Simply Have a Wonderful Christmas Time! Sexual Assault, Rape Culture, and Related Matters: A Non-Festive Look at a Topic on Which I Have a Very Personal Angle

It seems to me that each time the subject of sexual assault comes up, I make a personal and silent vow to allow this episode to pass without  commentary from me, Then I end up doing the opposite of what I intended to do, and I write, regardless,  about it as it relates to my own personal experience.. One stipulation my major perpetrator's attorney fought my attorney vigorously for was a non-disclosure clause. Those involved defendants represented by other attorneys in my case clearly felt  --  and rightly so in my opinion --   that their clients had far less to lose by anything I might have had to say about their own clients' personal culpability in the case, and about their clients' stories being naked and exposed for all the world, or at lest for the very limited audience would would acre enough to know of their own clients' share in any guilt or blame. Anyway, should I so desire, I possess, at least in the U.S.,  every legal right I could ever possibly hold  (except in the unlikely event that  our less-than-esteemed chief executive were to enact and somehow pass through both the house and senate  and manage to bypass the U.S. Supreme Court with some piece garbage of legislation prohibiting the victims of legally convicted or guiltily-pled defendants'  from the legal rights to tell their own stories in favor of the protection the rights of the guilty, which isn't quite so preposterous as it sounds considering the sources involved, though I will begin to distress myself about that sort of thing if and/or when it comes close to fruition) to share or sell the rights to my story to a movie production company, to a ghost-writer, or even to tell the story myself in my own words.. Much scrutiny would occur were such to happen, and much in-fighting would result as a result of the primary perpetrator's portrayal, but any story told on my behalf, were it not to be libelous, could be told from my point of view. I assume it's something my major perpetrator and his parents fear more than almost anything at this point in the incident, though it probably should be the very least of their concerns. The major perpetrator, to this point, once completing his legal sentence, has experienced little to no personal success or satisfaction in his life , at least as far as I have been able to observe.  Members of the opposite sex who would desire any contact with him whatsoever, or at least the ones whose Venn Diagram circles intersect his in the most peripheral senses possible, seem as far as I can tell to be practically nonexistent. Educational success appears to have eluded him. His family owns a business, which should provide him with steady employment though his skill-set is not ideally suited to moving up the ranks of the business to eventually assume control of the company. Much of what he might once have owned either now belongs to me or will. (Most of my financial settlement related to him was paid by his father, but, even at my personal expense, the judge presiding over the case adjudicated that a portion of the financial responsibility for his actions needed to be owned by him personally and not by his parents, garnished by wages legally documented through proper wage forms and other documents. Creative W-2 and W-4 forms aren't all that hard to come by, but at least someone involved is having to go through the motions and take the trouble to do so. Some of that is money I will likely never see  (though I believe it is exempt from any bankruptcy proceedings) but, for me anyway, it was a price well worth forfeiting for the sheer knowledge of continual inconvenience to the perpetrator and to his enabling parents.

At the present, I have no deep and penetrating desire to become the Erin Brockovich of the world of sexual assault, and I cannot see any aspect of that changing at any time soon. Still, it causes me no suffering in the least that the major perpetrator may occasionally lose sleep in concern over this ultimately happening. Any anxiety on his part is something I view as karmic forces at their very most optimal.

When it happened to me late  that late September afternoon,  I was fifteen  -- a very slight fifteen-year-old, weighing in at about seventy-five pounds and still limping noticeably from a severe compound tibia-fibula fracture incurred he previous spring in a freak track and field accident. I would have been little match for someone my own size, much less for a male more the 2.5 times my size, plus the reinforcements he called in, including one female by herself more than twice my size. The attack was overkill, and perhaps was intended to be literally such. I'll never know.

