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#are abused or exploited

wilwheaton · 2 years

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How did you get into acting? Was it something you've always wanted to do?

My mother forced me to become an actor when I was seven, and then refused to let me quit, even though I literally begged her to stop making me work. She used and exploited me to get things she wanted for herself.

I sincerely believed acting was something I wanted to do, because my mother manipulated and gaslighted me my entire childhood. I was completely brainwashed. By the time I was old enough to realize that not only was it not my idea, but that I didn't have to be an actor any more if I didn't want to, I was terrified I would be the huge failure my abusive father always made me believe I was, so I kept trying to be an actor well into my 30s.

In my 40s, I decided to retire from acting on-camera, and use what I'd learned over the years to work as a voice actor, audiobook narrator, and writer. I'm a New York Times bestselling author! And number on audiobook narrator!

I just turned 50 in July. I'm still doing the performing and entertaining work I'm pretty good at, but I'm only doing it on my terms. My favorite thing I'm doing right now is hosting The Ready Room, the official online destination for all things Star Trek universe.

I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life. I'm truly thriving. I've been married for almost 24 years, I have two wonderful children and a daughter-in-law I love like my own. It's a really good life, but I'm not going to lie: I had to crawl through a LOT of shit to get here.

#tw child abuse #tw abuse #tw child exploitation #stage mothers #child actor #survivors

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froody · 1 month

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I saw a slideshow about which states in the U.S. allow child marriage and the comments were like “Yes but that’s with parental permission.” as though that somehow makes it better. The institution of child marriage throughout history has generally been precipitated by parents selling their children for higher social standing, financial gain or simply because they no longer want to be responsible for them. It was not a phenomenon caused by loved children being stolen off the street in broad daylight.

As someone from a rural area in the south, almost everyone has at least one female family member who was a child bride. Usually the story is that girl’s parents said “You’re 14, that 30 year old who is perversely interested in you has a good job and will be a good provider. We approve of you marrying him because we can’t be arsed to care about you and a woman’s worth is only as a mother and wife.”

This is still happening to this day in fundamentalist religious communities through the U.S. where a girl’s worth is often based on how chaste and ‘innocent’ she seems, older women seen as more worldly and impure by virtue of being more wise. So many fundies get married at 17, 18, 19 or 20 and their parents would probably marry them off at a younger age if they could. And sometimes they still do.

#child abuse #child exploitation #child marriage #it’s often the same thing with trafficking scenarios #misogyny

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furiousgoldfish · 8 months

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Abusive parents will raise you so that every time you're in a room with another person you'll be asking yourself 'What if I'm not being useful enough? What if I'm being a burden right now? Could I have done something different? Can I do anything more to prove that I'm not a hindrance and a waste of space?" and then, when you're already using your entire life to do other people's bidding in hope that one day someone will love you, they'll attack you for being selfish, lazy, worthless, inconsiderate, greedy and spoiled little brat.

#and while you're running yourself ragged everyone will exploit you to the fullest #abusive parents #child abuse #raising children into endless servitude #for just a hope of deserving humanity and love #cruel upbringing #toxic parents #fucking stupid accusations #projection #they will never acknowledge what they did to you #but attack you as if you did it to them

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tanadrin · 4 months

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What response would you recommend to people attacking shipping? For that matter, what response would you recommend to Hamas doing that thing they did last October, which everyone has decided didn't happen and wouldn't matter if it did? I don't think the current response is good, but the alternative being offered is literally "roll over and die."

We are so far past a reasonable response to what Hamas did in October that “well what would you have done?” feels like a question that’s in extraordinarily bad faith, whether or not you mean it that way. A policy genuinely aimed at preventing massacres like the one in October starts with not illegally occupying territory, stalling a peace process indefinitely, and persistently dehumanizing and abusing a large civilian population—by the time we’re asking “how do you respond to a group like Hamas attacking civilians” we are already in the realm of abject policy failures, because a group like Hamas only exists because of Israeli policies. An honest response would be something like “fundamentally reassess our approach to Palestine.”

But if Israel has the kind of politics, and Netanyahu was the kind of leader, capable of doing that, it’s hard to imagine things getting this bad in the first place. This is one reason it’s important to put pressure on governments like the UK and US to criticize Israel’s actions, because the push for restraint is not going to come from within Israeli politics.

