“All my bitches, take some shots!”
When Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger addressed those words to a group of female college students he’d purchased drinks for on March 5, 2010, he probably wasn’t expecting them to end up in a police report. That delightful toast disgusted at least one woman enough that she left the VIP room in a Milledgeville, Georgia, bar, where Roethlisberger and his people had invited her to party. But others, including four sorority sisters of the woman who would be referred to in the national press as Jane Doe—stayed in the VIP room the famous athlete had invited them to share.
According to police statements provided by those four friends, after Roethlisberger’s bitches took some shots, one of his bodyguards led an extremely drunk Jane out a side door, with the quarterback following soon after. Jane’s friends immediately recognized that this was a bad idea, given the young woman’s level of intoxication.
A sorority sister named Ann Marie approached the bodyguard. “This isn’t right,” she said. “My friend is back there with Ben. She needs to come back right now.”
The bodyguard, Ann Marie wrote in her statement, said, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Other friends attempted to open the door Jane had disappeared through and to speak with the bar’s owner, Rocky.
“I told Rocky that [Jane] was too drunk to be back there,” said Jane’s friend Nicole in a handwritten statement to police, “and he told me not to worry because Ben would not do anything to ruin his reputation.”
Rocky can probably be forgiven for thinking Roethlisberger wouldn’t be so stupid as to assault a woman he’d plucked from a room full of witnesses, given that he’d been publicly accused of rape before. In 2009, a Nevada woman sued Roethlisberger in civil court over an alleged 2008 rape, which was still pending on that night in Milledgeville. (The case eventually ended in 2012, with an undisclosed settlement.1) The woman, a casino host at a hotel where Roethlisberger was staying for a celebrity golf tournament, claimed the football star called her to his room to fix a broken television and then overpowered and raped her.2
According to Ann Marie’s and Nicole’s statements, Jane emerged from the locked room about ten minutes later, crying, and immediately told them Ben Roethlisberger had penetrated her, despite her repeated pleas with him not to. (Ann Marie’s statement says Jane told her that “he had unprotected sex with her,” while Nicole’s says flatly, “He raped her.”)
Jane’s own statement fills in the details. After the bodyguard escorted her to the empty hallway, he told her to wait there. Roethlisberger arrived shortly thereafter, with his penis hanging out of his pants. Jane told him that wasn’t okay and tried to leave, but the door she opened led into a bathroom. The rest of her statement reads:
He followed me into the bathroom & shut the door behind him. I still said no, this is not OK, and then he had sex with me. He said it was OK. He then left without saying anything. I went out of the hallway/door to the side, where I saw my friends. We left [the bar] and went to the first police car we saw.3
Bystanders Revisited
Before I tell you about the police officer they found, can we take a moment to celebrate Jane Doe’s sorority sisters, and how hard they tried to look after their drunk friend? This is what gets lost in pearl-clutching articles about “hookup culture,” binge-drinking college kids, and overtly sexual sorority girls.4 Jane’s friends were well aware that she was too drunk to be left alone with a guy, and they worked very hard to intervene when she was—pleading for help from the bodyguard and club owner, trying their best to get past the door Jane had disappeared behind. They immediately believed her when she told them what happened, and they went with her to find help. During a night of bar hopping, they remained aware of the risks and worked together to keep each other safe while enjoying the same type of partying men can generally do without fear. When the worst happened anyway, they acted swiftly to look after their friend.
It’s a perfect example of that simultaneously heartwarming and heartbreaking “Leave no woman behind” approach Robert Jensen wrote about. Sometimes, no matter how prepared you are for battle, a soldier is lost.
But how many rapes have been prevented, do you suppose, by young women looking out for each other? We only hear about it when the system breaks down, but young women all over this country, every damned night, are looking out for each other at parties, dragging friends out of dicey situations, following their guts, walking away, and putting their besties to bed with a stuffed animal and a puke bucket. They may not accept finger-wagging, Puritanical bullshit about abstaining from alcohol and sex to protect themselves from violent crime, but young women are trying.
It would be great if they could get a little more help from men.
Sergeant Blash, Superfan
And now we come to the police officer Jane, Ann Marie, and Nicole found when they left the club. Sergeant Jerry Blash, as it turns out, was such a football fan that when he spotted Roethlisberger earlier that night, he’d posed for pictures with the star. There’s a group shot in which Roethlisberger has an arm around Blash’s neck and an apparent selfie of the two with their heads close together, Roethlisberger smiling while Blash does his best imitation of Derek Zoolander’s “Blue Steel.”
