I had never met her before. She was the first person I told that I was raped. She and I are still really good friends.
She walked me outside to my boyfriend’s car and she told him, “She’s not doing too well right now.” I was still in shock.
He parked the car and I wouldn’t tell him for what felt like hours. I finally told him and he said, “We’re going to the police to report rape.” I said, “No, that’s not me. That’s not what happened to me.” It’s such an awful word.
I went to his house. His stepmom is one of my mom’s friends; she’s Venezuelan. We had dinner and I was gonna shower and my boyfriend went to get some guest towels and his stepmom followed me to the bathroom and said she wanted to talk.
She said, “Fabiana, did something happen to you?” And I fainted. She threw water in my face and started screaming for my boyfriend.
I woke up on a couch. She said, “I have to call your parents.” I said, “I can’t call them,” and started crying. She dialed my dad at least fifteen times; it was really late, about two in the morning. My dad wouldn’t answer and finally he did and I just kept crying. He said, “What’s wrong?” and I handed the phone to her and she said, “Fabiana is at my house and she’s okay, but something bad happened to her.” In the background, my mom started crying.
My dad said, “I want you to go to the police right now. Please do that for me. And we are leaving and will be there as soon as we can.”
My dad later said he did one hundred miles an hour on the highway.
At the police station, I was shaking the whole time. I couldn’t really talk. My boyfriend would talk and I would nod. I gave my statement and then they drove me to the hospital for the rape kit. I had not showered yet. And then my family showed up. At this point, I’d been up forty-eight hours.
That was the first time I’ve ever seen my dad cry. It was always a joke in my family he’d never cry. That’s probably what hurt most, was seeing him cry.
The officer was fine. The detective came to my dorm and took all my bedding. Everything I had bought for college was gone: a Michigan blanket and stuff from Target; my sheets and all my blankets and pillow and the clothes I was wearing that night. I never saw any of that stuff again.
The hardest thing was when the detective came to take my statement that morning while I was still in the hospital. She later said since I’d had no sleep my statement was invalid and I had to do it again.
The first thing she said to me was “This is gonna be hard because he’s attractive, isn’t he?” I shut down. She now actually does a lot of Collaborative Reform work with the community. I think she’s had a change of heart.
ANONYMOUS XY
My rape happened a week before classes of my second year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago.
I was living in an apartment with three other people: a married couple and this other guy. We were having a housewarming party. It was super safe: my house, my party, not drinking that much. I was very explicit with this guy: we are not gonna have sex.
I had met him in passing the year before. Seen him around campus. He was a visiting student. I didn’t invite him to our party, but someone else did—my male roommate did. I was with other people in the apartment. It should have been safe.
But we were in my bedroom, me and this guy, kissing, and all of a sudden he penetrated me, without me saying it was okay. I don’t remember how he got my clothes off. I couldn’t see anything; it seemed to me as if the lights went off. I felt like I couldn’t move. I started screaming, “What are you doing?!” He kept saying, “You’re a psychotic bitch!”
I don’t know what happened. They said I was screaming a very long time. My roommates busted in. They threw him out. They took care of me. Called a university advocate. Apparently I became catatonic. They had to slap me to get me to wake up.
I remember coming to and a cop saying, “Is she drunk?” The advocate said, “No, she’s in shock.”
I said, “I know how sex works, and that was not sex, that was rape.”
My clothes were mostly on—my roommate had put my underwear back on for me. Somehow I got to the hospital and had a rape kit done. The rape exam was really bad; I remember it hurting a lot. But the staff was great. My roommates stayed with me.
After the exam, the cops said, “We need you to go to the police station right now.” At least I managed to say, “I want some food,” so we stopped at the apartment first. Hours had gone by at this point; it was the next day.
Then we went to the police station. It was really awful, waiting in that dark place. I don’t think I realized before how fucked up the world is for rape survivors. The detective came out and told me the guy had turned himself in. I took that as a good sign. I remember my roommate saying, “No, don’t get your hopes up, that doesn’t mean he’s admitting to it.” Then, sure enough, the detective said that him turning himself in was a sign he was not a bad person: See what a good guy he is, he came in on his own.
I said, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
The police had already questioned me at the hospital. And they said my facts matched his, for the most part. Then they had me take out my clothes and show them to them. I had worn a maxi skirt, and they had me put it on and wiggle in it, and they said, “Well, he couldn’t have raped you. It had to be consensual if you were wearing that skirt. It’s too long for him to be able to rape you unless you helped him.”
Wow, usually they say it’s a short skirt that asks for rape, now it’s a long one!
To this day if I see a cop car and it says, “Protect and serve,” I snort, “Yeah, you guys don’t do that.”
Did their disregard of me have anything to do with me being Asian? People ask me that now. And I don’t know. I have a dark sense of humor and am edgy and made jokes, and probably wouldn’t have done that had I been more strategic about rape culture. I’m a petite woman and a Ph.D. student and was dressed nicely, so maybe they thought, “Oh, this is a spoiled, privileged brat.”
