My obsession with animals pre-existed any trauma in my life. As a five-year-old, I wrote a fully illustrated book titled Tigger Maskkir, about circus animals that revolt and eat the clowns. My teachers thought I was becoming deranged, but my mother explained that it had been going on since before the divorce. I interviewed neighbours about their dogs. I put my teddy bears to bed every night under blankets of washcloths – I couldn't fall asleep until they were safely arranged like Tetris pieces on the floor, covering every inch of carpet. I once stood for an hour with my face against the glass at Sea World, trying to make meaningful eye contact with a manatee.

My ritualistic obsessions are no longer limited to animals (currently, they include Diane Sawyer, the Slender Man stabbings in Wisconsin and eating bacon for lunch). I never look for things to grab me. They just do, and once they do, the obsessions usually continue until I'm so sick of them – or of myself for enacting them – that suddenly, and with a sense of great relief, I'm repulsed.

On other occasions, it's as if I can't stop. Like on my 18th birthday.

The night was raucously fun – I must have stolen the karaoke microphone 11 times – but as dawn broke, my friend asked if I could please stop singing Limp Bizkit. She needed to sleep.

"Believe me, I'd love to, but I physically cannot." I was tired, too. I'd sung Faith twice, but five was my number and I was halfway there.

And sometimes I worry that telling the story I'm about to tell you is a compulsion, like counting. Giving testimony under oath was supposed to bring closure. But here I am, so sick of my own voice. The urge persists.

It was my first day of college. After unpacking, my mother and I went and bought a broken futon for $20. We carried it back across the quad, up a few flights of stairs and into my new room. Then my back started hurting. Flustered by our impending separation, my equally obsessive mother became fixated on the idea of getting me a massage. A fan of free massages, I traipsed alongside her through Harvard Square, looking for options. Every place was booked except for a store called About Hair, which offered haircuts and massages in addition to selling antiques. The store was so stuffed with secondhand items that some of them were arranged outside. A dark-haired, sullen-looking girl around my age was keeping an eye on them.

"The masseuse isn't here today," she told me in a thick, Slavic accent. "But…"

"I can definitely fit her in," Duncan Purdy interrupted, ducking through the front door of his shop. He was pale and muscular and bald, like an albino snake. You could see the blue veins in his cheeks.

"Was that place creepy or artistic?" I asked my mother as we walked away.

"Cambridge is very artsy," she said, sounding distracted. Travel makes her nervous.

I nodded. We were from out of town – from Wisconsin, specifically – and I was self-conscious about how my midwesternness looked against the backdrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts. As I would later explain in my cross-examination, "I was trying very hard to be open-minded and not be sort of like a country girl, like a country bumpkin who didn't understand the big city."

I returned to About Hair after putting my mother in a cab to the airport. Duncan Purdy was the only person there and he led me down a short flight of stairs, past mountains of antiques, to a dark, windowless room. A stool stood next to the massage bed. There was an industrial canister of massage oil on top of it. The cap was off. "I'll give you a second to undress," Duncan Purdy said, giving me a hand towel.

"What's this?" I asked.

"To cover yourself."

At home, a family friend had often given me back rubs on a portable massage bed that she kept in her car. Even she would cover me with a large bed sheet. But as I told myself, things were different on the east coast.

I gave the account of what happened next so many times in preparation for what would become my sworn testimony that during the actual trial I could tell the story with no emotion whatsoever. I once admitted to the prosecutor that while I never actually questioned my version of events, I'd relayed them so many times that on good days the incident felt more like something memorised than a genuine memory.

"That's the point of testimony," she said gently.

But I get nervous, even after all this time – not because I can still feel his hands on my body, but because so many people questioned or cross-examined me even before the trial that I have learned to expect incredulity. Despite what we say about sexual assault being a crime of violence rather than of sex, the knee-jerk response is: if it wasn't a home run, it doesn't count. I had internalised that logic – and still have. Until I found out what counted legally, I didn't know how to categorise my experience emotionally. I thought of it only in terms of his name: Duncan Purdy. In my gut it registered as a gross, sweaty thing that wouldn't leave.

So that's the big reveal, and here's the quick and dirty chronology. I lay face down on the table underneath the hand towel. Duncan Purdy came in fully clothed and yanked my arms behind my back until I thought my shoulders would dislocate. He tugged the towel off, flipped me on to my back, and leaned over me in a 69 position so that his crotch was in my face and his face was in my stomach. I could hardly breathe. He was tugging at my tits and working his way down to my thighs. I lay there frozen, with a detached sense of shock at my own paralysed reaction. I felt his non-erect penis through his pants at one point – a fact that stuck in my craw for a while afterwards – but I never saw it. As the defence attorney said on the last day of the trial, "It's not quite the same as the worst of the rapes that one can envision… for instance, if he had actually, you know, thrown somebody on the ground and raped them with his penis."

