There was nothing in my mind up for debate. But as she spoke, her reasoning hit me with horrifying clarity: his only way out is through you. It was like watching wolves being clipped off their leashes while someone whispered in your ear that meat has been sewn into your pockets. The only chance he had of being acquitted was to prove that to his knowledge, the sexual act had been consensual. He’d force moans in my mouth, assign lecherous behavior, to shift the blame onto me.
When I’d been assigned a DA, I thought the letters stood for defense attorney. District Attorney, Alaleh corrected. Brock has a defense attorney. I thought, But I need the defense, self-defense, to protect me from him. He’d hired one of the most prestigious lawyers in the Bay Area. As she talked I realized surviving the assault had only been the first challenge. If I ever wanted to confront him, contest his side of the story, it’d have to be in court. Now, we had to assume his innocence. In the court system, the assault hadn’t even happened yet. He’d seen me as a body, but would attempt to destroy me as a person.
Up until then I’d envisioned a limitless future. Now the lights went out, and two narrow corridors lit up. You can walk down the one where you attempt to forget and move on. Or you walk down the corridor that leads back to him. There is no right choice; both are long and difficult and take indefinite amounts of time. I was still running my hands along the walls looking for a third door, to a corridor where this never happened, where I could continue the life I had planned.
The dictionary definition of deny is to refuse to admit the truth or existence of. This refusal is another harm in itself. I deny your truth, it is not real, it does not exist. This will tinker with your sanity. The truth I had known would be complicated beyond understanding. It would be drowned in legal jargon, in personal attacks and manipulation, until it became so murky I would no longer be able to see it myself.
When I got home, I reopened the articles, squares stacking across my screen, all his neat rows of teeth. I was ready to see raised pitchforks, everyone in line with my disbelief. As I began reading, my scrolling slowed.
He was only nineteen! She hooked up with a freshman? Doesn’t that make her the predator? Haven’t you ever heard of gang rape in India. There are women out there suffering real abuse and you want to call this assault. Bored suburban kids can’t keep it in their pants. Lame. It’s not like he dragged her. If she had a boyfriend why wasn’t he there? Mother of the year award. What kind of mom dumps her two daughters at a frat party? Not trying to blame the victim but something is wrong if you drink yourself to unconsciousness . . .She didn’t even go to Stanford. Did she pass out with her underwear off while peeing? Whatever happened to the buddy system? I, for one, am not convinced there was a crime of the felony magnitudes charged here, and possibly no crime at all aside from consensual lewd behavior. Did he give her a roofie? If not, why would any woman get so drunk? I have never allowed myself to get so drunk that I don’t know what I am doing.
They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability. Drinking is not inherently immoral: a night of heavy drinking calls for Advil and water. But being drunk and raped seemed to call for condemnation. People were confounded that I had failed to protect myself.
This is the real mystery: This was a top athlete, a highly intelligent, good-looking boy! One might think he’d find lots of girls who wanted to hook up with him! Instead, he ruins his life by doing this? It’s hard to credit.
The indignation I imagined mirrored was absent. Some people wrote nasty things about him, Pretty boy won’t stand a chance in prison. Some wrote kind comments, Please, Emily, do not let this define you. Take back your identity and have an awesome life!!! If Brock Turner is innocent, I’m an extinct flying Juju bird. This is baloney. These words temporarily lifted me, but their warmth faded quickly. I found people unmoved, mildly disgusted by the whole thing, hoping their kids would never suffer similar fates.
That night I understood a few things to be true: I knew he led the Oakwood team to state championship two years in a row. I knew he was a heavily recruited athlete, a dominant swimmer, who finished second in the 200-yard backstroke. I knew there were multiple jokes made about breaststroke. I knew they called me finger lickin’ good. I knew I did not deserve help, because this was not real trauma. He was a kid, not a criminal. Accomplished, not dangerous. He was the one who lost everything. I was just the nobody it happened to.
The rage that had crackled and roared in my chest all morning had been reduced to a few dying embers in my throat. I closed my computer, laid back. I wondered how in an instant my identity had been reduced to the blacked-out and raped woman. This person who could never be a role model, at best a cautionary tale. If anyone ever found out, I understood I’d be publicly disgraced, permanently branded. This part of me had to be severed. I passed all of this mess, these new obstacles, uncertain future, soiled identity, to Emily. My ribs shook as I breathed out water, as I let go of the kind voices that’d said, Juju bird, baloney.
