Brock Turner, My Ex, and Sugarcoating Rape

TW - graphic description of rape/attempted rape, vulgar language

To Brock Allen Turner, to Brock's father, to the rest of the Nice Promising Boys who think and act like you, and to the man I describe in this entry - you deserve to hear what a life severely altered by rape truly feels like. Brock Allen Turner, my name is Laura, and you likely do not know this, but you are my rapist too. Not literally, of course, but it might as well have been you. My story takes place across the country several years ago. Today, I share it with you in the hopes that you will be overwhelmed by stories exactly like it. I hope to impress upon you, the Brocks of the world, their fathers, and their apologists the graphic, disturbing truth of rape. Those voices have silenced me for the past five years and have silenced countless other victims since the dawn of time. But today, from now on, I will be heard. Today I will tell my story.

I was raped four and five years ago in Indiana and Tennessee on two different college campuses (same person, repeatedly), well before your promising swimming career became relevant. My rapist has a different name, a similar face, a different story, a similar acquittal. Let me tell you about him. You need to hear it.

I once dated a man just like you - and I do mean Just. Like. You. Replace "swimmer" with "opera singer," change the haircut, and swap the Stanford name for a liberal arts college in central Indiana and you've got yourself a match. Much like you, Brock, he also has a promising future. He is smart, handsome, charming, and privileged. He has piercing blue eyes, wavy blonde hair, an athletic build, and a sparkling white smile rather like a wolf's. In fact, he looks eerily like you. He was pre-med and talked of becoming an emergency room physician. And just like you, Brock, he committed rape as a teenager. We dated for about two and a half years. I thought this Nice Boy was the love of my life.

I won't start this story at the beginning. Rather, I'm going to start by telling you about the night my Nice Boy became something else. Setting: his dorm, the same dorm where I'd spent the night with him fifty times before. My memories are not as clear as they once were. But, as many survivors will tell you, there are moments that will never be deleted, moments that stay in your mind so vividly they're practically in HD. Let's revisit those together, shall we? It is, after all, just fifteen minutes of action.

I remember the moment in which I wake up from a sudden strange pain between my legs. I remember looking down to my grey sweatpants around my calves, to my camisole pulled up to my collarbone. I remember feeling his fingers slide out of me and watching him pull his dick out of his boxers before he turns my head away and I freeze. I remember the clock radio next to his bed. I remember the time, 3:27 AM. I remember the inexorable and immediate feelings of paralysis and terror, the thought, "What is he doing? What in God's name is he doing?" I remember his sheets. I remember the cold silky touch of his navy blue sheets against my ribs and my thighs and my left cheek as he forcefully and quickly penetrates me from behind, holding my arms to my sides in a disgustingly close embrace that makes my skin crawl over my bones. His hands are warm. His fingers are firm on my right arm and I can smell on them that he has been awake and that my pants have been down for a while. I remember the door that suddenly seems a mile away from where I am. I can see it's locked. I stare at his clock radio, ruled in this moment by my inability to tear my eyes from those bright green numbers as he holds me, spoons me, rapes me. At 3:42 AM, he finishes, and I can finally turn my eyes away. He's rolled back over now and seems satisfied. I re-inhabit my body; somehow I have found myself staring down at my frozen form from the ceiling in a corner of the room, as though I am looking through a security camera.

After I know he is asleep again, I pull myself out of the bed, grab a towel, and walk silently to the showers at the end of the hall. It seems to take me an hour to get there. I stand under the hottest water I can tolerate, hoping I can wash it all off. I scrub and pick at the insides of my legs, trying to clean them beyond clean. I feel like I can never scrub him off me. Eventually the water turns cold and I have to go back to that bed. I have nowhere else to sleep; my college is five-plus hours away and it's 4:30 in the morning. He'll have questions. I have to go back.

