Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde was raped when she was 21, and forty years later she’s ready to talk about it, but what she’s saying has people upset. She blames herself, and other rape victims, for putting themselves in a situation where rape is a possibility. Hynde was raped by a member of a biker gang. “You can’t f*ck about with these people, especially people who wear ‘I Heart Rape’ and ‘On Your Knees’,” the Pretenders singer says in a new interview. Hynde thinks that the way she dressed and acted led to the crime. “If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault. But if I’m being very lairy and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who’s already unhinged.”
Alarmed by Hynde’s apparent victim-shaming, the director of Victim Support, Lucy Hastings, issued a statement saying “victims of sexual violence should never feel or be made to feel that they were responsible for the appalling crime they suffered, regardless of circumstances or factors which may have made them particularly vulnerable.” Hynde’s memoir, Reckless
