by Alisa Kaplan
A press release from the prosecutor’s office was even more explicit. My three friends had had vaginal, anal, and oral sex with my unconscious body, first on a couch, then on a pool table. They slapped and pinched me, and made signs to each other that I was still out cold. They continued for more than forty minutes while making hand signs pretending they were gangsters, laughing, and mugging for the camera while they assaulted me with the thick end of a pool cue, a Snapple bottle, a juice can, and a lit cigarette.
I didn’t make it to the bathroom before I threw up, and neither did my mom.
Chapter Three
Harassed
Seth, Brian, and Jared were charged with twenty-four felony charges, including rape and assault with a deadly weapon.
The DA’s office asked me if I’d testify. That was a nice way of putting it; really, they told me that I was expected to testify. I didn’t want to. In fact, with every fiber of my being, I wanted this whole thing to go away. But the DA’s office very clearly told me that they were planning to go ahead with the trial, and that I would almost certainly be called, whether I wanted to testify or not. It would be easier for everyone if I cooperated with them.
The wheels were set in motion.
Immediately, it became clear that Seth’s dad was serious about making sure the case didn’t come to trial. He was astronomically rich and hugely influential in county politics. (The alarming corruption in the sheriff’s department would come to light later, in large part because of my case. The only reason Seth’s dad didn’t do time in prison himself was because he testified against his friends.)
I hadn’t been named in any of the papers, but the harassment began as soon as the DA’s office announced they’d try the case. One day when my mom was leaving for work, she saw a dark green SUV sitting at the end of our block. My parents lived in a quiet suburb. People parked in their garages, so any car that was parked on the street drew attention—particularly if the man in the car was taking notes and stayed there from morning until night.
We started seeing that same car frequently around our neighborhood. About a week later, my mom saw the guy talking to our neighbor, Beverley. When she asked what he wanted, he told Beverley he was a private investigator hired by the district attorney’s office to investigate a rape that had allegedly taken place. But when my mom checked, the DA’s office had never heard of him.
After that, there was almost always a car parked outside our house. If we called the cops, the guy outside would drive off and come back later. I was frightened and confused. What were they looking for, and why? Why were they watching me? I hadn’t done anything wrong, had I?
My parents were understandably freaked out. They perceived, more quickly than I did, that my safety might be at risk, and they started circling the wagons. I wasn’t ever allowed to be home by myself. If my parents had to go out, they made sure that my brother would be home. If he had plans, I had to go wherever they were going.
Then, on a sunny afternoon at the end of July, I got a really bad scare. I was making my way home from the tanning salon when I noticed a maroon Volvo following me. The man inside was driving very aggressively, tailgating me so closely I felt sure he was about to slam into my car. Then he pulled up next to me at a light and started photographing me with a large, official-looking camera, like the paparazzi that had chased Princess Diana to her death.
I was terrified. I tried to get away from him, but no matter how fast I drove or how quickly I turned, he was always right behind me. In a panic, I called my mom. She was even more frightened than I was. Neither of us had any idea who he was or what he was likely to do. She got on the house phone to the police department. By the time she got a cop on the phone, she was practically losing her mind with fear for me.
In the meantime, I was screaming and crying into the speakerphone and driving like a maniac, trying everything I could think of to get this car off my tail. It’s a miracle that I didn’t die in an accident that day. I was a good driver (my dad had made sure of that), but an inexperienced one; I was sixteen, after all. Yet there I was, driving as if I were doing stunts on a closed course.
The police told my mom to tell me to go to the police station. I’d never been there before, so she had to give me directions. Between her own nerves and my hysteria, I barely made it. But they didn’t think to mention that there were two entrances. I took the turn into the wrong one, and the guy in the Volvo followed me in, blocking me in so I couldn’t get out. Then he was out of the car, running toward me with the camera up and flashing, shooting picture after picture of me trapped in my car, powerless to do anything but scream in fear and outrage.
Eventually, my mom was able to figure out what had happened, and a number of police officers came around back to find me. As soon as he saw the cops approach, the guy jumped back into his car and reversed out of there. I was a shaking mess, so frightened I could hardly speak, let alone drive. Being stalked, chased, cornered, and photographed like that had left me more vulnerable and scared than I have ever been.
The incident completely traumatized me. My car had been my happy place. In the months immediately after they’d given it to me, my parents had laughed about how easy it was to get me to run errands for them—as long as I could crank up the radio and zoom around, I’d gladly run out to pick up coals for the barbecue or whatever they needed. But after the incident that ended up at the police station, I felt shaky and scared as soon as I had the keys in my hand. I didn’t like to be in the car by myself at all anymore. Even if someone was with me, as soon as I got behind the wheel, I made sure the windows were rolled up and checked the mirrors compulsively for a tail. My days of cruising for fun and relaxation were over.
