Believe Me: Coming Out as a Rape Victim

This isn’t my typical blog post. In fact, this wasn’t the blog post I was planning on writing this week — that one is still sitting in my drafts and can wait for a better day. Another story takes precedence, as it has been brewing for months now. Four months and 28 days, to be exact.

Sexual assault has taken center stage this week. Between Bill Cosby’s sentencing and Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing, it seems to be an inescapable conversation. Perhaps even moreso for victims, those who have come forth and those who haven’t. All over the blogosphere, you’ve got posts like these:

And these are just the ones that come up with a simple search about high profile cases. In the everyday, I see regular people defending and choosing to support the likes of Tekashi 6ix9ine, a rapper who assaulted a child, and statements like the one on this shirt, worn at Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.’s national conference:

Seemingly innocent jokes such as these are hurled at victims that have bravely decided to come forth, and, perhaps indirectly, at every one of the one in five women that will be sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Including myself.

On Friday, May 4, 2018, I woke up on the floor in a house I had never been in, bare naked, with no recollection of how I got there beyond having my head in the toilet at the bar I was hanging out in the night before.

I have not been the same since that moment.

As if in a dream, I called a friend to come get me, hurriedly got dressed, and left with minimal words to the man next to me. The next 48 hours were a blur; in the emergency room, I made frantic calls to my family and anyone who may have known what the hell had happened to me.

I never felt anything. Not even when my attacker messaged me on Instagram asking me to keep quiet because he “didn’t like drama.” Not even when I overheard my friends trying to find a way to “not sound victim blame-y” when bringing me his side of the story. Not even when I realized I could never go to another open mic in this city and feel safe again.

I felt so much nothing that in the same weekend, I finished all my finals, moved out of my dorm and into my apartment, and effectively started a new life.

I never told anyone consequential about that weekend. If you knew, you knew. The closest I ever came to speaking on it was tweeting and making vague Instagram posts about it.

But clearly, that was not enough. Rape, which I’ve only recently become comfortable calling it, cannot be healed with a few posts into the Internet void. It cannot be healed by just talking about it. Honestly, I am not confident that it can ever truly be healed from. It is one of the highest and deepest forms of violations.

So to see the world turn its back on women when high profile cases such as Cosby’s and Kavanaugh’s come to pass — difficult is an understatement. I fear what I know regular women accusing regular men have to endure if they choose to tell their story.

Women are begged to consider whose lives we are ruining. They are ridiculed for being crazy, for wanting it and regretting it, for using their ‘female privilege’ to upend the lives of men for no reason at all.

I’ve had to sit quietly and watch family members and friends defend these men. I have to watch my nation’s leaders deny these women justice, and make light of their peril.

I may have to bear witness to a rapist be sworn into the highest court of the land and block another rapist from being removed from the highest office in the ‘land of the free, home of the brave.’

All while watching my own rapist have a successful creative career, using his platform as an erotic poet to possibly compromise other women just like me and his popularity to silence them… just like me.

My body has been treated as disposable, and it’s okay because I was drunk. Or because I was scantily-clad. Or because I project a sexually-liberated attitude. Or because I’m ‘a little bit nutty, a little bit slutty’ like Anita Hill. Or maybe just because I have tits and a nice ass.

That’s the message we’re sending women all over the globe.

But I have a message to send back:

Izreal the Poet, you are a rapist. It may take a long time and it may not be in my name, but karma for you, your ilk, and your defenders is coming.

And I refuse to be quiet until it does.