The details of which body parts he touched and in what order seem mundane and boring to me now – irrelevant on the witness stand – though I still remember the overwhelming need to tell myself, over and over, that it wasn't bad so long as he wasn't looking at me (and he wasn't; he was staring at the ceiling the whole time). As he raked his rough fingers over my skin, slathering me in oil, I clung to the notion that his contemplating something else was polite and professional. I was overreacting, I reasoned. It wasn't happening. He didn't mean to.

I had made an appointment for 30 minutes, but the whole thing lasted 45. When it was over, he left the room and I wrapped my arms around my legs to cover my nakedness. Then I looked up and saw a mirror on the ceiling, tilted in such a way that if someone were lying naked on her back underneath it, you would be able to see clearly between her legs. He hadn't been looking away; he had been watching from a strange remove.

It started to sink in that I was in danger. Nobody knew where I was except for my mother, who was on a plane. I looked up and there was Duncan Purdy with an industrial bucket and a sponge, blocking the doorway. I let him wash me. He cupped the sponge in his hand and shoved it inside me multiple times. I didn't make a sound.

"Go ahead and get dressed, I'll be upstairs," he said finally.

I put on my skirt and tank top – an outfit I remember only because Duncan Purdy's attorney would later ask me many times what I had been wearing – and met him by the cash register. In that moment, handing over the money my mother had given me was the last step to safety, the end-piece on a very close call. I hadn't yet wrapped my mind around the fact that getting out alive might not be the only issue, or that paying would hurt my chances of being taken seriously in a courtroom.

"You have a very athletic body," he said. "Here's my card. If you come back, I'll give you a discount."

"Thank you," I said, as I slid his business card back across the counter. It was my only act of defiance. "Thank you so much."

As soon as the sun hit my face, I laughed. My knees were shaking and oil was dripping off my hair. I called my ex-boyfriend and giggled uncontrollably. "Why in God's name didn't you leave?" he asked. Fifteen minutes later, I collapsed on the broken futon and gave one of my roommates the abbreviated version. "When I was 10, a man pulled down his bathing suit and masturbated at me," she responded. "In my opinion, it's best to forget about it."

The last person I told that day was my freshman proctor, a 33-year-old man with braces. I pulled him aside at our dorm's meet-and-greet and said, "I think I was molested." I wasn't sure what to call it. "Were your breasts touched?" he asked sternly. I blinked at him, not knowing where to start. I wandered away and found myself in the sleep aid aisle at the chemist. Fifteen minutes later, I was back in my room, my eyes droopy from NyQuil, spending what would be the first of countless hours Googling animal factoids. Feral hogs can grow up to 8ft long and 4ft at the shoulder. An anaconda's prey can ostensibly remain alive up until the digestion process. There were worse things out there than Duncan Purdy.

I have always been a social creature, but during those first two months of college, it became difficult for me to talk about anything except animals. I found myself in the bowels of the library, researching wild beasts instead of studying. Most afternoons, I would prowl the halls of the Harvard Museum of Natural History, circling the space for hours, sometimes, before standing dazed under the whale skeleton – its baleen still intact and sprouting from its skull like a moustache. I preferred the clammy frenzy of my pointless research to class. In lectures, as I fantasised about life-or-death scenarios with various non-human species, the professor's head became an unthreatening speck across the room, his voice a harmless, fan-like drone. I invented a game to distract myself: I'd flip to a fresh page, make it look like I was excitedly taking notes, and instead list as many scary creatures as I could, quizzing myself on the respective survival techniques. Then I'd check my answers against the answers in my diary – occasionally chiming in with class discussion with evasive gobbledygook such as, "I totally agree with Bethany." Unbeknownst to me, I wasn't preparing to survive another attack, but rather to execute one.

I finally told my mother after the Harvard Crimson, our college newspaper, published an article announcing that Duncan Purdy had been accused of running a house of prostitution. It was Thanksgiving and I was home for the long weekend. The Slavic-sounding woman we'd encountered had probably been a sex worker, and I found myself wondering whether Duncan Purdy had assaulted her, too. The idea that he might have done to others what he had done to me, combined with the fact that he was potentially a career criminal, somehow made my experience more real: more categorically wrong.

