We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out

by Annie E. Clark

  Nastassja: —which is a softer way of saying “hate crime.”

  Lea: The dean was taking notes on her iPad. We were all very open about what the campus climate was like, and that we had an active sense of fear. But not only did they do nothing, we found out later that none of those incidents had ever been reported. The Clery reports continued to be zero.

  Natassja: Lea was exactly the type of person I was looking for. I was hanging out with one of their friends in the LGBT resource room, and Lea came in and my friend was like, “Yeah, they’re practically married, don’t even think about it.” (“They” is Lea’s and my preferred singular third-person pronoun.) I said, “Are you sure?”

  Lea: Months later, when my relationship had ended and we were at the conference together, we went to dinner together. We were flirting a lot. Nastassja had a lot of energy.

  Nastassja: We were making eyes at each other. The next day we went to the same workshop, and then went to Subway for lunch. We went back to the room to talk over eating, and I had hoped to kiss, but we got caught up in conversation. Then we were packing up the food and started walking out and they just grabbed my hand and turned me around and kissed me, and it was like, “Yeah!!!”

  Lea: I had just ended a relationship, so I was not looking for one, but I really liked Nastassja.

  Nastassja: I had never been in a relationship, and I wanted to prove that love did exist. We spent time talking and holding hands. I had never held hands with a woman before, or been kissed in public before, and they just kissed me while we were standing on the corner there. And it really meant something to me, that they weren’t ashamed to be out with me. [Nastassja cries as they say this.]

  * * *

  We spent time talking and holding hands. I had never held hands with a woman before, or been kissed in public before, and they just kissed me while we were standing on the corner there.

  * * *

  Lea: We ended up together.

  Nastassja: It was meant to be. And being out and open with Lea was very different from what I had known in high school. Then, I didn’t feel comfortable coming out or presenting as genderqueer. There was this fear in my school, or in general I guess, that men and queer women of color were more aggressive sexually, so I was worried that the girls would be afraid of me if I came out as lesbian. I would wear some masculine things, a bow tie with my uniform, or pants instead of a skirt, but I’d always pair it with something pink or feminize it in some way.

  In senior year of high school, I went to this Halloween costume party and I kissed a girl. I hadn’t really accepted myself, and so even though I liked it, I was trying to numb myself, I guess, so I started drinking a lot. I thought some of my classmates might have seen it happen and I felt like I had to counter it somehow by kissing a guy. The bartender seemed to like me and gave me free drinks. We kissed, but then he took me into the bathroom. It was okay until he wanted me to give him a blowjob. I said I really didn’t want to but he tried to force me and I shoved him away and walked out. I was really drunk and pretty upset about everything that had happened at this point, and I guess this other guy thought he could take advantage of that, because he dragged me outside to the alleyway and raped me. I was a virgin. He threw my Spandex shorts away, and dragged me back inside as my dad drove up. It was really, really terrible. Before I went out to my dad, someone gave me a pair of worn-out pants to wear. My dad was really concerned about how much I had been drinking, but at the time I didn’t tell him I was raped, I sort of blamed myself, but everyone was drinking and I thought I would be safe around my friends. I told a friend of mine what happened and she really shamed me, she told me I didn’t have any respect for my body. I had to go get Plan B with my mom. The rapist told everyone that he didn’t use protection and that I wanted it outside like a black animal, and people at school were all talking about it. It was the worst thing that could have happened for my first time.

  At Dartmouth, the first Monday of classes, there’s a party at this fraternity, and some of my friends and I decided to go, and someone there kept handing me drinks. I was trying to pace myself, but I didn’t know that the drink was a hundred percent alcohol, with powdered Kool-Aid added. It was in a trash can. It was red. It tasted like fruit punch.

  Long story short, things took a bad turn, and something I didn’t want to have happen happened that night. It happened in my room. It was the first time I had ever experienced sex with a woman, and it was really violating. Later she told me she knew I would not have been into it if I had not been drinking, that she had planned it to get close to me. Afterward, I really started having issues connecting with my body. And then I met Lea.

  Lea: By spring 2013, we’d been dating about a year. Both of us were processing our sexual traumas. Both of us were really active in LGBT organizing. And we were balancing how our experiences affected our relationship.

  Nastassja: I had experienced a lot of violence. I really opened up about everything. Lea was really closed off and didn’t know how to trust. So here was this beautiful soul who had been through so much, and I wanted to create this intimacy and trust between us. But it was hard.

  Lea: We both had a lot of trauma, and people don’t know how to respond to that. So we found ourselves pretty isolated sometimes. We had to depend on each other for support and it brought us close together. Our lives are intertwined now. But at the time, both of us felt powerless and limited in the ways we could be there for each other.

  In the spring of 2013, we decided to engage in a form of protest with this poetry event, #realtalkdartmouth, that Nastassja organized with a collection of other students for the week when admitted students come to campus.

