I’m going to share a #metoo story, because these memories are helping me understand why I’m so haunted by aspects of the case involving Ted Mueller and Bethel College.

In 1996, when I was a junior in college, I was a foreign exchange student in a medium-sized city in France. I was a music performance major, so I attended both the conservatory and the public university. I lived in a small, poorly heated apartment on the first floor of a townhome owned by the people who were ostensibly my “host family,” which basically meant that once a week, they dutifully invited me and my American roommate upstairs for supper.

They were cold, unpleasant, clearly in marital hell, and perpetually furious with us for being vegetarians, despite the fact that the exchange program assigned us to them because they were the only family on the roster that would agree to host vegetarians. It was France, in 1996. I probably should have just trained myself to digest meat. Occasionally, when he was buzzed enough, the host father would loosen up and comment that it wasn’t too awful to have cute American girls living in the house, even though we were vegetarians, and after all, it wasn’t as if we were losing weight. (I think, with all those carbs and chocolate, I may have ballooned from 100 to 110 pounds.) I didn’t feel safe with him, but nor did I actively fear him. He just seemed like a normal, unhappily married, middle-aged jerk.

My refuge was the host family of another one of the exchange students in the program. They were everything my host parents weren’t—warm, effusive, generous, welcoming. They felt sorry for my roommate and me because our host parents were such uptight, cold fish. Even though we were vegetarians, they had us over for dinner occasionally, and always made us feel that they were happy to see us.

I didn’t particularly enjoy being an exchange student. I’m an introvert and an only child, which means I’m fully capable of being profoundly lonely while at the same time needing far more alone time than most of the people around me. I get socially exhausted easily when I’m around strangers, and that’s in my native language. The governing ethos of my exchange program was that every minute we weren’t speaking French with native French speakers was a minute wasted. I felt guilty for every moment I spent alone in my apartment.

The point was to have new experiences. During our orientation the first week, the male program director warned us, “Your professors may hit on you.” I remember specifically that he said professors; I don’t remember if he said host parents. Either way, his statement was not followed by, “If that happens, please don’t hesitate to report it to me.”

The message was, this is a cultural experience. Be ready for it.

Our cohort was small, and all women.

I experienced a lot of sexual harassment in France, all of it utterly normalized and typical of the experiences I’ve heard from other women exchange students. It’s one of the main things I remember discussing with the other Americans in the program. We didn’t have much in common, other than the shared experience of being regularly propositioned and heckled. I was followed home in the dark from the train station once; I ran while lugging a suitcase (I was not a runner back then). I was tailed across town on the bus, through multiple transfers. Fortunately, I was headed somewhere where people were waiting for me. In a closed compartment on a train trip home from Paris, a man became so enraged by my unwillingness to engage with him that he pointedly pulled out a pocket knife and started cleaning his fingernails with it, an unambiguous threat. I looked French, but the sexualized interest always increased when my accent revealed me as American.

I needed my friend’s host family to be a refuge, not only because my host family sucked, but because I so often felt unsafe in my day-to-day life. Her host dad was a big, bawdy, Falstaff-type character—in fact, I’m just going to refer to him as Falstaff. He would grab my friend, his host daughter, as she walked by, and pull her into his lap. As my French comprehension improved, it became clearer to me that some of the things he said to my friends and me—things that I would tell myself I had surely, literally misunderstood—were explicitly sexual. When I say that I understood his sexually explicit comments, I’m not suggesting that it ever once occurred to me that I had any choice but to figure out how to gamely respond in such a way that maintained my beloved guest host daughter status without the guy actually touching me.

Because obviously, he loved to touch us. And it was gross. He was the absolute prototype of “handsy”—most of the time, it was shoulders and back and waist and the sides of our faces. In France, where “la bise” is the traditional social greeting, it can take a long time to for a foreigner to figure out what kind of persistent lip-to-face action is just meant as a warm welcome and what is, not to put too fine a point on it, grooming.

