Shortly afterward, he was pressured into resigning from his leadership position in the organization. I had hoped that this would be a significant enough deterrent so that he would not assault anyone again. But not even a month went by before he assaulted another person. At that point, I connected with three other survivors who were all assaulted by him, and we turned to the university to officially report our assailant together. I never received any confirmation of anyone having read my statement, and was not contacted to take part in an investigation.
After waiting seven months for a reply that never came, and after learning through a friend that the assailant was going to graduate early, I inquired into my case. After multiple attempts to contact the administration, I finally received two short emails telling me that my case had “been resolved through an early resolution process” and that he had been found in violation of the student code of conduct, without specifying whether any disciplinary action had been taken against him. Two days later, he graduated.
It wasn’t until September 2013, a year and a half after my assault, that I learned of the sanctions. According to the Center for Student Conduct, he was put on “disciplinary probation” and had “engaged in counseling measures.” They also said that “any further misconduct during that probationary period could have resulted in further disciplinary action.” How many survivors does it take for a serial perpetrator to be punished?
I have now waited for nine months to hear back from the Department of Education about our federal complaint, which is longer than it took me to hear back from Berkeley.
I Write On
ANNIE CLARK
Her name is Tori. I’m not sure if it’s spelled with an “i” or a “y.” I don’t ask. My friend from elementary school was named Victoria. She had curly black hair and she spelled her nickname “Tori,” so I’m going to go with that. Tori is the name of my server at the Coupe, a restaurant in the Columbia Heights neighborhood in Washington, D.C.
The Coupe is where I have decided I will put pen to paper and write a part of my story for the first time.
The restaurant is divided into three sections. The left side is serving Sunday brunch, with traditional table service. The section in the middle is self-serve; it has a coffee counter with couches and rustic chairs where millennials sit and peck away at their keyboards. The middle is a conversational mix of D.C. politics and venture start-ups, and the interior decoration reflects that fusion. On the right side is a bar, which also offers food and coffee. Hipsters hide behind their electronics as they drink local drafts and lagers and wait for their friends.
I choose the bar side. I first sit at a small table with one wooden chair. It feels stiff. This wooden table is the wrong place to write something so personal. I move. I walk to the back, to an armchair. I cross my legs and sink into the chair, as if I’m expecting some sort of emotional comfort from a piece of furniture. Judging by the lack of lumbar support, this chair has been here, or somewhere, for some time. The chair, upholstered in a golden flower pattern, is stained with dirt and thoughts.
Tori comes back to ask me what I want. I haven’t even glanced at the menu. “Thank you, please give me a minute”—I’m really indecisive on basic things. “I’ll be here awhile,” I confess.
Originally, I thought I would do most of my writing about sexual assault from my bedroom, a place I affectionately call my nest. But my nest has become an intentional safe space of sorts: I leave emotional matter at the nest entrance. I have strung tiny cable cord LED lights ($17 from Amazon) around the ceiling and I have had every friend who has visited me sign a brick on the wall where the door is located. I have painted the wall opposite my bed a slate gray and have stickered “JUST BREATHE” in the center in white. My nest is a place where I can read fiction, listen to loud music, study academic journals, watch bad TV, and not have to think about my job or about my rape. My nest is safe.
And so I find myself at the Coupe, sitting cross-legged in a back corner of a bar in a golden-flowered chair, silently scribbling my story. My only witnesses include Tori, the wallpaper graffiti art, and a painting of acrylic and mixed media (including empty chai canisters and electrical wire shells) hanging crookedly behind me.
Tori meanders back to my chair, and I order the Dragon Tea. She’s probably annoyed that I’m sitting on the bar side drinking two-dollar tea. I hope she can guess that I’ll tip her well. What she probably can’t guess is that I ordered the tea simply because it was called Dragon Tea. Dragon. That feels strong. I don’t feel so strong.
BEFORE: GROWING UP
To be fair, I really like tea, and I offer this nonessential information to Tori when I order. She manages an I-have-to-smile-to-the-customer face and asks if she can bring me anything else. I say “No thank you, ma’am.” She turns her head back at me, with some confusion. Even in a big city, if I don’t say please and thank you, I feel off kilter. I’m southern born and bred.
Growing up, I loved sweet tea. I loved scooping cups of sugar from an old blue ceramic cylinder into a pitcher of tea at my grammy’s house. How could so much granulated sugar dissolve into the warm tea? That disappearing act fascinated me.
Growing up, I was a middle-class, precocious kid. I made fun of my mother’s southern accent, the one I have since partially adopted and begrudgingly embraced.
Growing up, I had braces, and I experienced the humiliation of digging a retainer out of the school cafeteria garbage can. I fought with my little sister, who attended the same elementary school as I did, and who knew I loved her more than anything in the world.
Growing up, I was the first female student in my high school class to earn a letter in a varsity sport. But I wanted to run on more than the field and the track. I wanted to run for office. My grandfather had been a Democratic congressman from North Carolina. He remains one of my role models, even after his death.
