It has been fifty-five weeks and five days since I was raped by someone I thought I could trust. I was raped on March 8, 2014, a week after my sister’s attempted suicide. I had gone to seek comfort from a friend, and was violently assaulted, having been taken advantage of in a state of weakness.
On November 5, 2014, eight months after my assault, my rapist was expelled from Tufts, but nobody knew he was expelled because he wasn’t coming back to Tufts anyways. It took almost three weeks after that for the cops to find him and serve him papers. There are friends of my rapist still on campus, people in this audience who know him by name or face, people I’m sure who still talk to him and don’t know what he did to me, and probably wouldn’t know how to respond if they found out what he had done to me.
I have been sexually assaulted three times in my life, twice on Tufts campus, and only reported the last time because it was the “worst” for me. I knew all three of my perpetrators. I cannot begin to explain what it feels like in the aftermath of an assault. I felt dead, to say the least. I have called the on-call counselor more times than I want to admit to prevent myself from committing suicide. I have tried to drink, smoke, fuck, and take pills to make the pain go away, and none of that has “healed” me. I have my good days, and I have my terrible ones. I would say that I’m “healing”, but I definitely didn’t expect to tell my story again at It Happens Here.
I have yet to tell anybody my full story verbally because I can’t stomach the pain that one man has caused me, and it took me months before I could say his name out loud. I still want to vomit whenever I see his face or hear his name. I started seeing a therapist two days after I was raped, and continue to see one today.
What keeps me going is knowing that I am better than him, and that I am not my rape. I am a survivor, and am healing. I sometimes read through his response, much of which says that I enticed him into getting raped, and admits to me saying “no” or “stop”. His response was less than a page handwritten. I think to myself, does someone care so little or think that they are so mighty that this is how they defend themselves?
And then I read the document that confirmed his expulsion. “The panel unanimously determined, by a preponderance of the evidence, that so-and-so violated the sexual misconduct policy…therefore, the panel recommends that so-and-so be expelled from Tufts University…”
I am lucky, in the sense that my rapist was expelled. I am lucky, because I have my last year at Tufts without him here. He still, however, has a part of me that I will never be able to get back. What he did to me still haunts me, whether it be walking home alone in the dark or trying to gain another person’s trust. He still haunts me by still having mutual friends with me. Fifty-five weeks and five days, and that part he ripped out is still an open wound.