What It’s Like….experiencing sexual assault

I’ve been writing this piece for about a month. It hasn’t been easy talking about this and I’ve been so ready to scrap this because I didn’t think what I went through justified writing this or that I should share this. But it’s important that I do. No matter how big or small, your trauma and experiences are yours. Legitimize what you’ve experienced and how it has impacted you. 

A couple nights ago I woke up in a sweat, or at least I thought I was sweating. It took me a couple seconds to process that I was actually crying. I wasn’t sure how long I was crying for and when I eventually fell back asleep, I only remember repeating one phrase. Every time I said it, it was a painful apology to a girl that has continued to physically and mentally punish herself for something that was out of her control:

“it wasn’t your fault.”

For anyone that knows me, I talk a lot about my first year and the academic, emotional and personal toll it had on me—and continues to have on me to this day. I’ve always had regrets about my first year, especially my academic performance because I’m a Pre-Med (a pre-med student who also identifies as a first generation, low-income, black and female). I’m not going to spend time talking about how all of those identities impacted my first year and the stress of being a pre-med because that is a whole another story, but they exist and matter. However, there were other things happening in my life, things that were out of my control that impacted my performance and I never really processed until recently. There are very few people that know about the stories I’m about to tell and there were certain things I left out when I told them these stories. So to those people, thank you for listening to the information I told you. I knew I would eventually tell the whole story, but I had to take time to process it. So, here we go.

Multiple times in my first year of college, I experienced/was a victim of sexual assault/harassment. 

It was my first night of college. I was in my house lounge and we had just finished introducing ourselves and doing our house icebreaker. We had complete free-time, aka, time to go party. The frat, DU, was the first of a week-long series of frat-parties and RSO mixers. I never went to parties in high school, my first party was going to Bar Night during my Prospie weekend at UChicago and that lasted for an hour, so needless to say the party life was a new experience. I still swore off alcohol at this time and the four parties I went to during my O-Week I was completely sober. My friends, not so much. My two friends and bunch of other people—some I knew, some I didn’t—made our way in the heat of the night to DU. I remember walking into DU and seeing so many people who I knew from the endless number group chats and Facebook groups I joined since being admitted in December 2016, now all at the same party that late September night. For the first 20 minutes, it was great. My friends and I were laughing, dancing the night away. One of the sober monitors was staring at my friends and I flashed a smile, letting him know that my friends were good and that I was keeping an eye on them. I turned away and went back to dancing. It was a great time. Until it wasn’t. 

We were moving through the dance floor, trying to get to a spot where we could breathe a little better and we held each other’s hand as we walked through the dance floor. Wild Thoughts by Rihanna had come on and my hand slipped out of my other’s friend hand as everyone around went crazy. My friend was pretty tall, about 6’2, and it was really easy for me to see him, so I started walking closer. I felt two hands come up behind me on my lower hips. I wasn’t sure who it was and it was really hard to turn my head in the crowd of people. I had come up behind people and gave my friends hugs and had first assumed it was one of them. He whispered in my ear “hi” and I knew that I didn’t know who this person was and felt this wave of fear travel down my veins. I turned my head to the side and saw the familiar sober monitor jacket and the face of the sober monitor who I had smiled at earlier. I tried to move but his hand was gripped on my hip and I was struck in fear that I couldn’t scream or yell. He had gripped my hip with his left hand and his right hand had slipped underneath my dress and grab my vagina through my underwear. I tried pushing him off, but he pulled me back, forcing me to feel the hard-on through his pants and the bigger grip his hands had on my vagina. In an instant, I felt a hand grab me and pull me away from him—it was my friend. They didn’t see what happened, all they saw was another guy behind me and they just wanted to pull me away. 