My situation has relatively little to do with anything going on in today's news world concerning taking of one's sexual liberties. Still, when a related topic hits the news, I often feel both the desire and the technical wherewithal to weigh in on the pertinent situation as it relates to my own. In some cases, the propinquity is compelling. In other cases, it's tangential at best. Still, as a survivor of a rape attempt, I will interject my opinion into any related news story if it seems pertinent to me or even if it would seem in some manner to make me feel in some way vindicated to tell a part of my story one more time, from perhaps one more angle, sometimes for the sole reason that maybe just this once, in sharing it, I will be helped to understand my particular set of circumstances more fully myself and will somehow be made,  myself, to be more whole, more recovered, and less a victim of the trauma. That, for me, is my genuine intent in all of this: I wish, on my own terms,  to permanently renege on my status as a "victim."

Then again, perhaps I merely love the sound of my own voice, even in print, so much that I cannot relinquish the opportunity to tell my story when I have reason to believe others might actually pay attention to something I have to say, as opposed what frequently happens to the often puerile drivel with which I fill up this page on a regular basis. (I do so by choice, finding solace in the absurdity of the mundane world as well.) I can state with total honesty that I'm not in any way gratified by  the negative experience I endured because it  in any way causes people to have to sit up and to pay attention to my words form time to time. Had the incident never happened, my life would be better than it presently is in every sense of the word. I'm not an "everything happens for a reason" sort of person. This incident happened to me because a single person chose to exercise free will to commit evil, because others willfully aided and abetted him in his attempt to commit the almost ultimate evil act, and because one other individual in particular was  derelict in his responsibility to take reasonable steps to protect me from any ill that might have befallen me as a result of this incident, particularly when he had been guaranteed to my parent, in discharging her from her duties as a parent at the site in order to send her to represent the school district elsewhere, that he had assumed  personal protection of me.

I will not say unequivocally that nothing good can or will ever come of the incident.  I cannot foretell the future. In the evil of all that occurred -- the physical repercussions of the attack, the psychological ramifications of it,  the months of my life  lost in attempt to heal -- all of these things, while overwhelmingly negative and something no one --  young, old, male, or female -- should ever endure -- carry with them the potential to make me a stronger and more passionate advocate for anyone I encounter in or out of my career as a medical professional who might experience something of a similar nature.  At this point in my life, I lack the strength of spirit or the perspective to allow those experiences to help me in advocating for those in similar situations. I hope such is not always the case, and I did once actually agree to (and, more importantly, I followed through with the agreed arrangement and delivered a presentation on the topic) a speaking engagement both to peers and superiors concerning my role in the ordeal.

With many accusations being made in politics, entertainment, and elsewhere in the media, the subject of sexual assault, sexual consent, and all-out rape have been in the forefront of current news.  The stories concerning political polar opposites Roy Moore and Al Franken have caught my attention most recently, but all sorts of incidents from the Stanford bicyclist's clear  taking of liberties of an incapacitated female and subsequent almost unconscionably lenient sentence.  The Franken case seems to have been brought to light primarily to somehow justify the actions of which Moore has been accused, which is ludicrous. If Franken did that of which he has been accused (it's hard for me to believe anyone as intelligent as Franken would have allowed himself to have been photographed in such not merely compromising but outwardly damning poses, though un-doctored pictures rarely lie) I have nothing to say in defense of him. Often it's a he-said / she-said situation, in which case I tend in absence of other compelling evidence to side, rightly or wrongly,  with with the accuser, knowing from personal experience how very mortifying it is to report such an accusation even under the presumed anonymity supposedly afforded to alleged victims, which may or may or may not actually exist in protection of the accuser depending upon multiple circumstances, including where and when the incident did or did not take place, who else was present, the use of social media in sharing of details [including but not limited to photography/videography of the incident], the size of the community in which the event happened (or did not; I should at least try to be fair), the integrity of those who may have been witnesses, the integrity and/or objectivity of the supporters of the accused perpetrator, and even the integrity and/or objectivity  of those charged with investigating and prosecuting the particular case. Where Roy Moore's wife and her staunch defense of her husband is concerned, I consider it utterly immaterial. If I had a husband who was considered to be a rising star on the political spectrum who had been accused of the atrocities of which Moore has been accused, any defense I might offer of him should be seen only as self-serving.

