#WhyIDidntReport: memory, terror and sexual assault

Like many people in their 60s, my memory isn’t as reliable as I’d like. When I learn something new, unless I use that information immediately and consistently, it won’t remain available for very long.

At the same time, I know every word to the Beatles songs I learned in college, and the poems I memorized in high school.

Many of my memories of specific incidents from my youth are vague or nonexistent. The exceptions are the events that were terrifying, joy-filled or humiliating.

For instance, in my experience with sexual assault (most notably what occurred when I was 19 years old and living in Livonia, Mich.), I remember the overall event, although not all the details, with unbearable clarity.

If I was questioned by a group of senators on live television about the clothes my accoster wore that night, or exactly what words were spoken, the sort of bedspread he forced me onto or the exact duration of his vicious attack, I couldn’t provide those details. Not necessarily because of a failure of memory, but because I was focused on staying alive. Everything else was extraneous.

What I could share with complete confidence as to the veracity of my account is how it felt to have someone’s hands around my neck and the weight of his body immobilizing me. I could recount what it felt like to wonder if I’d live through the night, to frantically devise a way I might avoid being strangled to death, to process the shock and physical pain I felt from his manhandling.

I could recall without hesitation the sudden and inexplicable distortion of the perpetrator’s face when he transformed from what I thought was a quiet, kind friend to a vicious, rage-filled rapist.

I would tell my questioners this, “I know I would have done anything in that moment to survive.” And I could tell them with certainty about the next day, after I did survive the night, when we both returned to our place of work and I had to watch him talking to his buddies, pointing toward me, with a sneer on his face — his ugliness as apparent as my own abject humiliation must have been.

I told my best friend at the time. That was all. I didn’t tell our employer, my co-workers, the police or my mother. I didn’t tell anyone else for many years. Does that mean it didn’t really happen?

If by some miracle I found that man today, the statute of limitations would be up and I wouldn’t be able to prosecute him. Does that mean it doesn’t really count? No, definitely not.

Do I feel that the experience I had in Detroit had a negative impact on me? Yes, there’s no doubt.

I’m a happy person; I’ve had a good Life. However, once you have experienced having no control over what another person can do to you, you never feel entirely safe again.

This, sadly, is something that a large percentage of women, and many men and boys, live with every day. And, unless you lived in that era, when women were even more deeply undervalued than today, you can’t expect to understand why someone might not rush to tell their story to the nearest listener.

After reviewing the tapes of Anita Hill’s interrogation years ago, it sickens me, literally, to think that a group of senators, most of whom have lived highly entitled lives, might have the unfettered opportunity to subject Christine Blasey Ford to the same kind of grilling as they did to Hill.

I pray that this does not happen, and that the Senate Judiciary Committee does the right thing, setting in motion a thorough investigation of her allegations and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s response.

Rape culture is alive and well in America. If Blasey Ford’s accusations go unchecked, if Kavanaugh ascends to the highest court without some kind of due process, the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will have contributed overtly to its perpetuation.