On Wednesday night, Huffington Post published The Lost Girls, a piece that investigated the 1975 rape of then fifteen-year-old Runaways bassist Jackie Fox (nee Fuchs), by the band's manager, Kim Fowley. Among the many disturbing details revealed by journalist Jason Cherkis's report was that Fuch's then bandmates, including Joan Jett, were in the room and witnessed what happened to her. Cherkis spoke with Pitchfork on Thursday, after the piece went viral.
Pitchfork: How did this story come to you?
Jason Cherkis: Jackie reached out to me over social media. She tweeted at me, she had read a story I had done about heroin addiction and treatment. She recognized that I had attempted to weave social science and science into the story. And she liked the science part of it. So, we exchanged emails and then we talked on the phone and she told me her story. And then, we were trying to figure out if I was going to do the story. I was hesitant just because I had never done a story like this before—I didn't know if I was the right person to do it. But she thought I could do a good job, and part of why she wanted me to do it, was that I wasn't a rock reporter. She didn't want questions about Runaways trivia. She really wanted the story to be about the science behind the bystander effect—the diffusing of responsibility, and the sort of social science of it.
Pitchfork: Once you started working on it, how did you approach it?
JC: I worked on the story on two parallels: interviewing Jackie, tracking down and interviewing witnesses and bystanders in her case and then also researching the social science. A lot of the social science didn't make it into the story—we did a sidebar or sort of a companion piece, and are gonna do a couple more in the coming weeks. [Jackie] was mainly interested in that and getting at the dynamic of the people in the room and sort of what they went through. By the time I talked to her, she had a lot of anger towards the other band members and the other people in the room. Many of the people in the room she had no idea were there, but she had already come to an understanding that they were victims, too, that they had gone through something as well being witnesses and not acting. That certainly came through when I interviewed them. One person that I interviewed, he cried. He was really shaken up by it and said that it took him decades to get over it. He really felt guilty about it. He was devastated.
Pitchfork: Most of the people in the room during Jackie’s rape, reading the account of it, were actually very young teenagers.
JC: Yes.
Pitchfork: When we hear about stories like this—where people witness rape or abuse—lots of times even adults do not know what to do, like in the case of Penn State. Rape is often used as a weapon to silence and intimidate people, and in this case it was a room full of people who were teenagers. And then you add drugs, the scenario, the dynamics of power—
JC: A couple things sort of stick out in what you're saying. One is that Brett Williams, one of the witnesses, he said he had never been to an after-show party and didn't really know what they were like, so he's thinking—this is before the rape—but he's thinking, maybe this is kind of how things are. People are doing a lot of drugs, because people were sort of bragging, talking up how much Jackie had taken. Like, "Oh wow, Jackie is loaded." He didn't know her, so he thought, maybe that's just who she is, not knowing that she had never done those drugs or was a straight arrow. A common sort of refrain among the teenagers that I'd interviewed and I'd interviewed a lot more people than were obviously in the story who had either experienced Kim Fowley in other ways, varying degrees of sort of brutality—two things sort of stuck out. One is what Trudy said, 'I was a virgin. I had no idea what I was really looking at, and it scared me. I knew it was wrong, but Kim was dominating the room.' I asked her what was the feeling that haunted her the most, and she said it was the feeling of being powerless. She said she knew something was wrong, and couldn't do anything, and [Fowley] had that power over her. He shut the room down. Other people said the same thing. That Fowley had total control of that room. Part of it was because everybody was so young.
There was a photographer that I interviewed who said, ‘We were all fleeing abusive parents, abusive dads and this guy was just like our abusive dad. He was like what we were running away from.’ I thought that was sort of striking, too. The thing that surprised me the most, I think, was that there were girls, and women, that saw through Kim Fowley immediately and didn't want anything to do with him back then. Fowley gets accolades for forming the Runaways, but I think he actually missed. He didn't judge the moment correctly, because that was a moment where women actually wanted more autonomy, not less. They didn't want a Svengali. They didn't want someone who controlled them. And there were so many women that I'd interviewed that said ‘I met him and I was like there's no way I was ever going to be part of anything he was doing.' If they were going to succeed in music, it wasn't going to be because of him. He missed it. Kari Krome is a genius—she shared some of her writings with me, she's really smart and great.
Pitchfork: You said you were initially hesitant—when you first heard Jackie’s story, did you think what am I going to do with this? How did you feel?