Some of the connection to what has been reported in the news has been  superficially-at-most connected to anything that happened to me. I feel almost like a fraud -- perhaps a bit of a hustler -- in that sense of connecting my story to the stories of others whenever the remotest connection might exist, and maybe for, in part, the purpose of self-promotion and of making a greater [pen] name for myself each time the opportunity arises. Yet while I may [and in all honestly am] furthering my  personal agenda ad nauseum from each retelling of my story, I earn not as much as a penny for doing so. Keeping such in mind makes it much easier for me to stare at my image as I brush my teeth each morning and evening and however many times in between that the dental hygiene routine may happen.

I suppose I should now recount the basics of my personal rendezvous with sexual assault for the benefit of those who may have missed an earlier retelling.  The events leading up to my encounter were complicated. An essay authored by me was stolen from a teacher's personal file and was resubmitted by another student who, for whatever reason -- lack of confidence in the ability to produce work of his own at an adequate level, simple laziness on his part, perhaps even a desire for personal gain at the expense of or without regard to the time and effort contributed  by another student,  perhaps even a sense of self-entitlement that would cause a person to believe he had every right to help himself to work done by another, possibly by virtue of his status as a successful athlete and the entitlement afforded to him by such. I'll never know why he stole my essay.

Still, it would have ended there had an assistant football coach who was also a wrestling coach  -- the perpetrator was also a wrestler -- had not been shown a copy of the composition assigned to his athlete as a punishment to the athlete under his supervision and had he not chosen to submit the composition for an award of academic excellence. I find tremendous irony there.  The very idea that a written work  required as a consequence of having ditched a class would then be considered as a sort of justification for accollades of any sort is ludicrous.  Had this coach not shown such  exceedingly poor judgment, none of the events precipitating the ensuing disaster would have materialized. I haven't a clue as to where if anywhere this coach is now employed, but I hope he recognizes his role in setting these events into motion, not that such in any way lessons the guilt of any of the other perpetrators.

Even if the perp were given a truth serum drug [perhaps sodium thiopental, amitobarbitol, flunitrazepam, or a host of others; as effective as these pharmaceuticals are [they're not 100% effective or their results would be used conclusively in courts of law to settle cases of guilt; medical science is not there yet, though we one day may be] asked to provide reasons for his actions, he might possibly be one of those individuals so lacking in a functional conscience that even those measures would be unsuccessful in prompting him to provide truthful reasoning for what were his actions. In the end, we might never be closer to an answer than we presently are. Beyond that, sometimes I'm not convinced of the significance of  the why matter so much as the what in such cases.

The matter of whose authorship under the composition fell should have been not nearly so complicated as my school's administration made it. It was complicated by site the principal having recused herself from the matter, leaving the next-higher-person in the chain of command -- my own mother -- in charge of investigating the matter. My mother immediately recognized her own conflict of interest in handling the matter and called in the district superintendent,  Her major mistake -- and I'm not sure what she could have done about it, even had she known then what is now known --  was to have overestimated the competence, the integrity, and the personal responsibility of the district superintendent. Football game outcomes are important, after all, and so are those who make heavy financial contributions devoted to the purchase of athletic equipment and facilities.