The incident had also completely traumatized my parents. As a result, they got more and more controlling. One day, my dad yelled at me for simply sitting at the window in my room, looking out at the street. “They’re going to take your picture!” he yelled. I started to accuse him of paranoia, but, as usual, there was a car parked outside. Plus, the DA’s office knew that my resolve to testify was wavering, and they may have been worried that I would run away, yet another reason for my parents to keep close tabs on me. More and more, I was trapped in my room.
A side effect of rape is the feeling of powerlessness, of a loss of control. For me, everything that came afterward seemed to exacerbate that feeling.
My parents were trying to protect me, but it was a difficult thing for me to tolerate. I was supposed to be coming into my own, becoming a young woman. Precisely when I should be experiencing independence for the first time, I had round-the-clock babysitting instead. It was a blow to my emerging sense of myself.
The press, meanwhile, had gone crazy. Seth’s dad’s money and influence, combined with the shocking nature of the crime, made the story headline fodder—and not only in California, but all over the world. Seth’s dad responded immediately by hiring a full-time publicist.
That’s probably why so many of the news stories focused on the impact that the case would have on these “good boys.” These hardworking, upstanding young men from good families had made a mistake, more than one article claimed. Should their whole lives be derailed because they’d gotten a little drunk? Why should these smart, gentle boys have their lives ruined because of one dumb girl?
I was shocked. I was incredibly naïve, and it had not yet occurred to me how many different ways you can tell—or spin—a story. The worst part was that, deep down, I agreed.
I’d like to tell you that I read those stories and got outraged and angry. Sometimes I did. But more often, I took them at face value and let what they were saying reinforce everything I was already feeling, so that I saw myself as even more worthless than I had felt already.
People tend to be shocked when they hear about the bias in the reporting that was done on my case. The sad truth is that victim blaming in the press is common, not just in my case, but in lots of rape cases. In 2011, the New York Times reported on the gang rape of an el
even-year-old girl. The writer described the girl as “dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s.” She hung out with teenagers, the writer made sure to mention.
Read between the lines, and the message is clear: She was asking for it.
This is classic victim blaming. The simple truth is that, no matter what she was wearing or doing, or what her reputation was (and remember, we’re talking about an eleven-year-old girl!), she did not deserve to be gang-raped.
Later in the article, the writer quoted one of the people in the town: “The boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.” When I see a similar comment now, I think, Yes, hopefully, they will have to live with it for the rest of their lives. And if you don’t want to live with the consequences of being a sexual predator, then you probably shouldn’t go around raping people.
When similar things were being written about me, though, I was too devastated to be rational.
That summer, I saw my dreams of being a journalist circle the drain. I’d always thought about journalists as heroes who did a public service by exposing injustice and shining light on the stories of the underrepresented. More than anything, I had wanted to be the next Barbara Walters. I loved how smart she was, how hard-hitting, how uncompromising in her dedication to the story. She didn’t back down from controversy or let the rich and powerful intimidate her. Nothing was more important than getting to the truth.
But the reporters writing about my case were essentially printing the press releases that the defense handed them. This was how they used the power they’d been given? This wasn’t journalism; it was publicity. The only thing I could console myself with was my anonymity: At least in the articles, I was referred to as Jane Doe.
Then an acquaintance from around the neighborhood called my mom.
“I am so sorry to hear about what happened to Alisa,” she said.
We had told very few people what was going on, and the woman who called was nowhere near my mom’s inner circle. My mom says that when she heard that, the hackles stood up on the back of her neck.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Our neighbor had found a bright orange flier in her mailbox, which read: “IMPORTANT NOTICE: Anyone having information regarding the Kaplan family and/or the circumstances concerning the alleged rape of their daughter on or about July 6, 2002, please call.”
The number led to Seth’s mother’s voice mail box. She denied having anything to do with it.
Legally, the victim in a sexual assault case is guaranteed privacy, especially a minor. But the entire neighborhood had been papered in the bright orange fliers. They were posted on every community bulletin board in the area, pushed under doors and into mailboxes, and taped in the windows of local businesses.
My brother, Jaime, went to each and every one of those stores and restaurants, and ripped each and every one of those fliers down. The lady who delivered our mail took them out of mailboxes whenever she saw them and reported the incident to her bosses. But the damage had already been done. I was living in a community of 170,000 people spread out over forty square miles, and this was one of the most scandalous things that had ever happened there. There was nowhere to hide. My time as a Jane Doe was over.
By the end of July, because of the intense media attention on the case and the smear campaign, everyone in my town knew what had happened to me. (More than I did, probably, considering my parents forbade me to read any account that might have details we hadn’t already heard.) I endured shaming whispers behind hands at the dry cleaners, the grocery store, the bowling alley. There was nowhere to hide. Suddenly, I was “the girl who’d cried rape.”
