For the past 17 years, I have borne a tremendous weight. When I was 22, a powerful man three times my age and three times my size took advantage of my wit and burgeoning sexuality. He told me I was beautiful, muse-like, and movie star material. Our first encounter was benign. We were standing in line at a Starbucks on the Upper West Side. He was with his nine-year-old son. He didn’t say much but shared that he was a film director and confessed that he couldn’t help but notice my profound sexual energy. “I know we just met, but I need to write a script for you.” Pulling from a stack of papers in his back pocket, he tore off a piece of the Village Voice, scribbled his name, number, and the titles of two films he had made, When Will I Be Loved and Two Girls and a Guy. He told me to call him. Intrigued by his proposition, I did the next day. Since then, I have carried the gravity of my secrets.
Secrets kept from family and friends are heavy, but the accumulation of shame that prevents such secrets from being shared is the most oppressive. By now, his name is no secret and I am no longer ashamed. His name is James Toback, and for five years, he strung me along while demanding sexual favors. For those five years, I kept the details of our meetings to myself. Until I told my therapist about them in 2013, I had believed these interactions were my fault and the result of my stupidity. What’s most shocking is that I had never considered his manipulation tactics as a form of abuse. I was so fixated on my own poor choices that I never entertained the part he played in my shame. The biggest blow to my ego, however, was that this movie never materialized. Not only had I performed sexual favors for this man, but I had truly believed that this script he was writing for me would eventually emerge. I had convinced myself that if I just continued showing up and doing what I was told, he would make me a star, and all my financial woes would vanish.
Brynn Shiovitz in 2011.Courtesy of Brynn Shiovitz.
I remember mentioning Toback in passing during one of my therapy sessions. I felt so embarrassed to admit that I massaged his nipples that I hid inside my sweater while sharing this secret with my most trusted listener. I remember my therapist then asking how massaging his nipples made me feel, and without hesitation, I responded, “Disgusting. He was disgusting. I am disgusting.” As I replayed the image in my head, I remember this feeling of repulsion taking over my body almost instantly. I wanted to vomit. And that’s when it hit me. For the past five years, I had unconsciously forgotten the details of my encounters with Toback, not because they were insignificant but because they were so impactful that I had to repress all of them.
I chose to work on other parts of my less-than-perfect self during therapy rather than confront what had happened with Toback—until the world confronted it for me, that is. When the #MeToo movement broke out in the fall of 2017 and people started posting their stories of assault and abuse, I felt insincere in not acknowledging this skeleton in my closet. I realized that this problem was more pervasive than I had ever imagined. Reading others’ stories made it nearly impossible to ignore my past encounters with sexual assault and difficult not to feel a set of mixed emotions: sadness, shame, and rage were just a few. As other brave women started coming forward about Toback, I felt empowered to face this head-on. I contacted Los Angeles Times journalist Glenn Whipp, who was actively investigating Toback’s abuse. He put me in touch with at least a dozen other women who had also been subjected to the director’s grooming.
Lucky for me, I have always been a woman of many words and found great comfort in journaling. I wrote down every conversation, every sexual act, and everything I felt as a result of that very first meeting with Toback in November 2008 up through my last meeting with him in the fall of 2013. Ironically, the last time I met him in New York was also at an uptown Starbucks, though this meeting was a little less benign. I cry for the younger version of myself who didn’t have the courage to scream then and there.
James Toback, January 2015.By Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images.
About two weeks into the #MeToo movement, I revisited the four journals I kept during my time with the director. When I kept these meticulous records, I convinced myself that the sole purpose of these journals was so that one day I could write a book: These meetings were too extraordinary not to record. Revisiting them in 2017, I realized that there was another reason I kept them: I needed to process a set of colossal emotions. Because I kept almost all parts of my relationship with Toback a secret, these journals became a series of confessions, a way to try and process feelings that felt bigger than me.
What I found in these journals shocked even me, but as I read, visceral memories—smells, sounds, textures—all began flooding back. For better or for worse, I began to relive these encounters. I remembered them, grappled with them, and began the work of sharing them, first with my therapist and then with my most trusted friends. While it had taken me several years to accept that Toback’s sexual demands were abuse, these journals made it completely obvious that the process he put me through was a textbook case of grooming.
In rereading these four journals (more than once), the thing that kept returning to haunt me was the level of disgust and shame I experienced throughout those five years. Toback was this abject human who simultaneously fascinated and repulsed me. Touching him made me feel, momentarily, special and immediately revolting. The ways in which he used his power to feed off my preexisting insecurities are obvious in retrospect. In the moment, however, my anxiety got the best of me.