"This is all my fault," she said, looking crumpled in the front seat. We were idling in the parking lot outside the mall. "I set up the appointment. I should have known better. Can I tell Daddy?"

I shrugged. Just imagining the conversation made my face burn.

"Your uncle knows people who could kill him," she said gravely. "I think it's Irish mafia." She wasn't joking.

"Mom. Come on."

"I'm serious."

I wished there were something I could say to make her feel better. I was struggling with conflicting mindsets: there was the need to be believed and heard, and simultaneously the need to acknowledge that my experience paled in comparison to some. "Have you ever heard of the goliath tigerfish?" I tilted my head back, trying to keep the tears in with gravity. "They're humongous and have these awful, dagger-like buck teeth. They're the only fish that don't fear crocodiles. They eat crocodiles, actually. Well, smaller ones, technically, but still."

"Can I hug you?" she asked.

I let her.

How to defeat deadly predators: pages from Kathleen Hale’s freshman notebook

The victims' room at the district attorney's office is decorated for the worst-case scenario. That is to say, it is decorated for children. The first time I told my story in its entirety, I was sitting at the wrong end of a two-way mirror, in front of a Fisher-Price table strewn with toys. Plastic farm animals and dump trucks.

They told me I was not the only girl. In addition to prosecuting Duncan Purdy on charges of running a house of prostitution, assistant district attorney Melinda Thompson was also building a separate rape case against him. Jillian Gagnon looked like she could be my sister, and had suffered a virtually identical massage. (There were suspicions that Duncan Purdy had also hurt some of his sex workers, but none of them would, or really could, come forward due to citizenship issues.) Melinda explained that if I built my own case, the judge and jury at Jillian's trial would not know about me, and the judge and jury at my trial would not know about Jillian. However, if I served as a prior bad acts witness at Jillian's upcoming trial, one jury would get to hear both stories.

"The rules of evidence allow a jury considering a person's guilt in one crime to hear facts about a different crime that is similar to the charged crime as proof of the person's intent, system or plan on the day he committed the charged crime," she told me while my head spun. "They aren't considering whether or not he is guilty of the 'prior bad acts' crime, but they hear about that crime as supporting evidence of his guilt in the charged crime."

I had never filed a police report. There was zero physical evidence. It had been months for me, and years for Jillian, since our respective massages. Any verdict would hinge almost entirely on accuser testimony. I never considered the possibility that they would not believe me.

I'd watched enough National Geographic specials on group predation to know that deadly animals often hunt in packs. A few days later, I gave Melinda my answer. "Hyenas, wild dogs, lions – they're all social carnivores," I told her. "Even leopards – I mean, they're incredibly fast, but they rely on teamwork to survive." If my drivel made her question having invited me to be a witness, Melinda didn't show it. Instead, she listened, nodding without any judgment – as if digressions about hyenas were common in the toy-littered victims' room. Then she shook my hand.

"Welcome to the pack," she said.

Prior to Jillian's trial, Melinda suggested it might be helpful to watch Duncan Purdy's prostitution sentencing. "Closure and stuff," she said. "No pressure."

I felt optimistic, because Melinda had told me the judge was left-leaning. As a student, I naively correlated liberalism with intelligence and empathy, because at the time I paid no taxes and only associated my politics with gay rights, women's rights and human rights. I thought any judge who voted Democrat would side with the victims – not yet realising that in a country where the imprisoned population is predominantly made up of poor people, black people and the mentally ill, criminals are also victims. Hence, liberalism in the courtroom hinges first and foremost on second chances for the guilty.

The man who got sentenced immediately before Duncan Purdy had been found guilty of hunting trick-or-treaters with a BB gun. I grabbed a pen and notebook from my backpack and added "poachers" to my growing list of dangerous animals. As I reviewed my notes on venomous snakes, one of the kids' parents stood up and read a statement about how their eight-year-old had a BB pellet lodged near his heart that couldn't be removed, or he would die. "There's a chance it will slowly travel through his body and kill him anyway," the father said, the printed statement shaking in his hand.

The judge gave the guilty man probation so quickly it was clear she'd made her decision even before putting on her robe. She explained that he had no priors, as if the BB thing had been a fluke.

Then Purdy stepped up.

Watching him stand before a lenient judge, I began to understand that humans are the most dangerous creatures. Of all the animals I'd studied, he was the only one who'd actually hurt me. I watched his bald head shine greasily under the fluorescent lights and regretted turning down my mother's offer of a hitman. I knew what happened to sex offenders in prison, and I wanted that for him.

