* * *
I received two death threats over the phone. An older gentleman said my kids and I would be hurt.
* * *
Still, I wanted some kind of justice. So I went to Oregon State and talked to a sexual assault counselor there. I didn’t want these men to do this again. I was told that the university took my concerns “very seriously.” I left there that day feeling like they were going to do what they were supposed to do. Meanwhile, in the athletics department, the football coach gave the two Oregon men a one-game suspension. (And the university required that they perform twenty-five hours of community service, but I didn’t know this until years later.)
I was angry but tried to rationalize it. I went to nursing school and pretended everything was fine. I got my RN degree, then my bachelor’s, then my master’s in business and health care. I put a bunch of letters behind my name to prove my self-worth.
Getting my nursing degree—that was a joyous day. Getting that degree had been such a struggle, but having it was like winning the lottery. I went from being on welfare to making a lot of money all at once.
I felt like Jenny had given me the gift of life and compassion, and I wanted to pay it forward to my patients. I always remember that you don’t know what a person’s going through, and sometimes they just need someone to be compassionate. That’s what I love so much about nursing: you get the opportunity to serve every day.
I got my first nursing job in 2003, not long after graduating. And nursing was my calling. But I was two different people. There was Professional Brenda, who was this success story, but behind the scenes I was suffering. I hated myself. After the rape, I stayed in a relationship with Anthony, off and on, for ten years. After what had happened to me, I figured no one else would want me.
I had nightmares and wanted to die and was angry because I couldn’t. I resented my children because I couldn’t die. I had a borderline eating disorder. I would binge and then starve myself. Take fat burners to wake up and sleeping pills to sleep. I had PTSD. To this day I can’t have anybody behind me and I can’t be in the dark.
Antwan, the father of my sons, has now turned his life around in many ways, but back then he drank and ended up in prison. Darius acted out. My mom had cancer. I went through bankruptcy. Then depression. There was always some kind of trial. I was working full-time and going to school. How did I get through it? I adopted that “Just Do It” slogan from Nike. Every day it was, “Get up: Just Do It. Take a breath: Just Do It.”
Then, in 2010, I went to a business conference. On the weekend, they had a church service. I went, and I got saved.
One of the first things I heard was that I didn’t have to be perfect for God to love me. I remember thinking, “Wow, God will love me the way I am.” I started believing that with God, anything is possible. I started leaning on Him. But I was still not thinking my issues came from being raped.
Then that family member who had molested me when I was little died. I felt this sense of peace; then I felt guilty. Two weeks later I was watching the evangelist Joyce Meyer on TV, and she said, “If you bury anything alive, it will come screaming back at you from the grave.”
I said, “Okay, God, what have I hidden and buried?” And God said, “You need to forgive that family member who molested you.” At that moment, I saw a vision of me in a yellow dress on a porch. I was two, and he was tongue-kissing me. I got nauseous and vomited, and the floodgates opened. My life came crumbling down. I had a breakdown.
I got to the parking lot at work, but I couldn’t get out of the car. My son had started going to a counselor. I called her and said, “Can I come see you?” She met with me and immediately said, “Go to the doctor and get medication and come see me every day or I am going to put you in a hospital.” I wanted to die. I didn’t want to be inside my own body. I wanted to peel off my old skin, but you can’t—you can’t get away from yourself.
That family member who molested me died in February and I started counseling at the end of March. I was forty. By August I started talking about the gang rape in counseling. I was ready to do whatever I needed to do to heal and get better.
I told my counselor that I had always hated myself for giving up on prosecuting the men for the gang rape. In the same breath I said, “But I went to the school and other women were saved because of me.” And my counselor said, “Are you sure the school did something?” I said, “I assumed they did.” And she said, “Hmmm.”
She said, “Let’s call them.” So I called the Student Conduct Office and said who I was, that I was raped and that two of the rapists were Oregon State students, and that I wanted to know what the student code of conduct disciplinary action was. I said, “I have a police report if you need it.” They said something about records and that they’d call me back.
A week later, I called again. That same day, a woman called me. She said she was from Oregon State. She said, “I haven’t read all the emails, can you explain?” And I thought, “What emails?”
She said, “Why do you want this information? Are you planning to litigate?” And I said, “No, I’m in therapy and trying to heal.” She mentioned FERPA, a student privacy law, and said she might have to ask my attackers to sign off on the records. She said something about her email not working and could I send the police report to her coworker’s email. I felt like something was really sketchy and called my counselor and she said, “No, don’t send in the report.”
My counselor said, “Maybe we need to consult a lawyer.” I looked up the name of the woman who had called me. She was a Title IX person at Oregon State. She was not from the Office of Student Conduct, and it was her boss that she wanted me to send the police report to. That was super sketchy to me. So I called three lawyers and all of them told me they couldn’t help me, that I should just give the Title IX woman the police report and try to work with the school.
