Consent

by Donna Freitas

  Dan thought it was important that someone at the graduate school know what was happening because if things got worse, we could say we’d notified a professor in the program, someone who worked there but was not an “official” official. If I could settle this outside official channels, I might emerge from the situation unscathed—or relatively so. I still hoped I might come through this to the other side as still-me, still-Donna, the Donna I had always been, the idealistic grad student who felt only joy with respect to her studies and her professors. I didn’t yet realize, or I refused to realize, that this Donna was already gone.

  When my friend and I decided to talk to this professor, it was a different time, back before there was such a thing as mandatory reporting at universities across the nation—and thank God for this. Mandatory reporting, a recent by-product of Title IX, requires faculty, staff, and administrators to make an official report if they hear of instances of sexual assault or harassment, even if the person who suffered the abuse doesn’t want them to report it, isn’t ready to, begs them not to. Mandatory reporting wrests the power of naming from the victim’s hands and places it in the hands of others. It yanks it, forcefully, violently from the victim and, in my opinion, threatens to victimize the person yet again.

  If I’d known that talking to someone about my situation risked my triggering official, legal action at my institution, I might never have told a soul, maybe not even Dan. I would have continued to suffer in silence, and secrecy.

  Mandatory reporting has been controversial from its inception for these exact reasons. It can discourage victims from ever reporting anything, from even trying to get help for what they’ve gone through, because reaching out could start a process they cannot stop. In theory, it’s supposed to hold institutions accountable, to keep them from sweeping claims of harassment or assault under the rug. It’s supposed to force schools to count these claims, to register them, officially. But sometimes I wonder if it’s yet another move on the part of institutions to make it harder, scarier, for people to report assault or harassment, because the effect of it is to do just this.

  It asks too much too soon for too many victims.

  It makes the consequences of speaking up that much more real, and immediate.

  I needed baby steps to get through this. I needed a process, a coming-to-terms-with. First, telling one of my most trusted friends. Then, the two of us telling one of our most trusted professors. Next, trying to handle the situation outside official channels and hoping for the best, hoping that things would end there. My own survival depended on my still being able to call the shots, to make the decisions, to say yes or no to the people who now shared the knowledge of my situation. I needed to retain control, at least some control—or regain it, really—since for the last year my primary experience was to have no control at all. I wanted some of that control back.

  The ability of Dan and this woman professor to hear my yeses or nos about what I did and did not want, to respect my wishes, to honor them, to listen and respond to them, even if they did not agree with them, was part of the healing I needed. I needed the experience of saying “I want this, but not this” and “This is okay, but this is not,” needed to see that the person I was telling could take it in and respond accordingly. I needed to know that they would not run right over me, act as though I had said nothing, disrespect what I wanted—because that was the experience I’d already lived for a year. I needed to be reminded that though my nos might have meant nothing to him, that he was an isolated case, that other people could and would hear my consent and my non-consent, that they would honor it because it meant something to them.

  I think this is the crux of it—mandatory reporting is like being violated all over again. It violates our very own teachings about consent, what it is and how it is supposed to operate. Mandatory reporting tells a victim: Once again, you don’t get a no or a yes, here your nos and yeses don’t matter to us, we care not whether you consent or do not consent. Once again, your agency is taken from you, forcefully. You are reduced to an object, a number, a potential lawsuit, someone who has no will or say about what happens to you. Once again, your voice is not heard or respected. You can say no, no, no all you want, as many times as you possibly can, but mandatory reporting shouts over your nos, until you learn to shut up and take whatever it is you’ve accidentally caused to happen to yourself again. Mandatory reporting reinforces the powerlessness of victims, and likewise reinforces the shame they feel about their own powerlessness. It perpetuates a state of helplessness and isolation. It encourages the perpetuation of their silence and secrecy.

  I needed the right to decide my own fate to be restored, to be placed back into my hands. I needed my own voice, when it spoke yes and no, to become meaningful to someone else again, to carry weight with that person, to have an effect. I needed to see that someone could hear me and comply with my wishes. I needed these things like my life depended on them. I think it did depend on them. Sometimes I think it still does.

  We went to see her in person, in her office.

  We told her the bare bones of the story. I held out a plastic grocery bag full of letters he’d written to me. Her eyes got big when she looked inside. She was calm and patient, concerned about me more than anything else.

  “What do you want to happen?” she asked, just like Dan had the night before.

  “I never want to see him again,” I repeated.

  “Okay,” she said, and then she began to talk about options, one of which was for me to come forward to the school.

  “No way” was my response.

  “I just want him to stop,” I said.

  Dan and our professor helped to come up with a step in between doing nothing and doing something official.

