Jackie Fuchs, a member of the all-female '70s rock band the Runaways, spoke out on TV this week about being raped by her manager, Kim Fowley, in 1975. The Huffington Post's Jason Cherkis first reported on the traumatizing attack last week.
Fuchs, whose stage name was Jackie Fox, appeared on TheLip.tv to explain why she waited four decades to publicly reveal that Fowley raped her in front of nearly a dozen people in a hotel room when she was 16. She said she had repressed the memories of the rape until she read a bystander's account of the attack in the book "Queens of Noise," by Runaways biographer Evelyn McDonnell.
"Some memories that I had buried started coming loose, and I realized I had been directing all my anger about it toward the people who had stood by and watched and not done anything," Fuchs said. "And they're not the people I should have been angry at. I should have been angry at Kim Fowley, the man who raped me. And I finally put my anger there, and once my anger went there, I wanted to do something about it."
Fuchs claims that a roadie handed her a Quaalude at a party after a Runaways performance in Orange County, California. She doesn't remember how many pills she took, or whether she took them willingly, but she said she started to slip in and out of consciousness as Fowley stood over her. She said she was so drugged that she couldn't speak and couldn't move, but she tried to communicate "no" with her eyes.
"The next clear memory I have, Kim was on top of me, raping me, and I looked over his shoulder and saw a room full of people watching me," Fuchs said. "And the only people I can identify with any clarity are [bandmates] Joan Jett and Cherie Currie, and after that, I blacked out."
Multiple witnesses said Fowley penetrated Fuchs with a hairbrush and "growl[ed] like a dog" as he brutally raped her.
Currie claims she spoke up and left the room when she saw the attack. Jett posted a statement on Facebook after the HuffPost story broke saying she had not seen the incident, or she would have tried to stop it. “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," she wrote.
Fowley, who died in January, denied having sex with any of the Runaways in a 2003 biography of the band. “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,” he said at the time.
Fuchs told TheLip.tv that she has now forgiven the people who witnessed her rape. "Possibly if I had been raped in front of two people or three people, they would have acted, but because there were close to a dozen people in the room at the time, I think they were just looking at each other and not knowing what to do," she said.
Need help? In the U.S., visit the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline operated by RAINN. For more resources, visit the National Sexual Violence Resource Center's website.