Authors: Emily Winslow
I never wore the coat, or any other clothes from that night, again. I did wear the shoes, even though he'd pulled them off my feet. They were my favorites. It seemed very important to deliberately decide that just because something had been touched by him, that didn't automatically make that thing garbage.
My first flashback happened outside next to the statue of inventor George Westinghouse, just a few weeks after I'd returned to the
drama department. It had started during a class, and I took my friend Allen out with me. When we were far enough away from everyone else, I explained to him what was happening. I knew in my mind where and when I was; I knew I was safe and on campus; but my emotions and my body were reacting as if I were back in my studio apartment, on that awful January Sunday. My heart raced and my breathing was shallow. I was terrified, though I logically knew that nothing bad was currently happening and that I had nothing to be afraid of. The mismatch of my knowledge of reality versus my feelings both emotional and physical was terrifying. I honestly thought that I had lost my mind.
These flashbacks ended up happening a lot for about eighteen months, six months beyond my self-imposed deadline for self-sufficiency. I got used to it. When they happened, I leaned on the men in my class more than the women. The women were just as loving and kind to me, but they felt they understood my experience to a certain degree, while the men were just horrified and in awe. The women tried to relate to my experience, generously, which made me feel possessive.
It'
s mine,
I wanted to say, hoarding it. The men treated me gingerly, like an alien creature, which felt safer somehow. I was still trying to figure out how I felt about everything, and appreciated freedom from other people's interpretations, however genuinely well meant.
Acting school is touchy-feely. We were used to hugging one another in greeting, massaging one another as part of class, even kissing onstage, all as a matter of course. We played opposite one another in a round robin of romantic parts, and there was a lot of mutual attraction. The atmosphere was a soup of feelings. It was the best possible place for me to be.
My friends of both genders were physically affectionate and emotionally articulate, and we had few boundaries. That was just how we were taught. Our bodies and our inner lives were the tools
we used in the classroom and on the stage, so they were normal topics of discussion, both with and among the faculty and with each other. Sometimesâoftenâthe personal aspects of the work, and of the criticism, were overwhelming. But, after the attack, the department's routine public handling of normally private topics, and the habitual physical closeness, became gifts.
My religious chastity, which was no secret, put me out of the running for being anyone's girlfriend, and in the middle of all that openness was the one bright line. Though it was difficult to abstainâI was desperately worried that putting off happy sex could give the rape further power over meâit freed the men to be generous with me, without any confusion over what their platonic affection might signify, and allowed the women to not mind if their boyfriends looked after me. I was desperate to not become afraid of men, and I looked to my classmates as examples of “good men” who would override the blot on my experience. In particular, I was able to experiment with relearning how to feel attraction, without worrying that anything would actually happen. No one in my class would have considered crossing that line.
Light shone gorgeously on the fine blond hairs of John's arm, and I got to kiss Aaron in a scene in acting class. Bradley took me up to Mount Washington to look at the city skyline with him and cry. He squeezed me against his chest. “I had all those little lights,” I wrote afterward about the city view, “one for every hundred tears. How sad it would have been if I had had only the tears.”
For one of my first roles after coming back, I was Clytemnestra the queen, playing literally bloody Greek tragedy. I felt finally able to key in on some difficult and complex emotions due to my recent experience; but the director was uncomfortable with my delivery of a monologue that coupled sex and rage, so it was cut. For my character's murder, however, there was no reprieve.
The character Orestes was directed to stand over me with a knife
while I begged for my life, a scene we repeated over and over so that the Greek chorus could be blocked in behind us. There was no safe-word for me to signal that I was actually distressed, not just acting, but my friend read me well. Still posing his face in grim determination, still bearing down on me with a pointy phallic object as he was required to do, he crossed his eyes to crack me up. He had to press his lips together to keep silent, and so did I, but we both giggled inside while we acted out my murder, and guffawed when it was over.
Orestes had been played by the only black man in our admittedly small class. The man who had raped me was also black. I'm white. I know that my experience after the rape is what it is in part because of biases that reward my race and class and religion. I was the perfect victim, not in the sense of attracting harm, but in the sense of the world being indignant on my behalf.