Growing up, I wanted to play on the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team. I believed Jif peanut butter was a superfood, and would have a spoonful before every one of my games. I won the state championship with my team in 2004 and had knee surgery shortly thereafter.
Growing up, I was terrified of receiving a “B.” I measured much of my worth by my grades. I was awful at geometry but kicked ass in pretty much everything else academically.
Growing up, I experienced my parents’ divorce, just like 50 percent of my friends. I have one sister, two stepsisters, and one stepbrother.
Growing up, I went to—and got used to giving extemporaneous eulogies at—the funerals of more than twenty of my friends and family members, including one who fell asleep at the wheel, one who died of an overdose, and one who had been my first boyfriend.
Growing up, I loved watching crime drama shows, particularly C.S.I. and Without a Trace on Thursday nights. Afterward, I would sing in the shower to my Christina Aguilera CD. I knew I sang poorly, but I sang anyway.
Growing up, I equated bravery with people who fought and reported crimes.
Growing up, I thought I would be one of those brave people.
Growing up, I never expected to be sexually assaulted.
I am still growing up.
* * *
I have to run to the restroom. I’ll take my notebook and my purse and ask Tori to watch the remaining half of my Dragon Tea. In the bathroom, I’ll go into a stall and I’ll come out of it. Then, I’ll wash my hands as I look at myself in the mirror, just like I did the night of my assault.
HOW IT HAPPENED
He pushed me up against a wall and he penetrated me; that’s the word the law uses. I really hate that word. Penetrate. It’s active on the part of the assailant. Though penetrate is the technical word for a criminal act in some states, it renders the victim an object.
In the moment of that verb, you are nothing more than an object, an object to be penetrated: an object to be acted upon.
Reporting to the police never crossed my mind. I didn’t even want the friends who were out with me that night to know, much less my parents
or siblings. I had always been a strong, independent young woman, and I thought that I could push the assault to a back corner of my mind.
I could hide and be strong and no one would know. My assault could be an invisible scar.
Just like I can sit in the corner of a restaurant and write, and no one has to know what I am writing.
I sip my Dragon Tea. I don’t add the honey that comes in packets on the side. I don’t like anything too sweet anymore.
I told myself that I was too strong for “breakdowns.” I told myself that things like this didn’t happen to girls like me. I had GRIT. I was made of GRITS. And Girls Raised In The South just learn to get over things.
HEALING
Just looking in the mirror is a reminder.
—Text message from an individual very close to me, who was assaulted during the writing of this book
After this penetration happened, I found myself in a bathroom. I used cheap toilet paper to clean myself up and forced myself to try to clean up my mind. It hurt.
Little did I know that my mind wouldn’t be disinfected; in fact, my brain would be altered. That night would be carved in memory and retold in flashbacks.
I guess I always knew deep down there was something I would have to address eventually, even though I could not immediately put words to what had happened. I don’t know how long I was in the bathroom that night. I remember putting both my hands on the sink, hunching over, and looking at myself in the mirror and knowing that was my reflection, but the person I was seeing didn’t feel like me.
Just looking in the mirror is a reminder.
I think I was in shock.
When you’re in shock, sometimes there are no emotions. There are only actions. For the rest of the night, and for a few days to come, I was simply robotic. I didn’t have my own voice. I wrote down song lyrics over and over again. I wrote down the lyrics to “SuperSoul,” an original song by Dilana, a South African rock star who had competed on one of those audition-to-be-in-the-band TV shows a few years earlier. In “SuperSoul” the narrator is harmed yet also somehow “bulletproof”; in the end, her scars heal and she has a “super soul.”
* * *
They’re turning down the lights in the restaurant. Even though it’s late afternoon, the sun goes down early now. Bar mood-lighting follows. I think Tori will be leaving soon because she asks if I will close out my check. Having worked in the restaurant business for years, I empathize. I say, “Of course.”
It’s interesting to write about healing in the darkness of the bar. There is no light, no pathway, no prescriptive narrative of healing, and the sound bites the media perpetuate are glossy and unrealistic.
To be able to tell one’s story is a privilege, but it’s also a vulnerability, a risk, and a sacrifice. Pieces of you are misconstrued and forgotten; your identity is chiseled to fit the mold of what sells, not what is real.
Tori brings back my credit card and says thanks.
There’s nothing special about our interaction, and why would there be? To her, I am a white, blond, blue-eyed, five-foot-seven-inch, athletic woman working on the weekend. I’m privileged; that’s what our society sees as normal. I’m average to her. I’m probably a near likeness of 25 percent of her customers. Tori doesn’t know or care that I’m writing about my rape. Tori doesn’t know or care that I’m bisexual.
I never intended to tell people at all about either of those things, much less lots of people at once.
I gulp the last of my Dragon Tea. I try to decipher the meaning of the recycled art piece on the adjacent wall. I pine for an excuse not to be so vulnerable to my notebook. Part of the reason I didn’t want everyone knowing what had happened to me in 2007, beyond the hurts from the slings and arrows of a victim-blaming culture, is that at the time, I was also coming out as a member of the LGBT community, and I had no clue how people who had known me my whole life would react to that. Each of these pieces of information was heavy in itself, and I thought that delivering them together would be throwing medicine balls at people who wouldn’t be able to catch them.
