(Trigger warning: This article includes a conversation about sexual assault.)
In 1977, Jacqueline Fuchs, the artist formerly known — or probably forever best known — as Runaways bassist Jackie Fox, quit her seminal hard rock girl group after “experiencing tremendous sexism, more than anything else I’ve ever done in my life” (and, as shockingly revealed in bombshell 2015 Huffington Post report, after being drugged and raped by the band’s manager in an Orange County motel room during a New Year’s Eve afterparty). She was only 17 years old at the time, with her whole life ahead of her, but she never played music professionally again — unlike her former bandmates Joan Jett, Lita Ford, and Cherie Currie, who went on to solo success.
Since her teenhood in the Runaways, Fuchs found her own version of success, repeatedly reinventing herself as an entertainment attorney, as a four-time Jeopardy! champion, as a novelist, and now as a board game creator, with Rock Hard: 1977 — her beautifully crafted, five-years-in-the-making, role-playing board game, the perfect gift for the music geek on your shopping list this holiday season.
And interestingly, Fuchs has found the board game industry to be a much more welcoming and safe space for women than the music business ever was.
“I eventually decided that female musicians weren’t getting taken very seriously at the time. I decided I wanted to have a little more agency, so I would go into the business side of music,” says Fuchs, who after the Runaways studied entertainment law at Harvard (where she was classmates with Barack Obama). “I loved music, and I wanted to stay involved, and I mistakenly believed I would be subject to less [sexual] harassment in law. And that turned out not to be true. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll go back to school, I’ll get a law degree, and then people really won’t bug me!’ But, you just get bugged by a class of people that know better how to protect themselves against it. You still get harassed as a lawyer.”
Now, Fuchs marvels, “What I saw in the board game world, which is stunning to me coming from entertainment, is you get actual mentors who aren’t helping you just because they want to sleep with you! … In the board game world, there are a lot of really conservative guys, and it is a predominantly male hobby, and most game designers are men, but it’s getting better. Because the board game industry, unlike entertainment, has looked around and said, ‘Hey, you know what? We have underrepresentation. We’re going to reach out to underrepresented voices and try to amplify them, and we’re going to have a zero-tolerance policy.’ Literally one of my game publishers just put out a call and said, ‘Hey, if you are a woman or a member of the LGBTQ+ community or BIPOC community who has a game design, we would love to hear about it.’ They’re actively reaching out and saying, ‘We need more diversity in this hobby. We need more points of view.’ And when something comes out about somebody in the board game industry being a harasser, or racist, or anything like that, they get blackballed.
“And you also get women who are out there actively supporting you. Even though it’s a more exclusive club in a lot of ways than entertainment ever was, it doesn’t feel like that,” Fuchs continues brightly. “Like, I have to shout out Elizabeth Hargrave — who designed Wingspan, the most successful game of the last decade — who is the most supportive to other female designers. She’s amazing. She amplifies the voices of other women. She’s the coolest.”
Many fans would argue that Fuchs is the coolest, and Rock Hard: 1977 allows the player to step inside her rock ‘n’ roll fantasy, “living a year of a musician’s life, competing to gain the most fame and become the most famous new artist of ‘77.” Players hustle and pay their dues, the old-school ‘70s way — working overnight shifts or donating blood to finance rehearsal studio rentals, demo recordings, and the hiring of a publicist and road crew; playing “random gigs” like frat parties or the Goldberg bar mitzvah; eventually graduating to club shows, opening slots, and finally arenas and stadiums; securing and renegotiating record contracts; and of course, giving band managers like Nigel Hawthorne Davies (“a man about town who’s very British and very pretentious”) a cut of the profits and royalties every step of the way.
“It’s very logical,” says the woman who was once characterized as a “brainy brainiac” in Floria Sigismondi’s 2010 biopic The Runaways. And indeed, Rock Hard: 1977 doesn’t seem to feature much of the salaciousness, darkness, and danger that Fuchs sadly witnessed and suffered firsthand as a teenage rock star. “Well, it is there — if you read all the ‘flavor text’ on the game’s cards, there is some stuff in there like that, if you want to read it that way,” Fuchs smirks. “You can certainly read ‘fans’ as being groupies, if you want. And you can think the ‘candy’ in the game is cocaine. That’s a euphemism for whatever you want it to be a euphemism for. Or, it’s just candy.”