The next day, I stood in a coffee shop. I saw a stack of newspapers, a bright blue rectangle on the front page. It was pool water. I saw the pale slivers of Brock’s arms, dark goggled eyes, capped head. There were blue rectangles littered on the tables around me, Brock swimming across the café. One man in a polo with a wide neck sat and spread the paper open in his hands. I looked around wondering if these people were the ones commenting, if I should resent them, fear them, question them.
I told my sister not to read the comments. I told her most people spent less than two minutes reading the articles, many of their facts blatantly incorrect. This was just a wee sample of the population; if you were to actually survey every person, you’d find responses that were much more reasonable, sympathetic. So don’t read them, okay? Who cares?
What I really meant was that I was investigating each comment so she didn’t have to. I thought, Of course I get to read them, they’re my messages. I treated the comment sections like Emily’s personal victim in-box. I refreshed them every night, digested every damaging note. When they said, Why was she outside in a dress in the winter? I said, Winter in California you dunce, we hike in shorts on Christmas. I wanted to fix everything, straighten it out one by one. Explain explain explain. But this defensiveness would carry over into my regular life. When my parents asked simple questions unrelated to the case, Have you gotten a chance to mail in the, have you folded the clothes on your, can you take out the recycling, I grew tense, a childish hostility. No I haven’t, I’m busy. Stop blaming me, stop attacking me, you’re saying this is all my fault. I dreaded more confirmation that I was not good.
I knew I shouldn’t have been reading the comments, but I wanted to understand. Some supported me, but others had gifted themselves with the task of constructing every possible explanation and excuse to put me in the wrong. Was I crazy? Was I exaggerating? Was this even sad?
What was unique about this crime, was that the perpetrator could suggest the victim experienced pleasure and people wouldn’t bat an eye. There’s no such thing as a good stabbing or bad stabbing, consensual murder or nonconsensual murder. In this crime, pain could be disguised and confused as pleasure. I had been to the hospital, a place where people go when their bodies are sick or wounded. But I pulled my sleeves over my bruises, afraid I would not receive the same comforts as an injured person.
In rape cases it’s strange to me when people say, Well why didn’t you fight him? If you woke up to a robber in your home, saw him taking your stuff, people wouldn’t ask, Well why didn’t you fight him? Why didn’t you tell him no? He’s already violating an unspoken rule, why would he suddenly decide to adhere to reason? What would give you reason to think he’d stop if you told him to? And in this case, with my being unconscious, why were there still so many questions?
There was another line of argument that nagged at me: the suggestion that boys simply could not help themselves. As if he never
had a choice. I have told each of my girls heading off to college: If you walk in front of a semi truck expect to get hit. Don’t walk in front of a semi. If you go to a frat party expect to get drunk, drugged and raped. Don’t go to a frat party. You went to a frat and got assaulted? What did you expect? I’d heard this in college, freshman girls in frats compared to sheep in a slaughterhouse. I understand you are not supposed to walk into a lion’s den because you could be mauled. But lions are wild animals. And boys are people, they have minds, live in a society with laws. Groping others was not a natural reflex, biologically built in. It was a cognitive action they were capable of controlling.
It seemed once you submitted to walking through fraternity doors, all laws and regulation ceased. They were not asked to adhere to the same rules, yet there were countless guidelines women had to follow: cover your drink, stick close to others, don’t wear short skirts. Their behavior was the constant, while we were the variable expected to change. When did it become our job to do all the preventing and managing? And if houses existed where many young girls were getting hurt, shouldn’t we hold the guys in these houses to a higher standard, instead of reprimanding the girls? Why was passing out considered more reprehensible than fingering the passed-out person?
