She was homeless and hid from her husband until a woman acquaintance helped her leave the country, but Dworkin said she lived in fear of him for the rest of her life. “I didn’t know that such horror had ever happened to anyone else.”
“I was buried alive in silence,” she wrote in The Times in 1995. No one came to her aid, even when she dared asked for it. She often wrote about how he beat her repeatedly and burned her with cigarettes. She went abroad again and married a Dutch radical. after a year and earned a bachelor’s degree from Bennington in 1968. Her parents felt disgraced by her disclosures and, Dworkin said, “pretty much abandoned me.” She dropped out of school and went to Greece, where she turned to prostitution for food and money. The New York Times and other major papers gave her story prominent coverage, which led to government investigations and the eventual closure of the prison. She was befriended by writer-activist Grace Paley, who urged Dworkin to tell newspapers about her prison abuse. She bled for days afterward, sustaining injuries so shocking that her usually dispassionate family doctor cried when he treated her later. The Bennington College freshman was sent to New York City’s notorious Women’s House of Detention, where she was violated during strip searches and a brutal internal examination by prison doctors. Her life as a political activist began in 1965 during an anti-Vietnam War protest outside the U.S. In school, her nonconformist tendencies put her at odds with teachers in sixth grade, for instance, she refused to sing “Silent Night” at Christmas and was dropped from the choir. As a child, she often stayed with relatives because her father, a schoolteacher and postal employee, worked long hours, and her mother had heart trouble. Often at her side when she marched against pornography, he is her only immediate survivor.ĭworkin was born in Camden, N.J., to immigrant Jewish parents with progressive politics. Stoltenberg shared Dworkin’s feminist fervor and helped found the group Men Against Pornography. The two met in 1974 at a benefit for the War Resisters League and soon began living together. Her relationship with Stoltenberg was a subject of intense fascination for many who knew of Dworkin’s work. They were together for 30 years, the last seven as a married couple. Despite the violence she endured in her first marriage and her subsequent identification as a lesbian, her longtime companion was writer John Stoltenberg, who has described himself as an openly gay man.
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