It Happened To Me: A Rapist Attacked Me —And The Men Who Were Supposed To Help Did Nothing

My husband-to-be, the gross local cop who investigated my case, and the campus police all continued to cause more pain with their comments and ineptitude. A total stranger lady is who helped me.

Hi there,

The backstory to today's featured AJPT piece is that it was executed in the opposite order of everything we've published before. This time, rather than adding a follow-up story to one that you all particularly loved and wanted to hear more about (like this hyper-popular one or this can’t-get-enough situation), today's is actually a prequel to a post here that you all also loved.

I was really excited when Amanda suggested writing about something that happened to her years ago that involved the husband-to-be that she had written about divorcing here. Partly because one of my favorite all-time literary devices is reverse chronological order. I guess Virgil used it back in Aeneid but I ripped it off from the Pinter play and then movie Betrayal when I saw those in high school and then used it multiple times (each) in Sassy magazine, Jane magazine and XOJane. It was there in stories about someone’s descent into full-blown cocaine addiction (Jane) and an early-20s two-year-long marriage that was clearly doomed from the moment they met (Sassy). And other stories too where it had no place but I stretched to use it because I like so much the idea that you get to see the end before the beginning and that by the time you get to the beginning, you see what the signs were there all along.

In any case, today's piece would be interesting (and angering and inspiring) all on his own, I think, but for those of you who loved Amanda’s account of her divorce and the impetus for it, there's the extra element of looking in today’s for signs of what would eventually be the demise of the marriage. Anyway, I love stuff like that. I hope you love this story, whether you love stuff like that like me or not.

Have a happy or whatever type of weekend you want. I will be here to talk throughout, as usual!

-Jane

By Amanda Jane

It was October 15, 1999, my husband Jon’s 25th birthday. I would celebrate 23 other birthdays with him after this one. They would contain home-cooked meals, hand-made cards, restaurant reservations, presents he wasn’t expecting, poems I’d written, treasure hunts organized by our daughter.

The specifics of these days are a blur, one blends into the other. But I remember more about October 15, 1999 than I do about any other day of my life.

We were living in Baton Rouge. We’d moved there from New Orleans for school, Jon for veterinary school and I for a master’s program in exercise physiology. I’d have never chosen to go to graduate school in the Bible Belt had I not gone to college at Tulane, in New Orleans. As a teenager, I’d felt certain that I’d live in my hometown of New York City as an adult. I chose Tulane because I wanted to experience a place that was not New York, just for four years.

But I didn’t go back to the city, not after college, not after graduate school, and not for many, many years after that. I chose to study exercise science on a whim. I liked to run and was intrigued that you could study the science behind it. I was a consistent runner at the time, but just as consistent a procrastinator. I often started running late in the morning, when it was way too hot to do so comfortably.

Baton Rouge 2001. Me with my naughty dog, Safa

On these runs, the humid air would fill my lungs right away, making it harder to breathe, and the Louisiana sun would burn my sweat-soaked skin like a wet fire. The run would be painful but I would persevere because doing it was always better than not doing it, even when it hurt, even when it felt like a punishment.

October 15, 1999 was one such day. I had woken up late, gotten dressed late, decided late to run, then later not to run and then, finally, to head out. I should go, I said to myself. I’m going.

We had a dog then, a pit bull. The day after this one, when people started asking questions that aren’t appropriate to ask right away, they asked why I didn’t bring him on that particular morning. The answer? He was a mess on a run, tugging me this way and that, sniffing everything that had a scent, slowing me down, ruining my rhythm, messing up my stride.

But I felt stupid admitting this, like I was the kind of person who didn’t evacuate before a category 5 hurricane or drove drunk because they were too cheap to pay for a taxi and ended up crashing into a tree.

“He’s not much of a runner,” I said instead.

We didn’t know what we were going to do to celebrate Jon’s birthday. It was a Friday. Jon had class all day but I had none, so the run was when I would decide what I needed to make or do or buy.

Me and Safa again, in Baton Rouge in 2001.

There is a time on every run when you ask yourself, “Is this going to be a good one or a bad one? Will I breathe easy, light on my feet, propelled naturally by stored energy and motivation, or will I need to push myself, drag myself, my body like a heavy package I’m carrying for a reason I can’t quite remember?”

And nothing can turn it from the first type of run to the second type of run so quickly as a rising, stinging sun or the loss of music in my ears, which is what happened, on this particular day.

There she goes. There she goes again. Then a crackle. And then nothing. The battery on my little radio had died.

Losing my music allowed me to hear the screams coming from the big white truck, the truck with the dark windows, the truck I would soon be describing– or trying to —to so many different people, so many times. I would never know if it had any significance, but I felt it was worth mentioning. What do you remember about the truck? I didn’t see anybody inside, I would explain, but I knew that the screams came from men. No, boys. Because men wouldn’t do this kind of thing, would they? Screaming and cat-calling and hooting and hollering?

Idiots, I muttered. Fucking rednecks.

“You shouldn’t run on that levee,” my next-door neighbor —the elderly, redheaded wife of a vet school professor —had warned me several weeks earlier. Her name was Ruth. “You never know who is going to be hiding in those bushes,” Ruth had said. I wonder why I didn’t heed her warning.

“‘When a man is on top of you,’ explained the cop, ‘the best thing to do is just lie there and take it. Act like he’s God’s gift to women, like he is the best lover in the world.’”

No, I know why. It’s because nothing had happened to me before – not in Baton Rouge or in New York or even in New Orleans, which had been the murder capital when I’d lived there. I never so much as had a wallet stolen or a car window cracked. To me, men hiding in bushes were no more real than witches holding poison apples or wolves dressed as grandmothers.

Despite my loss of music and this too-hot day, there was enough on the levee to temporarily distract me from my discomfort – the trees, the grass, the kick-kick sound of my shoes against the gravel, the oily twinkle of the muddy river, the cartoon clouds. I could and should and would complete the three miles to the turnaround point, the vet school, and run back. My head needed clearing, my to-do list needed constructing, my muscles needed toning.

I have so many more pictures of me with my dog than with my husband. Sorry if you wanted to see him too.

Yet soon, I found myself dragging, kicking up a little more dirt as my foot strike got flatter. I began hearing my own breath, labored, and something else too – something quiet but getting louder and louder still, a sound that echoed my own sounds but was different, faster. Other feet? Other breath? Another shadow? Yes, definitely someone else.

It was Jon! The vet school was just down the road. Jon must have been driving along the road and must have seen me. I’m supposed to be surprising you on your birthday, not the other way around, I was going to say. But when he caught up to me he grabbed me by the hair Ouch! and started punching me What is happening? and I fell to the ground. I’m not sure when I realized that this wasn’t actually Jon, but it wasn’t right away and this was therefore one of the most confusing moments of my life. Why is he being so violent with me?

It was a blur from this point. No, it was clear, just fast-moving, like bullets: his white baseball cap, my dark red shorts, his pale face, my blue underwear, his plaid button-down, powdery dirt kicked up like vapor, his dark jeans, gravel rolling onto grass. There were also sounds: screaming, kicking, panting, begging. “Help me!” I called out, to nobody, to the trees.

“I have to do this,” he kept repeating.

This is how I will die, I thought.

And, also: This is how she died. It was like a premonition and a memory at the same time. A warning and a regret, blended together.

I continued my kicking, screaming, begging, shoving and hitting until suddenly