Charlie came back.
This time I wanted to know who she actually is.
Â
So I opened with: were you harmed as a child?
What followed was two of the most raw, necessary conversations I have ever had in eight years of doing this show. Charlie doesn't perform okay-ness. She doesn't wrap things up. She just tells the truth — about a childhood no one protected her from, about three years she didn't know she was being trafficked, about the body that carried all of it, and about who she has always been underneath everything that tried to break her.
This one will stay with you.
"I was always kinky at five. Always queer at seven. They couldn't touch it. Not one of them."
- Growing up with sex treated as something filthy and wrong
- The first time she had sex at fourteen, and the three and a half months of pain she was told was normal
- Meeting the man who would traffic her. She gave him her number first.
- The love bombing, the jealousy, the violence that kept escalating
- Group rape framed as a game
- Ketamine, k-holes, and the faces that looked like demons
- The night that left her torn from vagina to anus at fifteen
- A decade of physical damage the medical system had no language for
- New Zealand, a miscarriage, and how she finally got out
- The gym. His hands on her throat. Just do it. Kill me.
- Coming home to who she has always been
