Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  There was so much love and fun and hope on that wall. But that day, as soon as I walked into my room, I felt an overwhelming urge to flee. The faces looking out at me from those photographs seemed malevolent. There was Adriana, my best friend, my sister, practically—who hadn’t believed me. There was Melaney, who had believed me, but whose response had basically been that I was powerless and should pretend it hadn’t happened. Worst of all, there were Seth and Brian, grinning out at me from my own walls. The sight of their faces made my stomach lurch. I’d thought they were my friends. What had they done?

  I looked at all those quotes and phrases I’d so painstakingly collected and cut out. Fearless. Light up. Beautiful dream. I’d loved to lie on my bed, getting inspired by those words. I’d think about the life I would make for myself in New York and how proud my parents would be of me.

  Other moms couldn’t wait to plan their daughters’ weddings, but my mom had told me over and over again that she couldn’t wait to see me cross the stage in gown and mortarboard on the day of my graduation. As sick as I felt about everything that had happened with my friends, the worst thought was that I’d let her—and myself—down. I couldn’t believe I’d jeopardized all my precious dreams by putting myself in this position. I’d known that I shouldn’t have gone out to that beach house. I’d had a bad feeling, a premonition, almost. But I’d ignored it, and now here I was, facing a crisis of such enormity I couldn’t begin to wrap my head around it.

  Looking at that collage was like standing in the ocean and seeing a massive wave crest up in front of you, the moment when you realize that there is absolutely nothing you can do to get out of its way. I wanted desperately to run—to run away from the situation, to run away from myself. The sentiments on that wall seemed to belong to a different time, a different girl.

  I could see it very clearly: My life had changed, and nothing on that wall had anything to do with me anymore. I would have no control over what came next. Whether I liked it or not, I would be swept up, tossed around, and then slammed to the ground.

  True Hearts. That phrase was pasted next to a picture of me with Melaney and Adriana. With a heart as sick as my stomach, I waited to hear the familiar sounds of my parents getting ready for bed. Then I grabbed my pillow and headed off to the family room to sleep on the couch.

  Chapter Two

  A Series of Shocks

  I was sleeping on the couch three days later when our phone rang at five thirty in the morning.

  My father picked up.

  It was the police, looking for my grandfather. My grandfather had died a few weeks before, but my cell phone plan was in his name, so that’s who they asked for.

  My father was completely disoriented. What on earth could the police want with my dead grandfather at five thirty in the morning?

  The caller clarified: “We’re trying to locate Alisa Kaplan.”

  “That’s my daughter. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “This is Detective John Houston. We have a video here that we need to discuss with her. Is your daughter in the house?”

  Alarm growing, my dad got out of bed and started moving down the hallway toward my room. “She’s asleep, safe and sound, in her bed. Is she in trouble? What’s going on?”

  The detective kept pressing. “She hasn’t been in the hospital recently? No injuries? She’s healthy?”

  My dad was beginning to freak out. “Let me get her, and we’ll talk about this together.” He broke into a run and threw open my bedroom door. Then he screamed.

  My bed, of course, was empty. I’d been sleeping in the family room for three nights, because I couldn’t bear sleeping under that collage. But I’d kept my sleep arrangements a secret. If my parents knew I wasn’t sleeping in my cherished bedroom, they’d start asking questions, and I didn’t have any answers to give them. So I’d sneak off to the couch in the family room after they turned in, and I’d wake up when I heard my dad turning off the alarm system in the morning. While he was letting the dogs out, I’d disappear down the hall, back to my bedroom.

  The scream woke me, and I sat bolt upright on the couch.

  “Alisa, where are you?”

  “Dad, I’m in here!” He stumbled in, clutching the phone, and told the detective he’d found me.

  The room was still dark; the sun hadn’t come up yet. My dad turned on the light and kneeled next to the couch. My mother came into the room, confused and frightened, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  “Who’s on the phone, Rick?”

  But my dad held up a hand and spoke again to John Houston. “What’s on this videotape that you need to discuss with Alisa?”

  “We have recovered a videotape, shot on the fifth of July, of a person we believe to be your daughter. We suspect that she may have been involved in a gang rape.”

  I couldn’t hear what the detective had said, but I was inches away, watching my dad’s face. When a person dies, it’s sometimes said that you can see the life leave their eyes. That was what happened to my father: His face went blank, as if the soul had been stripped right out of him. For a moment, it was as if my father wasn’t there at all.

  That look frightened me as much or more than anything that had happened up to that point. I had no idea what the person on the other end of the line had said to make his face go blank like that, but I burst into tears, my whole body shaking as if I were having a seizure. My dad grabbed my hand and said, “Alisa, I need you to be honest with me. It’s very important. I need you to tell me the truth. Where were you on July fifth and sixth?”

  I said, “I told you, Daddy. I was at Seth’s beach house. I promise, I was at Seth’s beach house.”

  “Alisa, I need you to tell me what happened. You have to tell me exactly what happened that night.”

