by Liz Seccuro
So, if you cheat on an exam, you can get kicked out of Mr. Jefferson’s Academical Village, but if you rape a fellow student you can just quietly slip away? When had he left? And why had no one told me? Were they sure he was never coming back? Canevari seemed unwilling to give me any further information. He bade me good-bye and led Dean Todd and me to the door. We walked over to her office in Garrett Hall. The office seemed like a perfect expression of her—warm and inviting, filled with fresh flowers, photos in silver picture frames, and mementos of her life in Texas. She was gracious, concerned, and maternal. I still couldn’t bear the thought of telling my actual mother, but I opened up to Dean Todd immediately. I told her the whole story again, of the rape, the ER, and my meeting with Canevari, not even trying to disguise my contempt for him. She nodded, she listened, and she wrote notes. She asked who was there that night, whom she might be able to speak with. Since I was so new to the university, I still didn’t know a lot of faces, but I named Jim, Hudson Millard, Cricket, and a few people I had happened to see there.
“Dean Todd, may I still go to the university police?”
“Why, of course you can, sugar. I’ll take you there myself whenever you’re ready.”
Phew. I felt so much better. And I was ready to go to the university police. But still, I put it off just a little bit longer. I didn’t know what would be involved once I set that in motion, and my parents were arriving the next day.
On Friday, as I sat in a late class, my mom and dad were at a cocktail party to welcome first years and their parents. A girl from my dorm introduced herself to my parents, saying how sorry she was for what had happened. My parents asked what she meant. She faltered and stammered, “Um, you better ask Liz. She really needs you right now.”
My parents became panicked, frantically calling my dorm room from a pay phone outside. I returned home from class to a ringing phone, but when I answered, it was Dean Canevari. My parents were in his office.
“You better get down here right now and tell them exactly what’s going on.” My heart about leaped out of my chest. I had told him that I wanted to tell my parents on my own terms. He had let me down once again. I told him I’d be right there.
In Canevari’s office, my parents were looking anxious and deeply concerned. I wondered what their biggest fear was at that moment. Maybe that I was being kicked out of school.
“Now, Liz, why don’t you tell your parents what’s been happening?”
I could not. Could not. Would not.
I turned to face them. “I was at a fraternity party and I saw one of the members doing drugs. He’s been threatening me …” I trailed off. It was a weak lie.
“You need to tell them what you’ve told me,” Dean Canevari barked at me.
The story he still did not believe.
“Mom, Dad, I was raped at a party by a boy I’d never met. It was awful, but I am fine now and I don’t want you to worry. Dean Todd and Dean Canevari are helping me out.”
I will never forget the look on my father’s face. He began to cry. His only child, his daughter, had been violated under this school’s watch and I knew he blamed himself for letting me come here. I was not crying. I knew I had to be strong for them. I kept repeating that I was fine. Once my dad recovered, he had questions.
“Have the police been called?”
“Well, as I explained to Liz,” Dean Canevari said, “the fraternity house in question is not under Charlottesville police jurisdiction, but it can be investigated by the university police. We’re working on that now. We’ve spoken to the young man and he denies it, but he has left the university for other reasons.” In front of my parents, the dean was no longer in cowboy mode. He was projecting pure, rational authority, trying to assure them that he was on the case and in control.
My mom, silent until this point, turned to me with sadness in her eyes.
“What were you wearing?” she asked me quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“What did you have on when it happened?”
I lost my calm. “Mom, I was wearing a sweater and a skirt. What does that have to do with it?” I was screaming.
My father shut her down. My mother was merely a product of her generation, one in which this question was expected.
Of course, my mother would support me fully in the weeks and years to come, but in her Irish Catholic world, polite people did not discuss such things. Her very understandable coping mechanism was to bury it away and act like nothing had happened. I respect that it helped her get through it, but it left me feeling disconnected and isolated during that time.