  Nastassja: We wanted to show them, if you come to this campus as queer or a person of color, you need to be aware of what the climate is like.

  Lea: You’re more likely to experience violence your freshman fall if you’re not aware.

  Nastassja: We made posters and did chalking to advertise the event the night before students arrived. But by eight a.m., the safety and security officials had erased all of our chalk. Someone had called it in as hate speech because it was mentioning rape and homophobia. It made people uncomfortable but was definitely not against the rules.

  * * *

  You’re more likely to experience violence your freshman fall if you’re not aware.

  * * *

  We had put up posters of facts about violence at Dartmouth around campus, and we saw students and administrators taking them down. There were stacks of them in the garbage. We posted a video to the admitted students’ Facebook group and that video was taken down.

  So our poetry event started with only three admitted students, and mostly current students. I read bits from op-eds from the school paper written by students of color and queer students, and then students with masks that said “Anonymous” over their faces read the actual horrible responses that people had made in the comments section.

  But we still hadn’t reached the newly admitted students. So we decided to do a protest at this big show that’s like the Super Bowl halftime show of the admitted students’ weekend. Freshmen pretend to be admitted students and mingle with them, and then reveal their true identities in this show, get onstage, and dance and sing about how much they love the admitted students and the school.

  We had wanted to add the poetry program as a skit, but the organizers told us no. And they had been tipped off that we were planning a protest, so they had security in the form of frat guys and administrators.

  The program took place in the cafeteria, and they would not let us in. We were so fed up; we were going to get inside the cafeteria to do our poem. We resolved to not touch anyone. Some people got scared, but a few people at the core said, “We’ll do this, and we know what the rules are!” Everyone had experienced activism, but it was still terrifying.

  So we walked up to the doors and said, “This is a public place, and the fire code limit for the room has not been reached. We have something to say; le
t us in.”

  Lea: A frat guy tried to bar us by slamming the door on our bodies. An administrator said, “You can’t do that to a student.” Another administrator tackled a very small transgender student who had been smashed in the door. It was shocking. We just kept repeating, “Dartmouth has a problem!”

  Nastassja: There were about fifteen of us. We came in chanting, and the students in the show, who were wearing rainbow tutus and other outrageous clothing, started standing in front of us, trying to block us.

  Lea: Hundreds of high-schoolers were watching.

  Nastassja: The freshman students started crying, “You’re ruining my life! How dare you!” They decided to get back onstage and tried to sing over us.

  We got in front of them, chanting, and we were louder. We were some pretty hard-core activists, and we were not going to be silenced.

  The high school kids’ eyes were big with shock. Freshmen started chanting, “We love Dartmouth!,” and soon the admitted students started saying, “We love Dartmouth!,” like robots. This whole time I’m holding a poster in front of my face that says, “I was called a fag on my freshman floor.”

  Lea: Then we left. No one tried to obstruct us. And it was raining. So dramatic.

  A few people went back to their rooms. Others stayed and talked to groups of admitted students about why they did it. Most of us went to a house off campus and sat in the basement in a state of shock. But someone had filmed the protest on their phone, so we decided we’d have the impact we were looking for if we posted it online.

  Nine thousand people saw it that night. It went viral. A conservative paper called us “ungrateful minorities.”

  Nastassja: Since we weren’t an organized student group, no one knew who to blame. So hatred grew toward any people who had those identities—interracial couples, lesbians, queers, Latin@s, Native American students. We didn’t anticipate how disgusting and extreme the reaction would become. “Freedom from slavery is a privilege and it can be taken away.” “There’s gonna be a lynching of the realtalkers at noon tomorrow.” There were also tons of rape threats.

  It was shocking to see such explicit hatred coming from the mouths of thousands of our peers. Most of the threats and hate speech were posted on an anonymous forum for Dartmouth students (you need a school email to access). The comments on the school newspaper site were also really bad.

  Lea: We knew the rules, and we hadn’t violated them.

  Nastassja: There was a lynch mob mentality. The school paper said we had attacked people and been violent. They published a poll: “What do you think should be the punishment of the real talkers?” The chair of the board of trustees sent a letter to the campus and alumni about a “decline in civility.”

  * * *

  The atmosphere got so bad that neither of us could leave our room to get food.

  * * *

  The atmosphere got so bad that neither of us could leave our room to get food. I had this idea we should print out posters of threats and the hate speech and hold it while walking around campus.

  Thirty of us went to a meeting of administrators, carrying the posters. They were thinking of canceling classes. We said, “Before you begin, we want you to read these posters out loud, and say the words out loud, because this is what it feels like for us to walk around here every day.”

  The administrators read the words out loud, and they all started crying. The dean of the school was crying. We said, “We’re not going to leave this meeting until you cancel classes tomorrow,” so we could all process what had happened. They finally agreed. And in the morning they did an event for all the tenured professors to explain what had happened.

