[The following content may contain sensitive information regarding sexual assault.]
[2/3] “A week after I was raped, my community, the Residential Leadership Community, decided I was lying. I don't know how they could believe that; I was a mess, I was too scared to leave my room, I was hysterically crying. I didn’t sleep for 96 hours. Then my community adopted the attitude of 'We have to stop her before she ruins this stranger's life'. Me, their friend, who never lied to them - I became nothing to them. When they told my parents against my wishes, I was hysterically sobbing in my room, and people in my dorm had their ear up to the door, trying to figure out what I was saying. I'm sure the ambience of my wails made a memorable experience as people I considered to be my closest friends sat next door, debating whether or not he penetrated me, with people I hadn’t told. My roommate said 'Stop acting like you're the victim here, I'm so done with you.' I found out later that they contacted my rapist to try to confirm whether or not he raped me. I had to prepare for my former friends to be used as witnesses against me in court when I went to the hearing to get my permanent protective order. Just fresh from being raped, I had to anticipate and practice with a lawyer for my story to be torn apart by people I confided in and thought I could trust. They turned my pain and made it their pleasure, because I was the hottest gossip of Peddrew-Yates, the girl who's lying about being raped right? It was the faces of those I considered friends in the RLC that I saw in my nightmares when I relived my rape, night after night. Two hundred people in my dorm, and not a single one stood up for me. My victim blamers continued to traumatize me for months afterwards. They posed for pictures taking the oath to not victim blame, to not rape, but I was raped, and they abandoned me and antagonized me. I consider the level of violation by my community to be my second rape.
I thought when I reported what he did, when he was expelled from Virginia Tech and lost his full ride scholarship, that I ruined his life. I only set him back two semesters. Now he's at another college, wrestling, doing pre-vet, and he can pretend like nothing ever happened. The worst part is that he's out there hurting other girls. I know I’m not his only victim, I know that I wasn’t his last. But I wasn't strong enough to stop him. I'm so sorry to his other victims, I’m so sorry I couldn’t stop him. It destroyed me to get the meager justice that I thought I got, and for what?
I sat there at 3am terrified of him, terrified to go to sleep, terrified of the nightmares, terrified of myself, mourning what I had lost. When I went home over the summer I punched a hole in the wall in my sleep, countless nights of screaming, of waking up to bruises and not knowing how I got them. I took showers constantly, trying to scrub him off my skin, because I couldn’t forget where he touched me. I wore baggy clothes, long sleeves, and long pants because I didn’t want people’s eyes molesting my body, looking at me the way my rapist looked at me.
The level of pain I went through, nobody should ever have to go through that ever. But throughout this pain, there are these moments of incredible human caring and kindness. In my darkest days, I found strangers who cared for me more than people I called friends did. I found humanity, hope and healing, from people who stepped up because I was worth being loved, because my rape did not make me undeserving of being treated like a human being. I could have started over anywhere else, but I started over here. This my school, I chose to come here and I chose to stay here. Every single day after making that decision was hard, haunted with the memories, the pain associated with places. But this is where I belong. It was people like my Russian professor, and one of my political science professors who said, 'I believe in you, you can do this, you can be successful' that really kept me going. So I'm here, and I have a mission. I want to make sure that this doesn't happen to anybody else because nobody else should go through this.”