#there’s this consistent dynamic in dehumanizing politics #where a population gets abused and oppressed and exploited #for years on end #and when someone in that population #finally lashes out in anger #even does something shocking #their oppressors go ‘see? we told you they were animals’#and uses that as an excuse to maintain the oppression #they were going to continue anyway #the correct response to hamas’s massacre was to do nothing #that would have required extraordinary courage and restraint #but it would have shown Hamas they were wrong about Israel #ditto for that matter 9/11 #the correct response to a provocation #is not to let yourself be provoked!

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canisalbus · 3 months

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sorry im emotonal and going off of the other asks sent about machete and just i need to stress how beautiful it is to me that machete sees himself so undeserving of love and affection and feeling as if vasco's too good for him but despite all that he is so incredibly devoted to vasco and loving towards him (in his own way) but is so incredibly clear to anyone with eyes that just how in love he is with vasco. like it's not done out of a "oh god please never realize that you're too good for me here here let me overdo it with the affection" its done with the "i love you, and will always love you, no matter what happens to us or separates us, and i will give it to you as long as i am able, and if you ever leave, i won't be okay, but will still love you, and want you happy". like he doesn't use his own feelings of being undeserving taint his love or the way he loves for vasco, and it's so, so beautiful

#;M;#oauhh #that's so sweet I'm in shambles and so glad to hear all of that #sometimes I worry about whether I'm communicating their chemistry correctly #it would be so easy for this sort of relationship to gain suffocating and possessive and overall just abusive tones #and even though you could argue it would be a source for juicy drama I just don't want that #Machete could selfishly exploit Vasco's care and altruism without giving anything in return #or worse let his paranoia and jealousy get the better of him and end up destroying them both because if he can't have Vasco no one can #and Vasco could leverage his influence over Machete to manipulate and use him because out of them two he's the more mentally stable one #and it would be easy to take advantage of Machete's vulnerability obedience and his trust that Vasco would never harm him #but I don't know maybe it's a bit tropey and idealistic but I really just want these dogs to be genuinely good for each other #they have so many things working against them already I don't wish to see them backstab each other as well #they have a bit of a 'us against the world' thing going on which I really like #they're not perfect there's issues they're trying to work on but the will to get through it together is there #and I want to make it seem like they wouldn't hesitate to prioritize the other one's happiness and wellbeing at their own expense #if it came to that #anwered #anonymous

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heyftinally · 7 days

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"You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me."

Somehow I don't think this is where Taylor Swift was raised.

Asylums we centers of horrific abuse, primarily of disabled people.

They were tied or chained up.

They were experimented on.

They were sexually abused and raped.

They were beaten.

They were degraded.

They were neglected.

They were murdered.

Asylums served as a way to hide away people with disabilities from society, pretend they never existed, and leave them to die alone, afraid, and in pain. Many having little to no idea why.

The fact that Taylor Swift, an able bodied, neurotypical billionaire who has never encountered even a fraction of the oppression asylum victims did and disabled people still do, thinks this is an acceptable metaphor is nothing short of selfish, vile, out of touch ableism.

She is profiting off of the abuse and the murder of disabled people. She's making light of their abuse by comparing it to her cushy, well to do childhood.

Let's take a look at Taylor Swift's "asylum":

Huge house. Huge yard. Detached two-car garage. In ground pool.

This is not an asylum. It's a home. She had a home. She had her family around her. That family did what they could to support her and make her successful.

That is not asylum life.

She was not experimented on by doctors who believed she was incapable of thinking or feeling. She was not left for dead because nobody could be bothered to clean and feed her when she was incapable of doing so herself. She was not denied access to society or human connection. She was not murdered for being disabled.

Might she have been abused? Sure. Abuse does not make an asylum.

This lyric is nothing short of ableist, and it demonstrates with incredible clarity that Taylor Swift only supports minorities when it makes her look good and suits her purposes. She doesn't care about actually being informed about oppression or being a good person. She'll use minorities in whatever ways she believe will rake in the most profit. She doesn't care who she hurts, as long as she adds another couple millions to her billions.

It's time to demand some real accountability.

