Consent

by Donna Freitas

  It wasn’t long before the secretary ushered me into his office.

  The provost was skinny, gray-haired, unsmiling.

  Not at all like Dr. H., even though they were both thin. Dr. H. was a runner, so he was thin and strong. But this man was thin and frail, skin pale, like maybe he didn’t see much sunlight. I don’t even remember whether he said hello to me or if we exchanged small talk before I launched into my reasons for being there.

  I told him everything.

  Every little thing this professor had done, every clever, creative means he’d found to worm his way into my life and that of my family. It took a long time. At least an hour, maybe more. I don’t remember. When I started speaking I’d tried to be calm, but by the time I was ten minutes in I was enraged, my voice going up and down, growing louder and quieter, louder and quieter, as I forced this man to hear every last thing I had been through at his university, because of one of his professors, one of his priest-professors, one of his colleagues, and because of that woman who did nothing to help me even though she told me she’d take care of things.

  Fucking Tootsie.

  Did he not already know what had happened? I asked, once I finished. Had no one informed him? Or had he been informed and he simply didn’t care?

  He didn’t answer. He just stared at me with the same blank expression he’d worn the entire time I’d been telling him the story of my time as a graduate student, all the way back from my first semester. I waited and waited for him to say something, anything, but all he did was look at me like he wished he were a magician and could make me vanish from his office. Then I realized that what I’d originally thought was confusion, even emptiness in his eyes, was really contempt. He watched me with contempt.

  I started to cry.

  “Don’t you care? Don’t you care what’s happening to me? Don’t you want to help me?” I was saying, over and over, my voice rising to a yell because I couldn’t believe that he might not care. And because I couldn’t believe he was regarding me like a piece of garbage, the stench offending him. Then, “You don’t care, do you? You don’t care, you don’t, you don’t, you don’t care at all.” My voice grew quieter and quieter, until it disappeared.

  Still he said nothing, looked down his nose at me, stared like he wanted to be anywhere else than with me. He showed no compassion, no sign that my grief, my fear, my despair, moved him, not even a tiny bit.

  Abruptly, I got up, turned around, and left his office without saying goodbye, sobbing. His secretary looked at me like I was crazy, some deranged girl student she was glad was leaving. And I was crazy, wasn’t I? I was acting crazy because I felt crazy. Crazy was where I’d landed. It had become my home, suddenly. It happened so fast. One minute I was hopeful, serene, excited, the next I was deranged. I went to Dr. H.’s office.

  He was there, like always, he listened to me sobbing and, like always, he was kind, he was worried. But this time his response shook me.

  “I have done all I can on my end. I have tried to get your mother’s letters back and L. has refused, saying she freely wrote to him so her letters are his to keep and to do with what he wants. I have met with him multiple times and with others at the university about what’s been going on.” He looked at me in a way that I knew was meant to say something without words, but I couldn’t decipher what. Then he said out loud, clearly and definitively, “Donna, it’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  I really didn’t know.

  “You need a lawyer. You need a lawyer now. You must get one.”

  I dumped the grocery bag full of unopened letters on my coffee table.

  Even after everything, I’d still been too allergic to touch the correspondence that remained from this professor that hadn’t gone into the trash. Too repulsed and sickened. Too full of dread to make myself do it.

  But now, I had to force myself to look.

  One by one, on the very same couch where I’d read his article the previous August about the goodness of priests falling in love with young women and having affairs, I opened the last letters he’d sent me before I’d made the phone call in December, telling him to go away forever. Among other banal things, like accounts of what he was up to and chronicles of trips he had taken, there were love poems.

  There was no accompanying explanation, no Dear Donnas at the top of the page or any Sincerely, L.s at the end. Just love poems, typed out or written in his hand, nothing else.

  Over the next few days, I went to see a number of people.

  Because I worked in Residence Life at Georgetown, I knew what to do if a student came to you with a complaint of sexual assault or harassment—I’d just never thought to apply the process to myself. Georgetown was ahead of its time back then; they’d hired a sexual assault services coordinator and someone else for sex education. They were wonderful women, and they happened to work in the offices on the first floor of my residence hall. They were always just steps from my apartment door, but it had never occurred to me to ask their advice or for help before now. Finally, now I did, and once I was there, talking to them, real women who treated me like a human being, who looked at me with honest concern and sympathy, women who would keep their promises to me, I wondered why it had taken me so long to go to them. I regretted not seeing them earlier. Soon I would regret this even more.

  From there I went to visit one of my women professors from undergrad, and then a second one. I told them briefly what was going on and asked them what they thought I should do. Soon I had four women, four adult women, mothers themselves, who would walk with me the rest of the way I had to go, far beyond the terrain that the lawyer I was about to get would cross with me.

  I called my father.

  “Dad,” I said. “Um, do you know any lawyers?”

  There was a long pause. “Why?” Then another long pause. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No, no, no,” I told him. “I’m fine. Everything is fine. I just…am in a situation. And I was advised I need a lawyer. So, um, do you know any?”

