Marcel Winatschek

The Name She Said Out Loud

Nike van Dinther said my name on a podcast. She hadn’t planned to—you could hear it in the pause, that half-second before ach scheiße, jetzt habe ich den Namen gesagt, and then she kept going anyway. Ja, komm, ist mir scheißegal.

The episode was the fifteenth installment of Jane Knows Wayne, the podcast she runs with her co-founder Sarah Gottschalk out of the German fashion blog This is Jane Wayne. The subject was Harvey Weinstein, #MeToo, and their own encounters with harassment and assault. Nike talked about how she used to wonder—genuinely, philosophically—why women who were assaulted felt guilty instead of immediately going to the police. Then she described the night she understood why.

A press trip to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 2011. Jägermeister was sponsoring, which tells you everything you need to know about the drinking. She knew the man well—the editor-in-chief of a fairly well-known German online magazine, someone whose site ran a lot of sex-and-tits content, but you told yourself that was just clickbait and he was fine. He offered to walk her to her room. They ended up in his. She wasn’t into him, wasn’t looking for anything, but she trusted him. He told her to sleep while he went back out. She fell asleep.

She woke up with his fingers inside her. Flotte Finger in meiner Vagina, she said, and her voice stayed steady. She was paralyzed—not exactly by fear, but by a shame she hadn’t known was in her until that moment. She pretended to stay asleep. Shifted her body until he stopped. Watched through half-closed eyes as he got up naked and went to shower. Got dressed and left while the water was running. The next morning she acted like nothing had happened. Sarah had been on the phone with her that day—ist das überhaupt passiert? Habe ich mir das eingebildet?—and Sarah had told her: you don’t imagine something like that.

For weeks she couldn’t shake it. She tried, eventually, to draw out a confession over Skype—oblique, asking whether maybe something had happened between them that night, she’d been so drunk. His response was the kind of defensive over-explanation that only makes sense if you have something to hide. She never told anyone after that. She was afraid of him being well-liked, of being called a liar. It was, she said, the first time in her life she felt genuinely connected to every woman who has experienced something far worse and still couldn’t open her mouth.

I could leave it there. I could call her a liar. I could confess. What I can do instead is say what I’ve already told Nike herself, more than once, in text and in person and face to face: I don’t know what happened that night. What I remember is running into her late in the corridor and the two of us ending up in her room—not mine, I was sharing with a friend. We sat on the bed and watched television. That’s where my memory ends. The next morning everything felt strange and I didn’t know why.

I’m not a good person when I drink. Not aggressive—more likely to get clingy, or to just vanish, which is why I try to keep a lid on it. I don’t like who I become. And I’ve made enough mistakes in my past that I genuinely cannot rule out that what Nike describes is true. "I don’t know" is the oldest excuse there is. It’s also the truth I have.

The morning after I acted strange around her because she was acting strange around me. I assumed it was the awkwardness of waking up in the same bed, or that something had happened between us that the alcohol had erased for both of us—compounded by the fact that she had a boyfriend at the time. Maybe I was naive about what I’d done. Probably I was.

Sexual assault isn’t a gray area. Can I honestly say I’ve never pushed someone toward something intimate when I had no business doing so? No, I can’t. Am I proud of that? No. Do I have a defense? No. What I can say is that I didn’t cut contact afterward—I went looking for the conversation multiple times. I told her I was sorry if something bad had happened that night. Blaming the alcohol is easy and justifies nothing. Can you apologize for something you can’t confirm occurred? I don’t know the answer to that. Maybe an apology is already an admission. Maybe it should be.

Before that night, Nike and I got along well. We’d been to Prague together, to Hamburg, to Cologne—lunch in Berlin, drinks in good bars. I liked her, I liked Sarah, I liked what they were building. I’m still sad about what this did to all of that. I can’t blame her for it. It just hurts.

She had every right to tell the story. I believe in what #MeToo was trying to force into the open—a thing this world had spent decades quietly agreeing to look past. Nike, I would still like to know what really happened in that room. For your sake and mine. Maybe that’s not even true. Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe what it would show me about myself is something I’m not ready to face. My hope is that we can talk again someday, plainly, without the wreckage in the way. But hope like that tends to stay exactly what it is.