“Why Didn’t They Save Me?” The Unhelped and the Unmoved

A tale of two traumas and the violence of indifference

A content note: This one gets into misogynistic, obstetric, and other forms of violence.

When Jack Teich pulled up at his home in Long Island, on a rainy night in November, 1974, he was surprised to see headlights behind him: his was a quiet residential street on which he rarely saw other vehicles. Two men got out of the car, wearing ski masks, holding guns. “You’re coming with us,” said one of the men, “Or we’re going to blow your head off!” Jack froze but did some quick calculations: his wife, Janet, and their two small children were waiting for him inside the house, and he couldn’t bear to put them in danger. So he didn’t try to run or fight back as the men hustled him into their car. He was handcuffed, forced into a prone position, blindfolded with some kind of putty, his body covered with cardboard.  

Jack was hauled away and chained up in a closet and interrogated for days. It was immediately clear that the attack was rooted in anti-Semitism. (‘You’re a Jew, right?” He was asked how much he donated to the Jewish Defense League—the answer being nothing.) His main capturer ranted and raved about a mixture of real and unreal issues. (On the former score, the fate of Palestinians; on the latter, evil Jewish slumlords.) He talked about his PhD and nine children. This man, it turned out, was “organized and depraved… [both] smart and completely nuts,” according to Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s riveting account of the incident. (She grew up in the shadow of this story, since Jack was a childhood friend of her father’s.)

A week later Jack was released, following a massive police and FBI investigation, and a carefully orchestrated ransom drop of three quarters of a million dollars by Jack’s wife, Janet, and his brother, Buddy. Masses of officers swarmed Penn Station where the drop had been ordered. Meanwhile, Jack was bundled back into a car and dropped just off the Belt Parkway near the John F. Kennedy airport. He staggered to a motel in Jamaica, Queens, and called home. Here is what happened next, according to Brodesser-Akner:

[Jack] was picked up a few minutes later and taken directly to the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters on East 69^th Street, where he remained through the night for debriefing. Janet eventually arrived, and by the time the Teiches left in the morning, the entirety of the New York press was outside, waiting for him. The pictures published in The Daily News and elsewhere the next day show him and Janet, shell-shocked but intact. A miracle.

Brodesser-Akner describes herself as haunted not by what happened, but rather what happened next: namely, Jack went back to his life more or less as normal. “You see, Jack was fine. He was better than fine. He was successful—an emblem of a dream that his ancestors just two generations back couldn’t have even known how to dream about. His business was thriving. He was healthy. His family traveled. They collected art. They educated their children. Look at what a person can endure and end up totally great,” she writes, in wonder.

Brodesser-Akner writes as a traumatized person herself: she was subject to the horrific medical rape depicted in her novel Fleishman is in Trouble and the subsequent TV series of the same title. (Although the novel is only loosely based on aspects of her life, she refers in the essay to the assault simply as her own experience.) Some sixteen years ago, at 39 weeks pregnant, she was sent to the hospital to be induced. 24 hours later, she still hadn’t dilated, and her water hadn’t broken. The doctor examining her took it upon himself to strip her cervical membranes with his fingers, as she screamed in pain and outrage. She had not consented. Here’s how Brodesser-Akner describes the experience:     

While he was examining me, I felt a searing kind of pain. I screamed. It went on. I screamed to my husband: “He’s not examining me! He’s doing something to me!” I screamed at the doctor to stop it, but he wouldn’t. I screamed over and over for him to stop, and he still wouldn’t. My husband stood frozen. The nurse avoided looking at me. Finally, I heard the doctor tell her—that same nurse [who had treated me], who now pretended we’d never seen each other—to get the hook. I screamed at him that I knew what the hook was for and that he didn’t have my permission to break my water. He told me that… he’d stripped my membrane, that there was nothing left to do but break my water and hope I dilated. Defeated, I lay back and let him do it.

Brodesser-Akner ended up with an emergency C section. And severe PTSD. She couldn’t stop talking about what happened, and still remembers everyone who started to listen to her story but wouldn’t let her finish. “I hate them for it,” she writes. She kept reliving her experience. She felt insane, broken.

Image credit: A scene from Fleishman is in Trouble (FX) taken from Ms. Magazine

Brodesser-Akner’s question in her piece is why she couldn’t recover from what happened to her but Jack could—and did, so easily. Of course, there are countless differences between the two cases. There is in some sense no comparison between a kidnapping and an obstetric assault, as Brodesser-Akner admits freely. And yet, in another sense, as she writes, “trauma is trauma. Something terrible happens, beyond what is in our own personal capacity to cope with, and the details don’t matter as much as the state we’re thrown into. Our bodies and brains have not evolved to reliably differentiate a rape at knife point from a job loss that threatens us with financial ruin… It’s wrong, but explain that to your poor, battered autonomic nervous system.”

Eventually, Brodesser-Akner concludes that Jack was not OK. That the signs and symptoms of his PTSD may have been subtle, but they were nonetheless there all along. Pace Tolstoy on families, “happy, well-adjusted people are all different. The traumatized are exactly alike.”

But they aren’t: only around one third of people who experience severely traumatizing episodes—such as being subject to heinous crimes, catastrophic natural disasters, medical crises, or active military combat—go on to develop PTSD symptoms. Certain types of trauma are more liable to lead to PTSD than others: sexual assault, notably. What’s more, whatever the correct diagnosis in Jack’s case, those who suffer from PTSD may be afflicted more or less severely. And Brodesser-Akner’s essay itself contains the seeds of an answer to the question of why some people are able to cope with traumatizing experiences but others can’t and don’t. Some people who are victimized have fierce advocates and allies and even a veritable army of people trying to save them. And other people’s victimization is met with the apathy and silence and indifference of third parties.

