Thank you for this powerful testimony. I have a soon-to-be-13-year-old daughter, and I want her to grow up to be healthy, happy, self-confident and able to do whatever she damned well pleases in life. I expect she will experiment and make mistakes, both with boys and alcohol(+), but I pray to the God I don’t really believe in that she never runs into the kind of predatory men you did. If she does, I hope she remembers she has a family who loves and supports her unconditionally and that it’s not her fault. And God help the men in that situation, not just from me but from her high-powered and ferocious lawyer aunt.

I also have a 15-year-old son. He’s a nice and decent kid, mostly marches to the beat of his own drum, has a highly developed sense of right and wrong, but I’m not going to claim he could never get himself caught up in a situation like this. I would hope he would try to protect the vulnerable, but if he couldn’t do that safely that he reports it as soon as possible, even if it turned out he had something to answer for.

As for the young men who raped you, odds are one of them — almost certainly a sociopath — was the ringleader and instigator. I only know of one guy, very much a follower type, who was involved in anything remotely similar (years before I knew him) and for the not-very-much it’s worth, he was wracked with guilt. The others were probably somewhere in between.

Unfortunately, I know a couple women who were also gang raped. I think about them and all the other women (too many) I know who have been harassed or worse, every time something comes up that reminds us we continue to have a long way to go in this country. Our culture is still way too enabling of sexual violence.

Thank you for speaking up and telling your story.