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By Anonymous on Monday, January 15, 2018
From 2010-2011, Dylan Vandemark abused and raped me.
It’s 2018, and only now do I feel brave enough to document these experiences.
I hope that this story helps another survivor know they are not alone. I hope that sharing this publicly will hold Dylan accountable for his actions. I hope that writing this will free me of the invisible gag he has been holding over my mouth for the last seven years.
* * *
My first interaction with Dylan was when he voluntarily took the blame for me after I pushed Chris M. to the ground in middle school. Dylan didn’t care if he got in trouble. Everyone knew he had been expelled from his old private school and that that was why he joined our class late in the year.
I didn’t see Dylan again until high school, when he stood behind me and laughed while I yelled at three guys for shoving Chris M. between two vending machines. Dylan explained why me helping Chris was funny.
In that conversation we figured out we were neighbors and later that week Dylan’s father roped me into tutoring his son in algebra.
Soon, rocks started hitting my window at midnight. We began dating.
I found Dylan’s bad boy status attractive. It felt exciting to be around someone who didn’t care about grades or dances or people’s opinions. But I felt special because Dylan cared about me.
The first six months of the relationship were littered with gifts. I was given clothes and jewelry and lavender perfume Dylan insisted I wear. I was all but branded with the symbol of Vandemark. I felt spoiled which made the idea of being mistreated by Dylan and his family an impossibility.
The abuse started so small it was easy to miss. Dylan pushed me off the couch because I took the remote, pinched me because I would say no to getting water for him, and hid my phone from me until I grabbed his charger from a different room. These moments always happened under the guise of laughter.
One night the laughter stopped. Dylan’s father yelled at him about his failing math grade. Their words turned into fists. I went into the hall to leave. Dylan put his hands around my throat threateningly and brought his face inches from him. Only after telling him he was scaring me did he let go.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You know I love you. You’re too sensitive.”
That became Dylan’s fallback: “You’re too sensitive.” When I didn’t like the way Dylan treated me, he would tell me to calm down, that I wasn’t recalling the situation correctly. He would act shocked, say I was hurting him and try to convince me I was making up details. Confused, I started doubting my memory.
While Dylan was gaslighting me, his family was taking advantage of me. At first I was asked to do small things like set the table, feed the dogs, or grab the mail.
Soon I was asked to do more, like cook a meal or run an errand. I was told to do laundry and clean bathrooms and vacuum. Dylan’s dad made comments like, “Does your family even miss you?” and, “They don’t seem to care that much about you,” and “I’m glad at least you have a family here.” They knew my home wasn’t great. They knew I would have given anything to be elsewhere.
My mom told me she didn’t want me to have anything to do with Dylan’s family. She could see that I wasn’t acting like myself anymore. She would call my phone over and over again, but I would turn it off. She would ground me, but I would sneak out. She would show up at Dylan’s house to take me home, but I would hide while his family would say I wasn’t there.
I didn’t want to talk to her because she had remarried. When her other half was around, I was ignored and left out. He was cruel and I didn’t hide the fact that I couldn’t stand him.
In a way, my mom and I were in similar situations.
Not long into dating Dylan, he had made it clear he didn’t like my friends. Disagreements turned violent and it was scary that he kept knives in his room. So I broke up with him.
I wish I could say these red flags had been enough to discourage me from associating with Dylan for good. Instead, I wanted to give him a second chance. I waited.
On cue, I couldn’t log into Facebook anymore.
I called Dylan, who claimed he didn’t do it but said he could probably fix it. All I had to do was come over.
Dylan fixed my account really quickly. Then he asked me to stay for a movie. I did. I still liked him. After, he promised me things would be different and we got back together.
Things did change. During senior year, Dylan took meds for ADHD and bipolar disorder. He told me his stomach hurt, he couldn’t do anything, and he really needed my help.
“Besides, don’t you want to help me? Don’t you love me?”
He asked me to feed his small farm of animals, stack firewood and give his dog its medication. I did. He guilted me into doing his AP Biology homework. I did so much that I think I deserved an honorary AP credit. All the while, my friends were continuing on without me. I had missed bowling nights and movies and parties. I felt far away.
I didn’t want to acknowledge to myself that something was wrong. I also didn’t want to get Dylan in trouble. His father hit him. I convinced myself that everything was okay. But everything got worse.