The date on which I submitted the essay preceded the day on which the thug resubmitted it by more than seven months. That alone should have been considered key evidence. The topic to which I wrote was one directly assigned, and I addressed the topic to perfection. I'm not suggesting that my final product was, itself, a work of perfection; I am stating, however, that .I covered specifically and with precision the material I was asked to cover. My foe's assignment -- a make-up assignment for having unauthorizedly missed a class session --had been to write something by way of make-up-assignment that was in some way connected to American history. Between the dates and specificity of the topic as covered, substantial evidence existed to support me up as having been the rightful author of the work..  Furthermore, comparison of existing writing samples should have identified the work as having  been my own. Even had I copied the essay, which I did not, had I plagiarized it, from the consistency of my work, I would very nearly have had to have plagiarized from the exact same author each time I produced a composition for school. I could not have blindly and successfully scoured the Internet for pieces from which to plagiarize and have come up with such consistently linguistically similar written work. Unless I'd had a parent or close relative willing to do my written work for me (which i didn't; my parents and other close relatives were and continue to be busy people who lack the time to do homework for their offspring. They would offer advice when requested, which happened rarely on my part, but they weren't in any way willing to author compositions for either my brother or me, and even had there been one of us who needed such unethical assistance, my brother would have been the likely recipient. He needed far more help than I did. There were multiple times when I went to his assistance, though not by writing his papers for him but by helping him to reconstruct paragraphs or to re-think ideas.  Suffice it to say that I did not have a back-up source completing my written work for me, but had I required the assistance of one, it would almost have to have been the same source in each instance. At one point a linguist from our city's local university analyzed anecdotal evidence of my written work as a favor to the court, and the linguist concluded that my written work was all done by the same person.

Next, questioning concerning the content of the specific paper under consideration was conducted. I knew exactly what was in that essay, even though it had been composed more than seven months earlier,  because I  had been the one to have composed it. I answered any and every query concerning the paper with the direct confidence of the person who authored it.  My adversary had no clue as to the identity of Senator Joseph McCarthy -- the primary subject of the paper --  much less of any of the details covered by the paper.

The investigation to that point should have clearly and sufficiently identified me as the true and correct  author if the paper, yet the adversary's parents' and their attorney's unwillingness to give up on the idea that their son/client might have been the rightful author compelled his parents and their attorney to continually pose counter-measures to support their son's innocence -- even  going so far as to promote his  status as a victim  and mine as a villainess --  empowered their attorney to devise increasingly demanding propositions which were, even more, increasing;y futile on their part and only further underscored their son's/client's guilt.

Each of us was then asked to produce a sixty-minute essay on a topic that should have been clearly to my adversary's advantage.  The assigned topic related to the BCS method of determining the NCAA's annual national championship as opposed to allowing sportswriters' and others votes to determine the national championship team, which sometimes led to a disputed conclusion.   I was them and continue to be much more of an academician than a follower of sports. I had a clue as to what is happening in the world of major sports, but arising each the morning to check out the previous day's athletic statistics  in a newspaper, or even checking into them on my computer early each morning, was not a part of my daily routine. Primarily because of my father's, brother's, and extended family's somewhat extreme interest,  I have a foundation of  understanding of major sports, of conference championships, and of related matters, but I do not  live, breathe, and bleed sports. My adversary, on the other had, supposedly did and does. One might have expected his essay related to the BCS system for determining each year's NCAA  national football championship team should have been something about which my foe could have written with ease.  His problems, as I see them, are that A) he can write about nothing with ease, and B) he may have had strength of body well-suited for a defensive lineman's position on a football squad, but beyond understanding the basic concept of going for the ball at anytime someone on the opposing team held possession, his understanding of even football was limited.

My BCS-related essay produced on demand covered the very basics of how the BCS (BCS is an acronym for Bowl Championship Series)  was a distinct but flawed improvement over the previous system of eligible voters choosing each year's national championship winner.  I suggested ways in which participating teams into the tournament of sorts could more fairly earn slots into the competition, among a few other suggestions. I really don't remember all that I wrote: I remember primarily that I completed my essay in just over forty-five minutes of the allotted time. My foe, in the full hour allotted, completed one-and-one-half sentences in which he attempted unsuccessfully to delineate the words comprising the acronym of BCS. 