There’s a wealth of empirical evidence that bears out this hypothesis: indeed, the inverse association between symptoms of PTSD and social support “is one of the most consistent relationships observed in trauma research,” according to the researchers Joshua Clapp and Gayle Beck. In other words, the less social support you have during and after a traumatic event, the more likely it is that you will develop PTSD symptoms, plausibly due to feelings of abandonment, betrayal, loneliness, alienation, and isolation. (These researchers also point to a potentially vicious cycle: the symptoms of PTSD—anger, withdrawal, numbing—may lead to an erosion of social support, which in turn worsens the symptoms.) Trauma invalidation following sexual abuse disclosure is also a strong predictor of subsequent psychopathology.

One cannot help but be struck by Jack Teich’s own account of what he was able to focus on after the kidnapping. Brodesser-Akner: “He thinks about when he was picked up from [the motel] in Jamaica, near the airport. How, when he arrived at the FBI headquarters and was led in through a giant bullpen filled with hundreds of agents, the room went silent. Every single agent stood up as Jack walked through. It’s that moment he thinks about when he thinks about his kidnapping. It’s the friendships, it’s the way everyone came through for him.” To wit: John Malone, the FBI agent who took him out night after night afterward to see if Jack could hear a match for the trains or chimes he heard when he was held captive; Margot Dennedy, the FBI agent who lived with Janet during that horrible week and became her lifelong friend; not to mention, Janet and Buddy, who gave their all to save him.

Meanwhile, what Brodesser-Akner faced was what so many women face in a misogynistic world: profound, systemic indifference. A nurse who turned away from her and deferred to the doctor raping her. A husband who “froze” and, at least in the plot of Fleischman, couldn’t understand, let alone sympathize with, her trauma in the aftermath. A system that sided against her and told her to just get on with it. Ironically, if we want to enable people to get on with it, listening to their stories and validating their reactions is one of the best things we can do for them. Not to mention this being demanded in the name of morality.

“Doctors have long puzzled over why, if some women don’t [as often] go to war, they exhibit higher levels of post-traumatic stress than men,” writes Soraya Chemaly, in her galvanizing 2018 book, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger. Chemaly hypothesizes that the constant thrum of threats women face in their day-to-day lives—and the straight line from street harassment to rape—is a large part of the reason. But I think the above findings must be a piece of the puzzle too: our trauma is not borne witness to in the same ways as male combatants who exist, by definition, in communities of deep loyalty and solidarity and camaraderie. And often, women are all too painfully aware that not only is nobody coming to save us, but the sympathy is running in the opposite direction. This is thanks to the workings of himpathy—my term for the tendency to sympathize with the privileged men who commit acts of misogyny over their female victims.

It’s easy, when nobody seems to care about the wrongdoing committed against you, to feel hurt or betrayed or lost. It’s possible, in some cases, to begin to feel crazy. If a wrongful act is one which an “impartial spectator” would disapprove of, to borrow (and simplify) a notion from the great eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, then what does it say when even your loved ones shrug about your violation?

It suggests it doesn’t matter. It suggests you don’t matter. And if you can’t reconcile that with your basic moral sense of what one human being may permissibly do to another, then how can you ever stop telling your story and looking for the right reaction? One that echoed your own screaming? As the epigraph of Fleishman reads: Summon your witnesses (Aeschylus).

In Brodesser-Akner’s novel, Toby Fleischman, the husband character, has a dream. His ex-wife is accusing him: “Why didn’t you save me, Toby?” (For the record, Toby is clearly distinct from Brodesser-Akner’s real-life husband. Still, the question lingers.) This isn’t a question of white knights. There are situations where anyone, whatever their gender, needs help from those around them.

How can we help others when they scream into the void and face the profound indifference of a silent majority of people who do not care, or care enough, about their plight? How can we help the girls and women, in particular, who are raped, beaten, strangled, violated, and tortured, while third parties stand around shrugging and looking bored—or giggling? Or jerking off to such images?

I don’t know the answer to this question but, in a way, I’ve spent my career trying to bear witness to these forms of moral wrongdoing. I write not so much to convince the second party wrongdoer that he needs to do better—I know he is not reading my words with great interest. I write because third parties are so often indifferent and apathetic. And that does further harm to victims. In some cases, it even exceeds the original harm of being subject to the wrongdoing in the first place. Third party indifference in the face of second party violence is itself a form of violence.

The flipside of this is that third parties who bear witness—and intervene, when possible—can do a great deal of good, even independently of the outcome. A detail from Brodesser-Akner’s story: the most relaxed she ever saw Jack was when he played her the audio recordings of Janet and Buddy communicating with his kidnappers as she prepared to write the essay. She imagines the same—superficially perplexing—relaxed look on her own face when she was on set helping to recreate her birth scene in Fleischman. She was sobbing at the same time. But when people around you demonstrably care, you sometimes find you can breathe through the sobs again.

Chemaly’s book bears out the fact that another powerful thing we can do as third parties, even after the fact, is to get angry on behalf of those who have been subject to grave wrongs and the indifference of society. As feminists, we bear witness and express outrage for all of the girls and women who did not have the interventions and the allies, the active bystanders and the advocates, in the moment—or, indeed, the aftermath. Our anger may or may not change the world and lead to the feminist revolution that I, like many others, am sometimes pessimistic about bringing to fruition. But it still means something. It means something to the people for whom that anger can be a balm, confirming that it mattered. It matters. They matter.

They should have had help. And they are now worth being moved, angry, enraged for.

Readers, have you been the unhelped? Have you been the unmoved? If so, I would love to hear about your experiences in the comments below, or, if you prefer, privately, over email. I may have been numb but I want to bear witness.