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Chapter 1
I closed my eyes again, this time settling into warmth. I was ready to leave this messy dream, to wake up in my own bed, beneath my floral comforter and rice-paper lantern, my sister asleep in the room next to mine. I was gently jostled, opened my eyes into the same brightness, same blankets.
They could not undo what was done, but they could record it, photograph every millimeter of it, seal it into bags, force someone to look. Not once did they sigh or pity or poor thing me. They did not mistake my submission for weakness, so I did not feel a need to prove myself, to show them I was more than this. They knew.
Home is where darkness could not get in. I was determined not to let it.
Chapter 2
After the first death, everyone showed up to school wearing black, but by the fourth, we were warned not to glorify, to trigger. The roses and letters were taken down, chalk messages hosed off, candles blown out, stuffed animals placed in bags. There was a sudden disjunction between what was felt and what was seen; all appeared normal. I learned celebrating a life could ignite a death.
What struck me was how quickly the blood and remains on the metal were cleaned, the train restored to its hourly schedule, rushing to deliver commuters to work on time. How unsettling it was to watch cars glide so casually and continually over the intersection where they’d died, the tires bumping over the tracks.
The most important thing to remember was that to be at the rear, to be slower, did not mean you were not a leader.
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.
They seemed angry that I’d made myself vulnerable, more than the fact that he’d acted on my vulnerability.
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?
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?
Chapter 3
My character was now an asset my DA would need. Investigators may be watching me. I had an image to uphold, could not be reckless. Be on your best behavior. I turned this comment over in my head. If I kept drinking, would the defense argue I was never affected? If I uploaded photos of myself smiling at a party, would the defense say I never suffered? And worst of all, if somehow I was assaulted again, would they say, well then clearly there’s something wrong with her, not Brock, to get assaulted twice?
It should have been enough to say, I did not want a stranger touching my body. It felt strange to say, I have a boyfriend, which is why I did not want Brock touching my body. What if you’re assaulted and you didn’t already belong to a male? Was having a boyfriend the only way to have your autonomy respected?
Would my private life have been exhibited to show that I was too loose, my lifestyle indecent? I would never have been able to explain they were my choices, but choices made during a period of sadness and low esteem. We all have different ways of coping, self-medicating, ways of surviving the rough patches. To deny my messiness would be to deny my humanity.
Chapter 4
No one told me I could do it, except me, which meant that no one could tell me I couldn’t do it, except me.
Every comment translated into, I like what I see and I want it. But I don’t want it, I don’t want it, I thought.
It also seemed like he’d said, if they’re bothering you while walking, why are you still walking? It didn’t feel like a solution at all; they’d forced me to seal myself off in a car. I didn’t want to give up my sidewalks. I called Lucas back. That’s not fair, I said. I just want to walk home from school, I’m not doing anything wrong. I should be able to. You can walk anywhere you want. It’s not fair you get to unsubscribe from the videos. You get to turn off the feed, you get to see it selectively, I don’t have that option, to decide not to live it. I’m trying to show you what it’s like for me. It doesn’t matter what I do, it doesn’t matter what I wear, how I act, it’s constant, the harassment is constant. I have no money for a car, and even if I did, I enjoy walking, I want to keep walking. I was crying.
the defense would argue she’s crazy, she acts out, screams profanities, provokes men. She should’ve ignored him, why was she walking alone? She endangered herself, asked for trouble. Always she, always she. I never heard the voice asking why he pulled over, why he believed I’d get in, what he might do if I did. How much was I expected to take, to absorb and ignore, while they yelled and clicked their tongues so freely, with no fear of being confronted. Was I stubborn for wanting to walk, was I asking too much?
I turned around to face them and introduced each piece. I was met with quiet. Then the professor spoke, a warm smile beneath his large mustache, and said they were wonderful. Classmates pointed out my drawing of a two-headed rooster. They complimented my imagination, the sinister, the whimsical. They asked me about where I got my ideas, what kind of techniques I’d used, admired the coloring. I sat and marveled too, as they were commenting, and I must have looked tired, but I was beaming. Seeing all of my pieces up, side by side, the beautiful and bizarre things I’d created despite all of the struggling in the hours in between.
