“A man pulled over and said, “Do you want to go for a ride?” he said. “I thought I’d go around the block a couple of times, but he started driving fast and it turned into a really bad neighborhood,” Merrill recalled, later adding, “I’d never been in anyone’s car before, but I had this feeling: he thought I was different from other people he’d met, so “I must always stick to it.”

Gacy eventually attacked Merrill and drugged him. When Merrill came to, he said he was handcuffed in the back of Gacy’s car. “I was a skinny 19-year-old kid. I knew I couldn’t make him angry. “I just had to diffuse the situation and pretend everything was okay,” he writes. “That’s how I survived as a child; we learned to lay low during our parents’ rages.”

When the serial killer arrived at Gacy’s “dark” home, he handcuffed him again and tied him to a “homemade contraption” with “ropes and pulleys” attached that would cause him to “lose air” if he struggled.

“He put a gun in my mouth. Then he raped me in my bedroom,” Merrill recalled sadly. “I knew I wouldn’t have much of a chance if I fought him. I never got scared or screamed. In a way, I felt bad for him too, like he didn’t want to do what he was doing but he couldn’t stop.” . We were there for hours. Finally, I could tell that he was tired and said, ‘I’ll take you home.’

“He dropped me off not far from where he picked me up,” Merrill continued. “It was around 5 in the morning. He gave me his phone number and said, ‘Maybe we can get together again sometime.’ When I got home, I flushed the number down the toilet and took a shower. I didn’t call the police; I didn’t know he was the killer at the time.”

Known as the “Killer Clown” because he worked as a party clown before being captured, Gacy was eventually arrested in 1978. At his trial in 1980, he was found guilty of 33 murder charges and sentenced to death. Gacy’s execution was carried out on May 9, 1994.

Merrill would continue his career in acting and appear in many high-profile shows. Sex and the City, ARROW, Grey’s Anatomyand the above mentioned Law and Order.

Click here to read Merrill’s full personal essay. PEOPLE.

If you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual abuse, text “TRUST” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.