I also understood the way the environment of this case did not work in my favor. Does real crime even happen at schools? Crazy things happen on campuses all the time. If someone took a shit in a kiddie pool on a residential street, people would say, That’s filthy, unacceptable, absolutely not. If someone took a shit in a kiddie pool on a fraternity lawn, people would say, Well, that’s college, ha ha! You ran around with your shlong covered in a sock? College. Drunk on a Wednesday afternoon passed out in a giraffe suit? College. Situations are softened, stripped of severity and any kind of seriousness, any real punishment. People read this story, heard frat, athlete, hookup, enjoy. That word bank was all they needed for the whole scene to come to life. We get it, they said, they were hooking up, things got out of hand, haven’t I done this, haven’t you. Even the fact that it was on the ground didn’t seem to raise eyebrows; in college didn’t people screw beneath statues, in stairwells, in the bell tower, in the library? The media was no help. They counted my drinks and counted the seconds Brock could swim two hundred yards, topped the article with a picture of Brock wearing a tie; it could’ve doubled as his LinkedIn profile.
I wanted to trim all the fat, all these distractions, to show you the meat of the story. I saw: man goes to a party, kisses three women, finds one alone who cannot speak, takes her into the trees, strips her, sticks his hand up her, is tackled by two men who notice she isn’t moving. He then denies running, can say nothing about the victim except that she enjoyed it. So take out the whiskey at 10:15, the urination, the younger sister’s name, the Olympic freestyle, at the heart that’s your whole damn story.
One Friday evening, I steered onto the highway. I turned my music loud, the windows vibrating, the knobs trembling, drowning myself in sound, began screaming. I hate you, I hate you, leave me alone. I pounded the wheel, choking on everything I was trying to get out. I swung off the highway, exited toward Ikea, slowed into a crowded parking lot flooded with light, pulling into the very center, locking myself in this grid of parked cars. I shut off the music. I couldn’t get ahold of my breathing, my hands were violently shaking, the tears were more than wet, it felt like my insides were leaking out of me, thick, painful. Help me help me. I felt like no oxygen was getting to my brain, I was going to die if I couldn’t breathe. Vision muddied, I sifted through the papers in my purse, pulled out the pamphlet I kept folded inside, scanned through the hotline numbers, so many numbers, calling the one that said Stanford in its description. I didn’t want to alarm the woman with the sounds I was making, I’m safe, I just need somebody. Stay with me I need somebody. I could hardly get the sounds to shape into words. The swimmer, the swimmer, I’m the person. I let my head back, let my shoulders shake, hand plastered to my forehead, my face wet, my chin wet, my neck wet. I could feel the sides of my throat shredded, and let everything out, knowing this person would never see me and I would never see her, but at least someone was listening.
When she spoke, she sounded concerned. And I heard those words again, It’s not your fault. She kept repeating it, like a mantra. I found irritation wedging its way in. His fault, her fault. How quickly victims must begin fighting, converting feelings into logic, navigating the legal system, the intrusion of strangers, the relentless judgment. How do I protect my life? From the investigators? The reporters? I was being equipped with a prosecutor, going into battle, but no one could tell me how to hold all this hostility, this wrecking sadness. I was alone, my story now sealed inside me, a faceless lady feeding me platitudes through the phone.
3.
EMILY AND I lived separate lives. My days were wonderfully ordinary, full of movement and texture; fresh salmon dinners with crispy skin, long talks on the phone with Lucas, bike rides through the Baylands with my dad across crunchy salt and pickleweed. I cut out heart-shaped valentines with handwritten couplets for everyone in the office. I filed invoices, licked envelopes, sniffed the half-and-half to make sure it was still okay. I made drawings of telephone poles and funny looking birds and sipped coffee with cross-legged friends. On the outside, life had seamlessly carried on. Emily lived inside a tiny world, narrow and confined. She didn’t have any friends, appeared only occasionally to go to the courthouse, police station, or make calls in the stairwell. I did not like her fragility, how quietly she spoke and seemed to know nothing. I knew she was hungry for nourishment, to be acknowledged and cared for, but I refused to recognize her needs. I did not want to learn more about the court system, refused therapy. You don’t need it, I told her.
In the beginning I was good at keeping the selves separate. You would never be able to detect that I was suffering. But if you looked closely enough, cracks appeared. Many nights I went to sleep with my eyes leaking, arriving at work the next morning with eyelids swollen and taut. I began keeping one spoon in the freezer, pressing the cold metal shell to each eye as I brushed my teeth. I sealed blocks of ice into a ziplock bag, one hand pressing it to my face, the other on the wheel as I drove to work, listening to KQED. In the evenings, I’d come back to my sealed bag of lukewarm water in my cup holder, emptying it into the grass.