Chapter 5
She said, Can I ask if you’ve ever heard any of this in person? I thought awhile, pinching my mouth together, then shook my head. No, not once. It had never occurred to me that I’d given the opinions of online strangers equal weight to actual people. This was a powerful revelation.
I reminded myself this was not simply a fight between perpetrator and victim; there was a third element, the Swedes. They represented the seers, the doers, who chose to act and change the story. It should be noted that several times throughout giving his statement, JONSSON became very upset, to the point where he began crying while recounting the incident. He had to stop and take several deep breaths before being able to resume giving me his statement. He said it was a very disturbing event for him to witness and be involved in, but he just reacted to the situation at hand without really thinking.
Chapter 6
At this point, who was I doing this for? Me? If this was for me, then why was I sitting on a bed alone, unemployed, in an unfamiliar city. We were fighting for closure, for justice. It was not for me, but at the expense of me, that we’d be able to get there.
If I was miserable, I told her I was miserable. She did not say, Really? Or, I can’t imagine. That must be hard. How unusual. She just nodded, verified. Strangely it made me feel right on track.
I had spent all my time trying to bury Emily, to forget and repress her. Now I wanted to show myself that the one crying in court was the same one who would be funny onstage. Both existed in me.
Wow, you were wow, someone said. I am wow, I repeated in my head.
You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine. It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do.
Chapter 7
I told myself what I wished I could’ve told them: You have to stay here. I told myself this was just one point in the long life I owed myself to live before I was swallowed up.
My DA would later tell me women aren’t preferred on juries of rape cases because they’re likely to resist empathizing with the victim, insisting there must be something wrong with her because that would never happen to me.
But you can’t do a little at a time, can’t dip in and out of it each day. I did not possess the ability to control the surging overwhelm and agitation it brought up.
I was attempting to tell the same story through two different filters; through the questions of my DA and the questions of the defense. Their questions created the narrative, building the framework that shaped what I said.
He’d planted answers in his questions rather than leave them open ended: Right? Isn’t that right? Correct? Right? To an observer, it would seem he was just verifying facts. But so much of it had not been right. It made me self-conscious, disagreeing with him repeatedly in front of the jury;
it didn’t matter how many times I’d blacked out before. This blackout remained different. I was not here to lie about who I was or to apologize for my past.
We had tiptoed around all of the heaviest moments and fixated on minute details,
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.
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.
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.
Chapter 8
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.
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 was allowed a messy mind. Victims often have inconsistencies due to traumatic blockage, alcoholic gaps. His inconsistencies came from what he said before he had a lawyer versus what he said after he hired one.
the obligation is on him before he inserts his finger in someone’s vagina to make sure they’re capable of consenting, not that their sister thinks that they’re fine. She swung the spotlight back to him, where it belonged.
I ride as a passenger inside my own body,
Chapter 9
For me he said, Please give her a warm round of applause as this is the only thing she has going on in her life. It played to the stereotype of partners. Is it too mean? he asked. I was the one who laughed the loudest. If only you knew.
She explained the probation officer had offered a lenient sentence, had said I only cared about treatment, not incarceration, suggesting Brock didn’t belong in prison. I wondered how I had finally been given a voice, but it had not been the one I wanted.
Kicking and screaming is not a sign you have lost your mind. It’s a sign that you have stepped onto your own side. You are learning, finally, how to fight back.
Maybe I’d gone with her back to Cal Poly after the hearing because I’d been the one scared to be alone. Because I wanted her to take care of me, to sleep in her bed as she came and went from classes. This whole time I’d tried to preserve this illusion I could be unwaveringly competent, never dependent. But they had seen through it.
He said Brock’s life had been deeply altered … He will never again be his happy-go-lucky self, with that easygoing personality and welcoming smile. We had come to Brock’s funeral. I was always excited to buy him a big rib-eye steak to grill or to get his favorite snack for him… . Now he eats only to exist. I could hear my family stirring. These verdicts have broken and shattered him and our family in so many ways. He spoke of the verdicts as if they were a disease that had befallen them. Verdict of what? Guilt. Guilt for what? Assault. Assault committed by whom? Brock. Your son has broken and shattered your family.
Alcohol freed Brock of moral culpability.