Blash’s narrative of what happened after Jane and her friends approached him, a copy of which is available (along with all the other statements) on the Smoking Gun website, goes like so:
She advised me that while in Capitol City (the club), she was sexually assaulted or sexually manipulated by the suspect around 130 hours. She also stated that one of the suspect’s bodyguards escorted her to a back room/hallway area where the suspect was. Once there she stated the suspect asked her for sex. At this time it is unclear to what happened after this point due to the complainant’s recollection being foggy from to [sic] her intoxication. However she did write a statement of what she thought happened. . . . The suspect stated that he remembers the complainant being around him, but advising her she was too drunk after observing her fall. He then walked away from her.5
That would sound fairly reasonable, if it weren’t for a couple of little problems. First, there’s Jane’s statement, which is perfectly clear on the point that Roethlisberger penetrated her after she told him not to. It’s not a matter of what she thought happened but what she says happened.
And the second problem, as the New Yorker’s Amy Davidson put it: “Blash admitted to investigators that he went straight to Roethlisberger’s party . . . and told them about the accusations in crude and dismissive terms, calling the woman ‘this bitch.’”6
Anthony J. Barravecchio, an off-duty police officer traveling with Roethlisberger’s entourage, reported that Blash said words to the effect of, “We have a problem. This drunken bitch, drunk off her ass, is accusing Ben of rape. This pisses me off. Women can do this. It’s bullshit, but we’ve got to do this, we’ve got to do a report. This is BS. She’s making shit up.”7
An Officer Clay, who accompanied Blash when he went to interview Roethlisberger, told a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent that the quarterback “said she probably started it because he wouldn’t give her the time of day, basically . . . she was rude to him so he kind of ignored her throughout the night. I can’t tell what he felt, but it seemed like he felt like she was the one who instigated it because she wasn’t given the time of day.”8
Instigated what? The penetration she says she didn’t want and he says didn’t happen?
Oh no, wait, I get it. She started a conspiracy to get Ben Roethlisberger arrested for rape, while she was literally too drunk to stand up straight. As revenge for being ignored, this theory goes, Jane made up a story that she was raped and convinced her friends to back her up. And her friends were all, “Sure, we’ll totally make false statements to the police, in hopes of sending an innocent man to prison, because you’re irritated that a famous athlete didn’t pay attention to you! What are friends for?”
Not too surprisingly, prosecutors declined to charge Roethlisberger with anything—in part because the alleged victim expressed that she did not wish for the case to proceed. (Davidson notes wryly, “One issue for her and her family, apparently, was that they didn’t trust the police.”9) Ben Roethlisberger claims he committed no crime that night, and I do not personally have enough information to say any different. Sometimes, as you’ll see by the end of this chapter, a bizarre and incredible story is the truth. But regardless of what happened that night, the way police handled the complaint reeks like the Steelers’ locker room.
Sergeant Blash, the only officer to interview Roethlisberger about these allegations, resigned from the Milledgeville Police Department one day before the Georgia Bureau of Investigation made documents pertaining to the case public.
Do the Police Trust Women?
Sadly, although the fact that the accused was a celebrity makes it an exceptional case, Blash can’t be dismissed as an anomaly. A recent study of eleven police and sheriff’s departments in the Southeast United States, conducted by sociologist Amy Dellinger Page and published in the journal Feminist Criminology, evaluated officers’ “perspectives on sexual assault” via two scales: one that measured “rape myth acceptance” and another that measured respondents’ perception of victim credibility.10
The “rape myth acceptance” scale measured agreement with statements like “Any victim can resist a rapist if he or she really wants to,” “Women who dress provocatively are inviting sex,” “Many women secretly wish to be raped,” “A woman is responsible for preventing her own rape,” “Any man can be raped,” and the like, on a five-point scale: strongly disagree, disagree, neither disagree nor agree, agree, and strongly agree.
For the most part, the officers responding didn’t fall for the most egregious rape myths—93 percent at least agreed, for instance, that any woman can be raped. But then, only 66 percent agreed that any man can be raped, and a full 5.9 percent strongly disagreed with that statement. (One is curious about what kind of men those other 34 percent believe to be rape-proof. Perhaps they have some lessons for the rest of us?)
Meanwhile, 16.6 percent agreed and 6.1 percent strongly agreed with the statement “Any victim can resist a rapist if he or she really wants to.” So that’s 22.7 percent of cops who apparently think victims just didn’t want not to be raped badly enough? That they could have gotten away if they’d really tried? Fantastic.
And then there’s the statement most relevant to what went down in Milledgeville: “Women falsely report rape to call attention to themselves.” The good news: 10 percent of respondents strongly disagreed with that, and another 30 percent disagreed. However, 17.6 percent agreed, and another 2.6 percent agreed strongly. So that’s more than 20 percent agreement with one of the most pernicious rape myths there is.
To be fair, the statement is worded somewhat ambiguously; 38.4 percent chose the “neither” option, which is a higher number of fence sitters than there were for any other statement on the “rape myth acceptance” scale. If one reads it as “Some number of women falsely report rape to call attention to themselves,” then one would have to agree; the facts bear that out. If, however, one reads it as “Women often falsely report rape to call attention to themselves,” then a person who knows the facts would have to disagree. As it is, “neither agree nor disagree” probably is the safest bet, and this is why surveys like this can be frustrating.
