(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . It Happened To Me Too [1] ['Douglas Schonenberg', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Chloris Creator', 'Belinda Ridgewood', 'Bill In Portland Maine'] Date: 2026-10-08 What happened to me at 17, and why I am finally talking about it. Men can be victims too. We just need to be willing to talk about it. This was not an easy musing to write. It brought up uncomfortable memories of a time that I don’t talk about. But I think this is a story that needs to be told because it may help someone else understand that what happened to them was not their fault. I have been watching and reading about what has been happening at Cornell and the conversation surrounding the woman who was sexually assaulted. And honestly, I am horrified. Not just by what she says happened to her, but by the fact that there are men who are capable of treating a woman that way. Men need to do better. We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard. We need to understand that women deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. Always. And I think more men need to stand up and say it. This kind of behavior is not acceptable. Not ever. Reading the conversation about what happened at Cornell also made me think about my own story. And I realized that maybe it was time to tell it. I want to be very clear about something. I am not comparing what happened to me to what happened to her. What happened to her was far worse than what happened to me. But her story reminded me that there are a lot of stories that don’t get told. Especially when the victim is a man. We talk about sexual harassment. We talk about sexual assault. We talk about sexual exploitation of women. And we should. We need to keep talking about it until women don’t have to be afraid of what might happen to them. But men can be victims too. Boys can be victims too. And sometimes we don’t say anything. We are embarrassed. We are ashamed. We are afraid someone will laugh at us. Or maybe we think we are supposed to just suck it up because we are men. I know. Because it happened to me. I was a victim of sexual harassment, of stalking, and of manipulation by someone that I thought I could trust. I was seventeen years old. It was 1987, and I was a senior in high school working as a host at a Denny’s restaurant. All of the people I worked with were older than me. They were college aged or in their twenties. To say I was naive would be an understatement. I was young, slim, attractive, and had absolutely no idea how much I didn’t know about life. The people I worked with would sometimes go out together after work. We would go to a diner or sometimes to a nearby bar that would let me in even though I was underage. So I didn’t think much of it when, one Saturday afternoon while I was home studying for a test, the phone rang. It was one of the waiters that I worked with. He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was studying. He said it was a Saturday. And you should be doing something more exciting than studying. Then he invited me over to his house. I assumed he was having some kind of party, so I asked who else was coming from work. He said nobody. That seemed strange, I thought. Why would he be calling just me to hang out when nobody from work ever hung out like that. And why was he calling me, a seventeen year old kid when he was in his late twenties. And that’s when I remember thinking, Wait a minute. How did he even get my phone number? I had never given it to him. This was before cell phones. Before everyone followed everyone on social media. All we had was landline phones. And when you were seventeen living at home, it was not even your phone. It was your parents. At the time, I didn’t know the answer. I would find out later that he had gone into the manager’s office at Denny’s and taken my phone number from my personal employee file. That’s also how he knew I was seventeen. He knew exactly how old I was. I just didn’t know that he knew. I asked him what we were going to do if nobody else was coming. He told me that we would drink some wine and play with his Ouija board. I was seventeen. He knew I was seventeen. And he was inviting an underage kid to his house to drink alcohol. That’s when something inside me started telling me that something weird was happening here, but I didn’t know what it was. I felt uncomfortable. But I didn’t know what I should do. So I told him I had to think about it and would call him back. He gave me his number and hung up. I went to my stepfather and told him what had happened. He called me an idiot, which was a word he used to call me quite often. Then he said something that made me stare at him in confusion. “Don’t call him back. He’s trying to get you drunk so he can have sex with you.” I was shocked. I was embarrassed. I was scared. Never in a million years would I have imagined that an older man I worked with would call me at home, to get me drunk, so he could have sex with me. I didn’t call him back. I didn’t tell a soul what had happened. Not a friend, not a teacher, not a school counselor. Nobody. I didn’t want anyone to laugh at me. The following week, I went back to work. I was scared. