The Hearing: Nine Months in the Making (Part 1)

We know about the Incident itself. On April 18th, I had my university judicial affairs hearing after nine months of waiting thanks to bureaucratic failure. A lot of staff members said it was the strongest rape case they had ever seen, and lots of eyes were on my hearing. Everyone knew that it was time for a major change at the university. They thought my hearing would be that change. One of the women’s institute staff members came to my hearing and waited the entire time for the result, which everyone was “positive” would change the school forever.

In a word, “no.”

And a new type of transformation begins…


Charge: Sexual misconduct, my university’s rape euphemism.

Verdict: GUILTY Sanctions: FREE COUNSELING Plot Twist: MY RAPE NURSE IS FRIENDS WITH THE RAPIST’S MOTHER


Cast: Charging party (me) + faculty representative, charged party (him) + faculty representative, judging panel (one staff member, one faculty member, one student), panel head/moderator (Associate Dean of Students).

Setting: a closet-size, dimly-lit room with a table about five feet long and three feet wide around which all parties sit. A model of institutional sensitivity to this issue.

Setup: 1. Charging party’s testimony
2. Charging party is questioned by panel members and the charged party
3. Charged party goes through 1 and 2
4. Charging party calls and questions witnesses
5. Charged party calls and questions witnesses
6. Panel decides whether the charged party is guilty or not
7. If found guilty, each party makes sanctions recommendations
8. Panel meets again and decides on the sanctions
9. Presentations of sanctions.

Not easy. Instead of a nice piece of cake, it’s more that nasty, gigantic, puss-teeming cake from Matilda.

The hearing is scheduled to begin at 1:00, but, at 1:15, the student panel member and the perpetrator and his witness have still not arrived. Everyone in my party was at LEAST ten minutes early.

Two panel members, the Associate Dean, my representative, my four witnesses (including my rape kit nurse who has performed over 250 exams and only does it for a living), and I are all squashed into the room. If the perpetrator (“Tom” henceforth) doesn’t come by 1:30, he will automatically waive his right to testimony, and the hearing will proceed without him. My faculty representative, Dr. B., and I are barely breathing, praying he doesn’t show up in time. Dr. B. laughs nervously several times, and it throws me for a moment, for this man is the epitome of evenness and balance… of dignity and accomplishment.

Yet even he is sweating and mumbling to himself.

We speak a few sentences in German to one another, and everyone in the room stares at us. It is my only comfort at that moment. The language itself. Not the words, not the quick gasps. Not anyone in that room or the blind hope that it won’t really happen.

The nurse stands up and begins to massage my shoulders. “You’re going to be fine, Anna. It’s going to be fine. He’s doing this deliberately. He planned this.” She truly believes it, and everyone else looks as though they begin to believe it, too. It would be perfect. His father is literally a 1-800 number lawyer whose commercial I saw at about 3 AM one night on local programming.

Dr.B. continues to mutter, and a few more minutes pass.

Ellen, one of my witnesses, goes into the corridor of the office and comes back quickly. 1:22.

“He’s here,” she says as she sits down, clasps her hands, and stares at the floor. She didn’t wear the several things I asked her not to, but she still looks completely unprofessional. Pink jacket, flip-flops, and low-cut blue polka dotted dress. I’m just being hard on her on the sake of doing so, because she, for some reason, is someone on whom I take out a good deal of my most devastating frustration. Most other parties are wearing suits for the "occasion," and her apparel irritates me, because it is juvenile and haphazard. Despite this tedious yet taxing qualm, she has made the most important announcement of the entire hearing: "He's here."

Tom enters with his advisor and his witness, who is an acquaintance of mine, Will. Will is actually how I met Tom to begin with. Will is wearing filthy jeans and is COMPLETELY wasted. Tom takes the only seat left, which is diagonal from me, and begins to stare at me. Will leans up against the wall in a corner, trying to support himself. The stench of alcohol is overpowering.

The Associate Dean hits record on the tape, and everyone introduces himself/herself as I detachedly watch thick chains of sweat roll down the side of his face. Into two of the many fat creases at his neck. I have abhorred this man from the first time I met him, which was only a few hours before this moment, when he looked at me as though I were the most moronic person he had ever met for wanting a partition to be put in the middle of the table. So that I wouldn't have to sit a few feet from my rapist and look into his eyes as he laughed at me. I know that the Associate Dean will present a problem for my hearing, because he arrogantly makes it clear that he is both unequipped cognitively to deal with his position and is narcissistic enough to believe it gives him unbridled power.

