San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Sex assault victims see Kavanaugh case with a personal lens
Survivors recount their ordeals, shine light on reporting dilemma
Rachel Norton felt so outraged by the sexual assault case of former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner that she publicly revealed her own rape as a college freshman three decades before.
Norton’s 2016 blog post didn’t identify her rapist. She never reported the assault to police. She tried to bury the memory and never researched her attacker or knew what he did for a living. She didn’t want to know.
“I hate him,” said Norton, a member of the San Francisco Board of Education.
Then she read last week about Christine Blasey Ford. It took Ford, a Palo Alto University psychology professor, 36 years and an extreme set of circumstances to come forward with allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her when they were teenagers. Kavanaugh denies the accusation. Ford has tentatively agreed to testify Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
On Tuesday, Norton typed her attacker’s name into a search engine and hit enter.
Ford’s story, the backlash against her and the politically infused debate about what role her accusation should play in a man’s career resonates with many sexual assault survivors. More than 323,000 people in the U.S. reported being sexually assaulted or raped in 2016, according to a Justice Department report. No one knows how many victims never come forward, but experts say sexual assault is one of the most underreported crimes.
The idea that such a crime should be reported immediately and the assailant identified may seem obvious to those who haven’t been sexually assaulted.
On Friday, for example, President Trump tweeted: “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”
But sexual assault survivors who have had to decide whether to tell the police say the choice is anything but clear. They have to contend with self-recrimination, fear of retaliation, potential lawsuits and possible scandal.
Jess Davidson says she was a junior at the University of Denver in 2014 when another student raped her. For others to understand what survivors go through, she said, they should take a moment to consider their most private, shameful experience.
Then imagine strangers discussing it, mulling it over. Evaluating them and how they handled it.
“The fact that people are going to go after you about your most personal and possibly worst experience is horrifying,” Davidson said. “It’s completely understandable why somebody wouldn’t want to go through that.”
Ford’s lawyers said she’s received death threats and has left her Palo Alto home. Kavanaugh supporters have questioned her account, and some have called her an opportunist. Davidson and other women who have never publicly identified their assailants say the only “opportunity” in coming forward is being forced to relive their attack through taunting and shaming.
“But if I knew that a sexually violent person was in a position where they could do further harm, I would speak up,” said Davidson, now executive director of End Rape on Campus, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Studies show that most rape victims don’t go to the police. Davidson is among them.
“The idea of handing the power over to a judge, or to peers, to say that whatever happened was valid was not what I needed,” she said. “I didn’t want my case litigated in the court of public opinion.”
But Davidson asked her school to investigate. The university expelled her rapist — but only after he graduated, Davidson said. “His degree was not rescinded.”
Many victims of sexual assault never report the attack at all.
“I didn’t say anything at the time. I didn’t see any way that reporting would benefit me,” said Denise Caramagno, now the director at UCSF’s Campus Advocacy, Resources, and Education for Sexual Assault and Gender-based Violence.
Caramagno said she wasn’t surprised that it took decades for Ford to reveal what she says happened to her as a 15-year-old in the early 1980s.
Kavanaugh, then 17, and another teenage boy pushed Ford into a bedroom at someone’s house during a party, according to an account Ford gave to the Washington Post. She said Kavanaugh climbed on top of her and covered her mouth with his hand so she couldn’t scream as he groped her and she struggled to break free. The friend jumped on top of them, she said, and she was able to escape.
It was not until 2012, while in therapy with her husband, that she fully described what happened, Ford said.
Caramagno sees that routinely with the survivors she works with — some of whom have been sitting on their secrets for as long as 30 years. They tell themselves it wasn’t a big deal, she says. They think, “I will beat this.” They think it will get better eventually. They try not to think about it at all.
“For some people, they stuff it for a long time,” Caramagno said. “And you can understand that impulse. But sooner or later
it comes up.”
Meghan Warner was a sorority member at UC Berkeley in 2013 when two fraternity members sexually assaulted her, she said in an interview. One of them raped her.