  I would write up a list of every single thing he’d ever done, a list of all of his unwanted behaviors, all of his unwanted attention. I would put it down on paper, making sure I was specific, that I was particular, that I was comprehensive. I would write it down so I could have it in my hands, so I could hold it, so I could see it before me. Then I would pick a time that was convenient, I would call him on the phone, and I would read the letter to him word for word, making sure to leave nothing out. If he tried to protest or interrupt, I would read over him and repeat certain lines if I needed to, making sure he heard every single thing on my list. This was not to be a conversation, or a back-and-forth. This was not an invitation to hear his side of the story after I finished reading. This was a notice, it was a cease and desist, an official communication on my part, informing him that from this moment forward, there was to be no contact between us ever again. Whatever had been going on, whatever he was doing, was to end immediately, and there was to be no further discussion about it. This was to be a one-sided conversation, with the only side being mine.

  This I agreed to do, not because I wanted to, but because I knew I had no other choice. I had to get over the fact that he was my professor and also a priest so that I could talk to him like he was a pest and, even worse, a predator. A man who was hitting on me like someone in a bar, who refused to give up. I had to scale that mountain, like it or not. I was filled with dread.

  I made the call on December 22. Merry Christmas to me.

  I’d spent hours writing up that list, carefully penning it letter by letter, word by word, until my hand ached. Some of the words I wrote were in all caps, as though I were screaming. It spanned several pages, not only because there were so many things on my list, but because the lines got bigger, wider, taller, as they went on, as though their size might increase the chances he’d hear what they said. I’d written everything on blank white copy paper. Dan reviewed it, our professor reviewed it, and then I got ready to get this over with.

  I decided to call him during the afternoon, from my apartment. We’d decided it was important I do this under circumstances where I felt at my safest, my most comfortable. We’d decided that the reading of my list should not occur if he happened to have called me, that it had to be th
e reverse, that I had to choose the time of the call, so that I was controlling the situation from the beginning. I chose to do it during the afternoon because I wanted there to be light outside my window. I wanted the safety of the day to reassure me.

  I dragged the clunky, ancient phone to my coffee table, picked up the receiver, and punched in his number. As always, I was standing, my script clutched in my free hand. He answered right away. At first, he was happy. It had been ages, months, since I’d called him. It had been him calling me, him calling me again and again, calling me nonstop, and me scrambling to get off the phone. I think he was surprised to suddenly have this long-craved-for attention from me.

  Quickly, very quickly, before that initial happiness could settle into him with any depth, I informed him that this was not a social call, that I had some things to tell him, and that I needed him to listen until I was finished.

  And then I did it, I read him my list.

  I don’t know how long it took me, but it felt like we were on the phone forever. I read through every single one of those lines I’d written, dropping the finished pages onto the floor. I could hear him breathing as he listened. My hands were shaking, and my voice was shaking, too.

  Do not call me on my phone in Georgetown.

  Do not call me on my phone in Rhode Island.

  Do not call my mother ever again.

  Do not write letters to my TA mailbox.

  Do not write letters to my Georgetown mailbox.

  Do not write letters to the mailbox at my family’s house in Rhode Island.

  Do not invite me to a play.

  Do not invite me to a symphony.

  Do not invite me to go for coffee.

  The list went on and on, and it was very specific. When I finally got to the end, he was silent at first, but then he wanted to respond.

  “Do you understand everything I’ve said?” I interrupted, talking over him.

  He began to protest again.

  “Do you understand everything I’ve said?” I repeated, forcing my voice over his.

  There was a pause.

  Then, “Yes.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’m going to hang up now.”

  I set the receiver back into the cradle. I thought I might pass out. But I’d done it. After all this time, it was over. Finally, finally, I was free.

  19

  Between Christmas and New Year’s, he sent me an unmarked card.

  I’d just come home from seeing my friend Hannah for dinner and had gone to collect my mail in the Residence Life Office. Hannah and I met up as soon as I returned from Rhode Island after spending the holidays with my family.

  “So,” she said, the moment we sat down across from each other, big blue eyes smiling. Hannah is very blond, with a wide-open, round face, and looks like she could play the part of Goldilocks in a show, which was probably why she was always getting cast as the ingenue in every musical she tried out for. “Tell me what is going on with you!”

  Hannah was, and still is, one of my best friends. From the moment we met, we fell into a shared intimacy that has never left us. She is one of the people I have turned to in my darkest of moments. She has an extraordinary voice, and in the years ahead she would become the person who sang at my wedding and also at my mother’s funeral. I told Hannah everything, always.

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “It was good to see my family. My mother is hanging in there, but it’s hard. Things with Christopher are good. Tell me what is going on with you.”

  Hannah began to give me her update, and the conversation moved on from there.

  I could have told Hannah that same night about what was happening to me, about what had been happening for a year already. I could have told her months before and she would have been the amazing friend she’s always been. I should have told Hannah that night. What would one more person be on the list of people who knew?

  I would tell her, soon, but not yet. Silence and denial were still my reality, my norm, my strategy, really. The fewer people who knew, the better, because then the less true it would be as a defining part of my life. Besides, I’d reasoned numerous times since my phone call on December 22, this man, this situation, was all behind me now, so maybe I wouldn’t have to tell a single other person about what had gone on, not even someone like Hannah. The shame would be mine and mine alone in the vast majority of my relationships, which meant it would disappear all the quicker. Soon, “all that” would feel far away, and life would be back to normal, as though it never happened.