#taylor swift #anti taylor swift #taylor swift critical #mental illness #ableism #asylum abuse #mental asylums #mental asylum #abuse #child abuse #medical abuse #medical neglect #medical experimentation #exploitation

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intersectionalpraxis · 2 months

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"A Jerusalem rabbi accused of enslaving 30 women in a cult-like home dubbed the “house of horrors” has pleaded guilty to lesser charges in return for a lax sentence of community service and cash compensation to his victims, according to reports."

"Aharon Ramati had been charged with enslavement, minor assault and obstruction of justice among other charges, but reached a plea agreement for “holding people in conditions akin to slavery,” according to YNetNews."

"The deal came with a cushy sentence of just nine months of community service and $34,000 in damages owed to his victims — and was reached after 11 of the women declined to testify against Ramati because they were too traumatized to face him."

"To control the women, prosecutors said Ramati frightened them by telling them they would face horrific harm at the hands of other-worldly forces if they disobeyed him, isolated them from their families and turned the women against one another to police each other."

"One common punishment in the house was forcing the women to burn their fingers in fire to “simulate hell,” the Times of Israel reported, or making them eat hot peppers."

This man is a monster. He was protected for WELL over a decade and committed atrocities for nearly 15 years against these vulnerable women.

The article states that he only got 9 MONTHS of community service and just owes a mere $34K in "damages"... do these so-called religious men really believe in a higher being? Because I truly can't fathom it. I see them as nothing but predatory, abusive, and violent cultists.

#feminist #social justice #current events #current news #rabbis #jerusalem #abuse tw #torture tw #israel #exploitation

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bigboobyhalo · 17 days

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doxxing is bad, death threats are bad, and also quackity is still 100% culpable in the workplace abuse that happened in quackity studios so for the love of god, don't fucking say it's not his fault at all?? according to lea and other ex-admins, he was literally one of the people actively enforcing insane deadlines for projects. he is NOT innocent here. quackity deserves to feel safe in his home, he should not be doxxed, he should not be threatened, there is nothing that he has done or could do that could ever justify that and anyone who is doing it is scum. but for the love of god don't act like he's just a completely innocent baby who didn't know anything and who can do nooo wrong and now everyone is mad at him for NO reason, because that's bullshit. you can feel sympathy for him without acting as if him being a victim of doxxing erases his role in the workplace abuse at qstudios. these ideas can coexist, there's nuance just like there is in every scenario, you don't need to go all in on either threatening quackity's life or erasing the fact that he was CEO of a company that was exploiting its workers like my god

#sorry like I'm angry and horrified that happened to him!#I'm also still mad at him! workers were being exploited at the company that HE WAS THE CEO OF !!!#DOES THAT EXCUSE DOXXING? NO!! BUT THE DOXXING ALSO DOESN'T EXCUSE THE WORKPLACE ABUSE ToT #banging my head against the wall not every situation is perfectly black and white oh my fucking goddd #qadmin situation #I hate it here.

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alwaysbewoke · 6 months

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THERE'S ALSO A GENOCIDE HAPPENING IN THE CONGO!!!!! THERE'S ALSO A GENOCIDE HAPPENING IN THE CONGO!!!!! THERE'S ALSO A GENOCIDE HAPPENING IN THE CONGO!!!!!

#congo #genocide #horror #congo genocide #conflict minerals #cobalt exploitation #coltan crisis #resource exploitation #human rights abuse #environmental impact #corporate accountability #drc #mineral supply chain

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wilwheaton · 10 months

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When you watch The Curse, you are watching two children who were abused and exploited daily during production. No adults protected us.

This was originally published on my blog in August, 2022.

I had a wonderful time at Steel City Comicon this weekend. It was my first time at this particular con, so I didn’t know there was such a huge contingent of horror fans, creators, and vendors who attend.

I love horror, and I was pretty psyched to be in the same place as John Carpenter and Tom Savini, across the street from the Dawn of the Dead mall. Pittsburgh feels like one of the places horror was invented, at least to me.

A number of these horror fans came to see me, and asked me to sign posters and other things from a movie my parents forced me to do when I was 13, called The Curse. I had to tell each of these people that I would not sign anything associated with that movie, because I was abused and exploited during production. The time I spent on that film remains the most traumatizing time of my life, and though I am a 50 year-old man, just typing this now makes my hands shake with remembered fear of a 13 year-old boy who nobody protected, and the absolute fury the 50 year-old man feels toward the people who hurt him.

