TRIGGER WARNING; and to my family and closest friends, this may be difficult for some of you to read. I wrote this from my heart, not only for myself, but for the victims without a voice, who are scared and unwilling to face the backlash they could face if they come forward. For those who have been not only the victims of sexual assault, but also the victim of a corrupt judicial system.
Let me make this clear, very clear. For all of you in the back, for all of you who have been bleating about how girls need to know what can happen if you party and get drunk: Rape is not a result of excessive drinking. Excessive drinking is the scapegoat of rapists and rape supporters (and yes, if you defend a rapist, you are a rape SUPPORTER). Intoxication is the twisted opportunity that a rapist sees as an easy accomplice to commit his or her crime. Partying can be irresponsible and even reckless, but should never be associated with excusing a rape or a rapist from the punishment that they deserve.
I’ll be willing to wager that 99% of you on my facebook or any other social media account haven’t heard me talk about this, for the sake of it being fiercely private and frankly not any of your business, but this whole Brock Turner controversy is really rubbing me the wrong way and I think that my voice has grounds to be heard and considered in case anyone who comes across this is playing the Devil’s advocate about the semantics of a heinous, sexually violent crime.
It’s 2002, and I’m just at the beginning of my sophomore year of high school. I remember the seventh night of September, hanging out with my friends, more intoxicated from attending a house party earlier in the evening than any 15 year old has business to be, when I was taken. A rapist with a previously clean record, 42 years of age, heard someone talking in the hall, looked outside of his apartment door, and saw an opportunity. That’s what I was, an opportunity. I wasn’t a teenager, I wasn’t a human being with rights to my privacy, I was an opportunity for a sick, morally corrupt adult male to take advantage of. Maybe he had done this before (though he’d never been caught), maybe he’d had sexual fantasies about rape since he was young, maybe he’d been attracted to children his entire adult life – I will never know, nor do I want to. What I do know, is that I was abducted by a human being whom I’d never before met in my life, who was 27 years my senior. Someone who knew that they had the advantage over me, and thought that they would get away with it; a rapist. Not a man who made an impulsive, bad decision; A RAPIST.
(Sidenote: I was wearing skinny jeans, and a tan and white striped form-fitting tee shirt, with pink and white Etnies, just in case you were wondering.. Appropriate, albeit awful garb for any teenager in 2002. The only thing I was “asking for” was a fashion consultation.)
I perhaps wasn’t “as drunk” as the unnamed victim of Brock Turner. Perhaps. Maybe my tolerance is better; maybe I paced myself better through the evening. I’ll admit, my memories surrounding that night feel sometimes like a movie reel of highlight clips – and I am thankful for that. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like it even happened to me, which allows for me to freely speak to others who have experienced similar trauma, without feeling everything so sharply again. I was drunk or amnesiac enough to black out several hours of the evening, but I am simultaneously disgusted and thankful to have remembered the key bits that secured criminal punishment to my attacker, a luxury that unfortunately not every victim has.
I remember standing in the hallway of an apartment complex, and the very large, very protective friend I had fled the party with, instructed me to “wait right here, I’ll be back in a minute” before closing the door on me to go say goodbye to his brother inside. I remember the clarity of that moment, I remember looking up into his eyes, nodding my head with agreement. In what seemed to be a flash immediately forward, like time travel, I remember running down the side of a street in the pitch black darkness, what turned out to be hours later. My lower body, breasts and face were aching in a pain I couldn’t understand, and there was a man running behind me, trying to catch up. I remember pleading with him, “I need to find Matt’s house, please stop.” I remember looking around me, in my haze, and thinking I found the area familiar, and knowing I had to get somewhere safe, as quickly as I could.
I remember that same man coming behind me, putting his arm around my torso as he tripped me, and straddling me as I lay on the ground thrashing, begging him “please stop, no!”. I remember his hand around my neck, his legs pinning me to the ground, his other palm covering my mouth, as his fingers closed my nostrils shut, with the desire to stop my screaming. I remember the struggle, hitting him everywhere I could reach, then how all of a sudden he seemed to grow 8 new arms, and I couldn’t move. I remember him dragging me through the tall overgrown and unkempt grass, removing my pants over my thighs and then ankles as he went. I remember clinging to the grass, grabbing as much as I could clutch in my hands and held on as tightly as I could, as it tore from the ground with every step he took. I started screaming again and he kicked me in my left side, took my very breath from my body, and came down to straddle me once more, to cover my mouth and nose, and squeeze my neck again. I remember how I was already choking from the kick, I remember the look of accomplishment in his eyes as he released my face to focus on finishing the removal of my underwear. I remember how fuzzy everything still was, in a cloud of vodka and fear, up until I started screaming again, because that was when he took his fist to my face, over and over again. Until I stopped screaming.
Something broke, and I stopped fighting. Everything was suddenly icy clear and I remember truly believing in my heart, in that moment – “I’m going to die here. This is how I’m going to die”. You don’t put your hands around someone’s throat and attempt to strangle them unless you’re aiming to silence them for good, I saw it in his eyes, his intention had become more than to rape me, this is why he was dragging me further and deeper into the woods, his intention was that I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what he’d done.