  This hope of mine was about to vanish because of the letter I held in my hand.

  Being at home on break had been up and down, but we’d managed to make Christmas happen in our house. My mother loved Christmas, and by extension, we all did, too. Christmas meant hours of cooking, of baking the Italian cookies my father loved and the neighbors also loved, since each year we made special plates that my mother would wrap with clear plastic and tie with shiny bows to give out to everyone. Christmastime meant making pasta from scratch, making sauces and Italian meats, and eating nearly constantly.

  Before my grandmother had gotten Alzheimer’s she was a magician in the kitchen; both she and my mother knew the family recipes by memory, whipping them up easily as though they were following detailed directions. But this year, between Grandma struggling and my mother often unable to get out of bed, it fell to me to oversee the Christmas cooking. My mother helped when she could, but for the most part I did all the food, with my father taking orders now and then, watching something on the stove or pulling something out of the oven under my direction. Somehow my mother made her cookies, so the neighbors got theirs as well. Making those cookies felt like my mother defying her death sentence. Everything had felt that way since her diagnosis, which meant that every day she endured felt like cheating it.

  On Christmas, people in our neighborhood got together and went caroling, and my mother was always one of the ringleaders of this effort. But this winter she didn’t have the energy to walk through the neighborhood in the cold and the snow, singing for hours.

  The carolers came to our door twice that holiday season, once early in the evening and then later, so my mother could join them for a few minutes. I remember how, the second time they’d rung the bell, one of the neighborhood men laughed and said to my parents, “This time, we’ve weeded out the non-singers!” by way of explaining why our house got special treatment. When of course it was because everyone knew about my mother, that the second visit was because of her cancer, because maybe she wouldn’t have another year of caroling in her future.

  We had the Christmas tree, the presents underneath, the special breakfast on Christmas morning, followed by church and our typical elaborate Christmas dinner with way too much food. We did it all, even though my mother could barely eat, even though she wore a kerchief over her head because she was bald, signaling to everyone in the pews at mass who hadn’t known she was sick that she was. We did it all because we had to, because this might be our last Christmas together. We were approaching that six-month mark, the one the doctor had given us after her surgery, the looming date of her possible death.

  I didn’t tell my parents a thing while I was home.

  I was still hoping they wouldn’t have to find out.

  There was no familiar handwriting on the outside of the envelope in my hand, no return address printed in the upper left-hand corner, nothing to alert me it was from him. My address had been typed, the envelope run through a printer. It looked like one of those cards you might get from your dentist, or some other peripheral person in your life, who sent out a mass of holiday cards to clients.

  The office where I was sorting through my mail was dark because it was night and most everyone was still on break. The only light in the room was the one I’d turned on over the staff mailboxes. The quiet was eerie. Usually this place was full of people bustling about, activity and noise everywhere. But the peace and the silence were nice. I’d already opened the first of the Christma
s cards in the pile, then another and another, until I’d gotten to this one.

  I was starting to feel happy again, and hopeful. Starting to put the pieces of my sanity back together. The ground was feeling steadier, my footsteps surer. My professor hadn’t contacted me, not once. Not over the phone, not in Rhode Island, not at Georgetown—not since our phone call. I hadn’t received any letters, except for a couple of stragglers he’d sent before we had our one-sided conversation. I’d had a blissfully professor-free Christmas with my family, and I was relishing this.

  I’d gotten through to him.

  He’d listened to my words over the phone. Finally. Finally, he’d heard me, really heard me, heard my no. Each thing I said, each request I’d made of him, each action of his toward me that I forbade, one by one, as I read from those pages out loud. He’d heard my words and he’d listened.

  Things were going to be okay. It seemed almost too good to be true.

  I still had a lot of damage control ahead, and I knew this, too. I still hadn’t told my mother that our lunch date at the Coast Guard House in Narragansett was canceled, that he wouldn’t be coming to Rhode Island or be writing her any longer. I didn’t know how to tell her this without upsetting her, without also telling her the truth, which I didn’t want her to know. I needed my mother to keep her faith in the Catholic Church and its God and its priests, because they were part of her recovery, her lifeline of hope. I didn’t want to clip it, this thing helping to keep her alive.

  I still hadn’t figured out what to do about grad school either, and the reality that he would be all over the building where I went for classes, that he had every right to be there since he was a professor. He had more of a right to be there than I did; it had been his place of employment for years. There was the problem of my program as well, the fact that he was the head of my concentration, the fact that he taught all of the major courses I needed to take before I could finish my MA and get through my PhD requirements and move on to my comprehensive exams. There was also the daunting reality that I would likely need him to be on my dissertation committee, if not be my dissertation director. I wasn’t sure how to finesse these complications, how to get around them or if I could get around them. Could I continue to avoid him without having to explain why to anyone else?