But. But. Let us not forget what this census was measuring: acceptance of rape myths. And the myth, in this case, is not that the very occasional woman will fabricate a sexual assault story to garner sympathy and attention. The myth is that women, as a class, are so likely to do that—so many are “bitches” just “making shit up”—you cannot and should not trust any woman who reports a rape.
“Unfounded” Cases
That interpretation is echoed in research conducted by sociologist Martin D. Schwartz when he was a visiting research fellow at the National Institute of Justice between 2004 and 2006. Working with 428 first respondents from fifteen municipal and campus departments in several states, researchers posed the question: “What percentage of rape reports do you think (your gut feeling) never happened; they are false reports? We don’t mean dismissed cases, but flat out never happened?”11
The phrasing was meant to keep the focus on the officers’ personal feelings, as opposed to giving them an opportunity to mindlessly spit back the department’s “unfounded” rate. The FBI requires all US police departments to submit their crime statistics to the annual Uniform Crime Report, including cases deemed “unfounded.” As I noted in Chapter 4, the FBI defines “unfounded” cases as “determined through investigation to be false or baseless” (emphasis mine), but individual police departments often have different definitions.
Happily, 27.3 percent of Schwartz’s respondents said their gut estimate of the false rape report rate was between 0 and 10 percent—consistent with the most reliable data we have.
Unhappily, “a similar number, 28.8%, came up with an estimate that was at 50% or above, and some estimated that 95 to 100% were false reports.”12
Some number of actual, working police officers in the twenty-first century said they believed 100 percent of rape reports are false. ONE HUNDRED PERCENT. What do you even do with that?
Writes Schwartz: “Overall, the 428 patrol officers who answered this question estimated that 32.7% of all reported cases were false. This is an extraordinary finding for a group of people who almost invariably got the questions on a rape myth scale ‘correct.’”13
Did I mention he tested the same officers on their acceptance of common rape myths, using a scale similar to Page’s? Schwartz found, as she did, that most respondents gave the “correct” answers, implying that they didn’t subscribe to victim-blaming stereotypes. But it’s unclear whether that shows a genuine decline in sexist attitudes or is simply a matter of “impression management”—which is sociologist for “lying to make someone think the best of you.” Schwartz’s interviews with detectives point toward the latter.
We learned earlier that police were quick to say all of the right things, including and especially the fact that all cases were investigated dispassionately by the detectives, written up objectively, and passed on without prejudice. Yet when the microphone was off (or even while the microphone was on), again and again these detectives admitted that there were a large number of cases where they “unfounded” the case rather than continue with it. Evidently if they just plain didn’t believe the victim, then this did not count as a case of “real rape” that would be turned over to the prosecutors. If the victim was treated poorly, and she chose not to continue with her complaint, this was another sign that the case could be ignored.14
So basically, if police make the process of reporting a rape so dreadful that victims decide seeking justice isn’t worth it, they don’t have to do all the hard work of investigating a case. That’s a neat trick.
Worse, it’s shockingly common. In 2010, a Baltimore Sun investigation of FBI data revealed that over the previous four years, “more than 30 percent of the cases investigated by detectives each year [were] deemed unfounded, five times the national average.”15 Forty percent of emergency calls about rape in Baltimore were not even investigated.
After reported data suggested New Orleans had 43 percent fewer rapes than twenty-four other high-crime cities, the Department of Justice ordered a review of the city’s “forcible rape” reporting. The findings were bleak: “The NOPD misclassified 46% of the offenses tested to sexual battery, miscellaneous offense or Unfounded (UNF) rather than forcible rape.”16 Almost half of reported rapes were called something else in the official paperwork.
These were not accidents or misunderstandings. In a 2014 article titled “How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America’s Hidden Rape Crisis,” University of Kansas law professor Corey Rayburn Yung writes that Baltimore and New Orleans, along with St. Louis and Philadelphia, “lowered their official counts of rape incidents through three difficult-to-detect techniques.”17 First, “unfounding” complaints without a thorough investigation; second, reclassifying rape complaints as lesser offenses; and third, “police officers in those jurisdictions often failed to create any written record that a victim made a rape complaint to eliminate the incident from the UCR data.”18
It’s easy to make it look like you’ve got a remarkably rape-free city, if you stick to a consistent policy of minimizing sexual violence and manipulating data.
Military Malfeasance
That approach also works nicely for those charged with serving and protecting the entire country.
When I started writing this book, I expected to rely heavily on Helen Benedict’s 2009 book, The Lonely Soldier, and Kirby Dick’s corresponding 2012 documentary, The Invisible War, for information on rape in the military. Both are thorough, powerful, and highly recommended; The Invisible War even inspired then secretary of defense Leon Panetta to move all military sexual assault investigations up the chain from commanders to colonels, and call for a special victims unit in each branch of the armed services.