One day, I told my boss I’d be gone briefly in the afternoon for a doctor’s appointment. Is everything okay? I waved my hand, said it was just a checkup. When it was time, I drove down to the courthouse. During the car ride I transformed into Emily, letting the warmth of the day drain away.
As I pulled into the parking lot, the squat building looked impenetrable, unsympathetic, cold. The courthouse resembled an abandoned medical clinic, untouched since the sixties. Satellites and metal rods jutted off the roof. Two birch trees emerged from the dirt like bones, black branches dangling thin as hairs. I walked through glass doors to the security check, wiped my feet on a tattered mat. I noticed tangled cords on the ground, a Lysol spray can, two oranges, a metal thermos, a checkered grid of screens. Six deputies in beige uniforms, leaning back on stained rolling chairs behind a desk. I placed my purse in a Tupperware container and stepped through the janky security frame. I watched one’s hand sift through my bag. I stared down the white hallway, the harshly reflected fluorescent light that was trapped in textured plastic covers above. He pushed the bin back to me and I stood blankly on the other side of the frame. Do you know where to go? he asked. I shook my head. He pointed me to a directory on the wall. Fourth floor.
The elevator doors opened to more emptiness. At the end of the hallway were two wooden doors. The door on the right led to a small waiting room I would later call the victim closet. I would spend many hours inside it. The door on the left opened into a room of gray cubicles and bulky printers, behind which was Alaleh’s office. To the right of both doors was a long, narrow walkway that led to the courtroom.
I w
as going to meet Alaleh and my advocate, Bree, for the first time. My parents were on their way. I’d asked my parents if I should bring flowers to say thank you. They said flowers were something I could give them when this was over. But I thought this would be the first and last time we’d be meeting; I needed a prosecutor to negotiate the terms of the settlement and close the case. We did not know the end would be almost four years from now.
Bree was in her midtwenties. She had long auburn hair and freckles, her presence approachable and warm. Alaleh had dark hair, hazelnut skin, and a wide smile. She was wearing a fitted blazer, pointed heels green as spinach leaves. She seemed to be in her early thirties, with a kind vibrancy and natural fortitude. Each time I’d see her again, I’d notice dandelion yellow earrings, fuchsia fingernails, little flecks of color in this land of smoky grays. She’d been born to Iranian immigrants, a fact I’d learn later; her parents had opened an Irish pub, where she worked while attending law school.
I sat center, my mom on my left, my dad on my right. Alaleh sat behind a large desk, her window framing the tops of trees, her shelves clogged with manila files. I could see the leaves of trees outside shivering in the wind, but in here there was only stillness. Down below I saw Mollie Stone’s Market, remembering the display inside where mechanical corn husks and blinking cows sang while Tiffany and I clapped. It was surreal, seeing my hometown from the fourth-floor window, while I was sealed off from it. My mom had taken my hand into the soft envelope of her own hands, massaging the pressure points. I wondered if I looked like a child, holding her hand, but my mom’s primary forms of communication have always been touch and food. I’d noticed in American culture, some girls talked to their moms on the phone every day, sharing soup recipes, boy issues, the way to wash a piece of laundry. I was always fascinated by this kind of conversation. All my life I heard my mom typing English phrases into a small silver electronic dictionary that would speak aloud whatever word she was learning: Spaghetti. Irony. Pernicious. Massachusetts. This was the fifth voice in our house. She called toiletries, toilet treats. When she exclaimed, Jesus Mary and Joseph, I thought for so long she’d said, Jesus Marion Joseph, believing it to be his full name. I knew her accented English could be perceived as broken and simple, but it concealed genius. We were always getting boxes on the doorstep, and I’d watch her unwrap Chinese writing awards from packing peanuts, casually, as if unpacking pears from the grocery store. I could talk to her about death, love, foreign films, universal themes that transcended culture. But mostly, if she was worried about me, she’d make me a bowl of noodles larger than my head, or place her fingers on my temples, my stress slipping away beneath her fingertips.
Know My Name Page 6