I turned around after they pulled me to find him, but he disappeared into the crowd. He was pretty tall and the reflective jacket should have made it obvious, but I couldn’t find him. He was gone. Was I dreaming? Was this just a bad nightmare and I actually was in my dorm-room fast asleep? I looked down and saw how much my dressed was pulled up and how much my underwear had been moved. I fixed my underwear and pulled my dress back down and realized that I wasn’t making this up. This was real. My friends asked if I was okay and I said yeah. I was a little shaken up, but I was fine. That’s the truth though. I was fine. I was shaken up, but my friends came and helped me, so it was fine. Secretly, though, I wanted to leave. I wanted to go back to my dorm-room, shower and sleep. But I didn’t want to be a burden to my friends and the last thing I wanted to do was walk back alone, so I said nothing else. We went back to dancing and I honestly pushed the moment aside. We were there for another 30 minutes before they wanted to go somewhere else. I followed. We ended up going back to their dorm because they were pretty much gone, and they needed to sober up. I said my goodbyes and walked back to my dorm. About five minutes later, I got back to my dorm, took off my clothes and sat in bed. My roommate wasn’t in the room at the time. I texted my boyfriend that I was back in my room, but I didn’t tell him what happened—and the truth was because I didn’t want to accept what had happened and honestly what could have happened. I closed my eyes and for the next 7 hours of “sleep”, relived the moment over and over again, till I woke up the next morning with a headache.

I went out again the next night. Why? Because I thought it was a one-time thing. I thought, okay, one bad guy. It can’t all be like this. And I was okay. I wasn’t actually hurt or anything. So, we out again the next night: me, completely sober and my two drunk friends. That night went well. Nothing happened and I’d figured that it was just one bad guy like I thought. 

The next night there were two parties that we went to. The first one got shut down pretty quickly, so we went on to the next one—another frat. I don’t remember what frat it was, and I believe that frat has either since been dissolved/changed around since this occurred in September of 2017. All I know it was a frat that was located “south of south” (for context, South is a residence hall on campus and the frat is located about 5 minutes from this hall going south). I was dancing with my friends and we were having a good time. At one point, they both wanted to have a little bit more to drink so we all walked over together so the bar area of the party. In the midst of a second, the party got more crowded and my friends had to use the bathroom. I waited in the corner that we were in so they would be able to come back to me when they were done. I remember scrolling through my phone, looking at Instagram and the pictures everyone took from the convocation ceremony that happened earlier that day. I looked at the photos that I posted with some of my friends from earlier that day as well and processed more that college was starting. It took another three minutes before I realized my friends still weren’t back, though I’d figured that the line was just long. I turned off my phone and had started to place it the back pocket of the jeans that I wore when I felt something was in the way. I looked down and saw another pair of hands on my lower waist and could smell the alcohol from the breath of the person behind me. I tried pushing the hand away and instead the person pulled me closer and I felt the same uncomfortable hardness behind me. I didn’t even turn around to see what guy it was this time. Instead, I pushed my body forward slightly and used the back of my heel to kick the guy in the balls. I heard the groan and his hands finally let go as I stormed through the crowd and left the party.  I called campus security so I could have someone drive near me since it was about a 20-minute walk and the last thing that night needed was me walking alone at night. I got to my dorm, this time I ended up seeing my housemates. I talked with two of them about what happened slightly, but I didn’t tell them a lot. I pushed it to the side again because once again I felt that what had happened could have been worse. 

That was the last party I went to that o-week. I told my friends who I’d been going out with that I had gotten bored of parties. The truth was, I was scared. I didn’t want to go out again and risk coming back to my campus dorm and not being able to say “what had happened could have been worse” because the worst thing would actually happen. My next party would not be until December. I remember as I was getting ready for that party, I kept looking at myself in the bathroom, making sure that I wasn’t dressed in a way that was inviting. Let me just put a reminder here, the clothes you wear does not mandate any type of assault or harassment in any manner. Everyone is free to wear what they want and they should be able to wear what they want without worrying that someone is going to cause harm and that harm will be justified because of the clothing. It took me months to realize that and not be scared of the clothes that I wore.

The rest of the year had gone by and I still had my occasional cat calls walking down the street to go grocery shopping or to class. I was still struggling academically and mentally throughout the year but it was spring quarter and things were finally looking up—and then they weren’t. 