I told this story in Still Just A Geek, and I’ve talked about it in some podcasts I did on the promo tour, but I’ve never put it out in public like this, in its entirety.

I suspect someone at the publisher would prefer I tease this and hope it drives book sales from people who want to read all of it, but I honestly don’t want to have another weekend like this one where everything is awesome, except the few times people who have no idea (and why should they) put that fucking poster in front of me, and all the fear, abandonment, and trauma come flooding back as I tell them that I won’t sign it, and why.

To their credit, each person was as horrified as they should have been, told me they had no idea (if they didn’t read my book why would they), and quickly put the poster away. They were all understanding. I am grateful for that.

But I really don’t need to tell this story over and over again, so here it is, with a child abuse and exploitation content warning, so I can just tell people to Google it.

After Stand by Me, everything changed. The attention from entertainment journalists, casting directors, and especially teen magazines came pouring in. The movie was a generational hit, beloved by critics and audiences alike, and every single one of us could pick anything to do next.

River’s parents and his agent got him Mosquito Coast, with Harrison Ford, as his next movie. I also auditioned for the role, but I knew even then that River was going to book the job. He was perfect, and I’d have to wait a little bit for my opportunity to come along.

I went on a lot of theatrical auditions after Stand by Me. I had tons of meetings with directors and the heads of casting at every major studio. It was all a very big deal, and I felt like we were all looking for something really special and amazing as my follow-up to Stand by Me.

At some point, a couple of producers contacted my agent with an offer to play one of the leads in an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space.” The script was titled The Farm. (It would, of course, be changed when the film was released).

I read it. I did not like it. It was a shitty horror movie, and I saw that right away. It was the sort of thing you rented on Friday when the new release you wanted was already out of the store.

My mother, already an incredibly manipulative person, used every tool at her disposal to change my mind. My father threatened me, mocked me, told me “It’s your decision” when it clearly wasn’t. It was all so weird; I didn’t understand why they cared so much.

I told my parents I didn’t like it and didn’t want to do it. I clearly recall thinking it was a piece of shit that would hurt my career.

It wasn’t the first thing that had come our way that I wanted to pass on, and every other time, it hadn’t been a very big deal.

Sidebar: I was cast in Twilight Zone: The Movie, in 1983. The film tells four stories, and I was cast as the kid who can wish people into cartoonland. It was a GREAT role, in a movie I still love. (Note that Twilight Zone had four directors. One of them got three people killed. The segment I was cast in was not that one. I mention this because too many people zero in on this to deflect from what this whole thing is actually about.)

But I was CONVINCED by my parochial school teacher that if I worked on The Twilight Zone, which she had determined was satanic, I would go to hell. (This woman and her bullshit played a big role in my conversion to atheism at a young age, but when she told me that, I was all-in on the supernatural story they taught us in religion class.) I was so scared, more scared than I’d ever been to that point in my life, I cried and wailed and begged my parents to not make me do the movie. And I never told them why, because I was afraid my dad would laugh at me for being weak and afraid. My agent tried to talk me into it, and I wouldn’t budge. It’s the only thing I deeply and truly regret passing on, and I really hate I made that choice for such a stupid reason.

Okay. Back to The Curse.

This time, when I told them how much I hated it, they wouldn’t listen to me. My mother, already an incredibly manipulative person, used every tool at her disposal to change my mind. My father threatened me, mocked me, told me “It’s your decision” when it clearly wasn’t. It was all so weird; I didn’t understand why they cared so much.

That is, until they made me take a meeting with the producers of the movie, in their giant conference room on the top floor of a tall building in Hollywood. All I remember about this place was that it was huge; the table was way too big for the five of us who spread around it, and there were floor-to-ceiling windows on three of the walls, but the room was still dark. There was a weird optical illusion in the center of the table, this thing they sold in the Sharper Image catalog, made from two reflective dishes with a hole in the top of one. You placed an object in the bottom of the bottom dish, and it made it look like that object was floating above the whole thing. They had a plastic spider in it. What a strange detail for me to remember, but it’s as clear in my memory as if I were sitting in that room right now.

One man, who I presumed was the executive producer, was European or Middle Eastern (I didn’t know the difference then, he was just Not Like People I Knew), and I was instantly afraid of him. He was intimidating, and seemed like a person who got what he wanted.

