My Favourite Season (Kind Of)

Fall is my favourite season. I love the change in colours and I love the cooling weather. But every fall, I’m also reminded of the worst things that have ever happened to me. Fall marks the “anniversary” of the worst experiences of my life. Every year, my brain gets overwhelmed with memories and flashbacks.

Fall 2009: I’m 17 years old and in my first semester of university. I’m naive and just want to do well and make friends. A guy in my calculus class asks if I want to hang out and I agree. He leads me across campus to the basement of the physics building where, despite my struggling, he assaults me. When I realize that I’m not going to get away and he’s not going to stop, I just switch off – mind floating out of my body – and let it happen. I never saw him again; apparently he wasn’t even in that class.

Fall 2011: I’m 19 years old now and OSAP doesn’t want to give me enough money beyond tuition to survive. I’m desperate and still incredibly naive, and I trust someone I never should have trusted. They manipulated me, and soon after I was a victim of human trafficking for 4 months of my life. At the time, though, I didn’t know I was a victim. I thought it was my fault. They convinced me that since they gave me enough money to get by and keep myself fed (to some degree, given the severity of my eating disorder at the time), that I was complicit in it all. I lied to my friends and tried to make it seem like it was all my idea, like I was okay. That entire fall was painful. Every week, I’d be driven or paid to take a greyhound out of town to an inconspicuous condo in downtown London. Men would take turns raping me. Some forced me to tell them that I liked it to ease their own conscience. Others gave me chemical burns and internal hemorrhaging and had no delusions. I’m not sure which one is worse. I’d get back to town every week, go through another week of classes, repeat. During this time, I tried everything I could to regain my control. I dated men I didn’t like for validation. I just wanted to get my control back. I wanted to use my body the way I wanted to. I skipped my own family Thanksgiving because I was told that I didn’t have a choice. I spent the whole time being raped by men who would shortly go back home to their families for Thanksgiving dinner.

Fall 2011 (again): A man traps me in the back of the bus, when I’m already on my way home from being raped all weekend, and starts stroking my leg. He follows me across 2 separate buses and, eventually, I end up jumping off the bus with no warning or plan and walking well over an hour home, barefoot, ending up with cuts on my frozen wet feet and autumn leaves stuck all over me.

Fall 2015: I used to have a close friend. Let’s call him Barry. His birthday was in fall. On November 17th of 2015, I agreed to spend time with him for his birthday. We drank, we went out to the bar, and we drank some more. Eventually, super drunk, we made our way back to his room in student housing. We watched Rick and Morty and I planned to sleep over instead of trying to get home in the middle of the night. Perfectly normal – we’d been friends for years. Until, that is, I woke up in the night with him on top of me and inside of me. My face shoved into a pillow, he couldn’t tell I’d woken up. He finished with me, cleaned me up, and wrote a note. [Very well-calculated for a guy who later claimed to be “blackout drunk and could not remember anything”.] I spent the entire night huddled in a corner in my coat, clutching that note he’d written, before buses started running in the morning and I was able to run out of there without being noticed.

Fall 2016: It had been a year since Barry had violated my trust, our friendship, and my entire being. I’d given a statement at the hospital the year prior, but now felt ready to speak to the police about what had happened – to try to get even the smallest semblance of justice. That was a terrible idea. The detective was dismissive, cruel, and completely re-traumatized me. I was stuck in that interview room with him for 3 hours – the second half of which I spent sobbing as he constantly accused me of lying and tried to get me to admit I was. Double trauma, a year apart, all because of the same damn thing. [The only positive note I can add here is that he is now, as of writing this, “retired” from his position with the police force SVU and can’t continue to do this to anyone else. To this day it takes every fibre of my being to not contact him and tell him how much he fucking ruined my sense of self and how much he traumatized me, and how I hope he suffers.]

Fall is a complicated season for me. I want to love it. I love the weather; I love the way that nature looks with the changing colours. I love fall foods and I love Halloween. I love cozy blankets and warm flavoured drinks. But ultimately, every fall, I end up sitting exactly where I am right now. Thinking back on everything that has been taken from me in this stupid time of year. I can’t get it out of my head, and at this point I feel like my friends and loved ones have to be tired of hearing me talk about how traumatizing my past has been. It’s been 10 years since the first fall trauma, 3 years since the last. I should be over it by now, right? I shouldn’t need to keep thinking about it, writing about it, talking about it. But I’m not over it, though, not really.

