“No.”
Speier was pissed off and huffy, and responded with a line that became legendary on the Hill.
“I’m shocked.” I was relieved that my staff witnessed the conversation. In the days that followed, her attempt to influence our organization morphed into an ultimatum. She and her staff made it clear that SWAN had to let Parrish in. Or what? I thought. They were speaking like mobsters. The idea of Jackie Speier throwing down with a bunch of Marines and soldiers was almost laughable if it weren’t so sinister. Her treatment of us reminded me of my experiences being threatened by senior Marine officers. The only difference now was that I was no longer forced to tolerate those threats. I don’t know what exactly triggered Speier’s menacing behavior. Politicians disagreed with constituents and advocates all the time. But they didn’t often cross these kinds of lines. (This was before Donald Trump’s unhinged behavior became the new normal.) They usually backed off and went on their way.
Speier, as a colleague put it to me, had just decided to “shit all over SWAN and move on.” She refused to play nice with folks who disagreed with her. After a House hearing one day, she walked away from me and another veterans leader in the middle of a conversation. He too was shocked. Soon after, she just flat-out stopped saying hello to me in the halls of Congress.
In the meantime, Speier pressed forward with a revised version of the bill we’d worked up for her. We agreed with the intent to remove commander influence over sexual assault trials, but we were concerned about the actual content of the bill. There was at least one section that violated the constitutional rights of defendants, and a couple of others that made no logistical sense. How were we supposed to back an unconstitutional bill? It was blatantly wrong. We couldn’t support a bill that wouldn’t work, even if we’d laid the ground for it.
Meanwhile, Speier was shocked with everyone, and her recklessness was multiplying. On the floor of the House, she accused colleagues who didn’t sign onto her bill of being complicit in military sexual assault. Human beings did not want to be compared to a bunch of sexual predators. It was below the belt. The members Speier considered enemies came from all stripes: Democrats who were caring, experienced, and far better equipped to interact with the military, but not passionate enough for Speier’s taste, as well as Republicans who were genuinely interested in reform. She treated them all like they were traitors.
Speier became the symbol of survivor outrage. She gladly played the part of messiah, a role that was cursed from the start. (One didn’t heal trauma by projecting hopes and dreams onto powerful people with questionable motives.) But this was politics. She was angry, and for many survivors, that was, understandably, all that mattered. Being pissed off meant you were on the right side—forget the law or governance. It didn’t matter if she knew the issues, or was misrepresenting facts to survivors, whose last hopes were pinned to a bill that had no shot at making it through Congress, in part because of the messenger. Over the years, folks signed on, but the bill was mostly symbolic. The kind that if you didn’t put your name to, the average constituent might accuse you of being pro-rape. But most folks knew the bill would never fly.
The jumper, unfortunately, was put on SWAN’s watch as our staff, exhausted and ready to go home to New York, wrestled with who was going to monitor the veteran in the hospital. One of our board members, a Marine Corps veteran and also a social worker, took over, working overtime to monitor the veteran for several days. After some investigation, it appeared that the veteran was totally unhinged and hallucinating. I called Speier’s aide, furious, telling him that after all the trouble they’d put our organization through, perhaps the congresswoman would like to take the time to visit her Californian constituent in the hospital. This was one of those moments that makes or breaks an elected official’s career. His boss was lucky I called him and not the press, and he knew it. Speier visited the veteran, acting the innocent angel. It was the last time I ever engaged with her staff.
Working with trauma is messy at best. However, powerful folks playing savior to traumatized people is beyond the pale. It was unfair and psychologically damaging for Speier to promise legislative miracles to veterans—victims, no less—especially when taking on a system as deeply entrenched and problematic as military justice. That she had obviously survived something just as awful may have had nothing or everything to do with her bullying, her desire to be a political hero, or her tendency to vilify the whole world. But plenty of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle had survived trauma—domestic violence, sexual assault, combat wounds, and imprisonment by enemy soldiers. It hadn’t held them back. In fact, it often elevated them.
Speier’s behavior may have been some indication of how unresolved trauma can manifest at the highest levels of power. Meanwhile, several rungs below, unresolved trauma was spilling out across an entire community of military survivors. And I had no idea how to manage it.
* * *
I. In 2018, when Collins chose to cast her vote in favor of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, I was outraged. It felt like she had dishonored Maria’s memory and disrespected all veterans who’d had the courage to speak out about their assaults.
II. Jackie Speier and Bruce Braley, also a Democrat, were the first members of Congress in this era to take on military sexual assault comprehensively. They didn’t need extra convincing about the merits of sticking up for survivors or daring to speak out against military generals. Braley’s legislation, the Holley Lynn James Act, named after an Army second lieutenant who was murdered by her husband, was far more radical than anything that came out of Congress in the last decade. He was challenging the military’s power over survivors at the core: he was taking on the Feres doctrine, which protected the military from being sued by uniformed victims. Without this critical reform, rape, assault, and harassment survivors, in addition to victims of medical malpractice, domestic violence, and discrimination, would be told that their injuries were “incident to service.” In other words, they were harmed during the course of their job, and therefore the military could not be held responsible. It was insane, and enough to make survivors feel insane once they found out about Feres. No one aside from Braley was ballsy enough to go there.