And I think that is a genuine feeling of remorse. Chanel has stated that he hasn’t really taken responsibility for his conduct. And I think at one point she basically wrote or said that “He—he just doesn’t get it.” And so you have Mr. Turner expressing remorse, which I think, subjectively, is genuine, and Chanel not seeing that as a genuine expression of remorse because he never says, “I did this. I knew how drunk you were. I knew how out of it you were, and I did it anyway.” And that—I don’t think that bridge will, probably, ever be crossed.
Twenty minutes of action. In swimming, one one-hundredth of a second is the difference between victory and loss. Yet they wanted to write off twenty minutes as insignificant. Twenty minutes was just the beginning: Who counts the six-hour flights we took back and forth across the country? Who counts the doctor visits, the hours spent wringing my hands in therapy, the nights spent lying awake? Who counts the trips to Kohl’s, wondering is this blouse too tight? Who counts the days devoid of writing or reading or creating, instead wondering why I should wake up in the morning? Who counts it?
They tell you that if you’re assaulted, there’s a kingdom, a courthouse, high up on a mountain where justice can be found. Most victims are turned away at the base of the mountain, told they don’t have enough evidence to make the journey. Some victims sacrifice everything to make the climb, but are slain along the way, the burden of proof impossibly high. I set off, accompanied by a strong team, who helped carry the weight, until I made it, the summit, the place few victims reached, the promised land. We’d gotten an arrest, a guilty verdict, the small percentage that gets the conviction. It was time to see what justice looked like. We threw open the doors, and there was nothing. It took the breath out of me. Even worse was looking back down to the bottom of the mountain, where I imagined expectant victims looking up, waving, cheering, expectantly. What do you see? What does it feel like? What happens when you arrive? What could I tell them? A system does not exist for you.
I wondered if, in their eyes, the victim remained stagnant, living forever in that twenty-minute time frame. She remained frozen, while Brock grew more and more multifaceted, his stories unfolding, a spectrum of life and memories opening up around him. He got to be a person. Where was her redemption story? Nobody talked about the things she might go on to do. I had laid my suffering bare, but I lacked a key element. The judge had given Brock something that would never be extended to me: empathy. My pain was never more valuable than his potential.
Chapter 10
I had grown up in the margins; in the media Asian Americans were assigned side roles, submissive, soft-spoken secondary characters. I had grown used to being unseen, to never being fully known. It did not feel possible that I could be the protagonist. The more recognition I gained, the more I felt I was not supposed to be on the receiving end of so much generosity.
One of the greatest dangers of victimhood is the singling out; all of your attributes and anecdotes assigned blame. In court they’ll try to make you believe you are unlike the others, you are different, an exception. You are dirtier, more stupid, more promiscuous. But it’s a trick. The assault is never personal, the blaming is.
I began to see the world through a softer filter. If somebody honked at me in traffic, I looked in my rearview mirror and thought, Maybe you have cried for me. In crowded lines at the grocery store, I wondered if the woman in front of me had written a letter, if she’d shared with me her hidden grief.
Chapter 11
There is a certain carefree feeling that was stripped from me the night of the assault. How to distinguish spontaneity from recklessness? How to prove nudity is not synonymous with promiscuity? Where’s the line between caution and paranoia? This is what I’m mourning, this is what I do not know how to get back.
We understand a victim’s antagonists to be the perpetrators and lawyers but overlook the enemy who is the victim herself. Old ideas about who I was resurfaced, told me I was damaged, unworthy.
Reading Brock’s testimony, I noticed how differently our evenings were framed. When questioning Brock, the defense opened with the following questions: Is [grinding] common at these parties that you noticed? Did people dance on tables? Was that a common thing, too? How about drinking? Was drinking seemingly a major part of these parties? For most everybody that was there? Most everybody that was there was drinking alcohol, is that correct? In each line, I found common, common, a part of, everybody, everybody. This pattern was not an accident. He was leading Brock back into the herd, where he could blend into the comfort of community. Compare this to when he had questioned me: You did a lot of partying. You’ve had blackouts before. It was you and you, the lens fixed so close I was stripped of surrounding. For Brock, his goal was to integrate, for me it was to isolate.
