Viewers, especially those born earlier, will remember her mainly as a girl. The Czech Michaela Kudláčková was a child actress and appeared in several titles. The most famous was the series We are all obliged to go to school.
Photo: Jiří Hadač / CNC / Profimedia
Michaela Kudláčková in an archive shot from 2007.
She later stopped working on acting, but her fate was brought closer to her fate only recently by new interviews. Kudláčková, born on the symbolic date of August 21, 1968 (when Russian troops entered the territory of Czechoslovakia), shared her life story in the show Na kafeečko and later in the show The thirteenth chamber of the public Czech Television. She shared a painful secret, she became a rape victim.
She was a married mother of two at the time of the attack. She went to a party with her friends, and one of the guests they befriended offered Michaela and her friend a ride home. He dropped his friend off in front of the house and drove the former child star to the forest.
Fight for life
“He ordered me to take off my clothes and my first reaction was that I started laughing. He responded by saying that it was not humor. I started to negotiate that it was undignified, that we would agree and meet somewhere, and that is of course a completely unnecessary waste of energy. He responded, do I think he is an idiot,” described Kudláčková in the Thirteenth Chamber. She wanted to run away from the car, but the man shouted at her that if she ever wanted to get out of the car, she would listen to him.
In the Na kafeečko podcast, she shared this story even earlier, and Kudláčková also responded to what is often suggested in similar situations. The woman had herself to blame for it, she was defiant, sat in the car with a strange man and so on. “I absolutely do not feel that I am to blame, not even at the moment when I sat down with him. That I let myself be raped? When you are in the middle of the forest with a moron who has a wrench in his hand and he explains to you that if you touch the handle, he will smash your head with it, then you say to yourself: I’d rather be raped for five minutes than be dead for the rest of my life,” shared her feelings, a former actress who also tried the profession of barmaid, taxi driver or card reader.
Sophie’s choice
After the rape, the attacker drove Kudláčková home. At first she refused, but he allegedly objected that she wouldn’t walk alone in the forest after all. She couldn’t believe her ears. But it turns out that he just wants to know where he lives. The next day he came to her again and threatened her that he knew where her daughters went to school. “I didn’t know what to do. Should I report him so that nothing would happen to them, or should I not report him so that nothing would happen to them,” she described the dilemma of the mother and the attacked woman. Finally, she told everything to her husband, who was a skilled boxer, who set out on a search.
They were looking for the man from the party for some time – as it turned out later, almost no one really knew him. Finally, however, Kudláček’s husband found it and threw it through the glass window. He was given probation, the Thirteenth Chamber actress revealed. Today, 57-year-old Michaela is currently a widow, her husband died. However, they have four daughters and several grandchildren from their relationship. She is gradually coming to terms with the trauma she experienced years ago. But she also decided to talk about it publicly. After years.
It was initiated by the publicly discussed cases of ambassador Dominik Feri and psychiatrist Jan Cimický. In November 2023, the court sentenced Feri to three years unconditionally for two rapes and one attempted rape. In April, Cimický’s Prague District Court found this eye again guilty of rape and blackmail. He was sentenced to five years.