My life is great now and I love the people in it. I have learned to love myself and have gotten through so much mental anguish and illness. I am better than I’ve ever been. However, deep down, these cracks are still here and I don’t know what to do with them.

Russian Roulette of Sorts

I grab my things tightly and back away when you approach.

I’m rude when I don’t offer you the seat next to me.

I shrink into my bus seat and avoid all contact.

I don’t leave the house alone before the sun is up or after it’s down.

I second-guess my outfits when leaving the house.

I hold my keys in front of me when I’m out, like I’m fucking Wolverine.

I check behind me so often, my head is spinning like an owl.

I have to simultaneously try to keep my head down to not make eye contact and try to keep my eyes on what you’re doing.

I stop breathing when you smile at me, weighing my escape options from my current position.

I question when you’re friendly. I wonder what your motives are. Could it be that you’re just a nice person?

I cling to others like an animal in a herd, so that I’m safe from you.

Well, more safe. I’m never really safe.

I hate myself when I start to trust you, because I should know better by now.

Every interaction with you is another game of Russian Roulette that I don’t want to play.
I remind myself to never let my guard down because when I trust you, that’s when you’ll attack.
It’s like you’re always ready; my trust is weakness to you, and you come for it like a shark to blood in the water.

So I have to try to do all of these things…
Because if I don’t do these things,

You’ll trap me in the back of a bus and stroke my legs.
You’ll trap me in the basement of the physics building where you know no one will see or hear me struggle.
You’ll tell me I shouldn’t show my legs, my shoulders, my chest if I don’t expect people to want to touch them.
You’ll get angry when I can’t take a compliment.
You’ll follow me home.
You’ll follow me across 2 buses, causing me to jump off quickly and walk 2 hours home (barefoot getting cuts on my feet after destroying my shoes), because that was preferable to letting you know where I live.
You’ll follow me across 10 blocks to my work while touching me, saying no one needs to know.
You’ll take advantage of any trust I give you, get me alone, and attack me.
You’ll traffic me under the threat of the destruction of my education and career.
You’ll arrange for countless others to assault me too.
You’ll use the drunken chaos occurring to make it seem okay that you’re doing disgusting things while I’m nearly unconscious.
You’ll get me blackout drunk, and only alcohol poisoning I then get keeps me safe from what you’d have done to me.
You’ll spend years gaining my trust so that I’ll let my guard down and you can attack me while I sleep.
You’ll call me a liar when I try to report any of this to you. You’ll tell me I’m being irrational and emotional, and that it doesn’t really matter. That it wasn’t really that bad.

Or maybe you’ll do something else.
If I let my guard down,
Maybe you’ll manage to surpass everything else here, and earn your own line.

I’ll keep telling myself that I can keep my guard up. That I can keep me safe. That every day isn’t just another fucking chance to play Russian Roulette with you.

Me Too

I’m writing this in the dead of the night, trying to be quiet, making sure to not wake my fiance. I can’t sleep because it’s been two years to the day since one of my closest friends decided to rape me – because hey, he was drunk and he just really wanted me.

I’ve decided to write, again, about life and its bullshit. Maybe I just think that people actually care to read things like this, and it’s not just being thrown out into the void. I’m probably wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway. If you don’t care, here’s your cue to leave.

It’s been difficult to stay afloat lately, with the #MeToo movement and the exposure of more and more sexual predators every day. I am so glad that it is happening, and I hope that society can learn from a time like this… but it’s just so hard to handle. Everywhere I turn, there are reminders. Reminders of what exactly?

*** Strongest possible content warning: graphic descriptions of sexual harassment and assault ***

Talking about all the ‘hardships’ I’ve been through feels selfish, there are clearly people that have endured much worse than I. But…

#MeToo

The first time I was assaulted I was 17 years old. I’d naively trusted a stupid boy from school enough to go to his house. We were hanging out in the back yard, and he decided that he wanted to touch me, despite my insistence that I didn’t want to. No one was there to hear me, so he shoved his hand in my pants and whipped his penis out. I told myself that it was my fault for being there, for not fighting back harder, and for letting him do it.

#MeToo

Flash forward to first year. A guy from calculus wants to hang out after class, and I naively assume that he genuinely likes me, so I say why not. I asked him where he wanted to hang out, and he said he knew a place. He took me to the basement of the physics building, under a stairway that no one ever went by, with a couch underneath (for whatever reason, I still don’t know). My mind told me to run, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I stayed. I told him I wasn’t really interested when he started kissing me, but he continued, and before I had the time to react, he was shoving my face down onto his penis. I struggled but I couldn’t get away, so I let him finish and I ran back to rez.

