Model, actress and television presenter Kat Alano shares her courageous story of speaking up about sexual abuse and how she hopes to educate and empower survivors of rape and violence against women in the Philippines
TRIGGER WARNING: The following story includes descriptions of sexual assault, rape, victim-blaming, harassment, and mental health struggles including depression and feelings of isolation, which may be distressing for some audiences. Please take care as you read the article.
At the age of 19, British-Filipina Kat Alano’s star was rising. She was the co-host of a popular daily television show.
“Just as I was starting to get into this new, shiny, beautiful life that I just made for myself,” said Alano, when telling her story at an event organised by UN Women and The Moth, a non-profit dedicated to the art and craft of personal storytelling, last year, “I was drugged and raped in my own apartment by a fellow celebrity.”
Alano was unsure what to do. She recalled that her British side was telling herself to go to the hospital, to the police, to get swabbed, to just do something, while her Filipina side, the side she ended up listening to, was encouraging silence.
“The Philippines is a patriarchal country with rape culture rife through society. And even the old rape law used to state that if you were not a virgin at the time that you were raped, it was considered your fault by law. So, I decided to stay quiet, to preserve myself.”
As time went on, Alano started to tell her story to a few people. She discovered that a colleague had also been drugged and raped, and she advised Alano to never speak about it, because if she did, she would likely never work in the industry again.
“I thought this was interesting, because not only was this going on, it was known that you shouldn’t talk about it,” said Alano.
She chose silence once again and Alano’s star continued its rise. It was not long before she was working for MTV, hosting international shows for Beyonce, Rihanna and Chris Brown, and her face was emblazoned across highway billboards and newsstand magazines.
Almost a decade later, she saw three women had come forward to say they had been raped by the same man. “It was like a nightmare. All of a sudden, his face was on every TV channel, on every magazine. And the thing that horrified me most was he wasn’t being cancelled. In fact, the women who had come out were being vilified in the media and bashed on social media,” says Alano. They were being called ‘fame whores’, ‘attention seekers’ and ‘prostitutes’. And worse yet, people were saying that they deserved to be raped.
Alano decided she needed to use her platform to speak up and defend these women. At that point she didn’t share that she had been raped. But just speaking out resulted in a backlash and career blacklisting, while the man accused of rape preserved his status in the industry.
See also: How this inspirational social activist gives power to survivors of sexual violence