Alisa Kaplan - Still Room for Hope: A Survivors Story of Sexual Assault, Forgiveness, and Freedom

August 20, 2005
San Bernardino County, Southern California

One week, you hear me? Seven days.

The cops experienced, weary glance took in everything about me: the sunken eyes surrounded by bruise-colored flesh, the filthy T-shirt hanging off my emaciated frame, the infected scabs marring my face, bare arms, and legs.

Still, he was giving me a second chance.

I was nineteen years old and addicted to methamphetamine. My desperate parents had kicked me out of my childhood home, and I was staying with my abusive boyfriend, Russell, in a one-bedroom drug house with ten other people, including three young kids. The cops had come to arrest Russell on an outstanding warrant for stealing cars, and since I was clearly under the influence in a house full of drugs, they were going to take me in, too. But then the cop rifling through my purse found something that gave him pause: a list of the overcrowded drug rehab centers Id been calling for weeks, begging for a bed.

At the time, I was still a Jane Doe, the anonymous victim at the center of one of the most notorious rape cases in California historythe event that had sent my life off the rails. But just as that cop had no idea of the trauma that had brought me to that meth house (or any inkling that I was the girl hed heard about everywhere, from CNN to 20/20 to the pages of LA Weekly), neither would he recognize me today: a healthy, powerful woman, joyful in my recovery and confident in Gods love.

That police raid was one of the first moments where I saw a glimmer of hope for my own future, so that is where I chose to begin this story. It was a lesson for me that even in the very darkest moments of our lives, there is alwaysalwaysroom for hope.

A meth house isnt where youd expect to find a former straight-A student, color guard captain, and cross-country star from a solid, loving, intact family. It wasnt where I expected to find myself, either. But in July 2002, when I was sixteen years old, my life turned upside down.

One night that summer, I was raped. I use the word rape, although my assailants were not convicted of rape; they were convicted of other sexual assault charges. Still, from an emotional and spiritual perspective, rape remains my experience of what occurred, despite what the jury said. And since this book is an account of how I experienced it, rape is what I will be calling what happened that night. Despite video evidence of the assault, the first trialan experience that was more traumatic for me than the attack wasended in a hung jury. I fared better during the second trial, but the four years it took to convict my assailants took a terrible toll on me. By the time the trials were over, I was addicted to meth, alienated from my close-knit family, and living on the streets.

Thankfully, my story doesnt end there.

In the twelve years that have passed since then, I have gotten clean. I have found the work I am supposed to be doing, work that draws on my own experiences to help other victims become survivors. I have found my faith again, faith that is stronger from my journey through the valley of the shadow of darkness. And I learned to forgive not just my friends who abandoned me, the attorneys who defamed me, and those in the media who publicly humiliated me, but also my assailantsand myself.

Although I would never have asked for what happened to me, I cannot deny that in the long, slow process of recovering, I have become the woman I was meant to be.

Id never thought about writing a book until I started speaking to other survivors. Unfortunately, there are a lot of us. One in every six women in America will experience sexual assault in their lifetimes. It is estimated that a woman is raped every two minutes in this countryand yet, it is still deeply taboo for us to talk about it. Since I have started telling my story, many women have told me that I have inspired them to speak out, too, to tell their families or partners about what happened to them. More than one woman has told me that my story gave her the courage to finally report her assault, many years afterward.

But I quickly learned that victims of sexual assault werent the only survivors seeking me out. In fact, many of the people who had the strongest reactions to my story werent victims of violence at all. Instead, they were people whod lost loved ones to a prolonged cancer battle, people whod gone through difficult divorces, people whod lost their homes because of financial misfortune or a natural disasterall kinds of people living through things they didnt think they could survive.

The specifics of their stories might have been different from mine, but they were all trauma survivors, and they were looking to me as someone who had made it to the other side for the inspiration they needed to get there themselves.

Every one of us will, at some point in our lives, face a challenge that tests us at our very core. All of us will find ourselves at a point where we simply dont know if we have the strength to go on. Every one of us needs to know how it will feel to put down the burden of guilt and shame, and to begin to take steps toward forgiving the unforgivable. No matter what were going through, we need to know that there is an afterthat it will, with time, be possible to trust again, to experience hope and happiness.

My intention with this book is to bring hope to everyone who has been to the depths of hell and felt, even for a moment, that they cant find their way back. Because I know that with a little help, we can all rise and answer whatever challenges life delivers us.

No matter what has happened to you, you are not alone. There is a joyful, glorious, meaningful life out there, one that is filled with light and laughter and love, waiting for you to be ready for it.

This is the path I have walked, and it is the story that I want to tell.