Everyone was angry, and it was the best gift they could have given me. Because they were so angry, I didn't have to be. Up on Mount Washington, while Bradley held me, he whispered in my ear what he wanted to do to the man, a torture-filled fantasy of revenge. I didn't have to prove that what had happened had hurt; that it was wrong; that it was significant; that I was not at fault. I think self-destruction can become necessary if a pain is not understood by others. You have to show people that it's so bad that you want to die. You have to make them understand if they don't already. Luckily, my pain had been understood. I was freed by the anger of my friends from having to prove anything by demonstrating anger myself.
That said, I was angry. I'd genuinely forgotten about that until now, when I found it in the poems I wrote then: wanting to stab my mother's cousin with a steak knife when he innocently put his arm around my shoulders for a photo, and later wanting to strangle a pigeon. Even inanimate objects weren't spared. When my tights caught on the head of a screw in a window seat, I
“plunged my finger in and ground the screw down . . . I hoped I was hurting it.”
Sometimes I felt suicidal, but I wasn't actually going to do it. I had a rule for that, too: you can kill yourself tomorrow if you still need to then. I just had to say it every day, tomorrow, too, to keep putting it off.
Though all the kindness and affection around me were platonic, there was one person I was madly in love with. He was my dearest friend, and might have returned my feelings in part, but lack of sex was a deal breaker for him. I wallowed in unrequited longing, which was a wonderful distraction from grief and rage.
After seeing him on a date with someone else, I wrote about stars and how, no matter how special they are, they're invisible when there's something brighter around. Even when feeling ashamed of myself for not being good enough, I wanted to think of myself as something sparkly, if inadequate: “I'm not who you want but, however far I may be from your desires, I am in my own place a sun. Please be at least flattered by this fire loving you. Though I may seem to you smaller than a penny and common in the pin-dot sky, I am a fire and I do love you.”
It felt so wonderfully normal. In college, you're supposed to suffer from youthful heartbreak. Crying over the sweet friend who didn't love me was a nice change from crying over the bad man who'd held me down and cracked me open.
I traveled to Europe with my mother over the summer, just as we had planned before the attack: lazy long walks in the Black Forest and in the Alps and along Venetian canals, visiting family and friends and familiar places. She let me pick which way we'd go every time a path gave a choice; the only German phrase I still know from that trip is
diesen Weg
â“this way”
â
because I said it over and over every day.
I returned for senior year refreshed. I got a new apartment, living on my own like before, but in a different neighborhood. I worried about doing well with my work and getting good roles and pleasing my teachers. I enjoyed the tight corsets and swishy skirts of period costumes, acting in the epic nine-hour
Nicholas Nickleby
and in a funny and elegant production of
Tartuffe
. Mingled in with the trauma, from which I still suffered in various ways but worked hard to start coping with less obviously, were ordinary college thoughts, the typical acting-school vanity and insecurity that we all shared. We were always looking at ourselves. The mirrored walls of the dance studios made this easy but also too obvious. I wrote, “The windows are better. When the lights on inside reflect my transparent silhouette off the glass night, I can pretend I'm bored, gazing at the tennis courts, when really I'm watching myself.”
I was terrified from the rape; and also terrified by worry that I wasn't good enoughâat performing, at being pretty, at being likedâjust like most everyone else.
It's easy for actors to get into the mind-set of always seeing ourselves as if from the outside, always thinking of how others are viewing us. I tried to balance that with a moratorium on photos in my daily life, only allowing them for performances and special events. As a result, most of my college pictures are of me in costume, in shows or backstage or at cast parties. In almost all of them, even after the rape, I'm smiling.
There's a temptation to regard the hidden and tragic as the “true,” and the presented and happy as the “fake,” but I don't find that to be accurate. All of it was true. I was broken and sad and angry and weak and scared and in love and ambitious and hardworking and proud of myself and really into the fun wigs and costumes we got to wear. I mentally compared it to British taps, where there are separate faucets for the hot and the cold. Unlike in normal single taps, where increasing the cold makes the hot less hot, and adding
hot makes the cold less cold, the sinks I'd used abroad kept the two apart. Things were apart in me. Happy feelings didn't cancel out the terrible ones; nor did the bad mitigate the good. Every feeling was just itself. They rushed side by side, each of them strong on their own and unaffected by the other. All of them were powerful in their own ways.