  I was crying so hard I could barely get the words out. “I swear, Daddy, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  That was the first time in my life that I ever saw my dad cry.

  My poor mom didn’t have the slightest idea what was happening, but she was watching me and my dad, and she could tell that something unbelievably horrendous had taken place.

  “Rick, tell me what it is,” she begged, and my father, his face wet with tears, turned around and looked at her. Very plainly and clearly he said, “The police say Alisa may have been gang-raped.”

  That was the first time I heard those words. Immediately, my stomach clenched, and I started to throw up. I was shaking so badly that my knees were collapsing out from underneath me, so my parents grabbed me on either side and carried me into the bathroom.

  As I rested my head on the cool porcelain, I could hear my father, still on the phone with the detective. “She says she doesn’t know what happened.”

  There wasn’t anything more they could tell us over the phone. “You need to come down to the station immediately.”

  I don’t remember getting dressed, but ten minutes later, I was sitting in the backseat of my parents’ car.

  All three of us were crying. I told them every detail I could remember about the night at Seth’s house. It wasn’t much, but I felt hugely relieved to get whatever I knew out there. My parents were completely amazing; both of them made a special point to tell me how much they loved and supported me. “Whatever happened, we’ll get through this together, as a family.”

  They did have one question: Why hadn’t I told them what I suspected had happened? In this, too, I told them the truth: “I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble without having proof.”

  It was crazy, but driving over to the station with them as the sun came up that morning, I felt almost happy. From my perspective, the worst was over. Though my fears about the rape had been confirmed, I no longer had to carry the terrible burden of my suspicions around with me. Plus, I wasn’t alone. My parents knew what had happened to me, and they still loved me.

  At heart, I was a good girl. With the exception of the previous few months, I was accustomed to enjoying a close
relationship with my family. My mom seems tiny and fragile, but she’s always been the glue that holds our family together, and I knew she’d do whatever she had to in order to get us through this. And my dad, the big, strong, silent ex-cop, had always been there to protect his little girl.

  We would take this next step together.

  Almost immediately, however, we were caught up in a whirlwind that none of us could understand or control. At the station, my parents went one way, into one interview room. I went to another.

  The deputies couldn’t tell us very much, but we were able to piece together some of the story from what they told us and, later, from testimony at trial. The deputies had gotten hold of a videotape Seth had made. He’d taken his video camera to another beach house and left it there. When someone at that beach house saw what was on it, she decided to hide the camera and tape in her car, and later she gave it to a friend of hers, who turned it over to the police.

  After they did, it had taken the police a while to find me. Why? They’d begun their search for the anonymous girl in the video not with Seth’s friends, but in the local morgues. They believed from what they’d seen that I was dead.

  Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the woman who turned in the tape. She stands for everything that is good in humanity. It would have been so easy for her to turn a blind eye to what she saw on that videotape. Apparently, other people at that beach house had. But she put herself on the line for a girl she didn’t even know, simply because she knew that what she was watching was wrong. That makes her a hero.

  Much later, when I heard the parable of the Good Samaritan and finally understood where that expression came from, the woman who turned in the tape popped right into my head. In this Bible story, a man is robbed and beaten and left for dead. A priest passes his body and does not stop. Another citizen passes his body and does not stop. But then a Samaritan, one of the most hated groups in that society, happens to pass by, and he does stop. Not only does the Samaritan comfort the victim, but he cleans and dresses his wounds, and then brings him to an inn, where he pays for his food and shelter. Before he leaves, he instructs the innkeeper to take care of the wounded man and promises to pay whatever extra is owed on his way back.

  For me, it’s one of the most powerful stories in the Bible. We could use more Good Samaritans, that’s for sure. In 2012, in Steubenville, Ohio, a high school girl was sexually assaulted by a number of her peers. The similarities between her case and mine are striking. She was also incapacitated—drunk or drugged past consent. Her assault was also videotaped and shared. (Thank God there was no Twitter in 2002.) Her assailants, stars on the football team in a sports-obsessed town, were immediately defended as “good guys” by the community, while her “bad girl” history of sexual promiscuity was paraded for the courts and the press. (In fairness, there were a couple of dedicated, passionate journalists who stood up to the defense’s publicity team in my own case, including the award-winning investigative reporter Scott Moxley of the OC Weekly.)

  Needless to say, I followed the Steubenville case closely, and I went so far as to clip out an interview with Steubenville police chief William McCafferty. For a long while, I kept it taped above my desk. In it he says, “The thing I found most disturbing about this is that there were other people around when this was going on. Nobody had the morals to say, ‘Hey, stop it, that isn’t right.’ If you could charge people for not being decent human beings, a lot of people could have been charged that night.”

  That is such a powerful idea! If one person, possessing a little courage, had stood up that night in Steubenville, they could have changed the course of that young woman’s life, just as the Good Samaritan saved the life of the robbed man.

  Not everyone was comfortable with what was happening that night in Steubenville. In the background of one of the leaked videos, you can hear at least one boy trying to rein his friends in. But he didn’t act. Imagine what would have happened if he had!