The next morning, I don't know what to say to him. This is my boyfriend we're talking about here. This is the man I love, this is the man I trust above all other men, and I have no idea how to reconcile last night with this stark, cold morning. I ask him what happened last night, nearly whispering the question, feigning hangover and blackout. I want to make sure it wasn't a dream. He answers, "We went out." I ask him if that's all that happened. He says yes. I ask him why I woke up to find him having sex with me. He replies, "What are you talking about?" I ask him the same question. "Why were you having sex with me at 3:30 in the morning?" He replies, "I thought you were awake."

I tell him not to do it again, he says he won't, he apologizes, kisses me. I have no reason not to trust him; we'd always had good sex before and he had never crossed a line. Never… had he never crossed a line? I think about it again. Why did he immediately clarify my waking status when I hadn't called attention to the fact I was asleep? That's defensive. He's been defensive before. Do you remember that time a couple of months ago when you were having sex with him and it started to hurt? Remember how you told him to stop and he ignored you? Do you remember, on the floor of your freshman dorm room, hands and knees pressed into the cold tile, his hands squeezing your hip and the back of your neck, you whimpering from pain, repeating over and over, "Stop. Stop. Please stop." Did he stop? Of course he did. He's never crossed the line, has he? Wrong, nope, sorry. That's not how the memory ends. In real life, he finishes, gets off of me, and tells me he "didn't hear [me] say stop." How is that even possible? What is that motherfucking excuse, he "didn't hear?" He apologizes, kisses me. I brushed that incident off as best I could, filed it in some faraway cabinet in the cobwebby recesses of my memory, and moved forward.

But there I was, shivering under the fluorescent lights crudely illuminating the bathroom, stewing in the same gut-wrenching uncertainty about this Nice Boy I'd come to love. There I was, again, questioning everything I thought I knew about this man, running in circles of suspicion and denial. And again, I failed to understand what he had done. I failed to understand because I never truly understood that there were people like Brock Turner and like my boyfriend. I believed on some level that rape happened in dark alleyways with strangers, not in my boyfriend's bed, not in my bed. Rapists were tall, burly men in dark masks, not young blonde classical music nerds. Again, I managed to convince myself that it was nothing to worry about. The alternative was a paralyzing thought.

Over the past few months, the Nice Boy had become more and more invasive and controlling in my everyday life. Texts every hour, every half hour, every twenty minutes, demanding to know when I would be back in my room, alone, not around other men. He logged onto my Facebook and read instant messages as I sent them. He listened in on my Skype calls and accused me of flirting with other people, of cheating on him. He went through my email, read all my Gchat records and messages, and again accused me of cheating. I changed my passwords. He attempted to change my email password again, confessed when I got an message alerting me to a potential hacker, and broke down sobbing over Skype. He "couldn't believe" he'd done such a thing. He threatened to break up with me unless I transferred to his college. I applied. I put down a deposit. Didn't actually go, but that comes later.

Unpredictably, I had begun to lose interest in sleeping with him. This was not the same adorable musician I'd happily hooked up with in high school. This was a whole new beast and I had no idea what to do with it. He had talked of getting me pregnant (I was 17 at the time), and I had to go searching for my birth control more than once a week. Not blaming him for that one, I'm just disorganized. I figured it would be in my best interest to find a method that I couldn't misplace, so I got an IUD. No assistance with sex drive there, thanks very much, and boy, did he notice. He began to pressure and push. "It's been days, that's not like us." "Really happy couples don't go this long without sex, Laura. This isn't healthy." "Come on, just give me a blowjob, it's nothing." I chalked the lack of interest all up to my new IUD, told myself it would pass, and obliged. It was after about six months of this back-and-forth that the dorm room incident I described above occurred and I realized that perhaps the birth control wasn't the larger issue at hand.