So we sat there, my father who didn’t give a shit about me, my mother who was cosplaying as someone with experience, and me, thirteen years old, awkward as fuck, and scared to death.

I don’t remember what they said to me in their pitch or anything other than how uncomfortable and anxious I was to even be in that room. I tried so hard to be grown up and mature, but I — and my parents — was way out of my depth. I’d done one big movie and that was it. We didn’t have my agent with us, who had lots of experience and would have known what questions to ask.

No, in place of my experienced agent, my mother had decided she was going to be my manager, and she tackled the responsibility with an enthusiasm that was only matched by her absolute incompetence and inability to go toe-to-toe with producers the way my agent did. She was outwitted, out-thought, and outmaneuvered at every turn.

“You don’t have a choice,” my father commanded. “You are doing this movie.”

So we sat there, my father who didn’t give a shit about me, my mother who was cosplaying as someone with experience, and me, thirteen years old, awkward as fuck, and scared to death.

At some point, this man, who is represented in my memory by big Jim Jones sunglasses under dark hair above an open collar, said, “We are offering you a hundred thousand dollars and round-trip travel for your whole family. We will cast your sister, Amy, to play your sister in the movie.”

It all made sense, now. I was only thirteen, but I knew my parents were pushing me so hard because this company was offering me — them, really — more money than I’d ever imagined I’d earn in my life, much less a single job.

I knew that the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, was to say no. There would be other opportunities, and it was stupid to cash myself out of feature films for what I thought was, in the grand scheme of things, not very much money.

It’s incredible to me that I knew all of this. It’s incredible to me that I could see all these things, plainly and clearly, and my parents couldn’t (or, more likely, chose not to).

So after this man made his offer, all the adults in the room ganged up on me, selling me HARD on this movie.

My mother said, “Don’t you want your sister to have the same opportunities you’ve had? Wouldn’t it be fun and exciting to go to Rome? Think of all the history!”

The experience was awful. It was the worst experience I have ever had on a set in my life, by every single metric. The movie is awful, and it is the embarrassment I knew it would be.

I don’t think about this very often, because it’s super upsetting to me. Right now, I’m so angry at my parents for subjecting me and my sister to this entire experience. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In that moment, I felt bullied and trapped. All these adults were talking to me at the same time, and I just wanted it to stop. I just wanted to go home and get out of this room. I just wanted to go be a kid, so I did what I’d learned to do to survive: I gave in and did what my parents wanted.

The experience was awful. It was the worst experience I have ever had on a set in my life, by every single metric. The movie is awful, and it is the embarrassment I knew it would be.

But here’s the thing: when you watch The Curse, you are watching two children, me and my sister, who were abused on a daily basis. The production did not follow a single labor law. They worked us for twelve hours a day, on multiple film units (while I work on First unit, second unit sets up and waits for me. When I should get a break to rest, they send me to Second unit, then to Third unit, then back to First unit. I was 13.) without any breaks, five days a week. I was exhausted the entire time. I was inappropriately touched by two different adults during production. I knew it was wrong, but I was so scared and ashamed, and I felt so unsupported, I didn’t tell anyone. I knew my dad wouldn’t believe me, and my mother would blame me. Anything to keep the production happy, that’s what she did. That was more important to her than the health and safety of her children. The director was coked out of his mind most of the time, incompetent, and so busy fucking or trying to fuck one of the women in the cast, he was worse than useless. He was a fading actor who was cosplaying as a director, as in over his head as my mother. My sister and I were never safe. Instead of harmless atmospheric SFX smoke, they set hay on fire in barrels and blew actual smoke onto the set. They took buckets of talc, broken wood, bits of wallpaper and plaster, and threw it into my face during a scene inside the collapsing house. My sister is in a scene where she goes to get eggs from some chickens, and they attack her. So they hired Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror master, to direct her sequence. His idea, which everyone was totally on board with, was to throw chickens at my sister. Live chickens, live roosters, live birds. Just throw them at a nine-year-old girl. Oh, and then tie them to her arms and legs so they’ll peck her. All of this happened under my mother’s observation, and with her full participation.

Everything I need to know about who my parents are is wrapped up in that experience: the total lack of concern for my safety and happiness, treating me like an asset instead of a son, lying to me, manipulating me, and using me to get things they wanted, and then gaslighting me about it.