Players can take on rocker personas with specific unique powers, which Fuchs says are “loose mashups of the type of people” she rubbed glittery shoulders with at ‘70s Hollywood hangouts like Rodney’s English Disco and the Starwood. For instance, there’s keyboardist Raphael Santiago, “The Well-Connected” (“Someone who knew people at every club and could get you in places and just seemed to know what was going to be going on generally before anybody else did”), or Yolanda Delacroix, “The Well-Tempered” (“She’s so damn reliable, and we all need people like that in a band”). A limited promo version of the game even features a pink-leather-trousered Jackie Fox acrylic avatar, billed as “The Cunning Vixen” — surprisingly casting the soft-spoken Fuchs as a true queen of noise, the sort of superheroine she might not have felt she could be as a naïve teen nearly 50 years ago.
I recently visited Fuchs at her cozy Hollywood Hills bungalow to play Rock Hard: 1977 — I was drummer Benji “Bam Bam” Bernstein, aka “The Scenester.” And while I lost, I did make it all the way to a headlining slot at the game’s Carter Stadium, and I consumed a lot of candy (both figuratively and literally: Fuchs generously shared her favorite game-night snack, dark chocolate peanut butter cups from Whole Foods, with me). After Fuchs’s victory in the role of androgynous guitarist Doc Sapphire, “The Merrymaker,” we curled up on her sofa with more candy for some post-game comfort-eating, and things got more serious and a bit less merry as she opened up about her headline-making sexual assault, her decision to come forward about it four decades later, and her current relations with her former Runaways bandmates in the aftermath of that HuffPost exposé.
But suffice to say, after living many lives in her 64 years. Jackie Fuchs is winning at the game of life.
LYNDSANITY: With everything you’ve been through, many people would expect you to write a memoir. After all, you have published books, albeit fictional ones, before. But it seems like this game is your memoir in a way, instead — that this is how you’ve chosen to tell your life story.
JACKIE FUCHS: I disclose a lot of things about my life when I do interviews. The reason I don’t want to write a memoir is that to fully write my story, [it would have to include] the stories of other people, and some of those people are very litigious. So, that would keep me from going there.
Well, you’re a lawyer, so you obviously know more about that than most people.
Yes, I know exactly who is likely to sue. But also, some of the things that really impacted me are not going to show people in their best light, and I kind of think that’s their story to tell regarding the band. Our stories are all intertwined. I am writing down as much of what happened as I can, because I’m the only one who remembers it. Everybody else came out of the Runaways with some kind of substance abuse issue; I think they’ve all spoken about it. Well, Joan never has, so I can’t speak for Joan. I don’t know for sure about Joan. But Cherie has talked about her problems with addiction. Lita has talked about her problems with alcohol. Sandy [West] had horrible issues with substance abuse. When they were making The Runaways movie, Cherie called me at one point and said, “You need to do this. Joan doesn’t remember anything. I don’t remember anything. You’re the only one who remembers anything!” And it’s true. I remember a lot of things that the other band members would like to forget. And I don’t want to inflict those memories on them. … So, I like telling stories through games that let you kind of live a part of what I lived.
In 2015, Huffington Post’s “The Lost Girls” story put you back in the spotlight in a way you might not have anticipated or been prepared for. I imagine that might be another reason why you’d be resistant to publishing an autobiography.
Yeah, I didn’t anticipate that response at all. Especially since this was pre-#MeToo, and it was a time when the Cosby accusers were not being believed and were being very battered just for daring to say this. It was also a really bad time on college campuses, when a lot of college girls were coming forward and not being believed. And Kesha came forward and got sued for it by Dr. Luke. I think Kesha was what did it the most for me. Kesha was a huge part of what inspired me. Because why would you ever come forward against a powerful figure with a lot of money, if you had anything to lose and they could turn around and sue you for defamation? It’s such a chilling effect on women. First of all, I 100 percent believe her, but also, why does Dr. Luke have to sue her? Because he knows it’s going to be shutting down behavior. It angered me, and it still angers me that he did this. All of these things were affecting me horribly, as a woman who had experienced something similar. And I was just sitting there going, “I have something none of them have, which is witnesses. And I have a little bit of celebrity. So, maybe I’ll break through the noise.” I didn’t really want to be public about it, but I felt like I could make an impact. But I did not know I was going to go to bed the night before this [article was published] and wake up to a viral story.
