She and her male friend went inside and sat on the stairs. “He had his head on my shoulder and was talking to me about things, and he tried to kiss me, and I pushed him away,” she recalls. “He kept doing things, and I kept turning my head away.
“At one point, he reached up the back of my sweatshirt and unsnapped my bra. I pushed him away, and he went to the bathroom, so I rehooked it. People ask me why I didn’t leave at that point, but I couldn’t even stand up,” she says.
When her friend returned from the bathroom, he held out a hand to help her up, she recalls. “What was running through my head was, ‘Maybe he’ll let me lay on his couch and sleep this off.’ My dorm was a mile away. I thought he’d let me sober up so then I could leave.”
Instead, she said he led her up the stairs, not to his room but into a small study room in which computer equipment was kept. “The computer room is on the same floor, but it’s before you come to his room. He opened the door and guided me in. I wasn’t talking, but I was thinking, ‘What could possibly be going on?’ I didn’t know at the time what the room was. He walked in behind me, shut the door and locked it.
“He spun a chair around and sat down and pulled me onto his lap and started kissing my neck and face. I kept leaning away, but he had his hands on my hips, and I’d feel dizzy when I leaned back, and he would catch me,” she recalls.
“He pushed me up off him and started taking my clothes off. He pulled my shirt off and my other clothes, and I didn’t pass out, but one minute his clothes were on, and the next they were off. I was standing, but I felt I couldn’t move. I felt paralyzed, and I could stand but I felt I couldn’t run. I felt like I was watching it from behind. Rather than looking at his face, I could see the back of my head. My counselor says that is a victim’s defense mechanism.
“I’d like to clear up the whole thing about us supposedly having sex twice,” she says, referring to what would become a point of contention. “I guess it refers to the fact that he pulled me on top of him on the chair and did some things and then put me on the floor. It wasn’t twice. It wasn’t until I hit the floor that I started to panic and realize . . . I was wedged in. My head was under the computer table, and one leg was bent up on the chair and another leg against the wall. He was on me, too, and he is big, 6 foot 4, close to 200 pounds.
“He finished and climbed off, and we started to put our clothes on, and not much was said. I think it was when we changed positions that he said, ‘I knew you wanted this’ or something like that. I got my clothes on and went out the door and realized I couldn’t find my dorm keys. He had my keys in his room, and I don’t remember giving him my keys. He knew where my keys were, and I didn’t. We can’t get back into the dorm without keys.
“He gave me my keys and followed me out. I was starting to cry, and he came up and put his arm around me. I should have pushed him away, but I felt, ‘What else could he have done to me?’ He walked me back to the dorm, hugged me and said, ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘Don’t bother.’
“People ask me what I was wearing. I was wearing a sweatshirt and jeans. I was a seductress in a sweatshirt and jeans,” she says angrily.
She is certain she was raped and that she did not consent to sex only to regret it later and then allow herself to believe she was raped, she says. “I’ve always felt that I didn’t want to do it that evening, and that is what rape is defined as-if you are forced to have sex against your will,” she says.
“I had expressed to him that I didn’t want to have sex with him, I don’t remember if I did that night, but we had talked about it the night before for quite a long time. There were a few times when I said ‘no’ while he was kissing me and stuff, but once we were in the room and he started taking my clothes off, I think I was in so much shock I might not have remembered.”
The first person she told the next day was a sorority sister who found her crying. That friend was the first to apply the term “rape” to what had happened, the young woman says.
“That kind of brought it together. A lot of rape victims blame themselves, and I think I was at that point. I guess I had felt you are only raped if it’s a man who jumps out of the bushes with a knife-that kind of thing,” she says.
The second person she told was her boyfriend back in Chicago in a telephone call. He immediately drove to Valparaiso. “He questioned how it could have happened. That’s the typical reaction of males. My father did the same thing: ‘You had to do something to make him do it.’ “
The third person to learn what happened was a friend from down the hall-Shannon Welch, 20, of Cary-who knew the accused rapist. When Welch learned that her friend had allegedly been raped by the Chicago student, Shannon went to confront him at his fraternity house.
“I wondered what he was going to do and if he was going to live his life as if nothing went on,” says Welch, an Irish-Catholic with her own strong sense of morality.
When Welch told the Chicago man that her friend claimed to have been raped by him, he began to weep, she recalls. “He said, ‘Oh God,’ and his face was downcast. He didn’t deny it. He said, ‘What can I do? What do I need to do?’ I told him to call the counseling center. I said, ‘You don’t know how much you have hurt her.’ “
Welch said he asked if he could see the alleged victim, but Welch vetoed that, she says. He then asked if he could call or write to her. He asked Welch to stay while he wrote a message.