If just ONE of the things I can remember happened to someone I loved, I would have grabbed my kids, gone to the airport, and flown home. Fuck those abusive assholes in the production. Let the lawyers sort it all out. Nobody hurts my children and gets away with it.

My mom says she “had some talks” with the producers. She claims that, once, she wouldn’t let us leave the hotel. (God, what a fucking dump that place was. It was just slightly better than a hostel.) I have no memory of that, but honestly the entire experience was so traumatic, I’ve blocked most of it out.

The movie was the commercial and critical failure I knew it would be. My parents spent the money. I don’t know what they spent it on. I got to keep fifteen cents of every dollar, so . . . yay?

My sister and I hardly ever talk about this. I suspect it was as upsetting and traumatic for her as it was for me. I told her I was writing about it, and asked her if she remembered anything. She told me she’d been lied to her whole life about this movie. Our mother let her believe she had been cast on the strength of her audition. “I was excited to work with you,” she said. She reminded me about some stuff I’d blocked out, including a scene where my character’s older brother (played by an actor named Malcolm Danare, who was kind and gentle, and made both of us feel safer when he was around) shoves my character into a pile of cow shit. When it came time to shoot the scene, the mud they’d put together to be the cow shit looked an awful lot like cow shit. When Malcolm pushed me into it, we all found out it was real cow shit. I was FURIOUS. The director had lied to me and had allowed me to have my entire body shoved into an actual pile of actual cow shit. I don’t remember what I said, but I remember he treated me the exact same way my father did whenever I got upset: he laughed at me, told me I was being too sensitive, reminded me that he was the director and he wanted to get a “real” performance out of me, and concluded, “If it bothers you so much, we’ll get you a hepatitis shot,” before he walked away.

My sister also recalled that, after she survived the scene with the chickens, it was the producers’ idea to give her one as a pet.

Okay, let’s unpack that for a quick second: you’ve been traumatized by these birds, so we’re going to give you one as a pet. That you’ll somehow keep in your hotel, and then will somehow get back to America. It will shock you to learn that neither of those things happened.

She remembered, as I do, the huge fight I had with my parents in our kitchen, where I told them I hated the script and I hated the movie. I didn’t want to do it, and I hated that they were making me do it.

“You don’t have a choice,” my father commanded. “You are doing this movie.”

“This is the only film you are being offered,” my mother lied to me. She made me feel like, if I didn’t do this movie, I would never do another movie again in my life. I had to do this movie. As my father bellowed, I had no choice.

Both of my parents denied this argument ever happened. Can I tell you how reassuring it is to know that my sister, who was also there, remembers it the same way I do?

The makeup department decided they would literally cut my little sister’s face with a scalpel, in three places, and put bandages over them.

But one thing she told me, the thing I did not know, the thing that makes me so angry I want to break things, actually managed to make the entire experience even worse than I remembered it.

There’s a scene after her chicken incident where I check up on her in her bedroom. She’s got cuts and bruises, and I guess we talk about it. I don’t remember and I can’t watch the movie because I’m terrified it will give me a PTSD flashback (I’ve had one of those and I recommend avoiding it). Here’s the thing about that scene: she has some cuts on her face, and those cuts are real. They are not makeup.

I’m going to repeat that. My nine-year-old little sister had actual cuts on her face that were placed there by an adult, on purpose.

The makeup department decided they would literally cut my little sister’s face with a scalpel, in three places, and put bandages over them. My sister told me our mother wasn’t in the makeup room when this happened — honestly, it seemed like our mother was strangely and conveniently absent when most of the really terrible things happened to us on the set — and when my sister told her what they’d done, she “lost her shit” at the production. She was pissed, I guess, which is appropriate and surprising. I wonder what would have to have happened for her to put us on a plane and get us home to safety? I mean, her son being abused daily didn’t do it, and her daughter being CUT IN THE FACE ON PURPOSE didn’t do it.

I just . . . I can’t. I can’t understand or comprehend allowing your own children to be physically and emotionally abused. They were literally selling my sister and me to these people, like we were some kind of commodity.

This was a tough conversation. My sister’s experience with our parents is very different from mine. My sister and I love each other. We’re close. I know it’s hard for her to hear that her brother, who she loves, was so abused by her parents, who she also loves. I was really grateful she made the time to talk to me about it, and grateful the experience wasn’t as horrible for her as it was for me.