He took his hands to my face and neck once more, as I went limp, trying to convey to him that I wasn’t going to struggle anymore, I gave up. I remember laying there dizzy from lack of oxygen, paralyzed, scared to scream again, scared to move, scared to die this way, for my parents to find out that this is how it happened, this is what had been done to my body. I said “No”, I begged him. He only spoke Spanish, but the word “No” is the same to him as it is to me; he simply ignored me. I said “NO!” and he kept doing it. I gave the opposite of consent, even intoxicated, and he did not respect my choice.
I remember my instincts kicking in, my father’s voice in my head telling me what to do if anyone ever touched me where they shouldn’t, and I took my own opportunity. I kicked him as hard as I could, where my father had told me it would hurt the most, and I jumped to my feet as he fell back, and I RAN. I remember running to the nearest house, I remember banging on the door screaming. I remember looking back in the direction I’d come in, and seeing him limping towards me, clearly in certain amounts of pain but still set on finishing the crime he had made a decision to commit. I remember running and sobbing as I ran because I knew that I didn’t know where I was. I was living in a real life version of the horror movies I’d only seen on my television late at night with a bowl of popcorn and a glass of Cherry Coke.
I remember making it to a main road, at this point it was early hours of the morning or so, and I remember the man who was leaving for work in his SUV, who drove up to the side of the road and saw me, naked from the waist down, and pulled over to save my life. I remember him taking me into his vehicle, immediately giving me a coat to cover myself with, driving to the gas station at the corner, calling the police, and standing outside until the police came, wringing his hands and palming his face as he paced. I blacked out again, from either shock, or maybe even from the vodka, still, several hours after it had last passed my lips. I don’t remember the Romulus Police Department finding this man, 11 minutes after a call was placed, and bringing him to the gas station where I sat now in an ambulance, or the screaming and panicked tears that ensued when they brought him near me for identification. I don’t remember any witnesses to this as they filled their tanks for the drive to work, I don’t remember the ride to the hospital, I don’t remember the remaining clothes being taken for my body, replaced with one of those harsh, backless hospital gowns. I barely remember what happened AT the hospital, until my best friends showed up and sat with me while I gave my statement and underwent poking prodding and all the tests that come along with being my new classification: a rape victim.
I remember the news crews outside of the hospital the next day, waiting for my mother and I as we exited. I remember the sweatpants I was wearing, how my wrist was barren of my favorite heart locket I always wore, I remember rubbing my arm and acknowledging the missing trinket. I remember how embarrassed I was, I remember begging my mom not to let them come near me, I remember my fear in people knowing that I “let this happen” by being too intoxicated. I was only 15, but I knew enough to know that in this fucked up day and age, they’ll blame the victim just as swiftly as they blame the actual criminal.
My story is different from the unnamed Stanford girl who Brock Turner raped, not because of the details, but because I could remember parts of it – and I don’t imagine I’ll ever be able to forget. I was able to remember saying “NO”, so that when I gave my testimony, they knew for absolute certain that the attack on me was unwelcome and non-consensual in any and every form. Sometimes I wish I remembered more, there are things I wish I understood, hours and moments unaccounted for. What was that original pain in and on my body that I had recognized, even before he took me down on the side of the road, after I’d come to again? What had happened in the two hours that nobody can account for? I was told by my therapists that I suffer from trauma-induced memory loss, and that someday it might all come flooding back, which I would be perfectly fine without ever experiencing. I went through extensive therapy at a youth rehabilitation center in Utah for 10 months, away from my family and friends and everything I ever knew, where my counselors were mostly ill-prepared to deal with the severity of the crime committed on me, yet they worked tirelessly with me to find a safe emotional place and find my self worth again. I remember jumping out of my skin if anyone crept up on me, if anyone hugged me from behind. I remember the staff member that they had to relocate to another area of the facility, because when I saw him, I saw HIM. Something in his resemblance to the man who had hurt me, I was frozen in fear and I couldn’t control my breathing. My staff would watch me while I slept. We do know that the memories are in there somewhere that I can’t see, because (and anyone who has ever slept next to me regularly can attest to this) I have night terrors and there are nights that I’ve relived the rape subconsciously, yet still cannot remember anything new when I open my eyes. Sometimes I know that something horrible is happening in my head, and I wake up shaking. Sometimes my partner, scared and worried about what is happening to me while I thrash about, wakes me up to my great confusion and I cannot recall a single thing. I remember how it felt like there were spiders on my skin for years and years after, if anyone so much as touched my breasts, how immediately I would snap out of “the mood” if anyone dared try. I am pleased to report, that after 14 years, this seems to have subsided a bit. Yeah, that’s right, 14 years. 14 years of being physically affected by a crime that only takes minutes to commit. 14 years.