I wish there had been a predatory expert, victim expert, consent expert to better educate the jury. We scrutinized the victim’s actions, instead of examining the behavioral patterns of sexual predators.
In her letter, she wrote: I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists… . This is completely different from a woman getting kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot. That is a rapist. These are not rapists. These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgment. When my statement emerged, her letter was uncovered. That summer she was scheduled to tour with her three-woman band, but venues canceled one after the other, announcing they did not tolerate rape culture. The band was dropped from its label, the tour dissolved, and she issued a public apology. Even more disturbing was that out of thirty-nine letters written, this was the single one the judge had quoted at the sentencing. Her misguidance was expected, the judge’s was not.
Brock’s mother wrote, My first thought upon wakening every morning is “this isn’t real, this can’t be real. Why him? Why HIM? WHY? WHY?” I have never wondered why me. The only thing running through my head when my sister picked me up that morning was, Thank God me. Thank God me and not her, not Julia, not an eighteen-year-old who would’ve had to forgo her schooling. I was privileged enough to have completed my education and to be in stable circumstances. I had a home, not too far from the courthouse, where I could recuperate after proceedings. I had two parents who clicked off my light and covered me in a blanket when I fell asleep. I had money saved. In a strange way I was prepared to go on this journey.
Chapter 12
This was locker-room banter, a private conversation that took place many years ago. Instead of apologizing, he dragged it from the bus to the locker room, another place inaccessible to women. He never said it was supposed to be different, only said it was supposed to be private. He intended to keep us out, we were never meant to hear. He was not sorry for what he said, just sorry he was caught.
When we call out assault when we hear it, Trump says, I don’t think you understand. Just words. You are overreacting, overly offended, hysterical, rude, relax!!! So we dismiss threatening statements and warning signs, apologizing for our paranoia. We go into a party or meeting thinking it’s just a party or meeting. But when we are taken advantage of, and come crawling back damaged, they say, How could you be so naive, you failed to detect danger, let your guard down, what did you think would happen? Trump made it clear the game is rigged, the rules keep changing. It doesn’t matter what you think is assault, because in the end, he decides.
In his testimony, I heard the familiar expectation that a victim be flawless, in order to be worthy of life. The audacity to smoke marijuana provided sufficient reason to die. The defense calling me a party animal meant I, too, deserved to be raped.
Most of us understand that your future is not promised to you. It is constructed day by day, through the choices you make. Your future is earned, little by little, through hard work and action. If you don’t act accordingly, that dream dissolves.
The stories about Brock running from police with a backpack full of Coors, rubbing up on girls, smoking weed, tripping on acid, photographing tits, were all absent from the image his loved ones and the media projected.
In his mother’s three-and-a-half-page single-spaced statement, I was not mentioned once. Erasure is a form of oppression, the refusal to see.
Do you understand, when you ask a victim to report, what you’re telling her to walk into? Why didn’t she go to the police? I had deputies, a detective, paramedics, I had squad cars, an ambulance. I had them handcuffing him, photographing me, recording witness accounts, jotting down every detail of my body from the thin chain wrapped around my neck to the laces of my shoes, my clothes collected, his clothes collected. I pressed charges within twenty-four hours of the assault and here I was three years later reading the appellate attorney’s statements about how I was clearly in front of the dumpster, not in any way “behind” it. How it was “merely exterior massaging” of my “genital opening,” how we were enamored young people expressing their sexual urges. When you say go to the police what do you envision? I was grateful for my team. But the police will move on to other cases while the victim is left in the agonizing, protracted judicial process, where she will be made to question, and then forget, who she is. You were just physically attacked? Here’s some information on how you can enter a multiyear process of verbal abuse. Often it seems easier to suffer rape alone, than face the dismembering that comes with seeking support.
We force her to think hard about what this will mean for his life, even though he never considered what his actions would do to her. Inherently the victim is outnumbered. She is the sole object of his sexual aggression, expected to single-handedly undo all of their staunch beliefs, backed by years of amiable stories. They’ll say, We’ve never seen him behave that way, so you must be lying. This sentiment was echoed in Brock’s sister’s statement: The evidence presented during his trial and the conclusions that were made about his character were only from one night of his life, from strangers that didn’t know him: a fraction of a fraction of his existence. Victims are not fractions; we are whole.