You really didn’t expect that huge public response?
No! I went to bed, and when I woke up the first thing I did was check my email, and there was a message from somebody saying, “How does it feel to have a viral story?” I was like, “What are you talking about?” And I looked and I was on the Huffington Post front page. The only story above me was a story about Donald Trump, and mine was the second-most-viewed-story of that week. And it started getting retweeted like crazy. It was really weird.
Well, you did want a lot of people to read this story, because you were hoping it would make some kind of impact. So, perhaps the attention was a positive thing?
The whole trajectory of the story was kind of traumatic. When I first talked to Jason Cherkis, who wrote the story for Huffington Post, I gave him a deadline. I said, “This story has to come out before the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, because Joan is getting inducted and I don’t want her to be up there [thanking the Runaways' manager]. I know she’ll thank Kim Fowley. I really need to give her a chance not to do that.” But this story didn’t come out before [Jett’s Rock Hall induction]. I don’t think I’ve told this to anybody, but Huffington Post was holding it for their new Highline magazine. They didn’t want it to be the first story, because they wanted to at least get Highline rolling, but then they had delays that they weren’t anticipating. So, it didn’t come out [before the Rock Hall ceremony], and Joan thanked Kim during her induction speech. And then I was like, “OK, you’ve got to at least get this out before the ceremony airs on TV. People are going to think that this is just me trying to make her look bad out of jealousy or something.” But it didn’t come out before that. And of course, that was one of the things that I got accused of. That’s not why I told my story, but it was an unintended side effect. I did not want to embarrass my bandmates — although they embarrassed themselves, after the story came out.
I read Cherie Currie’s autobiography, Neon Angel, years ago, and I recall she gave a fictionalized account of what had happened in the motel room, changing the girl’s identity and describing it as a consensual encounter?
At first, in her original version of it, she named me, and you do not do this to somebody. You don’t out a rape victim. … I was not ready to talk about it. Fortunately, Cherie had sent that chapter to Lita, and Lita sent it to me. And I wrote to Cherie, and because there was so much in there that was provably inaccurate, I said, “If you do that, I will sue you.” So, she changed it to a fictionalized person. I thought she changed some of the other details in order to protect me, but it turns out she just misremembered it. And because she misremembered so many little details, I assumed she had misremembered some of the more horrifying details too.
Or suppressed them, maybe?
Well, I was drugged into unconsciousness, so I was unconscious for part of the assault. I woke up in the middle of it, or came to, but it was confirmed during the research for the Huffington Post story by five other people. Cherie got a lot of the smaller details wrong. She had it happening before a gig. And when I talked to her, I said, “Cherie, how could that happen before a gig? How could I have gone out and played, when you’re writing about this person being so out-of-it that her head’s slumped on her shoulders?” So, she has changed the story a few times over the years. At first I asked Jason, “Did she tell you that it was non-consensual?’ And he said yes. And then she went on Facebook and was saying, “Well, of course it was rape, because Jackie was only 16.” But then it went to, “Oh, she just had day-after regrets.” And then it got down to, “It was Jackie’s idea! She staged the whole thing! She was directing the action!” And then the funniest part was she was going to do a GoFundMe to fund a lie-detector test. And somebody pointed out to her that you can get a lie-detector test done for like $125. So, that was kind of funny.
Have you spoken to any of your ex-bandmates since that story came out almost a decade ago?
I’ve spoken to Cherie, yeah.
Are you on OK terms?
Not now, but that’s probably more over her politics. I have never spoken to Joan. So, all the time that Joan is saying, “I wish Jackie well,” it’s like, “Hey, your manager has my phone number and my email.”
