We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out

by Annie E. Clark

  The guy and his friends were trying to hunt me down. I moved to another friend’s apartment for a few days. That’s when I realized this wasn’t going away and I couldn’t ignore it.

  My friends convinced me to report to the school but I still waited until three or four weeks after the assault. I confided to another student, a teacher’s assistant. She told me to report to the film school’s director and I ended up telling the associate vice president of the school and the human resources officer. They told me they would take immediate action and that it might take thirty days.

  They removed him from my classes and all student events, but he would still show up. The rules weren’t enforced. I was always afraid of running into him. His friends cornered one of my friends and screamed at her. They posted on Facebook that they would shit on me for what I did; they approached me and cursed me.

  The school’s investigation took two months. The school administrators interviewed a professor’s teaching assistant and asked her to compare my art to his. They asked me what I was wearing that night, how short it was. If I had feelings for my rapist. If I had climaxed during the assault. And if I had issues regarding climaxing. They asked me how oral rape was possible and I had to describe how he was choking me and forcing me. They didn’t get it.

  Months later, I realized that they wanted to keep him in school. He was paying full tuition and he had a lawyer. I was on scholarship. He comes from a very wealthy, powerful family. He’s white. He couldn’t take no for an answer. He had ownership over me.

  I like my school. I love my professors and my friends. But it’s not a healthy environment. I wish I could take a semester off, but because of my student loans, I’m imprisoned.

  The school came out with its decision in May and the sanctions were super light. He was only suspended for an academic year. That’s been one of the hardest things: the institutional retaliation and betrayal. You’ve dreamed of being there and they turn their backs on you. I went home that summer upset and hurt. I researched Title IX and got in touch with End Rape on Campus and Laura Dunn.

  I told my parents when I got home. Not immediately but about a month into the summer. It was almost an accident. One of my sister’s friends told a rape joke and I started sobbing in front of my mom. My dad was just getting home from work and was pulling into the driveway. I ran out and met him. I told him I needed to talk to him but not at home. We drove to the nearest Starbucks and talked.

  I was trying to look composed. I explained Title IX and said, “Hey, this law exists, and my school violated it, and I’m going to file a complaint, Dad, and I need you guys to support me.” He kept trying to get me to go to the police and I kept trying to explain why it wasn’t an option. He looked the saddest I’ve seen him.

  We got home and I was a crying mess again. My dad called my mom and my sister, and my mom started crying and we hadn’t even told her yet. Their questions were painful. I didn’t want to tell them and they wanted to know every detail.

  I took them to a screening of The Hunting Ground at school. That was the first time they realized this is a huge issue and I’m not the only one. I send them articles for parents of victims but it’s still not a conversation they like to have.

  My assailant was allowed back in school as of the fall of 2015. But, so far, he hasn’t reenrolled. His friends said he was going to reapply but to a different program. On September 30, 2014, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into CalArts for Title IX violations.

  I’m looking for a therapist. I am learning, and I’m around a close-knit group of nurturing people. In a few years I’ll be close to where I want to be. I am trying to raise awareness through film and art. Film is my artistic voice and my activism. In December 2014, not long after my assault, I made my first movie about sexual violence. I was supposed to make a documentary about a location for a class. So I went back to an actual location where he’d been aggressive. The film is called I Have Been Told That My Skin Is Exceptionally Smooth.

  I want to show the escalation of violence and the horror of rape. I’ve hardly ever seen an effective rape scene—a realistic one that makes you sick. So I force the audience to endure my film. A lot of people feel sick and gross after watching it, and that’s the point. One professor told me it was the best because it successfully re-created the experience.

  I want people to think about it and understand why I made the film. It’s not enjoyable. It’s not something that can just stop. I’m taking advantage of the audience because I’m not letting them know what they’re getting into. I wanted to feel that power, because I’ve had to struggle to regain it. If I get any reaction, the film is successful.

  A screenshot of Regina from her film, I Have Been Told That My Skin Is Exceptionally Smooth

  * * *

  This reflective film essay about one of my traumatic encounters has a running time of five minutes.

  Accompanied by darkness and on-screen text, it consists of twenty-four images, a reference to the standard number of frames projected in a second.

  It’s not an easy film to watch because I have deconstructed narrative, documentary, and film-essay formalities. The audience is in unfamiliar territory, forced to participate. It becomes powerless, like the narrator.

  While inviting the audience to enter such a vulnerable setting, I also create a space where I can reenact, perceive, and reflect on my experience under conditions to which only I have consented.