#MeToo

Going into third year, I was worried about money. OSAP had screwed me, and I didn’t have any money to eat or live. So I reached out to faculty on campus, looking for anyone who needed help. I did find someone, willing to pay me under the table to help with “papers and things”. I was desperate, and needed to eat, so I believed him. I even stupidly went to drop papers off to his home when he asked me to. I was stupid. It was my fault. I could never have imagined what he had in store for me.

He asked me to come inside, and when I did step inside, he locked the door behind me and that was the beginning of the end. He raped me, and then he paid me for the papers. I didn’t know what to think. I’d gone there of my own free will and I’d taken his money, so I decided that it was on me. He started calling me. Intimidating me. Threatening me. He said that he’d ruin my university education. He told me he’d tell the police I’d accepted money for prostitution. I changed my number, but still, he found me again.

He demanded that I continue to work for him, and so.. with no other options (I thought), I did. I would do exactly as he said, and each week he’d have me driven to a high-rise condo in London, where men would take turns raping me while the man’s wife “kept me presentable” and attractive. I suffered chemical burns. I suffered haemorrhaging. I was overcome with guilt, knowing that I shouldn’t be letting this happen. I made up lies when friends asked what was going on. I couldn’t jeopardize my future, right? University is everything. He’d pay me enough to feed myself for the week, and in taking the money, I knew I had no right to do anything about what was happening. I was complicit. Clearly it was my choice. Eventually I mustered the courage to get out of there, asked a friend to go with me to confront them, and I was given hush money and told to shut up and never speak about what happened. Not that I felt I could. Because in my mind, I was disgusting. I had let this happen.

#MeToo

Riding a city bus, a man cornered me in a seat, stroking my leg and telling me how pretty I was. I laughed nervously, pulled away, and thanked him for the compliment. I got off the bus at the terminal, and he followed me. I got on another bus, and he followed me. I jumped off that second bus with no warning, no where close to home, and I managed to be rid of him. I had to walk an hour home, barefoot – because my heels had cut into my feet, all because I’d been too afraid to yell out for a bus driver at the risk of seeming impolite, of offending him or making him angry, or to get off anywhere near my home and be followed there, too.

#MeToo

I got drunk watching a movie with an acquaintance from my psychology class. I was in and out of being coherent. He fucked me anyway. I barely remember most of it, it’s black and it’s fuzzy. But hey, I didn’t have the capacity to fight, right?

#MeToo

I spent the evening with one of my closest friends out for drinks for his birthday. He offered his couch, and I passed out at his house, watching TV. I woke up with him inside me. I froze, and he didn’t know that I’d woken up. He finished, and wrote me a note saying that I’d fallen asleep and to come find him when I woke up. I huddled in the corner of the room, too poor to cab home, and with it being too far of a walk. I didn’t want to inconvenience anyone in the middle of the night, so I stayed huddled, fully dressed in my coat, until the morning buses started running, and I ran for my life while he was still asleep,

#MeToo

It was 6:30 in the morning in downtown Kitchener when I was walking from the terminal to work. A man started following me, complimenting me, trying to hinder my passage, asking if I wanted to spend time with him. I told him thank you, but no, I needed to get to work. He continued to follow me, despite my insistence. He grabbed my ass, talking about how great it was. I ducked into Coffee Culture and stayed there, while he stood outside, speaking with another guy, clearly waiting for me. Eventually he left, and I ran the rest of the way to work and called the police.

#MeToo

I decided to walk the 10 minutes from my house to the grocery store and grab some things. Simple walk, one long block away. A walk I’ve done dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. An older man started walking next to me on the sidewalk, asking what was good to eat around here, that he’s visiting from Italy. I tell him, and start to walk faster. He keeps up with me, telling me how attractive I am, and insisting that we get coffee. I tell him that I’m busy, and engaged, but he doesn’t really seem phased. He followed me into the grocery store, even, and grabbed me by the arm as he asked an employee for a pen to write down my number. He pulled out his phone, and told me he’d need to test the number to make sure he got it right. Finally, when he was looking away, I dashed to the back of the store, feeling ridiculous but afraid, hiding between canned vegetable displays.

These are the instances I can remember right now. They aren’t all of them.

Have you noticed the trend here? Of me being too afraid of men to be impolite, or rude. To say no. To fight. To try to just “wait it out” or “deal with it” until it’s over. And then blaming myself, because well, I could have stopped it. Couldn’t I have?