  I believe, in my case, that the women who turned in the tape are precisely the decent human beings that Police Chief McCafferty was talking about. I don’t use the word hero lightly. It’s hard to buck peer pressure and do the right thing when it would be so much easier to close your eyes and wish the ugliness away. Good Samaritans, like the woman who turned in the tape, give me hope every day.

  But I had no thought for the woman who’d turned in the tape of my assault that first morning down at the station. All I felt was panic, and a growing feeling of terrible dread.

  The deputies indicated that all three of my friends had been involved, but nobody was responding to my questions and requests for more information. What exactly had they done?

  I heard the deputies talking about arrests and search warrants, and I desperately wished I could wave a magic wand and make the whole situation go away. Whatever had happened, the guys had been drunk. They hadn’t been thinking straight. These were my friends—I didn’t want to get them in trouble.

  The deputies asked me to identify parts of my body from still screen shots taken from the video. It was disturbing to see these pictures of myself, cut up into parts like a bucket of fried chicken. There was a shot of my hair, one of part of my belly and torso. It was definitely me.

  Then they told me that I’d need to get down to the hospital for a SART exam. No way, I said. I’d showered compulsively in the three days since whatever had happened. Any evidence that might have been there had long been washed down the drain.

  The detective explained that I probably had injuries and marks on the inside of my body from what they’d done to me. “If this is prosecuted,” she kept saying, “we’ll need this evidence.”

  I finally agreed to go. The detective told me that I’d have a victim’s advocate there the whole time. I could trust the advocate, she reassured me.

  When we got to the hospital, my victim’s advocate, Tiare, was waiting outside. I was impressed. She’d gotten there early so she could be there with me every step of the way. I was also impressed by her gorgeous, long, thick hair and her huge smile. Tiare very clearly explained her role: “I support sexual assault survivors and their families.” It was the first time I had heard the word survivor used in reference to sexual assault, and it gave me a little lift. Apparently, this experience could be survived.

  Tiare stayed with me every step of the way, as she’d told me she would. But the SART exam was still terrifying.

  The hospital had a special room set up for the exam, which is videotaped so that what they find can be used as evidence. When I saw the camera and the instruments, I started to freak out. I was sixteen—I’d never even had a regular gynecological exam.

  But Tiare stayed very calm and collected, and kept it positive. She talked in a sweet, low voice, and I focused on her words. Yes, it would be uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t be that uncomfortable, and anyway it wouldn’t take long, and I was so brave, and she’d be right there with me.

  “If there’s anything you don’t want to do, you say the word,” Tiare told me over and over again. It was important to me to feel I had some control. She also distracted me by getting me to talk about what I liked to do for fun—so I told her all about my car and where I liked to drive it. The nurse was great, too, and told me every single thing she was going to do. Tiare explained why every procedure was necessary, but even with her experienced ministrations, I was shaking so hard at some points that the nurse had to wait to continue with the exam.

  As the exam went on, I found myself getting increasingly anxious. Mostly, I needed some confirmation that all of this had happened because none of it felt real. Finally, I asked the nurse, “Do you see anything?”

  She nodded and then said, very simply, “There are a lot of rips and tears.”

  When I heard that, I got really, really scared.

  Afterward, Tiare hugged me and told me how great I’d been. “If the DA decides to prosecute, you’ll have helped them out with important evidence,” she told me. Until that moment, it ha
dn’t occurred to me that my ordeal wouldn’t end when the SART exam did.

  My parents drove me home. We were all wrung out and exhausted by the events of the day, and I fell into bed without dinner, but I found I couldn’t sleep. The idea of prosecution and a trial loomed up ahead like a bogeyman in the dark. I thought about what Tiare had said. The cops had talked about prosecution, too. What did that mean? Was there nothing I could do to stop this, even if I wanted to?

  I collect little figurines of angels now. My friends and family gave most of them to me. These little figurines hang mostly in my bedroom, where they give me comfort. They make me feel that I am safe and protected, no matter what might happen. And that was how Tiare made me feel, as she sat behind me, soothing me with her voice and stroking my hair. I always say that she was my first angel.

  Her calming presence that day has everything to do with why I became a victim’s advocate myself. Every time I sit behind a survivor during a SART exam, rubbing her shoulders and holding her shaking hand, I think about Tiare and what it meant to me, during the darkest hour of my life, to have her calm, strong, sweet, supportive presence behind me.

  Because of the way I’d felt the next morning and the fact I couldn’t remember anything that had happened at the beach house, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the drink Jared had made me had been laced. Of course, we couldn’t prove it. All traces of any drug would have been gone from my bloodstream by the time the police finally found me, three days later.

  On top of all this, I still didn’t know exactly what had happened to me. My parents must have had a more finely attuned sense of what they could tolerate; I don’t think they even asked. So three days later, when our golden retriever, Brandy, returned from the bottom of the driveway as she did every morning, tail wagging and the freshly delivered newspaper in her mouth, none of us were prepared for what we saw splashed across the front page: a detailed description of the gang rape charges that had been filed.