JC: First, I was really horrified by what she told me. I was really taken aback by the responsibility that I might have in telling that story. It was also right on the heels of the Rolling Stone debacle. I was a little bit leery about doing the story. I realized this story was going to be difficult because you had to ask her some very uncomfortable questions, that are all sort of based around our unwillingness to talk about rape, to discuss how as a culture where we're second guessing everything a rape survivor does. We wouldn't normally do that with other people who have experienced crime, but with her, it's like, 'Well, why didn't you say something? Why did you join the band? Why did you stay with the Runaways?' So there were difficult questions that I had to ask, but I wish I didn't have to because the answers were complicated and, in some ways, obvious, too. Like, she didn't come forward because she was full of shame and because the band didn't really back her up and she knew it would be a disaster if she came forward. I was leery of having to answer those questions. How do I corroborate everything? And how do I make sure?
I was encouraged by even the people that I thought might have had an ax to grind with Jackie—they were supportive of the story and they helped me, even though they may not have liked her, they helped me. The other thing that was interesting is no one else ever really thought about her that much, and so I interviewed people about Fowley, and then I'd ask about Jackie, not telling them really what the story was about—I never outed her—they all said that she was truthful and that she was an honest person and that she was super smart.
Pitchfork: When we're considering an account of someone's surviving their own rape—those often become the things that bolster the truth—assessments of their character, their goodness. You can see the insidiousness of rape culture in that.
JC: Yes, exactly! Some of the stuff I had, as a reporter, was just because of that culture. And then there was a lot of people who were very defensive of Kim Fowley.
Pitchfork: Why do you think that it is? Do you think it's the culture or people who he had a hand in their careers? People protecting their own?
JC: It's a little bit of that, but it's also this fervent belief that showbiz is hard, and if you can't handle Kim Fowley, then you weren't destined to make it anyways, and he was just testing you. If you didn't follow with what Kim wanted, that's because you didn't want to be a star enough. That was a refrain I heard, endlessly.
Pitchfork: Wow.
JC: That Kim was tough because he was just trying to make people a star and being a star in Hollywood is really difficult. And I just thought it was a load of bullshit.
Pitchfork: Rock'n'roll, especially at that time in the mid-'70s, it was a contested space, where women were starting to make some inroads into it but it was still very much a man's world. Women were much further down on the hierarchy because above all, male artistic success and vision must be preserved and maintained. When that is the structure of power, women, in that equation, become very small and unimportant regardless of what they're doing.
JC: Some people excused his behavior as 'well that was the '70s,' and I'm like, well I could understand that excuse if his behavior was like, he drove around in a Porsche and hit on underage girls because people may have done that on the Sunset Strip at one point.
He was a predator. He went to a parochial school to hit on girls. There were others that did similar things I didn't write about. That was sort of mentioned a lot, too, but my story wasn't about this other person. There was a lot of that sort of myth-making around Fowley, and Fowley sort of cultivated it, too. There was nobody that believed as hard in the myth of Hollywood and it being a difficult place and it's a difficult town and whatever, than he did. At the same time, he sort of posed as sort of this outsider, but there was really nobody who believed sort of harder at inside myth-making world. He depended on that. It was part of his clout, his sales pitch was like, 'Hollywood's tough, but I have all the connections and I'll help you.'
Pitchfork: Were you surprised at all by the reactions of other Runaways, when you asked them for comment?
JC: They have such a complicated history. I wish they'd resolved their differences a long time ago, because I think the resentments are still there, and still at play. I wish Lita Ford gave a shit because she doesn't and doesn't care at all. I brought it up to her, and she says, "I heard about it, obviously, but I don't have a comment. You can talk to Jackie." You could tell she had to force herself to say, five minutes later, "Oh, and rape is bad. It's a bad thing." But she didn't care to talk about what happened with Jackie. She just wasn't interested. At all. And Joan doesn't wanna talk about it at all. It wasn't a total surprise that she didn't. I think that she...I think the story speaks for itself in terms of what we say about her in the story.
Joan very much believes in that rock myth Fowley [perpetuated]. In the L.A. Weekly she said, "These girls, they wanted to make him out to be this bad guy, but they're just blaming him for their own failure." That was the gist. "Was there abuse? If there was, why did we take it then?" So she was sort of defending him in this story. I think it was the one about Sandy West.
Pitchfork: In the story, his defenders also seemed to want to dress what he was doing up as him being edgy and transgressive—that’s what glam was about—pushing boundaries. But that’s a different issue than consent.
JC: There's a big difference. What Kim did... he molested Kari Krome. He raped Jackie. And those were things that aren't transgressive. That's not art. That's not glam. He preyed on people. He abused women. He belittled them in public, shamed them in public, over and over again. One woman told me she had moved out to California because Fowley had asked her to be in a band. And she knew he was horrible. But I said, "Why did you move out?" and she said, "He could get me a record deal." He totally lied to her. They eventually got a record deal, but he lied to her about money. She ended up having to live with him. He'd throw furniture at her.
