Kavanaugh controversy triggers painful memories in armed forces
“I didn’t want to be the girl who cried rape and then nobody would want to work with me because ... in the military, if you come out about your sexual assault ... you get shamed about it.”
Virginia Messick
Virginia Messick can count the ways her life was changed when an Air Force sergeant sexually assaulted her during basic training. Seven years later, she’s angry all the time. She cries randomly. She avoids crowds. She takes medication to snuff out nightmares and struggles to sleep.
Hypervigilant after the assault, she took to packing a knife. “I carry a gun now,” she said. Messick’s assailant, Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, killed himself in a military prison in 2014. She and her Veterans Affairs counselors thought her torment would ease with time, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Walker still lives within her mind, a swaggering figure who abused and sexually assaulted the recruits he was supposed to train at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland.
Walker, described by a prosecutor as the “consummate predator” in a scandal that helped bring major changes to the military justice system, loomed a little larger last week as a bitter partisan fight erupted over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh.
Victims of sexual violence in the military often remain silent for years, and those who file complaints struggle to be believed. Many saw echoes of their own experience in the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, the California research psychologist who came forward to accuse Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a high school party decades ago.
Kavanaugh vehemently denied the allegation, and the U.S. Senate confirmed his nomination Saturday on a near party-line vote of 50 to 48. Explaining their support for Kavanaugh, many Republican senators said Ford’s
charge was uncorroborated, and some questioned why she didn’t report the incident to police when it happened.
Messick, now 27 and living in Florida, didn’t tell anyone about what Walker did to her until she was confronted by investigators.
“It’s so hard to pinpoint why someone wouldn’t report, because there’s so many different reasons, which is unfortunate,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t want to be the girl who cried rape and then nobody would want to work with me because a lot of women in the military, if you come out about your sexual assault or something happening to you, you get shamed about it.”
Biennial surveys since 2007 have found that tens of thousands of U.S. service members have said they were sexually assaulted. The Pentagon’s most recent Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military said 14,900 service members were assaulted in the 2016 fiscal year.
Nearly 7 in every 10 victims said they told no one in authority about what happened to them.
The number of sexual assaults actually reported to military authorities hasn’t changed significantly in recent years, and only a fraction of those cases — 406 — went to trial in 2017.
Nearly 60 percent of the service members who did report assaults said they were subjected to some kind of retaliation for doing so.
In the U.S. population as a whole, nearly 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men have suffered some form of sexual violence, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The estimates are based on 2012 data collected in the agency’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, published in 2017.
The CDC also reported that nearly 23 million women and 1.7 million men have been victims of rape or attempted rape.
Against this backdrop, Ford’s decision to weather public scrutiny — and mockery from the president — prompted men and women across the country to take to social media to recount their experiences with sexual assault.
One of them, Washington Post columnist Karen Tumulty, revealed that a man had groped her on an overseas U.S. Air Force base when she was 9.
“He asked me if I liked it. I thought I had done something wrong,” she wrote.
Tumulty told the San Antonio Express-News that her tweet “was not meant to be a statement on whether Brett Kavanaugh had done what he was accused of doing, but rather, a response to President Trump’s tweet questioning why Christine Ford did not come forward – or tell her parents – when it happened.”
“My tweet came as a shock to my own brother,” Tumulty said. “I honestly don’t know if I would have gone public, even this many years later, if my parents were still alive.”
Relationship sours
Reserve Maj. Anita Young, one of the Air Force’s few female AfricanAmerican navigators, said she went on a dinner date in San Antonio in early July 2017 with a fellow officer. They had consensual sex that night, but Young said the officer’s behavior was troubling. When they went out a second time, she declined to have sex with him, she said. He persisted. She submitted.
Young, 44, said she tried to ignore him the third time they met, on a Sunday night at her apartment, and that he said: “‘I’m tired of you telling me no. That’s all you’ve been doing is telling me no.’ ”
Two days later, she filed a complaint, which triggered an investigation by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
Feeling unsupported by OSI and her command, Young said, she withdrew her complaint but refiled it last December. She’s awaiting a conference with her special victims counsel, a lawyer assigned to sexual assault victims in the armed services, to learn about the status of her case.
The Air Force launched the SVC program in January 2013 in response to widespread sexual abuse of young recruits at Lackland.
An 18-year Air Force veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, Young said she first learned of the Kavanaugh controversy on the internet. It didn’t surprise her, she said, that some doubted Ford’s story and that Kavanaugh’s supporters defended him as an upstanding family man.
“People have this notion that (in) all sexual assaults, you have to wind up in an alley and you have to have blood coming down your nose and you have to have been attempted to have a murder perpetrated on you,” Young said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “So to hear them say those things almost kind of, it just … sets me back, and I cannot tell anyone — and especially in the military — I cannot tell anyone in good conscience to report.”
The struggle to be believed is a long-standing barrier for sexual assault victims.
“That’s the battle they face every time they come forward,” said retired Air Force Col. Don Christensen, once the service’s chief prosecutor and now president of Protect Our Defenders, an advocacy group for military assault and sexual assault victims. “Over my 27 years that I’ve been doing this, one of the common refrains that you hear is the perpetrator tells the victim after he’s finished that no one will believe you. And unfortunately, they have people like President Trump reinforcing that.”
Endless anxiety
Messick, who lives in the Florida Panhandle, knows that firsthand. Her testimony and that of other recruits trained by Walker led to a string of trials at Lackland, home to Air Force basic training. Thirty-five instructors were investigated for allegedly assaulting and harassing 69 recruits and technical training students. A number of the cases involved consensual sex between instructors and trainees, which is forbidden by the Air Force.
Walker was convicted of aggravated sexual assault and rape in connection with illicit relationships with 10 women he oversaw.
Messick, who testified for the prosecution at Walker’s trial, said that in the first week of training in 2011, he seemed like any other instructor, barking orders and making the female recruits do pushups. Around 10 days later, he acted like a sympathetic camp counselor, which struck Messick as odd.
A few days after that, she said, Walker made his first move.
“‘I could tell you’re from the country because you have an accent. I could tell how you carry yourself. You’re tough,’ ” Messick recalled him saying. “‘All you country girls are crazy. Girl, they’re hot.’”
Days after that, he grabbed her, ran his hands over her shirt and kissed her, she said. Stunned, Messick pushed him away and told him never to touch her again. In the fifth week of training, he lured her into an empty office. Inside, he grabbed her and threatened to have her thrown out of the Air Force or made to repeat part of basic training if she didn’t submit to him. He coldly dismissed her after they had finished, throwing her uniform at her and calling her “a stupid b----,” Messick said.
As a result of her ordeal, Messick was medically discharged from the Air Force. She receives a 70-percent VA disability for serviceconnected post-traumatic stress disorder.
Now a self-employed makeup artist, she’s able to leave her mother’s house in Baker, Fla., for only a few hours at a time. She feels anxious in public, wondering if people are looking at her, and she’ll go to the back of a checkout line if someone stands too close behind her.
She doesn’t trust men. Messick wonders if her daughter, Layden, 3, has picked up on that. The little girl will hug a woman she meets but will stand behind her mom if a man is around.
The Kavanaugh controversy stirred up old feelings, but it’s a lesser issue compared with having to start over professionally, she said.
“I’ve been more triggered by that lately, like I get very upset that this isn’t where I wanted to be in life,” she said.
“I’m really bad about being the person who thinks, ‘Well, in retrospect, if that wouldn’t have happened to me, then maybe my life wouldn’t be where it is,’ ” Messick said. “That’s part of the anxiety. The anxiety goes on and on and on and on all the time, and then everything replays in your head a lot . ... It’s always there.”