We sat in the parked car as the windows blurred. She said we’d go when the rain lessened. I knew what she meant, that she needed to sit mindless for a moment. I learned she had run out of time, would have to return in the morning. I wanted to ask her how it went, to tell me everything, but was paranoid we’d be accused of sharing information. Even in a locked car sealed in by the roar of the rain, the fear of being watched, of doing something wrong, always snuffed the conversation out.
That night we put on a movie with Tom Hanks to take our minds off everything. Her phone rang, interrupting the stillness. It was my DA, my sister slipping away down the hall. When she returned her eyes were wet. She sat on the couch staring at the screen. I messed everything up, she said. That’s impossible, I said. I did, she said. My comforting was useless, as she insisted I didn’t understand, I wasn’t there. I hated that I wasn’t permitted to know what was happening. Later I would discover my sister had testified that when she left me briefly that night she thought I’d be fine. The defense was using this to argue that when Brock found me he had every reason to think I was fine too. If they could prove Brock genuinely believed I was coherent enough to consent, they could walk away with the case. I meant I thought you’d be fine, she said. I knew what she meant; she meant she didn’t think that her older sister would’ve been raped. Alaleh had called to tell her she needed to clarify and hold her ground, because the defense would nail her on this tomorrow.
I was ready to grab my keys, walk straight out the door. I wanted to pull up to the defense attorney’s house, run up the carpeted stairs, and rustle him awake in his stupid pajamas, his glasses on the bedside table. I would throw the quilted blankets off him, revealing his hairy white legs, his tube socks. I’d ask him if he knew how he was disturbing my little sister, couldn’t he figure out a goddamn way to do this decently, to keep it between me and Brock, to look at the evidence scrawled across the board, my BAC level, the voice mail, what more do you want, do you want to destroy my sister in the process, because I will end you. Somehow it had become all of our faults, except his.
As I sat there witnessing her crumbling before me, her agony in trying to carry this all, I finally understood. He knew there was a part in us that was self-conscious, the lingering voices that told us we were in the wrong. Wasn’t it you, who left? Who said she was fine? He found it, hooked into it, injected it, grew it until the guilt was all-consuming. Until we became so inundated by self-blame, so blinded by the pain, we lost the ability to see.
It was happening to her and it was happening to me, the two of us fed distorted realities, our words twisted until we became uncertain, discredited, writing ourselves off as flawed and broken. We willingly rammed our heads against the walls, confused, apologizing, unsure of what right we had to speak. I had unlocked the secret of the game; this was not a quest for justice but a test of endurance. His mistake was that he was going after someone I would go to the ends of the earth for. See, if it had just been me in there, being attacked, I might’ve backed down, retreating to my places of self-doubt. But her? I had been asked, earlier in the day, what I meant when I’d said I was more of a mother to her than a sister. I wanted to say, I don’t know, you tell me. What happens when a person gets in between a mother bear and her cub, have you read about the maulings, faces ripped clean.
I took my meticulously typed guidelines and encouragements, threw them in a drawer, gave myself a new mantra: fuck the fried rice. Fuck what you sipped, how you sipped, when you sipped with whom, fuck if I danced on the table, fuck if I danced on the chair. You want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Your whole answer was sitting with his shoulders low, head down, his neatly cut hair. You want to know why my whole goddamn family was hurting, why I lost my job, why I had four digits in my bank account, why my sister was missing school? It was because on a cool January evening, I went out, while that guy, that guy there, had decided that yes or no, moving or motionless, he wanted to fuck someone, intended to fuck someone, and it happened to be me.
This did not make me deficient. This did not make me inadequate. But it did make me angry. My sister allowed me to see what I needed to see. Pain, when examined closely, became clarity. I knew now what the attorney had come here to do, and I would not let it happen. He believed he could break us, but from this day forward, I would begin to build.
8.
THE TRIAL WOULD continue for the rest of the week, though I wasn’t allowed inside the courtroom. I lived inside my strange parallel universe; all day I’d putter around aimlessly and at night I’d check coverage on the local news. On Tuesday, Tiffany finished her testimony and I asked my DA who was next. A blackout expert, she said. I waited a beat for her to tell me she was kidding. I wanted to say, I’m the real blackout expert am I right. The expert, Dr. Fromme, had been paid ten thousand dollars by Brock’s side to testify. She claimed I could have been ready, willing, and able to consent even if I could not remember it.
On Wednesday, the day Brock testified, I laced up my running shoes. He’d be taking out the curated version of me, pulling her like a dusty mannequin out of a box, dragging her out onto the stage, grinding her hips in a strange dance, peeling her lips into smiles, garnishing her with kisses, feeding her words he had written. I found the whole thing sick, suffocating, my body stuck in his hands in that small, square building. I ran for miles, winding through thin trails, past hills with barrel-bellied horses.
The news appeared that night, the article glowing in the rectangular screen. I blurred and refocused my eyes, debating whether I should read what he’d said. I decided to scan, one quick scroll, and then stopped when I saw a tiny new word, yes. I counted how many he had given me; he said I’d said yes to dancing, yes to going to his dorm, yes to fingering.