But starting in early 2013, military rape suddenly became a hot topic, with constantly updating news. The Invisible War was up for an Academy Award, and the Senate Armed Services Committee held its first hearings on sexual assault in the military in a decade. The media exploded with talk about the film, the hearings, the Defense Department’s annual report on sexual assaults, and the complex, shocking problems they all highlighted.
An Associated Press report revealed that nearly a third of all military commanders fired between 2005 and 2013 were released because of sexual offenses.19 Based on anonymous surveys, the Pentagon estimated that 26,000 soldiers were victims of sexual violence in 2012, but only 3,374 of those assaults were reported; 2,610 investigations were completed; 594 courts martial were convened, and 302 went to trial. A mere 238 cases ended in a conviction.20
In May 2013 Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Krusinski was charged with sexual battery. Although that charge would later be downgraded to assault, of which he would eventually be acquitted, it’s worth noting that Krusinski’s mug shot shows scratches and bruises on his face, delivered by a woman who told police that he’d drunkenly groped her in a parking lot. Also worth noting: Krusinski was—wait for it—head of the USAF’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program.21
His arrest came a month after Air Force Lieutenant General Craig Franklin used his authority to overturn a jury verdict that found Lieutenant Colonel James Wilkerson guilty of sexually assaulting a woman in his home after a party. Describing a six-page letter Franklin wrote to Air Force Secretary Michael Donley justifying the decision, the Associated Press reported:
Franklin, commander of the 3rd Air Force at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, said a host of details led to his decision, including that the victim turned down offers to be driven home from the party, didn’t accurately describe the house layout and gave a version of events that he did not find credible. He said Wilkerson was a doting father with a good career and it would be “incongruent” for him to leave his wife in bed, go downstairs and assault a sleeping woman he’d only met earlier that evening.22
Missouri senator Claire McCaskill, who at the time was working on a bill that would remove commanders’ authority to overturn jury verdicts, told the AP, “This letter was like fingernails on a blackboard to me.”23 Girl, tell me about it.
A week after Krusinski’s arrest, an army sergeant first class, in charge of his battalion’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program at Fort Hood, was under investigation for two counts of sexual assault and allegedly forcing a subordinate into prostitution. Although he went unnamed in the press at the time, in March 2015, Sergeant First Class Gregory McQueen pled guilty to fifteen of twenty-one charges, including pandering, and received a sentence of twenty-four months. Army reports indicate that McQueen recruited female privates who were desperate for money into a prostitution ring.24
Suddenly, it made a lot more sense that military sexual trauma was so ubiquitous—if victims were reporting their assaults to sexual predators, no wonder they weren’t getting justice.
And even when it wasn’t that bad, it was still pretty bad. Writing in the Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta outlines the hurdles victims face:
The basic problem with the military justice system in cases of sexual assault—as outlined in horrific detail by the military women and experts featured in Invisible War and by members of Congress during hearings—is that it combines the dynamics of the workplace with the problem of crime investigation. A woman who is assaulted and wants redress has to report the crime to her commanding officer—her boss—and press charges against one of her colleagues in the military, often someone who also works for her boss, all the while continuing to live near her attacker in a thick soup of overlapping interpersonal and professional relationships between her and his friends.25
Beyond that, the commanding officer has a strong incentive to decide allegations of rape are unfounded—it will reflect poorly on his leadership if crimes are happening under his nose—and women who report rape can find themselves penalized for “adultery.”
New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who spearheaded a bill to remove sexual assault prosecutions from the chain of command entirely, told PBS Newshour in July 2013:
For those victims who have been courageous enough to report these cases, 62 percent have said they have been retaliated against for reporting those cases. Of the tens of thousands who didn’t report incidents of sexual assault, rape, and unwanted sexual assault contact, the reason they give us is they don’t trust the chain of command, that they think nothing will be done, or that they fear retaliation, or they have seen someone else be retaliated against.26
I believe the correct military terminology for this situation is “FUBAR.”
On the upside, legislators saw in this an opportunity for bipartisan progress—because everybody loves the military and hates rape, right?—and got cracking on reforms. On the downside, Gillibrand’s bill eventually failed, and conservatives were quick to blame the military rape crisis on young men and women living in close quarters. When Senator McCaskill interfered with the nomination of Lieutenant General Susan Helms for vice commander of the Air Force Space Command, citing concerns about Helms’s judgment in a past sexual assault case, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto declared it evidence of “a war on men—a political campaign against sexual assault in the military that shows signs of becoming an effort to criminalize male sexuality.”27
Once again, I can’t help but notice that it’s not feminists who equate “male sexuality” with the desire to rape any woman who wanders by.
