified to find herself the focus of office gossip. ‘I had to look at everyone at work looking at me like I was something I was not because I was suddenly this appalling person. I was talked about and talked about. It was the most devastating time of my life. This person would ring me up when I was in different places and pretend that there was a work thing on and I had to come “or I’ll tell everyone what’s really happening”. And I would go. I had no idea how to handle it, how to stop it. I was book clever, I was good in school, I was very academic. And yet for this thing I had no weapons or any information about how to deal with this. Girls need the information to know what to do, to know how to handle it. Because it will happen again,’ she says, adding that it can be ‘very difficult’ to deal with.
‘Imagine you’re working in a small shop or a garage and you need the money. There’s talk on radio programmes and they say, go to your HR person. In lots of companies the HR person might also be the boss or the boss’s wife. Are you going to go to them and say, “By the way your husband grabbed me and put his hand up my skirt?” Of course you’re not because you’re going to lose your job. So I think you have to probably go to an outside agency,’ she advises – and websites like citizensinformation.ie can help.
‘It’s too shocking an assault on you as a person to deal with just with the people in the company. If you’re in a big company and there is someone you can trust – I would say a woman – then go to her. I minded every woman that came in there after me because I just thought, “no one is going to do that on my watch”. It’s a terrible thing to live with.’
For a long time, Cathy pushed it all to one side and got on with her very successful and full life as a writer, wife and mother. ‘I would have said that I had dealt with this actually really, really well. It was part of the tapestry of my life – not a bit I wanted to look at but I was able to look at it.’
Then came a seismic trigger. ‘But with the Harvey Weinstein thing, I could just feel the pain and body memory, because your body doesn’t forget. I just thought of the power and how he was able to get away with it for so long. Because all of these other people were complicit.’
Time magazine named the Silence Breakers of the #MeToo campaign its Person of the Year 2017. That movement began on social media last October to help demonstrate the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace. It followed soon after sexual misconduct allegations against the Hollywood movie maker became public.
‘I’d found the whole Weinstein thing so disturbing, so upsetting, and I was getting angrier and upset,’ says Cathy. ‘I watched it all and read about it endlessly. I just suddenly thought, “now”.
‘That’s the one plus, perhaps, of menopause,’ she adds. ‘Suddenly you’re older – I’m 51, and I reached a point where I thought, “Do you know what? I have flaws, I mess up, but as long as I can do the right thing by my kids and my family then that’s the most important thing.”
‘It’s like this strength comes over you instead of this feeling of apologising for your existence. And I suddenly went, “no” and I just started to talk about it.’
When she first spoke up about her abuse, Cathy ‘freaked out’ afterwards. I can well imagine this because she gets in touch after every interview worried about something she said (on this occasion as ambassador for Unicef she also asked me to mention their upcoming campaign around female genital mutilation, #MeTooFGM).
Friends contacted her and reassured her she had ‘done something for other people’ and ‘helped other women’. The idea that it has taken so long for Cathy to come to terms with her own abuse underscores how difficult it must be for less powerful women.
Cathy, after all, is one of Ireland’s most successful ever writers. Ranked number 76 in the top 100 selling authors from 2000 to 2009, she shifted 2.3million books in that time and earned €14million. She is still on top of her game, signing another €1million book deal late last year. Her latest novel looks at the lives of Ginger, Sam and
“GIRLS NEED TO KNOW WHAT TO DO, HOW TO HANDLE IT, BECAUSE IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN”
Callie, who are respectively turning 30, 40 and 50. ‘Your life changes so much and you change so much in each decade. You’re so different at 30, 40 and 50,’ Cathy muses.
Ginger is an overweight, sassy journalist who has never had a boyfriend, Sam is a career woman who discovers she is pregnant and Callie is the wife of a wealthy businessman who loses everything overnight.
‘I had fun with the ancient Irish thing of virgin, mother, crone,’ explains Cathy, who particularly enjoyed writing about Callie’s experience of the menopause. ‘In the earlier days as you’re going through it you feel every part of you falling apart. You’re moodier. You’ve got teenagers in the house with their hormones and you’ve got you with your hormones. Some people just sail through it and are absolutely fine. I’ve been sailing through it for a very long time and I’m sick of sailing, I want to get off the boat now,’ she quips.
‘There is this belief that this glorious, goddesslike power comes over you during the menopause – we are strong, we are fabulous. No we are not. We are sweating and we are cross and we’re putting on weight around our middle and our clothes don’t fit. And we are irritable. Where did this much-vaunted goddess go to? I think that comes much later in it. I can feel that now,’ she admits, and speaking out as part of #MeToo is definitely evidence of it.
Did she ever confront her abuser about what he did? ‘No, no, no. The only way I could cope was to coexist,’ she says, later adding: ‘People always talk about my writing being hopeful and despite all that I have a very positive view of human beings. I love people. When it comes to people who abuse, people who exploit, there is no rage too much in me for them,’ she clarifies. ‘There is no coming back from that.
‘It’s like that Olympic swimming coach [Larry Nassar]. We were looking at that on the news and John said, “I wonder why they all came forward after he got all those sentences”. I said, “They wanted to be heard”, to say, “Me too”. Maybe people looked at me and thought, she has everything. And I am private and I keep an awful lot in but this is the time to talk about this.
‘I’d hate people to think I’ve a book coming out so I’m talking about it now. I mean, I kept this to myself for 31 years. But I just couldn’t keep it in any longer. I feel there are so many areas women have been flattened down about over the years. And I just think now, no. This far and no further. It has to stop.’ THE Year That Changed Everything, published by Orion, is out now