“We are beautiful, but we are ugly too”

—Langston Hughes

CONTENT WARNING: sexual assault and harassment, racism, misogyny, mental health

 

It doesn’t matter what his name is. This piece isn’t a callout, but a chance for me to reclaim space. Those of you who know him or were directly involved in this situation will hopefully read this and walk away with a better understanding of a situation that has been twisted, and a lived experience that was invalidated, delegitimized, and silenced. The words I use to create this space are not just for me, but for anyone who has had an experience that was erased.

I am not here to make judgements on an individual’s character. I am here to share an experience in order to heal and to call attention to the larger social structures that allow for so little care and attention in handling sexual assault situations.

Let’s make space, take a moment, to delve into the complexities, the hard questions, the emotions wrapped up in sexual assault and harassment “allegations.”

I encourage conversation in the continual process of understanding and dissecting this situation and situations like it. This piece should be seen as part of an ongoing conversation about how we view, approach, and speak on many issues: sexual assault, sexual harassment, the subjectivity of experience, the importance of narratives, callout culture, and social silencing.

I acknowledge that I’m biting off quite a bit. I would love to see these topics fleshed out. I encourage you to write, to add harmonies. We need a fuller sound.

This piece will be informed by my own experience, as a black woman.

The wisdom of brave hip-hop feminists.

The hearts and experiences of those who have shared their stories with me.

 

We’ll start with the night I was assaulted.

I had broken up with him before winter break. Once we got back to school, we were deciding how to continue to be in each other’s lives—whether or not we could. The whole night, from the moment we met up on the benches by My Market, was heavy with emotion. I cared about him deeply when I made the decision to break up with him. I had my reasons; the biggest was simply space to be away from a relationship that had been hurtful and invalidating.

That night we recognized that we still cared for each other. We decided to end our sexual relationship and just focus on being friends.

We went back to my off-campus house. He had this terrible cough, so I made him tea. We embraced each other. I finally felt safe with him, seen by him—really with him.

We fell asleep next to each other.

 

At some point that night I woke up. I had been sleeping on my back, and my eyes cracked open to see that his body had moved. He was propped up on one arm, his head was next to my hips and his other hand was inside me. He wasn’t looking at my face at first, his gaze was focused on what he was doing. Then he looked at me and saw me looking back. He didn’t say anything, he just continued.

 

At first, witnessing this, I couldn’t believe it was happening.

I couldn’t feel anything;

I was numb.

I knew he was inside me, and I felt pressured to acknowledge him, to react. I was scared. Who was this person I had just forgiven, who I had just decided to trust again, who I had let sleep in my bed?

This couldn’t actually be happening, not to me. Not by him, the person I had missed so dearly over break. The person I had been strong enough to take space from—the person I had listened to, and eventually forgiven— was fingering me while I was asleep.

 

I wanted him to stop.

I didn’t want to scare him.

 

So I took control, tugging at his white t-shirt and I pulling him on top of me.

I’ll try to erase this mistake. I actively made the decision in that moment to disguise his harm and my pain.

 

The next day, confusion and fear bubbled to the surface. The thought of someone taking something like that, without me being conscious, scared me. The longer I thought about it, the harder it was for me to understand how he’d thought his actions were okay.

So I texted him: “How long were you inside me until I woke up?”

He responded: “I was asleep too”

I didn’t know how to respond to this or how to share that I had seen him awake.

The topic then changed to the sex we had afterwards. We agreed that it was “loving and emotional.”

But it was sex that only happened because I was vulnerable,

because I was asleep.

He violated my trust and took advantage of me.

I couldn’t change the way it had started, the sex that wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t stolen my decision, if he hadn’t spoken for me.

So I erased it from my mind.

 

Well, I did my best to. But I couldn’t forget how he had brushed off my initial question, asking him how long he was inside me. I thought he was afraid to be honest; that he was afraid to explain why he had done something that felt so explicitly problematic. So I didn’t tell him I was hurt, and I let him and myself believe that the sex was great, that I was great.

I wasn’t.

 

Obviously.

Without that conversation, without that understanding, I wasn’t able to regain trust or feel safe with him.

 

After the assault, I remember there was one night we smoked together. As I sat across from him, I just felt afraid, out-of-sorts with who we were to each other. I couldn’t place why I felt so far away from the situation. We finally went to bed, but I didn’t fall asleep.

I couldn’t.

That night it felt impossible. I woke him up, asked him to leave, then I begged him to stay.

I couldn’t tell what was wrong,

or where my distrust was coming from.

I had buried the actuality of the assault, covering it with lies I had told myself in order to stay with him.

I tried to ignore all these feelings.

We would constantly break up and get back together. I’d push him away, trying to understand why I felt so shitty being with him, and then I’d remember how much I had loved him.

