When Sarah Joy Brown returned to former General Hospital co-star Maurice Benard’s State of Mind podcast on September 1, it wasn’t just to discuss the good old days in which they were paired as Sonny and Carly (and later Claudia). Fighting back tears, she shared a horrifying chapter of her past in hopes of helping others avoid going through the same horror.
“Something happened in 2016, and it blew up my life,” she said. “I really struggled with my mental health as a result of it for years… I was roofied, and I was raped — violently, from what I could tell. I don’t have any memory of it.”
Brown had been in Brooklyn, where years earlier she’d worked while playing Julia on As the World Turns. She was visiting from the West Coast and waiting for a friend in a bar, L.A. cap on her head, bags at her side. She’d given up on the friend showing up when a man offered to buy her a drink. “Against my better judgment, I said OK. I remember walking outside of the bar with him to sit on the patio.” He made a disparaging remark about someone that Brown mentioned, and after that, she can recall nothing else, not until the morning after. This, she makes clear, was not the man who raped her.
“I wake up, I’m fully dressed, I’ve got my bra on, although it’s not the same bra I went to bed in, and I’m wearing somebody else’s pants,” Brown recounts. “I look out at a brick wall out of a window. I’m on somebody’s bed, and I’m panicking. This is 10 am or something like that. My head is pounding.”
In the room with her, Brown soon discovered, was a 30-year-old kid, as she called him. He said that she was wearing his girlfriend’s pants. “He looked really kind and normal,” she says. But she soon sensed that he was lying as he told her that she’d needed help the previous night and had asked him to get her out of the bar and away from the man with whom she was having a drink. Brown left as quickly as she could, but the Uber that the kid insisted on calling for her dumped her in the middle of Brooklyn nowhere near where she’d asked to go. “I immediately get out and start vomiting into a potted plant. White foam,” she points out — of note because she’d been drinking red wine. “I stumbled to a hotel… I was hurting, and I was a mess.” She was bruised with broken capillaries around her neck and a broken toe.
Back in L.A., Brown got a new phone and found that her attacker’s number was in it. She synched it to her computer, and within two minutes, he texted, admitting that yes, something had happened in Brooklyn, that she’d been drunk and that he’d used a condom. That last part was a relief to Brown, but the rest… “I couldn’t stop crying,” she says. “I was devastated to have had somebody have their way with my body and have no memories of it whatsoever.”
Brown’s story becomes even more disheartening. “The fiasco that was made of [the case] was outrageous. People wonder why women or men for that matter don’t report,” she says. Well, this is why. After giving her statement to the special victims unit in Brooklyn over the phone, she was told that she had to return to New York to do it again in person. Then the police investigated the wrong date. Upon being questioned, the kid was caught in a lie; the cops did not follow up on that. The owners of the bar didn’t respond to Brown’s call to obtain surveillance footage until after it had been deleted. On top of all that, the D.A. misplaced the case for months.
When she asked the police for the records of the case, she says that she was told it would cost her 5150 — a veiled threat in that the number 5150 is the section of the Welfare and Institutions Code which allows an adult experiencing a mental-health crisis to be detained for 72 hours against their will.
“It was horrifying, and my mental health tanked,” Brown says. “I’ve never been in a situation like that where I felt so helpless and unable to take care of myself.” To climb back out, “it took years of extreme darkness. I was celibate for a long time. I’m too much of a control freak to manage that somebody had their way with me and I wasn’t able to stop them and I don’t know what they did to me.”
Brown’s advice to others: Buy your own drink. Always.