  * * *

  From 2012 to 2015, Emily Yoffe, then a contributor to the online magazine Slate, wrote a number of widely read pieces on sexual assault, including several “Dear Prudence” advice columns (in 2012), which encouraged women to avoid assault by adjusting their own behaviors, and the articles “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” (October 2013), “College Women: Don’t Depend on ‘Bystanders’ to Rescue You from Assault. Rescue Yourselves” (February 2014), “The College Rape Overcorrection” (December 2014), and two pieces critical of the documentary The Hunting Ground. In the first of those, a review (February 2015), she deemed the film a “failure” for “privileging the claims of accusers,” and in a second piece (June 2015), she asserted that one of the personal stories in the film—Kamilah Willingham’s and a friend’s assaults at the hands of a Harvard Law School classmate—was not an assault but rather a “spontaneous, drunken encounter.” The student whom Kamilah accused of sexual assault was later convicted of misdemeanor (nonsexual) assault of her friend, but he was not indicted for assaulting Kamilah.

  Dear Emily Yoffe

  KAMILAH WILLINGHAM

  Dear Emily Yoffe,

  While a student at Harvard Law School, I was assaulted during the January term of 2011. And a month later, I started the class “Race and Justice: The Wire,” taught by a prominent Harvard Law professor, Charles Ogletree. This class used the HBO crime series The Wire to explore some of the realities and legal issues in many black communities, especially the consequences of America’s “war on drugs.” I found the course both refreshing and disappointing. It was refreshing, as a black law student at Harvard, to have a space where we could have honest and important conversations about race. It was disappointing because, like many conversations about race and justice in America, the course treated blackness as if it is defined by the experiences of black men.

  In these types of conversations, black women are treated as a footnote—a side story, at most—in the broader story of the struggles and injustices faced by black Americans. In these conversations, we can acknowledge how black men are victimized by systemic oppression and entrenched racism, citing police violence and mass incarceration as examples. But what about black women, who are subject to these same oppressive forces in addition to the abuse of patriarchy and must endure and fight white supremacy as well as forcefully dominant masculinities? Is there room in that conversation for black women who are subject to abuse, too often at the hands of black men?

  As I noted in a paper I wrote for that class, “In the study of equa
lity and rights, it is as if we—as academics and professionals in a wide spectrum of fields, but especially legal—cannot think of people in more than one dimension. When the topic is rights or inequality, it is as if we can only think of two groups: oppressors and the oppressed; villains and victims.”

  In your June 2015 piece for Slate, “How The Hunting Ground Blurs the Truth,” you fell into this same kind of one-dimensional thinking, Emily Yoffe. You wrote in the introduction to your piece that an assault against me, a black woman, and against a female friend of mine, who is white, by a black man was the “story of an ambiguous sexual encounter among young adults that almost destroyed the life of the accused, a young black man with no previous record of criminal behavior.” And again, to make sure this “subtle” point was not lost on your audience, you awkwardly reiterate, before walking through the timeline of the night my friend and I were assaulted: “Both Willingham and Winston are black,” going out of your way to point out my assailant’s blackness, as if it supported the “story” you believed you were uncovering (me being a “bad victim,” and thus the documentary The Hunting Ground being inaccurate). In setting up your story this way, you irresponsibly and outrageously played on one-dimensional cultural fears of further victimizing black men.

  This diversion tactic—inverting notions of victimization—is pretty clichéd among those who, for whatever reason, set out to deny the occurrence, prevalence, and effects of rape. In writing your piece, you set yourself up to be an objective finder of facts, but what is “objective” in the prioritization of men and the acceptance of the inherent unreliability of women? You seem to be asking, “Who is the true victim here? Are the victims these women who seem so demanding, with their incomprehensible pain and anger? Or is this victim this promising young man, who had such a bright future ahead of him?”

  Of course “innocent until proven guilty” is a valuable principle, but do you really think there are only as many rapists as there are defendants who have been proven guilty in a court of law? The type of writer you are—the supposedly objective proponent of “reason,” but, in fact, a principled denier of rape—seems to embrace an inverse of this innocent-until-proven-guilty principle. That is, to you anyone who says they were sexually assaulted is lying and/or crazy unless they can produce, for your satisfaction, incontrovertible proof (a handy videotape they made or photographs they took while they were passed out?) that they were violated. To you, anyone who says she or he was assaulted is confused and oversensitive, if not malevolent. Again, the true victim is the poor, innocent man being persecuted as a result of the crazy woman who woke up to find someone trying to put his finger inside her and who thinks that is assault.

  You used my assailant’s race to prop up your demented “true victim” narrative. You wrote your piece during a year when mass media was focused on the victimization of black men by a racist and overzealous criminal justice system, a year when Ferguson, Missouri, had become a domestic cops-versus-black-people combat zone; you wrote a month and a half after Freddie Gray was murdered while being transported by the Baltimore police department, ten months after Eric Garner was choked to death by New York City police on suspicion of selling illegal cigarettes. Yes, there had been yet another bad year for black men. Truly. So, because it was a black man who was being accused of raping me and my friend, did you figure that the idea that he might be falsely accused would be especially powerful to your audience?

  One of the things that shocked me the most about the campus proceeding that looked into the assault against my friend and me was that at first our assailant didn’t seem to dispute many of the facts. He simply seemed to have trouble differentiating between unconsciousness and consent.