Dylan and I argued more. One night, angry at him for lying about being the one who hacked my Facebook, I grabbed his phone and held it over my head. He lunged, grabbed me by the neck, and slammed me into the side of his bed.
“You deserved it,” was what he told me. I was in shock. I held my side while tears streamed down my cheeks. I remember thinking, Maybe it was my fault.
“Stop exaggerating. It didn’t hurt that much.”
Similarly, when Dylan accused me of flirting with a classmate I got up to leave. Before I knew what was happening, Dylan threw a metal throwing star which grazed my arm and stuck with a thud into the door.
“Look what you made me do!” Dylan cried. He jumped up and put his hand over my mouth. “Shhh shhh shh you know I love you, you know I wouldn’t do that on purpose.”
I believed that. How could this be the same person who cuddled me by campfires? Who had volunteered to come and hold my hand when I needed blood drawn? It didn’t make sense that someone who tucks my hair behind my ear and sends me goodnight texts could harm me.
But then, Dylan knew me too well. My fears were never far from his tongue. He could be gentle and sweet while he cut my heart out.
Comments about my body hit me the hardest. He veiled his criticism with concern. He was fixated on my chest.
“If you got a boob job you would be a lot prettier.”
“Why don’t you buy push-up bras?”
“Why do you want to look like a boy?”
Dylan went so far as to buy me soy milk because he had researched ‘my problem’ and found that it could help.
He told me he would break up with me if I cut my hair. Then he begged me to go blonde because then I would be hot. He wanted me to work out more so my arms would be toned and my butt would be curvier.
It turns out you can get away with saying just about anything to a teenage girl if you tell her it was said out of love.
Dylan had only started damaging my self esteem. The verbal abuse had just begun.
“You’re lucky anybody loves you.”
“You’re fucking stupid.”
“I’m going to lose control if you don’t shut the fuck up.”
Dylan would call me a piece of shit. Five minutes later I was the best thing that ever happened to him. In one breath, he would say I was beautiful and that I might die.
Dylan said something similar the night he drove us miles away on a dirt back road and, grinning, told me we weren’t leaving until he got “at least a blowjob.”
Coerced oral sex became a regular occurance. Once I tried to get out of the car and Dylan jerked me backwards by my hair, leaned over and slammed the car door on my hand. He told me I was a bitch. Another night I refused to get in the car altogether. Dylan’s headlights followed me the whole walk home. Before he drove off he made a gun with his fingers and pretended to shoot me through the windshield.
It wasn’t a coincidence that the next day he beat me with a belt. After he hit me he wrapped his arms around me, kissed me and insisted he didn’t mean to do it that hard, that he was joking. Dylan was also only joking the day he threw me fully clothed into his bathtub and turned the shower on. Jokes have laughter and Dylan had definitely been laughing.
I kept the abuse hidden. Concealer, scarves, long sleeves. Ignoring concerned texts, eating lunch alone in the corner of a unsuspecting teacher’s classroom, pretending to be sick to get out of family birthdays. I was scared, broken, and unsure of myself. That’s when he started raping me.
The first time Dylan raped me we were in his room watching TV and he started pulling my shirt off.
“No, I don’t want to.”
“Stop being like that,” he said. “We have sex all the time.”
“No.”
I stood up, ready to argue. He pulled me close and unbuttoned my jeans. I pushed him backwards and he stumbled.
In an instant, everything changed.
His face filled with red fury. He shoved me into a nightstand, then rolled me onto his bed.
He ripped down my pants. He tore off my underwear. He flipped me over and pinned me to the bed, holding my arms behind me.
He raped me.
I cried while it happened.
After, I ran to the bathroom and wiped away my blood.
Dylan’s voice came through the door.
“You okay?”
I didn’t realize that that was rape. I didn’t realize you could be raped by someone you were dating. I didn’t know that it could be simple and that you could feel mostly okay ten minutes after it happened. I thought rape was dramatic and with strangers and that it had to tear your life apart. I thought you’d know it when you saw it.
It’s been seven years since Dylan Vandemark first raped me and just writing it down has made me feel more vulnerable than I have ever felt in my entire life.
The times Dylan raped me were often angry responses to being told “no.” I learned to lay still and stop crying because normality seemed to be restored faster when I didn’t struggle. When he had finished, Dylan would kiss me and then head for the shower, leaving me bruised and tangled in blood-stained sheets.