Pitchfork: I know from reporting stories like this one, that when a piece like this runs, people who have their own experiences with the perpetrator come forward—and I am wondering if that will happen in this case.
JC: Someone emailed me after the story ran and said, "I wish you had told me what your story was about—" because I was really protective of not outing Jackie before the story...it's her story to tell, I didn't want people to talk about it. He said, "I know some stuff." There are people coming out of the woodwork and talking directly to Jackie. There were people I didn't interview, and didn't wanna talk.
When Kim died, someone had posted a rant on Facebook about him, what a pig he was. A lot of women spoke up at that point too. That was interesting because even during that time, it was all sort of circulating, like what happened to Jackie was being talked about. People may not have known Jackie’s name, but they knew the circumstances and they knew what happened to her. I had interviewed a roadie, a former roadie of the Go-Gos, who had mentioned this when I talked about it. Sandy West had warned her about Kim, they had run into him in a club. She was like, "We gotta get out of here, don't ever talk to him." People were very wary of him at that point. Women circulated it around to watch out for this guy.
I do think there was a difference between ages. People who were 15, 16, 17, much more vulnerable, willing to take Kim's behavior. Women I interviewed who were older, they immediately saw it and didn't want anything to do with him. I interviewed a woman in the band Fanny. She recalled seeing him once, sized him up instantly, and was like, "Yeah, we're not going near that guy."
Pitchfork: It sounds like there was this cult of true believers around him, or people who were like him, who basically thought young women are there almost as a reward. Being able to use and abuse women is a right of power within, as you're saying, the mean streets of Hollywood.
JC: There was a little bit of a cult of personality around him. One of the witnesses who described him as a Manson figure… Kim had a certain way of talking. He had a list of Fowleyisms that he would say, that he sort of invented. People around him would say the same things, use the same words. Joan Jett talks like that. Other people that I'd interviewed...a couple of guys, they would revert back to talking, sounding just like him. They'd use the same words. It was weird and eerie how they eased back into it as if it was 1976 all over again. You could never utter those words in public, now. They're horrible. He picked people that were pretty marginal and then "helped" them. He was a scam artist. He had this thing in the '80s, "Dollar a Minute," where bands straight off the bus from Iowa...he'd get their demo tape, and he'd invite them to his apartment, and he'd give them advice, for a dollar a minute. He listened to their demo tape, charging them, and then giving them advice. There was a guy who was his driver who told me it was all bullshit. He was just making stuff up. He didn't care about these bands, he just wanted the money.
Yeah, there was this weird sort of conspiracy, to not say anything. Jackie told me she didn't say anything for three reasons: one, that if she did, no one would back her up, and she was full of shame about what happened. And really confused, because in a way she worried about her own, like, "why aren’t people comforting me? I must have done something wrong." And so she was full of shame and anguish over it. She also knew that if she had gone forward, she would destroy the band. Not just her chances in the music industry, but their chances, too, and that was really complicated, because they were the bystanders, they watched her get raped, and she's still concerned about their well-being.
Jackie said to me, "I knew the industry was all male and this was it for me. I'm either in this band and trying to make it, or I'm never going to be in music." It was a very limited opportunity. She saw this as her chance, because there were so few options.
I had interviewed Kathy Valentine from the Go-Go's, and I thought what she had to say was really relevant. She said something quite moving to me. She said, "The Go-Go's had posed on the cover of Rolling Stone, quite famously, in their underwear. These Hanes underpants." She remembered the brand. Shot by Annie Leibovitz. And this was a band that really took feminism seriously. They had female roadies, a female lawyer, a female manager—they were really headstrong, smart. She said, "We didn't want to do that cover. But we ended up doing it. It's so hard, when you're in a rock band, to say no." She says it took her decades to realize that she didn't have to say yes all the time, that she could say no. I thought about that quote, and thought about what those girls did, and what the Runaways went through, how they were 15, 16, 17 in that room. And how they went on after that. And I thought that helped explain why they stuck around, why they didn't rise up against him in that way—it was too hard.
Pitchfork: In the story, it’s very clear that he used fear and intimidation to control them. He had them watch someone in their band get raped for not being appropriately pliant.
JC: It's hard to be in their shoes. I felt sorry for them. I felt Jackie did, too. That’s what makes me so proud of her courage, and respectful of her courage, because she not only opened up about it and talked about it, but she called people and tracked down people who watched her get raped, and really wanted to hear what they had to say, and really listened and empathized. And to care for them, it's an incredible strength of hers to do that.