Still Room for Hope

by Alisa Kaplan

  But when the cravings for drugs would get too intense, I’d head out again, back to Neil and the streets and the drugs—often without even saying goodbye.

  Shirley is an incredibly compassionate person, but she’s also had a lot of experience with drug and alcohol abuse because of her job. She could see, clear as day, that my mom making me lasagna exactly how I liked it and buying me clean cute T-shirts to replace my own soiled clothes wasn’t helping me to quit the drugs.

  It took Mom a long time to hear what Shirley was telling her. There was absolutely nothing hard about my Mom or about the way she loved people. My dad was the fierce one, the tough guy, the one who didn’t take any flack from anyone. But my mom was the sweetest, most generous, most openhearted person anyone could ever hope to meet—and that was true whether you were her daughter, a stranger, or a guest in her home. Still, in the months before the second trial, she came to understand that her nurturing and love was hurting me, not helping.

  One day, I called home with some nonsense junkie excuse. Someone had stolen my last five dollars. Could they come pick me up? My mom showed up, but the atmosphere in the car was tense. I was coming off a binge, irritated and anxious and, of course, pretending not to be an emaciated, scarred up, drug-sick lunatic, while my mother was pretending not to notice how filthy and thin and unwell I looked.

  Then my mom noticed me scratching myself. She leaned over, looking closely, and we both saw little bugs leaping off my greasy, foul-smelling sweatshirt. I had fleas, like a neglected, unloved dog.

  My mom pulled the car over, reached over me, and opened the passenger-side door.

  “Get out,” she said.

  Something that day helped the message strike home. Maybe it was as simple as the world’s tidiest person not wanting her pristine car to become infested with fleas—or finally understanding how far her daughter had gone, that I’d get into her beloved car crawling with them. Whatever it was, my mom had finally heard Shirley’s tough love message, and she was done.

  Shocked beyond belief, I got out of her car. A few days later, my dad told me that after years of letting me use her for money and food, my mother had disowned me. I was not allowed anywhere near their home, and she did not want to have any contact with me. In the future, when strangers asked her about her children, she would tell them only that she had a son.

  It was as if my parents had completely reversed roles. When I was growing up, my dad was the disciplinarian, the one who laid down the law, and my mom was always the softie. But I’d pushed her too far. The message was clear: I’d have no relationship with my mother again until I got clean.

  Neil’s abuse intensified. He blackened my eyes, left bruises and cuts all over my body, knocked out one of my teeth, and fractured my arm. My dad drove me to the hospital, frantic to get me clean and away from him, but I wasn’t going anywhere but back to drugs.

  Neil and I were arrested on drug charges, and then arrested again. It was self-sabotage, pure and simple. I was wresting some control over my life, in the most self-​destructive way possible. According to my twisted logic, if everything had to go down the toilet, at least I was the one doing the flushing.

  After the second arrest, I realized I had nowhere to go. Neil was still in jail. I couldn’t call my parents; my mom would make sure my dad didn’t come to help. I went by the house of a couple I knew because Neil and I had sold them drugs. I spent two nights sleeping on their floor, at the foot of their baby’s crib. We used drugs in that room, while the baby was right there. It was one of the most shameful things I remember doing, but I was too far gone for it to register.

  When that couple kicked me out, I went to see if Neil’s parents would let me stay at their house, but they only let me in long enough to fill a backpack with some of my stuff. So I went to find Sammy, another guy I knew from the drug world.

  Sammy lived at home, but his mom was a nurse who worked the graveyard shift. He told me I could sleep in his room at night when she was at work, but he was so scared of her finding out—she was religious and incredibly strict—he made me sleep underneath his bed, staring up at the springs. There wasn’t enough room under there for me to turn over so I could sleep on my side.

  I begged Sammy to let me use the shower. It would be the first one I’d had since spending the night in jail. At first he said no way, but on the third night we got ridiculously high together, and I was able to wear him down until he relented.

  The shower is where I was when Sammy’s mom’s came home unexpectedly.

  Her shift at the hospital had been canceled. Twice my size and strong as a bull from lifting patients, she stormed right into the bathroom and yanked me out of there, soaking wet, naked, covered in soap and shampoo. She didn’t want to let me rinse my hair, but I convinced her to give me some privacy to put my clothes on, and as soon as she stepped out, I locked the door behind her and jumped back in the shower to rinse off. She was so mad, I thought she was going to break the door down. I got dressed before she could rip it off its hinges, without drying myself off. As soon as I opened the bathroom door, she picked me up and threw me and my backpack out the door, into the freezing cold November night.

  The whole time, she was preaching at me, throwing Bible verse after Bible verse at me to let me know that the trouble I was in wouldn’t end in this lifetime. “You better find Jesus,” she yelled, before slamming the door. “Even with all this that you’re doing, God still loves you.”

  There I was, high and sopping wet and freezing, without anywhere to go. There’s no God, I thought. God wouldn’t put me through this.