I’m afraid of men in general more than ever before. It’s been slowly building up over the years, but now I can’t be on the same side of a street, daytime or no, as a man if there’s no one else around. Every time a strange man looks at me or tries to talk to me, I get ready to run. Who can you trust? If you’ve seen the news, it seems like very few people.

#MeToo

I’m not special. This happens to millions of women every day. But that’s a problem, don’t you think?

If you’ve made it to this point… well, thank you. I appreciate your time.

 

 

The System Failed Me

The following is an account of my rape, PTSD, and the abject failure of the police. Content warnings in place for graphic content.

.

The system failed me, just like it fails other women (and men) every day. In North America, 1 in 4 women will be sexually assaulted in one form another another in their lifetime. Of those women, somewhere between 6% and 34% will approach the police about the matter (depending on which studies and age brackets are considered). And finally, less than 1% of all incidents of sexual assault result in the perpetrator being arrested or held accountable in any way. Compared to other crimes, the rate of incarceration for sexual offenders is obscenely low.

. 

However, this personal essay/think-piece, whatever you want to call it, is not about statistics; most people know how bad it is and don’t need to have the stats repeated for them. This is about the fact that, for survivors of sexual assault, all of those statistics are so much more than numbers. I am a victim of rape and sexual assault and I am not a statistic; this is my real life and my real pain. No number can describe the incredible difficulty of dealing with the fear, anxiety, and health issues related to the trauma I have experienced.

.

I’d like to add that, although I’ve been raped on multiple occasions, there’s one instance that I’d like to focus on with this piece. To focus on more would entail telling my entire story, which would probably take far more pages than most of you would be willing to read.

.

PART A: The Event

.

November 18th 2015. It feels so long ago, now that we’ve started another new year. It’s drifting slowly into the past, but the pain associated with what happened never seems to drift or fade away with time. So that’s where I’ll begin.

.

(Actually my rapist.)

. 

On November 17th 2015, one of my friends, let’s call him Barry*, wanted to hang out for his birthday. I’d been friends with Barry for years, and we were quite close. He’d dated a friend of mine briefly, we’d travelled together, and was dating another friend of mine (Catherine*) at the time. She was out of town on co-op and so, unfortunately, she was unable to join him for his birthday. Barry didn’t invite anyone else to hang out for his birthday, but at the time, I didn’t really give that a second thought. Barry had my trust, and he knew it.

. 

* Names changed for my own safety.

. 

I joined Barry at his house, where he was living with some of his frat-brothers. I was low on money, so I’d brought rum and coke mixed in a travel mug to drink before we went out. However, Barry insisted that, since he’d had so many shitty birthdays in the past, he just wanted to make this one a great one. He shared his rum with me, and then we made our way uptown. We went to Chainsaw, and since it was a Tuesday, they had a deal on their cheap, crappy, eponymous beer. Barry bought a few pitchers of the beer, until we’d both had more than enough. He even bought me a poutine when I told him I felt that I needed some carbs to counteract the effects of the beer I’d just drank. Barry did these things because he was a good friend… or so I thought.

. 

We continued drinking around town and eventually, some time between 1 and 2am on November 18th 2015, we made our way back to Barry’s house in a cab. I couldn’t afford my own, and we’d agreed that I could crash at his place. When we returned, Barry began drinking more beer, Block 3 to be precise, straight out of a massive growler. I’d had enough already, but I enjoyed Block 3 beers, and after the swill we’d been drinking all night, I took a few sips to wash down the taste. His room was set up just like any other typical student-aged guy’s room. He had a large monitor across from his bed, which we used as a seat as we watched Rick and Morty. We laughed, chatted, and watched the show to wind down from the loud night out.

. 

Some time later, I woke up. Because it had been so late, because I’d had a fair amount to drink, because it’d been so comfy there on the bed watching the show, I’d fallen asleep without moving to the couch. No big deal, right? Just move over there now. However, as I regained consciousness, I knew that something was wrong. It was darker; the show was no longer playing. I was on my stomach, face pressed down into a pillow. My pants were pulled down to my mid-thigh, and Barry was on top of me.

. 

***** Content warning: the following paragraph describes graphic detail of rape *****

. 

I froze. I didn’t let him know that I’d woken up. I kept my face down into the pillow, and just lay there, trying to tense up my body as best as I could. I wouldn’t make it easy, I thought. His hands were on me, inside me. His mouth was on me, his tongue inside me. I felt like I was going to be sick. I shut my eyes harder. I’m sure he’ll stop soon, I thought. But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled down his pants and tried to force himself inside me. Aha, I thought, that’ll stop him. No way he won’t notice I’m on my period! But I was wrong, really wrong. He continued anyway, pushing harder, until eventually he managed to get himself inside me. He continued for what felt like an eternity, and eventually he stopped.