  The day after the protest, we met with our deans and asked them to send emails to our professors explaining that we were in the protest and were being harassed and might be behind on assignments or miss class. The deans said they would, but they didn’t. Luckily, I personally contacted my professors anyway, and they all said I didn’t have to come to classes that week.

  The next week, I had to attend a class that would discuss the topic of online activism. It was a large lecture class and lots of students were always posting on the anonymous campus forum where we were being threatened. Especially with the topic of the class, I knew our group would be called out, and I said to the professor, “I don’t feel comfortable coming to class. I’m scared.” He was an adjunct, so he hadn’t been at that faculty meeting and didn’t know about the degree of the harassment. He said, “Not only do you have to come to class, but you need to take your midterm later today.” I said, “I have been having panic attacks, and there are people threatening my life and threatening to rape me.”

  He said, “Did you talk to the administration in advance about your protest?” I said no, we didn’t have to, that was the point of a protest.

  He said, “If you weren’t ready for the backlash, you shouldn’t have participated in the protest.”

  I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t expect people to threaten to rape me or kill me.”

  I felt he was assuming I was just trying to dodge work in his class. I had a 98 percent average.

  So I went to class. Everyone was staring. As I sat in the back of the room, I saw the faces turn and I started hallucinating that they were the faces of rapists. I had to be hospitalized for a week for PTSD.

  Lea: I couldn’t go to classes, or do even the simplest assignments, even though I was an honor student. I couldn’t focus. I was so overwhelmed by the situation; it totally derailed me, even though I was only weeks from graduating. I was falling apart.

  I was still living just off campus, with threats coming in all the time and Nastassja in the hospital. People were threatening to come into our house and attack and rape us. Meanwhile, we had reported all the hate speech and hate crimes but nothing had been logged or investigated. None of the administrators seemed to be willing to address the situation, they all wanted it to blow over but it kept getting worse. Dartmouth didn’t have a Title IX office. So we started organizing alumni and others on campus to do a Clery complaint. We had thirty-seven testimonials of rape, hate crimes, and religious discrimination. We hoped our complaint would be a positive catalyst for change. We knew if we filed the complaint we’d be protected from retaliation. So we were in a rush to get it filed. We were very afraid for our lives.

  * * *

  We had thirty-seven testimonials of rape, hate crimes, and religious discrimination. We hoped our complaint would be a positive catalyst for change.

  * * *

  Nastassja: The school did file disciplinary charges against us and a handful of other #realtalk protesters the week after we filed the complaint for “not following directions.”

  Lea: Ultimately the two of us had to leave campus that spring, due to the backlash. We both ended up withdrawing from school, but we couldn’t just stop the work we were doing. We needed to focus on healing, but we also traveled around the United States presenting workshops on intersectional coalitional organizing and campus violence at conferences and universities, and participating in the national movement against sexual assault.

  Note: On May 30, 2013, Dartmouth students and alumni filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education against the college for violating the Clery Act. In July 2013, the U.S. Department of Education opened its own investigation into Dartmouth for possible violations of Title IX.

  In December 2013, Nastassja and Lea founded Spring Up, a partnership offering workshops to student organizations and supported by sales of handmade bow ties. Lea graduated from Dartmouth College in June 2014. Nastassja has not yet been able to return to school. Spring Up (timetospringup.org) has since evolved into a multimedia activist collective creating a space for learning and healing, and a style representation project about the healing power of self-love called Imagine a World: Everyday Heroes. The two self-published a coauthored collection of educational short stories about the sexual culture, titled Millennial Sex Education. As of November 2015, they are engaged to be m
arried.

  PART IV

  HEALING AND EVERYDAY ACTIVISM

  Everyday activism: the radical notion that everyone can play a part in ending violence and oppression by resisting rape culture, supporting survivors, and challenging our institutions.

  Believing survivors is a type of radical everyday activism, since we live in a society that suggests that you do completely the opposite.

  So, to every survivor reading this book: We Believe You.

  There are hazards to openness, but they seem minor compared with the possibility that some readers may find comfort, perhaps even inspiration, from the close examination of how an ordinary person, with strengths and weaknesses like anyone else, has managed an extraordinary journey.

  —Sonia Sotomayor, My Beloved World

  Vulnerability is terrifying. Being vulnerable about your life’s hardest moments? That’s a nightmare. But we have come to realize that sharing our experiences, even just pieces of our struggles and triumphs, can help us feel that we are not alone. While it was heartbreaking to recognize that there are so many of us, there is immense strength—and a great diversity of activism—in our numbers.

  Survivors of violence heal in different ways and there is no one right way to react after experiencing trauma. We cycle through many emotions, and sometimes those emotions are conflicting.

  There are days when we feel as if our assaults happened decades ago, but there are other days when our hearts are beating so quickly that we clench our chests as hard as we did on those nights from years past.

  Some students might lose interest in school or lack the ability to concentrate, while others might regain control by hyperfocusing on grades.