After my outburst, Canevari seemed uncomfortable. He tried to connect man-to-man with my dad, saying things like “Boys will be boys” and “We see a lot of this sort of thing. It’s called ‘date rape’ and there’s not much we can do about it.” My dad just looked at him, slack-jawed, having none of it.
Finally, Canevari took another approach. “Look, I think Liz should take the semester off, get her act together. Or, if she’d like to transfer, I can make that happen very quickly. Perhaps she’d be happier at Clemson, Duke, or another good school … I have contacts.”
My dad looked at me. “Honey, do you want to start over? It’s okay if you do. The dean here can take care of this and you can go somewhere else. I don’t think you should stay here. It’s not safe.”
Canevari interjected, “Oh, no, it’s a very safe school. That’s not what I’m saying. I am thinking that Liz is troubled and maybe a change of scenery, whether home or another school, might do her some good.”
I glared at all three of them. No way. I was staying put. I had earned this.
“I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t understand why I should be punished for the actions of another person, a criminal. I’m staying here.”
“Well, that’s up to you, Liz,” said Canevari. “But if you change your mind, your parents will have my phone number and my support.”
At that point, I got up and left. I told my parents I’d see them at dinner, that I had some work to do. I needed to get out of that stuffy room and shake off the conversation.
My dad went to speak with a university chaplain, seeking his counsel. A deeply religious man, my dad believed in the goodness of people, and thought this man of the cloth might care enough to spur someone into action. Ultimately, though, that chaplain was just another part of the closed university system.
Mom, Dad, and I went about Parents’ Weekend activities, not really speaking of what had happened. They would ask how I was feeling and I would say, “Fine.” I tried to let them see the normal parts of my collegiate life, introducing them to the friends I had made, showing them my classrooms and the places I hung out. Still, when it came time to leave, Dad made me promise that I would call him every night at ten P.M. If I ever didn’t feel safe, he said, or if something felt wrong, he’d fly down right away and collect me.
I had never been so relieved to see two people leave. Their grief must have been bottomless, but I needed to move forward. My first step would be to finally take my story to the university police.
With Sybil Todd at my side, I went many times to the university police, a privatized police and security group, employed to deal with campus crimes—mostly break-ins, theft of personal property, and any sort of student protest. They were housed in an ugly salmon-colored building far from campus. Dean Todd and I went and I told my story once again. But, once again, I noticed that no notes were taken. The officers sat respectfully and listened to me, but they weren’t hearing me.
A couple of months later, we returned to the station for a follow-up meeting, to see if any of the witnesses whose names Dean Todd provided had been questioned, or if the officers had done anything with the statement I had made in our previous meeting. I wanted resolution. Dean Todd conducted her own interviews with the people at the party whom I knew. The university police completed an “investigation,” but there were no reliable witnesses. No one at the fraternity was speaking, an
d Beebe was gone. At Dean Todd’s suggestion, I spoke out in another way—the student press. I gave anonymous interviews to the student newspapers, and they wrote about my rape as one of many. The fight against campus rape was very much a grassroots movement at this point. I wanted everyone to be put on notice. Most of all, I didn’t want other college girls to suffer similar fates.
Still, although other students wanted to hear what I had to say, I realized the university authorities had effectively silenced me. My case was cold. Sybil Todd and I continued to meet each week for lunch or coffee, but she was really only there for moral support. She was my appointed “maternal figure,” since Canevari didn’t want to deal with a “female issue.”
I would call the university police every once in a while, but I was always told there was no new information. Finally, they stopped returning my calls and I, too, stopped calling them. By end-of-term exams in December, I focused my attention on my coursework and forged forward with the rest of my life.
It was over. They had won.
One day, perhaps a year later, I found the outfit I had worn on the night of the rape at the bottom of a closet in a new house I was renting off-campus with Caroline and several other girls. I had forgotten about these clothes and I wept as I opened the bag. This would never be evidence. I told my housemates that I was going to study and jammed the bag of clothes in my backpack. At the Lucky Seven convenience store on the Corner, I bought some lighter fluid. It was dark and cold as I walked across the Grounds to a cemetery on the fringes. I found a trash can and placed the bag in it. Dousing everything with fluid, I lit a match and dropped it. My clothes ignited in a ball of billowy flames as I sat on the cold red dirt and cried.