 

It wasn’t until after spring break that I finally, properly asked for space. He told me that I was making assumptions about him. A part of me believed him. I didn’t know how to explain to him or myself where my feelings were coming from. It was fucking with me.

 

So I took space.

Which resulted in us breaking up again.

I was heartbroken. I was even further away from being able to articulate the pain, fear, and distrust I felt with him. I was tangled in a mixture of emotions. I did miss him, and of course I wanted him back, but I also finally felt safe, happy.

I wanted to find space to talk calmly, to be friends, and to investigate, but high emotions on both ends ruined the chance for that.

He told me that that I hadn’t loved him; that I was just using him; that I didn’t know how to be in relationships.

At the time, I was still unable to articulate what had happened. I still hadn’t faced it myself. At one moment I threw the incident in his face, exclaiming that what had happened “wasn’t cool,” that it “wasn’t okay,” without taking the time to understand how I really felt about what had happened. When I was met with his silence, I apologized for saying anything. I didn’t want him to think differently of me, or to think I was just making up something to get his attention.

I didn’t know where to start. There wasn’t anywhere to start.

I finally wrote a letter that expressed how I felt about that night, the love I had for him, and where I was at.

Writing is what I do to create space, to stop time, to hold things, keep them safe.

A friend delivered the letter to his dorm room and slipped it under his door.

I never heard back from him.

 

That summer everything came to a head.

I was on campus working with the Ford program. He was there as well, working in the Campus Activities Office.

I was still very much dealing with the trauma of trying to share the experience with him, of being silenced, pushed aside. Not knowing if he received the letter, if he learned anything, if he would make sure not to do it again.

I was in a very turbulent place over the summer.

I was trying to deal with the assault.

I had finally told friends and found support.

I was opening up about the relationship.

During the semester, I hadn’t told anyone anything. That summer, I finally started to confront how I felt and what had happened.

He eventually became aware of this.

He was passing by a party I was throwing when my friend stopped him and started questioning him about why he had treated me so poorly in our relationship. The whole alteration took place right in front in me, and I wanted nothing more than for him be elsewhere. So I asked a mutual friend to ask him to leave. She was confused. She knew we had dated but didn’t think that was reason enough to kick him out.

That’s when I dropped, “He sexually assaulted me.”

It was the first time I had used the term in a public situation like this. I had finally pushed back, had finally asked for space that validated my experience.

 

The following events were messy.

He reached out to me through my best friend and we began to exchange emails. The whole thing was terrifying. I was afraid of what he would say to me, how he would react. I was afraid of what he would tell other people, how he would paint me.

I was infuriated, it seemed to me that he only cared about the situation as other people were beginning to ask him questions, once his reputation seemed to be under attack.

The language he used in his emails was careful and silencing.

It was language that protected him while showing he did the “politically correct” thing. He recognized my feelings in a disconnected way. He was unable and unwilling to analyze his actions but he was quick to apologize and express his feelings on sexual assault.

His language made me feel that what I believed to be true was not valid and was grounded in a misconception of his reality.

His language made me terrified me to even speak from the I, in case he used my own words against me.

He told me: “I understand that I sexually assaulted you and that was one of many mistakes and violences I did against you.”

But his understanding was made up of his experience. He hadn’t taken the time to hear what I had experienced, what I had felt.

 

The most difficult part was sitting down in front of him and trying to hold him accountable.

He told me he was going to step down from his positions of power on campus.

Even though we spoke, we weren’t able to go back to that night. I was never able to tell him why I reacted the way I did. Why it was difficult for me to talk about it then, why it still was.

I felt pressure from his friends to “find closure,” to “move on.”

I felt pressure from him to keep it to myself, to not speak about it.

I was uninvited from parties.

His friends iced me out, shot me dirty looks in passing.

 

Then he took back everything. I tried to approach him again, to better explain what had happened, what I had felt. He said he would only have the conversation if he was able to record it.

He said he had met with a house advisor, who had advised him not to step down.

He told me he wouldn’t speak to me again without a counselor present. He felt uncomfortable speaking to me alone. He wanted me to be held accountable for what I was saying. So he said he would schedule a session with a counselor, once the semester started.

 

I felt crazy, I kept questioning myself.

I pushed myself to relive that night and the relationship.

Why hadn’t I pushed him away?

Why couldn’t I tell him sooner?

Why was the administration protecting him?

Why were his friends pressuring me into silence?

I tried to pinpoint where I had made mistakes—the places where my dependency, my internalized misogyny, my previous pain allowed me to stay in a relationship that continued to cause me harm.

He had always presented himself to me as a “woke” man. He knew what language to use to move around Vassar socially, as do so many individuals, to gain social capital and power. But his actions showed me that he was unwilling to confront his own problematic behavior.

