A True Story, She Said Through Tears, by Michelle Stevenson
“I was instructed to morph myself into a more palatable rape victim”
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I used to practice the first bit of my story in front of the mirror. I wanted to say it just right so everyone would understand. Also, I wanted to tell it in front of people and still have my dignity.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Long brown hair, round face, twenty-something girl in cracked glass. Took my glasses off and stared at myself straight and angry and the tears came out. I told the story until the tears had to stop, because tears couldn’t go forever, and I wasn’t going to stop telling my story.
Scott raped me. In the accordion door room in the church. In other places, too.
I held my book in my hand while he hurt me. I thought while it happened: my place in my book is still there. I can go back to my place when this is over.
He raped me.
I talked in front of the mirror because I wanted to make sure the tears were all gone and all my emotion, controlled. They don’t deserve to see my tears, I told my lawyer Kelly. The church doesn’t deserve to see my tears. They watched them for a decade and a half and didn’t care. They ignored me while I begged. They don’t get one tear more.
Kelly said I shouldn’t have done that in front of the mirror. Shouldn’t have drained all my tears out before the trial. I needed to cry for the jury. Give them a show, he told me.
My whole body responded to that word, show. My breath in and out with anger and the feel all over my shoulders and back of something heavy, a messenger bag full of sand hung there with that word, what the word required of me. I responded with my teeth together and my breath short. A little spit came out on the fancy table. A show? I don’t want to give them a show. I want to give them the truth.
He got that look in his eye and brought his shoulders up close to his neck like he wanted to explain something to me but wasn’t sure how to start. He said to me slow, each word even and thought out. Nobody wants you to lie, Michelle, he told me. But they don’t understand and it is our job to make them understand. You have to show them how hurt you are.
That phrase. You have to show them how hurt you are.
Kelly, if I hurt much more than I already do I won’t be alive anymore. You almost committed me for trying to kill myself. How do I show more hurt?
It’s a theater, he told me. It’s not a lie, it’s an argument. You’re amplifying the truth so people can hear you.
They can already hear me. There’s no problem with my voice. You’re worried about them believing me.
Silence. Then: yes, of course. This is always the worry.
Kelly’s blonde eyebrows down towards his blue eyes when he said that’s always the worry. The down-lean of his eyebrows made grim lines from his mouth out towards his cheeks. It wrinkled up his forehead. Maybe that face meant he was worried, sad, or maybe it meant something else. I don’t know what that face meant. I was always so bad at reading faces.
Now that he’s dead I don’t get to ask him what his face meant, what he felt. I don’t get to ask him to help me in telling you this story. We are only ever told our own stories, not other people’s.
I think, though, that Kelly might have agreed with Kenneth Burke the rhetorician who wrote that the best arguments are in the form of the social context of those to whom the argument is directed. The arguer disguises herself as the person she’s arguing with and says: we’re alike, you and I. We’re both human. This happening to me is like this happening to you or to your daughter or your mother. I am relatable and likeable and I just might be you.
Burke’s form of argument is effective. Kelly won many, many cases. He argued me a settlement just a few days before trial and I was able to start a new life. That new life is not perfect but I’m also not planning to jump off the Vancouver Bridge anymore. Kelly’s work and his argument saved my life. He navigated and negotiated a new place in society for me—a society where one more rape survivor had come forward and received a kind of restitution.
Let’s turn our view, though. Burke’s theory worked but at a cost. I had to give up my own words to tell my story and be believed. My words were true but they were not mine. I had to take myself off, like I was a garment so easily flayed from my shoulders. I had to put on society’s idea of what a rape victim looks like. I had to make myself into someone the jury could identify with. Only then, only then, was I believable.
It was a kind of destruction of my identity and a merging of myself with the popular idea of a child-rape victim. I must weep in front of a crowd, must let go the salvaged dignity I’d worked out for myself in front of the mirror. I must simultaneously be intelligent and wounded. Wounded badly, but not so badly that I was crazy. I was not that crazy lady stereotype. I had to be intelligent, but not so intelligent that I could make slicing sarcastic remarks about the people in charge of hiring Scott. I could show feelings, but only the right feelings. I had to be what the jury expected me to be. Anything more, anything less, and I might not be believed.
That process of public theatre was incredibly difficult for this mildly autistic feminist.
There’s this saying by the artist Otto Natzler: the form is the content. To wit, if I give you a heart-shaped pile of poop, what am I really giving you? Form and content are intertwined to the point of being indistinguishable. The same in rhetoric, the form is always the content. It matters very much if I tell my story of being raped to a courtroom of Saudi men or American men or the feminist men I write with every week. But ask yourself: if I give you myself disguised to look like someone you could believe and love, am I giving you myself or am I giving you a reflection of yourself?
By giving my story to the public my story became public property. For me it was very hard to remain completely myself with so many people commenting on my very personal story. I was a very young, distraught woman with no self-esteem. I’d spent a good deal of my young life getting raped. When I came forward I was told it was my fault I was raped because I was walking around the church, told I was the only person complaining, told I was not spiritual because I wasn’t forgiving enough or that my hurt made other people feel uncomfortable. And then, when I sued, I was instructed to morph myself into a more palatable rape victim so random members of the public would see fit to grant me money for counseling.
I hear that my response in the aftermath of the case was pretty normal for rape-case survivors— I got married to a man who treated me like I was an extension of himself until I left him. Moved to Guatemala in a bid to find myself and my voice again. This was part of the price I paid for talking. I gave the world myself and was left very little that was readily identifiable as Michelle.
So hey, let’s go back to Kelly’s office.
He still sits there in my memory. His down-lean eyebrows and earnest face. Well-dressed, the way he always was with his blue tie and pink ironed shirt and those pleated crispy crisp gray pants. Me, rumpled with my anarchy hoodie on and I looked like maybe someone had just strangled a kitten in front of me. It wouldn’t be hard for me to cry in front of a jury at that point. My hands were held out on the flatness of his desk. Kelly had a coffee in his hand, stirred the drink round with his pen the way that drove me crazy because I worried he’d get ink poison in him.
I do think we loved each other past our differences, even then with him telling me how to act and me being enraged and hurt at his telling me how to act. I hurt and he hurt for me. He tried to not hurt me more and at the same time get me help in the way he knew how.
He said: The Adventist conference has learned from Bill’s case. They won’t try to say straight out you’re lying. At least, I don’t think so. The lawyers won’t call you a whore. That would be a bad idea. If it were me on the defense, I would say that you are a confused woman who does not know reality. They will probably take the inconsistencies in your story, the gaps in your memory, your troubled past, and they will use it to destroy your testimony. You must show the jury your intelligence, your sanity, and show them your pain. I will show you how to do it.
How to respond to that? I put my head down on the fancy desk. Rested myself in my arms, closed my eyes, felt the cold pain ice of my nearly numb body around the warm movement of my heart.
Michelle, Kelly said soft. I turned my head up so I could see his eyes. Blue behind his eyeglasses, the oval of his face, a tan October leaf leaned down to the ground of me. The sadness and fondness when he said to me: Michelle, you remind me of my daughter.
I lifted my head and sat up straight. I let gulped breath melt the ice of me. I had to do this, I had to be this person with this story. Kelly there in front of me, he advised me how to be so that I could be believed.
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Michelle Stevenson lives in Portland, Oregon with her two cats and many stacks of books.