Why do Creeps Get Away With it? Author and Survivor Myriam Gurba Has Some Ideas
In her new essay collection, she calls out institutions that allow predators to continue offending—and escalating
“People who hurt people can be charmers. It works in their favor. Charm disarms victims and makes us feel special. Chosen.” — CREEP
I recently came across an interview with the author, a rape survivor who describes her new book as an “informal sociology of creeps.” I emailed her, and she kindly agreed to talk with The Landing about Creep: Accusations and Confessions. I immediately bought it and found not only echoes of what’s happening in aviation, but a sharp, at-times funny examination of our resistance to seeing a nice, average guy as a creep—even with the most damning evidence.
Myriam Gurba, a teacher, sits with the director of human resources at a conference table. Under unforgiving fluorescent lighting, the woman assures her, “We are here to support you in any way we can.”
The man they are here to discuss, a fellow teacher called Q, once handcuffed Gurba, stuffed her in a garbage bag, and stored her in a closet. The HR woman is in possession of a copy of the restraining order and a five-page document detailing Q’s most egregious threats and assaults against her, including rape, as Gurba tells it in the titular essay of her critically acclaimed book Creep: Accusations and Confessions (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster).
The HR woman sides with the social mask Q wears in public instead of the traumatized woman who knows what he does when other people aren’t watching.
“It is also necessary that I remain neutral,” the woman continues, “and I must admit…I have a very hard time believing your story about Q. He is very well-liked.”
“I want to laugh. Shriek. Flip the table. Slap someone,” Gurba writes.
Regular readers of The Landing will find this scenario familiar. Together we’ve gotten to know a grim pastiche of smiling, uniformed creeps and the institutions that protect and enable them: Southwest Airlines Cockpit Creep Michael Haak. RyanAir Pervert Aidan Murray. American Airlines Predator Sten Molin. This Piece of Shit from a major U.S. airline. What do they all have in common?
Probably a lot of things, but for our purposes, No. 1 is that they all have multiple victims. Why do they have multiple victims? Because their airlines protect, enable, and/or ignore or suppress victims’ reports and complaints about their predation.
“I’m afraid Q is going to hurt somebody.”
Gurba’s live-in boyfriend, the “well-liked” Q, terrorized, abused and raped her for years. When she reported him, the police declined to press charges and the school district allowed him to continue working with children. (Don’t ask a woman why she “doesn’t just leave.” As Gurba points out, getting out is the most dangerous thing: “We don’t get killed for staying, we get killed for leaving.”).
She wasn’t Q’s first victim, and odds are she wasn’t his last. School administrators also knew he wasn’t the first slimebag to slither through their hallways.
“In that same school district, there had been a teacher reported for the same type of behavior who did murder a student,” Gurba says. “There was an established pattern. The parents of the girl he murdered sued because he sexually abused her, groomed her, and had her move into his home. The school district won.”
Oh, hi! We meet again in the land of Shocked but not Surprised. Says Gurba,
“The criminal legal system does not exist to serve victims of gender-based violence. There’s another case in the same district where a man was sexually abusing multiple students, and when he was reported to the same set of administrators I reported to, they allowed him to resign. They said if he went quietly they’d seal his record. The way the Catholic Church passed their [predatory] priests around is in no way anomalous. Rather than address whatever elements of the institutional culture are enabling that [behavior], they shut down the messaging.”
Experienced sexual violence? Good luck!
We’re all familiar with the stranger-in-an-alley portrait of Regular Rape, the kind people will believe actually happened to you and the cops might even take you seriously when you tell them. The kind perpetrated by a slavering stranger with a knife to your throat.
“In 1996 I survived a stranger rape. I was jumped by a teenager who sexually assaulted me, and the attack was very much what I jokingly call a classic rape,” Gurba says (she wrote hauntingly about this in her acclaimed true-crime memoir Mean). “I do not know this person. It was a blitz attack that came out of nowhere. The stranger literally ran into an alley to escape from me.”
“It was almost cartoonish in the classic elements. And because it was so cartoonishly classic, the the police took it seriously. It’s the only time the police have ever taken my assaults seriously. Every time I was assaulted by someone I know, the police have doubted I was telling the truth.”
The assailant was Tommy Jesse Martinez, who was later convicted of raping and murdering Sophia Castro Torres and assaulting three other women. (In 2013, his brother, Isaac, was convicted of murdering his estranged wife Maria Dejesus, who tried to leave and paid with her life).
After the rape, “I immediately began experiencing PTSD symptoms, and I was not provided with any kind of intervention. I was offered nothing,” Gurba recalls. “I was encouraged to go back to school at UC Berkeley and forget about it.
“During Thanksgiving vacation, I was watching TV with my family and there’s a news story about a rape and murder in a park. There is a suspect in custody and they flash the perpetrator’s mugshot onscreen, and it’s a face I’ve seen once. It’s my rapist. I was in shock, because not only am I being confronted with my rapist through the TV, I also now know how fucking dangerous he was because he’s killed somebody. So the intense fear I experienced [during the attack]—I had the sense this person was capable of killing me—that news story validated that primal fear I had.”