I could not fully avoid the truth of my relationship with this man any longer than that spring. I had headed up to Indiana once again for his fraternity formal. I wore a breathtakingly garish blue cocktail dress and he wore a tie to match it. Both of us were under 21 and knew we wouldn't have any luck at this particular event as it was held in an upscale Indianapolis hotel, so we pregamed heavily and brought a flask of Smirnoff to the party. Neither of us was blackout, but we both definitely had a good buzz going upon arrival. We talk, we dance, we do the fraternity formal things. He begins to hint not-so-subtly that he'd like to go back to the hotel room sooner rather than later for some privacy. I tell him that I'm not particularly in the mood, and he reassures me that we can just go to sleep. We head back to the room sometime close to midnight. I was on the tail end of my buzz and starting to get drowsy, so I took my dress off and fell into bed. Out like a light.

Sometime between 1 and 1:10 (those bright digital numbers tend to stick out pretty well), I am awakened by the Nice Boy yelling in puce-faced rage. He is incoherent at first, rambling and hollering, but somehow pulls it together enough to accuse me of masturbating in my sleep, clearly to other men. You have got to be kidding me, I have been asleep for the past hour. That is not remotely possible, I tell him. He goes on, demanding to smell my hands and touch them to make sure I'm not lying. He's sure, he's so sure, he tells me, he just knows I'm fantasizing about other men, other women. He reaches for something to throw in his anger and settles on the Gideons Bible on the TV stand. It might as well have been King Kong in that hotel room with me; I have no idea what I have done and I have no idea how to make him stop yelling. I don't know how to talk to this man. He stomps into the bathroom and locks the door. I can hear him banging on the walls. Shit, we're going to get in trouble, I think. I ask him to come out; he refuses. He tells me he can never trust me again, that he always knew there was someone else. I ask again, again, again. I beg him. He comes out. He isn't yelling now. He almost whispers at me to get on the bed.

I can see his eyes this time, like steel angrily digging into my soul. He is heavy and forceful. This is new. There is no subtlety here, no sneaking around. This is loud and raw and present and it is 1:30 and he is still looking at me and it is still not over. He goes to sleep at 2. I go to sleep at sunrise.

If you can believe it, I tried again to talk to him about it. I tried again and again and again. I spent months convinced that if I could just persuade him to see that what he was doing wasn't okay, he would just stop. Over and over I explained it to him, that he had fucked me while I was asleep, that I was experiencing trauma symptoms. Over and over he told me I was exaggerating, I was bending the truth, I was trying to guilt him. In the meantime, I was awake every night, sweating and crying in my bed, afraid to sleep. I lost my appetite - no ribeye steaks or pretzels for me either, Mr. Turner. To put it in terms you might understand, my every waking moment was consumed with worry, anxiety, fear, and depression. I had been nursing a growing drug habit that eventually went from weekends wasted to full-blown dependence. I attempted suicide and wound up in a psychiatric ward for a few days. My grades dipped. We fought more and more frequently. Eventually, I broke it off.

A few days after this tentative breakup, I got a Skype call from Nice Boy's Nice Dad. He informed me angrily that I had broken his son's heart beyond repair, that he was lonely and despondent, that he had gone through so many tissues that he now had to wipe his nose with socks. He wasn't even interested in his pilot lessons anymore, poor lad. We somehow wound up back together, and the wheel in the sky kept right on turning.

I figured out sometime at the end of July before my junior year of college that I could not be with this person anymore. I broke it off again, informed his school that I would not be transferring there in the fall, and made arrangements to give back his things. It honestly broke my heart. I cannot tell you the depth of confusion and pain that swirls around the idea of being heartbroken over dumping your abuser. I made the decision mid-emotional crisis to see him again in September. He would come down to see me in Nashville and we would talk about things again. Once more, I thought I had a chance to get through to him. The day he got there, we went out to a concert together and had a lovely dinner as though nothing had ever happened. We went back to my dorm and, given the tight quarters, decided to share the bed.

What I take from this particular night is clarity. Pure, beautiful, blinding, smack-you-upside-the-head clarity. I woke up in the middle of the night with his hand on my hip, pulling at my sweatpants, the usual dance. That night, I didn't freeze. I looked at him and asked what the hell he was doing. He proceeded to look me dead in the face and utter the words, "You're dreaming, baby. Go back to sleep."

