Parents rented out four adjoining hotel suites for an after-party, she said, each with two bedrooms and a sitting room, and none with adult supervision. She said that she got drunk—too drunk to walk or speak straight—and the two boys steered her into one of the bedrooms. “I remember we were in the corner suite, the room on the left if you were standing in the sitting room looking at the door to the hallway, and I remember when the drunker one got on top of me. My body and my voice were sluggish, uncooperative.” She said it was all going too fast, and everything about her body was slow. “He was too drunk to get it up, and he rolled off of me. As he and his friend joked about how drunk he was, I pulled myself up and stumbled out of the room.”

She said her friend saw her come out of the room, and heard the boys talking about what had happened “We only spoke about it briefly the next day, and then did not discuss it again until this week. I never told anyone else. I did not tell my parents or my husband, who I have been with for nearly 20 years. What was there to tell? I was drunk. I hadn’t been raped. He was drunk, too, so didn’t that mean he also wasn’t in control of his actions? I felt dirty and ashamed, like it had been a sport for them. They were popular, and I was not. Who would have believed me?”

The friend who went with her to the party confirmed her account to me. “She was troubled, but she also felt like there was nothing she could do,” she said. “She believed that no one would believe she hadn’t brought it on herself or wanted it to happened, and she believed that people would mock or blame or ostracize her. And the sad thing is, she was most likely right.”

From left, Sen. Mazie Hirono, Alexis Goldstein and Sarah Burgess, alumnae of the Holton-Arms School, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, speak at a news conference in support of Christine Blasey Ford on Capitol Hill, September 20, 2018. By J Scott Applewhite/AP/REX/Shutterstock.

On another occasion, in the summer of 1996, this woman was casually dating a student from Georgetown Prep, and she joined him and two friends who attended Georgetown Day School for a night out in Georgetown. They had intended to shoot pool at Georgetown Billiards or stop at Café Northwest, but, as usual, they ended up at a spot on the south side of the canal in Georgetown that came to be known as the “Grassy Knoll”—a secluded area between two buildings with tree cover, overlooking K Street on one side and the Potomac from above. They had all been drinking, and the Holton student and her boyfriend started making out. He got up to light a cigarette, and, heavily intoxicated, she laid in the grass until she felt someone kiss and grope her. “I was so drunk that, at first, I thought it was my crush,” she said, but it was one of his friends from Georgetown Day. Another one of his friends realized that she was too drunk to know what was going on, and told the boy to “cut it out,” she recalls. He didn’t relent at first, but the friend got closer and told him to get off of her. He stopped, and he and her boyfriend left. The friend stayed behind with the Holton girl until she sobered up. “Neither of us spoke about it to anyone,” she said. “I messaged him this week to thank him for being brave enough to stand up to his friends.”

“I don’t think men are born with an innate lack of respect for women. It is a learned behavior.”

The man, who still lives in D.C., confirmed the account to me. He told me that he was shocked at the time to be put in that situation, but was not surprised in general. “I knew things like this happened, and that women were casually taken advantage of all the time, especially in these circles,” he said. “Guys were fully aware of what they were doing. They had just been raised in a world where consequences did not exist, and they had not been properly taught about consent or how to respect women. I don’t think men are born with an innate lack of respect for women. It is a learned behavior.”