While much of the attention surrounding the Maryville rape case has focused on Daisy Coleman, the second victim, Paige Parkhurst, has come forward to offer her story.

Parkhurst was 13 in January 2012 when she and Coleman, then 14, were allegedly raped by Maryville High School football player Matthew Barnett and another 15-year-old boy. She described the rapes in great detail in an interview with Al Jazeera America:

And we got there, and they just started handing [Daisy Coleman] drink after drink after drink. And they had separated us as soon as we got there. And another boy that was there with me, had taken me into another room, and had sexually assaulted me, after me telling him no, pushing him away. And after he was done, he made me go back out into the living room with him, and we sat and waited until Matt was done with Daisy. And I had walked into Matt’s room, and she was incoherent. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, and just was talking like a baby pretty much. ... I was intoxicated before we left the house. She [Daisy] was also, but they gave her even more when she got there. They drug [sic] her out of his bedroom window, drug [sic] her to the car, and then they were going to drop us off, but they were freaking out, trying to think of how they were going to drop us off without any of her brothers waking up. And they took her and carried her to the back corner of her house and left her there. And they told me to go inside, that all she needed to do was to sober up, and that she would be okay, and they were gonna be there and watch her.

Parkhurst told Al Jazeera she’s choosing to speak out now because the victims didn’t have “this kind of support” when “everything happened,” and the fact that people are now listening is “like a miracle.” Some fucking miracle.



As for what she hopes to gain from speaking out, Parkhurst told Al Jezeera that she would “like justice to be done, and I would like to be able to know that there was something to be done, and that our voice didn’t go unheard.” But she also calls warns those supporting the girls, presumably Anonymous, of the problems with bullying those involved in the case:

I do love everyone who has been supporting us, but you also have to be civil with them, and bullying them isn’t going to do anything out of this...

[Screenshot via Al Jazeera America]