More Praise for A FALSE REPORT
“A False Report is a gripping and often devastating tale. By bringing their characters alive, Miller and Armstrong do not judge so much as illuminate the deep sexism that continues to pervade our society’s treatment of rape. Better still, the women in this book are strong protagonists as much as victims.”
—ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER, president and CEO of New America, and author of Unfinished Business
“This is a grim, important, meticulously reported book that denounces breakdowns in the system of investigating crimes against women. The revelations are tragic, unthinkable, almost Kafkaesque. But the authors don’t stop at outrage. They do a public service by explaining practical reforms that can make a profound difference. And they tell their story with unrelenting clarity and compassion. A False Report has all the detail, drama, and humanity that make the finest nonfiction as compelling as a novel.”
—SEBASTIAN ROTELLA, author of Rip Crew
“Far too many women and girls who are sexually assaulted never report it—often out of fear they won’t be believed. A False Report reveals the true cost of doubting women’s accounts of rape. This fascinating, deeply troubling book has the power to spark a national conversation about how our criminal justice system fails victims, and how it can be reformed.”
—PEGGY ORENSTEIN, author of Girls and Sex
Copyright © 2015, 2018 by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
crownpublishing.com
CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is an expanded version of “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” by T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, which was originally published on ProPublica (propublica.org) and co-published with the Marshall Project on December 15, 2015.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, T. Christian, author. | Armstrong, Ken, 1962– author.
Title: A false report : a true story of rape in America / T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong.
Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Publishers, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037935 | ISBN 9781524759933
Subjects: LCSH: Rape—United States—Case studies. | Rape victims—United States—Case studies. | Police charges—United States—Case studies. | Rape—Investigation—United States—Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV6561 .M554 2018 | DDC 364.15/320979771—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037935
ISBN 9781524759933
Ebook ISBN 9781524759957
Cover design by Christopher Brand
v5.1
ep
To my father, Donald H. Miller, whose strength, devotion, and sense of duty have been my lifelong source of inspiration. I look forward to many more years of your light, Dad.
—T. CHRISTIAN MILLER
To my mom, Judy Armstrong, who’s been known to juggle three book clubs and still insists on hardcover. “I love to turn the pages,” she says, words dear to my heart.
—KEN ARMSTRONG
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map: Denver and Its Suburbs
Map: Seattle and Its Suburbs
Chapter 1: The Bridge
Chapter 2: Hunters
Chapter 3: Waves and Peaks
Chapter 4: A Violent Alchemy
Chapter 5: A Losing Battle
Chapter 6: White Man, Blue Eyes, Gray Sweater
Chapter 7: Sisters
Chapter 8: “Something About How She Said It”
Chapter 9: The Shadow Within
Chapter 10: Good Neighbors
Chapter 11: A Gross Misdemeanor
Chapter 12: Marks
Chapter 13: Looking into a Fish Tank
Chapter 14: A Check for $500
Chapter 15: 327½
Epilogue: Eighteen Wheels
A Note from the Authors
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
1
THE BRIDGE
Monday, August 18, 2008
* * *
Lynnwood, Washington
Marie left the interview room and walked down the stairs of the police station, accompanied by a detective and a sergeant. She was no longer crying. At the bottom, the police handed her off to the two people who were waiting for her there. Marie belonged to a support program for teenagers aging out of foster care. These two were program managers.
So, one said.
Were you raped?
It had been one week since Marie, an eighteen-year-old with hazel eyes, wavy hair, and braces, had reported being raped by a stranger with a knife who had broken into her apartment and blindfolded, bound, and gagged her. In that week Marie had told the story to police at least five times. She had told them: thin white man, short as five feet six. Blue jeans. Hoodie—gray, maybe white. Eyes—possibly blue. But her story wasn’t always the same in the telling. And the police had heard from people in Marie’s life who had doubts. And when the police had confronted Marie about those doubts, she had wavered, then buckled, saying she had made the story up—because her foster mom wasn’t answering her calls, because her boyfriend was now just a friend, because she wasn’t used to being alone.
Because she had wanted attention.
She’d sketched her history for the police detectives. She’d described growing up with something like twenty different foster parents. She’d told them she had been raped when she was seven years old. She’d told them that being on her own for the first time had made her scared. Her story of being raped by an intruder had “turned into a big thing that was never meant to happen,” she’d told the police.
Today she had tested whatever patience the police could still summon. She had returned to the station and doubled back, saying she had told the truth the first time, saying she really had been raped. But when pressed in that interview room she had folded once more—admitting, again, that her story was a lie.
No, Marie told the managers at the bottom of the stairs.
No. I was not raped.
