This piece was commissioned for and appears in the first issue of Mary Review, a new magazine of news and ideas written and produced entirely by women. It appears here in its unedited entirety.

Cathy Sellars can still remember the look of the knife her truck-driving instructor toyed with as they roared down the Arizona interstate. Sometimes he’d rest its finger-long blade on his leg, where it caught the glare of passing headlights as they drove through the night on their way from California; sometimes he’d set it on the dash. Earlier in the ride, he’d used it to cut up steaks. The way he was holding it now, though, sent a message, she thought. She was in danger.



In the days leading up to this moment during the road portion of her trucker training in February 2014, Sellars says the instructor showed her pornographic images on his smartphone and told her that he wanted to tie her up and “do things to her.” She consistently refused his advances. They argued after she complained to dispatch that she was too tired to drive. He got angry and “shoved me on the passenger seat and messed up my shoulder and my head.” He started driving, and then the knife came out. When we speak in July 2015, she’s still rattled, but her tone is deliberate; at the time, she remembers being petrified. “I didn’t realize the pain until I got to Riverside,” she says. “That’s how tense.”

Riverside is home to the West Coast terminal of trucking company CRST, located just off Interstate 215 in California. Cordoned off by a high wall, its lot is full of anonymous-looking trucks parked in neat rows. Each contains goods being shipped on behalf of CRST’s clients, a group that includes companies today’s consumer interacts with on an almost daily basis, such as FedEx and e-commerce giant Amazon, as well as Boeing, a government contractor. Trucking-company terminals are places where paperwork gets filled out, driving orders are given, and partners are assigned. They can often be social hubs for drivers, breaking up the monotony and solitude they face on the road. Riverside is a critical home base for CRST, the company Sellars was training with, and as a driver she would have had to stop there often.

Ever since she started with CRST in December 2013, she says, she’d put up with comments from male drivers at the terminal, typically about her ass or sexual acts they wanted to perform on her. According to a legal complaint she filed, one driver masturbated in front of her in the back of their cab after they stopped driving for the evening; another tried to pull her shirt off while she rested in her truck’s sleeper berth. “They acted like they had never seen a woman before,” Sellars says. “It was demeaning and degrading. [They acted like] the only reason I was there was to sleep with everyone.” She says she observed an on-duty terminal manager at Riverside who appeared to overhear sexual remarks directed at her but ignored them.