As a teenager in the San Fernando Valley, Fox — born Jackie Fuchs — played guitar, surfed and overachieved. High school bored her; she imagined graduating early and studying mathematics at U.C.L.A. One night she was plucked from the Starwood nightclub by the Los Angeles scene maker Rodney Bingenheimer and introduced to Kim Fowley, a producer who recruited her into the all-girl band he was assembling, which had grown to include Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, Lita Ford and Sandy West. Fowley handed Fox a bass guitar and a new last name. The band was subject to Fowley’s whims and dangerously objectified by the larger culture of the scene. In an infamous feature in Crawdaddy magazine, the reporter imagined masturbating while watching the girls play.
In 2015, after Fowley died, Fox told the full story of her experience in the band for the first time, to Jason Cherkis, an investigative reporter at HuffPost. She said in the early morning of Jan. 1, 1976, she was drugged with quaaludes after a show, and Fowley raped her in front of a crowd backstage as other members of the band watched. (Jett denied she was present; Currie told Cherkis that she spoke up in the moment and left the room.) Fox quit the band the next year.
It was decades later that she began to confront the abuse and speak to other women in the room about what happened. Going public was not exactly healing; after the story’s publication, she has said she “woke up in a parallel universe.” But it was worth it to help other women in music. “I know that I am a part, however small, of the lead up to the #MeToo movement,” she said.
After quitting the Runaways, Fox hoped to become a manager, to advocate for artists behind the scenes. “I wanted to stay in the music industry because I just love music that much,” she said. But outside the glow of stardom, she still faced harassment.
She finally did go to U.C.L.A., where she majored in linguistics and Italian, and then earned a J.D. from Harvard’s law school, where she was classmates with Barack Obama. She become an entertainment lawyer, and eventually wound her way back to music, negotiating song rights in films.
In 2018, she went on “Jeopardy!” and won four times. It wasn’t until her third game that she revealed that she had been in the Runaways. “I didn’t want that to define me,” she recalled.
Read More: Jackie Fox Saw the Dark Side of Rock. Now She’s Playing Her Own Way.