In a film literature class I once took, Mr. Hernandez showed us the scene in Jaws where Martin, the lead, is about to get on the boat and is saying good-bye to his wife, Ellen. Ellen is worried about losing him, but instead of saying, Please be careful, I love you! She says, I put an extra pair of glasses in your—black socks and, and there’s the stuff, your nose, the zinc oxide, the Blistex is in the kit. And in response, instead of saying, Don’t worry, I’ll come back for you! He says, Don’t use the fireplace in the den because I haven’t fixed the flue yet. She nods and says, What am I going to tell the kids? He says, Tell them I’m going fishing.
Love is implied, love is the black socks she packed, the promise he’ll return to fix the flue, the desire to protect the kids, the detailed attention to each other’s lives, the urgency of comforting one another amidst the gravity of what’s about to happen. The most important messages are felt, never stated explicitly. That is real dialogue.
Then we had Brock’s testimony.
I asked her if she wanted me to finger her.
Did she reply to you?
Yes.
What did she say?
She said yeah.
He admitted he had tried to kiss Tiffany.
DA: Did she say anything to you about it?
No. She just left.
He said he had removed my underwear, pulled them down my legs, over each boot. He said I orgasmed. And I fingered her for a minute, and I thought she had an orgasm and then—well, during that time, I asked her if she liked it, and she said uh-huh. When I learned this, I went from a seated position, to crawling on the floor, to lying down. He said the dry humping made his stomach upset. Said he’d decided to leave when I realized there was a guy standing right next to me. Said he was scared because they were speaking in some foreign language. He said they had broken his wrist. When he was handcuffed, he’d never mentioned wrist pain. Now he explained to the jury how he’d had to get a cast. How he’d suffered from bruises and scratches. When Brock explained he only ran because he was scared the guys would hurt him, Alaleh asked, You weren’t concerned that they might try to hurt Chanel? He said, I didn’t look back at her. In second grade, we
had this currency called fuzzies, tiny colorful pom-poms. If you were well behaved, turned in your homework on time, you’d be awarded fuzzies. Brock’s fuzzie count started off awful low. But on the day of his testimony, he’d come in with a truckload; they poured across the floor, flooded the room up to his knees, and suddenly he was rich enough to win the prize. I wondered if the jury would see that his fuzzies were fake.
DA: And as you sit here today, you admit that you ran?
Brock: Yes.
DA: So what you told Detective Kim was a lie, wasn’t it?
Brock: Yes.
Victims are often, automatically, accused of lying. But when a perpetrator is exposed for lying, the stigma doesn’t stick. Why is it that we’re wary of victims making false accusations, but rarely consider how many men have blatantly lied about, downplayed, or manipulated others to cover their own actions?
He’d made it sound too easy. If I’d really granted him consent, he would’ve told the officer upon his arrest. The latest script he had crafted was too blatant to be real, too convenient to believe. His reconstruction was just poor writing, almost comical. It was insulting to be on the other end of this dim-witted dialogue.
I called Lucas, laughing. He said I wanted it! This material is gold! This is good for us, right? He’s done, it’s over. I mean is anyone eating this up? Way stupid. But Lucas went quiet at the other end of the line, said he was going to be sick, and excused himself for a few minutes. As I listened to the silence, I felt the inside of me hardening, anger rising. You need to play my game. You need to say, Not the sharpest crayon in the box! You need to say, You’ve got this in the bag! I didn’t get to be sick, be outraged, to choose not to hear it. If I stopped even for a moment to absorb what was happening, I would not make it.
When Lucas went quiet, my illusion faltered, and I got a glimpse of what I was facing, the brutality of it, the oppression. The rules of court would not necessarily protect me; swearing under oath was just a made-up promise. Honesty was for children. Brock would say and do what he needed; unabashedly self-righteous. He had given himself permission to enter me again, this time stuffing words into my mouth. He made me his real-life ventriloquist doll, put his hands inside me and made me speak.
On Thursday, court was closed. My friend Matt and I went to my favorite Indian spot, sat outside scraping orange rice from a metal tin. There was a local newspaper on the table, Brock striding in a suit on the front page. I glanced at it a few times, afraid to show too much interest. Matt scanned the paper. I was biting into a samosa when he said, Did you hear about the girl who got raped? I played dumb. Recently? I said. No, it happened like a year ago, he said. Oh, I said. I felt a tide swelling, my head going under, then it drained and I was back. How’d you hear about it? I asked. He’s infamous around here, plus it’s all over Facebook, he said. When we left, I kept the newspaper, claiming there was a coupon inside I wanted to use. As Matt drove, I casually flipped through it. Do you think she’s at fault? I asked. He winced and gave one strong shake of the head. Hell, no, he said. It was all I needed to know. We drove to my house, Matt plucking his mandolin on the couch while I tried to play alongside him on the piano, enjoying my freedom before court resumed the next day.
On Friday, the final day, Brock’s defense attorney brought in four character witnesses. No one from Stanford testified, which meant only people from Brock’s past life were flying in to speak for his present self. The lineup included his best friend from adolescence, an ex-girlfriend, his high school swim coach, and high school French teacher. I took six years of French too, but it never occurred to me to bring Madame Jensen in to let you know I gave an excellent presentation on Le Petit Prince. What were they here to say? He never took his penis out in class, never fondled his coach.
