'I couldn't tell the bad guy from the good guy'
Raped by a 'friend,' a young woman struggles to get control of her life again
April 2, 2006
She doesn't want her face photographed; she doesn't want her name used for this article.
But she wants to tell her story.
She remembers the details: It was 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, 2001. The movie was Jay and Silent Bob. The walls were white. His shirt was yellow.
But she forgets some of the big things.
She tried to forget them, anyhow.
At 21, she was responsible, didn't drink much, graduated from Waubonsee Community College, held a full-time job at a day-care center. She was proud of her virginity.
He was the same age, a former classmate at West Aurora High School, a friend of four years — one of her best friends. They talked on the phone every day. He knew her boundaries, and he had always respected them.
That night, he came over to her Aurora apartment with a rented video and some alcohol. She thought the booze was a little strange, but a lot of her friends drank. She was 21, after all.
Halfway through the movie, her phone rang and she went into her bedroom to pick it up.
He followed her.
"I didn't know what he was doing but all of a sudden he pushed me on the bed and started taking off my clothes," she recalled. "Some parts of it I really kind of blacked out, but he got on top of me where I couldn't get up and I just kept telling him, 'Stop it, what are you doing?'
"And the weight of him — it was like my body was just frozen in time. Like I couldn't move. I was yelling and I kept telling him to stop, and I just remembered that he was inside of me and I kept yelling at him and screaming at him and telling him to stop and he just looked me straight in the face and he wouldn't stop."
And that was how it happened. Just like that. A guy she trusted, for reasons she will never really know, took her virginity, her self-worth, her confidence, her safety, her control.
He did something that night that caused her for years afterward to drink excessively, suffer daily anxiety attacks, jump when her doorbell rang and re-live the rape every time she saw white walls.
Then he turned around and ran out of her apartment.
"I just went and I took a shower and I couldn't stop taking a shower and I just couldn't stop crying," she said. "I was like, hold on, this didn't just happen, this couldn't just happen to you, it didn't just happen to you.
"I was totally infuriated that a person had just disrespected everything I valued about myself, and I just felt really bad. Out of anger — I wasn't even thinking — I called him up the next day and said, 'How could you do that to me? You raped me.'
"He said, 'Because I could. Because I can.' ... He just thought that what he did to me was so funny.
"I told him, 'You know I'm going to tell somebody, right? You know you're not going to get away with this.'
"And he said, 'If you do, I'll kill you.'"
* * * * * *
Maybe it was his threat. "Here I was thinking there's no way in the world this guy is going to rape me. And if he's capable of that, I just didn't know what he was capable of."
Maybe it was the embarrassment. "I wanted to tell my parents, I wanted to tell a lot of other people. But I knew that one of the things my mom and dad thought was really great about me was the fact that I was a virgin, and I was very ashamed that this happened to me."
Whatever the reason, she didn't report it to the police, and she didn't talk to a counselor.
She figured she could handle it on her own. So she handled it with 20 to 30 drinks on a good weekend night. She handled it with multiple sexual partners and a series of suicide attempts.
"He knew how special I felt," she said. "There are a lot of people who don't want to be virgins, but I did. After that happened, I just felt like I'm not special anymore. It was like, this person took this from me, so who cares?
"I tried to kill myself quite a few times because the pain that you feel when someone does that to you is just so unbearable. To me, that was the worst betrayal I have ever felt in my life, and it changed who I was as a person."
Two years after the rape, she told her mom, who begged her to get help. She attended a few counseling sessions, but didn't want to talk about what happened.
For a while, the alcohol helped her forget. But when she finally stopped drinking, all the fears she'd blocked out came crashing in with full force.
"I felt so scared of the world," she said. "Whenever I would see a man walking down the streets — it didn't matter if he looked like the person who attacked me, it didn't matter who it was — I was scared. If I was driving in my car, I would automatically lock the door. My heart would race, go crazy, I couldn't breathe. It was like it was happening all over again.
"I couldn't do anything for myself anymore. I tried to go to the grocery store, I couldn't walk in. I tried to go and do anything, and I couldn't. I could just sit at home, and I didn't even feel safe there.
"Whenever anybody would knock on the door, I just panicked ... When I went to bed, I locked the doors, checked it 10 times."
She lost 50 pounds and her group of friends. She couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. Last year, an ambulance was called when she had an anxiety attack at work. She quit her job and moved in with her parents in Kendall County.
"I felt like I couldn't tell the bad guy from the good guy. If you can't trust someone who is that close to you, who do you trust? Where are you supposed to feel safe?
"I felt out of control with my life. Because that's what rape is about. It's not about sex; it's about someone forcing you to do something."
* * * * * *
Finally, one day last December, when she didn't know what else to do, she found a number for Mutual Ground in Aurora.
"Everything was just getting to be too much," she recalled. "So I said, 'I need help now.' I said, 'Can someone please help me?' I said, 'If I don't do something to help myself, I'm going to die.'"
Once a week now, she meets with her counselor, Jan Faulhaber, and they use a method called "Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing" to deal with her memories. It helps, she says, to work through her emotions and understand that what happened wasn't her fault.
She's started working at a day-care again and hopes to find a new apartment soon.
Two months ago, while at a local bar with some friends, she caught someone out of the corner of her eye.
"I looked again, and it was him," she said. "But I looked him straight in the face, and I didn't look down and I didn't run away. I gave him all that guilt and all that pain that I was feeling ... I was anxious, but it was also very empowering. It was like, I can look him straight in the face, and I don't have to be ashamed of myself. I don't have to feel bad."
Like seven out of 10 rape victims in Illinois, she has never reported the crime to police nor prosecuted her attacker. Like several others at Mutual Ground who offered to tell their stories, she doesn't want to use her name because a part of her is still afraid of him.
Like the estimated 683,000 women over 18 who are raped each year in the U.S., she still suffers every day.
But like too few of them, she's getting help.
"A lot of times I felt like I was in so much pain, I just couldn't talk to somebody," she said. "But once you work through things, you're able to be free again. You're able to live your life. You don't have to live in fear.
"For a really long time, I felt like everything that happened was my fault, and it really took away my whole life ... But you realize it was somebody else's actions. It wasn't my actions. I didn't cause this to happen.
"Because in the whole world, there's nothing that anybody can do to deserve that."