Here’s the thing about rape—you get used to it. Your mind finds something else to focus on. I can still hear a song by Serani about respecting and taking pride in your woman that would often float over us.
On such an occasion Dylan grabbed me in his barn and pulled me to the ground for sex. I let it happen. I let my mind go.
Later I stood in front of a mirror with dirt in my hair and I told myself This is love. You’re fine.
Around Thanksgiving we had unprotected sex.
Weeks went by. Gravity doubled. I napped for hours a day, every smell made me nauseous and I was permanently lightheaded. However, it wasn’t until my boobs started hurting that I noticed my nipples darkened and it dawned on me that I had missed more than one period.
It was January when I found out I was pregnant. My best friend bought me an EPT and held me in a girl’s bathroom stall while we listened to the high school band play in the next room. Later I bought another test, hoping the first was wrong.
Before telling Dylan I put his bed between us.
“It’s not mine!” were the first words out of his mouth. He backed away, panic in his eyes, hands in the air. He told me we weren’t keeping it. He paced around a lot. He googled ways to induce an abortion at home. He told me I could take all of my birth control pills at once. He found a forum that advised ingesting household cleaners.
Instead, he settled for dragging me to the stairs. I clawed for the wooden railing but couldn’t manage to grab it before Dylan shoved me down.
The pregnancy affected me. Dylan’s abuse affected me. I couldn’t focus in school. I failed my chemistry final. I sat through my statistics final fighting tears, every minute eyeing the girls’ bathroom door across the hall. When it was over, I locked myself in one of the stalls and sobbed. I tried punching myself in the stomach and cried more because I couldn’t seem to punch myself very hard. I checked my underwear every hour waiting for some sign of blood.
I wanted more than anything for this mistake to be erased.
When I decided to go to Planned Parenthood, Dylan refused to go with me. My best friend took me. I lay with my feet in cold metal stirrups, in a paper gown, staring up at an orange sunset poster. This facility didn’t have an ultrasound machine so my doctor slid her fingers inside me and pushed. “Oh yeah. You’re really swollen. I’d say between 6 and 8 weeks.”
I refused the on-site counseling because I didn’t want to talk about my relationship with Dylan. I was also worried that I would somehow be talked into keeping it. My abortion was set for nine days later.
The night before my appointment, lying in bed, Dylan put his head on my stomach and looked up at me. He began laying plans for our future. He told me when he graduated high school he could work for his dad and get us an apartment. He wanted to be a family—him, me, and it. He knew it was a boy. He said we would name him Nathaniel.
“Can we keep it?”
I hesitated. I was afraid to voice my opinion.
But I already knew this future meant I couldn’t start college in the fall—my one goal.
“No.”
He eventually agreed, but the day of the abortion he refused to come with me.
“Why? You promised.”
He said his stomach was upset. Instead, that same friend drove me over an hour away to the clinic.
Planned Parenthood comped half the expense, citing a “private donation,” and I paid the other $400 alone. Dylan promised to help pay for it later.
On Wednesday, January 26th, 2011, a nurse with a mustache finger tattoo gave me an internal ultrasound. She asked me if I wanted to see it on the screen.
But I had a lot of mixed feelings about it that I had been trying really hard not to acknowledge.
“No.” I closed my eyes and turned away.
A voice in my head panicked. This is your only chance. Ever.
“Wait…”
The screen displayed a small white alternate universe resting in my uterus.
I felt so fucking guilty.
In another life, this could have been a beautiful moment. Instead, for me, it was bittersweet. The nurse kept talking but I stopped hearing her. I saw her grab my ultrasound printout and watched as it fluttered to the bottom of a nearby trash can.
I took a mifepristone pill at the clinic and went home with vials of pills, including buccal misoprostol, which I dissolved along my upper and lower gums 24 hours later.
After school on January 27th, I waited for the cramps and chills to go away while lying under four blankets. They didn’t.
Pills. Puke. Blood clots.
I only got a few hours of sleep that night before I had to go to school and act like everything was normal.
During my follow up appointment, my doctor confirmed the abortion was successful. At the end of the of the visit she paused. Thoughtfully, slowly, speaking to a faded bruise on my wrist she told me that it was safe for me to start having sex again but that if I wanted to, I could tell my partner that she said I needed to wait another 6 weeks.