I requested to use the women's facilities at this point. Permission was granted. My adversary apparently utilized this opportunity to contact friends through text-messaging.  What may already have been in the planning stages was put into effect. Three girls arrived in the administration hall restroom almost immediately after I did. It soon became apparent that their presence was neither a coincidence nor anything that was intended to work in my favor. I was slapped and punched in the face, burned three times with a cigarette, knocked to the floor, had my not-quite healed fracture stepped directly upon by a girl much larger in size and greater in weight than was I.  It was at this point that my foe was also dismissed to visit a restroom. The bathroom he chose to visit was not the males' restroom directly across the hall from the principal's office, but instead, the women's restroom, which was maybe thirty feet down the hall and around a corner..  As the male entered, two of the three females barricaded the restroom door with their bodies. They also turned a trashcan on its side in attempt to wedge it in such a way as to block the door from easy opening. The third female, who had done nothing to come to my aid by this point, also had done no physical harm to me, The third female, against threats from the others,  forced her way out of the restroom.

The male asked the females to undress me from the waist down, which they did, again kicking my ribs and stepping on my not-yet-healed leg. I had a cell phone in my jacket  pocket, which, for reasons that don't need to be detailed at this time, was of the highly simplified variety. With that phone I was able to reach 9-1-1- and six additional numbers. 9-1-1- seemed at that time like my best bet. I dialed it and hoped that the 9-1-1- operator would hear that something was very wrong and would follow up on what she heard. I also knew that my cell phone was micro-chipped, but I had no idea how long activating such a chip might actually take.

My adversary removed his male appendage from his pants. I'm uncertain as to whether I was to be expected to perform services for him orally or vaginally. I'm not sure it would have mattered. Either would have been equally devastating for me.  The view of his nude penis and of how it would involve me caused me to vomit. This, in turn, cause the male to lose his erection. Despite having studied advanced biology by that time, which should certainly have covered the basic anatomy of the human erection, between shock of the circumstances and perhaps having blocked out anything I hadn't needed to know in order to ace an exam on the topic, I may have, due to lack of comfort of the subject matter and lack of emotional readiness to learn of it,   blocked out much of what was taught in class.  I was so very ignorant at the time of the physiology of an erection that  I was thoroughly unsure of what was happening and as to how the loss of the erection might impact me.

Angry at his lack of ability to perform the one or two functions that he had intended to perform using me as his object of hate, he directed a solid kick at my pelvic area with his steel-toed boot. Except to the extent that my body had been positioned by two of the three females who had participated in some way, I wasn't necessarily lying spread-eagled in order to accommodate his kick. This undoubtedly reduced the ultimate damage, though there was damage. He also  kicked my right flank hard, stepped on my ribs, and urinated directly upon my private places.

A meeting very important for administrators in our county -- in retrospect, it's tough to understand how any meeting for administrators anywhere could have superceded in importance what was happening at our school at that very moment -- had been scheduled to begin. The superintendent was already late for the meeting before the bathroom visit incident even set into motion the devastating chain of events. The superintendent's response to his pending meeting was to send my mother to the meeting in his stead. My mother now says the should have tendered her verbal resignation at that very moment, followed the next day by a written resignation. (Keep in mind, I had not yet been injured or even threatened.) Hindsight is always superior to foresight, though.  My mother had long been conditioned by educational administrative protocol to follow the chain of command. She agreed to attend the superintendent's meeting

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the female who had escaped the bathroom was running furiously though the halls of the nearly empty  building, attempting to get the attention of the adults in the building. She first succeeded in gaining a custodian's attention. While I did phone 9-1-1 and there was evidence that they eventually located the source of the call, without the aid of that third girl, the authorities may not have been able to arrive in time to be of practical assistance to me except after the fact.  Though she consciously made the poor choice to have become involved in the first place with the lower element responsible for  the near-tragedy, her involvement was indeed a blessing, and not a very heavily disguised blessing at that. Charges against her were dropped, due in part to my own family's attorney's involvement, and members of my family did what they could to help her to secure college financial aid. She'll never be someone I'll choose voluntarily with whom to socialize, but I owe her an amazing debt of gratitude, and I've told her so.  She's done well in university, and I think she will do well in life, though guilt can be a powerful antidote to success, and I sincerely hope guilt does not overpower for her what good she is able to accomplish in the world.