I felt victimized all over again.
I was frustrated and angry, so I decided to talk to Coach Mike Riley. He was the coach when the rape happened, then he left for the NFL, and then came back to Oregon State. I decided to write him a letter. I wanted him to understand how profoundly he had hurt me. So I Googled him. And all I found were articles about how great he was. This was a guy who had suspended players for one game for a gang rape. Then I found a 2011 article about one of his players being convicted of domestic violence; Riley gave the player a one-game suspension.
Very impulsively, I wrote to the reporter of that article. I wrote an angry email, telling him all that had happened to me and how nothing had happened to those men. I said, “Thanks for letting me vent,” and signed it “Brenda.” He emailed me back one minute later.
He was John Canzano, the head sportswriter for the Oregonian.
A week later, I met him in the lobby at his workplace, handed him my police report, and dumped my story on him. He said, “If you want to meet with Mike Riley, I will set that up for you, but if you want to tell your story, I will do that.”
At the time I didn’t think I had a story. I was surprised he was acting like I had something to say. He said, “You know you have a story, right?” I said, “Okay, but we have to put my name and my face on it. I don’t want to be anonymous.” He started investigating and calling people. This was September 2014, and the story came out in November.
During those three months, I was nervous and I was scared. I thought the article was just going to be a sports column. Then John called and said, “Normally my stories are twenty inches long. Yours is one hundred and seven inches.” The Oregonian didn’t want to cut it down. They ran it on the front page in a series of four articles, and it also appeared on their website, which is how I first saw it.
John texted me a few minutes after it went up and said, “The article is up. You’re a hero.” When I went online to read it, I immediately started to cry. I had to take deep breaths and stop a few times to get through it, but I called John, literally sobbing on the phone, thanking him. I remember specifically feeling
like it was the very first time I didn’t feel ashamed about what had happened to me. And even more important, I felt like my two lives were finally merging.
* * *
John texted me … and said, “The article is up. You’re a hero.”
* * *
I became one person that day, in that moment that the world read about me. I had lived in a prison of shame and silence for so long. I had lived in the public as one person—Brenda the independent, put-together single mom and RN, and then behind the scenes there was the Brenda who was ashamed, depressed, and suicidal. But once my secret was out, it was liberating. I walked out of prison that day.
My plan was to not read the comments, because I knew I risked being attacked by the public. But John told me it was safe to read them, so I did, and there was an amazing outpouring of love. Reading those comments was a healing experience. It helped restore my faith in humanity, literally. I don’t say that lightly. My life experiences have caused me to question humanity. Reading that first article was a deeply pivotal moment that set the course for my life’s purpose and my destiny. I will always be grateful to John for what he did for me. He is my hero.
The Title IX woman from Oregon State had never called me back, but about a month after I talked to her, while John was reporting the story, she left me a voice mail and said, “Oh, Brenda, I realized I never called you back. Oregon State would love to help you.” But it was too late. I didn’t call her back.
* * *
I became one person that day.… I had lived in a prison of shame and silence for so long.… But once my secret was out, it was liberating. I walked out of prison that day.
* * *
All along, I had had the police report but I had never read it. Two months after being raped, I had started nursing school, and because I was depressed and failing my classes, I was put on academic probation, so I got the police report and sent it to the school and said, “Can you cut me some slack? I was just raped.” And they did. After that I stuck the report in a manila envelope and never read it.
But when my story came out in the Oregonian, I finally read the report. Turns out, all the men had confessed to wrongdoing and had implicated each other. My account corroborated their accounts, from the condom to the white tank tops to the flashlight—the whole scene.
John had uncovered meetings between Oregon State and the DA and the police. The DA had misled me when the DA’s office told me I had no case. Three years after my rape, the police destroyed my evidence. They had audiotapes of the men implicating each other and the DA had told the police to keep them, and they had destroyed them.
The athletic department officials had felt that my rape scandal would bury them. The school was in the hole financially. In 2001, my attackers went to the Fiesta Bowl.
So I politicized my pain. I’ve helped pass three bills, including one to double the statute of limitations for rape in Oregon. Coach Riley issued an apology. The president of Oregon State, Ed Ray, came forward and apologized on behalf of the university.
I’ve been hired as a consultant at Oregon State. One of the first things I did was to go there for Take Back the Night. That was in April 2015. Somewhere between five hundred and eight hundred people showed up. (The year before, forty people had shown up.) I spoke, and a basketball coach, Rachi Wortham, spoke after me. They’ve really embraced me and asked me to be a part of what they’re doing. I talk to all the athletic programs. Recently, I told my story to every male and female athlete at Oregon State. There are 520 of them.
I’m still nursing. I’m a coordinator for a mobile dialysis team. I do treatments and oversee the team.
