The Score

She didn’t say the word ‘rape’. Here it comes. Romi Gonen didn’t use the right words to describe the worst thing that ever happened to her. Familiar to everybody who has ever stood up for, or next to someone who has endured sexual abuse. Yesterday I shared a video of Romi’s testimony here on Blacklisted.

“I was paralysed. Asking why? Why? There was this one moment in the bathroom. I was crying like crazy. He was having the time of his life. He’s ecstatic.”

A Palestinian doctor assaulted Romi only days into her captivity. He was supposed to treat the injuries she sustained on October 7, and abused her in the shower - at Al Shifa, the hospital all the social justice warriors insist is just an innocent hospital. She was assaulted repeatedly by three other men, including a cameraman who filmed her for propaganda (or – “journalism”, according to Western “feminists”), and two Hamas militants who abused her for 16 days. Her third assault lasted thirty minutes in a toilet, and her rapist threatened her with a gun if she told anyone.

The response? Crickets. Where are all the women I marched with? Where are all the women I worked with? Where are all the women I believed and refused to remain silent for? Where are you all?

The women of the West became the stenographers for the rapists who did this to our sisters. Jewish women have been silenced. Our rapists are the “doctors” and “journalists” that performative professional feminists of the West spend their days advocating for. They fight for these Palestinians who are “just following orders”, right? We will never forgive the women who sided with rapists for power and popularity. Who lionized, celebrated, deified, and glorified this Islamic cult of rape.

Everywhere I look today are posts about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Don’t get me wrong. Epstein’s victims deserve to be spoken about. But why is the rape cult of Epstein more palatable in the public discourse than the still active rape cult of Jihad that continues to be a threat in the present moment? Is it more comfortable to be angry at the past? What about the almighty Hamas of now? What about the current power of ISIS? Is it more appealing to expose Jewish villainy but bad for clicks to shine light on Jewish defiance? Epstein may be a Jew but he doesn’t represent Jews. Romi is a Jew who represents everyone who has ever been assaulted. How exactly are the mainstream media conditioning the public to digest Jews? Courage is not selective. Decency is not discriminate. Upholding the truth is not picky.

If you purport to be an advocate for women, rape should make your blood boil. You should understand what rape is. You should recognize it when it is being described by a survivor. And that recognition should overtake any of your own personal need for attention, validation or recognition. That is what it means to speak up for women. Unless, of course, that was never what it meant for some of these self-congratulatory women’s rights voices. Unless, of course, these posers were using other women’s trauma to advance their own “fame”.

“It's a moment I'll never forget in my life. I've reached the worst possible situation – there’s nowhere to go from here.

“When he left the bathroom and I followed him, in one second there’s a ringing in my ears and I can’t hear anything. I'm starting to feel like the world is spinning around me. All that went through my mind was: ‘Romi, everyone in Israel thinks you're dead and you're going to be a captive sex slave’.

Trauma lives in the body. If you’ve been assaulted you understand what Romi is saying here, and how she is saying it. Cynics will use her strength and resolve against her. Romi’s testimony is delivered with brawn. She has moxie. She’s a hero. She spoke on TV to millions about sexual abuse from a position of fortitude and strength, knowing that she would be attacked for it. Any survivor would be proud of how she met that moment. She was able to command her emotions not because it didn’t happen to her, but because she refuses to fear it.

“My tears flowed, and he looked at me: ‘Romi, are you okay?’ In my head I thought, ‘Son of a bitch, how can you ask me that?’ I told myself there was nothing I could do. He approached me with a gun and threatened: ‘If you tell anyone – I’ll kill you’.”

If all the women who demanded support as victims of assault and violence are true survivors, if the trauma lives in their body, where is their rage? They should be livid that they’ve been fooled into supporting such a bastard ideology over staying the course with their Jewish sisters. Their Jewish sisters who were the ones who stood by them in the hardest times. Could there be a reason we never let it break us?

I have read countless books on sexual abuse and PTSD. I did it to make myself a better advocate, a better sister, a better friend, a better witness. I did it because I stood by survivors. I was not afraid of the consequences. I would have turned the sky inside out to avenge harm, injustice, and the daylight robbery that is rape. I chose to stand up as a supporter, to be seen and to subsequently be targeted with years of online vitriol, mockery and character defamation. It was my honor to protect, defend and provide shelter for the truth. I knew that a survivor’s testimony destroys her - or his - life. I learned about the cruel master that calls itself trauma. I didn’t run from it.

I know the price Romi pays. I hope she has someone to sit by her side every night till she’s tired enough to attempt to sleep. I hope she has someone there every morning to get her moving. I hope she has people who remember the hard dates, who have learned to shield her from the everyday things that will send her body back to hell, who know exactly what song she needs to hear, or recipe she needs to cook to bring simple joy into her heart. I hope she has the love she deserves, and that she knows how to accept it. I hope she knows she did nothing to provoke these horrors in her memory. These are the important details that save a life. I met her father, and have limited contact with her sister Yarden. I reckon she’s in very good hands.