As we were finishing our call, Amy also remembered one man, a young Italian named Luka, who was our driver for the movie. I haven’t thought about him in thirty years, but I can see his face now. He was kind, he was friendly, he taught us how to kick a soccer ball, and in the middle of an abusive, torturous experience, he stood out as a kind and gentle man. I mention him because she remembered him, which made me remember him, and goddammit I want at least one small part of this thing to not be awful.

The Curse remains one of the most consequential times the adults in my life failed to protect me. I’m 50. I still have nightmares.

Ultimately, as I predicted and feared, this piece of shit movie cashed me out of respectable films forever. I got offers for movies, but they were always mindless comedies or exploitative horror films. They were never the serious dramas I wanted to work in after Stand by Me. The industry looked at me and River, wondering if one or both of us would become a breakout star. They quickly saw that River was doing real acting work, and I was in this piece of shit. For River, Stand by Me was a beginning. For me, it would turn out to be pretty much everything, at least as far as film goes.

There are thousands of reasons film careers do and don’t take off. Maybe mine wouldn’t have taken off anyway. Clearly, it’s not where my life ended up, and I’m super okay with that now. But when all of this happened, it hurt and haunted me.

The Curse remains one of the most consequential times the adults in my life failed to protect me. I’m 50. I still have nightmares. Everything I need to know about who my parents are is wrapped up in that experience: the total lack of concern for my safety and happiness, treating me like an asset instead of a son, lying to me, manipulating me, and using me to get things they wanted, and then gaslighting me about it.

This annotation is the last thing I wrote before I turned this manuscript in, because opening these wounds is hard and painful. I put it off as long as I could, and I feel like I’m still holding back, because just this small glimpse of the experience has taken me a week to write. I can’t imagine trying to go back and unpack the whole thing. (Note that is not in the book: I’ve made an EMDR appointment to work on this because the nightmares have come back after the weekend).

Fuck The Curse, and fuck every single person who exploited and hurt two beautiful children to make it. You all participated in child abuse, and you all knew better. Shame on all of you. I hope this follows you to the end of your life. I hope that living with what you did to innocent children has been as hard for you as it has been for me, because you deserve no less.

#tw abuse #tw child abuse #tw exploitation #child actor #still just a geek #lucio fulci #trauma survivor #speaking up for the child who was silenced by his abusers

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furiousgoldfish · 5 months

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abusive parents: Children need to work! In order to have work habits! I'm just making sure they're developing good work habits!

the actual 'habits' being taught: work being thrown at children with no announcement or schedule, being yelled at for not doing something they had no idea needed to be done, endless punishments if the work is refused or even rescheduled, being ordered around with no nuance for your own schedule, human needs, illnesses or school responsibilities; being pushed into labour with no clear instructions and severe punishments if you get it wrong, having to predict when someone will want something to be done or risk contempt, being told you're lazy, worthless and a waste of space regardless of how much work you do, never getting any rewards or acknowledgment for completing all of the work, exposure to criticism, insults, and overall horrid working conditions with no right to complain or refuse to do it, being taught that you're worth nothing unless you can prove your worth in endless free labour, perfect setup to be maximally exploited by every boss and manager in your future life because you've been taught to fear confrontation more than death

#abuse excuses #no work habits just constant fear #child exploitation #child labor #abusive parents #toxic parents #using children for labour #pretending this is good for children #liars

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mourninglamby · 4 months

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dsmp is anti mentally ill and ghostbur should have been a part of cwilbur! he is an eerie posthumous reminder of the harm c!wil caused while also representing his capacity for kindness/his most intimate and vulnerable emotions in retrospect to his past mistakes. This ideally would function as both a humanizing, nuanced approach to portraying the mentally ill but also a constant reminder of who he hurt and left behind in his suicide who loved him. C!wilbur, the character, who is ALSO GHOSTBUR, should have physically haunted the damn narrative. I think the ppl who “wrote” for dsmp are fucking weird and never should have touched these topics tho so actually nvm. They woulda found a way to ruin that too. lalalala (in my World where everything is good and nothing is made without love and care)

#dsmp #lalalalalala #these men make me sick #say abuse #say grooming #say suicide #say the things you are exploiting for you trashy shitty Minecraft roleplay #angry sorry #always so angry

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