This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/flybyknight665 on 2023-08-23 20:05:35.

trigger warning

10 years and 7 days ago I was assaulted by two acquaintances I went to high school with. I was 20 years old.

I’d been invited to a “party” that was actually a half dozen men and one guy’s girlfriend sitting around drinking.

Things turned ugly for me in a backroom and it completely derailed my life.

I have always regretted reporting it.

In a small town and from the same high school, I dealt with a mass unfriending, online harassment and phone calls, stories of what a liar I am.

They said I’d cheated on my boyfriend and came up with a story to cover it. I was too ugly and they were too popular, too “nice” to have done it.

I was a gross, slutty, fat, ugly, cheating, liar. They were the victims here, and there were two of them and one of me.

The police were awful. They made me tell my story in the back of an ambulance to 5 men at once.

They were suspicious of my demeanor in the days afterward because rather than the tearful, trembling victim you see on SVU, I was frozen and empty.

I didn’t act “right.” I was numb and furious.

When the detective came to my parent’s house to take updated photos of my injuries, he clearly thought I wasn’t acting hesitant enough to pull down my pants and shirt to show the bruises.

As if I had ANY privacy left after what happened, telling the story over and over, and enduring the samples, photos, and exposure of the SANE exam. I guess I didn’t cry in front of them enough.

The men said I lied. That it was consensual.

That the bruises and scratches on my wrists, thighs, shoulders, and back of my neck, and the huge bite mark on my breast were all because I’m kinky.

That the friction burn under my chin from them struggling to rip my landyard off was something I’d done to myself. That I was just a regretful slut. Their other friends backed them.

The police were inconsistent and inaccessible. One of the last updates they gave me was that one of them had admitted the night of that he did not remember getting consent from me.

They said because he was drunk and not mirandized they would be re-interviewing him with the presence of a lawyer (which never made any sense to me) and would let me know how it went.

They never did and I was so empty of everything that I could no longer care to follow up. I just wanted it to go away. Eventually, I learned that they were declining to prosecute.

The next two years are a blur because I’ve mostly blocked it out. I was full of rage all the time.

I wanted justice, I wanted acknowledgement, I wanted them to be sorry. I wished it was some sort of mistake, misunderstanding, or accident, that they would apologize. I hated them, I hated myself.

I put it behind me for awhile. Then one died tragically and I got to experience seeing them memorialized all over social media as a great person and friend. Maybe he was, but not to me.

My family, boyfriend, and a few friends told me I should be happy.

I was anything but celebratory because it’s another way that he gets to be the victim, for always now. There will never be any acknowledgement of what he did to me and I will never be able to tell anyone without speaking ill of the dead.

The other one, who had repeatedly attempted to harass me online, moved away, and I tried to leave it all in the past.

A year ago, I didn’t answer a call from a restricted number and then got a text message from a detective asking me to call him.

It never even occurred to me it would be related to my case. I called immediately, worried someone I loved had been hurt.

This is what he told me: police in a very large county, in a very large state had run DNA from a cigarette butt left at a crime scene.

It hit on the samples from my case. Shocked and emotional, I asked what kind of crime? Had he been arrested? Was it another sexual assault?

He told me he couldn’t give me any other details, that all he had was the case number and item tested. That the agency’s codes/prefixes for case type were different than theirs, and he didn’t know anything else. He was only calling because he was required to notify me.

It seems my state passed some kind of victim’s notification law.

I asked if he could find out more information for me, he said no.

Before he hung up, he casually offered to resubmit my case to the prosecutor, telling me it wouldn’t necessarily lead to charges this time but that the statute of limitations would expire this year. This was my last chance. I declined.

After the panic subsided, I unblocked him, started searching his social media, and Googling his name.
I could find nothing about it. (I did learn he has a young son, though!) His accounts had been inactive for a few months but I have no other information.

I’ve been so angry again. I’m furious at the police and policy makers that seem to think they did me a favor by dropping a tiny scrap of information on me and then bouncing.

Presumably, they don’t run DNA left at the scene for minor, nonviolent crimes. So wtf did he do? Did he hurt someone? Did what I go through with the police have some meaning if it means that someone else’s case was solved? Or if I had tried harder would it not have happened to them? These are the questions that are haunting me.

This information has brought a lot of things back up for me. I’m frustrated and furious again. Thinking about things I thought I’d mostly put to rest.

The unfairness of it all sticks in the back of my throat. Part of me wants to scream “See?! See?! I wasn’t lying about him being a POS!” but there’s no point.

Because of that phone call, I know that the statute of limitations was up this week. It feels like a grim anniversary that I should mark in some way.

Victim’s Rights Laws and new notification policies are something we hear about in the news sometimes, but who knew it was so useless?

While I’m sure the people who set this up gave themselves a pat on the back, all they’ve done by dropping their incomplete information on me is retraumatize me.

And I’m not grateful for it.

These things have the ability to cause more pain and it’s cruel to notify people of this kind of stuff without giving them the full information and making no effort to follow up.