  Yes, he told me, and gave me the man’s name and number.

  “Are you okay?” my dad kept asking.

  “Yes, I am. I swear. Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry.”

  “Did someone…did someone hurt you?” he asked in a gruff, fractured voice.

  “No,” I told him, firmly and decidedly. “No.”

  I think my father wanted to know if I’d been raped, was scared maybe I had. Once I confirmed this wasn’t the case, he was able to let go of anything else that might have gone wrong, since I suppose nothing could seem as bad as that in his mind.

  “Don’t tell Mom about any of this,” I begged him before we hung up. “Please.”

  “I would never,” he said. “Your mother has enough going on.”

  When I called my father I knew I could probably get away with asking him my question without him forcing me to say what was really happening. With my mother I never could get away with this. When I called him, I also knew that one of his best friends was a lawyer, a small-town lawyer, but a man who was nice, who had always been kind and friendly. Even though he didn’t have any experience with situations like mine—then again, who did at the time, this was the nineties—I called him and he said he would help. I made him promise not to talk to my dad about anything. He told me he didn’t need to promise, that as my lawyer he was legally obligated to keep what was between us only between us.

  Things happened fast from there.

  Formal letters with demands were dispatched to Tootsie, as well as a Title IX complaint to the Department of Education with claims of sexual harassment and a failure on the part of my university to respond. Letters from Tootsie finally arrived at my lawyer’s, letters that did not say what she’d told me they said, but something else entirely, something to the effect of how everyone at the university knew that I was at fault, that I’d misunderstood a friendship with my professor. The letters repeatedly spelled my name wrong, Frietas instead of Freitas, a detai
l that bothered me deeply, that still bothers me deeply, errors that pierced my already raw skin. Tootsie couldn’t even bother to spell my name right. Long days of formal interviews were scheduled, interviews where I would have to spend hours explaining everything I’d gone through again and again. And eventually, after many, many letters back and forth between my lawyer and the school, my professor was finally placed on sabbatical.

  But there would never be any consequences.

  Not real ones. Not while I was a student, not afterward either, not ever.

  In fact, soon this man would be promoted within the university’s administration. He would be a celebrated professor for many years to come, for more than a decade.

  Tootsie, my university, had known exactly how to handle me the moment I showed up in her office, exactly what to do to make it more likely that consequences, real ones, would never be suffered by this man no matter what he did to me, and that there would never be any consequences for the university or the Church either. Tootsie was as clever in ensuring this as he was at stalking me. She knew she’d win before she actually did.

  My lawyer confirmed this pretty much the moment I first called, that I didn’t have a leg to stand on with the school and my claims, that likely nothing would or could happen despite all this had done.

  Had the human resources woman explained to me the first time I went to her office, my lawyer asked over the phone, that the moment I made my complaint, a clock started ticking?

  No, I told him. She hadn’t. What clock?

  The clock for the statute of limitations, he said. The clock that gave me six months total to come forward with a formal complaint of sexual harassment to the Department of Education. Once the six months passed, there would never be the possibility of court, or the threat of consequences for a university from a judge. Any complaint from me would be dismissed immediately for this reason.

  By the time I called a lawyer, a little over eight months had passed.

  The statute of limitations had run out over the summer.

  24

  My mother died shortly after I received my PhD, at the end of my first year as a professor. Dr. H. had died about eight months before she did, not long after he first called me Dr. Freitas and my dissertation committee popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate my transformation from just Donna to Dr. Freitas.

  I’d finally begun to live my dream of being a professor after the lengthy process of becoming one, and it turned out to be one of the saddest years of my life.

  To add to my misfortune, soon I discovered that I had “landed badly,” as it is sometimes put by my fellow academics, at the college where I’d gotten a tenure-track position.

  With professor jobs, you either land well or land badly, and this depends on the makeup of your department. Women professors especially are at risk of landing badly, and women professors in my field are especially, especially at risk since our field is mostly male and run by men, though this is changing, slowly. I found out, through the grapevine of other professors at my school, that my department of only tenured men had never wanted a woman teaching alongside them. Worse still, I was their third attempt at hiring one. They hadn’t wanted to hire me either, not really—they’d been forced to hire a woman by the school. The two women who held my position before me had undergone six years of torment by my new colleagues, and then were each in turn denied tenure and sent packing. This, apparently, was to become my fate as well.

  My new colleagues were terrible to me, and now there was no Dr. H. to call.

  And when my mother went into a coma in early May of my first year as a professor, the tenured men in my department saw this as an opportunity. They used my absence at graduation, among other events, as marks against me in my evaluations, as evidence that I was not committed enough to the school. They would use my ensuing sadness about losing her to cite me for other failings, too. So I knew, early on, that I had to leave that place, but I also knew that I would be short two important letters if and when I tried—the most important ones, Dr. H.’s and Father L.’s.