If I were to do a performance piece, I’d place Brock on the ground atop a half-naked body, while these four people stood around him in a half circle, peppering the scene with the same things they’d said in court. Take the French teacher: That would be the farthest type of behavior, the sexually aggressive or assaultive behavior that I would ever, ever, ever associate with Brock Turner. I would sample the ever, ever, ever and put it on loop, Brock thrusting to the tempo of each ever. As Brock disrobed the body, I don’t believe that he would do anything that would harm anybody. And as Brock took off sprinting, the coach would say, I think that Brock is a very respectful and courteous and, you know, that he knows what right and wrong is.
Their platitudes did not come as a surprise. What I wondered was, in a trial meant to examine facts, why hours were set aside to shower him in accolades. His history included his childhood, education, summer jobs, sweet relationships. My history was blackouts one through five. My character was just as much on trial as his character; my behavior, my composure, my likability, were also being evaluated. But there was nothing to suggest that I was a person extracted from a full life, surrounded by people who cared about me.
My DA didn’t waste any time on the cross-examinations:
Now, you obviously—have you ever been with him where he was drinking to excess?
No.
You haven’t seen him when he’s intoxicated?
No.
And you weren’t with him on the night of the 17th, were you?
No.
So you have no idea what happened that day?
Correct.
Her questioning was brief, swiftly confirming they were useless. She asked his French teacher if she’d ever talked with him about his sexual desires or preferences, to which she said no. When questioning his ex-girlfriend, she’d said,
And you would never get intimate in public, is that true?
I mean, define your . . .
Sure. You never had sex in public?
No.
Okay. That would be out of the ordinary?
Later someone would describe to me the look of shock that came across the ex-girlfriend’s face, the way she reared her head back when my DA asked about public intercourse. I wanted to say, yes, it is alarming, sex behind a dumpster. My DA said the only time she saw Brock cry was when his ex-girlfriend had testified.
I was ready to dismiss their insignificant stories, deeming them unworthy of energy or attention, but reading them now I pause. During trial, the jury was forced to pick; is he wholesome or monstrous. But I never questioned that any of what they said about him was true. In fact I need you to know it was all true. The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That’s the terrifying part.
Brock had a sister my age. The French teacher had three daughters, the swim coach had a daughter and two sons, all close to my age. But it was no help to me that they had girlfriends and sisters and daughters. Somehow I was different, cast outside their range of empathy. In that courtroom, my identity had been reduced to something in the category of “other.”
On Saturday, I thought I’d feel relief after all testimonies had been given. Instead I felt paralyzed. Every day I had less control. Proceedings had digressed, strayed away from seminal questions, everything more corrosive and irrelevant than I could’ve imagined. I read on the news how I’d sobbed so uncontrollably, read updates on the woman’s vaginal area, about the way the Ohio native made eye contact with the woman, crossed his right leg over his left, tapping his foot. Online it sometimes seemed I had done nothing more than cry. In real life, my basic functions began to falter: I stopped sleeping, forgot to eat, couldn’t even shit properly. By the end of the two weeks, my mind had withdrawn, my body withered.
My mom called. Can you go see Gong Gong? She had driven him to the airport for his flight to China. His bags were packed, hair combed, passport updated, Chinese opera downloaded, pots
and pans put away, and shoes lined up by the door. On the other side of the world a family member would be waiting to bring him to a dinner with pickled mustard greens, rice noodles, and quail eggs. But when they arrived at the airport kiosk, they discovered a single letter of his Chinese name on his ticket had been mistyped. The airline turned him away, did not let him board, and my mom drove him home. It was the first time she’d seen tears run down his cheek. She asked me to go cheer him up. As I drove to his place, my temper rose.
How could one little letter prevent him from going halfway around the world? I barely greeted him when I arrived. Marching to the phone, I started making calls. My grandpa and his friend looked at me, mouths slightly agape as I screamed at a helpless agent. He needs to be in fucking China, tell me how that makes sense, well there must be an office that’s open. He’d never seen me act like this. I felt his hand on my back, comforting me, saying I could go home, that they would handle it. But I was incensed. A single letter! Incomprehensible that all his plans collapsed because of one tiny typo. How something so small could ruin everything.
In trial, all evidence had been filed. But what if there was one error, one minuscule oversight, one letter. If a teaspoon of doubt leaked into one of the juror’s minds, it would all be over, there would be no trip, we would all turn around and go home, defeated.
I woke up the next morning to a bowl of boiled eggs on the counter, shallow pools of pink and yellow dye. I’d forgotten it was Easter. Only my dad would insist, during a rape trial, that we’d still sift through poppies in the garden to find rainbow eggs. In the gutter, in the birdhouse. Tiffany drove back to school with a massive bag of eggs to begin her final quarter. I slept well, relieved she had fled the sinking ship, was back on track, studying textbooks instead of transcripts. I technically could have left town too, but wanted to see it through the end. I also stayed because I had no routine to resume.
Know My Name Page 20