The judge explained to the courtroom that, due to Duncan Purdy's previous crimes – which ranged from drug possession to armed robbery –she planned to be slightly tougher on him. She sentenced him to two years and one day. After that, I prayed, almost every single night, that the judge at Jillian's trial would be a Republican.

I lost a lot of friends that year, in part because I wanted to tell everyone about the trial. Boys fetishised me, thinking they could reintroduce me to sex, which I had never learned to hate, or else they pulled my head to their chests, like they were enacting some paternalistic movie moment. Hearing what had happened made recently deflowered Harvard boys feel like sexy dads.

Girls, aside from those who became my closest friends, tried to give me hugs and then disappeared for ever, or judged from afar. (My best friend from high school took one look at the For Sale sign outside Duncan Purdy's now empty store and said: "God, I would have left right away… What's wrong with you?") I was a teenager and so were they.

The story often burbled to the surface during the most inopportune times: over lunch with new acquaintances, during a fight with a friend about something weird that I had done, or when a paper was due. Teaching assistants hinted that such confessions, made while asking for a deadline extension, seemed a little calculated. "I couldn't tell if you were a bad person, or the best person," a boyfriend from the time recently confessed. "When you were talking about it, especially if we were fighting, it felt like the ultimate trump card."

'Instead of practising my testimony, I took out library books on fanged deep-sea creatures, and memorised animal attack statistics.' Photograph: Annabel Clark

As a storyteller, I grew increasingly anxious about my power to unsettle. Writing this has taken its own toll; last night I called an old friend to ask about the way I acted that year. He asked if this was an opportunity to air old grievances and I told him, sure. I asked forgiveness, realising only afterwards that doing so was tantamount to apologising for screaming after somebody had hit me.

On a visceral level, I began to associate talking about what had happened with a certain degree of dissociation. After Duncan Purdy was sentenced for prostitution, we had almost a year to build the rape trial against him. But instead of practising my testimony in front of a mirror, as Melinda had instructed, or thinking about what I might wear on the stand to convey my victimhood (I ended up impulsively ordering an ill-fitting, beige, polyester pantsuit from eBay and giving the matter no additional thought), I took out books from the library on fanged deep-sea creatures, and memorised animal attack statistics (28 people in the US died from dog bites in 2005).

When it came time to tell my story under oath, I put my hand on the Bible, spelled my name for the court transcriber, and promptly panicked that the jurors in my peripheral vision would respond like my teaching assistants and see my testimony as discomfiting and crafty. I steeled myself to give my responses frankly and without emoting, to be more convincing by appearing less invested. I didn't want to look as if I was letting myself cry to sway them. I answered the attorneys' questions casually, stony-faced, and between each of my remarks I silently counted the number of constrictors I could remember.

I did a horrible job, in other words.

Eleven out of 12 jurors believed Jillian and me, but one thought we were lying, which meant a hung jury, which meant a mistrial, which meant another whole trial, which could take one year, or two, depending. At the time, I felt like it was my fault for holding back, for speaking too plainly, and for telling my story in the order it was asked for, rather than restructuring it for effect.

My sense of responsibility for that verdict seems sad now, bordering on narcissistic. But in retrospect it also marks the moment where I stopped apologising for how my story might make others feel, and stopped waiting for others to tell me what had happened.

Melinda encouraged me to wear something more form-fitting for the second trial. "An outfit that shows how small you are," she said. "Let's lose the Hillary Clinton pantsuit."

I tended to wear pyjama pants and baggy, cashmere turtlenecks, so I picked out what I secretly referred to as my "party clothing": a fitted white T-shirt and flared jeans (my friend now has the jeans in her drawer and wears the shirt to yoga; I gave them away after the trial). I also bought a headband, since I was planning to cry this time, and figured the jury sitting to my left should see my pretty face and practised, bereft expression.

I wore that outfit to the courthouse many times before the trial began; the date kept getting pushed back because Duncan Purdy kept getting sick or falling down. It was his legal right to ask for medical attention. Reading the court transcripts now, it seems that Justice Diane Kottmyer started to think he was crying wolf, because eventually she sent a patrol car to bring him in. I remember he looked fine, though still pale and veiny. I remember knowing he was a liar.

Here's what else I remember: camera phones were new then, and I had taken my first selfie in the hallway outside the courtroom. I remember thinking I looked beautiful, and knowing how dangerous that made me. I remember sitting on the witness stand and identifying Duncan Purdy for the court as the man with the blue striped tie, even though in my mind he was no longer anything more than a fleshless carcass – a sun-bleached rack of ribs eaten by vultures. I remember letting my hands shake on either side of the microphone so the jury could see, so they would think I was weak and fragile. I remember reshuffling the structure of my narrative without changing my story – this time, I started with the fact that he'd restrained my arms, and that it had hurt.

