Victim Impact Statement

I was raped directly under the flag of the country I was born to, in it’s capital. When I returned home, I told my therapist what happened. She was the best therapist I have ever had, and she began sobbing. I was in utter shock. She said, “You have worked so hard to become this empowered version of yourself. You have gone low, but not deep and dark again, and I honestly don’t understand why this keeps happening to you.”

She asked me, “what was the writing on the wall?” It took me a long time to understand that she saw something that had triggered my fight-or-flight response from abuse situations in childhood, which was to freeze. In this case, however, there was no writing on the wall. There was only the American flag that the assailant hung above his bed and the blanket that had the words of the constitution on it.

While the assaults were happening, I experienced a disconnect between my mind and body. It felt like I was an object, incapable of moving or expressing feelings and emotion. The most painful times occurred while I was asleep. I remember being jolted awake to stabbing pain radiating up my spine and neck, and my head jerking back so that when I opened my eyes, I saw the flag.

He killed who I was that night, and the pieces of her stayed in that bedroom. I don’t think I will ever get them back. I will never be able to forget going to the bathroom, looking down, and seeing blood for the first time. Every single day, for over 600 days, I was internally bleeding. They tried medication, but nothing would stop it. I ran out of clothes that I hadn’t bled through. Now, almost four years later, I still haven’t recovered. I have been in physical therapy once a week for over a year, and I still have a long road ahead of me. I take 21 pills a day to manage the pain, depression, and lack of sleep.

I went into depression, not just because of what he did, but because of all the times it happened before that I never had the time to grieve. What happened to me sent my body into severe and prolonged psychosomatic distress. My mind triggers grand mal seizures, which means that my body goes stiff, my eyes roll back, I lose control of my muscles and breathing, and I violently shake. The best I can describe it is a physical flashback. At one point I experienced up to 20 a day.

At first, I cut off every single friend and support that I had because I questioned everyone’s motive, and I blamed myself for not seeing the signs sooner. Then I stopped going outside or opening the windows. A sense of apathy washed over until I didn’t care whether I lived or died. I stopped dancing. I stopped making art.

The worst part was losing all my hair.  I remember being in the shower and clumps falling into my hands. I looked in the mirror and saw spots of my scalp. I shaved what was left and agonized over bald spots. I hated seeing myself.

There are no words for looking in the mirror and seeing a ghost where you used to be. He not only stripped my body, but my identity. It is taking so long to recover because everywhere I go, I am forced to see the same flag that haunts me. The flag of my own country. Of our country.

I became so ill I was forced to drop out of school and quit my job. When I couldn’t pay my rent, I was forced to go into a shelter. I lived on $9 a day in food stamps and whatever non-rancid or rotten food I could find at food banks. I couldn’t afford phone service, so I communicated by email. My car was repossessed when I fell behind on payments. My life became solely doctor’s appointments, eating, showering, sleeping, and the sexual assault investigation.

I had zero physical contact with anyone for close to a year. I couldn’t stand the thought of it. I couldn’t go to a public place without being paranoid someone was going to grab me and rape me. I stopped experiencing love. I wanted my life and my power back. He saw my power, and he went inside of me with pieces of his body, and he took it.

The Title IX office at his university did not remove him from the university or prevent him from earning a master’s degree. He walked across our country’s National Mall on the exact one-year anniversary of the assault. He was praised on a university blog and endorsed by professors to join a government agency's scholarship program. He was put in a position of power over children aged 12-17, and no one stopped him, not even I could. This is the song of my country: sanctioned violence and abuse.

He defined consent as me wearing his sweatshirt. Would you want a man working with your children who sees a sweatshirt as consent? I do not. I knew what an investigation would do to me, and I did it because they gave me no other option to stop him from hurting others. They found him guilty and let him go on. No one has taken any action besides me because that’s my job as his victim, right? To prove it.

Those who do not learn from their history are condemned to repeat it, as is the case with the perpetrator. I strongly believe there will be more, or there are more victims. Over the course of this investigation, he tried to maintain both “I will never take this action again” and “I just misunderstood where we were at the time.” If he is not responsible for rape, then what action is he referring to? There is no “just” and there is no “misunderstanding” on the topic of rape.

The perpetrator committed a systematic and dogmatic violation of my inherent human rights. My country no longer feels like home to me because of its close relation to these assaults. I have not allowed myself to heal to complete this investigation. I destroyed myself to be heard.

I believe that the perpetrator did this because someone did it to him. He once disclosed to me that when he was a child, he was sexually assaulted, and no one believed him because he defines his gender as male. He said he couldn’t stand the thought of doing what had been done to him, and that it was his worst fear. He became his worst fear. He is a rapist. My rapist.

I have not used his name because if I do, he could take legal action against me, and so could the university. He committed a crime, did no time, and I am still the one in danger. I view him now as a nameless, faceless cog in a machine that is inherently designed to oppress me.

He is deranged, disturbed, and deluded, and what he did, I will never forgive. I thank God every day that the perpetrator didn’t get me pregnant, because in the state I lived in I would have been forced to carry and birth his child, who would be approximately 3 years old today.

I will not stop telling this story until the outcome changes. Until women are believed and men are held accountable. I will never stop fighting and my survival means I won.

Lastly, this is my message to him: I have put my mind and body through hell harboring this experience so that the day would come I could finally give it back to you. This is not my secret anymore. It is yours. Face it.