I. Was. Not. Dreaming.

After that weekend, I didn't see him again. We continued to talk over the internet, mostly to tie up loose ends. That would inevitably devolve into a fight about what he'd done (me) and my apparent refusal to understand his perspective (him). I am including here a few snippets from our final conversation that November, another searing moment of clarity. Read on.

10:01 PM [Nice Boy]: Laura

I don't want to get into a fight about this

me: neither do I.

I'm just trying to get you to understand that this is one of the scariest experiences that has ever happened for me.

[Nice Boy]: I'm really struggling to understand your perspective.

10:02 PM me: I don't understand why this is difficult

on several occasions, I woke up to you having sex with me

I confronted you about it, you apologized and said you wouldn't do it again, and then it kept happening

you terrorized me about not wanting to have sex with you

10:03 PM [Nice Boy]: It's difficult for me to understand where you're coming from

me: that's because you don't want to understand

because if you can understand my perspective, that might mean you did a very bad thing

[Nice Boy]: That's not the case at all

...

me: but you have to understand

10:08 PM I can't get into your perspective

because from where I am, you raped me repeatedly

and I cannot be in your shoes.

[Nice Boy]: and I cannot be in yours

I feel like I can't even tell you what my perspective is, or you'll become angry

10:09 PM because you'll feel offended that I said it

I know it bothers you when you feel like I'm trying to justify my actions

but that makes it very difficult for me to even tell you what my perspective is...

just that: "because from where I am, you raped me repeatedly," made me very upset

10:11 PM and a part of me wants to yell back, "No, I didn't! How dare you accuse me of that?"

but I know that won't help, because it's how you really feel

(also, if you don't want to talk about this, just say so. It's frustrating when I type all of this and you don't say anything.)

me: I don't know what to say.

I'm exhausted and uncomfortable.

10:12 PM and sad and upset now.

[Nice Boy]: Yeah.

No point in assigning blame, and I'm too frustrated to care.

We killed the cheer, though, and that sucks

me: I don't even know what I should say

...

10:14 PM [Nice Boy]: I wonder if you're bending the truth a bit to make me feel worse

me: um, no.

and it kind of makes me sick that you even say that.

[Nice Boy]: It makes me sick that I think it.

me: if I really wanted to make you feel bad and mess with you, I'd have told your family.

10:15 PM or pressed charges.

I'd have told your friends.

I'd have made your life miserable if I wanted to hurt you over that.

From where I am, you did something terrible to hurt me. If I wanted to guilt you and make you suffer for it, I would have.

10:16 PM like

it offends me that you say that.

10:17 PM [Nice Boy]: I could have reacted more harshly, as well

and while society just isn't built in a way to support me, I could've been a huge dick about this

10:18 PM We were struggling sexually before this stuff happened

and because you didn't come to me until some time after it had happened (and after a few times), it felt very odd to me

me: what was I supposed to SAY to you?!

10:19 PM you don't even begin to know how much turmoil has been going on in my mind over this

you haven't the slightest idea how this was torturing me

[Nice Boy]: I could have thrown it back in your face, told you that you were just retroactively trying to guilt me

me: you know what, I can't deal with this right now,

I'm going to bed.

[Nice Boy]: You could've said, "Hey, stop! I'm awake! What are you doing?"

You kept going.

If you didn't like it, you could have stopped me.

10:20 PM Fuck.

I didn't want to talk about this.

this is why we fell out of love, you know.

It took me at least six months from his final attempt to even begin to identify what had happened. I could not bring myself to utter the R word out loud, although it was the loudest thing banging around in my head and had nowhere else to go. It took two girlfriends of mine saying the words to my face, "Oh my God, Laura, he raped you," before I began to acknowledge the possibility. One of those same girlfriends, thank heavens, worked at the women's center at my school and dragged me in the same week I told her what had happened. It was there that I was paired with an advocate and began to discuss my options.