My rapist was charged with numerous counts, sentenced to 26 years in prison, and served 10. 10 years. I remember finding out towards the end of September of 2014, that he’d been released two weeks prior. I remember parking my jeep on another street away from my house, and hiding in my car for 7 hours crying, scared again, wondering if he was going to have built up enough hatred for me for being caught, that he would come after me again. My dad’s address hadn’t changed in 10 years. I didn’t know if this man had been deported – I was told he had to serve 2 years probation in the county he was released in, my county, the place I lived. I remember panicking, because I didn’t know what ill he wished on me now that I’d been “the reason” he spent 10 years away from his wife and two children, whom I’d always had a sick curiosity about. Was it just me? Did he hurt them too? I won’t ever seek to know this, but that doesn’t mean I’ve not thought about it almost obsessively. The day I found out that Jorge Ibarra Perez had been released, one of my close friends in California told me I needed to get away from the bad vibes and the heavy weight I feel every time I see the wooded area, every time the street it happened on was mentioned on my GPS, every time I see a friend who knew what had happened to me – I felt like I was marked, like I could never truly escape what had happened. My friend told me to come move to California and start over, and so I bought a flight and had relocated my life within 2 weeks of that day. Almost no one in my life knew why, or even questioned such a hasty decision, and I was okay with that, it was easier to seem like a gypsy tumbleweed than to admit how scared I was.
My rapist served 10 years in prison, a seemingly small price to pay for something I still feel in my body to this day. My ribs are permanently disfigured from where he kicked them in, for the rest of my life. Sometimes, they still pain me. 10 years, this man served, for permanently damaging a child. Brock Turner is no different from this man, yet someone thinks that it is appropriate that he serves 6 months. SIX MONTHS. For a violent and horrible act of inhumanity.
I don’t tremble any longer, at the sight of someone who resembles the man who raped me. In fact, I’ve studied his updated prison photo to see if it would jog any memories that could explain a few unanswered questions for me. I’ve graduated from the thought of him causing me to feel cold inside, for the name “Jorge” to not involuntarily cause me to cringe internally. I’m nearly 30 years old now, and I’m finally able to sleep without nightmares more often than not. 10 years, he served, for something that will continue to mark my soul for the rest of my life.
And I’m considered one of the lucky ones. I was able to testify with facts and descriptions that horrified the jury, of a child being dragged away and hurt badly by a big scary man. The unnamed Stanford student who was raped and changed forever by Brock Turner, didn’t have those memories to replay for the jury. I’d consider her the lucky one.
But because of this, for what I consider a blessing, Brock Turner, a opportunistic RAPIST, who permanently damaged another human being, sexually, mentally and emotionally, only gets sentenced to 6 months, and not even in a federal prison where he belongs. 6 months. Because of the “impact” a longer sentence might have on him. 6 fucking months, while the victim has to live with the damage he’s inflicted upon her for her entire life. 6 months, because she does not, and perhaps CANNOT remember details of the horrible things that were done to her. 6 months.
I’m filled with disappointment and betrayal towards the “justice” system which has so obviously failed the victim of Brock Turner, and subsequently has failed numerous other rape victims for which this case will be used to set precedent for other rich privileged rapists to receive lighter sentencing. There is no justice in this, and the judge should be removed from his position for disregarding the severity of the attack and the residual effects that “20 minutes out of 20 years” will have on not only the victim, but on everyone else who will be silenced by fear of their abuse not being taken for what it is as well.
I’m sad, not for myself, I’ve come to terms and accepted that what happened to me shaped who I am, and how I conduct myself now. I’m constantly aware of my surroundings, I almost always have a weapon on me for self defense, and the “worst case scenario” what if’s are always playing over in my head. Constant vigilance. I’m sad because there’s another girl out there who doesn’t have the comfort of knowing that her attacker is locked away from harming another person for the foreseeable future. I’m sad because her pain is being grossly swept to the side, and the media is focusing instead on the “misfortune” of a RAPIST who also happens to be athletically inclined, losing his opportunities to swim professionally. People are actually looking for loopholes in a truly horrendous crime, waving their entitlement and privilege high and smug. I feel no sympathy for a rapist, or any rape supporters who deign it necessary to put their ignorance on display by justifying something that is very black and white. Rape is wrong. Rape is never okay. If someone says “NO” or are unconscious/intoxicated to the extent that they cannot say YES or NO at all, then even if the victim is too gone to physically fight, that is STILL RAPE. If you are not invited verbally or physically into a situation of intercourse, THAT IS ALSO RAPE. There are no excuses for rape, and nobody, not even the award winning jock son of the ruling magistrate’s old frat brother at a prestigious college should be exempt from due punishment for such a senseless crime. Ask this unnamed victim in 14 years, if she is still affected by the events of that evening. I can tell you from very personal experience, it will still mean something to her.
Oh and hey, guess what Brock Turner? If you’d just have NOT made the choice to take the opportunity to rape a nearly unconscious woman behind a dumpster last January, you could have saved two lives from being irreparably tainted.
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