I had just gotten a job that summer to work for Admissions and one of my close friends and I were leaving our weekly training for that internship. We both lived in Campus North at the time and we were going to get dinner together. We walked through the doors of North and tapped our ID as we normally did to get to the second floor. We walked up the stairs and he saw a dollar on the floor. He picked it up, excited about the good luck and then screams and laughs echoed across from us. We looked up and there were a group of four guys, pointing and laughing, screaming “You just got shit-dollared!” 

Yes, they put actually shit in a dollar as a prank. I grabbed my friend, flipping the guys off and yelling at them for being assholes and helped my friend wash his hands. I grabbed a paper towel and walked out the bathroom and grabbed the dollar to throw it in the trash—ignoring the boys yelling at me for doing so and calling me a “thief”. My friend had left the bathroom to go report the incident to his resident heads and I had walked out the bathroom to see one of the guys in front of me, his phone out, video-tapping the whole thing. I told him to stop video tapping and following me. He wouldn’t. I ignored him and walked away. As I walked away, I heard him say “damn girl nice ass.” I turned around and saw him angle his phone to zoom in on my butt. I told him to stop and he laughed. 

I quickly walked away and went to my dorm room. My roommate wasn’t in the room and I remember panicking—trying to process what had I happened. My friend had called me because he could hear the whole thing from the other hallway. I took a minute to compose myself, trying to figure out whether I was dreaming—realizing the events that had happened minutes prior in my residence hall. The last place I’d ever thought something like this would happen. I ended up finding out who the person was, after talking with a classmate who was on the same athletic team as the person who did that “prank” to my friend and me. I found out that it was a frat initiation thing for FIJI. I had to report the incident to my resident heads and RA’s at the time. The next day, I talked with the classmate who told me the name of the person who did that and I found out that the video was shown to the entire frat. That entire frat had seen a zoomed-up video of my body that I did not consent to. He told me that the video was deleted after it was shown and that they were mad at him for that comment he made—I still have no idea that is true or not. The athletic team that he was a member of had to do extra runs that morning as punishment. He was put on probation in housing. I even eventually talked with him because I needed an answer to the question: why? I got an answer. Was it what I wanted, no. But I had an answer and I hope that the response I gave him stuck with him to this day.

There are people who will read this and say, “yes I’m so sorry for you but this isn’t the worst thing that could have happened”. Yes. I know and I’m extremely aware that my experiences are not the worst. I know that because two days after my experience in May, a female-identifying individual was raped in I-House: another dorm campus. A couple days before graduation, a student was expelled for sexually assaulting a female student. During my second and at the start of my third year, certain frats had to stop having mixers and could not host events because multiple girls ended up at UChicago Medical Center and were found to have date-rape drugs in their system. There were more sexual assaults, both reported and unreported, at the same frats that my experiences happened. So I know, that the things that I’ve gone through pale in comparison to what many have experienced on campus. But something that I tell my friends when they experience trauma and they compare it to others: “your trauma is your trauma.” And I had to tell myself that and remind myself of that.  

Yes, what I went through wasn’t as bad as what others have gone through, but it still impacted me, it impacted my ability to be a student, a girlfriend, a friend, a basic human being. It traumatized me and it changed me. For two straight weeks until I talked with him, I was so scared of taking the elevator in my own dorm because the person I reported lived in my dorm, in the same building, three floors below me. I was scared that if we were to get on an elevator alone, he was going to stop the elevator and rape me. I had never met this person until that incident happened and within that two-week period, we were on the same elevator 7 different times, three of those it was just him and I. Every time he got on the elevator, I thought this was the day it was going to happen. “This was the day I’m going to be raped,” “I should have stayed quiet.”  I had to cope with all of that, with many other things happening in my life and above all: trying to be a student at UChicago in the quarter system that is unforgiving for falling behind for personal and non-important academic matters.

I haven’t forgiven myself for my first year. One day I will, but for now I still don’t and that’s okay. It’s okay because I’ve made steps in recognizing something that has impacted me, something I’ve never done. Most importantly, I can finally say and actually start to believe:

It wasn’t my fault.