That was my first direct encounter with rape culture. I was never before aware of how much injustice was out there.
Assaulted by Strangers, Twice
ZOË RAYOR
I left home at seventeen to attend New College of Florida, in Sarasota. A young feminist, I wanted to escape the Bible belt of north Florida as soon as I could, and I skipped a year of high school to do just that. When I first arrived at New College, I had no idea what I wanted to study and took multiple classes, including gender studies and Hebrew classes, and became interested in conflict resolution.
After turning eighteen, I traveled to Israel (and ultimately ended up in Palestine as well) as part of a program, geared toward Jewish students, called Birthright. During those few weeks in Israel, I wrote an extended essay for an independent study project about Zionism, the Israeli occupation, and female Palestinian suicide bombers. After this experience I became a conflict studies major and I moved to Israel during my sophomore year to attend Tel Aviv University. While living in Israel, I experienced my very own conflict, one that would rage on for years to come. It was there that I was assaulted for the first time.
One afternoon in the fall of 2009, I took a taxi from my dorm to the beach in Tel Aviv to meet up with some of my family. I sat in the front seat and began to smoke a cigarette. The driver was an Israeli man old enough to be my dad or even grandfather. We were almost to the beach when he pulled into an alley and locked the doors. It took me a second to realize what was happening and then I frantically tried to open the door but couldn’t. I froze. The man began groping me and then shoved me into the backseat. I didn’t know what to do, I went into shock and completely let go of control. He yanked my dress off, pulled down his pants, and raped me. After he was finished, he crawled back into the front seat, told me to put my dress back on, and then drove me to the beach as if nothing had happened.
I didn’t know what to do; I was in a daze. I had no way to identify this person, and my Hebrew was fairly shitty. Co
nfused and numb, I walked out to my family and tried to act normal. One family member asked me what was wrong, and I told her I thought I had been assaulted, but said I didn’t want to do anything about it because I didn’t think I could and I hadn’t fully processed what had happened. It just didn’t seem real.
A few months later I spoke to my mom on the phone and she described a date she had gone on during which a man tried to grab her and force her to kiss him. She was very upset and asked if I had ever dealt with anything like that. The question came out of left field and I broke down and told her that I had been raped. She was completely shocked and desperately wanted to be there for me. The reason I had kept it from her was because I didn’t want her to know, to feel the distress of having her only child raped at eighteen, in a foreign country, alone. I didn’t want her to experience the pain of being unable to do anything. She immediately booked a flight for the next month and helped me move my life back to the United States.
While I was still in Israel, I starting sleeping with a ton of people. I didn’t totally understand what I was doing or why, but in hindsight I was desperately trying to regain my power and dignity as a human and a consenting sexual partner. I began to compartmentalize my experience of rape and tried to sweep it under the rug, although my PTSD and the trauma surrounding the experience would continue to dramatically impact my life. I think I was able to psychologically separate myself from what had happened to me because I had escaped from the physical place where I had been assaulted—both the cab and the country. I know this now because when I was later assaulted in my own space I felt very differently about it. After the first assault, I did go to therapy, but I felt that talking about the assault over and over was more hurtful than helpful. For the next few years, I tried my hardest to forget about it.
A difficult part of my recovery was learning to be in a relationship again and to accept love. I had started dating Josh my first year at college and when I came back to the United States I had to explain to him what had happened to me. He was incredibly supportive and loving, but it was horrible to have to talk to him about my assault and infidelities. Having sex with someone whom I loved turned out to be much harder than the random sex I had engaged in overseas.
Fast-forward two years. My thesis research was under way and I had begun my fourth year of college. After I returned from Israel, I had decided to change my major and pursued gender studies and religion. I shared an off-campus three-bedroom house with a friend and Josh. Josh and I usually slept together, but on a night in September 2011 I had come home late from a party and Josh had gone to sleep in his own room. I woke up two hours later, around four thirty a.m. I vaguely remember someone embracing me, trying to wake me up; I thought it was Josh. I pushed him off and mumbled, “No,” before falling back asleep.
* * *
A difficult part of my recovery was learning to be in a relationship again and to accept love.
* * *
Right after that I suddenly woke up again with someone on top of me, and my body was pinned to the bed. As my eyes adjusted, I could see he was wearing a black hat pulled down to his eyes, and a handkerchief over his face. He said, “Don’t say anything or scream or I’ll kill you.” Time stopped. It seemed like minutes went by, but it really must have been seconds. A million thoughts came into my head. “Is this really happening again? Who the fuck is this? Am I going to be raped again? Am I going to let this happen?” That last thought came up, and I realized that I was not going to let this happen. I don’t know where my confidence came from, but I decided I wasn’t going to freeze this time. I was going to fight.