A big takeaway from the Huffington Post story was a broader thing: an examination of the bystander effect, and why people would freeze and not help when they’re witnessing a crime right in front of them. So, I am playing devil’s advocate here, but have you considered the possibility that your very young bandmates and friends just couldn’t process what was happening, or didn’t know how they were supposed to react? That maybe they were so inexperienced that they thought this was just typical rock ‘n’ roll debauchery?
It is possible that they didn’t realize it, but I don’t think it’s likely, given that the other teenagers who were there that night all knew what was going on. … I’ve spoken to four people, not including Cherie, who were in the room that night, two of which I hadn’t even remembered being there. My friends Trudie and Helen came forward, and there was a young man there who is now a pastor and who really had to do some soul-searching about whether he wanted his name used or not. Jason and I were both on the proverbial tenterhooks, waiting to find out if he would back up the story, because it was huge. But he finally felt like if he didn’t come forward, it was going to eat away at him. He had carried the burden of that night for 40 years, so I think it was a relief for him to be able to get that off his chest and move on with his life. … I once thought that it is an absolutely horrible thing to witness something like that happening and not doing anything to stop it, although Cherie will say that she got up and stormed out of the room, and that is actually kind of confirmed.
Storming out of the room isn’t really helping, though.
No, but you have to remember, nobody had cell phones then. Plus, it didn’t happen suddenly. Things were happening gradually, and there were a lot of drugs in the room that night. You’d have to talk to them to ask whether they were inebriated. I know I was drugged. I don’t know to this day whether I was always the intentional target of this, or whether I was a target of convenience. I tried to set up a meeting with our manager. By the way, I don’t say his name, not because I’ve got this thing where I can’t say his name, but his name doesn’t deserve to live on. The worst thing you can do to these guys, in their mind, is to let them be forgotten.
You mentioned that #MeToo hadn’t really happened yet when you came forward in 2015. There has since been retribution for predators like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, but I feel in the music world, compared to other areas of entertainment, sexual misconduct sort of gets shrugged off as just “rock ‘n’ roll” antics. R. Kelly and possibly Diddy are exceptions in terms of facing real consequences, but for instance, Marilyn Manson is still releasing music and playing shows. Dr. Luke is still producing hits. It seems when most music people get accused of wrongdoing, they don’t get entirely canceled.
It’s tough. I think the thing about the music industry is it’s not like a film set, where there are dozens or even hundreds of people present on set. It’s an artist and a producer in a recording studio — increasingly at a home studio. It’s a dressing room. It’s an afterparty. It’s not like there are a lot of people to witness it. So, it can be very difficult to say, “I’ve experienced this,” and go to the press by yourself. The press doesn’t want to run a story that can get them sued, so they need validation or verification from at least one other person. There are a couple of rock stars in particular that have gotten a pass, and [their alleged victims] really want to talk about it and have approached me and asked for advice: “Should I do this?” But I don’t know if you want to be in the spotlight if it’s not a full-blown sexual assault, like somebody slamming you up against a wall or groping you. Because you are going to have one of two things happen. Either there’s going to be a spotlight on you and everybody’s going to be asking you about it and you get to relive it over and over, or worse: nobody cares.
Jane Wiedlin recently came forward about how your ex-manager’s pal Rodney Bingenheimer assaulted her at his English Disco, the club you guys all used to hang out at. But that story also blew over pretty quickly. He still has his radio show.
Well, I think I continued to make excuses for Rodney, because Rodney is not terribly bright. You kind of know that he was hanging out with teenage girls because emotionally and intellectually, there were a little closer to being on his level. But also, I consider Rodney to some extent a victim of he-who-shall-not-be-named as well, because he took Rodney and put him in this world, knowing Rodney’s weakness and that Rodney wasn’t that bright, and made him a party to it and put Rodney in a position. I mean, Rodney doesn’t have swag. Rodney doesn’t have game. That’s all I’m going to say. Notwithstanding whatever he had going on at his club, I don’t know enough about how Rodney became a harasser, abuser, whatever he was.