CHAPTER 5 The Legacy of Rape
I had been determined not to let the rape destroy the rest of my college years, and the remainder of my time at Virginia was pretty typical. I made lots of friends, partied, dated a little bit. I went to football games and movies and fell in love with Latin American literature. I even joined a sorority, Alpha Phi. I didn’t want the horror of that night at Phi Kappa Psi to preclude for me the close friendships and community that had made Greek life on campus appeal to me in the first place, and many of my sorority sisters became lifelong friends. For a time I steered clear of the Phi Kappa Psi house—or as far as I could, considering it was just a few doors down from my own sorority. Even with William Beebe gone, I was scared and ashamed to be recognized by someone who had seen my assault. But eventually I felt as indistinguishable as the next coed. Keeping in touch with Dean Todd, I still made small attempts to change the landscape of sexual assault on campus, through anonymous interviews and forums. But the rape was definitely not the focus of my college experience.
I saw William Beebe only once more, under circumstances so surreal it was hard for me to believe afterward what had happened. It was a spring evening in my third year, and I was hanging out with my sisters at the sorority house. We had ordered pizza to be delivered and I had collected the money. When the doorbell rang, I was the one who ran to the door.
Crash.
There, in a delivery uniform, stood Beebe. He was unmistakable. And he knew me. He recognized me. He looked as frightened as I was. Many times I had imagined confronting him, shaking him until he admitted what he had denied to the dean, forcing him to cower with shame for the irreparable harm he had done. But now I just fumbled with the wad of bills in my hands, shoving them at him without waiting to hear the total or calculate the tip. I grabbed the pizza boxes from his hands, slammed the door, and double-locked it. I stood at the window, watching him climb down the stone steps from our house and into the delivery vehicle, while I tried to breathe.
I dropped the pizza boxes and shoved them across the floor, into the chapter room. My heart was pounding as I crawled up the stairs to my room and collapsed on the bed. I had been trying to act normal, to feel normal, but seeing Beebe again tore me apart. I felt like I was experiencing the trauma all over again. The truth was, the scars would last long after college.
Two months before graduation, I fell in love with a law student named Dan. He was older, charismatic, good-looking, smart, and funny. What he failed to tell me was that he already had a girlfriend. Actually, she was his fiancée. I didn’t know about her until he dumped her to be with me.
After graduating, I accepted an entry-level position at Grey Advertising in New York and moved back into my parents’ house. But every Friday, I would board the Amtrak train in Penn Station to visit Dan in Baltimore, where he was studying for the bar exam. Our relationship flourished and soon I quit my job and moved to Baltimore to be with him. We were back in New York for my twenty-third birthday when he proposed to me under the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center with a beautiful diamond ring. We married in a gorgeous ceremony at my childhood church and honeymooned in Aruba. We bought a beautiful townhouse in the historic Bolton Hill section of Baltimore. I set up house and spent my days decorating and my evenings entertaining his colleagues. It seemed like a fairy tale, but it was quite the opposite. My smart and successful new husband turned out to be a womanizing cad with a volatile personality and anger-management problems. Many of my friends did not enjoy his company, and soon I noticed that the other law firm wives we socialized with did not like him.
Even during the times I thought I was happy, I would occasionally suffer what my husband and I called “the wave.” We would be out at a restaurant or walking on the beach, and I would feel suddenly ill. Nausea and terror would sweep over me. It usually lasted only a few minutes, but it would leave me sweating and exhausted on a bench or sidewalk, struggling to catch my breath.