CHAPTER 14
Bleeding Hearts
SWAN’s high profile meant that we were a target for everyone’s discontent. Being from the community that was on the attack, it hurt like hell. SWAN’s multiple advocacy initiatives and regular presence in the media and on Capitol Hill pissed off some survivors who had been featured in The Invisible War. It seemed I was always being accused of doing too much, or never enough. A couple of veterans were seething with jealousy and rage, toward me and toward each other.
Fights were breaking out on social media. Survivors were trolling one another. There were threats, one survivor against another, and talk about law enforcement getting involved. I was alarmed reading the back-and-forth. The pain was palpable, with untreated post-traumatic stress dominating social media threads and causing enormous rifts in the community. No qualified person was providing guidance to this group of women, including the best directive of all: get off social media.
One day, I opened my Facebook account and read a post by one of Susan’s original plaintiffs, accusing me of making money off the backs of rape survivors. I read this in my closet-size office, almost laughing. I made hardly any income doing this work over the years. I had refused a salary so I could make sure my staff was paid and had benefits before I did. And there were many months I was hustling just to keep our office doors open.
Thinking I would explain things and set the record straight, I responded to the veteran. I should have kept my mouth shut. She lashed out and attempted to shame me publicly. Despite a sea of civilian activists now using survivors from the military—trial attorneys, members of the media, politicians—I was the biggest villain.
More than one trauma expert, including a trauma psychiatrist on our board, described these group dynamics as completely n
ormal. They said some folks would be consumed with anger and jealousy toward me because I seemed to be unfazed by trauma or hardship. They described the betrayal trauma caused by the military’s negligence toward their welfare and the impact of my public profile. They were speaking in clinical terms, and it was scary stuff. These veterans essentially wanted me dead while also wanting what they thought I had. I was grappling with my own mental and emotional demons the entire time I was being attacked, and clung to these explanations just to get by.
Animosity and, at times, personal threats continued to mark my relationship with a handful of extremely loud sexual trauma survivors. I was enemy number one, and I quickly learned the best way to engage with these voices was not to engage at all. It ate me up that I was forced to do this for my own safety. It went against my nature. I wanted to connect with people. This work was forcing me to put up huge boundaries between me and members of the community, women whom I’d gone to bat for, just like I would have if they were my Marines. Detaching didn’t feel right. But it was absolutely necessary, both for my health and for the work.
This small but vocal group had no compunction telling lies about me and, as the work developed, other veterans who had become key voices or faces of the movement. Slowly, any advocate on these issues would be idolized briefly—no matter what their level of expertise or integrity—and then cast aside as some sort of traitor to the cause. None of the hostility I faced from male misogynists could ever compare to the sting of hatred from a fellow woman in the military, who, like me, had been hurt while serving.
While turmoil over SWAN’s success was brewing outside our offices, I was also faced with the challenges of managing a diverse staff that was part civilian and part ex-military. Hiring was often difficult. Civilians were idealistic about service women’s rights, but took time to adjust to the realities of veteran experiences and learn about military culture. Civilians were sometimes slower to act, and at times seemed more entitled or naive about everything from their personal welfare to notions about politics.
In a perfect world, I’d have hired an army of shit-hot women veterans. But not all women veterans were willing or interested in putting themselves out there in what was obviously a radical way in order to change policy for service women. And lots of veterans were dealing with personal reintegration issues—everything from learning all over again how to live free of orders and regulations to more urgent challenges involving health, emotional well-being, or trauma. At SWAN, where gender and sexuality were the focus of our work, the challenges of reintegration appeared in unique ways.
One weekend I’d flown to Las Vegas to speak at a veterans conference. I got a phone call from Greg on a Sunday. He sounded anxious. And still, somehow, reserved.
“Things happened over the weekend. You’re going to hear about them.”
My stomach began to rumble.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The staff went out to a bar. I said something to Olivia that offended her. I apologized, but she’s upset.” Olivia was smart. Sensitive. Young. Greg was at least fifteen years older, a lumbering giant who had seen and done things in uniform that folks like Olivia would never be able to process.
“What did you say?” I insisted.
“She brought a boyfriend. He said he was taking her home. I told him, ‘You’re in there like swimwear.’ She overheard me.”
My mind was reeling. It was my first time hearing this odd phrase, but any reference to sure things and bathing suits could not be innocent. In the end, if Olivia was offended, then I was too. I could barely contain my anger. There was this matter with Olivia, and then there was this:
“Why were you drinking with the staff?” I was alarmed.
He struggled to answer, and then did, quietly.
“We were just letting off steam.”
I could have hit him.
Greg had no business hanging out at bars with our staff. With my staff. It was a question of judgment. He was never right with alcohol. Only bad things happened. You didn’t drink with your troops. And you didn’t drink with your subordinates. One drink, maybe. Then you left, before everyone got too drunk to care what was right and what was wrong. Hadn’t we both learned this the hard way?
