Saved by the FIRE
When rape stole her sense of control, she fought back by eating fire
SHEBOYGAN – Valerie “Val” Ringwell eats fire. ❚ When she performs, she is in control of the element. ❚ Using only her mouth and hands, she commands the flames to dance from one prop to another and swallows them without a second glance and with no harm to herself. ❚ Usually dressed in all black, the yellow-and-white flames stand in stark contrast as she spins them above her head on a dragon staff. ❚ Just when you think maybe they’re growing too big or she will lose control, she reins in the flames and extinguishes them with her mouth.
During her performances, she reminds both the flames and the audience that she is the one in control of the situation.
One would never suspect that only two years ago, Val was deathly afraid of fire.
And with good reason. Her house had burned down years prior.
Val learned to control fire for another reason, however. In May 2016, she was raped and assaulted at her job. She uses the flames, she said, to cope with the trauma of her past.
In the flames, a way to heal
In the aftermath of the assault, Val felt lost. “I was numb for the first couple days. I felt like it didn’t happen or I didn’t know how to deal with it. I was in a giant haze,” she recalled. When she emerged from the haze, she said, the pain of what happened hit her.
“I didn’t want to be touched,” she said. “I was very emotional.”
Val’s assault affected her so much that she became depressed, riddled with anxiety and had suicidal thoughts.
“It’s almost like you can’t trust anybody,” she said. “I couldn’t go out in public and I was very
ashamed of what happened, because you think it’s your fault.”
Luckily, Val had a large support system, including her husband of 15 years who stood by her side following the assault. She began to go to counseling and entered into the Partial Hospitalization Program at Aurora Medical Center in Sheboygan. The program supports adults struggling with their mental health through daily counseling.
Despite the strength of her support system, she still felt powerless.
“I just felt like I had no control over anything that was going on around me,” she said. “I had no control around the investigation. I had no control over seeing him. I had no control over my own thoughts.” Enter the flames.
After her house burned down, fire had become something Val feared. After she was assaulted, she again felt out of control. She decided to take command of her fear.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to conquer this one thing and work towards doing it,’” she said.
She started to train with her friend and fellow fire eater, Sarah Supernova.
Taking command of the flames allowed her to
gain a sense of peace that her attacker stole from her.
“When I was stressed out or didn’t want to get out of bed, or at times when I was wishing he had killed me, or I was having suicidal thoughts, it was something that I would go out and practice,” she said.
A little over a year later, she is able not only to eat the flames but also to breathe them out. She transfers the fire effortlessly from prop to prop.
“It can be very dangerous,” she said as she described the technique of using saliva to put out the flames. “You always have to be careful about taking breaths when you’re breathing in the vapors.” She warned that inhaling the flames might cause chemical pneumonia.
Her friends and family also got involved by learning how to help if a trick ever goes wrong.
“You always want to have a safety person,” Val explained. For her, it’s usually her husband, her brother-in-law or a friend. “If anything goes wrong,” she said, “they know how to put me out.”
But for Val, mastering the art has been an effective way to cope with her trauma.
“It’s actually really helped me heal,” she said. “It was something I could focus on when everything else was falling apart.”
Val says she turned to fire eating whenever she felt stressed. While she works closely with fire almost daily, she has never burned herself while fire eating.
“I actually probably burned myself worse on the pizza oven a couple weeks ago at work than on any of my fire props, ever,” she said.
Her props include a dragon staff (a long staff that has ends she can light on fire), fire fans (fan-shaped metal props that have ends that can be lit on fire), and levi wands (a short stick that can be lit up and spun from an invisible string).
Val performs at the Odyssey Fun Center in Sheboygan Falls when comedy show season comes around and has started booking events like birthday and graduation parties.
A survivors calendar
A couple months ago, Val decided that she wanted to do more than just empower herself. She wanted to empower other women who are also survivors of sexual assault.
“It’s important for women to know that they’re not alone,” she said.
She decided that she would start a fundraiser to support the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN.
“I felt like I had no voice for so long after this happened, and I lost myself,” she said. “I kind of wanted to have a voice and make a difference.”
Val is working on creating a calendar of other women who are survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse and harassment. Each woman featured will be performing fire eating, doing circus art or flow art (movement art that might use hoops or rings).