  The year after my mother’s death my colleagues were cruel, crueler than I ever could imagine anyone being when a person is grieving, though at the time I was in a fog and would take in the scope and depth of their cruelty only later. I asked these men, then pleaded, then begged them for some understanding, and the answer was, sorry but no. They did not consent to my grief. They used the power of non-consent forcefully and enthusiastically, with all the intelligence and power of their positions, knowing full well that when it came to power in my department, I had none. And once again, in the context of a university, I had no agency. I went on the job market again and again, desperate to leave.

  I would never get another position as a professor. Not a real one.

  One day, about nine months after my mother died and well into the terrible treatment by my colleagues, a friend and I went to a small diner near her house. She and her husband lived in a beautiful, tiny Vermont town about a forty-minute drive from my Burlington apartment. I loved going to visit them, and I loved the little shops and restaurants that dotted their picturesque Main Street. She was a psychology professor from school, and we’d become friends the first week we’d started teaching. Over coffee and breakfast, I made a confession.

  “I think I might be going crazy,” I told her.

  I was dismayed, I was ashamed, I was at my wit’s end. She asked me why, and I began to explain, listing my symptoms, one by one.

  Lately, I’d become afraid—of everything. I was afraid of the mail, for example. Like weirdly afraid of it. Like when I walked through the lobby of my apartment building on my way home from teaching, I would avert my eyes from the long line of silver mailboxes on the left-hand wall. I didn’t want to touch or go near them. What’s more, after I managed to force myself to pick it up, the mail would sit in a pile, unopened, for days. Weeks. Months. I resisted even looking at the stack on the counter. Going near it, picking up a single envelope, tearing it open, required such effort, such tremendous effort.

  So yeah, there was the mail.

  But there were other issues. I was having trouble getting out of my car when I went to school to teach. I would drive into the parking lot and pull into a space near my building, turn the ignition off, and sit there. Hands on the wheel, staring out the windshield, the clock ticking toward the start of a meeting or one of my classes. Come on, Donna. What are you waiting for? Get out of the car. Get. Out. You’re going to be late. Eventually I would grab the handle and open the door. Then I’d look at the blacktop. I’d stare at the white painted line that marked my parking spot, door open, even when it was freezing. Then, eventually, I’d take deep breaths, deep, deep breaths, and set one foot outside the car, then the other, and shut the door behind me. Still breathing deeply, I’d walk the few steps to the building and up the stairs to the second floor, where my office was, sick, utterly sick to my stomach the entire time.

  Once I got to my office, I then faced the inability to leave it. My classroom was a problem as well; not entering the classroom but leaving it after class was over. Thresholds had become an overall challenge, though only at school, for some reason. I would sit in my office chair, trying to persuade myself to stand up and walk out the door so I wouldn’t be late for my students, or I would stand inside my empty classroom once my students had gone, unable to move. My heart would pound, my lungs would heave. I couldn’t breathe. I would talk to myself, cheer myself on, scold myself. Come on, Donna. Just go. Just go. You can do it! What is your fucking problem? Stop being crazy. Go, go, go!

  The more I explained to my friend what I was feeling, doing, going through, the crazier I felt. Crazier and more ashamed.

  This friend also happened to be the only person in this new chapter of my life as a professor that I’d told about what I went through in graduate school. I’m not sure why I told her, what had possessed me to. There were still very few people in my life who knew anything about him; people who’d known me for year
s still had no idea. But this friend has a calm about her, a kind of peace and openness that invites intimacy, so I’d confided in her one day. And she also happens to be a psychologist.

  She listened carefully as I finished going down the list of behaviors I’d been exhibiting while I picked at the food I would never actually eat. When I stopped, she told me that in graduate school for her internship, she’d worked at Veterans Affairs and had counseled a lot of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. She explained what PTSD was, because I didn’t know, explained about the brain and how it can react to trauma, how as a survival mechanism it can bury certain experiences and all the emotions that go with them. Then, unfortunately, new experiences in life—experiences that have nothing to do with the trauma—can trigger the brain into thinking the trauma is still happening. The brain reacts by flooding a person with all the same feelings and emotions they felt when the trauma was taking place.

  It occurred to her that the seemingly innocuous things, like getting the mail or leaving my car or crossing the threshold of my classroom, sounded an awful lot like the behaviors I’d developed because of that professor from graduate school I told her about. She wondered if I was experiencing PTSD, which would make sense, she thought, given that I’d lived under siege for quite a long time.

  And maybe, she theorized, my mother’s death, maybe everything surrounding it, including the awful treatment from my new colleagues, had triggered me. Maybe school and all that went with it—each time I arrived and had to go up the stairs to my office, willingly surrounding myself with these cruel colleagues each day, going in and out of classrooms when I’d once been afraid to do just this in graduate school—were triggering me, flooding my brain and my body with the same emotions I felt when the professor was stalking me. Maybe PTSD could explain my sudden fear, my repulsion, my sickness, regarding the mail, especially that sickness regarding the mail.