I’ve been thinking about this whole “Devon’s a rat,” bullshit lie that’s been going around town for the last eight to ten years and honestly? It makes me laugh. Keep calling me a rat because EVERY SINGLE TIME you call me a rat what you’re really saying is “she’s smarter than me, she escaped the clutches of a cult, and a gang, without ever shooting off a single bullet and I don’t like that I’m going to jail for being a bitch ass pedophile who rapes women and children.”
“When my son Lowell was eight years old, one day he and I had just finished playing. Tired and exhausted, we were lying on the bed talking. He sat up in the bed and started to trace his finger over the scar behind my neck. He asked me with concern in his voice,‘ Daddy, how you got this cut behind your neck?’
I hesitated for a while, wondering how much I should tell him, or if I should even tell him at all. I decided to tell him some of it, leaving out the part about the shooting. So I told him, ‘I got that from fighting with one of my friends.’
Lowell didn’t respond right away. After a moment of silence and tracing his finger over the scar, my son said something to me that I had never even considered up to that point. He said, ‘Daddy, your friend tried to kill you!”
― Drexel Deal, The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father
We were kids once, innocent and carefree, we had no ambitions other than getting stoned and listening to music in the summer, and getting through the school year in the fall. We had dreams of travelling the world one day and seeing all the adventures we could have, and instead they became rapists and I became their victim. – Devon J Hall #StrongEnough
I was a child when the abuse started, I was a victim for more than thirty fucking years, and every time that I thought I was getting a pass for awhile, every single time that I found myself in the arms of a CHOSEN Lover, often times that CHOSEN person, would be someone from my past unbeknownst to my brainwashed mind.
Do you have ANY idea what it’s like to find a counsellor on Google.Com and then find out that he was there the night your “friends” ganged up to rape you? I fucking do, it sucks, it’s insane, and no one believes me.
The people in this town, the people who are wrapped up in gang culture want you to believe that you OWE them your loyalty because hey they let you hang out with them right? They buy your drinks compliment your nails and tell you that they love you, but have they ever actually SHOWN you?
Have you ever seen someone turn against every fucking thing that they have ever known in their entire life to do the right thing for someone that they love? I have, and it’s fucking terrifying knowing that at any moment they could be killed, and why for? Because they decided that as adults they didn’t want to repeat a cycle of abuse that would have them raping and abusing women and children like they were abused.
I am so tired of feeling like I am using this blog to defend myself when IN REALITY what I am doing is making sure that if you are out there, and if you have been abused, or traumatized by abuse, you know that you’re not alone.
We’re convinced, brainwashed, into believing that we deserve to be treated like crap by people who don’t know how to treat us better, because they don’t know how to treat us better, and we don’t know that we deserve better. What a bullshit pound of mental mind fuck that is.
There are people in this world who will literally try to murder you with the death of 1000 cuts and then tell you that you should be grateful you didn’t die because they took you to the hospital after hours of torturing you, and what’s worse is that they will absolutely believe it.
“You are blessed and cursed with consciousness, my child, in a society that has done everything imaginable to remove your kind from its gene pool.”― Sol Luckman, Cali the Destroyer
Yesterday I was sitting here thinking about all the things that I was crying over, realizing that if I had made DIFFERENT choices, if I hadn’t stopped talking about what happened, if I hadn’t made myself small and little so that I could fit in, maybe I would have found someone to help pull me out of the quicksand that had become my life. And then I started thinking about something that I’d heard.
There was a girl I know who got pregnant by a guy I know, and she has been talking about how she “won.” Her boyfriend is in jail, she has two kids she hardly ever sees, and she’s got about half a dozen guys on the line all who sell or use drugs. Yup, you won sista, congrats.
Insert eye roll here.
“Don’t judge,” he says, the man who was my tattoo artist, who turned out to be a rapist in his own right, don’t judge what? A woman who has absolutely no direction in life? A group of people who sit in the same strip club night after night which sits mostly empty as they sell dope to the most desperate of people, who are in so much pain they don’t even know that they are in pain?
In literature Vampires are often considered the most powerful and “sexy” of all the mythical creatures, and my question is why? I’ve studied Vampires a lot, and with the exception of David Boreanaz, and Luke Evans, there aren’t that many sexy vampires out there, and if you say Edward so help Me Christ, turn off this website right now.
Vampires LITERALLY feed off the people around them for survival, they offer absolutely nothing of substance, and the only time they try to save the day it’s usually because of some hot blonde that they are trying to impress, they are literally the most INSECURE bastards on the planet. What is here to envy?
They crave power, they get power and it’s still not enough, and gangsters are the same way, especially today. There used to be rules about women and children, but those rules went by the wayside with the new generation of gangsters who don’t care about anyone but their own selves.