The note would also become a point of contention. A copy was obtained by the Tribune. It says: “I can’t believe what’s happened. First off, it appears I’ve lost two friends and I truly regret any of this has happened. I want to express the guilt I feel-I’m truly sorry. I know words can’t change things-I just want you to know I’m going to change-mainly by calling a counselor and taking a hard look at what’s happened. I can’t believe I’ve ruined you and our friendship. I’m scared and I’m sorry.”
Welch carried the note back to her friend in the sorority dormitory. And she also brought to her no little experience in dealing with such matters. Unknown to the alleged victim, Welch was then active in a newly formed group called SCAR, the Student Coalition Against Rape, which was organized in response to increasing awareness of sexual violence on the campus.
In the spring semester prior to the reported rape involving the two Chicagoans, VU President Alan Harre heard eight hours of testimony from 13 women students who had been raped or sexually assaulted.
Harre had asked for the meeting after a “Take Back the Night” rally against sexual violence on campus in which nearly 500 male and female students participated.
At the rally, green armbands were offered to any student who had been sexually assaulted. More than 100 were passed out and worn by men and women. “I was in shock. We all were,” said Kirsten Lee, one of the organizers of the rally and a leading campus activist against sexual violence.
“We looked out into the audience, and it was our friends, people in our classes, people we never expected- they were the ones wearing the armbands.”
During the rally and in discussions that followed through the night, women students began to speak out about being raped at fraternity parties, of being assaulted by male friends whom they had asked to escort them at night, and of gang rapes during what men on campus referred to as the “dead horse game” in which the goal is to get a woman so drunk she passes out and can then be assaulted.
Many of the speakers criticized the university administration for failing to recognize and deal properly with sexual violence. The rally set off a series of charged responses across the campus. In the days that followed, campus counselors reported a waiting list of 50 students seeking appointments for counseling on problems related to sexual assault.
Some of the more militant women students threatened to paint the names of alleged rapists and sexual assailants on sidewalks-a tactic used by women on other campuses, including Northwestern University in Evanston, in recent years.
“R.A.’s (dormitory managers) were calling me, not knowing what to do with residents who were curled up in the closet rocking back and forth,” Lee says. “It was scary seeing our friends like this. . . . It felt surreal.”
Some men students responded sympathetically. Others charged that Lee, who has talked openly of being sexually abused as a child by a relative and again as a teenager, was responsible for a “hysteria” in which all men were unfairly portrayed as predators. Privately, her detractors characterized Lee as a man-hating feminist and SCAR as “left-wing.”
In response to the high emotions over the issue, Harre conducted a hearing with testimony from 13 women selected by Lee. One woman, who weighed only 90 pounds, told of being raped by a 300-pound male in the school’s science building. Another student told how she was sexually assaulted in a fraternity house by a Valparaiso football player during the first weeks of her freshman year. She said that when she left, her assailant asked, “What was your name again? I’d like to call you sometime.”
After that hearing, Harre formed six task-force committees composed of students, faculty and administrators to address various aspects of the problem. As a result, by the start of the fall semester this academic year, Valparaiso had in place a comprehensive but untested procedure for dealing with sexual violence.
When students returned for the fall semester, they found posters in every residence hall with information on what to do if sexually assaulted and advising them on how to avoid being accused of sexual assault. A few weeks into the semester, students were given brochures prepared by the university on sexual violence.
In addition, Harre created a special office on campus with trained counselors to handle reports of sexual assault, known as the SAAFE office (Sexual Assault Advocacy & Facilitating Education).
And, most notably, the university came up with a “victim-friendly” procedure for handling charges of sexual assault brought by one student against another. As with similar procedures on other campuses-including Northwestern University-students can bring their allegations directly to the administrators without involving law-enforcement officials, and the disciplinary hearings are conducted in secret.
That policy is the target of the $12-million lawsuit brought in Federal District Court in Hammond, Ind., by the Chicago man and his parents-none of them identified by name. He was the first to go through the new process, and, as a result became a victim himself, he claims.
“As an attorney it is pretty amazing to read (the university’s sexual assault policy) because it comes off as slanted and one-sided as drawn up, and they didn’t even follow it as it was drawn up,” contends John Bushemi, the Merrillville, Ind., lawyer hired to represent the accused.
