Most of what came next was a blur except for the feeling. I don’t remember kissing, but I do remember his fingers suddenly being inside of me. Harder and harder and pushing and pushing like no one had touched me before or has touched me since. I could feel the shape of myself and my ridges, and it really, really hurt. I brought my hand instinctively to his wrist and pulled his fingers out of me with force. I didn’t say a word. He stood up abruptly and scurried silently into the darkness up the stairs.
I touched my forehead with the coolness of my palm and breathed in through my nose. I felt the bristled texture of the old couch against my back. My body was sore and fragile, and I kept stroking parts of myself with the back of my hand—my arms, my stomach, my hips—maybe to calm them or maybe to make sure they were still there, attached to the rest of me. An intense headache began to beat into my temples, and my mouth was so dry I could barely close it.
I stood up carefully, pressing my bare feet against the floorboards. I climbed up the wooden stairs and into the room where we’d shot at the beginning of the night, then lay down on the thin flowery sheets. I shivered uncontrollably. I was both confused as to why Jonathan had left without a word and terrified that he would come back. I listened for a sign of him as I watched the blue light of dawn peek in through the window. I thought about Jonathan’s daughter. Does she normally sleep in this bed? I wondered.
Later in the morning, I woke with a vicious hangover. I dressed quickly in the clothes I’d been wearing the day before and noticed that my hands were shaking. Downstairs, Jonathan was making coffee, and the makeup artist was already up and dressed and sitting hunched over a mug. Jonathan didn’t react much to my arrival. “You want coffee?” he asked. My temples pounded. “Sure,” I half-heartedly chimed, opening Instagram. Jonathan had put up one of the Polaroids from the night before.
He had captioned it simply “iCarly.”
It was only as I sat on the bus headed back to the city that I realized Jonathan had never paid me back for the fare.
* * *
A FEW MONTHS later, my agent received the oversize, heavy magazine with the Polaroids printed in its pages. Of the hundreds we had shot, only a handful were included, mostly black-and-white ones.
A couple were favorites I’d pointed out to Jonathan on the night of the shoot. I was relieved to see that he’d done a tasteful edit, and I went so far as to think he might have chosen the images he remembered I liked. Years passed, and I tucked the images and Jonathan somewhere deep in my memory. I never told anyone about what happened, and I tried not to think about it.
A few years after my photo shoot, I received a call from a well-known magazine asking if they could help promote my new book of photographs.
“What book?”
By then, I’d appeared in David Fincher’s Gone Girl and on the covers of international magazines. When the news broke of a book being sold with my name on it—the cover was completely white and read only “EMILY RATAJKOWSKI,” in bold black lettering—several media outlets reached out to me directly, thinking they were being generous by offering their support to a new project of mine.
Confused, I searched my name online. There it was: Emily Ratajkowski, the book, priced at $80. Some of the images were posted on Jonathan’s Instagram, and they were among the most revealing and vulgar Polaroids he had taken of me.
I was livid and frantic. New articles about the book, accompanied by images, were popping up hourly. My fingers went numb as I read the comments from eager customers on Jonathan’s page. His followers were skyrocketing, as were the followers of @imperialpublishing, a “publishing company”—I realized after just a few moments of research—that Jonathan had personally funded and set up solely for the purpose of making this book.
I wondered what kind of damage this would do to my career as an actor. Everyone had told me to shy away from being “sexy” in order to be taken seriously, and now an entire book containing hundreds of images of me, some of them the most compromising and sexual photos of me ever taken, was available for purchase. And from what was being said online, a lot of people believed the entire situation had been my doing. I, after all, had posed for the photos.
My lawyer sent cease and desist letters: one to Jonathan’s makeshift publishing company and one to a gallery on the Lower East Side that had announced it would be holding an exhibition of the Polaroids. My lawyer argued that Jonathan had no right to use the images beyond their agreed-upon usage. When I agreed to shoot with Jonathan, I had consented only for the photos to be printed in the magazine they were intended for. The gallery responded by going to the New York Times and telling the paper that it had a signed model release from me. By that time, I’d stopped working with my agent, who’d quit the industry, but reading this, I called her in a panic.