Setting that aside, what these “if you let women in, it’s bound to happen” arguments leave out—besides everything decent and reasonable—is the fact that, owing to sheer percentages, more than 50 percent of military sexual assaults involve male victims. Just over 6 percent of women serving have reported sexual violence, and less than 2 percent of men have. But as of 2010, there were 210,000 women on active duty and about 1.2 million men. A far greater proportion of women are being assaulted, but a greater number of individual men are suffering sexual trauma. The crisis has nothing to do with horny young people in close quarters and everything to do with a culture of toxic masculinity and institutional secrecy.
What all of this tells us is that soldiers and law enforcement officers are just as affected by rape culture as laypeople—only, when they don’t believe a victim’s story, they have the power to punish her. Just as being falsely accused of rape can plunge an innocent victim into a nightmare journey through the criminal justice system, so can reporting a real one. When we talk about sexual violence and false accusations, we must also remember the stories of women who were arrested and prosecuted for reporting their own rapes.
In 1997, a legally blind Madison, Wisconsin, woman named Patty was raped at knifepoint in her own bed. She called police and underwent a hospital examination but was unable to identify her attacker. Patty had been sexually abused as a child and had reported two attempted rapes to police when she was younger. Pressed to think of anyone who might have done this, she named her daughter’s boyfriend, who resembled what she could make out of the rapist. But that young man had a solid alibi.
Because she suggested he investigate the wrong man, and because he apparently didn’t believe her vision was as substantially impaired as she claimed, Detective Tom Woodmansee became convinced that Patty had made the whole thing up. In his report of her questioning, Woodmansee writes, “I told [Patty] that her vision does not even appear to be noticeably bad to me and she stated ‘I don’t think it is that bad.’”28 Patty’s ophthalmologist would later submit a court brief explaining that her vision is 5/200 in both eyes, “considerably worse than legally blind.”29
The Madison district attorney’s office told journalist Bill Lueders, author of the book Cry Rape: The True Story of One Woman’s Harrowing Quest for Justice, that she “behaved in a manner wholly incompatible with” their image of a rape victim.30 Perhaps that explains why Woodmansee and another detective, Linda Draeger, encouraged Patty to confess that she’d invented the rape story. She eventually did, telling the detectives, “I’ll say whatever you want.”
Here’s a taste of how that conversation went, from Woodmansee’s own report:
I asked her, “Do you believe that I know this is a lie,” to which she responded by saying, “yeah.” [Patty] then responded by saying, “Okay, I’m lying.” I asked her why and she stated she did not know why. I told her I found it difficult to believe she would not have a reason for making this up and she stated, “I’m honest, I don’t really know why.” I asked [Patty] at what point did she decide in her mind to make this up or was it spontaneous. [Patty] stated, “I’m sorry, I’m very sorry, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” I asked [Patty] if she has ever told anyone else that she was lying about this incident and she stated she did not. I asked her, “Did you ever consider telling me that you’re lying” and she stated, “no.”31
Patty recanted her confession the next day but was charged with filing a false report—a charge later dropped when DNA tests failed to produce a match between semen found in her bed and any man she knew. Patty sued the city of Madison and underwent a lengthy, humiliating series of depositions. A judge dismissed the case.
In 2001, the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory reexamined the DNA and found a match on file: Joseph Bong, who was by then in prison for robbing a hotel and sexually assaulting the clerk. Convicted of raping Patty, Bong was sentenced to an additional fifty years in prison.
The city of Madison eventually apologized to Patty and offered her $35,000 for her trouble.
Sara Reedy was nineteen and working alone at a Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania, gas station when an armed man came in and held up the store for $600. He then held a gun to Sara’s head and demanded that she perform oral sex on him.
For reasons best known to himself, the detective who took her statement in the hospital, Frank Evanson, almost immediately decided that Sara had fabricated the sexual assault story to cover up her own theft of the $600. Despite knowing of another recent assault under similar circumstances, Evanson simply dismissed the possibility that Reedy was telling the truth. A rape kit was collected but never tested.
Reedy was charged with theft, receiving stolen property, and filing a false report. Pregnant at the time, she was turned away by a local victims’ services center, and lost the trust of friends and even some family members, who took the police’s word over hers.
After several months—and only a few weeks before Reedy’s trial was scheduled—a man named Wilbur Brown was arrested for another convenience store sexual attack. During the interrogation, he confessed to orally raping Reedy and assaulting a third young woman; eventually, he would plead guilty to ten sexual assaults and be sentenced to life in prison.
Reedy sued Cranberry Township. The case was thrown out. On appeal, though, she was awarded $1.5 million.
In a January 2013 interview with Vice magazine, reporter Natalie Elliott asked Reedy what she’d do differently, if she could go back to that first encounter with Evanston. “I don’t think that, in that position, after having been sexually assaulted and robbed at gunpoint, there is necessarily anything that I could have done differently,” she said. “I was just in so much shock, and I guess they had a certain expectation of a person who was sexually assaulted. And I didn’t live up to that expectation.”32
Frank Evanson still has a job with the Cranberry Township Police Department.
