"But they never actually hurt Sandra"

It is both surprising and disappointing that even now, in the 2020s, you occasionally hear people say that Sandra Peabody's abuse while she was making The Last House on the Left was somehow less severe because it didn't result in broken bones or bloody wounds. This is a fundamentally incorrect and outdated idea of what harm actually is. People can be hurt very badly by invisible wounds, without any physical injury whatever.

Psychological harm is real harm. Emotional harm is real harm.

Being threatened with rape if you "don't behave yourself" is immensely harmful. While we don't know whether Sandra suffered any long-term health effects – and it would be entirely wrong of us to speculate – we can and should say that the risk was there and significant. Even in the 1970s, when the likes of PTSD were little understood outside the military, it did not take a genius to understand how unrealistic it was to expect a woman to simply shrug off a threat of violence once filming had wrapped.¹

Being threatened with being pushed over a cliff and ending up "fucking mangled" is deeply harmful too. As with the rape threat, we don't know and should not speculate as to whether Sandra personally experienced long-term health effects from what she was subjected to. Again, though, we can and should be clear that if the threat was received as credible – which must have been the case for Sandra's fear to be real – the risk was there.

There remains, as far as I can tell, no public apology to Sandra, and that may have had consequences as well. Once again, we do not know what may or may not have been said in private, and that belongs to Sandra and nobody else unless she freely chooses to share it. But today, it is widely accepted that a genuine and meaningful apology can assist in the healing process, often contributing towards validation, restoration of agency, accountability and closure.²

Regardless of what the actual reverberations of Sandra Peabody's abuse may have been, the fact that she showed great courage and resilience in continuing under such duress does not diminish the severity of the harm she endured in connection with her work on Last House. To say she wasn't hurt is highly misleading and diminishing of Sandra's suffering. Being treated so unethically and deliberately frightened in order to bring about a desired reaction was very much harm.

¹ Mental Health Foundation. "The impact of traumatic events on mental health" (undated)
² Amyrotos, Raphael. "The importance of an apology for survivors of abuse" (undated).