10 Years a Rape Victim
The story of the night I was raped by Karl Van Dessel
Please donate to RAINN in my honor here: https://www.crowdrise.com/o/en/campaign/sarahs-fund-for-rainn
Update (04/29/2019): I am adding photos of my rapist so you can identify him and stay safe. He lives in Berkeley, CA and currently attends UC Berkeley.
Once upon a time I was a normal, albeit anxious and awkward, teen. Once upon a time I still had the chance to experience my own body becoming a sexual thing. Once upon a time I had my virginity, intact. I was so earnest. I was going to give it to my prince charming, my first love.
But I was raped before I got to give my virginity to anyone. I was drugged and raped by Karl Van Dessel almost 10 years ago.
Karl, you got to be there when I lost my virginity. I didn’t.
So today, Karl, I am going to do two things. One is for you, and one is for me.
Today, just for you, I am leveraging the only weapon I have against you — the story of the night you raped me. I am going to tell everyone exactly what you did to me the night you raped me. Every excruciating detail.
And today, for me, I am going to try to give myself something positive to think about when I remember how you raped me. I’m going to use my story to raise money for rape victims in your face. I am going to make something positive of this crap mess that you made for me. I am taking back my rape. So, in honor of my virginity that you stole, I am going to raise money for RAINN.
Please do donate to RAINN on my GoFundMe page here. Please help give me something positive to think about when I think about my rape. Every dollar counts. Thank you.
Karl, you fuckwad. I hope this story kills you. I hope you feel unbearable, unrelenting shame. You should be embarrassed just to be you. I hope this story makes you feel so, so small. Because Karl, you shit, you fucking coward, you child, you almost ruined my life. You could have killed me that night. And I don’t think you even cared.
No-one likes a rapist, Karl. Sucks to be you.
My Story
It was two weeks after my 18th birthday. I was no longer a minor.. but barely.
It was my second week of classes as a freshman at UC Berkeley.
It was my first college party ever.
It was September of 2009.
I’d only been drunk once prior to this party, and I did not want to recreate that at my first-ever college party. I wanted to be really careful not to drink very much. I wanted to be cool, calm and collected.
My first crystal-clear memory is of Karl, coming up behind me, and saying hey. Karl and I had met earlier through a mutual friend. There was another guy with him, he was very tall with blonde/brown curly hair and kind of a big nose, I remember. I don’t remember his name.
Karl asked me if I wanted to head back to his apartment to smoke with him and the tall guy, the guy whose name I can’t remember.
I thought Karl was a Very Cool Kid. So, yea, I said yes.
We made it back to his apartment, but somewhere in the kerfuffle, the tall guy disappeared.
I asked Karl where he’d gone. Karl said he’d gone home. It seemed odd.
It seemed like a red flag, but I was not about to let my paranoia ruin my potential friendship with Cool Kid Karl.
I remember his apartment layout very clearly, even though it’s been almost 10 years.
You would enter into the apartment after a flight or two of stairs and immediately to your right was the kitchen and a counter. There was some space in front of the counter for a living space. I forget what furniture he had there. There was a balcony where he usually had people over to smoke.
And then there was his bedroom. When we entered his apartment that night, we went right to his bedroom.
Karl had a roommate, we’ll call him Melvan. The two had bunk beds, wooden. The beds faced a computer, a white Mac desktop, which was on top of a desk (this was 2009).
Melvan had a pile of clean laundry on the floor by the bed that night. I remember because I puked all over it later. Details on this to come.
Melvan was not there the night Karl raped me, at least as far as I can remember.
Cool Kid Karl sat down at his computer and drew me a chair. We were looking at iTunes on his computer. He asked me what kind of music I liked. I don’t remember what I said.
He made a very subtle pass at me which I rejected — I just wanted to be friends.
He asked me if I was 18. I told him I’d turned 18 a week ago. I remember his face lighting up ever so slightly, though I didn’t know why at the time.
He asked me if I wanted another drink. I said no. He pushed me with some peer pressure bull — come on. I wanted him to like me.
I accepted, figuring I wouldn’t have to drink the drink he brought me.
He told me to pick some music that I liked and play it while he went to fix me a drink in the kitchen.
He took a long time.
I remember thinking, ‘what if he’s adding a date rape drug’. But, nah. I thought, the chances of that were way too slim.
He returned with a drink for me.
The red plastic cup was incredibly full. To the brim, which was odd. The drink was orange in color.
I remember his hand was shaking so much that the drink was spilling over the sides as he handed it to me.
I pretended to take a sip.
He seemed offended. You don’t like it? he asked me.
Was it my politeness? My desire for friendship? My blind belief in the inherent goodness of everyone?
In that moment I remember trying to calculate how likely it was that he was going to rape me. Whatever conclusion I came to, I guess it was unlikely enough for me that I took a few big gulps. I figured this way I could put the drink down and Cool Kid Karl wouldn’t bother me about it again.
The drink tasted nasty. Like skunk. To this day I have never tasted another drink like it.
I was sitting on the edge of the bottom bunk.
Almost immediately, I remember my vision started to blur. My eyelids started to feel heavy. The room started spinning. I leaned back against his bedpost. I remember feeling tired and asking him if I could lay down. I remember his looming face. I remember his looming face so vividly. Half-smiling, glowing. He looked weirdly happy, like he was trying not to grin. Something was off. He took my drink from my hand and put it somewhere. He helped me lay down on his bed.
I promptly vomited all over his roommate’s clean laundry. Projectile, and a lot of it. It just kept coming. I never vomit like this.
I asked him for water.
He took forever bringing me water. I remember calling out to him.