And I remember being able to tell by Duncan Purdy's bored expression that he didn't recognise me. (Melinda told me in the wings that although he pretended to know who I was, he kept confusing me with Jillian; she had the feeling that he'd done this sort of thing so many times he could not recall specific incidents.)

I'm trying hard to remember, because although I know I made myself cry, and made the jury cry – and generally stirred the courtroom so that the defence attorney started his closing remarks by saying, "The first thing I want to talk to you about is Kathleen Hale's testimony, which just seemed very emotional, very heart-wrenching" – there is no record of what I actually said that day; the recording device malfunctioned as I spoke.

The transcript cost me almost $400 (they charge per page) and ended up being one of the more poignant artefacts of the trial, despite the fact that my words weren't in it. I now know that of the potential jury pool, more than 20 individuals were disqualified because they knew rapists, or someone who'd been raped, or had been raped themselves, making the record of those proceedings a testament to the statistical likelihood of sexual assault. One lady described how her young niece had been raped by a neighbour, and then argued for her right to serve on the jury despite that. She claimed to be capable of objectivity. I have a feeling she was lying, but I thank her for it. Unbeknown to me, a whole herd of people could identify with my experience and lost their voice as a result.

The absence of my testimony allows me to go on thinking that I contributed in large part to the jury's final verdict: they found him guilty of rape.

As he was sentenced, two of my best friends sat on either side of me and watched in horror while he flexed his butt muscles in front of us. He was handcuffed, and looked like a tied horse shivering its ass to shoo a fly. The display lasted so long that the three of us dissolved into nervous giggling messes, and had to clutch each other, pretending to sob so we wouldn't look like psychopaths.

Judge Kottmyer glanced at us over her glasses, looked away politely, and asked if Purdy had anything to say. "Your honour," he said, still flexing his butt, "on behalf of myself and my family, I would just say that I regret the circumstances of this case and the burden that it's caused the commonwealth and all the families concerned, myself and my family." In the transcript, he goes on to talk for four pages about how he can't go to prison because he needs to sell paintings.

Judge Kottmyer, whose disdain had become increasingly evident throughout the trial, finally cut him off, responding: "What I see, Mr Purdy, is that you don't comprehend and you're not remorseful…"

"I am," Duncan Purdy muttered, and dropped on to his seat like a petulant teenage boy.

"You don't comprehend that, in fact, what the evidence shows here, viewed against the backdrop of your entire record in terms of deriving support from prostitution, is that you – you have acted as a predator."

"I respect your opinion…"

"Stand up, sir," she boomed.

In Massachusetts at the time, the minimum sentence for rape was probation. But the judge sentenced Duncan Purdy to seven to 10 years.

(A state representative recently called to remind me that he would be up for parole one year from now. The representative also encouraged me to update any restraining orders I might have, because Duncan Purdy had recently changed his name to Duke One Blood True Blood – "AKA, Mr Blood," the guy said, sighing. "So at least anyone who meets him after his release will know he is a fucking lunatic.")

Duncan Purdy was dismissed shortly after sentencing. Before leaving her bench, Judge Kottmyer, who thought I had already left the room, added: "I do want to say one thing to Ms Hale, who is not here. And that is that the sentencing is the responsibility of the court. You don't bear any responsibility for the sentence that's imposed in this case. That's my responsibility."

I pressed my face into my friend's neck, and this time I cried for real. A weight was lifted, a sense of culpability temporarily quieted, and the critter factoids swimming through my brain were now a still pond to draw from, rather than drown in. Yet there were still so many things I wanted to say on the witness stand – they just didn't fit into the categories of "yes" or "no".

And I feel that way a little now (choked and incomplete), because there are so many details I still want to include: how my friends donned all black and traipsed with me to Duncan Purdy's defunct store to loose bricks from the sidewalk and steal discarded signs; or how sad I felt about the dodo, which became extinct due to its friendly tendency to walk up to human strangers and expect the best. But then the other part of my brain, the writerly part I guess, keeps saying, that's irrelevant, that isn't crucial to the story, delete, move on –

Let go.

Juror dismissed: excerpts from the court transcript

Hale court transcripts 3 Photograph: Courtesy

Hale court transcripts Photograph: Courtesy

Hale court transcripts Photograph: Courtesy



• A version of this article originally appeared in the online magazine Hazlitt

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