were asleep a few feet away in the same room. “I have to ask obvious questions,” Brueckner apologized, “because these are questions people would ask….You’re using a quiet voice when you’re telling him to stop. I can understand to some degree. But tell me what was your thinking there? Why weren’t you just screaming loud? It certainly would have stopped things.”
“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. I was very scared.”
“Did he ever make any threats to you?” Brueckner asked.
“No,” Kelly replied.
“I don’t mean to ask you that question to make you feel bad,” Brueckner persisted. “It’s just—it’s easy to think through things now and go, ‘I could have done this,’ or whatever. But things were happening.”
“I feel really bad about throwing my sheets away,” Kelly said, breaking into tears as she realized how inexplicable her silence must seem to someone who hadn’t been in her position. “I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to forget about it, like it didn’t happen. It was really hard for me to even report it.”
In fact, psychologists and psychiatrists who study sexual assault report that victims frequently react to being raped much the way Kaitlynn Kelly did. In a 2012 presentation in Baltimore, David Lisak—a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who is an expert on the subject of acquaintance rape—explained to a room full of prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, and health-care professionals that when people are raped, the experience is so traumatic that it often causes them to behave in a wide variety of ways that may seem inexplicable. “How many people have ever heard a rape victim say, ‘I felt paralyzed’?” Lisak asked the room. “How many have ever heard a rape victim say, ‘I wanted to scream, and I couldn’t’? How many people here who treat trauma victims have heard them say, ‘I had a nightmare last night; I was trying to run away and I couldn’t move’?”
When a rape occurs in a dorm room, Lisak said, investigators often determine that the victim could have gotten out of bed with apparent ease and fled the room. But “the fact that they didn’t immediately make a break for it, or the fact that they didn’t scream—none of those things necessarily mean that this was a consensual encounter.”
After Lisak spoke, his colleague Russell Strand, a sexual-crimes expert who heads the Family Advocacy Law Enforcement Training Division at the U.S. Army Military Police School, told the same room full of people a story about a military couple who threw a party at their house. One of the guests, a soldier, became too drunk to gohome. The husband and wife escorted him down to their basement and offered him a couch to sleep on, where he promptly passed out, after which they went back upstairs and fell asleep in their own bed, with their four-year-old son lying beside them.
In the middle of the night, the wife woke up to discover that the drunk party guest was lying next to her with his fingers in her vagina, masturbating her, as her husband and son slept in the same bed. She was horrified but said nothing. She lay there in silence for the next fifteen minutes while he continued to penetrate her with his fingers. Defense attorneys for the assailant built their case around the fact that she could have immediately stopped the assault by waking her husband but had remained mute instead.
Prosecutors took the case to trial, regardless, put the wife on the witness stand, and addressed the issue, head-on, by skillfully framing their questions to elicit an honest explanation that would resonate with the jury. According to Strand, one of the prosecutors began by telling her, “Help me understand what you are able to remember about your experience.”
“Well, his fingers were in my vagina,” the woman said.
The prosecutor asked, “What were you thinking when you woke up and realized, ‘His
“I don’t know,” Kelly said. “To tell you the truth, I just don’t know. I was very scared.”
“Did he ever make any threats to you?” Brueckner asked.
“No,” Kelly replied.
“I don’t mean to ask you that question to make you feel bad,” Brueckner persisted. “It’s just—it’s easy to think through things now and go, ‘I could have done this,’ or whatever. But things were happening.”
“I feel really bad about throwing my sheets away,” Kelly said, breaking into tears as she realized how inexplicable her silence must seem to someone who hadn’t been in her position. “I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to forget about it, like it didn’t happen. It was really hard for me to even report it.”
In fact, psychologists and psychiatrists who study sexual assault report that victims frequently react to being raped much the way Kaitlynn Kelly did. In a 2012 presentation in Baltimore, David Lisak—a clinical psychologist and forensic consultant who is an expert on the subject of acquaintance rape—explained to a room full of prosecutors, defense attorneys, police officers, and health-care professionals that when people are raped, the experience is so traumatic that it often causes them to behave in a wide variety of ways that may seem inexplicable. “How many people have ever heard a rape victim say, ‘I felt paralyzed’?” Lisak asked the room. “How many have ever heard a rape victim say, ‘I wanted to scream, and I couldn’t’? How many people here who treat trauma victims have heard them say, ‘I had a nightmare last night; I was trying to run away and I couldn’t move’?”
When a rape occurs in a dorm room, Lisak said, investigators often determine that the victim could have gotten out of bed with apparent ease and fled the room. But “the fact that they didn’t immediately make a break for it, or the fact that they didn’t scream—none of those things necessarily mean that this was a consensual encounter.”
After Lisak spoke, his colleague Russell Strand, a sexual-crimes expert who heads the Family Advocacy Law Enforcement Training Division at the U.S. Army Military Police School, told the same room full of people a story about a military couple who threw a party at their house. One of the guests, a soldier, became too drunk to gohome. The husband and wife escorted him down to their basement and offered him a couch to sleep on, where he promptly passed out, after which they went back upstairs and fell asleep in their own bed, with their four-year-old son lying beside them.
In the middle of the night, the wife woke up to discover that the drunk party guest was lying next to her with his fingers in her vagina, masturbating her, as her husband and son slept in the same bed. She was horrified but said nothing. She lay there in silence for the next fifteen minutes while he continued to penetrate her with his fingers. Defense attorneys for the assailant built their case around the fact that she could have immediately stopped the assault by waking her husband but had remained mute instead.
Prosecutors took the case to trial, regardless, put the wife on the witness stand, and addressed the issue, head-on, by skillfully framing their questions to elicit an honest explanation that would resonate with the jury. According to Strand, one of the prosecutors began by telling her, “Help me understand what you are able to remember about your experience.”
“Well, his fingers were in my vagina,” the woman said.
The prosecutor asked, “What were you thinking when you woke up and realized, ‘His
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