Injustice

I was raped between the hours of 3am-5am on April 9^th2017.

At around 1 pm my friend took me to the emergency room.

I was released from the emergency room at 8pm.

Seven hours of telling nurses, doctors and police officers about what happened.

All the details over and over again.

I had to have a Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence (SAFE) kit done. The whole process is humiliating and time consuming. Mine took 5 hours.

The SAFE KIT doesn’t feel very safe.

It starts with you standing in the middle of the room on a piece of butcher paper and completely stripping your clothes to be put in a bag and sealed for evidence.

You then put on a hospital gown and they take samples of everything you can imagine.  (They failed to take a blood sample, which is one of the steps but I’ll get to that in another post)

Due to some of the circumstances of my rape, one of the things I had to do was lay naked on the hospital bed while one nurse held a backlight to my body and the other nurse collected samples.

When I say it was a humiliating traumatizing experience, I mean that completely, wholly, all consuming humiliation.

No exaggeration.

I know this may seem like a lot of unnecessary information but I am writing all of this because it is important for you to know everything I went through so you can understand how frustrated I am now.

So you can understand how broken our Justice system is.

Only 40% of rapes are actually reported to police.

Between 2 and 8% of rapes turn out to be false accusations.  That’s it. Such a small number and yet, even with those statistics and the fact that I was putting myself through this horrible and humiliating experience, one of the first questions I was asked by law enforcement was

·      if I was sure it was actually rape

·      if I wanted to just drop the whole thing and not go forward with charging these two men once we could identify them.

I was actually told by the first detective that handled my case that I should

·      just go home to Illinois (I was living in North Carolina at the time) and “forget about it. “

·      once they can identify the two men, it will be “two of them against one of you”.

·      There probably wasn’t going to be enough evidence. 

This interview with the local detective took place on April 12 2017. It was well documented and video taped, although I was never made aware a camera was rolling.

We had not gotten far into the interview when you could tell that he had already given up on the case. I had told him that I was unconscious for parts of the rape and I only remember the parts I was conscious for and he told me that because of that, I sounded like I was lying about it.

So, because of the fact that these men raped me while I was in and out of consciousness, I apparently was the one in the wrong.  Talk about injustice.

Going forward with the charges was an incredibly draining experience both emotionally and physically. So many people told me that I was lying and that I “probably wanted it” and I “probably led them on. “

No man wants to admit that their gender plays a HUGE role in dehumanizing women.

The reality is that women are treated so poorly and anything we say in front of a man is almost always disregarded before we have even stopped talking.

I’ve thought about this for many excruciating hours and have decided that regardless of the outcome and the two year long (and still continuing) fight for justice, I wouldn’t go back in time and drop the charges. Although now, I would be a lot more prepared and less trusting of others to fight for me, I would still go through with it.

I am proud of myself because in all of this I have never once said anything but the truth.

I never left anything out that I could remember and I never added to the facts or exaggerated.

It is because of this that I can still feel so good about everything that has happened since, despite the extreme injustice.

Each of the rapists were tried separately by the USMC in a court martial.

As it stands right now, the first trial (rapist #1) is finished and he got off with NOTHING.

I’m sorry to share the news that he is a free man, and his wife stayed with him and their 3 year old son. (Lord willing that boy is nothing like his father)

The second trial (rapist #2 ) is still not over. The US government signed a pre-trial agreement that I strongly spoke against but I guess the victims’ vote doesn’t matter much.

He plead guilty to assault.

NOT SEXUAL ASSULT.

So, I am waiting on the dates for the end result where I will stand before a judge and before rapist #2 to give my victims impact statement. I will speak the truth once again and hope that the judge gives him some sort of punishment.

Regardless of what the judge decides, in a few months time, he too will be a free man.

I’m sorry.

I tried.

I truly tried to stop him from hurting anyone else.

I gave it my all.

What breaks my heart the most is that these two men were put back into the world with barely a slap on their wrist and they are free to rape whomever they want now fully equipped with the knowledge of how to get away with it.