I will tell you a very funny story, since I’m giving you the full confessional here. So, after my Huffington Post story came out, the phone rang one day — and it was Rodney. He called me up and with a surprising level of emotional maturity and said, “I just want you to know I’m really sorry for what you went through, and I want you to know, I believe you.” That was surprising. At the time, I didn’t know that Rodney was doing things to women in any way. So, we talked a little bit about the good times of the ‘70s and what we missed about those days, and after we reminisced for half an hour, Rodney said, “Hey, can I ask you a question about that night?” And I said yeah, and he said, “Um… was I there?” That was kind of funny. It’s like, he witnessed shit like that so often, he couldn’t even identify what was going on. And it’s not because Rodney was a heavy drug user, as far as I’m aware. It’s just because I think that stuff happened so often back then.
Many sexual assault survivors take years to come forward, like you did. Or they don’t come forward at all, or only come forward once others do. And most victims never press charges or sue.
Yeah, and part of the problem [with victims not being believed] is people will say, “Well, it’s never been proved in court,” but a lot of the reason why these things are never proven is the statute of limitations has expired. For instance, they recently did a “lookback,” but they didn’t advertise the lookback period. [Editor’s note: The California AB 218 provided a three-year lookback window between Jan. 1, 2020 and Dec. 31, 2022, during which all underage sexual assault victims in California could start a civil action for money damages, no matter how long ago their abuse had occurred.] I didn’t even know about it until the day before it was up. I think I found out on Dec. 30 [in 2022], and the deadline was Dec. 31. You’re not going to get a lawyer to draw up those papers and get it to court before court closes. And I didn’t know that [founding Runaway] Kari Chrome was suing Rodney and our former manager [for sexual assault of a minor]. Afterwards, there was a part of me where I was really angry that I didn’t know about it, but I also felt that because I wanted my story to be credible, I didn’t have had the same space to sue. Because the minute you sue, people will say, “Oh, she’s just in it for the money.” So, in a way, I’m happy that I didn’t know about the lookback period.
When your story went viral, I don’t recall anyone accusing you of just being in it for the money…
Are you kidding? I had all kinds of accusations! I kept some of the Facebook posts, and unfortunately, some of them were brutal. I mean, people don’t want to believe these things, because then you might have to believe it about a band that you love, or about a celebrity that you love and grew up with. But yeah, nobody really experienced any blowback except for me. I would say Cherie and Joan did a bit, but by their own actions — not their actions on that night [in 1975], but their response [to the story in 2015].
How long after your rape did you remain in the Runaways?
I stayed in the band for a year and a half. Apparently, [Fowley] wanted to get rid of me and was interviewing people to replace me, but I think on some level he knew that would’ve been a big mistake. Because if you get rid of me, you’ve taken away my incentive to stay quiet. I stayed quiet not just out of my own sense of shame, but also because I would’ve been taking away the dreams of four other people. And I didn’t want to do that. That is part of why their response was painful. But I also paid for it in not being allowed to play on the first album. So, every time “Cherry Bomb” is used in movies or television shows, I don’t get the reuse fees from having played on it, because I’m not listed in the session reports. I get this tiny little artist royalty, but I didn’t write the song and we didn’t own any of our own publishing. I mean, there are things that almost anger me more than what happened. There’s all the stuff that nobody knows about, but people will know about it after we’re all gone. Music history will know about it, because I have all these records.
Is that why you wanted to go into entertainment law? To fight for other artists and make sure that they don’t get screwed over?
Absolutely. Absolutely, that was the motivation.
You were only 17 when you left the Runaways. You’ve done all these other things with your life, had all these other great careers. But to many, you’re still “former Runaways bassist Jackie Fox.” Does that bother you?
No. I am really proud of the stuff that I did post-Runaways, but I’m always going to be known for being in the Runaways, because I’m not looking to surpass that. And one of the things that I think people don’t realize, because I don’t get along with my ex-bandmates particularly, is that I’m also really proud of them and what they’ve accomplished. I know how hard it was as a woman to be an artist during that period. And Joan kept with it. She was rejected by every label in town. She kept doing it. She’s still doing it. I’m still really proud of everything Cherie has accomplished in the music industry. She’s an amazing performer. With Lita, same thing — and she went through some really traumatic stuff within her marriage, too. They all kept doing this in the face of what we went through as women, and all three made great music. And so, I’m really proud of them.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.