It was troubling to think of him holding positions of power within the community—to be responsible for making space for others, when I was so silenced by him. We exist in systems where having power allows for a certain level of protection; when held by people with questionable actions, powerful positions can continue harmful behavior on a larger scale.

At the end of the day, I returned to the fact that it was his responsibility to know better, to listen, to make space for change.

I was exhausted.

I had taken so much time that summer to make space for him emotionally. I had pushed myself to articulate what had happened, how I felt, and why I tried to hide the assault from him. I wasn’t only trying to explain this to him, for the first time, but to myself.

At the end of the Ford program, I was able to go home. Then I finally had space to confront everything I had gone through. I was able to sit with everyone’s actions and my own. I reached out to the mutual friend who had been involved since the party. I expressed that the way she handled the situation made me feel unsafe on campus, and around her friends. I explained how I had seen their behavior as problematic. I tried to explain the pain it had caused.

He found out that I had reached out to her, and in an email, told me to stop talking to her and stop involving people in our “toxic situation.” I responded with anger. I explained that by speaking, by sharing what I was going through, I finally felt able to sit with the situation, I felt in control.

His email had hit me hard. I felt horrible. A part me felt grounded in my decision to make space for myself and my experience, but another part of me believed what he said—that I was just hurting people, that I was just spreading toxicity and negativity.

The physical manifestations were the worst. I lost my appetite and was plagued with panic attacks. I would wake up, paralyzed by anxiety, second-guessing myself but always returning to what I knew was true, to what I knew my experience to be.

I spent the rest of the summer writing,

trying to prepare mentally for another face-to-face conversation with him and the possibility that it wouldn’t be validating, productive, or healing.

But once the semester started, there was radio silence.

I thought about reporting him. I thought about trying to approach him or his friends again.

As a black woman, I felt like I would be betraying the black community by reporting him. It felt immoral to rely on institutional systems that have historically been racially biased.

I tried approaching people who knew him, who worked with him in the social justice sphere. I found that many of them had known about the situation, and had known how misogynistic he could be. Over the summer, he’d told one of his friends that I was “just being petty.”

Then I found out he had been speaking for me.

He announced to his House Team that we had come to the conclusion together that I had falsely accused him.

Which was not true.

We had never sat down to fully discuss what happened that night for each of us, and I never concluded that I had falsely accused him.

I was furious.

He had completely erased my experience, my perspective, and had been speaking for me the entire time. He had decided for himself what had happened and how I felt about it.

Friends of mine tried to engage him in transformative conversation, but it was unproductive. They told me that he labeled himself as someone already transformed. That through his experience of being falsely accused, he had been forced to confront his misogyny and how he comes off to others.

Learning all of this was terrifying. How had no one stopped to question the story he was sharing without trying to learn of my experience?

There were so many spaces that were taken away from me.

I didn’t feel safe in most of the POC spaces on campus, especially those spaces for and by the black community.

He even went to the Take Back the Night event.

 

I assume he was afraid of what would happen to him.

I’m guessing he was worried about his reputation.

Vassar’s social sphere has a history of tearing apart, isolating, and terrorizing those who have committed sexual assault. So quickly labeled as either good or bad, innocent or guilty.

Vassar as an institution has a history of ignoring and further traumatizing those who have been assaulted. We get othered so quickly, ostracized from social centers because these situations are heavy, emotional, complicated, and dark.

Isolation is powerful, especially when the whole community is involved. I think it forces the individual who committed harm to confront their actions. However, I think there should be ways to rehabilitate folks back into society after that work is done.

We shouldn’t partake in a punitive justice system which directly reflects the justice system of the colonial government that oppresses and persecutes us.

As we deal with sexual violence in the POC community, we should be working to create systems that work outside of binaries. Systems that insist on confrontation, conversation, and transformation.

I would like to see Vassar’s social sphere center the victim’s narrative, and work with folks so they might come to terms with the misogyny that so often leads to violence against women, trans, femme, and nonbinary people. Those who have inflicted hurt should be required to understand their actions from the perspective of the victim. We need to be willing to witness, listen, and reinforce a level of unlearning, understanding, and protection. I believe the culture of excommunication is harmful and unproductive if it isn’t attached to these steps. I think it works to a degree, to help hold someone accountable, but how do we know they’re actually confronting their actions?

 

I’m terrified of what will happen to me when this article comes out. I recognize that I am not innocent, that I have also caused hurt.

I’m writing this to speak for myself.

To take back the space he took from me.

These situations are complicated. They’re emotional and multi-dimensional. We need to create a space where they can be seen in their totality.

For those of you who read this and recognize the story and have heard it in other lights, I hope you are able to see me more clearly.

I hope the conversation continues.

I hope we continue to write,

to take space.

 

So this is a call to action,

to publish your narrative.

 

Let’s be heard.