And the worst part is that these assholes don’t even have any actual power. They are driving rented or stolen cars, they are living on credit cards that are marked under assumed or false identities, they are hiding in the shadows everywhere they go because everyone who knows them either wants them to go to prison, or die, or worse. These are not “good” people, and yet too many women around the world, writers SPECIFICALLY, want to write about how sexy and beautiful they are.
Have you seen the film Legend? It’s my favorite film in the entire world, and it’s the film that helped me to decide that I wasn’t living like this. In it, Emily Browning plays Francis, who meets a gangster, whose brother ends up driving a wedge so deep between the two that she ends up killing herself.
It’s based on a true story.
In Public Enemies Marion Cottillard plays Billy French, in real life that “character” was a woman that John MIGHT have been with, who got left behind after beaten for information about his whereabouts by cops. John Dillinger died without any family to his name, and not a penny in his account. The real Billy French moved to the middle of nowhere and allegedly died after being married three times. Her life sucked.
Then there was Devon J Hall, who followed a boy she loved into the depths of hell and got gang raped for her her efforts. She walked away after making that every single person who was involved or even heard rumor of her rape experience throughout childhood and into adult hood was outed to people who could do something about it.
Statistically speaking one of two things are going to happen:
- I might be killed for outting said rapists against my will
- I might if I am SUPER FUCKING LUCKY make it out of this God forsaken shithole of a city and actually make something of myself, but the chances are not high.
Every girl wants a bad boy until she realizes he’s a fucking fundamental moron who has absolutely ZERO clue about how to actually LIVE life.
Not a single one of the men that I know who were in gangs know how to pay bills, mostly because they don’t know how to do their taxes – my excuses is that I get my taxes done when I can afford it, their excuse is that they don’t pay taxes so why should they fucking care?
Half the guys I know still live at home with mom. “But Devon so do you,” yeah but I don’t rape and beat women and call myself a gangster and sell dope out of an empty strip club while acting like a fucking jackass, I don’t tell the world that I’m a badass, while simultaniously not being able to function. MY inability to function comes from abuse, THEIR inability to function in society comes from their absolute desire to do anything BUT be normal human beings.
Everyone wants to be a gangster but no one understands that when people say “our lives end in Jails, institutions and death,” they mean that IT’S A BAD FUCKING ROAD SO DON’T FUCKING DO IT OKAY?!
You want to wear your pants down low because you’ve seen the guys in jail and in all the Youtube videos do it right? Do you know what that means? It means “I’m ready for sex,” it’s what guys in jail do so that other guys know that they are interested, it’s so they don’t have to say “hey yo I’m gay so fuck me,” because ADMITTING you like gay sex would be bad, but having secret signals? That’s totally fine.
Men in gangs are ashamed of EVERYTHING they are and too afraid to be what they COULD be, so they pretend to be what they aren’t and they look like fucking morons. You remember awhile ago I told you how when I was gang raped one guy tried to murder me as he was raping me? Yeah he was pissed off because he thought I reported his Facebook page.
-Pause to let the stupid settle in.-
His response to the fact that he believed that I reported his Facebook page, was to rape me and try to murder me at the same time. This is what you “won” ? Congratulations, the father of your child is a fucking lunatic. You have fun with that.
I was asked once if I was proud to have the man on my arms that I did, turns out that guy threw me down the stairs so that I would miscarry our child. Yup real fucking winner there.
I was proud when I first met him, because I thought he was a nice guy despite the alarm bells going off in my head, I forgot because of all years of trauma that men lie, they pretend, they fake it, and they will squeeze you until you have nothing left.
You can not fix, save, protect, heal, or do anything with a gang guy that you can’t do with a guy who actually has a future. The only thing that gang guy is going to offer you is guns under your bed, black eyes and red swollen cheeks, and the possibility that every person he knows is going to gang up to rape and try to murder you just because they think that you MIGHT be a rat.
The fact that you won’t BECOME a rat until AFTER they rape, humiliate, and try to murder you won’t matter because YOU broke the rules.
YOU decided you didn’t want them anymore and that’s not allowed because they say, because if you don’t follow their rules then they have to “punish you,” because they believe that what they want actually matters.
I went to someone once, repeatedly, to tell them what happened, to explain that I needed help, fuck to tell them to get me out of the God damned country, you know what I realized? He already knew.
Not only did he fucking know, but he was a part of it and had been for YEARS. His name had been mentioned mentioned at least two of the times that I was gang-raped, and it occurred to me as I stood in his shop trying to tell him what happened, that if I’d told him the details, I’d be dead before I fucking left Vancouver.
So when the cops showed up I laughed, and I let as much of the notes I’d been keeping in my head out and I went crazy and I regret nothing. I don’t care if I die tomorrow, there are at least fifty people who know what happened to me, who know where, when, why, and who was involved. They know the names and faces, and they know that my life is LITERALLY in their hands. So if they kill me? L.O.L well at least the people who know what happened will say something.