In November 1992, less than a year after my rape, another woman was attacked, again in Shadyside, like me.
The new victim had answered her door to a man with a clipboard in his hand. I had a clipboard job in Pittsburgh one college Christmas, raising money for some environmental cause. People had always opened their doors to me. Some of them had even invited me in. If I'd made my quota for the evening, I would stay in out of the cold and snow, sipping hot chocolate with a random, hospitable family until it was time to be picked up. Opening the door to clipboard people was a standard thing to do.
This new victim heard her clipboard man out and declined to give and tried to close the door. He'd stuck his foot in, though, and pushed himself through, and lifted her up by her neck.
It's the DNA that he left in her that gets him arrested in 2013, twenty-one years later, and which has the potential to lead to the solution of my case, too.
I used to keep the names of all the detectives I've ever spoken with in the back of an address book. Years later, when I transferred my collection of addresses to a digital record, I made the deliberate decision not to copy the names of the police before I threw the book away. What did it matter? If the pattern of turnover held, none of them worked in the Sex Assault Unit anymore.
For years I followed cases in Pittsburgh similar to mine. The one that overshadowed all the rest in the news was the East End rapist, who got a lot of press when he was caught in 2007. Keith Wood was ultimately convicted for raping four women in 2000 and 2001. When his name came up in one of my searches, I wondered if he could have been my guy. I wasn't the only one asking that question.
The victim of a 1988 rape contacted the police in 2011 to ask if Wood could have been her attacker. She was lucky to reach Detective Aprill-Noelle Campbell, who pulled her case file and sent her
rape kit to be analyzed. “Rape kits” are the evidence packs collected after assaults, full of potential bits of the man, and comparison bits of the victim. The DNA results from her kit matched not Wood, but another man, in California, who was then arrested and confessed. He's in prison now.
I, too, had called the Pittsburgh police, reaching Detective Dan Honan, in hope of similar success. I came close to getting my kit in the lab queue, but it never quite got there.
The policy of the lab had once been to analyze DNA only when there was a suspect to compare it to; otherwise there was nothing to test against, as there was not yet a reference database of criminal DNA as there is now. Now DNA analysis is routinely performed for current cases, but for the old cases, they don't have the time or workforce to tackle them all. Individual old cases are carefully chosen. Honan didn't think that the East End rapist fit my attack profile. I was not a priority.
It's also the general policy of the Sex Assault Unit to leave victims alone. I assume that there are people who appreciate that, who want to move on and forget, and would find check-in contact from the police to be unwelcome and traumatic. I, on the other hand, felt abandoned. I called every few years, and each time there were new detectives, no one whose name I recognized. None of them had heard of me either, or of the early-nineties Shadyside rapes. I would have to explain myself and, to their credit, the automatic response was always to treat me very, very carefully, as if there were a soap bubble around me that they had to be mindful not to pop. Every member of the Pittsburgh police who has dealt with me has always been respectful and kind in manner to me. Still, nothing progressed. There were present cases that needed more urgent attention. I had moved overseas, to my British husband's home city. It had happened a long time ago.
In April 2013, a friend of the woman who'd opened the door to the man with the clipboard also called the Pittsburgh police
to follow up. She, like the lucky woman above, reached Detective Campbell, and the woman's evidence kit was analyzed. It matched the DNA of Arthur Fryar, from a sample taken for a 2002 drug conviction in New York. He was arrested on September 12, at 6
A.M.
at his home in Brooklyn.
That rape had taken place in the same year as mine, only blocks from my apartment. This one they were willing to run my kit for.
Though I had thrown away the names of all of the previous detectives, I remembered one without having it written down: Detective Valenta. He was the one who had questioned me in the hospital the night it happened.
In 2013, I find him via his LinkedIn profile. I discover that his first name is William, that he's become an assistant dean at the University of Pittsburgh's business school, and that before retirement from the force he'd been promoted all the way to commander. I e-mail to let him know about the arrest and possible link with my case.