The two managers, Jana and Wayne, worked for Project Ladder, a nonprofit program that helped foster kids make the transition to living on their own. Project Ladder taught teenagers—eighteen-year-olds, mostly—the mundane skills of adulthood, from how to shop for groceries to how to manage a credit card. The biggest boost the program provided was financial. Project Ladder subsidized each teen’s one-bedroom apartment, making it possible for the kids to get a foothold in the expensive rental market ringing Seattle. Wayne was Marie’s case manager. Jana was a program supervisor.
If that’s the case, the managers told Marie, if you weren’t raped, then there’s something you have to do.
Marie dreaded whatever was next. She had seen it on their faces when she’d answered the question. They weren’t thrown. They weren’t taken aback. They’d doubted her before, just like the others. It occurred to Marie that from now on, people would think she was mentally ill. She, too, wondered if she was broken, if there was something in her that needed to be fixed. Marie realized just how vulnerable she had become. She worried about losing what little she had left. A week ago, she’d had friends, her first job, her first place to call her own, freedom to come and go, a sense of life unfurling. But now that job and that sense of optimism were gone. The place and her freedom were in jeopardy. And friends she could turn to? She was down to one.
Her story had, indeed, turned into
a big thing. Last week the television news had been all over it. “A western Washington woman has confessed that she cried wolf,” one newscast said. In Seattle the local affiliates for ABC, NBC, and CBS had covered the story. The NBC affiliate, KING 5, zoomed in on Marie’s apartment complex—panning up the stairs, lingering on an open window—while Jean Enersen, Seattle’s most popular anchor, told viewers: “Police in Lynnwood now say a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by a stranger made up the story….Detectives do not know why she made the story up. She could face a charge of false reporting.”
Television reporters had pounded on her door, tried to get her to answer questions on camera about why she had lied. To get away she’d snuck out, a sweatshirt over her face.
Her story found its way into remote corners of the Internet. False Rape Society, a blog that focuses on wrongful accusations, posted twice about the Lynnwood case: “Another in a seemingly endless cavalcade of false rape claims. Once again, the accuser is young—a teenager….To underscore how serious this particular kind of lie is, sentencing for false rape claims needs to be tougher. Much tougher. Only then will the liars be deterred.” A Londoner who compiles an “international timeline of false rape allegations” going back to 1674 made the Lynnwood case his 1,188th entry, following a Georgia teenager who “had consensual sex with another student then pointed the finger at an imaginary man who was driving a green Chevrolet,” and a teen in England who “appears to have withdrawn her consent after texting him to tell him how much she enjoyed it!” “As will be seen from this database,” the compiler writes, “some women will cry rape at the drop of a hat, or more often after dropping their knickers then regretting it.”
In Washington and beyond, Marie’s story became an exhibit in a centuries-long argument about credibility and rape.
The news stories hadn’t named her. But the people around Marie knew. A friend from tenth grade called and said: How could you lie about something like that? It was the same question the TV reporters wanted to ask. It was the same question Marie got wherever she turned. She didn’t answer her friend. She just listened, then hung up—another friendship, gone. Marie had let another friend borrow her laptop computer—one of those old black IBMs—and now the friend refused to give it back. When Marie confronted her, she told Marie: If you can lie, I can steal. This same friend—or former friend—would call Marie and threaten her, telling her she should die. People held Marie up as the reason no one believed real victims of rape. People called her a bitch and a whore.
The Project Ladder managers told Marie what she had to do. And they told her that if she didn’t do it, she would be cast out of the program. She would lose her subsidized apartment. She would be without a home.
The managers took Marie back to her apartment complex and summoned the other teens in Project Ladder—Marie’s peers, kids her age with the same kinds of stories to tell about growing up as wards of the state. There were around ten of them. Most were girls. In the front office, near the pool, they gathered in a circle and sat down. Marie stood. She stood and told them—told everyone, including the upstairs neighbor who one week before had made the 911 call to report the rape—that it was all a lie, that they didn’t need to worry: There was no rapist out there to be on guard against, no rapist the police needed to be looking for.
She cried as she confessed—the sound magnified by the awkward silence surrounding her. If there was sympathy in the room, Marie sensed it from just one person, a girl sitting to her right. In everyone else’s eyes she saw a question—Why would you do that?—and a corresponding judgment: That’s messed up.
In the weeks and months to come, there would be more fallout from Marie’s retraction. But for Marie there would be no moment worse than this.
She had one friend left to turn to, and after the meeting, Marie made for Ashley’s home. Marie didn’t have a driver’s license—just a learner’s permit—so she walked. On the way there, she came to a bridge. The bridge crossed Interstate 5, the state’s busiest road, a north–south highway with a ceaseless current of Subarus and eighteen-wheelers.
Marie thought about how much she wanted to jump.
She took out her phone, called Ashley, and said: Please come get me before I do something stupid.
Then she threw her phone over the side.