My father was out of state when the incident occurred.  After being photographed in my half-nude state, among other things, I was transported by ambulance to a local hospital, and spent that first night in the local hospital  undergoing the indignities of a rape kit. Though no actual rape had even allegedly occurred, there was transfer of body fluid with the perpetrator's having urinated directly upon my open  genital area, in addition to tissue transfer due to his boot's contact with my open genital area..  Injuries, both major and minor, had to be treated, and I was furthermore in no psychological state to be on the loose. My Uncle Steve and my mother spent the night in the hospital with me. The superintendent demanded that my mother report for work at her usual hour of 7:30 a.m. the following morning. She told him in no uncertain terms that he was free to go directly to hell, and not to pass Go or collect two-hundred dollars on his way there. He told her he considered that to be a threat. She told him to consider it whatever he wanted to consider it.  My Aunt Heather spent the night at my family's home with my brother Matthew. Matthew felt strongly about not wanting to be intimidated from sleeping in his own home by thugs. Consideration of the entire baseball team spending the night there was given, but it was ultimately decided that sending just one [very strong and capable] woman to fight off potential thugs sent more of a message to the perpetrators as to anyone's opinion of their power made a stronger statement than did reinforcing the house with a crew adolescent males. Police patrol was provided in a regular basis. Inexplicably, the juvenile perpetrators were released immediately to the custody of their parents.

My father caught the next plane out of his east coast location and made it home by nightfall the next evening, by which time I was discharged from the hospital. It was a very good thing that he was there, as that night, a group of two of the three original females, the perpetrator, and an additional male friend chose to drive to our home between the hours of two and three a.m. and to use a strong slingshot-like device to propel a brick through my bedroom window.  Due either to instinct or to inside source information, the school's head varsity football coach, who lived just around the corner from my family,  knew something was up and was prepared to act. He and two other neighbors immediately blocked the perpetrators' truck in so that no vehicular escape was possible. They chased down the responsible parties.  I wan't physically harmed by the brick or broken glass, but the emotional upheaval was severe. My family no longer owns the home at which this took place, but it took months to sell the place. In the interim, I never spent another night in that bedroom. I don't think I ever even went inside the room again.

There are more specifics I could detail, but I feel that I've said all I want or need to say for now.  Due to mechanical malfunction, I'm nether a rape nor an oral sodomy victim. I'm not sure how much difference would have been made in the grand scheme of things  had I been, but I am very glad that the decision as to when, where, and with whom to have my first sex was left to me and not to the physically overpowering force of a thug. That matters immensely to me. Control is crucial where a woman's sexual life is concerned.

I'll end with a few ideas. Women are told that their anonymity is protected at all costs. We all know such not to necessarily be the case. In some cases, women voluntarily go public in revealing their identities under the [arguably correct] assumption that  a face and name attached to a victim can create the benefit of strengthening a case.  Others feel that they may never be able to get on with their lives even under the cloak of anonymity, much less with a public persona.  I cannot judge anyone for either decision. Furthermore, I should make it clear that, as most of us are aware, not all victims of rape or any other form of sexual assault are female, nor are all perpetrators, real or wrongly accused, male.

Regardless of  however stupid, stoned, inebriated, innocent by way of ignorance, or whatever adjective anyone cares to apply here, consent is consent. No means no, and everyone, barring those with the severest forms of cognitive disability, who, if they're truly so disabled, belong behind bars and razor wires,  knows what is means and has known since roughly the age of eighteen months. The involvement of a few hormones changes nothing.

And, in finality, if i ever have to wonder whether or not this really happened to me or was a bad dream or a figment of imagination, I need only look at my right arm above the elbow, where, despite regular and repeated application of topical Mederma,  a scar from the worst of the three cigarette burns remains.

I do not own this video. I thank its rightful owner for having allowed it to appear for however long it remains here.