He replies kindly, goes to police headquarters to review my file, speaks to the lieutenant of Major Crimes on my behalf, and replies again. We exchange family photos. His youngest and my oldest are near in age.
We e-mail almost daily. He explains the forensic and bureaucratic processes to me. I tell him what I remember about the original investigation, and he puts names and backstory to the figures I describe.
He'd heard of my case over the police radio that night in 1992. While regular police responded to my 911 call by coming to my apartment, taking my clothes as evidence, and escorting me to the hospital, he and another detective had driven around the surrounding streets looking for the man.
At the hospital, the nurses had fussed over me, clearly upset but
trying to put on good cheer. They'd blushed and giggled when Detective Valenta arrived, because he looked just like you would cast a movie's young leading detective to look. I remember thinking that their reaction was sweet. I was in shock, I assume.
Valenta had apologized for having to ask me, but, he'd explained, every touch would become a separate charge. I had to answer yes or no for every sexual act he could reel off. Two decades later, I ask him if he'd had a checklist for that, or if he'd just improvised such a long, weary catalog. He says that he'd done a hundred sex assault interviews by then, five years into the job. He hadn't needed a checklist.
I finally feel that I, who'd failed to win the lottery of being assigned to Detective Aprill-Noelle Campbell with her knack for cold cases, at last have a real ally.
I look to the trial of Pittsburgh's East End rapist for some hints of what to expect, if all goes as I hope it to. One of the more descriptive articles details the “impact statements” that victims had presented at sentencing. They describe lasting physical injury, career effects, repeated suicide attempts, sexual fears, PTSD, and ongoing depression.
I feel threatened by these stories. I feel like a slacker. What kind of victim am I? Getting past what happened should be a victory, but I feel like I'm letting my side down. It doesn't seem fair to measure the badness of what my attacker did in an inverse ratio to how I've coped. It seems that the better I've done, the more I've been able to thrive, the more he'll then be excused, the more that what he did to me will be downgraded in significance.
I want to take the stand to tell what he did in my apartment, even if it means facing a defense lawyer who'll ask what I'd worn that night. Impact statements, on the other hand, seem to require talking about what I've done since. I don't want to be the one on trial.
I honestly can't figure out in what exact ways I'm different because of this. How do I know what I would have been like otherwise? Am
I wary, when I walk at night or sleep alone, because of this, or just because it's sensible to be? I can't tell if my fascination with crime, reading all of the serial-killer books in my hometown library, is a memory from my high school years, before the rape, or from when I came back home to live with my parents for grad school, after.
A friend of mine thinks that I left acting because of the rape. I don't know if that's true. I think I was getting sick of acting before it happened. I remember feeling exhausted by how vague and tricky it was to try to improve, how personal and immediate the criticisms were. It was exciting, too, of course, and deep and meaningful and playful. But if I don't like being on display as an inherent aspect of my job, well, that could be the rape, or it could just be common sense.
Some friends think it's a wonder that I'm functional at all. They're surprised to learn that this happened to me, because they expect someone to whom this has happened to be less optimistic, less outgoing. They don't know that this has probably happened to a lot of other people they know, who just haven't mentioned it yet, and who are still versions of their earlier selves afterward. I'm glad that rape is now popularly understood to be a serious and violent crime, not just a “mistake” or “misunderstanding” or “bad date.” But popular understanding can go too far in the other direction, and put expectations on victims to be not just hurt but permanently broken.
What if the rape has made me more empathetic, more honest, more open to the wide spectrum of acceptable feelings? It's made me a better writer, which is now my job. Am I supposed to thank him for that? I want to thank myself for that, and my friends. I want for him to be judged for what he did, not for how I reacted.
I don't want to have to say that he ruined my life. I don't want to consider my life ruined.
My husband, Gavin, is protective about keeping this about me, not about him. He wants to know how I feel and what he can do for
me. He won't divulge how he feels about it, I think even to himself. He would consider that unseemly and self-indulgent. He can't sleep and admits that he's stressed. I ask him what about, and he says, “Nothing.”
