Margaret Cho: My classmates said I deserved to get raped
Margaret Cho let out all of the skeletons in her closet when she talked to Billboard.
Just 13 minutes in, she told the interviewer about how she was sexually molested from the age of five to 12 by a family friend.
"I had a very long-term relationship with this abuser, which is a horrible thing to say," she said. "I didn't even understand it was abuse, because I was too young to know." She said later that her abuser is still alive and her family knows about the abuse; she said they want to move on and not talk about it; she added that this has strained her relationship with her family.
Cho was raped by someone else -- an acquaintance -- at the age of 14.
"I was raped continuously through my teenage years, and I didn't know how to stop it," she said. "For me, I think I had been sexually abused so much in my life that it was hard for me to let go of anger, forgive or understand what happened."
Sadly, she said when she told her high school classmates about the rape, she was bullied about it and told she deserved it.
"I told someone that I was raped, and the kids at school found out and said, 'You are so ugly and fat that the only way anybody would have sex with you is if they were crazy and raped you,'" she said. "'So don't act like you are hot and somebody wanted to fuck you. It's because you are disgusting, and you deserve to be raped.'"
At the time, she was able to cope with her experience with the help of her English teacher who told her to keep a journal. When he was killed, her classmates teased her again and said "he was murdered because he was a f****t." The cruelty became unbearable for her, and Cho left that school.
How does Cho deal with the pain now?
One way is through her music. She has a song on her new album called "I Want to Kill My Rapist."
"I'm a victim and now a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and I think it's really hard to talk about it," she explained. "I think having a song to perform live will allow others to talk about it. It's a huge issue, and this was cathartic for me."
Cho said she believes she grew up in a time when rape culture ran rampant, and she called out Bill Cosby and Woody Allen.
"People sexualized young girls like Brooke Shields. Men had so much control and entitlement over women," she said. "I think Bill Cosby and Woody Allen and all these men are so disgusting. It's gross."
Like anyone else, Cho uses social media to look up people who wronged her. She joked about publicly shaming them.
"But I have to watch myself because I don't want to be a bully," she added. "It's just funny to think about. There was this one girl, she was horrible, and she filled my sleeping bag at camp with tons of dog s***. She has kids that are the age we were then. I wonder if she lies in bed and thinks of me and feels bad. I wonder if her girls bully or get bullied. Maybe she is terrified that will happen to her kid?"
Cho seems well-adjusted now with her boyfriend and bandmate Andy Moraga; on her Twitter account, she seems to be riding a high coming off of a "Fashion Police" appearance, and she will soon be part of a PBS documentary called "The Women's List."