Warner says she wasn’t accosted by a stranger in an alley, but was instead drunk at a party. She never consented to sex — California rape law says drunken people by definition cannot give consent, as do policies at most college campuses in the state. Yet the circumstances of her attack didn’t fit the “perfect victim narrative,” she said. It wasn’t the stereotype of what many people consider rape.
Her sorority sisters were the first to lay blame: Warner had hurt the house’s reputation by drinking, and she would make them lose the property altogether if it came out that she was drunk when she was raped, they told her.
Warner didn’t go to the police. She didn’t know she could ask UC Berkeley to investigate, and isn’t sure she would have if she had known.
“I can’t imagine the level of harassment I would have gotten if I had named the perpetrators and the fraternity,” she said.
As for Ford, Warner said, “she’s going to be in for quite the harrowing experience.”
Warner quit her sorority and resurrected a dormant group, Greeks Against Sexual Assault, which persuaded fraternities and sororities to require sexual assault and harassment awareness training for members every year.
Warner joined dozens of UC Berkeley students and alumnae who filed a case with the U.S. Department of Education accusing the campus of acting with “deliberate indifference” in its handling of sexual misconduct reports. In March, the department’s Office of Civil Rights found that UC Berkeley failed to investigate all cases and took too long to resolve those it did look into.
Today, Warner is studying sexual violence as a doctoral student in sociology at Stanford University.
Luoluo Hong, a vice president at San Francisco State University, has coped with her experience of a vicious, nightlong assault by helping others. She is the campus’ Title IX coordinator, named for the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education.
Thirty-one years ago, when Hong was a student at Amherst College in Massachussetts, an acquaintance broke into her apartment and raped her repeatedly. Hong told two people: a school counselor, who questioned her background and habits, and her boyfriend, who called her a slut and left her.
Hong turned to drinking. At one point, she tried to kill herself.
She recovered. But she has never told her parents what happened, and she has never pressed charges or publicly identified her rapist. If she named him, Hong said, “attention would very likely shift to him and whether my naming him was ‘right’ or ‘fair.’ ”
If she learned that her assailant was being considered for a big job in politics, education or other influential role, she said, she would break her silence — but only if she had a “viable chance of being heard and taken seriously.”
People in those roles “should be subject to higher standards of conduct, ethical behavior and principled decision-making,” she said. “I believe a U.S. Supreme Court nominee falls into that category — especially because they serve for life.”
Hong said she prefers to focus on her own life, not her assailant’s. “This is a personal choice that may not be right” for everyone, she said. “But it was the right choice for me.”
Jenny Shao of San Francisco made a different choice.
She was incensed in 2010 when a UCLA shuttle driver was allowed to keep driving his route after she reported that he rubbed his groin against her and repeatedly asked her out. As a student without a car, she said, she was forced to continue taking that shuttle.
“I got fed up,” Shao said. “One day, I got onto the bus and got everyone’s attention. I said, ‘You need to be cautious! This driver has a tendency to sexually harass and sexually assault!’ ” She announced what he had allegedly done to her and called out, “I’m warning you! You watch out for him!”
UCLA sent Shao a letter of reprimand, noting that when the driver objected to what she was doing, “you told him to shut up.” The letter also said that UCLA had advised the driver to call the police if Shao did it again, and that she could face student conduct charges.
Shao does not regret publicly shaming the man who she says sexually assaulted her.
“He was a predator,” she said. “If you don’t speak up, it’s only going to continue.”
In the wake of Ford stepping forward, that’s an idea suddenly resonating around the country.
Norton, the San Francisco school board member, had never looked up the man she says raped her in 1985. Now she typed in his name.
There he was.
“Oh my God,” she told The Chronicle. “It’s terrible.” He’s a school principal. Norton is considering what to do next.
“I do think there is a compelling responsibility to act,” she said. “And what that means, I’m still determining.”