The Time Cherie Currie Was Kidnapped By A Serial Killer

Cherie Currie made rock and roll history in the 1970s when she fronted the first all-girl rock band, The Runaways. But that accomplishment didn't come without a price. She and the other girls in the band were just that: girls. They were all underage, just 15 or 16 years old at the time they were rocking out on stage with songs about sex, drugs, and alcohol.

The Runaway girls lived through some very traumatic events during their time as teenage rockers. Absentee parents and abusive male managers exploited them both economically and sexually. Currie had come from a difficult background, and her upbringing appeared to set the stage for the kinds of situations she would either find or put herself in as the years went on. She told Spin magazine in 2010 that she was raped by her sister's boyfriend, and the experience made her angry. She also said that while in the Runaways, the band's manager, Kim Fowley, had sex with a woman in front of the girls as a form of "sex education." And according to OC Weekly, she had an abortion after becoming pregnant by another manager at just 16 years old.

Currie would end up leaving the band just two years after it was formed, but she didn't leave behind her penchant for getting into precarious situations. That tendency of hers would soon get her into a rather dire life-and-death moment.

Currie told the Democrat & Chronicle in 2013 that she was a people-pleaser as a young woman. That attitude got her into more than a few precarious situations. While she was still just 17 years old, a man in a limo asked her to get in with him, and she took him up on the offer. He turned out to be a deranged stalker, a serial killer who told her that he had killed six women in Texas. He imprisoned her, beat her, and raped her for five hours before she was able to escape. She was able to get a hold of a knife, stab the man, and escape.

"He was mentally ill. He really believed that we'd been together in Dallas, Texas," she told Juice magazine in 2007. "It was brutal, five hours of hell." She said that the police were able to identify the man based on the injury she gave him, and he was arrested. "He said I was dead and would never see my family again. He confessed to me that he had murdered those women while he was beating me almost to death." Unfortunately, justice did not seem to be served, neither for Currie nor the six women he allegedly killed in Texas. He was given a year in county jail for his kidnapping of her. Currie was definitely lucky to have gotten away with her life.

"The bottom line is that I survived," she told Juice. "And you know what? You can survive anything. So many women are affected by these kinds of things. It changes them. I say, 'Don't let that happen.' It doesn't have to destroy your life. They say God never gives you more than you can handle. I believe that."

Currie said she received counseling for that and other traumatic events in her life at the Santa Monica Rape Clinic, but the therapy ultimately didn't work for her. It involved beating on blow-up dolls of Bozo the Clown. She smacked it around a couple times, then realized that it wasn't her for. "Then I thought, 'You talked yourself out of an impossible situation. You survived. You lived. You should be proud.' So I stood up and left. As I walked down the hallway, I felt so small, but as the door got closer, I felt taller and taller. By the time I hit those doors, I was a whole person again."

As Currie told the Democrat & Chronicle, she found that learning to carve tree trunks with a chainsaw helped her heal more than beating up Bozo. "That same little voice that told me to go back to the chainsaw gallery told me to not get in that car, told me I shouldn't," Curry says. "I did it to people please, please this guy, be nice... I don't do that now."