2
HUNTERS
January 5, 2011
* * *
Golden, Colorado
A little after 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 5, 2011, Detective Stacy Galbraith approached a long row of anonymous apartment buildings that spilled down a low hill. Dirty, half-melted snow covered the ground in patches. Winter-bare trees stood gray against the orange and olive walls of the three-story complex. It was blustery, and biting cold. Galbraith was there to investigate a report of rape.
Uniforms swarmed a ground-floor apartment. Beat cops knocked on neighbors’ doors. Crime scene analysts snapped pictures. Paramedics pulled up in an ambulance. Galbraith stood out in the chaotic scene. She was a woman in a swirl mostly of men. Her face was narrow, her hair straight and blond, running past her shoulders. She had a physique like a long-distance runner, lean and coiled. Her eyes were blue.
She walked over to one of the cops. He motioned to a woman in a brown, full-length coat, standing outside the apartment in the thin winter sunlight. She clutched a bag of her belongings in one hand. Galbraith guessed that she was in her twenties, maybe five feet six. She was slight, with dark hair. She looked calm, unflustered.
The victim.
Galbraith walked up and introduced herself. Want to talk in my car? she asked. It would be warmer there. Safer there. The woman agreed. They slid into the front seat, and Galbraith blasted the heat.
The woman’s name was Amber. She was a graduate student at a local college. It was winter break, and her roommate had returned home for the vacation. She had remained at the apartment, luxuriating in the time to herself, staying up late and sleeping all day. Her boyfriend had driven from out of town to visit her. The previous night, though, she spent alone. She cooked herself dinner. She curled up in bed for a marathon of Desperate Housewives and The Big Bang Theory. It was so late by the time she drifted off that she could hear other people in the complex stirring for work.
She had just fallen asleep when something jolted her awake. In the morning half-light, she saw a shape looming above her. Her senses began to process what was happening. There was a man in her bedroom. A black mask covered his face. He wore a gray hoodie. He had on sweatpants. His shoes were black. In his hand, he gripped a gun. It was pointed straight at her.
“Don’t scream. Don’t call or I’ll shoot you,” he told her.
Adrenaline raced through her. Her eyes snapped to the gun. She would remember that it was shiny, silver, with black marks.
She pleaded: Don’t hurt me. Don’t hit me.
She offered him the cash she had in the apartment.
“Fuck you,” he told her.
The man terrified her. He was going to hurt her. He was willing to kill her. So she made up her mind: she would not fight. She chose to endure. She would do whatever he told her to do.
He shrugged a green-and-black backpack onto the floor. Inside was everything he needed. He stashed his equipment in clear plastic sandwich bags. They were labeled with neat block letters. GAG. CONDOMS. VIBE. WASTE.
He ordered her to take off her thermal pajamas. Amber watched as he pulled a pair of white, thigh-high stockings from the bag and rolled them up her legs. He asked whether she had high heels. When she said no, he pulled clear plastic high heels from his bag. They had pink ribbons for laces, which he wound up her lower legs. He reached into his bag again, producing pink ponytail holders, and styled her hair into pigtails. Where was her makeup? She retrieved her cosmetic kit from a dresser. His instructions were precise. Eye shadow first. Then lipstick. More. He wanted her lips pinker, he told her. Finally, he ordered her to lie on her mattress. He took a black, silky ribbon from his bag. Put your hands on
your back, he said. He tied the ribbon loosely around her wrists.
With a shock, Amber recognized the ribbon. She had bought it with her boyfriend. They had searched for it weeks before, but had not been able to find it. Amber had assumed she had misplaced it. Now, she was confused. How did the rapist have her ribbon?
For the next four hours, the man raped Amber repeatedly. When he would tire, he would rest, dressed only in his shirt, and drink from a bottle of water. When she complained of pain, he applied lubrication. When she said she was cold, he covered her in her pink-and-green comforter. He told her what to do and how to do it. He told her that she was a “good girl.” He did not use a condom.
He brought with him a pink digital camera. He posed her on her bed. Move this way, he ordered. Turn that way. When everything was to his liking, he took pictures. He’d stop in the middle of a rape and take more pictures. She had no idea how many photos he had taken, she told Galbraith. Sometimes, he would snap away for twenty minutes at a time. He told her that he would use the photos to convince police the rape was consensual. And he would post them to a porn site on the Internet where everyone could see them—her parents, her friends, her boyfriend.
Amber decided to survive by making herself as human as possible. Every time the man stopped to rest, she asked him questions. Sometimes, he would say nothing. But other times, they would chat for twenty minutes. The man recounted in detail how he had hunted her. It seemed almost to relax him.
He had been watching her through her apartment windows since August, he told her. He knew her full name. He knew her date of birth, her passport number, the license plate of her car. He knew what she was studying and where. He knew that at night, before she went to bed, she would talk to herself in her bathroom mirror.
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