  He essentially told the faculty, “Yeah, I did this, what’s wrong with it?” and they ultimately said, “Yeah, don’t punish him for being a boy!”

  Our schools, our courtrooms, and our society (that’s you, Emily Yoffe) can’t accept this “Boys will be boys” excuse anymore. Not when “Boys will be boys” includes undressing and fondling an unconscious woman. Is it okay for that to be considered “normal”?

  Yes, black men are victimized in our culture, but I hate that you played into the victimization of black men in this case, because this perpetrator is not part of that narrative. Yes, he’s black, but this isn’t someone who is being targeted or overpoliced because he’s black. He’s not the victim here.

  A lot of the framing of the struggles of black people in America leaves out black women. We’re even more marginalized by the criminal justice system and authority than black men are.

  What was your intention with that piece in Slate? What it looks like is an opportunistic move by a white woman who doesn’t seem to care about the treatment of black Americans in the criminal justice system if they are black women. The kind of accusations you make about me are the same kind of accusations that were lobbed at Bill Cosby’s black victims when they came forward—that we’re betraying something more important than our own selves by publicly calling out a black man. The potential for that kind of accusation was something I grappled with before I came forward to identify my assailant.

  But the horror of his actions outweighed that reluctance.

  Only a few days before your piece came out, you started calling my former employer. They promised not to give you my contact information—even though you contacted them repeatedly—because I did not want to speak to you. Why would I feel safe talking to the “journalist” who writes about campus sexual assaults with articles like “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk”—how could I trust that you would treat me objectively or fairly? It was one of the most dreadful feelings, knowing that someone who treats victims with such disdain would be singling out my case.

  In the days before your article came out, I couldn’t make it out of my room. I woke up with a pit in my stomach and my heart racing. “Keep breathing,” I thought, and when I was about to leave the room I had a full-on panic attack. I was sobbing, hyperventilating. It was scary.

  I called my aunt who lives in Germany and she gave me massive pep talks: “You made a decision to speak out, and you knew it was not going to be easy. It’s not personal; you’re being attacked for what you represent. Put up walls around yourself. You have to be strong, and think about it as a job you’ve taken on. You can stop if you want to, but know that this isn’t about you. What woman in our family has not been attacked at some point? We all fight back in whatever way we can; this is how you’ve chosen to fight.”

  Whether or not I chose to continue fighting, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop the renewed feelings of assault that your story would trigger—I could only brace myself. I became so anxious, I couldn’t eat or sleep. My weight started dropping immediately, and I’m already underweight. I felt like I was disintegrating.

  But back to your awful piece: the morning it came out, I got a text from a friend with a link to it. Not knowing what to do, I called my boyfriend, who had already left for work on his bike. He said he was turning around. My heart was racing. I sat on my living room couch and began reading your piece on my phone. I barely got through the first page—through the part where you mockingly describe me explaining in The Hunting Ground how “the events continue to haunt” me, through the part where you, grossly, describe me and my assailant as “both tall and good-looking” and write about us romantically connecting.

  I was shocked. I was not prepared to read a sensational reimagining of the beginning of my nightmares, an imagining in which my assailant is the true victim and his most convenient retelling of events is taken as unscrutinized truth. He and I were not romantically involved. If you actually examined the voluminous court record, you’d have seen that even my assailant confirmed, on record, that there was absolutely no romantic connection between us, that we were, as I understood it, just “friends.” Do you know how disgusting it is to read someone writing about your assault as if it happened in a romantic context? Can you imagine how devastatingly powerless and a
t the same time outraged that would make you feel?

  You say that an “ambiguous sexual encounter” ruined a promising young black man’s life. What about my life, Emily? I was once a promising young law student—a young black woman with a bright future ahead of me. My life and my career were derailed as a result of that awful encounter—as a result of his actions. I spent four years bracing, in crisis, for a trial that was continually delayed. Four years of nightmares, flashbacks, and panic attacks. Sometimes I still don’t feel safe falling asleep in my own bed, not until the sun comes up and I’m sure I don’t have to relive those awful hours when I was “ambiguously sexually encountered” while unconscious.

  After the trial I thought, as plaintiffs and defendants in trials probably often think when the legal contest is over, “Okay, I’m done being in battle mode and I can relax. Nobody’s going to come after me. Nobody’s going to attack my integrity or my sanity.” And I also thought what crime victims may also often think after a trial, “No one can make me relive what happened again.”

  * * *

  I was once a promising young law student—a young black woman with a bright future ahead of me. My life and my career were derailed … as a result of his actions.

  * * *

  But thanks to you, I was back on trial, back under attack; this time, in the court of public opinion.

  One of the things you mentioned is that once I kicked him out of my bedroom, I allowed him to stay in the other room. It’s something they asked about at Harvard too: “Why would you do that if you’d just been assaulted?”