I didn’t take this concern seriously. Overall I was relieved. It was done. Final. I couldn’t change it. I also assumed Dylan would be sympathetic towards me. I truly thought my life would go back to a level of normal that I could handle.
I was wrong.
Moving farther into winter, Dylan’s anger towards me intensified. I wasn’t the same person to him anymore. In his eyes, I was the one who fucked up. Though he agreed to the abortion, though he told me he didn’t want responsibility for a baby either, it was my fault. He held knives to my throat and choked me against the wall of his barn. He alternated these with passionate kisses.
He spat on me. He locked me in a closet. He cried and said if I left him he would kill himself. He ripped shirts he didn’t want me wearing to school. He apologized on his knees. He swore if I walked out that door he would find me and kill me.
I needed air.
While at a party, I walked in on Dylan under a blanket with someone else. I spent the next few hours outside alone glaring at the moon.
His dad picked us up and I exploded the second the car door closed. Dylan started yelling back and I smacked him across the face. Without hesitation Dylan hit back even harder. His dad saw all of it. He told us to knock it off. Minutes later he told Dylan that maybe he should pick a less sensitive girlfriend next time.
A text sent in the early hours of the next morning read, “Nothing happened. I promise.”
Apologies. Gifts. More promises.
Less than a month later four girls from class went over to Dylan’s house. Dylan waited a week before he told me about this encounter. One of these girls tried to kiss him and kept putting her hand on his thigh. I was beside myself. I yelled and swore. I called them bitches, sluts, and ugly whores.
For reasons I will never understand, Dylan told them what I said.
I am left to assume he played the victim and made me out to be a mean, controlling girlfriend.
From then on, the tide changed at school. I was hated. Ignored. Snubbed. Laughed at. Deleted.
In the hallway, I heard some girls whisper “bitch” as I walked by. Their giggles followed me into the bathroom. Someone I hadn’t talked to in a year told me to kill myself on three separate occasions.
The girl who kissed Dylan made it her mission to alienate me from my last few friends. She circulated a conversation where one of my friends agreed that I was “a fucking cunt.” It worked.
My own mini crusade had started, and to this day I have never felt more alone. I leaned into it. I went reckless. I quit band, my favorite class, because my teacher kept asking me if I was okay. I pissed off some of the last remaining people who would talk to me. I lied a lot. I ruined a friendship that was dear to me—and have regretted it ever since.
I spiraled. School had been my one refuge and Dylan took that away from me.
I fantasized about car accidents and suffocating myself with car exhaust. I sat in my bathtub and held razors to my wrist. I thought about killing myself every night. I counted the number of steps between my bed and the butcher’s block downstairs, between my bed and the medicine cabinet. I stood at the top of the stairs at 2 a.m. and cried, hating myself for being too weak to take another step. Because, every night at 2 a.m. my dog’s giant, sleepy eyes waited at the bottom of the stairs to greet me.
Fragile and broken, I took a marker and wrote a suicide note on my closet wall. I started it with “If I kill myself” and ended it with “I’m sorry mom. Tell [my little sister] I love her.” Nowhere in that note did Dylan get the credit he deserved. Somewhere between deciding where to kill myself and wishing anybody would know to help me, I fell asleep.
I begged my mother to take me to therapy. She was so angry with me, she ignored me.
Over February vacation, I told her I was going to kill myself.
I didn’t tell her how trapped and worthless I felt. I didn’t tell her about the abuse, the rape or the abortion.
She said I was being dramatic, so I walked out.
My mother called the police on me. I told the officers what I told my mom and showed them the places where I had been cutting myself. I was brought to the ER.
The relief I felt was short lived. The second my doctor determined that my injuries hadn’t been life threatening and that he needed my bed for other patients, my mother dragged me home.
She didn’t talk to me again except to wake me up two days later and say, “You’re going to school.”
I sat in AP English and pretended I had finished reading Beloved.
I was invisible, and doing a good job of it until one girl who had stopped talking to me started a passionate condamnation of Sethe, the mother who kills her children to spare them from a life of slavery.
“WHAT DID WE JUST READ? What kind of a person would kill their daughter? That’s heartless! I don’t care who you are, how could you do that?” On and fucking on.
I shouted at her.