When society questions a victim’s reluctance to report, I will be here to remind you that you ask us to sacrifice our sanity to fight outdated structures that were designed to keep us down. Victims do not have the time for this. Victims are also students, teachers, parents, who can’t give up work or education. The average adult can barely find time to renew their license at the DMV. It is not reasonable to casually demand that victims put aside their lives to spend more time pursuing something they never asked for in the first place. This is not about the victims’ lack of effort. This is about society’s failure to have systems in place in which victims feel there’s a probable chance of achieving safety, justice, and restoration rather than being retraumatized, publicly shamed, psychologically tormented, and verbally mauled. The real question we need to be asking is not, Why didn’t she report, the question is, Why would you?
Brock will always be the swimmer turned rapist. He was great and then he fell. Anything I do in the future will be by the victim who wrote a book. His talent precedes the tragedy. She was supposedly born in it. I did not come into existence when he harmed me. She found her voice! I had a voice, he stripped it, left me groping around blind for a bit, but I always had it. I just used it like I never had to use it before. I do not owe him my success, my becoming, he did not create me. The only credit Brock can take is for assaulting me, and he could never even admit to that.
Our bodies kept it in storage no matter how many times our brains took it to the trash, no matter how many times we were told to move on, take the blame, grow up, no matter how many years passed, if we built families, had kids, our kids had kids, still our bodies remembered. And while our minds attempted to abandon it entirely, late at night, lying awake alone, our bodies protested, you can’t.
Some called it a witch hunt, said she’s after him. I ask, starting when. Mark the day. Trace it back. I can almost guarantee that after the assault she tried to live her life. Ask her what she did the next day and she’d say, well, I went to work. She didn’t pick up a pitchfork, hire a lawyer. She made her bed, buttoned up her shirt, took shower after shower. She tried to believe she was unchanged, to move on until her legs gave out. Every woman who spoke out did so because she hit a point where she could no longer live another day in the life she tried to build. So she turned, slowly, back around to face it. Society thinks we live to come after him. When in fact, we live to live. That’s it. He upended that life, and we tried to keep going, but couldn’t.
We don’t fight for our own happy endings. We fight to say you can’t. We fight for accountability. We fight to establish precedent. We fight because we pray we’ll be the last ones to feel this kind of pain.
Chapter 13
When Grandma Ann asked my mom, What was it like when Chanel told you? my mom said four sentences: I try not to remember. My knees softened. I was the one who drove her. I should’ve turned around, driven my babies home. Julia says, I was the one who invited you to the party. Tiffany says, I was the one who left. Lucas says, I was the one who spoke to you last on the phone. How many times I have told them, you are the reasons I am still here, not the reasons I am hurt.
I’d never questioned the short time limit I was given to read my statement, until Judge Aquilina made time for one hundred and sixty-nine statements. She made it clear each one was important. She invited restoration and compassion into a space I had associated only with torture. Leave the guilt here. It doesn’t deserve any more of your family’s time. She shooed off the negative forces. Quit shaming and blaming the parents, she said. Trust me, you would not have known. And you would not have done anything differently. She said to the women, Leave your pain here and go out and do your magnificent things. I didn’t know instructions like this were possible.
I requested there be a case manager, someone who exists exclusively to serve the needs of the victim, keeping them informed, ensuring adequate support. The lack of support I’d experienced would not happen again. I needed them to review the policies they had in place around contacting victims after rape. I wanted training for the Department of Public Safety on campus so they could better inform victims of the court process and their options, especially when it came to pressing charges. Also please add lighting to the dark back area of the fraternity. Michele requested additional well-lit areas and video surveillance in outdoor and high-risk areas.
responding to a hotline call is different than taking initiative, extending resources to the victim earlier, stepping in before she unravels. I tried, I should have said back. That was me, not you. I called you. I should have pushed back. Hadn’t I already felt echoes of this in the court system? Chanel not seeing that. The subtle gaslighting, the shifting of blame and burden back onto the victim.
It hit me then. I had created the wrong list. Thursday, talks with Stanford. Friday, rapist out of jail. A panic attack, a failed meeting, guilt from money, the politics of negotiating, all repressed in my gut.