I say "options" as though I had them. While my advocate was nothing but supportive, my college police department was quick to inform me by way of a delightfully charming lady with an accent dripping of honey that there was nothing they could do unless the rape had occurred on that particular campus in Tennessee. I asked about the rape freshman year, the one in my room, most definitely on that campus.

"Were you having sex with him before you decided to stop?"

"Yes ma'am, we were having sex and I told him to stop because it hurt."

"But you had agreed to sex before? And he's your boyfriend?"

"Yes."

"Sweetie, a jury can't buy that as rape. You said yes and you were dating the guy."

I sat in that room for an hour, cheeks burning, as this woman described to me what I would face should I choose to press charges in the state of Indiana. Lawyer visits every week; court dates; recounting every detail of what happened in front of him, in front of his family, in front of my mom, in front of his friends and his school and what felt like my entire world. A conviction was a non-starter, I was told, since I had no rape kit to back me up and I had had a consensual relationship with him prior to and during the rapes. If I wanted to see some action, she said, I could try and get a hearing in front of his student disciplinary board. He might face punishment up to and including a suspension, but again, I'd have to go to Indiana over and over and relive every incident and detail ad nauseum in one of the very places where it happened. I considered this possibility - no legal fees were appealing, and some punishment is better than none. The campus officer maintained it would not be worth my time, energy, or money to pursue the case. I was told to be grateful - at least I didn't have to see him every day on campus! Besides, didn't I know that if I pressed charges, he'd have to put it down on every application to medical school he ever wrote? Didn't I understand how that would affect his life? I left discouraged and furious.

I did everything I could in the months that followed to erase the memories of what he had done. I tried drug after drug; for a while, I was drunk or high more often than not. I went out of my way to create sexual experiences for myself that I felt were on my terms, mostly in the form of casual, easily forgettable sex with easily forgettable people, usually gone by sunrise with the door bolted shut behind them. Maybe, I thought, if I fill myself with enough sexual memories that aren't this, that aren't him, maybe I can have that part of myself back. Maybe I can wash him away with other bodies. After all, I reasoned, the damage had been done. My body wasn't mine anyway. I was already dirty, already broken, already tainted. What did it matter if I slept around at this point?

I have cut off contact with my ex, but he follows me everywhere I go. I smell him sometimes and find myself pinned to those cold navy sheets again, caught like a deer in headlights. I see his name every day; he's got the same name as a popular vehicle. Someone brushes against me the wrong way on the bus and my entire body responds in panic. I cannot count the number of nights I have counted thousands of sheep trying to force myself to sleep, finally passing out as the sun rises and my body decides it's safe. People I have dated since him have been woken by my violent nightmares. Every relationship I have had since that one, romantic and otherwise, has been affected by his actions. I pulled my hair, picked my skin, and in many other ways physically pulled myself apart. I have been diagnosed with PTSD. I have spent the last five years of my life trying to pull myself together enough to discuss what happened to me in this much detail. I'm still processing pieces of it. And now, this week, he's following me again. Every time I scroll through my news feed and look at your smarmy mugshot, Brock, I see him. Down to your brows and your dead eyes, you look just the same. You are the same. Every time your unrepentant face crops up on my screen, I relive it all over again.

Do you know where my Nice Boy is today, Brock? My rapist is attending graduate school, free of any allegations from me or from anyone else he's ever touched. He will likely go on to medical school, just as he had planned. His grades didn't suffer, his reputation didn't suffer, and his conscience didn't suffer. I cannot tell you how ecstatic I am that the same will never be said about you.

I made a mistake at the beginning of this essay. I called you a man, Brock. You do not begin to deserve that title. A real man doesn't go dumpster diving for unconscious women to harm. A real man doesn't hide behind his daddy's money and lawyers to avoid the consequences of his actions. A real man doesn't point the finger at his own victim and accuse her of drunken promiscuity. You have done all of these things and so much more. I've seen you before and I see you now. You, Brock Allen Turner, are a coward. You are a desperate opportunist who was stupid enough to get caught, and the fact that you have to live with being the poster child for rape culture is your own goddamn fault.