1. Would people think the only reason I was interested in dating women was because I was assaulted by a man?
2. If I told people I was assaulted at the same time as I told them I was bisexual, would that be too much to process and would it therefore lesson the impact of each bit of information?
3. If I told conservative family members or friends both things at the same time, would they just judge me on the basis of my sexuality, and forget the rape part?
4. If I told my more liberal family and friends, would they not care about my sexuality and ask me a lot of questions about my assault?
5. If, years later, I talked about my sexuality in a documentary, would people take sexual assault less seriously?
6. If, years later, I let media sources constantly cut out my sexuality, or I was silent about it, was I being unfair to the LGBTQ community and to myself?
This list of complex social- and integrity-cost calculations doesn’t end. I have questions 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and on and on. My mind reels with these questions.
I grappled with what to say and with how to phrase these two things and to whom for years. By the time I graduated from college, almost everyone in my circle of friends and my family knew that I wasn’t heterosexual, but only a handful knew about my sexual assault.
So when I look into a mirror, I see things that the media doesn’t capture, facets of my identity that are never conveyed through a magazine photo shoot for a story about my activism. I’m getting through my assault, but I’m not over it. I’m angry at the erasure of parts of my identity, and more angry at the complete erasure of so many others’ experiences.
I might be on camera talking strongly about policy, but I still struggle sometimes in the greenroom, always doing a last-minute check to make sure my mascara hasn’t run. And because of that mascara and my long hair, most at home won’t know I’m bisexual. But I hope that people reading this will know that whatever their identity or struggle is, they are believed and not alone.
Tori has left, and my tea is gone. And I press my pen to my notebook a bit harder. I want to feel the words I’m writing more viscerally. I will write on.
I Have Been Told That My Skin Is Exceptionally Smooth
REGINA GONZALEZ-ARROYO
I was born in Mexico and we moved to California when I was three.
Growing up as an undocumented Mexican immigrant was hard. I didn’t speak English until I was seven, and even when I got to junior high and became a citizen, kids still mocked me and called me wetback. I was eager to leave Orange County, which is very white and very conservative.
In middle school I had an artsy friend who talked about someday going to CalArts, so that’s when I started researching it. That college seemed like a utopia. I desperately wanted to be a part of an open and diverse community. I had never been to a school that was inclusive. I applied to major in film.
The college is like a large high school. There’s only a cafeteria and a lounge, so not a lot of places to eat or hang out. You know everyone and know their major. It’s kind of claustrophobic at times.
I started school in the fall of 2013. I felt really privileged to be there, so my first semester I was trying to convince myself that I belonged. I was a bubble of positivity. I was just trying to embrace the environment, which sounds really immature now that I look back.
The assault happened my second semester. He was in the same program as I was, and also a freshman. We hooked up a few times over a month and a half. Then we had a falling-out because he was manipulative—he would want to see me only when he wanted sex. I didn’t see that as abusive until a friend said she didn’t want me around him. So I told him, “I don’t want to see you anymore, have you touch me anymore.”
At the beginning of second semester I was invited to a film department party. I didn’t know he was going to be there. I got there and realized I was one of the only girls at the party. I started feeling real
ly uncomfortable. About an hour into the party, other girls arrived, including one of my best friends. I hung around her until people started leaving. I was very intoxicated. I couldn’t stand. I sat on a staircase talking to my friends, then at some point the guy I had dated came and sat really close to me, almost on top of me.
I go upstairs to use the bathroom and the guy I used to date appears up there. He drags me into the bathroom, closes the door, and turns off the lights. That’s when the assault begins.
After the assault, I tell one of the guys at the party, “I wanna go home.” At some point the rapist comes out and hovers around us as they’re walking me home. I start saying, “I don’t want him here. I hate him!” One of the guys is recording it. They’re trying to walk me home and I don’t remember where I live. One guy looks up my email and finds an order for Amazon, finds my address, and gets me home.
The next day I woke up with my dress on. It was dirty and torn. I was bruised and sore. I had messages from friends: “Where are you?” I showered and went on a friend’s film set as I’d previously planned. On set someone said the word rape and I started crying.
I broke down for the next week. I didn’t want to go to school, didn’t want to talk to anyone. Didn’t know whether to get a rape kit. Friends kept telling me to go to the hospital or at least to the school to get help.
I was scared of what would happen. I didn’t want my family to know. I wanted my parents to trust me. I wanted to make them proud. I was the first in my family to go to college. I was supposed to be an example. My parents are so conservative and I didn’t want them to blame me.
So I wrote about what happened on my blog. Now I know that one of my good friends was following me on Tumblr and forwarded the post to my perpetrator. That night, one of my perpetrator’s friends called me and told me, “You need to talk to him and work this out.” I was scared. I never wanted to see him again much less “work things out.” My friends took my phone away from me. They were worried I would end up answering out of anxiety.
We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out Page 23