A couple of years ago, a friend asked me why rape victims feel shame. I opened my mouth to bite her head off, and then I stopped. It’s actually a good question. “I can understand that you’d feel violated,” she continued. “But why shame? It’s not as if you did anything wrong. Why should you feel like you did?”
It made me think: Why is there so much shame associated with rape? I think a lot of it comes out of the way we persist in blaming the victim. This is the idea that you must have done something to ask for it or it wouldn’t have happened, right?
It’s hard to understand why people feel the need to do this, but for me it all fell into perspective when a friend told me that when her grandmother was a girl, it was common to whisper the word cancer. Seventy years ago, cancer was considered to be a shameful condition. Nice people didn’t talk about it.
I was astounded when I heard that for the first time. Why on earth would there be stigma associated with cancer? But I now believe that people whispered the word for the same reason they blame rape victims. Rape and cancer are both misfortunes that can (and do) happen to anyone. But nobody wants to think that those things can happen to them, so they comfort themselves by blaming the victim. If they want to believe it can’t happen to them, then they have to believe that there was a reason that it happened to you.
It may not be admirable, but it’s human.
The good news is that we don’t whisper the word cancer anymore. Survivors and their supporters proudly wear pink ribbons and Livestrong bracelets, and march together to fund research. It’s my hope that if we keep pointing out how wrong victim blaming is, and how it hurts rape victims, then sexual assault survivors will get there, too. We still have a ways to go, though, and as a survivor I can tell you that the sense of shame is real—and it is a terrible thing to live with on a daily basis.
As the summer progressed, the harassment got more intense with every passing day. My dad was routinely followed to work and photographed. One guy called our house, offering his services to investigate our side of the case. We discovered that he was already working for the defense; the call had been a troll for information. One night my brother woke up to a noise outside the house. When he got up to investigate, he found that it wasn’t a raccoon raiding our trash, but a strange man nosing through the coffee grounds and carrot peels. The whole family felt violated.
Then a copy of my cell phone records showed up in the mail—“per our request,” said the accompanying letter. But we hadn’t requested any phone records. Someone else had, apparently. It was deeply disturbing to realize that they’d had whatever security information they needed to get the records released. The same thing happened with my medical records, never mind that neither of my parents had signed for their release. We found out when the publicist for the defense handed them out—my private medical records. Nothing was safe.
One other circumstance that summer hurt me worse than all of the fear and intimidation and humiliation did, or the loss of my independence: I no longer had anywhere to go, or anyone to go with. I had lost all of my friends.
Right after the charges were pressed, the phone rang off the hook. One after another, my girlfriends called me to ask me to reconsider my testimony. Seth and Brian were good guys, they told me. They’d been drunk. The guys hadn’t known what they were doing. I’d been drunk, too. And besides, they were quick to remind me, it wasn’t as if I’d been some pristine virgin. I bore some responsibility in this, too.
Private investigators had gotten to them. I believed this because my friend Beka told me. She told me they’d tried to get to her and her family, too. Beka and I had been friends since fifth grade. She was upbeat and spunky, with the most contagious laugh you’ve ever heard. And while she liked to have a good time, she wasn’t a party girl and didn’t hang out with them, either.
She told me investigators had shown up at her house, hoping that since Beka was such a good friend of mine, maybe she could help me see what a silly idea it would be to testify. Certainly we’d both be very well taken care of; we could have anything we wanted. Beka’s parents were allies: They told us about the offers they’d received. Their family, though, was the exception to the rule. As it became clear that I wasn’t going to be pressured into not testifying, the phone stopped ringing. Aside from Beka, my friends were just gone.
There was no one to talk to, no one to tell me a joke, no one to hug me, no one to eat ice cream with. I was, of course, lucky enough to have the unconditional support of my family. But ask any sixteen-year-old girl, and she’ll tell you that her friends mean the world to her, and I was no different. Those girls and I had been inseparable. We’d shared everything: clothes, makeup, notes for class. We knew each other’s locker combinations and hopes for the future. Now, suddenly, I’d been cut from the herd.
The next thing I heard about my girlfriends came from the DA’s office. They would be testifying against me. I’m not sure there are words to describe how much this hurt.
You’ve probably heard about a number of cases recently where girls have killed themselves after being sexually assaulted. In almost every case, it’s clear that the decision to die by suicide had less to do with the sexual assault than with the online shaming these girls had to endure after the rape: pictures of the assault posted on Twitter, public bullying via Facebook. I have a hard enough time understanding how boys could bully a rape victim after the fact, but it makes me absolutely crazy to know that girls—many of them their former friends—attacked the victims, too, calling them sluts and liars.
What is it that makes girls turn on one another? More victim blaming, I suppose. I thank God every day that there was no Facebook or Twitter yet the summer I was raped. I lived through the pre-digital version, though, and I can completely understand why those girls killed themselves: the harassment, the name-calling, the cruelty, and the betrayal by their so-called friends.