To Brock's father, I have this to say. You crafted a sentimental letter about a boy suffering from the results of his own actions. You ask for our pity for your son, that he's unable to enjoy his stolen potato chips with the same gusto he once did, that his life has somehow been made harder by his violent assault on another person. Do you know what we call this in real life? Consequences. Fucking consequences. Your son and the entitled little boys like him have no accountability, no concept of anyone's experiences but their own. The apple clearly doesn't fall far from the tree, sir, but even you must begin to see at some point that you are trying to defend a caught and convicted rapist. When you use phrases like "20 minutes of action" and "a mistake" to describe the violent act of raping another human being, you clearly indicate that you have no idea of what rape entails. I did my level best to make that crystal clear to you today. The life truly altered is not your son's. It is his victim's. What your son did is inhuman, inexcusable, and no mistake. The best thing you could do for him would be to encourage him to admit his wrongdoing and to spend the rest of your money not on lawyers, but on therapy.

To my Nice Boy - Fuck you. I've said everything I want to say to you and I would be delighted never to see your face again.

Why today? Why now? I spent years hiding my experience and that has worked out terribly. If there is even the most remote chance that writing this will help me, help some other survivor, or even help some potential perpetrator, then it's done its job. Rape culture affects everyone in some way or another, known or unknown. Someone you know, even if it isn't you, has fallen victim to rape culture, to someone like Brock, like my ex.

Rape culture is when the quality of life of a rapist is prioritized in the legal system over the safety of women everywhere. Rape culture is when someone is caught mid-rape, when there is evidence pointing directly to the crime, and people still come out of the woodwork to the defense of the Nice Promising Boy. Rape culture is a wealthy white student getting six months at most for a violent sexual offense and countless black and Latino Americans serving 10-25 year sentences for the same crime because we're somehow under the impression that cute white boys can't rape. Rape culture is the idea that it is anyone's fault but the rapist's when a rape occurs. Rape culture is printing someone's swimming times in the same article that is supposed to implicate them for sexual assault. Rape culture is Brock Allen Turner, it is my ex, it is thousand of other perpetrators getting away with it every single goddamn day.

I tell my story today to impress upon you, the Brock Turners of the world and upon your apologists, the true nature of the crime you have committed, to spare you no details in recounting the horror you unleashed upon your victims. Rape is graphic. It is vulgar, biting, uncomfortable, brutal, and devastating. It does not hide itself behind rose-colored glasses and describe itself with words like "a mistake" and "his actions." Rape is a reality that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy - but we've already talked about him enough. Rape is being controlled in body and mind. Rape is semen dripping down your legs like acid, a warm and sticky reminder of the thing that has happened to you that you cannot make go away. Rape is pine needles in your vagina and bruises on your skin. Rape is nightmare after nightmare after nightmare with no end in sight. Rape is feeling betrayed by the dirtiness of your own body, it is drowning in the shame of having been defiled. And the only way I can possibly begin to imagine any serious change coming from these myriad rape cases - mine, the Turner case, every other victim that has endured - is to talk about rape like what it is. If we have a hope in hell of changing rape culture as it exists, we can no longer allow people to refer to rape in a manner that hides its power and impact on the lives of survivors.

I'm telling my story today in public for the first time, not proudly or happily, but with intention. I am enlivened by the sheer outrage over the ruling in this case, and I hope it is a harbinger of favorable rulings to come. I implore my fellow survivors to share their stories as well. I will not allow my story to be dismissed by language like Dan Turner's. I will not allow the repeated violations of my body, my spirit, and my trust that I endured to be dismissed as "approximately two hours (cumulatively) of action." I will not sit in silent anger and despair, staring fixedly at picture after picture of my rapist's doppelganger, bursting at the seams with frustration and no idea of how to mitigate it. I will not allow the rulings of judges like Aaron Persky to deter me. I am done sitting down and waiting for things to change. I hope there are more of you who will stand and raise your voices with mine.

In solidarity,

Laura