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do or say, so I did what a lot of people do when they are ashamed and confused. I said nothing. I pretended it had never happened. I didn’t mention the call to anyone I worked with. I avoided him as much as I could. When I saw him, I walked the other way or made myself look busy with work. I must have cleaned the front door windows a dozen times that day. Eventually, though, our paths crossed during that shift. I had just cleaned a table and was standing at the station where we put the dirty dishes. As I put my tray down, he walked over and stood beside me. There was nobody else near us. He leaned toward me and whispered, “What happened Saturday? You never called me back.” I was scared. So I lied. I told him I was sorry I did not call him back. I told him that I had accidentally lost his number. He nodded and went back to work. I breathed a sigh of relief. I thought it was over. It wasn’t. A few weeks later, I received a phone call at home after school. The man on the other end was a stranger. He asked me why I hadn’t shown up for my photo shoot. That we needed to get these pictures done today if they were going to be ready on time. I had no idea what he was talking about. And I was extremely confused. I said to him that I didn’t know him and that I had no idea what he was talking about. I then said that I had never called him about a photo shoot. He then asked me, “Is your name Douglas Schonenberg?” I said yes. He then said that I had called him last week and left a message on his answering machine saying that I wanted to do a photo shoot for his magazine. Now I was really confused so I asked him what kind of magazine he was taking pictures for. He told me it was an adult gay men’s magazine. I was in shock. I said there must be some mistake because I had never called him. I didn’t know what he was talking about, and I had no idea how he even had my name and phone number. At this point, he was getting angry with me. He said that I had cost him a lot of money setting this photo shoot up. He then asked me if I didn’t know who he was then why did he call him and leave a message on his answering machine. I told him that I didn’t and that I had no idea what he was talking about. He insisted that I had left a message about modeling for his magazine. I asked him if he still had the message. He told me that he did. So I asked him to play it for me over the phone. He did. The voice on the recording wasn’t mine. But I immediately recognized it. It was the voice of the waiter that I worked with who had called me at home. Now I was not just in shock, I was terrified. I told the man on the phone that the voice wasn’t mine. I told him that someone was impersonating me. I told the photographer that I was seventeen, that I was a senior in high school, and that the person on the recording was a waiter that I worked with. The moment I told him my age, his entire attitude changed. He was no longer angry. Instead, he became nervous. He apologized for the mix-up. And then he hung up. I sat there terrified, embarrassed, and completely confused. I didn’t know what to do. And I was too ashamed to tell my parents. I didn’t tell my friends. If I thought they were going to laugh at me when some guy called me at home for sex then I was sure that I would become the laughingstock at school if this got out. The next day, I went to work and finally told my manager what had happened. I told her about the call at home, the offer of alcohol and who knows what else. I then told her about the call from the photographer and the gay magazine. She was shocked. She was also close friends with the waiter and didn’t want him to get in trouble. She told me not to call the police. A thought that had not even occurred to me. She then told me that she would talk to him about this and not to worry about it. But I didn’t feel safe there anymore. And I knew that shortly everyone working there was going to find out what happened. I could not face that humiliation from everyone. So I quit. And I never told anyone what happened to me until I told my wife. I kept that secret to myself for more than thirty years. Thirty years. That is a long time to carry shame for something that was not your fault. I wish I could tell you that I never experienced sexual harassment from a man again. Unfortunately, It wasn’t. It happened to me three more times. One of those experiences eventually became the story I wrote about in Tales From My Acting Days: The Audition I Never Saw Coming. It wasn’t even the last time it happened to me at a job that I had to quit over it. Though the next time I was in my late twenties. For a long time after that experience, I didn’t really know what to call what had happened to me. I didn’t have the words. I was a teenage boy. I was inexperienced. I was embarrassed. And I thought maybe somehow it was my fault. That I gave off some kind of vibe or something. That somehow I had led him on without realizing it. I also blamed myself that I should have known how to handle it. I didn’t. And that’s why I am telling this story now. Because somewhere out there someone else has experienced something similar and has been carrying the shame of it alone. I want to say something to that person that I wish someone had said to me back then. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t cause it. You didn’t invite it. You didn’t make it happen because you were naive. And being a teenager doesn’t make what happened to you any less serious. Being afraid doesn’t make you weak. Being confused doesn’t make you weak. Being a victim doesn’t make you weak. And speaking about what happened to you doesn’t make you weak either. It takes courage to finally say: This happened to me. Well, I’m finally saying it. This happened to me. And I am not ashamed of it anymore. That’s why I’m writing this. I’m telling this story because I don’t want another boy or man to believe that he has to remain silent simply because he is a male. We need to be willing to talk about this. All of us. Because sexual harassment and sexual abuse don’t care whether you are male or female. And neither should our willingness to listen. It happened to me too. Thank you for sitting under the tree with me and listening to my musings. If you enjoyed this musing, please consider subscribing to my Substack, Musings Under the Tree. I write about empathy, personal growth, Being S.A.F.E., politics from time to time, and whatever else wanders through my mind while sitting under the tree. https://musingsunderthetree.substack.com/p/welcome-to-my-tree?r=1s6ofh [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/10/8/800109227/community/it-happened-to-me-too-2/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/