Crash Into Me_ A Survivor's Search for Justice - Liz Seccuro [60]
I crawled under my desk and screamed at the top of my lungs.
CHAPTER 10
Dark Days and New Revelations
Worrell’s revelation upended my already fragile sense of security. The legal process had empowered me in some ways, but was also a new source of stress. I had always darkly suspected I had been attacked by more than one person, with my foggy sense of a crowd and the rumors later, but hearing the confirmation was especially destructive to me. Having a gut feeling was very different than knowing there was evidence to support it. With this new information, my panic attacks increased in frequency and intensity. I tried deep breathing, yoga, giving up caffeine, creative visualization, grounding techniques, acupuncture, and meditation. Not even medication would help.
When I had first received the e-mails from Beebe, and way before I alerted the Charlottesville police in December 2005, I had sent notice to the University of Virginia’s president, John Casteen, about the fact that a former student who had raped me was now in contact with me. I expressed concern that the University of Virginia Alumni Association had given Beebe my home address, despite the fact that he was not himself an alumnus, having never graduated from the university. I mentioned that I had met with the university police, Dean Sybil Todd by my side, on several occasions, and I requested any information he might be able to find in my file about the incident.
Casteen replied to say he had received my e-mail and would work diligently to get to the bottom of the problem. He copied his e-mail to others who might help me locate the file.
Later that day, a man named Leonard Sandridge, the chief operating officer of the university, informed me that he had communicated with the University of Virginia Police Department at the behest of President Casteen, and that, despite my many visits and reports made in the wake of the attack, “no record of the complaint can be found at this time.” He also informed me that Student Health records were destroyed after ten years, so there was no paper trail of my visit to Student Health.
Months later, however, after the police were on the case, the chief of police, Tim Longo, referred in his press conference to a university report on my attack. This prompted a Washington Post reporter who was in touch with me to request the report, but the university rebuffed him. But after my testimony at the hearing I read a statement in an article from a university spokesperson saying that the report was legally mine to have. I wanted the Post reporter to be able to see it, so I wrote a formal request to the university’s legal department to have the report sent to me.
One day, while Ava slept, I was sipping tea at my kitchen table when a large yellow envelope with a Charlottesville return address landed on my porch. It was thin. I slid the pages out and stared at them. My eyes scanned the five copied pages of handwriting. There was no letterhead, no date, no signature, and no official stamp. It was rife with black marks, redacted names, but my own name was front and center.
It stated that I had come to someone in authority to report an “alleged rape at Phi Kappa Psi house.” People were interviewed. There were five interviewees in the report and, although the names were blacked out, one was clearly Jim Long, and another was Hud Millard. I had no idea who the others might be. They spoke of a party, of alcohol. One witness said he saw me lying bleeding on a sofa, but that he assumed I had been menstruating. Another witness claimed he saw me in a sheet lying on another floor bleeding, and then ran away. One witness tried to wake me up, but I only opened my eyes. One witness saw a man “running out of a room, with blood all over his pants” and “thought there had been a shooting,” so he and his companion ran away to avoid any possible trouble. The report ended with the assertion that I had been advised by the university that I could speak