I couldn’t move my arms, but I immediately began screaming and my right leg shot up and kneed that fucker in the balls. He jumped up and ran, and I chased him. I watched as he fled through the backyard, hurdled over a seven-and-a-half-foot fence, and took off. I collapsed on the floor. Josh and my roommate came running into the living room to see what was wrong. I could only keep repeating, “Someone was here! Someone was here!,” over and over. They thought I was having a nightmare, but I pointed toward the open back door and they realized that someone had indeed been there.
Someone immediately called the police. They came to inspect and couldn’t find anything. They asked what I had been doing, if I had been drinking—they even joked about having a lot of DNA on my bedsheets. I eventually found out that the cops knew about this rapist. He had raped six people and had attempted to assault three others. His MO was that he would stalk his victims and wait until they were either home alone or asleep. The police believe he had been stalking me for months and although I had kept my blinds closed, apparently he could see in through one of the windows at night, a fact that made me feel nauseated.
I later found out that the young woman who lived in my room previously—another New College student—had been assaulted in that very same room eight months earlier by the same rapist. The landlord knew about the previous assault and had never told me and my roommates about this rapist who had not yet been caught. Neither the campus police nor the Sarasota police department had warned the student body about the assailant.
I found out most of my information not through the police but through an advocate at the local rape crisis center who had also happened to previously work as a police advocate (the police casually forgot to grant me a police victim advocate until a few weeks after I was assaulted). My mom had done a lot of research after my initial assault, and I had seen this advocate as a therapist at the rape crisis center (Safe Place and Rape Crisis Center [SPARCC]) in Sarasota. She told me about the other rapes and that the perpetrator had never been caught. He wears gloves, a mask of sorts, and a hat, and he leaves no trace evidence. He basically looks like an average white male, twentysomething, of average height and build. In a college town. After my assault and the publicity surrounding his crimes, he became known as the Bayshore Rapist.
About a month after I was attacked, he attempted to rape a friend of mine who lived down the street (also on Bayshore Road). This time there were four other people at home asleep and a dog, and yet he still attacked her. During the next few months, through mutual friends, I ended up meeting other people who were either victims themselves or who knew the women he attacked. He would stalk them for months and then sneak into their houses while the place was empty. He would then sit on their beds and wait for them to come home. He asked them questions about their beliefs and talked to them about religion. Most of these girls were Jewish. He generally sat and talked to them for about an hour before he raped them. They all thought they could talk him out of it. Or that he would not rape them if he got to know them as a person. No one knew if he had weapons on him or not, and I don’t think anyone had fought back until I did.
* * *
I ended up meeting other people who were either victims themselves or who knew the women he attacked.
* * *
After the Bayshore Rapist attacked me, I was very angry not only about what had happened but also about the fact that he still hadn’t been caught and no one was talking about it. I spoke out. I gave interviews to local news agencies and wrote numerous emails to the student body warning them about the situation, the known locations of the attacker, and the fact that the campus police weren’t doing a thing about it. I got involved with a group of survivors who met up weekly to discuss our trauma, the patriarchal culture of rape that we live in, healing, and activism. I, along with nine amazing students, interviewed stakeholders, consulted other schools’ sexual assault policies, and completely rewrote our college’s Title IX policy and reporting process. I even spoke publicly to my entire campus about what had happened, about living as a survivor in a society that glosses over the staggering rates of assault, and about what it means to be an activist. To this day, more than four years later, neither my Israeli rapist nor the Bayshore Rapist has been caught.
When I look back, the most important parts of my story are not about what happened to me but rather my strength in healing. For me, self-l
ove—learning to accept, embrace, and respect myself and my story—has been key. Moving from an intellectual understanding of self-love to a truer, internal, emotional, and grounded belief in my worthiness has been quite a process. Through EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and mindfulness therapies, I have been able to handle my PTSD and unravel the stories my past has created about who I am. Over the last few years I’ve been able to set up boundaries around my relationships, I’ve cut out the people and jobs that do not serve me, and I’m living my life like it’s one that I’ve intentionally chosen and created. I’ve allowed myself to be vulnerable with a select group of people (and now the public), and have been able to find power and strength within this openness. I live in a place that lets me exhale, and have found a source of spirituality in the mountains. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to have a mom, close friends, and a dog that provide me with a powerful love and belief in me that I’ve been able to rely on when I can barely stand on my own two feet. It’s been a long journey, but I am steeled with love and I now take whatever life throws at me with confidence and resiliency.
Dear Abuelita
ANDREA PINO
Dear Abuelita:
I have a big secret.
I was raped.
I’m sorry I’ve never told you, but I can’t find the strength to ever say those words in your language. In our language.
Abuelita, I dropped out of college.
It’s a secret that only a few people know, but I carry it like I’m wearing shackles every day.
The truth is that I feel like a failure, sometimes.
I feel as if I let them win, and I feel as if I’ve let generations of Pinos, Silvas, Meriños, Villafruelas, and Cabreras down.
We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out Page 5