All witnesses are asked to leave the room, and my testimony begins.

We are allowed to give a brief introduction, and I say that, before I begin my story, I would like to draw attention to the fact that I am a lesbian and would NEVER willingly sleep with a man. The Associate dean questions why it’s relevant and asks me if it is “officially documented” somewhere. What, like my own personal dossier in the fucking US census? FBI documentation, perhaps? He dismisses this altogether and gruffly tells me to begin speaking, implies that it’s irrelevant… aka a LESBIAN charging a man with rape. If I had ever slept with a man before or had wanted to that night, my body wouldn’t have been torn the way it was, which my nurse will testify to.

I speak very quickly, and my story isn’t long. I have notes and blast through everything. I glance down at my hands, and all of my cuticles are bleeding. A few sparse drops of blood have soaked into the legs of my suit, and Dr. B. grasps my hands and shakes his head (faculty representatives cannot speak… they can only write notes to the party they are representing). I nod at Dr. B., wipe away the few drops of blood left on my fingers, wrap my arm around the back of my chair, and prop my leg up. Begin to twist my hair to hide the way my fingers look. Casual, right?

Wrong again.

Tom grills me, trying to get me to make claims I specifically refuted in my story. He asks probably fifteen questions, and the Associate Dean dismisses some of the immediately.

Tom tells his story. It’s longer than mine by about five minutes. His first contention is that I was wearing a dress and looked like I was “ready for a party.” GASP. I usually do. He claims I escorted him to my room and asked for a massage. When he agreed to massage me, I apparently ripped off my clothes. He claims to have been locked out of Will’s room (which, logistically, he couldn’t have known) and that he simply wanted to sleep. I, however, “wouldn’t let him sleep” and desperately wanted to have sex with him. He notes that, at one point, he tried to shake me. I was “unresponsive,” but he “didn’t know my sexual norms” so thought that it was fine.

He follows by detailing that, upon penetrating me, I didn’t make any noise. He says that he usually gets “some kind of positive or displeased noise. Something either way when he has sex with a woman.”

Yes, he admitted that I was unconscious. “UNRESPONSIVE.”

He then tries to bring the fact that I have a hamster into the trial. No, I couldn’t make that up even if I wanted to. He brought Virginia, my teddy bear hamster daughter, into a rape trial. If we are being technical, she was a WITNESS.

As a rebuttal to my statement that I woke up one of the times because someone else came into the room and saw him naked and illuminated in the middle of my room, he says that I had turned the lights off and that he opened the door himself. That means that he would have had to have opened the door and gotten across the room in one second flat and subsequently that he would have chosen to be standing stark naked in the middle of the hallway light in an open doorway doing nothing. Just standing. YEAH. RIGHT. He says that he didn’t say “Oh, shit, she’s going to wake up” to the other person who apparently wasn’t there, of course.

And then come my four witnesses. My friend Ben testifies first, because he was at the “party” we were having immediately before the assault. He testifies about my orientation, my level of intoxication, and the wretched aftermath/effects it had on me. How I asked him to walk everywhere with me… all the little things. And the much larger ones my pride won’t allow me to admit.

[The worst thing about the entire situation is that I only realized these things myself a few days before the hearing… about how I always slept naked before and now sleep even with my shoes and glasses on and have a hard time showering because it requires me being naked. I only allowed myself to see a few of the most telling results not long before these people pulled what they did]

My Nurse comes in second. As soon as she arrives, Tom says, “We already established that Anna and I had intercourse. Why are you here?”

The Associate Dean, go figure, agrees, and they question the rape nurse’s relevance to a rape case. They tag team her, and she is stunned. She explains the rape kit procedure, her position, and goes through the medical reports I copied and disseminated to the panel members. One of the pages details an injury Tom inflicted to the interior of my body. She says that it was caused by “blunt force trauma” to my body. The Associate Dean cannot wrap his head around the fact that rape kits are sealed and given to the police if the woman requests, and that, no, my nurse does not have my vaginal swabs in her pocket for his satisfaction.