I sent Olivia a concerned email and met with her in my office first thing on Monday morning. Olivia was an invaluable assistant. She’d gone to some fancy-pants liberal arts college and was a theater geek. When I’d heard her sing for the first time (she grabbed the mic at our “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal party), it brought me to tears. She was on top of my frenzied schedule and had never let me down. And she’d almost single-handedly organized the logistics for our first summit.
I let her know despite my relationship with Greg she could come to me with anything.
I know. I trust you.
That comment pierced me. If I was so trustworthy, how could something like this happen in my organization?
Was this all about Greg? Apparently not. Alison had made some dumb comment about Olivia’s short hair, telling her she’d gotten a dyke haircut. Alison had meant it as a compliment. A millennial who’d moved well beyond the gender binary, Olivia didn’t take it that way.
While I listened to Olivia, I was reminded of a female Army veteran on staff, whose in-your-face style and frequent use of the word bitch had my head spinning. So many self-proclaimed feminists insisted on using the word bitch—I thought, who was I to argue with her? And yet the word stung. I felt its misogyny. Why hadn’t I said anything to her? Jesus. Was there a culture of sexual harassment blossoming in my own women’s rights organization?
I asked Olivia what she wanted to be done. Did she want to file a harassment complaint? Did she want Greg fired? Did she want a formal sit-down with Alison?
She wanted none of that. It seemed she wanted Greg and Alison to understand what they’d done wrong, and for it never to happen again.
With Olivia’s consent, I brought Greg in. Olivia spoke to him while I witnessed. He didn’t say much. I can’t remember if he apologized. I wondered if clamming up completely was his way of avoiding sticking his foot farther down his throat. But I wasn’t sure.
And then I spilled my guts.
“What you said was a betrayal. It was like what Thomas did with Katz and Hamby. It was like that.”
Olivia didn’t have a clue what I was talking about, but the tenor of my voice was probably enough. Greg had fucked up royally. He had let me down. And I wouldn’t get over the disappointment anytime soon.
As best I can tell, Greg heard me loud and clear. He never apologized to me, or brought this moment up again. I don’t think he had any idea what pressures I was under as a female executive, of color no less. I’m guessing his silence was about shame as much as anything. Over the months and years that followed, he was more and more vocal about decrying the basic indignities that women faced. Still, I wondered what soul-searching he was doing internally. Had he fully processed the misogyny the Marines had instilled in him? He wasn’t just one of the good guys. He was quite possibly the best. He’d thrown his career into the toilet to stop sexual assault and harassment in his unit. He was no average Marine.
None of us who’ve worn the uniform are untouched by misogyny. It takes time to process it, and I’m not sure most veterans even get to a place where that’s a priority. Hatred of women has never not been a priority for me, because, as a target, I don’t have the privilege of ignoring it. It’s painful work, and people like Olivia get hurt as we learn to replace the military’s othering of women with kindness and respect.
One doesn’t emerge unscathed from ten years of infantry experience. In this way, Greg is like many Marines. And he is also exceptional. Greg ended up being responsible for ushering in more legislative changes to military sexual assault policy in the last decade than any other human being that I’m aware of. His expertise was unparalleled. He was a workhorse, and there wasn’t a congressional office or member of the media for the seven years he worked thes
e issues in Washington who did not benefit from his analysis, writing, and passion for change. I still sit with this, recognizing how much good can follow so much immersion in violence and discrimination. We are all capable of transformation.
• • •
One weekend in 2013, the New York Times quoted me in a piece on Dick’s film called “This War Is No Longer Invisible.” I had said the Department of Defense was “definitely taking [sexual assault] seriously. After Afghanistan, combating sexual assault is probably its highest priority.” I was not exaggerating—DOD was running around defensively, often helplessly, trying to keep up with the arrows we were throwing at them. I’d never seen so many senior officials being called before Congress and the press to answer for their inaction. We had finally gotten the Pentagon to pay attention, and the quote was meant to acknowledge our work in lighting a fire under their asses, not to congratulate it for a job well done.
After the article was printed, a discussion forum had been started over social media with one person saying SWAN was no longer serving the community’s interests. I was a Pentagon sympathizer. Hate mail was coming in, including one call by a veteran to pound me in the throat. I quickly called my communications director.
“Robin, Facebook is on fire. Survivors are asking for my head.”
Robin was perplexed. I did not need perplexed. I needed a solution.
“Why don’t you just talk to them?” she proposed.
Robin was not a veteran, nor did she have experience in crisis communications. She was unprepared to deal with sexual violence on such a massive scale. Between a stressed-out boss and hysterical veterans crying mutiny, she had shut down.
SWAN was doing work that happened so fast, and with such intensity, that my staff was completely unprepared to handle the impact and keep up with the pace of change. If I’d been wiser, I might have been able to defend us from impending implosion. I might have refused to do half of the work we did. But it felt like we were making history. And some part of me didn’t know how not to embrace every good opportunity that came our way. I was a workaholic and perfectionist with more stamina than was healthy, who was racing against each day to make up for the humiliating time I’d had in the Corps.
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