“I posted in a private fire eater group (on Facebook) and told them that this is what I wanted to do and why I was doing it,” she said. “I had an overwhelming response of women that wanted to be in it.”
The calendar will feature more than 50 women from Wisconsin, other parts of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and others.
“Sometimes being a performer, men think that it is OK to push the boundaries that they shouldn’t and a lot of these women have had lots of experiences like that,” Val said.
Each month will feature one performer or group of performers doing their tricks.
One of the groups featured will be The Hive — the world’s first all-female
fire breathing group.
Also featured will be fire eater April Choi of Peoria, Illinois, who is in the Guinness Book of World Records three separate times for tricks she can do with a whip. For one record, she knocked over multiple Jenga blocks with her whip without toppling over the rest of the blocks.
Another is Red Sarah, a fire eater from the UK who is the director of the Fire School, a school that teaches others how to master fire arts.
“I’ve never seen a woman circus art calendar, ever,” said Val. “And I thought it would be a good way (to raise funds). Most people still have a calendar even though they use their phones.”
All proceeds from calendar sales will go to RAINN.
Val is currently looking for sponsors to get the calendars, to be called “Fire and Flow Calendar 2019,” printed by August. She’s created a Go Fund Me page to seek donors for the creation of the calendar, and an Etsy site where those interested can pre-order the calendar.
Still waiting for justice
Following her assault, Val went to the hospital where she opted to have DNA evidence collected and a sexual assault examination done. It took over six months for the test results to come back.
Val filed a report with the police department, but her case remains open two years later and she declined to share details in order to avoid compromising the police investigation.
It is not uncommon for test results to take so long to get back to survivors.
“You just sit and wait,” she said. “And you call and you ask, ‘Any updates?’ Because you’re expecting that it’s going to be really quick, and it’s not.”
In thousands of other Wisconsin cases since the 1980s, evidence collected from similar exams was never sent to state crime labs for testing. State officials first discovered the idle evidence in police and hospital storage rooms in 2014 and are now working to have much of it tested.
Recently in response to a USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin investigation of untested sexual assault evidence, Gov. Scott Walker said he supported “strengthening” a law that requires police to send some evidence to crime labs for testing.
Survivors have the option of reporting their assault to the police before or after they have evidence collected at the hospital. If they choose to report the crime, the hospital gives the evidence to law enforcement. Law enforcement then has the responsibility to send the kit out to be tested.
Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center does not store sexual assault kits, also known as “rape kits,” on its campus.
“We don’t store kits,” said Deanna Grundl, the forensic nursing coordinator at Aurora Hospitals in Sheboygan, Manitowoc and Washington counties. “We’ve always handed those directly over to law enforcement so we didn’t have a backlog.”
But even if the kit is sent out as soon as possible, science itself can still make getting results a waiting game.
“I thought it worked like it did on TV or movies; that you report it, they go to jail,” Val said. “But it doesn’t work that way.”
Nikki Roehm, director of Wisconsin’s state crime labs, said sexual assault cases are the most complicated for DNA analysts to work.
“They take the most time to interpret,” Roehm said. “Science is a process. We can’t rush it. We can from time to time, in the interest of public safety, pull one case out and work it and expedite it, but as a whole, in an effort to get all of the cases done in a timely fashion, we work through our workflows.”
If survivors elect to not file a report with law enforcement, Aurora Memorial in Sheboygan sends the kits directly to the Madison Crime Lab. There it can be stored for up to 10 years. If a survivor decides to file a report with police within that 10-year period, evidence from their assault is still available for testing.
Grundl is also one of the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners, know as SANE nurses, at Aurora Sheboygan Memorial Medical Center.
At the time of her assault, Val was living in Greenbush, a small town in western Sheboygan County. She and her husband moved to Sheboygan last August for a fresh start. She was tired of facing the possibility that on any day she could see the man who attacked her. They lived in the same town, she said, and she always feared bumping into him in public or at work.
This is also not rare. According to RAINN, 55 percent of sexual assaults happen near or at a victim’s home. Twelve percent of survivors, like Val, were working when the assault happened.
Val hopes the calendar shows other women that they are not alone when it comes to dealing with assault. On Sept. 8, she and some of the other women featured will have a fundraiser at the Odyssey Fun Center in Sheboygan Falls.