Most people say development is linear, but for survivors it is cyclic. People grow up, victims grow around; we strengthen around that place of hurt, become older and fuller, but the vulnerable core is never gone. More than becoming a frog, I believe surviving means learning to live forever with this trembling tadpole.
The other two quotes Appleseed suggested were from the final paragraph of my statement. On nights when you feel alone, I am with you. Those words were written from a place of deep hope, cultivated alone in a high apartment in Philly, when hope was the single thing I had. I wrote those words to survive. How could you abandon me these last two years, to reappear and take those lines. To hide the damage, then present the polished. I wanted to offer students a sentiment of solidarity, but could not give Stanford words of hope when they had not provided me reason to feel any. I could not sell victims a false dream, a tranquil and bright-eyed existence. On nights when you are alone, you are left alone.
As a survivor, I feel a duty to provide a realistic view of the complexity of recovery. I am not here to rebrand the mess he made on campus. It is not my responsibility to alchemize what he did into healing words society can digest. I do not exist to be the eternal flame, the beacon, the flowers that bloom in your garden.
There have been numerous times I have not brought up my case because I do not want to upset anybody or spoil the mood. Because I want to preserve your comfort. Because I have been told that what I have to say is too dark, too upsetting, too targeting, too triggering, let’s tone it down. You will find society asking you for the happy ending, saying come back when you’re better, when what you say can make us feel good, when you have something more uplifting, affirming. This ugliness was something I never asked for, it was dropped on me, and for a long time I worried it made me ugly too. It made me into a sad, unwelcome story that nobody wanted to hear. But when I wrote the ugly and painful parts into a statement, an incredible thing happened. The world did not plug up its ears, it opened itself to me. I do not write to trigger victims. I write to comfort them, and I’ve found that victims identify more with pain than platitudes. When I write about weakness, about how I am barely getting through this, my hope is that they feel better, because it aligns with the truth they are living. If I were to say I was healed and redeemed, I worry a victim would feel insufficient, as if they have not tried hard enough to cross some nonexistent finish line. I write to stand beside them in their suffering. I write because the most healing words I have been given are It’s okay not to be okay. It’s okay to fall apart, because that’s what happens when you are broken, but I want victims to know they will not be left there, that we will be alongside them as they rebuild.
I encourage you to sit in that garden, but when you do, close your eyes, and I’ll tell you about the real garden, the sacred place. Ninety feet away from where you sit there is a spot, where Brock’s knees hit the dirt, where the Swedes tackled him to the ground, yelling, What the fuck are you doing? Do you think this is okay? Put their words on a plaque. Mark that spot, because in my mind I’ve erected a monument. The place to be remembered is not where I was assaulted, but where he fell, where I was saved, where two men declared stop, no more, not here, not now, not ever. When they held him down, they freed me. Without them, there would’ve never been a chance for me to speak my words in the first place, no hearing, no trial, no statement, no book. Because of them, I am here now. They gave me a chance, to grow and fight and come into myself again. It took a long time, it is still a strenuous process, but I would be nothing without that chance. I often get scared of speaking out, of confronting lawyers and institutions bigger and better equipped than me, but when I’m afraid, all I have to do is think of the two of them. I think of how I want to return the favor; to pull the heaviness off you, to be the one yelling it is not okay, pinning your demons down in the dirt, so you suddenly find yourself free, given the chance to begin your journey, growing on your own, uncovering your voice, finding your way back. I want to stay and fight, while you go.
Chapter 14
People sometimes say, I can’t imagine. How do I make them imagine?
When I write, I have the privilege of using a language that she fought her whole life to understand. When I speak in opposition, I am grateful my voice is uncensored. I do not take my freedom of speech, my abundance of books, my access to education, my ease of first language for granted. My mom is a writer. The difference is, she spent the first twenty years of her life surviving. I am a writer, who spent twenty years of my life fed and loved in a home and classroom. In a sense they were right. I don’t deserve credit. It belongs to my mom, who held my hand in line at book signings, to Grandma Ann, who read to me on the corduroy couch, to Mrs. Thomas in second grade, who laminated our covers and bound our books, turning our classroom into a publishing house. I owe it to public school English teachers, Mr. Dunlap, Wilson, Owen, Caroline, Ellen, Teddy, Kip. To my grandmother, Bam. To my grandfather, Lovick, a six-foot-two World War II veteran who read books thick as bricks, but sat in his office with a little handwritten pile of my poems beside him, typing them up one by one, so they would never be lost.
