Rape Leads To Insanity / Live-Action TV

• The very first Alfred Hitchcock Presents story, "Revenge", plays on this idea without using the R-word. A woman already recovering from a nervous breakdown is "assaulted" in her trailer. Her husband looks to avenge her by killing her assailant. One day, she points the man out to her husband, and he does the deed. Then she points to another man, and another, and another.
• Norma Bates of Bates Motel was sexually assaulted by her brother, and is later raped by Keith Summers in her own kitchen. Because of this her mind is a psychological mess and she's smothering and controlling of her son Norman. She also kills her rapist.
• Alan Shore of Boston Legal was raped by a friend of his mother's when he was fourteen. It's implied that this is why his interactions with women are, in general, so messed up.
• Brother Justin has this effect on several young women in Carnivàle. It's implied to be at least partially due to his nature as The Antichrist, although there are also visible bruises showing that physical abuse is also part of it.
• Recurs in Criminal Minds:
  • The killer in "Jones" was driven to imitate Jack the Ripper after she was raped at a party and the police refused to investigate because they felt she was "asking for it." The BAU team speculates that she had previously been molested by her father and goes so far as to speculate that Jack the Ripper had been molested by his mother (because that's how a Gender Flip works, apparently).
  • The UnSub from "The Uncanny Valley" had an extra step in between: her psychiatrist father molested her, then subjected her to electroshock therapy to keep her from revealing the molestation. The combination of factors left her stunted emotionally and dependent on a set of dolls.
  • The surviving victim of "The Edge of Winter" was driven crazy through a combination of rape and Stockholm Syndrome, to the point that even years after she was rescued, she has no hope of living outside a mental institution.
  • One woman became delusionally obsessed with Cinderella because of her father's molestation (and then getting placed in a foster home with two 'wicked stepsisters').
  • For a male example, one episode revealed that Morgan wasn't the only boy Carl Buford molested. Of his four known living victims: one (Morgan) has coped with it, one is doing well in school but repressing his trauma, one is a weed-addicted petty criminal who never amounted to anything, and one is the unsub of the episode. After he learned that his own son was being groomed/potentially molested by a pedophile, he snapped and started murdering any man he saw interacting with children, no matter how benign that interaction was.
• Jan from Days of Our Lives is an Alpha Bitch before she is raped. Afterwards, she goes crazy.
• Darcy from Degrassi: The Next Generation is date raped at a party and later contracts Chlamydia. Afterword, what was originally an innocent Christian school girl quickly loses her mind and pretty much becomes a ticking time bomb of hell. She slices her wrists, nearly slices her neck (before cutting off a chunk of her hair), and even lies to the school administrators that a teacher who was trying to help her through it all had molested her, resulting in his suspension.
• While not stated outright, Doom Patrol (2019) implies that Crazy Jane was raped by her father as a child, and that her capturers may have molested her while doing experiments on her. Either way, she is now barely functional due to her alters.
• Played for Laughs in an episode of Flight of the Conchords which has Bret dating a woman who becomes increasingly pushy and aggressive in demanding sex from him, finally outright lying to and manipulating him to get him to capitulate. It's a little shaky on how it's portrayed; Bret is clearly traumatized afterwards though and is shown taking a Shower of Angst.
• Invoked in Fosse/Verdon when Bob Fosse internally justifies his constant womanizing and infidelity as a consequence of having been raped by two older women when he was a teenager. Of course, his long-suffering wife Gwen was also raped as a teenager, but doesn't have nearly as many issues as he does.
• A villainous example in Justified. The Big Bad (migrating into The Heavy) of Season 3, Robert Quarles, was pimped out by his father and repeatedly raped. From then on, he could be the poster child for Insane Equals Violent, as a horrifically violent gangster and enforcer, a hired killer for the Detroit Mob who rapes, imprisons, and tortures male hustlers to death and takes a huge amount of drugs while doing so.
• The Killing: Or molestation, in Season 4. (The runaways in Season 3 are frequent victims of rape and Sex for Services but maintain their sanity, albeit traumatized.) Being molested by his stepmother caused Kyle to snap and kill her and the rest of his family when he is forced to masturbate in front of the other cadets. Her other victim is also shown to be a violent misogynist who likes to imagine blinding women as a result.
• Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
  • "Behave" has probably the most justified version of this ever seen. The victim of the week was an ordinary woman with an ordinary job and dreams and the like until she was assaulted several years in the past by the Villain of the Week. The aggressor was never caught, but she moved on, went to college, and had just about graduated when the same man found her and assaulted her again, having tracked her down using a stolen driver's license he had taken the first time he attacked her. As far as the after-assault investigation went, same result. Far more traumatized this time, she moved across the country, slowly recovered, got engaged, and was just a couple weeks away from being married... when the same man tracked her down again. The stress and trauma eventually broke apart her engagement and the victim became a total recluse, working from home, having groceries delivered, not leaving her apartment more than once a month if she could possibly help it, and basically dealing with a full dose of the most High Octane Paranoia Fuel imaginable... until during the one day she absolutely had to leave her home for something work-related, the man finds her yet again, this time beating her bloody in the process, which is what leads into the start of the episode. As it happens, the villain was a successful travelling executive who had a collection of these women across the country, who used their stolen IDs to track them down and assault them repeatedly until he became the first thing they think of when they wake up and the last thing they think of when they go to sleep, feeding his ego with the idea that every minute of their lives revolves around what he's done to them and what he'll eventually do again. Even for SVU villains, he is quite beyond the pale.
  • "Totem" involves a mother who has physically abused and raped (with an object) her two daughters. The older one managed to piece together a normal life after leaving home, but the younger one is so warped that she ended up assaulting and inadvertently killing a younger girl.
  • "Delinquent" introduces Hunter Maezlon, a bratty, disgusting Serial Rapist and murderer who's still a teenager. The episode deals with the detectives trying to make charges stick to Hunter, who even falsely accuses Detective Stabler of molesting him to beat the first charge. The episode ends with his mother revealing that Hunter himself was sexually abused by a woman charged with watching him when he was a child. He ends up drunk and lying next to her dead body and explains to a detective that she won't hurt anyone else.
• In the Masters of Horror episode "Imprint", the prostitute eventually reveals that a big part of why she's so emotionally scarred is her horrific youth, where she was separately raped by both her father and a local Buddhist monk.
• Melrose Place: Jane goes off the deep end after being raped by ex-lover Richard, first stalking and terrorizing and eventually killing him, then stalking and terrorizing her other ex-lover Jake (who she pushed away after the rape) and his new girlfriend. She finally checks herself into a hospital for treatment.
• In The Morning Show, there's a realistic example in Hannah's fate. After being raped by Mitch, she turns to drugs and alcohol to cope, which lead to her hallucinating, losing grip on reality, and either dying through accidental overdose or suicide as a result of PTSD.
• In Mr. Robot, Elliot comes to accept that his father, Edward, pushed him out of a window, breaking his arm, when he revealed his cancer diagnosis to his mother Magda. The grief and trauma started Elliot off on a path of severe dissociative identity disorder, which results in him creating alternative personalities. In Season 4, his sister Darlene reveals that this was actually because Edward molested him (and probably Darlene too), and Elliot fought back against the abuse.
• An unusual version on One Life to Live applied this to the rapist himself. After being bullied into participating in a gang rape, Powell Lord the 3rd spent the next few months bordering on a nervous breakdown out of the guilt over what he'd done as well as fear of the ringleader. This culminated in him almost killing himself before he finally found the courage to confess and plead guilty. Roughly a year after the first storyline, someone began attacking local women. It was naturally assumed the assailant was the ringleader of the gang rape, but he was as shocked as everyone else when it was revealed to be Powell.
• Orange Is the New Black: It's hinted that Pennsatucky's initial insanity was partially caused by having been occasionally raped from a young age, believing it was normal because of a disturbing sex talk from her mother. Later, she genuinely tries to become a better person and to help people in her own way and loved animals, namely ducks. However, after she's raped by a guard, she withdraws into herself, keeping to herself and hiding under her hoodie. She also states in an emotionless manner about how she used to like ducks but not anymore after the guard showed her the ducks and treated her with kindness before later raping her. While he's doing that, she looks like she's repressing her emotions and feelings about the whole event and shutting herself down to avoid the reality of what is happening to her. She later appears willing to go along with Big Boo to get revenge on the guard.