. 

***** End of content warning *****

. 

Now, Barry was a smart guy, and so he grabbed some Kleenex, cleaned me up, and pulled my pants back on as far as he could get them. My heart was racing; I just wanted to get out of there, but I was terrified. I listened carefully, what was Barry doing? Barry grabbed a sheet of paper from his printer, and began writing a note. “You passed out on my bed,” he wrote, “I’m asleep on the couch. Find me there.” He dropped the note on the bed next to me and left the room. I bolted upright, grabbed the note and my phone, and I used the light of my flashlight app to read the note, praying I wouldn’t be noticed. I shoved the note in my purse for evidence, but unfortunately did not think to grab the tissues he’d used.

. 

At this point, I began to hyperventilate. I was still broke, and had no means to cab home. It was a 58 minute walk, I was drunk, and it was freezing. I texted Chris (my then-boyfriend-now-fiance). I considered calling him, or walking to his building, which would only be a 10-15 minute walk from where I was. In the end, I decided that I didn’t want to bother him with it, and didn’t call. I slipped my sweater, socks, and winter coat on, and curled up in a ball in the corner of the room. I’d wait until buses started running in the morning, I decided.

. 

Once the sun was up, I slipped on my boots and quickly ran out of the house. I ran to the bus-stop, and hopped on the route 12 home. By the time I got home, Chris had responded to my texts, and I finally had to really admit what had happened. Unfortunately for me, my first instinct was to shower. I showered for an hour, letting the water scald my skin. I cried, screamed, and could not bear to look at my own naked body. It didn’t belong to me anymore. I stopped crying for a while, and covered myself in layer upon layer of baggy clothing, and curled up into my bed. But then, my silly fat cat fell off of my headboard onto my face and the crying started again; the facade of calm that I’d been maintaining was shattered by the smallest amount of pain.

. 

The reasonable thing to do would probably have been to go to the hospital or police at that very moment, but I was in shock and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I had a scheduled group therapy session that day at Grand River Hospital, and since the sessions had been doing me some amount of good, I decided that no amount of crap was going to keep me from going. So after hours of crying and staring at my ceiling, that afternoon I made my way to the hospital. My session began, and when asked how my week had been, I instantly broke down. They recommended that I pursue help at St Mary’s Hospital, since they had a specialized sexual assault team.

. 

That evening, after spending some time with my dear friend Darcy, Chris took me to the hospital to speak to someone. The sexual assault team was (seemingly) great. They were really kind and understanding, and they even gave me a care package before I left. Unfortunately, as I discovered after the fact, that night was the first failure of the system in a long series of (increasingly awful) failures.

. 

PART B: The Aftermath

. 

For starters, I did not trust the system. I’d heard so many stories of people who were failed/torn apart by the police, the courts, and everyone involved in their situation. So with that in mind, when I was in shock, sitting in the assault centre – I was not focused on making sure that they did their jobs correctly, or that evidence was correctly collected. I didn’t believe I had any shot at justice, and was still fully traumatized from the events of the night before.

. 

They asked me if I wanted to have a rape kit done. I explained to them that I had showered, and asked if there was any point to doing one. They said no, and so the conversation moved on, and no kit was ever done. A year later, I found out that even if I’d showered, they still could have found plenty of microscopic DNA evidence on both myself and my clothes. I don’t believe that they maliciously left this information out… but I do believe that they either had a serious lapse in judgement, or don’t know the information they ought to know in their position.

 .

They asked me if I wanted the police involved. I specified that I wasn’t ready to press any charges against Barry at the moment, but did want the incident fully reported to the police. And so, I filled out a report form, in which I detailed the events of the night, that they then kept in their files. They didn’t send it to the police, the police were not even aware of it until I called them a year later. The police then told me that it didn’t count as a statement, as it was just a written accord and I hadn’t been spoken to by any police officers.

 .

Let me back up for a moment, and explain the events that led me to approaching the police a year after the event. Over the span of the year, I’d thought I’d be able to move on from the trauma. I’d been through trauma in the past, and was clearly still doing okay, so I thought that I could just move on with my life. Then, Donald Trump was elected. I’d thought it was impossible that a man who so clearly boasted about sexual assault and preached racism would be able to be elected. But I was wrong. And so I was reminded how little the world cares about sexual assault, and how few people actually get justice for what was done to them. The results of the election caused me to have a relapse of my PTSD, which I’d struggled with for years since I’d first been assaulted.

