and clothes she made herself, including a skirt made
of neckties inspired by Blossom. In high school, after
a classmate bragged about getting hand jobs from one
of Goldberg’s friends, she and Lunnum glued a bunch
of amputated dolls’ hands to a poster and wrote, “We’ll
Give You a Hand,” presenting it to him on his birthday.
The two girls would get kicked out of AOL chat rooms
for making up characters and causing chaos. Goldberg’s
family was one of the first to get internet in Aberdeen,
Washington, a “sleepy little logging town,” as described
by another friend, Sheri Bozic.
oldberg wasn’t exactly the black sheep
of her family, but she was a little weird,
Bozic recalls, an enigma to her more
traditional parents and three siblings.
(Even today, Goldberg says her sister
won’t tell her adolescent daughters
what their aunt does for a living, as if “describing what I
do is too traumatic for them or something.”)
The tight-knit Goldbergs were “really well loved” in
Aberdeen, Bozic says; Goldberg’s father helped reopen
a shuttered paper mill, restoring jobs to a town strug-
gling after the government restricted logging to protect
the endangered northern spotted owl. But Bozic loved
Goldberg’s family for a more personal reason: They
fiercely supported her when she put her father in jail
for sexual abuse.
It was never Goldberg’s plan to work with sexual
assault victims or even become a lawyer—she wanted to
be a writer until college, when a bad workshop experi-
ence left her feeling disillusioned. But supporting Bozic
through her ordeal was a harbinger. Goldberg says it was
her “first real exposure to how fucked up people can be
and what strength really looks like.”
Goldberg’s own first taste of sexual trauma came af-
ter her freshman year at Vassar College, when she was
home for the summer and working at her father’s mill.
There, some of her male coworkers routinely groped the
18-year-old. As she recalls in Nobody’s Victim, she didn’t
tell her parents. Instead, she began fighting intensely
with them. She went on a hunger strike that turned into
a debilitating eating disorder: “By the end of the summer,
my diet consisted primarily of Baskin-Robbins Rainbow
Sherbet and these little white pills we called ‘mini-thins’
that truckers used to stay awake.” She was eventually
hospitalized and took a semester off. (Even when she
was back at Vassar and in recovery, Goldberg still had
an eccentric palate. Her roommate, Sasha Erwitt, recalls
her mixing dry oatmeal with Dr Pepper.)
Around this time, Goldberg inspired a pop-punk song
that still lingers in her Google results. “Carrie Goldberg”
by The Steinways tells the true story of a winter formal
during which she got a nosebleed from doing too much
cocaine and told a guy that she liked him but was already
seeing her professor (whom Goldberg later married
and amicably divorced). Goldberg didn’t find out about
the song—which ends with that same guy bellowing, “I
wanted to have sex with you!”—until a few years later,
but she thought it was funny. She has a dark sense of
humor about her life. When people ask her about her
self-care routine, for example—and this happens a lot,
usually at panels or talks with female audiences—she’s
calibrated her answer to equal levels of honesty and
flippancy: “450 milligrams of Wellbutrin a day, running
marathons, and sex.”
Today, Goldberg’s unorthodoxy extends to her re-
lationship with some of her clients; she doesn’t feel the
need to draw strict professional boundaries with them.
One 17-year-old client calls Goldberg in any crisis, day or
night. Sometimes Goldberg acts as the girl’s therapist or
social worker, or as a mediator between her and her mom.
“I’m always gonna send her shoes for her birthday
and for Christmas, and no one can tell me it’s not appro-
priate because I don’t give a shit,” Goldberg says. “And
because I own the business.” Some corporate lawyers
might gift their clients box tickets to the Mets, she points
out. Goldberg takes hers out for manicures.
This closeness can be helpful in her work, too. Gold-
berg’s job can involve extracting painful memories from
clients, excavating their trauma in order to determine
their legal options. In return, she helps them reclaim
their stories. When Hadley read the 79-page civil com-
plaint Goldberg filed on her behalf, “for the first time, it
felt like someone truly listened to me, heard me, and put
my experiences to paper,” she says. Yet when it came to
her own story, Goldberg hesitated.
While writing Nobody’s Victim, Goldberg says she’d
nibble on an eighth of an Adderall and send long emails
to her cowriter, Jeannine Amber, working through her
thoughts. In one email, she told Amber about her rape
and the suturing, but she insisted, “It’s not gonna go in
the book—you just need to know this thing.” Amber told
her to put it in the book anyway.
“I felt really guilty,” Goldberg says. “I felt like it was
really going to upset my family.” They knew vaguely
about the rape; the “psycho ex” (who’d threatened to
find and kill the doctor) told all of Goldberg’s relatives
about it during his post-breakup Facebook rampage. But
Goldberg had never spoken directly to anyone in her
family about it. She worried they’d think putting it in
the book was “too exposing.” And, like so many others,
Goldberg was afraid she wouldn’t be believed.
Then she became ashamed of her fear, judging her-
self for wrestling over the decision. She was supposed
to be fearless. She writes in her book that in 2014, when
she gave herself one more shot at living, she decided to
“quit admonishing myself for making stupid choices and
bad mistakes. I stopped seeing myself as a victim and
reclaimed control.” But this was tripping her up.
Once Goldberg began experimenting with writing
about her rape, her editor and agent urged her to keep
going, she says. She expected they would. It’s a lurid
story. It stops you, sickens you, and stays with you. Still,
Goldberg had her dread—her “holy shit” feeling. It took
time and therapy to come to terms with the decision
and unpack her guilt over it. When she had her break-
through moment, it came simply and bluntly. Goldberg
was telling her fiancé and her best friend that she was
considering including her experience in the book. They
knew the story: Sharing it didn’t have to mean giving up
her hard-fought control of it, nor diminish any of the
professional hell-raising she’d done since. They said:
“Duh, of course you should.”G
Nobody’s Victim: Fighting
Psychos, Stalkers,
Pervs, and Trolls
By Carrie Goldberg
Plume“ALMOST
EVERY ONE
OF OUR
CLIENTS’
STORIES
STARTS
WITH ‘I MET
HIM ON THE
INTERNET.’”263