And more than ever, I’m focusing on education. But the right kind. We need to stop trying to educate women about how to prevent their own rape and engage the men. Women can’t stop rape. If we could we would have already done it. There are good men out there, but they’re not speaking up and doing their part. And we’re not paying enough attention to the men who are speaking out.
Brenda Tracy and her sons, Darius Adams, twenty-two, left, and Devante Adams, twenty-one, on the right. “We were at a gala in May of 2015 for the nonprofit foundation Sparks of Hope. They help children who have been sexually abused. I was given the advocacy award.”—Brenda Tracy
Riley coaches in Nebraska now, so I’ll go there to talk to his team. I’m hoping to get Nike engaged in some campaigns. How do you get to men? Through sports. How do you get to men through sports? Nike.
I’m still a single mom, with two college-age boys. My boys were really nervous when the story came out. But they supported me. When there was such an outpouring of support, so many people saying, “Your mom’s courageous,” they felt the love from the community. They had carried some of my shame. When I became free, they became free, too. They’re very proud of me, and I’ve seen a lot of healing.
Now I think, “It happened to me; I didn’t do anything.” I’m not going to carry around the shame of the men who hurt me. I did that for a long, long time. I’m giving them back that case of bricks: “You take this shame. It’s not mine anymore. You can carry it around.”
In May 2014, at the capitol in Salem, Oregon, I was testifying in support of a bill, a resource bill for college students. If you’re sexually assaulted on campus, the school has to tell you what your rights are. I was testifying, saying that if I had known what my rights were, my life could have been very different. I spoke of how I struggled for sixteen years and wanted to kill myself. And I realized at that moment that I don’t think about dying anymore; I think about living and helping others. I thought, “Wow, I haven’t thought about killing myself in six months.” Somehow, the love within me was finally out-tipping the hate. Love for myself was finally tipping the scales.
PART V
DECLARATIONS OF INDEPENDENCE
I believe that telling our stories, first to ourselves and then to one another and the world, is a revolutionary act. It is an act that can be met with hostility, exclusion, and violence. It can also lead to love, understanding, transcendence, and community. There’s nothing more powerful than truly being and loving yourself.
—Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More
What we’ve been through doesn’t define us, and we are fighting back.
Some of us hold protests, some of us go to the press, and some must work within the safety of silence.
We are trying to dismantle systems that operate as if our circumstances of sexual assault are statistically inevitable.
Some of us have moved past the daily reminders of our trauma; for others, simply getting out of bed in the morning is an act of defiance, resisting the visible and invisible aggressions that put us in the position of writing these declarations.
We will not allow the current oppression of women, people of color, and LGBTQ-identified individuals to continue. Our acts of resistance, simultaneously boldly public and intentionally private and everywhere in between, have value.
We declare our independence from the oppression that silences us.
We are using our words and sharing our lived experiences as tools to chip away at the status quo.
We need both legislative action and cultural change to end sexual violence. But we cannot legislate cultural change. Through everyday activism, we collectively change the way people talk about survivors of sexual violence. Through consciousness raising, we change the vocabulary of our legislators, our college presidents, our school board members, our families, and our friends.
We know change takes time. And we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, those who offered and invented the language for us to share our stories.
Our activism is our storytelling. And our activism is not over.
What follows is Chloe Allred’s artistic statement for a self-portrait, Rape, pictured here.
Statement from the Artist on Doing a Self-portrait About Rape
When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. Somebody’s hands
were on my body, groping my breasts and stomach, running between my legs and inside me. I didn’t know how long they had been doing this or what else they had done to me. I shifted my body, stirring. The hands froze, they shrank away. Details surfaced in my mind: I was at my friend’s house. I had stayed the night after a party because I didn’t think it would be safe to walk home late at night. A guy who I thought was a creep had slept behind me that night. He invaded and violated my body while I slept. I confronted him that morning and he pretended not to know what I was talking about.
At first, I tried to forget what had happened. But I couldn’t. A deep repulsion churned in my stomach. Just months before, my aunt had been raped and murdered in a park that I’d frequented as a kid. The grief from her death weighed heavily on me. The man who killed her had committed many atrocities on other women. He had slipped through the cracks of the legal system, ending with my aunt.
The violation of my body left me feeling fragmented, numb. I wanted to address what had happened to me. I wanted to hold him accountable.
After two days I called the police and filed a report. The detective I met with told me that what happened to me was a form of rape. He was sorry but thought that little would happen legally because of the lack of evidence.
I told my friends about it. Some of them ignored what I had to say. This felt like a new violation. To not acknowledge my rape was to deny that my grief was valid. My true friends stuck by me, listened, and made sure to be a consistent presence in my life. I was raped. I will not feel guilty about that. I refuse to shut up or feel ashamed about something that I didn’t do. The rapist did something horrible and should feel ashamed. I will not take that on for him.
We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out Page 21