By Dvora Meyers

When I begin my Skype interview with Jessie Kahnweiler, the 29-year-old filmmaker behind last year’s viral short, Meet My Rapist, she’s fidgeting with her iPad, which has caused the camera to pan the living room of her Los Angeles apartment.

“Are you trying to show off your spacious LA digs?” I jokingly ask from my 350-square-foot Brooklyn studio.

“No,” she says, laughing. “I just spilled yogurt on my friend’s iPad.” An iPad she borrowed, Kahnweiler adds, because she’d recently gotten hummus on her own laptop.

This sort of adorable klutziness reminds me of Jennifer Lawrence’s many red carpet and late night interview antics, which have managed to earn her the mantle of “cool girl”according to Buzzfeed (and millions of filmgoers).

In her Buzzfeed piece, Anne Helen Petersen writes, “Cool Girls don’t have the hang-ups of normal girls: They don’t get bogged down by the patriarchy, or worrying about their weight. They’re basically dudes masquerading in beautiful women’s bodies, reaping the privileges of both.”

 

Kahnweiler is smart, funny, brash, and cute with cropped dark curly hair. But, by her own admission, she’s no Lawrence: “[She’s] like, ‘I don’t give a fuck.’ I do give a fuck,” Kahnweiler says.

Aside from giving a fuck and, you know, not being an internationally recognized movie star, Kahnweiler also lays her troubles out for all to see. Her issues are neither adorable nor easily digestible yet she tackles them head on, putting them out there for all to see and comment upon: There’s Meet My Rapist (the forementioned short about everyday life after being raped; “Jessie Goes There,” a new web series in which her boyfriend-seeking character interviews homeless men on the street; and a forthcoming short about Kahnweiler’s multi-year struggle with bulimia.

To be sure, Kahnweiler is fearlessly brilliant and heartbreakingly hilarious, in her work. But she’s found that it’s deeply honest (and often disturbing) nature has left her personal life in peril.  She recently wrote an essay for The Daily Dot about the chilling effect her work has had on herdating life. At the after party for its screening, she couldn’t get any men to dance with her. “I even tried to thank the host with an innocent side hug, but instead he drunkenly bowed to me like I was the Duchess of Rapesville,” she writes. As the movie received more notice, her prospects shrank further. “My faithful booty call lost my number and my new crush claimed he was moving to Canada. Even my vibrator seemed over me.”

But when asked directly about the film’s impact, she has no regrets: “I made the movie and made this whole public stance and it was really well received, but at the end of the day I was really separated from my body. I was feeling unsexy in myself and I was projecting it onto all of these guys,” she says. “To a lot of guys, it’s just too much. I struggle with that sometimes—am I too much?” Still, she says, “I don’t know if I can blame this all on my rape.”

 

During the Great Rape Joke Debate of 2013, Kahnweiler’s movie was held up as an example par excellence of a rape joke that works by Jezebel’s Lindy West. Kahnweiler didn’t necessarily set out to make a rape comedy—if such a genre even exists (and I sincerely hope it doesn’t). “I was raped, but then I want to get thrown up against the hood of the car,” she said. “It’s insane to deal with all of these voices in your head. It comes out as comical, but there is nothing more shocking than the truth.” She pauses before adding, “As much as that sounds like something written on the side of a teabag.”

Kahnweiler says she has been more open about her rape than her struggle with eating disorders, which she plans to tackle in her work next. “I got raped and I told people right after,” she recalls. “What I didn’t tell people was that I took laxatives for a month after it happened. The laxatives were the shameful part.”

Part of the difficulty in admitting that she had an eating disorder was that it didn’t seem to reconcile with the image she had created, one that she herself is invested in. “Nobody expects me to be bulimic. I’m a feminist, I have really good teeth, I’m not super skinny or super fat,” she observes.

“I’m loud and confident. I was in denial for so long about my eating disorder. It goes really deep,” she says. Kahnweiler was mum about details about her forthcoming work but offered “with this bulimia piece, I’m exposing myself in a way I’ve never exposed myself before.” That’s saying something coming from an auteur who made a film about the aftermath of her rape.

Just as with Meet My Rapist, the bulimia project promises to be humorous—if only because it contains all of its creator. “Bulimia did not destroy my life,” Kahnweiler insists. “I’ve had an incredible life. I’ve really prospered despite the bulimia.”

We’re running out of time before she has to go to a therapy appointment (“I have no heat right now, but I have my two therapists so I’m good,” she says), but Kahnweiler has more to say so she takes the iPad with her into the bathroom. “What the show is really about—it’s about me getting healthy,” she says from the very room where parts of her disease likely played out.

It’s classic Kahnweiler: part free spirit, part prisoner. “I’m really strong and independent and fierce,” she says, “but at the end of the night, I really want intimacy.” Despite that craving for intimacy, she holds firm: “I have to tell this story…even if only the teddy bear is listening.”