. 

I decided that Barry needed to be held accountable for what he’d done to me. I approached the police, and was put in contact with a Detective. He told me that he’d pull my report from the hospital, and that I’d have to come in to make a statement. I knew that I was opening myself up to a world of hurt, but it was worth it if I could receive justice. (I had, at this point, somehow convinced myself that a system as messed up as ours could actually deliver justice to my rapist.)

 .

I bussed an hour and twenty minutes out the Cambridge Police Headquarters, to make it easier on the detective, so he wouldn’t need to transfer his files from another station. I gave them the note, and all of my chat history with the people that’d been involved. That day at the station was the worst experience I’d had since the day that Barry raped me. After leaving, I compiled a list of notable things that had happened/were said to me, and so instead of explaining the events of the interview, I will share that here.

• After being asked to describe my skin colour for the information gathering portion of the interview, the detective complained about how “PC” our culture is regarding race and other matters.
• The detective explained that unwanted ass-smacking in high-schools is not actually sexual assault, and seemed surprised when I appeared offended.
• When I described Barry as a “rapist”, the detective scoffed. He asked me if I considered the sexual assault I experienced to be on par with a “Paul Bernardo rape and abduction situation”, and told me that it was a “different thing.” He explained to me that what happened to me was a “betrayal” but not the same thing.
• The detective asked why I would wait a year to report, and explained on multiple occasions that the lack of evidence would work against me. Tried to convince me to drop it.
• The detective asked me whether or not I thought Barry had maybe “changed” by now. I told him, “Rapists don’t change, a rapist will always be a rapist.” To that, he responded and asked me if in the past I’d done anything I am not proud of now, and that lots of people make bad choices.
• The detective tried, on multiple occasions, to make me admit that I’d been lying about the rape kit, and tried to make me say that I’d actually refused one. When I explained that I was never told that evidence could still be collected after a shower, he told me that the workers at the assault centre do this for a living and I must be lying.
• The detective asked me about my clothes and other physical evidence, and condescendingly asked why the assault centre had never asked for it. Pushed me to admit that I was lying or had refused to give it to them. Once I was sick of being accused of lying and snapped, the detective then asked “Oh, are you angry now?”
• The detective stated that he was “not a social worker” and was not “there to make me feel better, just to tell me the truth” when I couldn’t stop crying during his constant drilling. Continued to push, drill, and accuse me of lying despite my crying for an hour and a half straight.
• Asked me why I didn’t fight or say anything when I woke up and Barry was on top of me. When I said that I’d been too afraid, he laughed and said “that can’t be true, since you just described being such good friends with Barry, and stated that he never made any threats against you in the past”. When I insisted that, yes, I’d been afraid, he said “I don’t believe it.” Detective continued pushing me to tell him why I “really didn’t” stop him when I woke up.
• The detective kept asking me what I wanted out of being there, and when I told him that “I couldn’t handle it anymore”, he replied with “Handle what, exactly?” I then had to explain how my rapist gets to live without any consequences, and he did not take that seriously.
• The detective explained that he’d been doing this job his entire life, and that he was the most senior detective in his squad. He said that he knew when people were lying, and that his job had a lot on the line, not like “handing out tickets.” He stated that he would not stake his reputation on a case like mine if there was no further evidence.
• When I was visibly upset during the last 1.5 hours of the 3.5 hour interview, he asked what I’d expected to happen when I went in there today. When I responded that I’d expected “pretty much this”, he told me that I “clearly have no respect for the police or the system”, and seemed angry and offended.
• The detective told me that my friend Catherine, Barry’s girlfriend, definitely didn’t believe that he’d raped me. He said that she likely just believes that Barry cheated on her with me, otherwise there’s no way that a woman could stay with a rapist. He repeated this to me, regardless of what I said about her reactions/the situation.
• The detective stated that if, by some chance, the case went to court, that no one would believe me, since I’d drank alcohol and gone back to sleep at a man’s house, which is what people do when they hook up. Pushed me to drop it.
• The detective asked me approximately a half dozen times why my boyfriend was okay with my staying over at a male friend’s house (especially considering that we’d had some history together far into the past). Women are property, apparently?
• The detective kept reminding me that in the past I’d initiated encounters with Barry while drunk, so clearly I could not have thought that he was a bad guy.