I haven't told our boys, ages eight and twelve, but perhaps they know something's up. I'm being impatient, and easily frustrated by interruptions; I'm distracted, sensitive, panicky. The twelve-year-old looks over my shoulder. I'm writing an e-mail about “detectives” and have tabs open about “extradition” and “DNA.” He assumes it's research for my next novel. I let him think that.
Euphemisms help.
I try to avoid saying “rape.” That word upsets people. It's too personal. It doesn't help that I live in England now, not just England but
Cambridge,
and everyone here is so fucking polite and formal and circumspect.
When I tell Gavin about the latest updates, I refer to the subject breezily as “that whole Pittsburgh thing.” That's for my sake, not his.
I pick friends at random, whoever happens to be standing close to me but out of earshot of kids, to tell about the arrest and prosecution, but I imply that I'm a “witness.” I say, in hope, that I'm going to testify in a cold case now reopened, and they think that I saw something, which I did. I saw him doing things to me. I'm not outright lying, just circling the truth. They ask, gingerly, if it happened to a friend. I finally say, “No, me.” I point to my middle, just under my rib cage. “Me.”
Talking about it now is harder than it was then. Then, the information had been urgent, and was a needed explanation. “I won't be in class for a few weeks,” I'd had to explain. “I'm a little messed up right now,” I'd had to excuse. Now there's no context. The information drops with a thud. My friends now are as kind as my friends then. The difference is that now there's no call to action, no
necessary assistance they can offer. I don't need a place to stay, or help getting things out of that apartment, or someone to walk with me while I have a flashback. I don't know what I want in return for telling now, but I do want people to know. I need to be able to talk about what's happening with the case, and for that to be understood they need to know about the crime.
Back then, I saw a counselor for just a few sessions. She concluded that I was handling it in a healthy way and could move on without her; I agreed. I had enormous support and no guilt. Talking it out with people who loved me felt much more satisfying and healing than telling a paid stranger. At the end of the first year, when I had promised myself that I would stop being a full-time victim, I tried again, at the university's counseling center. That was a disaster. I told my randomly assigned therapist, straightforwardly, that I had been raped; my friends had been a great support; but I wanted to start weaning myself from relying on them so much. He'd leaned back and said, smugly, “Well, we both know that this isn't
really
about the rape. We can talk and try to figure out why you're really here.” I walked out.
I've made a counseling appointment for later this week, with a chaplain, John Hughes, who I also consider a friend. His being in an official capacity means that I can make an appointment and that it won't be selfish and awful of me to talk mostly about myself; his being a friend means that he knows that I'm not just this, not just a mess, not just a falling-apart person, and also that he'll genuinely care. I already matter to him.
I don't know what to say to him. It seems awfully self-indulgent to just narrate what happened, without some goal, some dilemma or present decision to make. I've been trying out ways to begin, but none feel right. Do I start with that night? Or step back to first set the scene? Just cut to now, and my anxiety as I hope and wait to get my name added to the charges against
the man? I want that more than anything. I feel an urge toward seeing this through, thoroughly. My friends wish for me to be spared having to travel, spared returning to the scene, spared a trial and having to testify, but I want it all.
I end up telling John everything, starting with what acting school is like, so that he understands the people who took care of me after. Without those bookends, the attack would be just a sordid action sequence; with them, it's a story. He makes us tea and listens carefully. He offers to connect me with a woman he knows who is an excellent counselor, but I don't want a stranger. I want to talk again with him. He seems surprised, and maybe flattered. His schedule is full up with services and students, then somehow now full with me, too. He makes room for me.
In New York, Detective Aprill Campbell has traveled from Pittsburgh to ask Arthur Fryar if he's remorseful, and if he wants to avoid a trial. She says that he can show that by telling her something: What had he said to both of the women in Shadyside?
“Their legs,” he admits, matching exactly what the detective is looking for. “I liked their legs. I told them they had nice legs.”
I'm told that that's in my file. I'm sure it is, but I don't remember it myself. At the time, I had apparently remembered it well enough to tell the police, but it's not one of the things that had then played again and again in my mind. It had been of little interest to me, not shocking or distressing, just a throwaway remark. Now it's one of the things solving my case.