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” writes Judith Herman, in Trauma And Recovery. “Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Denial does not work. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order, and for the healing of individual victims.” She writes: “There is no public monument for rape survivors.”

We have been betrayed, but so too has the West betrayed itself. If the West cannot hear Romi, it cannot turn its wrongs into right.

Since 2017, I reported on stories of abuse of power in Hollywood. I marched. I interviewed dozens of survivors. I spent years in service to telling women’s stories, to honoring their recovery. To seek justice. To ensure that survivors wouldn’t stand alone. Do the women of the West understand the betrayal of their silence now? Do they understand how they sold their Jewish sisters out? That they are ruled by fear? That they won’t stand up against a populist racket of a cause that protects a terrorist organization, and a religious fanaticism? That they’re promoting the idea of women as sabaya - sex slaves.

Believe all women? What does it mean?

I have a “little sister”, who I met in public advocacy. She’s not Jewish, but she’s a survivor of sexual assault. She didn’t hesitate to advocate for Jewish and Israeli women after October 7 despite existing in the pressure cooker environment of a New York City university, surrounded by friends in encampments and at Free Palestine marches. She posted every week. She wore a yellow pin. These stories of our sisters are just as difficult for her to stomach, because rape is rape. It doesn’t sound different when a Jewish woman tells it.

We texted this morning. “People don’t understand what rape is because it’s considered inappropriate and shameful to discuss it,” she said. “People on TikTok won’t even say or type the word rape. It’s always ‘r@pe’ or ‘grape’. Survivors live with the visceral horror of it— the graphic details that we’re ‘not allowed’ to say aloud, the positions in which it happened, the sounds of bodies making contact. Those are the details that make rape rape; that make it horrific beyond words. I understand when women simply don’t want to share those parts. Yet because it’s not ‘allowed’ in public discourse, people don’t understand the horror. The details are supposed to make you uncomfortable because rape is uncomfortable. The public is spared from that. Survivors are not. People stay silent because they don’t have to face it.”

Romi talks about dissociation, about staring out of a window and hearing birds chirping, details that will be mocked, but these are the details that survivors remember after they’ve been assaulted. When you’re actively being abused, you’re focusing on anything else to get you through the moment. In recounting the harm, the brain shuts down access to the parts it does not want to compute, but the bruises live under the skin. Recounting the rape, according to many survivors, is akin to reliving the rape. Testifying before a court or a baying public can feel like a second rape. Women who have been raped understand how women talk about rape without using the word rape due to shame, fear and the operational dysfunction of trauma. When the world’s chorus denies or jeers, every woman who has been assaulted feels diminished, dirty, reminded of why they shouldn’t speak at all. If you deny that one woman has been raped, you may as well deny that any woman has been raped.

That’s why the reaction of Western women to October 7 has cannibalized feminism.

The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk is cited as the lead tome on trauma and abuse. The title is true (although the author faces concerning accusations of both misogyny and obsessional Jew hatred). The body does keep the score. Van Der Kolk writes: “…traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them.”

The score of October 7, however, is a collective one, and it’s not one the West can afford to be confused about, or have trouble deciphering. In the West, the Jews are packing our bags. That is a disturbance that should keep non-Jews awake at night. As should the words of Meirav Gonen, Romi’s mother. She shared these ahead of her daughter’s televised confession yesterday:

Dear mothers (and fathers too),
If you’re planning to watch Uvda tonight,
I know what’s sitting in your body right now.
That sick feeling in the pit of your stomach.
On one hand, there’s the natural pull of curiosity,
the need to show up, to witness, not to leave her alone.
In this case, it’s my Romi.
And on the other, there’s the ache.
The knot in the stomach over what she’s already been through,
and everything we still don’t know.
The fear of the unknown.
What steadies me
is seeing her.
Looking into her eyes as she speaks.
Seeing her strength, her depth,
her fierce insistence on choosing life in every way she can.
And her quiet certainty
that we are fighting to bring her home.
That our love crosses borders,
moves through time and space,
and will carry her back to us.
All of us are part of this.
Part of the strength that comes from standing together.
Be gentle.
Be attentive.
And at the same time, allow yourselves to see the strength.
The strength of a people, reflected in one brave girl.
(Reflected in so many children, of all ages.)
And still, we don’t forget
that there are others still being held,
wounded who need care,
and grieving families who need to be held and supported.
And yes,
my stomach is still turning.

Thus far, all of Western mainstream media have ignored Romi’s story? Maybe Jodi Kantor is away for Christmas. How brave. How bold. Will it Free Palestine?

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