On being critiqued for survivor’s guilt
“I developed a profound survivor’s guilt. I kept thinking if had I done something different during the attack, I could have prevented him from attacking more women, because according to the court record there were four or five of us he had attacked.”
When I tell her some of the victims of American Airlines rapist Sten Molin report experiencing similar overwhelming feelings, she gets it.
Martinez, she says, “was caught trying to kidnap another woman. I lived with this guilt that I was partly responsible for the decedent’s death because I had not done enough to prevent the rapist’s capture.
“I lived with that for a very long time. When I would try to share that guilt, people would tell me I was somehow doing something wrong by experiencing that guilt, which would then compound the embarrassment and shame. There must be something wrong with me. It was destructive to criticize it. Usually it was outright critiqued: You should not be feeling this.
“One [example] was the detective assigned to the case, who said, ‘You’re really lucky to be alive.’ I thought, I don’t understand why. What’s lucky about getting raped on street corner? I was literally snatched in broad daylight, and that’s not lucky.”
I ask her, What does a creep look like?
“Creeps are the guy next door. That’s who a creep is,” Gurba replies. “He’s also the guy across the street. He’s also your rear neighbor, he’s also your dad and your uncle and your teacher and your coach and your priest and your president. That’s what a creep looks like.
“The last man who assaulted me [was former military]. I told him I didn’t want to date him and he punched me in the mouth. That’s highly symbolic that his fist went into my mouth.”
On the connection among survivors of sexual violence
I ask her what the response has been from readers, and if it matched what she hoped for. Yes, she says.
“I’m getting responses from survivors of sexual violence, including intimate partner violence, expressing to me they could relate very much to situations detailed in various essays.
“I wrote the Creep title essay in a very detailed way, very explicit and graphic, because I needed to read accounts of survivors experiencing parallel forms of abuse in order for me to be able to name what was being done to me,” Gurba explains. “It wasn’t until I read those that I was able to use language in a way that helped to free me.”
“What I wanted to do through Creep was continue the passing of that mirror. I detailed my account in the hopes that somebody might be able to recognize elements of their own struggle and ordeal in it and act upon that knowledge.”
We talked about how many fellow employees still refuse to support victims within commercial airlines. I told her about The Landing’s origin story and how it hadn’t taken me long to pivot from friend of Sten Molin to advocate for his sexual assault victims, and I ask her why she thinks some people are so adamant in their defense of these men even in the face of reams of graphic testimony about their assaults (and in the case of Ret. Southwest Capt. Michael Haak, a conviction in federal court for what he did to Captain Christine Janning. Yet her own colleagues still flood social media with “she wanted it.”).
“You’re not part of the institution,” Gurba says. “The denial tends to be issued from the institution. In my case, when I was basically chased out of my school district for outing my perpetrator, no current teachers wanted to associate with me publicly. But retired teachers did.
“It’s faith in the institution, and it’s fear of the institution. And people are so strange in their loyalty to institutions. They believe the institution is an extension of themselves. So the institution’s reputation is wrapped up in their own reputation.”
But, she says, “Who cuts our paycheck is actually our enemy, not our friend.”
She will go a step further, proferring an on-point sobriquet: “I joke that HR stands for ‘Hides Rapists.’™”
Buy CREEP wherever books are sold, including here and here.
Note to regular readers: The book about predators in aviation is well underway, but I still need more victims and survivors of serial rapist Sten Molin, who was the first officer at the controls of American Airlines flight 587, to speak to me before this project can become a reality. Your identity will be kept confidential.
About Sara Hammel and The Landing
I’m an award-winning journalist, experienced international correspondent and author of the #1 bestselling book The Strong Ones, the true story of a groundbreaking 7-month U.S. Army women’s strength study and its long-term impact on women in the military.
My work has appeared in national and international publications including U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, The Sunday Times Magazine (UK), People, Glamour, Shape and more. I contributed to the feminist anthology Letters of Intent (Random House) alongside such icons as Judy Blume, Ntozake Shange and Gloria Steinem. As an international correspondent based in London and Switzerland, I covered high-profile crime stories in nine countries including the Amanda Knox case in Italy, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann in Portugal, and back in the U.S., the tragic school shooting in Sandy Hook, Connecticut. I am the author of three mystery novels: The Underdogs, Famous Last Words and The Expat Wife.
The Landing was born after I wrote an investigative series and personal defense of American Airlines First Officer Sten Molin, the pilot of tragic flight 587 and a friend of mine in the late 1990s. Starting in 2021, dozens of women, most of them flight attendants, came forward to re-educate me and my readers about Molin’s double life as a serial rapist, harasser, stalker and predator of underage girls. Once I began sharing their stories, women from many other airlines (and their attorneys) came forward to tell me of their own assaults—and the coverups that protect their predators in alarming numbers. #TimesUp
What a heartbreaking but also empowering story.
Myriam you are FIERCE.