I left the station crying and unable to breathe, and Chris had to take an emergency leave from work for an hour to come pick me up at the station in Cambridge, because I couldn’t handle getting home on my own. I felt betrayed and disrespected, and I definitely did not feel that I was taken seriously or believed. And so, I did what I could and I moved on with my life while the police performed their “investigation”. I saved my list, and I thought about it every day until they finally contacted me a month and a half later, just this past week in January 2017.

. 

The Detective first contacted me regarding their investigation on Thursday January 5th. They’d been investigating, and had “stumbled” onto information about my past rape claims (that I’d never reported to the police). I was hurt beyond belief. The police were investigating me rather than putting that same energy into my rapist and my case. They asked me if I had a history of making rape claims, and why I’d never contacted the police in those cases. The information they’d attained had enough of the truth to be credible, but it was littered with lies. So, despite not wanting to speak about the traumas of my past, I was forced to defend myself, to try and give them the correct side of the story, which is what they’d hoped for. I asked them why it was relevant to my current case and they wouldn’t give a straight answer, other than stating that “they have to follow up on all of their leads and information.” Despite being given the contact information of the people involved in the aftermath of my situation, not once did the detectives contact Chris. Chris, who was the first person I told, who took me to the hospital, who had eye witness experience as to what it was like when this happened to me. They did not call him once. But yeah, they were completing a super thorough investigation.

. 

The very next day, the detective called me back, stating that he would not pursue my case any further. They’d spoken with Barry, and his girlfriend Catherine and his parents had come down to the station with him. I suppose I needed to know how supported my rapist was. They noted how he came in even though he didn’t have to, and explained that his description of the night was very similar to mine up until the event. Apparently, as Catherine had said to me before, Barry doesn’t remember the night of the incident after getting home. And so, there’s “no evidence” and no case against him, so they did not see a point in continuing. The detective even told me that he believed that *I* “didn’t really want to case to go forward anyway”, and that had been the feeling he got from me from the very beginning. He said that he thought I just wanted someone to listen to me, some attention, and not real legal action or consequences. I was in shock and wasn’t able to really fight back, not that there’s anything I could have done about it when their minds had been made up from the beginning.

. 

That brings me to now. It’s been 5 days, and all the thinking and stressing in the world has not helped me to make any more sense of what happened. It has only caused my PTSD to flare up and provided me with a plethora of nightmare fuel. Because it doesn’t make sense. This should not be how the police and our system for sexual assault work.

. 

I believe that the system has grossly failed me, and though I’m not sure what my next steps will be, I feel that it may need to involve the court of public opinion. Just need to get all of my legal ducks in a row first.

. 

What I do know for sure is that the actions of a monster, and the disgusting, hurtful opinions of a broken system will not change who I am. I am survivor, and I get stronger every day.

(Not) Just Another Post About Sexual Assault

I’ve never tried to write about my sexual assault. There are so many accounts out there already, from women braver than I; women who fought to be heard despite living in a world that tries to silence them.
I’ve asked myself, “Why does the world need to hear the story of yet another rape victim?”
I’ve told myself, “People in your life don’t need to know this sort of thing, they’ve heard enough. You’ll hurt them.”
However, it has occurred to me: my story is necessary because it’s yet another story, like the millions that came before, about a rapist who will never pay for what he did. Another story about a rapist that probably does not believe he’s really a rapist. Another story about a girl who couldn’t turn to the systems designed to protect people for fear that she wouldn’t be believed, or that the system would turn against her. No, this story may not be unique. But that is exactly the problem.

The first time I was raped, it was someone I went to high school with, and I was seventeen. The second time, I was eighteen, and it was a university classmate. I was in denial and refused to call it rape, insisting that I’d just been wrong to put myself in situations alone with these boys and that they must have thought I wanted it somehow. And then I was raped again and again when I was nineteen and twenty, by figures of authority I’d thought I could trust. It was time for me to admit it was rape.

I spent a large amount of my adult life trying to come to terms with everything that’d happened to me (or as I saw, that I’d let happen to me). I spent most of my life blaming myself for always freezing, for never being physically or mentally strong enough to get away. For being a victim and allowing more people to victimize me.
By the time I was twenty-three, I’d recovered from the PTSD I had developed, and I’d started to move on from the blame. But then it happened again. Worse than before, because this time it was a friend that I loved; a friend that’d been there for me for years; a friend that knew about my previous assaults.
Because of these things, this has been the hardest by far to move on from. Over the past nine months, I’ve had long periods of time where I was fairly certain that I’d ‘gotten over it’. I’ve had periods where I’ve wished harm on myself and on my rapist. I’ve had periods where I denied what had happened and considered trying to re-establish our friendship.
So because of all of this, that is the story that I’m going to tell you today.