[Meanwhile, no one should forget that I found out that she knows Tom’s mom while we were chatting and waiting for the hearing to begin].

Third comes Deloris who testifies about the effects. Professional housing staff member of over thirty years.

Fourth comes the real heavy hitter: Ellen, Director of Residence Life, highly-respected and celebrated school pseudo-administrator that should have sealed the case for me even more than the rape nurse. And she’s seen everything that’s happened to me firsthand save the naked bathtub incident. She almost fucks me over entirely by forgetting the timeline, which the whole thing was contingent upon at that point. I can see Tom nearly begin to salivate as she threatens to destroy my entire case. Before the hearing began, I was deeply worried something like this would happen. She manages to correct herself and, though, and everything is fine and exactly as I had said it was. Close call. She then says that she is in-charge of handling these cases and has done so quite a few times, and that this is the most severe disruption she has ever seen to anyone’s life before. Not that I am somehow less capable of dealing with situations, but… you know.

Two expert testimonies, someone who was there, and another professional staff member all saying it was undeniable. Undeniably violent, vicious… premeditated. TRUE what I said.

In comes Tom’s drunk staggering witness, reeking of alcohol.

He cannot remember anything. The only thing he can say for sure is that I “became distant from everyone and really upset all the sudden.” IMPACT OF BEING RAPED, VAGINA MOTHERFUCKER! Though the faculty member asks him what I was wearing, he also cannot remember that. “Do you remember what that guy sitting next to you was wearing three weeks ago, man? I mean, I didn’t think it would come to this. I didn’t know I was supposed to remember all of this.”

The faculty member who implied that I was “asking for it” through his questioning sits back in his chair.

Will staggers away.

Closing statements.

We all leave the room for deliberation. I walk back into the main office, and there are about six people waiting for me. My mother also came for the hearing. I go outside with a few of them to have a cigarette, and, after about twenty minutes, the panel calls us back into the room.

They find him guilty of raping me. A huge weight seems to be ripped off of me instantaneously, and I am positive that this hearing is going to change the university’s outlook on rape and how it should be dealt with judicially. An administrator told me Tom would be suspended or expelled, but almost certainly expelled. Everything seems clear and seems near its end. I am able to shake away images of myself sleeping in my shoes and everything else and congratulate myself on realizing it just before it will be rectified and will go away.

We give our sanctions recommendations.

I summarize the effects this has had on my life and very passionately yet professionally argue for expulsion (which I was assured would be exceedingly easy to achieve for this kind of violent offense). The student panel member laughs in my face. Not loudly enough to be caught on the tape, though, so I had to minimalize it for the university newspaper article. Tom says that he should simply be banned from residence halls. “I’m a reservist, and, if I am expelled, this charge will follow me for the rest of my life.” THAT’S THE POINT! “And, if I am expelled, I will end up back in Iraq, so I trust you to make to right decision.”

Even though the military will kick him if they catch wind of this charge. Logically fallacious and blatantly false.

He also falsely claims one of his witnesses was intimidated away from the trial. I don’t even know about whom he is speaking, but, as he said “she,” I know it has to be one of my two good friends who was there that evening.

The panel kicks us back out so that they can discuss. Everyone waiting for me laughs at the nonsense Tom pulled. “He REALLY suggested that,” they all laugh.

But the panel bought it.

We are called back in, and they announce how they think Tom should be punished for rape:

Our no-communication order (put into effect in July) must remain in effect.
His ban from residence halls (put into effect in July) remains
He has to get free on-campus counseling. Not related to sex offense.


Tom smiles, holds the door for me and exaggeratedly ushers me out the door on our way out. A beacon of polite company.

I cry. Ellen tries to comfort me. I scream at her in the middle of the Office of Student Conduct, saying that she is "full of bullshit" and that I hope she "doesn't believe it and doesn't expect me to, either." I storm out. Cry some more. Everyone follows. Dr. B. wraps his arms around me in an uncharacteristic display of affection.

[Dr. B. walks back to the German Department office and tells the secretary that someone could have knocked him over with a pencil.]

My mother takes my friend and me out drinking all night.

And I know that this isn’t over.