One night, as a magnanimous gesture, he and his wife invited my host parents to dinner along with me and my roommate. We complained about them a lot, and I think these families knew each other a bit through the exchange program. Falstaff held court over the multi-course dinner, while discussing our various physical attributes. There was no point where it would have occurred to any of us to express displeasure at the way we were being talked about. That would mean we were resisting the cultural experience. We were supposed to be flattered, and on some level, I’m sure we all were. These folks had American exchange students every year. They had a long-term relationship with the exchange program. This must be fine.

Later in the evening, hanging out in the room of my friend who lived there, she said “Falstaff had his hand up my shirt the whole time.” She had been on his lap. I think I expressed shock, or disgust. For all the weird hugs and wet kisses and sexually inappropriate comments, the guy had never put his hand up my shirt. If he ever grabbed my breasts or my butt, I have no memory of it, and I doubt that he did. I think he reserved the worst for her, because then she said, “He only wants one thing from me. Just like every other man I’ve ever met in my whole fucking life.”

Of everything that happened in that house, this conversation is what I remember most clearly. She was twenty or twenty-one at the time, like me. She talked about the sexual attention of this fifty-something man like it was an unfortunate but typical bout of bad weather. I remember it because she was always the social balm that made everyone more comfortable, and the only thing she ever really complained about was the difficulty of scoring decent weed in France. She was a cheerful pothead who’d been hospitalized for anorexia as a high school student. I have absolutely no idea what her inner life was like.

On my last night in France, the director of my exchange program took me and the other women in my program out to dinner. If I’m remembering correctly, it was at a Chinese restaurant that could feed vegetarians. We were drinking, of course, because you don’t go out to eat and not drink when you’re having a cultural experience in France. (Alcohol is the backdrop to most of these stories. That doesn’t mean alcohol was the problem. But for Falstaff, alcohol was convenient, and it was easier to not feel ashamed over Falstaff’s sexual comments after a glass of wine or two.)

My friend—the one who lived at Falstaff’s house and suffered his hand up her shirt, and I dearly hope that was the most physically invasive thing she suffered and also suspect that it wasn’t—commented to our exchange program director that she thought my host father had a crush on me.

My host father, remember, was mostly a grouch. I found him unpleasant and not trustworthy, but he’d never made any sort of move on me; mostly he just chewed me out for being a vegetarian. I had no idea what she meant by that, if there was any truth to what she said, or if she was actually trying to articulate what was happening to *her*.

The exchange program director—who was at least forty, and generally, in many ways, good at his job—was in some sort of “one of the girls” mode that night. He turned to me and said, “Well, do you like him back?”

I did not like my host father back, at all, even a little, and even if I had, it would not have occurred to me to say so, or to show interest. There is no moral universe in which such a relationship would have been okay. And yet the exchange program director was asking me point-blank, and it was basically the equivalent of, “What do you think, would you throw that one out of bed?” It was like he was suddenly playing my gay best friend in a shitty rom-com.

I don’t remember what I said back; it was probably some sort of denial, burnished with faked sophistication. People, I was a child. Not a minor, but a child.

These were not the most traumatic experiences of my life, by any means. But they affected me. I’ve spent years minimizing them to myself, playing the “it wasn’t that bad” game. Looking back, though, I can see how these experiences tipped the scale in a dangerous direction, so that I entered my twenties with the belief that no older man would ever listen to a thing I said unless I also looked conventionally hot. For men my own age, that assumption was already mostly a given.

Facilitating an exchange program is an enormous responsibility. Being a host family is an enormous responsibility. If you’ve never spent an extended period of time in a foreign country, young, not speaking your native language, among people you have no choice but to trust, you can’t possibly begin to understand how vulnerable a time this is, how hard it is to be safe, how hard it is to figure out what version of yourself you should be.

Bethel folks: please, please, think of these things before you minimize Bethel’s responsibility to protect its exchange students from the likes of Ted Mueller.