San Antonio sex assault victim testifies before Pentagon panel

AUSTIN — A Pentagon panel looking into sexual assaults in the military had just wrapped up a long day of testimony from experts when a Texas Army National Guard officer sat alone in front of a bank of microphones.

She wasn't an academic, military lawyer, big-city deputy police chief or a high-level official from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, among 18 people who outlined issues concerning sexual assaults until after dark Wednesday.

Maj. Melissa Brown, 31, of San Antonio told the panel she was a sexual assault victim. She said she decided to testify after seeing another soldier, a private attacked in basic training, tell her story on a video that aired on an Army website.

“I'm an officer in the Texas National Guard, I served on active duty and I recently found the motivation to share my story for the benefit of others,” she told the panel.

The panelists, led by retired U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones, listened intently to Brown's story as they neared the end of the first of two days of hearings at the University of Texas.

Their group, the Response Systems to Adult Sexual Assault Crimes Panel, was created by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel earlier this year and will visit Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland on Friday.

The panel will file a report on its findings in late May or early June

Brown was a young lieutenant on active duty at an installation in Colorado in 2005 when she said the incident occurred. She doesn't recall what happened, but awoke the next morning with “physical symptoms” of a sexual assault and fell ill in her car.

The attacker, she said, was an enlisted man in her unit.

There had been drinking, but Brown also believes some kind of drug was used on her.

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The soldier didn't deny being intimate with Brown when she confronted him, but he claimed it was consensual. Rather than report it, she held back because their unit was preparing to deploy to Iraq, she said.

It would be the first of two tours of Iraq for Brown, who reported the incident a year and a half later and was told it had been substantiated.

No action, however, was taken, and she believes her attacker is still in the Army, on active duty.

After the hearing, Jones stopped to visit with Brown outside the large hearing room. At one point, she told Brown, “You did a great job.”

Others came to thank her, as did South Texas College of Law professor Geoffrey Corn, who sat with Brown and asked if she was still interested in prosecuting her case.

Yes, she said.

She wasn't finished with the case, thanks to the private who inspired her to “put my incident to use in a similar way.”

“I'm done from a perspective that I'm OK,” said Brown, who like many sexual assault victims had not told some people in her own family before going public Wednesday night.

“I just feel that as long as I'm in the service for sure that I'll continue to do what I can to support the eradication of sexual assault crimes in our forces because it is counter to what we all stand for.”

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