“You don’t know what you would do until you are in the situation!”
Our teacher looked from one to the other and said “You do have to consider the context of the situation.” I stared at the girl for a long time but she wouldn’t look at me.
Dylan also wasn’t looking at me when I snuck into his room and guiltlessly snooped on his phone and found plans to cheat on me that night.
I snapped.
In revenge, I took a letter of recommendation a friend had written him for college, opened it, and added that he was a cheater, a liar and a terrible person. But I’m guessing I didn’t reseal it very well because that same February night he dragged me, gym shorts and t-shirt, into his kitchen and shoved me through the dog door.
LinkedIn, 2018
I stood outside barefoot, bleeding on pee-stained snow and ice for 15 minutes. It was less than 5 degrees. When I eventually got inside, my skin purple and burning, I gathered my things and went to leave but Dylan took my shoes. He called for me to follow him into another room.
But something had clicked for me in Dylan’s backyard that night. The undeniable inhumanity of what he did had spent 15 unbearable minutes sinking in.
I put my socks on and walked the mile home.
I weighed 88 pounds.
After that night, I didn’t talk to anyone for weeks.
Coming back to life hurts. I went to school feeling hazy. I came home and locked myself in my room. I played The Office on my laptop while I laid under a pile of blankets and cried. I would zone out and stare at a wall for hours before eventually falling asleep. I slept with the light on every night.
Dylan would still come over and throw pebbles at my window. I would grab my blanket and go lay on my bathroom floor.
Every day started to feel a little bit brighter and a little less numb. My friend’s mom did me a favor and cut off over a foot of my hair. My appetite came back. Slowly, I felt like me again. I avoided every text and call Dylan sent me. I hid in the bathroom when the bell rang until the day school was over because Dylan would wait for me outside my classes.
Even after it ended, I continued to be reminded of Dylan. Years later I would find several pill bottles and laxatives wrapped in an old tablecloth in the linen closet. My mom told me that during the time I dated Dylan, she thought I had been using them to lose weight. I got an email from Dylan’s mom saying he wrote a beautiful poem about me and that if I wanted to read it I should ask him for it. I didn’t. I told my mom about the abortion and she cried. During a college break I came across my suicide note on my closet wall. I spent that night layering over it with sharpie scribbles and white paint.
I could erase my suicide note but I couldn’t erase Dylan. During my junior year of college, he transferred to my school with his new girlfriend. I found out by running into them on a crowded sidewalk. Heart hammering I shouted “What the fuck!” at Dylan before I turned and ran for my dorm.
His new girlfriend ended up in my capstone ethnography class. Using my rapport with the professor, my advisor, and five of the other girls in class, I shut her out of every class discussion. She became a silent fixture in the back corner of the room. I was so frightened of the mere association with Dylan that I missed a crucial opportunity to reach out to this girl.
Having Dylan at my school jarred me. Seeing him on my campus or walking down a hallway towards me felt like a knife in my gut. The last thing I wanted was a living breathing terrifying reminder of my past life.
Of course, Dylan found my number. He texted me asking to buy back a piece of jewelry he had given me. He wanted it for his new girlfriend.
I couldn’t ignore the text. It was my chance to demand he take his share of responsibility for the unplanned pregnancy.
“Pay me back for your half of the abortion and we can talk about the jewelry,” I said.
Another broken promise.
He was “only interested” in buying the jewelry. I blocked him.
That was the last time I heard from Dylan.
Sadly, that was not the last time I thought of him.
It’s been seven years and I still shake when I think about what Dylan Vandemark can do when he’s angry. To this day I wake up sobbing from nightmares where I am somehow trapped in that prison again. The smell of lavender makes me puke. I can’t be touched on my neck, however innocently, without having a mental breakdown. Songs from my rapes haunt me. Sometimes, at my weakest, I still have to sleep with the lights on.
I’m still scared.
But you can’t stand up for yourself by staying silent.
This is my #MeToo story. This is about how Dylan Vandemark manipulated, abused, and raped me. It’s a warning for anyone that comes across this who might currently be in the same situation. It’s a offering to those who have also been through this. And it’s a promise to everyone that you have the power to leave. You are not alone.
* * *
*Dylan, if you’re reading this, stop hurting people and get professional help. I know that I am not the only one you’ve hurt, and we’re here in numbers now.