  A few weeks before, Neil and I had ducked into a Dumpster stall in an alley behind a McDonald’s in a rundown shopping center to get high. We’d seen a busted couch sitting nearby. It was the filthiest thing I’d ever seen, so ragged and heavily stained that you couldn’t tell what color it had been when it was new. Graying foam inserts leaked out of the few remaining cushions, and in a number of places the tattered upholstery had ripped off the frame, exposing the bare wood and springs underneath. It was such a depressing, disgusting piece of furniture that Neil had made a joke about it.

  But it was two o’clock in the morning, and I was wet and freezing and high, with no money, no cell phone, and nowhere else to turn. So I went to find that couch.

  The alley was terrifying. The only source of light was a tiny security light hanging over the Dumpster. Everything else was pitch black. “Anyone could be out there,” I thought, and the idea made me so uncomfortable that I went into the Dumpster stall and squatted in there for a little bit, grateful for the shelter from the wind and the idea that at least I’d see someone coming. When I stopped feeling so high, I went back out to that vile couch. What I wanted was to fall asleep and to not wake up.

  Half an hour before, of course, Sammy’s mom had given me the answer. She’d served it up to me on a platter. God still loved me, she’d said. He loved me, as sick and screwed up as I was. There would never have been a better time for me to meet Jesus than in that alley. But I wasn’t ready to hear.

  Neil stayed in jail for ten days, and I spent the rest of them on that couch. Shirley had been right. I wasn’t any better than those bums on Skid Row.

  The biggest difference, in my opinion, between the first trial and the second was passion.

  The defense had always had passion. As twisted and wrongheaded as it might have been, there was a deep conviction fueling their win-at-all-costs strategy. For the second trial, our side had passion, too.

  Chuck truly believed that young men should not be permitted to do the things that those guys did to me—no matter what I’d drunk or worn, or whom I’d fooled around with. He believed that what had happened to me was wrong and that the guys who did it must be punished, or it would be sending a terrible message not only to them, but also to society at large.

  I was high for the whole second trial, except for the days before I testified. In order to get me there, Chuck had my parents check me into a hotel, never l
etting me out of sight—all so he could guarantee I’d be clean on the stand. My mom was there, too. Although she had stopped supporting me as a drug addict, she never stopped supporting me as a victim.

  Chuck ran the second trial very differently than the first one. The defense wanted to make sure that we didn’t allude to the possibility that I’d been drugged. So Chuck agreed to a stipulation stating that the only substance in the cup Jared gave me was eight ounces of gin. They stepped into his trap. That stipulation opened a door: if that drink was the only drug I’d consumed (plus one beer and a hit of pot), then how on earth did I get so drunk that I passed out?

  Chuck’s experience benefited me in another way, too. During jury selection, both the defense and the prosecution get to pick the citizens they want to see on the jury. Each side has a certain number of choices they can reject. But how can you know who’s going to be sympathetic toward your case? This is why picking juries is an art form.

  The defense had hired a high-powered jury consultant, and some of the jurors from the previous trial acted as consultants, too. They were looking for certain kinds of people they thought would be most likely to relate to the defendants: people who hated law enforcement, people who wouldn’t necessarily have a knee-jerk negative reaction to the idea of violence against women. They were also looking for people who’d be appalled and outraged by the idea of a woman with multiple sexual partners.

  One of the potential jurors in our case was a Hispanic man, with tattoos covering his arms. His appearance, his ethnicity, and the fact that he lived in an area known for gang activity made the defense feel very comfortable with him. Plus, he didn’t have a wife or any kids that he could imagine lying like a rag doll on that pool table. The defense was sure that the combination of all those factors would make him less likely to vote to convict.

  But Chuck had thirty years of experience interviewing potential jurors for sexual assault cases. He’d interviewed this guy, and he’d listened to his answers. Maybe this guy did look kind of scary, but Chuck had found him to be quite sensitive and thoughtful, the kind of person Chuck thought would make a good dad someday. The defense practically fell off their chairs when Chuck didn’t use one of his vetoes to get this guy off the jury. But they were probably more surprised when he turned out to be jury foreman.

  I felt vindicated when I heard this story a couple of years after the trial. The defense had made a judgment about that juror based on his appearance. As it turned out, neither one of us would be so easily dismissed.

  As the case went to trial, the defense approached us with the possibility of a plea bargain: The guys would serve time, but they wouldn’t have to register as sex offenders. For me, that was an instant no. The sex offender classification was the most important thing for me. What they had done had left a hole in me. That night hadn’t been youthful hijinks, boys being boys. It had been serious and damaging, with lasting effects. I wanted to make sure that what they’d done to me wasn’t treated like some little mishap they could laugh off in the future or explain away with a wave of the hand to a future girlfriend. They had to own what they had done. If I had to wear my own scarlet letter, the placard around my neck that I felt everyone could see—THE SEXUALLY ABUSED WHORE—then they did, too. So I told Chuck that the only plea we’d entertain would be one in which they had to register.