• The Outer Limits (1995): In "A Stitch in Time", a woman is raped/assaulted as a teen and grows up to be a mentally unbalanced scientist who builds a time machine and uses it to go back and execute serial killers before they target anyone. Her ensuing Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory does not help with her ongoing mental stability. This is ultimately resolved when a cop goes back in time and saves her from getting raped in the first place. Her altered present self is significantly better off as a result. Sadly, the cop takes her place as the vigilante when her friend is murdered.
• Oz:
  • Beecher's rape at the hands of Schillinger definitely didn't do any favors for his mental health.
  • The same goes for Cyril.
  • Adebisi brutally rapes the semi-conscious Schibetta at one point. As a result, Schibetta, traumatized by the rape, begins losing his mind and is transferred to the psych ward.
  • A homophobic rapist is targeted by Schillinger and his gang. Beecher gives up protecting him after the guy was such a Jerkass to him leaving him open to being raped by Schillinger and his mooks. A later scene shows him laying in the fetal position naked on the ground following the rape looking traumatized and covered in scratch marks and bruises.
  • James Robson is a murderer who enjoyed raping other inmates. It is later revealed that he himself was raped as a child. He was also clearly traumatized after he was raped with a spoon by a brawny inmate who promised him protection in return.
• Prison Break: T-Bag's Freudian Excuse for his behavior as a Depraved Bisexual pedophile rapist is that he was a Child by Rape and abused physically and sexually as a kid.
• Rectify: In a flashback, Wendall reveals to Daniel (while masturbating) that he had participated in gang-raping Daniel in the shower, and Daniel mentions how he was gang-raped repeatedly while in prison. That, combined with his Dark and Troubled Past before prison and the being isolated from reality in a completely white room with nothing to stimulate him, helped to push him down the Sanity Slippage path, combined with his Cloudcuckoolander ways and tendency to act withdrawn and keep to himself as well as have anger management problems. Amantha, Daniel's sister, states outright to Jon that Daniel is "damaged" as a result of his time in prison.
• Rizzoli & Isles: In "No One Mourns the Wicked", Dr. Victoria Nolan becomes a serial killer after being raped and getting pregnant by her own father. Mom and Dad were her first victims, and might have been excusable, given the situation. However, her body count rose, especially after she found her son, and started teaching him to become a serial killer as well.
• In The Shield, Da Chief David Aceveda is raped at gunpoint by a criminal, which acts as the catalyst for his Face–Heel Turn. His Fatal Flaw is Pride, and being humiliated in such a manner as well as his trauma from the ordeal leads to him becoming more and more ambitious in order to salvage his ego, as well as causing him to delve into sexual sadism himself.
• Starsky & Hutch: After a college student is raped in "Strange Justice", she stares into space with tears pouring down her face, not responding to anything. Starsky later mentions that she's in the "psycho ward".
• Supernatural:
  • Implied to have happened to Sam while in Hell. The first time he has a hallucination of Lucifer, he greets him with "Hi, Sam. Long time, no spooning." It's compounded further when he tells him "You're my bunkmate. My bitch, in every sense of the word" and refers to him as "bunk buddy". Crosses into Fridge Horror. "Repo Man" more or less confirms it: "That's what I'm talking about, Sam. Real interaction again, I miss that — the rapier wit, the wittier rape." It's implied that the abuse Sam suffered from Lucifer led to him developing PTSD hallucinations about it. Sam confirms this to Dean in season 11.
  • Implied heavily between Alastair and Dean too. The former mentions "poking and prodding" way too often. Dean mentions "They sliced and carved and tore at me in ways that you... until there was nothing left." Unsurprisingly, he's even more messed up after his tribulations in Hell, which he tries to cover up.
• In Veronica Mars, Cassidy "Beaver" Casablancas' desperation to hide the fact that he was raped by his Little League coach led to him raping Veronica and becoming a sociopathic serial murderer because the other victims were on the brink of accusing him publicly. However, the show also portrays other survivors of sexual assault realistically and recovering from their trauma, including Veronica herself and Parker in Season 3.

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