Reply #20: Knowing my father would do the same thing was one of the reasons... [View All]

[moriah]

... that I didn't tell the full story when I was raped at 13. (Yes, that's part of the reason I feel strongly about this case -- I'm obviously identifying with the victim. But that's not something I'm ashamed of.) Dad didn't live with us and had a lot of his own problems, but he would have killed him without a second thought if he had heard the full story.

Actually, a lot of the circumstances were similar. No, the dude wasn't rich and famous, nor was he three times my age -- he was 22. My mother trusted him to be alone with me, as she thought he saw me as a little sister and had actually been showing quite a bit of interest in my older sister, who was his age. He'd spent nearly a year cultivating that trust. He did jobs around the house, moved furniture when we needed it, picked me up from school to take me to get my allergy shots -- keeping my mother from having to leave work early to do it herself. He had even volunteered to be my Algebra tutor the next year, since my mother had made the decision to homeschool me in the fall.

But that summer when he came over and we were alone in the house he had the opportunity he had been waiting for.

The act was interrupted, too -- another friend of mine, a 17-year-old who really did see me as his little sister, called. There wasn't caller ID back then and as I was supposed to be at home he knew he had to let me answer it in case it was Mom checking up on me. I grabbed the clothes he had torn off of me as I ran to get the phone, and clothed myself while I was speaking to my friend, but I was not thinking very clearly at all, I was too afraid, and I couldn't make myself tell him what had just happened. He could tell something was wrong but I just couldn't get the words out.

After I hung up, I saw he was still in my bedroom and so I went into the living room and sat on the couch. I wasn't about to go back in there with him. He came out, sat on the couch beside me, and put his arm around me -- I was stiff with fright and jerked away.

Then he started crying. He apologized, said it was the worst mistake of his life, that I was just so beautiful, that he didn't realize I wasn't enjoying it, that he never meant to hurt me, and that he would go away and never talk to me again, that I'd never have to see him ever again...

This man had been my closest friend for over a year. I trusted him, loved him like a brother. I didn't have many friends, I was an outcast at school and the way he said things made me feel like I was wrong to be upset and that my reaction to what he did was going to cost me my best friend.

I told him I forgave him.

Fortunately for me, he didn't have a chance to be alone with me again. Also fortunately for me, I was scheduled to leave the state for three weeks very soon after that, to attend the Duke University Summer Residential Program for G/T students. That gave me the distance and the time to process what had happened. My sister had been molested and my mother didn't catch on until my sister's friend forced her to tell my mother -- Mom had punished herself for years for not preventing what happened to my sister, and in her mind she had done her damndest to protect me. I didn't want her to know that all of the sacrifices she had made to protect me were in vain. I didn't want my father to kill him. At the time I was blaming myself for attracting his interest -- I didn't think he would hurt anyone else. I just didn't want him to hurt me again.

So I told my mother that he tried to kiss me. That was reason enough for her to keep him away from me. Since I had met him on the local BBSes and didn't want him to try to talk to me there, I also told several of the System Operators that he tried to kiss me. He was thrown off of every BBS in Arkansas except ones that required real names and paid accounts -- ones that I didn't call. My father told me later that he went to the dude's house with a gun and sat outside his house for about an hour, and that if he had come outside that he likely would have shot him -- even with just thinking all the dude had tried to do was kiss me.

I regret not prosecuting him. I hope to God that he hasn't raped another woman or girl. But I'm also glad my father didn't spend his last years in jail for murder (he died July 21st from AIDS, had been diagnosed already at the time of the incident).