Fancy Figueroa of Queens, New York, was two weeks pregnant on her sixteenth birthday, in 1997, when a man followed her home from school and snuck into her home. The girl grabbed a knife to defend herself, but her assailant took it from her, chased her into her basement, and raped her.
As with Reedy, authorities went through the motions of taking a rape kit but didn’t expect anything to come of it. Because of the pregnancy—by her boyfriend at the time—they assumed she made up the rape story to avoid getting in trouble with her parents. Their belief in this theory was so strong, in fact, that they charged the traumatized high school sophomore with filing a false report, convicted her, and sentenced her to community service. By that point, even her parents didn’t believe her.
Nearly seven years went by before a DNA match would identify Vincent Elias as the man who did, indeed, break into the Figueroa home and rape Fancy on her birthday. Elias confessed and was sentenced to twenty-two years, on top of the fifteen he was already serving for two other rapes.33
He committed those two rapes after he raped Figueroa—while the city was busy prosecuting her for making it up.
Stranger Than Fiction
As horrible as all of those women’s experiences were, New York’s Seemona Sumasar endured a post-rape miscarriage of justice that tops them all.
On March 8, 2009, Sumasar tried to get her abusive boyfriend, Jerry Ramrattan, to leave her Far Rockaway home, where he’d been living. Ramrattan took her down to the basement, covered her mouth with duct tape, and according to the New York Times account of her testimony at his trial, “held her captive for hours, ordering in Chinese food, watching television and putting a gun to his own head before raping her.”34 When he was gone, Sumasar showered and called 911.
Later, after Sumasar refused to recant her report of the rape, Ramrattan plotted elaborate revenge. He recruited friends to claim they’d been robbed at gunpoint by Sumasar. He showed them pictures of his ex so they could identify her to law enforcement, created fake crime scenes, and coached his friends on how to offer clues that would lead the authorities where he wanted them to go. The plot had such range and depth, it convinced police to arrest Seemona Sumasar and charge her with multiple armed robberies.
Immediately, she told them that Jerry Ramrattan had to be behind the frame-up.
Although Sumasar had alibis for all of the nights in question—including security video that showed her at a casino when one of the robberies supposedly took place—her bail was set at $1 million. Unable to afford it, she spent seven months in jail, separated from her child, awaiting trial for crimes that never happened. The restaurant she owned went out of business. Her home went into foreclosure.
Sumasar was freed only after a police informant tipped off the authorities that her ex-boyfriend was, indeed, connected to the people who claimed she robbed them. Ramrattan was eventually convicted of rape and perjury, and sentenced to thirty-two years in prison.
Notice some distinguishing factors about the women whose stories I’ve just told. First, they were imperfect victims. Patty didn’t tell a completely consistent story and was a survivor of previous sexual assaults. Sumasar had dated her attacker before realizing he was dangerous. Figueroa and Reedy were both young and pregnant—clear evidence that they weren’t wide-eyed virgins.
As I hope you’ve gathered by now, none of these factors should suggest that a person is lying about being raped—in fact, all except the pregnancies are common characteristics of genuine victims. But rape culture tells us that “real” victims don’t get confused, misspeak, or tell white lies alongside the description of a true attack. “Real” victims don’t make stupid mistakes, have crappy families, or stay with abusive men. And they certainly don’t have consensual sex for pleasure, outside of marriage.
Next, note that all of these women were already marginalized in some way. Sumasar and Figueroa are women of color. Patty is disabled, and she and Reedy were both struggling financially. Any one of those details can severely damage victims’ credibility in the eyes of law enforcement—not to mention juries and the general public. (For instance, Detective Evanson assumed that Reedy’s lack of funds was motive to steal $600, which figured heavily into his refusal to believe she’d been assaulted and robbed.) As long as our image of a “real” rape victim is still a naive, sexually inexperienced, able-bodied, middle-class white woman conked over the head and dragged into an alley by a large, gun-wielding, brown man, other types of people who report rapes are at risk not only of being humiliated and degraded by invasive questioning and a general aura of suspicion, but of being charged with crimes themselves.
Think for a moment about how many people believed that Seemona Sumasar, who had no criminal record, was an armed robber who lied about being raped to get revenge on her ex. (For what? Who knows?) Yet they found it easier to believe that than to believe that her ex—who did have a record and enough underworld connections to be a paid source for police—went to great lengths to punish her for reporting him and prevent her from testifying.
All of those people believed three separate reports of nonexistent crimes coming from petty criminals but didn’t believe a rape victim (previously deemed credible by police on that count, even!) who said her abusive ex-boyfriend and attacker, already a convicted criminal, had set her up.
A catastrophic series of failures like that doesn’t happen when you start out believing, in accordance with the statistical probability, that someone who reports a rape is most likely telling the truth. That happens when you start out believing the chance is no greater than fifty-fifty, and if a woman has any possible motive to lie, she will.