  The night before I was set to testify, my parents and I got a call from Chuck telling us that the guys were seriously thinking about taking a plea bargain—one that included agreeing to register as sex offenders. We were up half the night, hoping and praying that they would take it, because that would save me the horrendous experience of heading back into that courtroom. The very idea that I might not have to go back was like a stay of execution. Then, at the crack of dawn, we got a call telling us that they were fine with the jail time offered, but that they had once again refused to register as sex offenders.

  I was devastated. I would have to testify again.

  The next morning, I had a breakdown so severe that my parents thought I’d have to be hospitalized. It was in the parking lot of the DA’s office. When I was testifying, we’d go from our hotel room to the DA’s office, meet quickly with the team, and then they’d arrange transport for us to the courtroom. The press attention was so crazy that we had to be snuck into the courtroom through the judge’s chambers.

  I was fine when I got into the car—still a little shaky from lack of sleep, but feeling strong and sure of myself. And then a dreadful, creeping cold feeling came over me. Suddenly, I had a whole-body memory of how horrific it had been to sit in the witness box at the first trial. My throat closed as my mind raced, and my heart was beating so hard it hurt. I couldn’t get a breath, and bright black spots appeared in front of my eyes.

  I started crying and screaming. “I can’t do this. I won’t do this.” I begged to be allowed to back out and started trying to claw my way out of the car.

  By the time we arrived at the DA’s office, I was a complete wreck, sobbing like a spineless blob of ectoplasm in the backseat. My mom tried to talk to me, but quickly realized there wasn’t anything she could do to get me out of there, so she went up to the office and sent Shirley down.

  I had locked myself in the car. Shirley waited patiently outside until I let her in, and then she crawled into the backseat with me. She held me and rocked me like a little girl. Silently, she let me cry and shake and rage. When she did speak, it was only to remind me why I had agreed to testify in the first place. “It’s not only for you, Alisa, but so these guys don’t think they can do this again to some other girl. Because I can promise you one thing: If they get away with it this time, they will do it again.”

  With my head in Shirley’s lap, I allowed myself to be comforted. Once again, she knew precisely how to reach me. I wasn’t strong enough to testify for myself. But thinking about all the other girls the guys might do this to—and more, all of the other girls all around the country and the world who would be vulnerable if we sent the message that what the guys had done to me was okay—made me feel braver. Thinking about all those other women was what got me out of the car and into the courtroom that day.

  My fears, of course, had been totally justified. The defense made mincemeat out of me on the stand, attacking me so viciously it made it seem like they’d handled me gently at the first trial. Again, the case should have been very clear: It’s against California law to have sex with someone who cannot consent throughout the act. But once again, it was as if I were the one on trial. For four days, the defense grilled me in the most humiliating way possible. Their goal was to convince the jury that I’d been awake—or that even if I was unconscious, I was such a whore that I would have consented to everything they did to me.

  It was a horrible experience. I felt horrendously exposed and vulnerable, like they were ripping the skin right off me so that everyone in the room could stare at my insides. The humiliation was worse, now that I’d seen the video: I knew exactly what the jury was thinking when they looked at me, the images they had burned into their brains. And, after watching the video, I found myself even more powerfully disturbed by the tack the defense was taking. It was really shocking that those men could turn around and try to portray me as the perpetrator after seeing how limp and unresponsive I’d been.

  Something else disturbed me. I was older and more experienced in the world during the second trial, and it felt to me like some of these older male lawyers were getting a truly unseemly amount of pleasure out of getting me to describe various sex acts. The sight of them leering at me as they asked their questions made my skin crawl.

  But I made it. When they’d asked their questions at the first trial, I’d answered honestly: “I don’t know.” After seeing the video, I did know—more than I wanted to, in fact. So I could be very clear about what had happened, and about the emotional impact the rape had on me. I wept, openly and often, while I was testifying. Seeing the video had practically killed me, but no one could complain that I didn�
�t show enough emotion on the stand.

  And on March 23, 2005, a second jury convicted each of the three men of several counts of sexual penetration with a foreign object by intoxication. None of the men were convicted of rape or of assault with a deadly weapon. They would not be sentenced for another long year.

  Years later, I asked Chuck Middleton why the guys hadn’t been convicted of rape, and he explained that rape is specific in that it requires force (against the will of the victim) and penetration. One of the jurors in my case had held out on that charge.

  This happens a lot. The good news is that there’s a movement to broaden the definition of rape. In 2012, the FBI changed their definition of rape to “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

  That’s more inclusive than the previous FBI definition, which was simply: “The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” That definition didn’t include male victims, rape with an object, or victims of forced anal or oral sex. And “forcible” could be used to exclude anything but overwhelming and potentially deadly violence, including crimes similar to mine, where the victim was under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Nobody had had to hold me down or use force, because I couldn’t move.

  The FBI’s new definition is good news because it will dramatically change the way that these crimes are tracked and reported—and many people, myself included, believe that it will give a more accurate picture of rape in the United States. Unfortunately, local criminal codes seem to be heading in the opposite direction. Twenty-five states and the District of Columbia have stopped using the word rape in their criminal codes altogether. So a lot of real crimes aren’t being counted when they should be. That’s something I feel should change.