Last November, I spent the night with a close friend for his birthday. Whether he didn’t have anyone else to invite or if he just wanted to spend it with me, I don’t know, but the two of us hit the town. We drank, and we went to a karaoke bar, and we drank some more. This was not the first time we’d done this; this was a kinda regular thing for us. I was, by all accounts, drunk. And so was he. Not blackout drunk, but drunk enough that I couldn’t manage an hour long walk home. I couldn’t afford a cab home, or much of anything that month, and he’d insisted that the night had been out of his pocket so that he’d have a fun birthday that year.

So, I decided to stay at his place since there was plenty of space.I dozed off in his bed while watching Rick and Morty, assuming (based on all past experience) that he’d wake me to move to the couch, or move there himself. However, what I was jolted awake by was much less pleasant. I’ll not go into detail, but the long and short of it is that I froze, afraid to let him know he’d woken me for fear of what worse things he would do. And so he raped me, slid my clothes back up, and left a note on the bed next to me and snuck out to the couch.

The moment he was gone I began to sob. I couldn’t breathe. I was afraid to move in case he realized that I knew what he’d done. I had no way home since I couldn’t afford a cab and was still unable to walk a full hour. And so I stayed there, curled up, waiting for the morning busses to begin.
In the morning, I snuck out of the house and went home as quickly as possible. I immediately jumped into the shower, where I stayed for 45 mins, sobbing, retching, and trying not to think of how filthy and violated I felt. I curled up in the baggiest clothes I owned, not wanting to see my body. Not wanting to acknowledge its existence. My body was no longer my own; he’d taken it.

Later that day, I was taken to the hospital to report the rape, get shots, and file a police report. I was asked if I wanted to press charges. I thought about the justice system, and I thought about what had happened. I counted the factors: I had been drunk, he’d paid for our drinks, I had been close friends and had a history with my rapist, and I’d willingly slept at his house. I knew I didn’t have a chance, and so I filed the report anonymously, such that it would only be brought up should he ever be involved with the police in the future.
Would I have wanted to press charges? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But do I think that they’d decide in my favour? No. The system is not in my favour nor any other victim’s. I know this from the million stories that came before mine. So, I decided not to open myself up to the kind of pain that would come from rehashing the details in court, and having both my testimony and my character torn to shreds by a defense attorney.

I moved on in the only way I could. I confronted my rapist via online message, advising him that I knew what he did and that I’d filed a police report, and then blocking and deleting him from every piece of social media that I could.
After that, I spent days agonizing over how to tell his girlfriend, a mutual friend, who I felt had a right to know. With help from friends, I was able to tell her. She took it surprisingly well, better than I expected (and in hindsight, perhaps too well). She insisted that he must have been too drunk, that he said he didn’t remember, and that he wasn’t coherent. She ignored the fact that he was coherent enough to clean me up and leave me a note. She wasn’t sure what to do; she loved him and she cared about me, and she had to make a decision.

In the end, she decided to stay with him. And she also decided to remain friends with me. In all fairness, I could have severed the friendship myself, but I am not one to burn bridges, and I did care for her. I thought I’d be able to handle it. I thought, “I’ll just never really think about it.”
However, that became increasingly hard to do, because, over the span of a few months, she began talking about him as if nothing had really happened. She’d tell me the mundane bits of life and what he was up to.* And at first, I thought that I could be okay with that. But now, I’m not so sure. I don’t like remembering that he hasn’t paid for what he did. I don’t like the reminder that he’s still just happily living his life, being a success, when what he did to me has deeply damaged me; has severely impacted my mental health, and made it so that I can’t trust a large majority of men that I would not previously have categorized as untrustworthy.
*I’d like to note that I absolutely adore her and value her friendship, and don’t want to sound in any way that I want that to end.

And so that’s why, on a not-so-special day like today, I finally decided to write about this. On a day where I was reminded about the number of rapists out there who will not pay for what they did, I decided to add my story to the growing archive of stories just like mine. Today I will acknowledge that I will likely never get any closure with this rapist. That this rapist will likely never acknowledge that he is, in fact, a rapist. That he will move on with his life and have his relationships unhindered by what he’s done and is capable of.
So I guess I have to move on too. Eventually, I’m sure that’ll happen. Though I’m sure for me, the pain will never really go away, not entirely.
But I’m not going to let it ruin my life. He will not have that power over me.
My life is mine, and he can’t touch me anymore.