That same erroneous belief is at least partially behind the appalling and widespread failure among US police departments to bother testing the evidence they collect from victims.
Missing and Untested Rape Kits
Helena Lazaro was seventeen in 1996, when a man approached her one night at a self-serve car wash in Los Angeles, claiming to have been in a fight, and asked her for a ride to the hospital. Lazaro’s instincts told her to flee, and she thought she had time to get into her car and drive away. Before she could, the man held a knife to her throat and demanded that he drive her to a parking lot, where he raped and robbed her.
As investigative reporter Ralph Blumenthal wrote in Marie Claire in 2009, Lazaro reported the crime to the first police officer she saw, and submitted to being swabbed, prodded, and combed for a rape kit at a local emergency room, in hopes of identifying her attacker.
Six weeks later, an Indiana truck driver named Charles Courtney raped his wife at knifepoint. She reported the rape but didn’t protest when Courtney struck a deal that reduced the charge to sexual battery, a class C felony. Courtney served only five months.
Fortunately, that felony conviction meant his DNA was already on file when he raped a young Ohio woman in 1998, at knifepoint, in a deserted parking lot. Eventually, samples taken from the Ohio victim’s rape kit were matched to Courtney via the national Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, and he was arrested for that rape—three and a half years later.
Meanwhile, Lazaro continued to call the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department regularly. In 2007, she was told that her rape kit had been destroyed, along with any hope of catching her attacker. She called a friend at Peace Over Violence, a social service agency that specializes in sexual violence prevention and education, who had a coworker make a call to the sheriff. Writes Blumenthal, “Miraculously, Lazaro’s rape kit was found and tested and the DNA results uploaded to CODIS. It matched Courtney’s DNA profile.”35 Thirteen years after that evidence was collected.
If Lazaro’s rape kit had been tested, and the DNA results entered into CODIS in a timely fashion, authorities could have identified him as a serial rapist after he attacked his wife—instead of pleading him down to a lesser crime that carried a shamefully short sentence.
Now let’s take a moment to recall what Page’s survey found about law enforcement officers’ attitudes about marital rape. That men who rape their wives might also rape other women should surprise exactly no one at this point. But again, as long as we continue to treat rape as an act of sexual incontinence—as opposed to one of deliberate malice—rapists who target their romantic partners will benefit from that misconception. If down deep, we believe the real crime of rape is violating a chaste woman—as opposed to violating another person’s bodily autonomy—we’ll never take spousal rape as seriously as we do stranger rape. But as the case of Charles Courtney demonstrates, sometimes the same men commit both.
If Courtney had been charged with the crime he actually committed against his wife—rape carried out with a deadly weapon, a class A felony—it’s unlikely he would have been free to commit the Ohio rape less than two years later. Or if Helena Lazaro’s evidence had been tested fewer than thirteen years after she was attacked, Courtney could have been kept in prison for a very long time. Either one of those actions—and you’d expect both of a functioning justice system—would have prevented at least one more violent crime that we know of.
Instead, Courtney was free after five months for raping one woman at knifepoint and wouldn’t be prosecuted for raping Lazaro until more than a decade later. In the meantime, as the Ohio victim told Blumenthal, “He was a trucker driving across the United States. I honestly feel there are more women out there.”
Statistically, she’s probably right. And that isn’t an isolated example. The men who raped Sara Reedy, Fancy Figueroa, and “Patty” all committed more sexual assaults while those victims’ rape kits sat untested. A CBS News investigation in 2009 found twelve US cities “said they have no idea how many rape kits in storage are untested.”36 In Detroit that same year, prosecutor Kym Worthy discovered more than 11,000 aging, warehoused rape kits and vowed to process them all. As of early 2014, 1,600 kits had been tested—and 455 suspects identified, with 87 of those serial rapists.37 In 2011, Los Angeles finished testing a backlog of 6,132 rape kits, which yielded 1,000 matches to DNA already in the system.38
In August 2014, New York Times reporter Eric Eckholm offered the following explanation for why key evidence in rape cases so often goes ignored:
The reasons for the backlog, experts say, include constraints on finances and testing facilities, along with a slow recognition among investigators that even when the offender is known, DNA testing might reveal a pattern of serial rapes. And too often, women’s advocates say, the kits went untested because of an uncaring and haphazard response to sexual assault charges.39
A 2010 article in the Journal of Community Psychology by psychologists Debra Patterson and Rebecca Campbell explores why some victims do choose to report their rapes to police, despite it all. Both prior research on the topic and Patterson and Campbell’s small study of twenty adult female survivors revealed that one of the most common motivations is to prevent the perpetrator from victimizing anyone—including themselves—again.40 And yet, as we’ve seen, law enforcement’s spotty, suspicious response to sexual assault reports often leaves predators free to attack repeatedly.