And guess what. You’ll never believe it. The water had the same nasty taste. I knew it wasn’t water. More of the drug was in the water he’d given me.
I began throwing up violently again.
I asked him if it was really just water. He didn’t respond, but he told me he’d bring me different water.
This time he was quick, and the water actually tasted like water. It tasted great.
I must have passed out around that point.
Please pause here to fully appreciate just how reckless, how careless Karl was with my life.
I woke up again around 3 or 4 am. I was so embarrassed that I’d thrown up all over Melvan’s clothes. I grabbed my stuff and left as quickly as I could. I sensed Karl was awake on the top bunk, I heard him move. But I didn’t turn around to check. I fled.
And it wasn’t until the walk home that I started piecing things together.
And when I say walk, I mean drag because I dragged my feet as fast as they would go. My feet did not want to move. They were like led. I was like led. I felt like I had the flu or something worse.
I noticed peppermint in my mouth, like someone had brushed my teeth or given me mouthwash.
I noticed the back of my head hurt so badly, like it had been banged against the wall or board a few hundred times.
I noticed the weird feeling of like, rips in the back of my throat. Like I had a sore throat. I remember wondering if this could be the feeling you get after a penis is in your mouth.
Well I can confirm years later that yes, deepthroat stretching was the feeling I was experiencing, having now done it willingly. But I had no idea really what that was at the time.
I remember my vagina hurt. I remember putting my finger down there to check, and pulling up blood, though my period should have been far away.
I remember my asshole hurt. But I remember thinking, ‘psh, nobody would ever want to put a penis in there, that’s gross’, and feeling very confident that at least he hadn’t stuck his dick in my asshole based on this logic.
Obviously I was wrong. But what’s a virgin to know, I guess.
I remember trying to figure out how I could know definitively if Karl had raped me or not. And I decided to check if my clothes were on the same way that I’d put them on earlier.
And I noticed one thing.
I had put my underwear on inside out that night, as one does when one is out of clean underwear.
I’d turned my thong inside out, Karl, you fuckhead.
Walking home, it was dark but I could feel that my underwear were on the right way around now. The logo was facing outward, not inward anymore.
And so there it was. Devastation washed over me, cold. I’d been raped. I’d been saving my virginity for my first love, and that was gone. Gone. I couldn’t give it to my first love. And I’d been so careful, I’d wanted that so badly. But there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. It was gone. Karl had stolen that from me.
When I did finally get back to my dorm room, I remember feeling a big wave, the warm relief of safety. And then I promptly passed out on my bed.
My dorm roommate at the time has since informed me what happened over the next 24 hours. I have no recollection. She tried to wake me several times, I was not responsive. She tried to give me food, no response. She told me she was about to call my parents because she felt like there was something seriously wrong. She told me I finally woke up the following night, got out of bed and went straight to the dining hall. I came back to my dorm room and went back to sleep.
I have no recollection of any of this.
I woke up almost two days after Karl raped me and promptly went to the showers. I’d decided to pretend that I hadn’t been raped. I remember deciding that it was the closest I was ever going to get to giving my virginity to the first person I loved. I remember crying as I turned the water on, knowing that once I took a shower, I couldn’t get a rape kit.
It was on this day, too, that I stumbled upon this lovely Facebook post from the night Karl raped me (thanks Karl):
And he’d Facebook messaged me. Karl Facebook messaged me the day after. He wanted to check if I remembered anything. He asked me several times.
He then deleted his Facebook and reinstated it (all who are friends with him can confirm), which is the only way to delete messages permanently on Facebook.
How has Karl raping me, taking my virginity away from me, affected the rest of my life?
Every night for what seems like months I’ve been thinking about Karl The Rapist. About what he cost me. I wonder who I would be if he hadn’t raped me. I think about how I will never get any kind of real justice. I cry. I think about how his girlfriend and his parents and his friends must not even know. About how he must be lying to everyone. About how he must think of me — an ignorant slut, perhaps? About how he must think of himself.
Sometimes I try to strain to see if I can re-create the dialog or the scene that happened as my rape was unfolding. Did that other tall guy come back and join in? Did any of Karl’s other friends?
I think about all of the friends I lost since he raped me. About how so many of them said I was different after he raped me. About how I didn’t see it.
And the image that has occupied my brain the most is that of the actual penetration.
My hymen was so thick. I remember I used to cry in the bathroom in high school because I just couldn’t get a tampon in. I always knew sex the first time was going to be painful.
But I didn’t get to be a part of it.
Was there a lot of blood? Did he have to push really hard? Did it make a sound? This image is gruesome and awful, and yet I still want desperately to know. It swirls around, transforming as I try to guess what it looked like. But I will never get to know.
And so it seems I will always have these horrible images, these thoughts swirling around my head. They will never go away. They pop up at the most inconvenient times — in the middle of meetings, in the middle of social conversations. I sometimes go hours, totally consumed by these thoughts, unable to think about anything else.
I will never get to know what it was like to lose my virginity. Never. Karl took that from me. And nothing can ever get that back for me.
So here I am, trying to reclaim my rape in the only positive way I can think of. Here I am, telling my story, hoping it will be compelling enough for you to donate to RAINN in my honor, in honor of victims of assholes like Karl The Rapist, in honor of my stolen virginity. It would mean so much to me if I could look back on my rape and have this positive light, if I could know that at least because of my rape, a buttload of money was raised for victims of sexual assault. It would be so good for me if my rape actually brought some good on the world in the end.
Please donate to RAINN in my honor here. Every dollar helps me, helps RAINN.
Please share this post with your friends and your family, and ask them to donate too.
Please help me re-claim my rape.
Thank you.
With love,
Sarah