Somehow in my insanity I found a way out, but I had to go completely insane in order to escape a life of being a mother to kids that I can’t stand and a man whose touch makes me sick to my stomach.
I am as free as I am probably ever going to get and I will take it, because the alternative means allowing my body to be a prison again and that will NEVER happen, I’ll kill myself first, and I mean that sincerely.
I am tired. I am 38 years old and I shouldn’t be this fucking tired, I shouldn’t look back at my life with tears of shame, guilt, fear, dread, misery, disappointment, and just downright disgust.
I imagine the soul inside this body was excited when they first arrived, and honestly? I’m looking at myself and just apologizing.
“Sorry you came to this planet where the people here have 0 ambition of their own but pretend that they do so that they can look tough while abusing and destroying everything around them and then screaming about how no one loves them.
DO YOU KNOW WHY NO ONE LOVES YOU? IT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE A FUCKING SOCIOPPATHIC ASSHOLE WHO KEEPS MAKING THE SAME ROTTEN ABUSIVE MEAN SPIRITED EVIL CHOICES OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND WE’RE FUCKING TIRED OF SEEING IT.
In truth it’s not even that we don’t love you, it’s that we see the darkness, we see the pain, we see the sorrow, we see the SICKNESS, and yes, raping a woman because you THINK she reported your Facebook page is fucking deranged.
We see it and we don’t like it, and we don’t want it for ourselves or our children, and we’re allowed to want better for our children.
After all the darkness, all the fear, shame, anxiousness, the PTSD of it all, “Be Loyal” really means dissect what this word means s that you can use it properly.
If you’re going to be loyal to something, be loyal to the thing that believes that you deserve to be happy, healthy, joyful, and filled with honesty.
The kind of people who WANT to rape women, sell drugs, hurt people, use people, throw away their own lives so they can die saying “YOOOOOO I WAS A G….” are not my kind of people anymore.
I never EVER joined a gang, what I did was walk into a strip club, sit down, talk to a few people, and find myself surrounded by all the boys who had raped me when I was a child, and all their friends.
I didn’t choose what happened to me, but they did, and then they were genuinely shocked, and confused and angry, like legitimately ANGRY that I didn’t want them in my life.
“Why don’t you love me?”
“Because you’re hitting me in the head with a flaming shovel.”
“BUT YOU SHOULD LOVE ME ANYWAYS.”
“Motherfucker, fuck you.”
There are days I look at people that used to be in my old life, in my minds eye, and wonder if they were REPEATEDLY dropped on their heads as children, but then I remember my cousin Jake. I ACTUALLY dropped him on his head, he’s a genius.
He’s a mechanic, or something, and it involves a lot of numbers, and a super big brain, so that clearly can’t be the excuse.
There are limits to the people that we are allowed to have to deal with in our lives, and I have fucking hit it.
Bitch, how stupid do you have to be, to think that I, want your life? What makes you think that YOUR life is better than mine?! I’ single I have no boyfriend to answer too, I do what I want, when I want, and I don’t have to shave my legs. I have better orgasms than any man has EVER given me, I eat what I want, I smoke what I want, and the tv remote? It’s mine.
I can fart, I don’t spend my money unless I have to or want to, I don’t have to worry about dressing up so that some disgusting guy can grab my ass and slobber all over my breasts while he tells me how I look like his “next challenge,” like um no? I do not exist to be your human sex toy.
This isn’t about rape alone, it’s about the idea that people who don’t even know what the word “respect” means, expect you to give it to them even though they have absolutely no idea how to define it.
Respect means listening when the people around you are speaking, it means hearing the word “no” and refusing to PRETEND to believe, that it means “yes.”
It means not stealing a car someone has worked their entire life to buy, just so you can look good to people who all know you can’t afford that shit without having to be a thief.
And yes for the record, in my former life I was a liar, and a thief, and I make no excuses for it. I was a broken person and I fucked up and I am sorry. That’s the end of it.
In my current life I am trying to do the best that I can by admitting that I was a broken person as often as possible, so that I can show other people how to PROTECT their pieces so that they don’t break apart like mine did.
Gang life convinces you that you have to be mean to be a “badass”, that you have to legit put your life on the line every single day to prove you’re “loyal” to the same people who wouldn’t think twice about throwing you in the center of traffic to save themselves.
And the moment that you try to leave they will do everything they can to destroy your life to bring you back and make you spend the rest of your life “making up” for the “bad choice” of trying to be happy. Fuck gangs, fuck gangsters, throw em all in jail and therapy and toss away the key.
Real gangsters hustle to get OUT of the ‘hood, they don’t destroy the hood to protect their image.
A change in behavior comes when you realize the life you’re living is not the life you want.
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 