Women are frustrated by how they are treated by society, how they are treated by the criminal justice system. That passion is genuine. It needs to be expressed. Expressed was the wrong word. We the victims are tired of expression, I expressed a lot in his courtroom. The word we need is: acknowledged, taken into account, taken seriously.
I am not sure exactly what healing is or looks like, what form it comes in, what it should feel like. I do know that when I was four I could not lift a gallon of milk, could not believe how heavy it was, that white sloshing boulder. I’d pull up a wooden chair to stand over the counter, pouring the milk with two shaking arms, wetting the cereal, spilling. Looking back I don’t remember the day I lifted it with ease. All I know is that now I do it without thinking, can do it one-handed, on the phone, in a rush. I believe the same rules apply, that one day I’ll be able to tell this story without it shaking my foundation.
Ram Dass said, Allow that you are at this moment not in the wrong place in your life. Consider the possibility that there have been no errors in the game. Just consider it. Consider that there is not an error, and everything that’s come down on your plate is the way it is and here we are. I don’t believe it was my fate to be raped. But I do believe that here we are is all we have. For a long time, it was too painful to be here. My mind preferred to be dissociated. I used to believe the goal was forgetting. It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving. If I got stuck inside scenes in the courtroom, I would glance down at Mogu and wonder, if I am really in the past, how did this blinking thing get in my house? I assembled and reassembled letters in ways that would describe what I’d seen and felt. As I revisited that landscape, I grew more in control, could come and go when I needed to. Until one day I found there was nothing left to gather. The transcripts that once overwhelmed me were now only pieces of paper. I began to belong more to my present than my past. I was no longer trying to get somewhere, only asking myself, Are you improving? Sometimes the answer was not today. Sometimes I was regressing. But the voice in my head was now gentler. Whatever the answer, I was patient and understanding.
I used to shrink at harsh tones, used to be afraid. Until I learned it takes nothing to be hostile. Nothing. It is easy to be the one yelling, chucking words that burn like coals, neon red, meant to harm. I have learned I am water. The coals sizzle, extinguishing when they reach me. I see now, those fiery coals are just black stones, sinking to the bottom.
One by one, they became powerless, fell away, and when the dust settled, I looked around to see who was left. Only Emily Doe. I survived because I remained soft, because I listened, because I wrote. Because I huddled close to my truth, protected it like a tiny flame in a terrible storm. Hold up your head when the tears come, when you are mocked, insulted, questioned, threatened, when they tell you you are nothing, when your body is reduced to openings. The journey will be longer than you imagined, trauma will find you again and again. Do not become the ones who hurt you. Stay tender with your power. Never fight to injure, fight to uplift. Fight because you know that in this life, you deserve safety, joy, and freedom. Fight because it is your life. Not anyone else’s. I did it, I am here. Looking back, all the ones who doubted or hurt or nearly conquered me faded away, and I am the only one standing. So now, the time has come. I dust myself off, and go on.
Acknowledgments
To the Swedes. You’ve taught us that we all bear responsibility to speak up, wrestle down, make safe, give hope, take action. We do not have to wait for something wrong to happen to be a Swede. Being the Swede begins with respecting bodily autonomy, the language we choose, the understanding that consent can never be assumed or overridden. We must protect the vulnerable and hold each other accountable. May the world be full of more Carls and Peters.
For all the names I do not know, the ones who carried clipboards for petition signing, who live with tadpoles, and who wrote long letters to me. I kept that box of letters beside my desk while writing; when motivation dipped, I read them. You were teaching me self-compassion, encouraging me to keep going. I hope you understand you are worth fighting for. Your character is not what caused your hurts to happen. You are not a statistic or a stereotype, so when they minimize you, dehumanize you, objectify you, you must push back with your whole weight, with your lifetime of experiences. To the faceless, the ones who remain anonymous. We each have a name. You have taught me to be proud of mine.