This is what happens when rape culture infects the systems we have in place to protect us. Quite simply, we allow violent criminals to go free.
The Right Way to Center an Investigation on the Victim
In January 2013, Human Rights Watch, a nonprofit organization that keeps tabs on abuses of power around the globe, published a policy paper, “Improving Police Response to Sexual Assault.” It contains forty pages’ worth of recommendations based on the existing literature and interviews with “sex crimes detectives, Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE nurses), prosecutors, forensic lab chiefs, and/or rape crisis advocates” in four American cities.41 I strongly encourage you to read it for yourself, if you’re into that sort of thing. But right now I want to talk about a subject that takes up nearly half of the document: what it means to investigate sex crimes using a “victim-centered approach.”
It means collecting just the basic facts at first, while reassuring the victim that they won’t be judged or mistrusted, what the report calls “brief but compassionate initial contact.” Pumping someone for details in the immediate aftermath of a trauma is counterproductive, and a “poor interaction with a first responder can result in the victim deciding not to move forward with the investigation.”
It means being mindful of how often a victim is asked to repeat her story and by how many people. The more you’re asked the same questions over and over, the more it can start to feel like no one believes you, even if the actual issue is poor communication among investigators. Ideally, the victim should only have to deal with one detective throughout the process, and police and SANE nurses will work together and share information.
It means interviewing victims in a space that’s comfortable, safe, and private—whether that’s their own home or a room at the police station—and prioritizing their emotional well-being. The report offers some lovely examples of how this plays out in departments that have undertaken deliberate efforts to improve their interactions with victims:
The guiding principle for detectives in Philadelphia, according to the former lieutenant in the Special Victims Unit, is “How do you want someone in your family to be treated?” In Kansas City, police start the interview by saying, “We are really glad you are here because you are safe,” or “Thank you for being here.” They also explain the effects of trauma to victims who may be upset about being unable to remember events chronologically. In Grand Rapids, the sergeant responsible for sex crimes makes a point of regularly reminding her detectives that victims will remember their first contact, and that if officers are accusatory, blame the victims, or convey disbelief, “it is all downhill from there.”42
It’s so simple, really: You treat the victim like a human being. You begin with the assumption that this person is telling you the truth about a traumatic event they’ve experienced, and you treat them as you would like to be treated in that awful situation. You remember that your job is to investigate the crime reported, not interrogate the victim. If your investigation of the crime reveals good reasons to doubt the victim’s testimony—as, for instance, the investigations of Tawana Brawley and Crystal Mangum’s rape reports did—then you follow that evidence where it leads. But you don’t look at a person telling you she’s been the victim of a violent crime and immediately start trying to poke holes in her story.
In keeping with this reasoning, the report also recommends that detectives “should be trained to create a non-judgmental environment by reassuring the victim that they are not there to judge the victim’s behavior and that nothing the victim did could have given the suspect permission to sexually assault them.” This isn’t just the nice thing to do; it’s also an important part of making sure the victim doesn’t leave out crucial information.
When they’re worried about being judged, blamed, or punished, survivors of sexual assault don’t always include all the pertinent details investigators need to know. They don’t want to admit that they were drunk or high, for instance, or that they engaged in some amount of consensual activity before being forced. Later on, though, withholding information like that can come back to haunt them, if a defense attorney uses it to paint them as liars. It’s best to get it all out up front, and investigators can facilitate that process by clearly explaining their questions and reassuring victims that they are not on trial.
You’d hope this would go without saying, but “experts also strenuously object to threatening victims implicitly or explicitly with charges for false reporting.”43 Again, a detective is meant to investigate the reported crime, not the person who brings it to their attention. If that investigation supports the conclusion that there was no crime, then sure, police should close the case and maybe even charge the “victim” with false reporting—just as they would if someone lied about being mugged or beaten or burgled. There are systems in place to handle the minority of people who waste police resources for their own inexplicable reasons. Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel for fabricated allegations of sex crimes.
Other things that are helpful in creating a victim-centered approach to investigations: connecting the victim with an advocate, taping the interview, making an effort to follow up as time goes by, and helping the victim access community resources. Collaborating with people outside the department who become involved in an investigation also makes a difference:
Communication between law enforcement and medical personnel, for example, can assist the investigation by helping the nurse document and collect evidence. The victim may also be more comfortable speaking to a nurse in his or her medical capacity and therefore might disclose information that he or she is hesitant to share with law enforcement.44
There is much, much more than this to be done, if we want to see the number of reported sexual assaults increase, let alone the number of successfully prosecuted cases. For starters, requiring that all reports of sex crimes be fully investigated, and all rape kits be sent for processing, would be good. Many departments still haven’t even gotten that far.
The greatest challenge, though, is changing the culture. Both a law enforcement culture in which one former Philadelphia detective—echoing Milledgeville’s Sergeant Blash—reportedly called Special Victims the “Lying Bitches Unit”45 and the larger society we all live in.