When my husband’s volatile temper escalated to the point where I could no longer stay, I packed a few suitcases one night and left. Our divorce was obviously acrimonious. He came from a family of lawyers and they all helped represent him. I had no money—Dan had encouraged me to be a stay-at-home wife for the most part, and I had signed a prenuptial agreement three weeks prior to our wedding. His family actually hired an attorney to represent me in the divorce.
I started working at a local catering and event-planning firm and found the work very satisfying. I also found a place to stay—a co-worker was just moving in with her boyfriend and needed someone to care for her own house in the suburbs of Baltimore. Eventually I began dating again—Tom, a young chef I worked with. He was everything my ex-husband was not: mellow, unassuming, and unconcerned with class or monetary status. Since we worked together, we kept our relationship quiet at first, but finally moved in together after a year of dating.
It was soon after my divorce was made final, on the morning of my twenty-ninth birthday, and I was getting ready for work. Tom had had a small birthday party for me the night before and had let me sleep in a bit. I brewed some fresh coffee, watched the morning news, ran the dishwasher, and made a grocery list for later. Our new puppy, a birthday gift, was scratching at his crate to be let out. Suddenly, I could not breathe. My limbs turned purple and blue with cold, my head was red and hot, and my heart was pounding so hard I could see it move in my chest. Death felt certain, the terror was so great. My coffee mug dropped to the floor and I crawled on my hands and knees to the phone in the kitchen. It was a wall-mounted phone, so I had to shimmy up the wall and knock down the cord to grab the handset. It was all I could do to punch the numbers 9-1-1.
“This is the operator, what is your emergency?”
“Help. Heart attack. Send someone. Now,” I gasped into the phone. I could still hear my puppy scratching.
“What is your address, ma’am?” asked the female voice.
“I don’t … I can’t … Please. Just come.”
I began to scream. Sirens wailed and I remember seeing two paramedics over me, working on me. They strapped a blood pressure cuff on me and stuck heart monitors all over me. “Please don’t let me die. It’s my birthday today,” I wailed.
“Honey, you ain’t gonna die today, not on my watch,” said a kindly EMS worker as he
helped me up and led me to the back of the truck. I believed him, but I wanted to know what was wrong with me.
They loaded me onto a stretcher and the waves of panic waxed and waned. Once at the hospital, I don’t recall much except a profusion of doctors and nurses hooking me up to intravenous fluids, and a loud beeping noise that was a heart monitor. On some level, I was convinced I was already dead. I thought of my family, of Tom, of the children I would never have.
Then Tom was there, coming through the curtain. He looked concerned but calm. A young doctor came in behind him and asked questions about what was going on in my life. I admitted that I had been in the middle of a terrible divorce, but that I did not feel as though that was enough to provoke a heart attack. I worked out; I was healthy. But I was also adopted and did not know my family history.
“Heart attack? You haven’t had a heart attack. You are the healthiest specimen I have seen today,” he said. He said that all of the tests had come back negative—EKG, blood count, respiration, etc., and that perhaps I was simply stressed, tired, or hungry. Perhaps I had had an adverse reaction to caffeine, an allergy attack. He gave me a bottle of pills and told me to follow up with my internist. I was dumbfounded. I had felt certain I was going to die, yet there was no clear diagnosis.
Over the next few days, certain that something more serious was wrong with me, I followed up with my internist and two cardiologists, but they all gave me a clean bill of health. I saw a therapist, too. But mostly, I stayed home, scared that the mystery illness would strike again. I still made it to the office and back, but there were no movies, no dinners out, no trips to the store. I became a hermit.
New Year’s Eve, there was a terrible ice storm and black ice coated the roads and the trees. Tom and I stayed in and made a special dinner of lobster, foie gras, and champagne. We were toasting the promise of a new year when I felt the symptoms begin again. My hands were cold and purple and my heart had begun to palpitate. Though the roads were icy and treacherous, Tom drove me straight to the hospital. By the time I got there, my symptoms were easing up and again it was impossible to determine what might be wrong. I was incredibly frustrated.