I didn’t notice him when we first got to the bar. There wasn’t anything really unusual about him. He looked like a normal college kid, messy hair and a flannel overshirt. My sorority sisters had convinced me to tag along with them to try out a semi-new bar about a mile away from campus. A lot of the clientele looked to be grad students or other college seniors. It wasn’t really the kind of place to go with a fake ID - it was more sophisticated, it made me feel like a real adult.
We were all graduating in three months - I already had an internship lined up. I felt invincible. I was ready to graduate, ready to start making money and head out into the real world. My two roommates also had jobs lined up in the city, and we were planning on living together once we graduated. I couldn’t imagine a better future, a better college experience.
The bar was dim - mood lighting is what you call it. The two bartenders were a bit gruff for the area - they didn’t look like students working part time. One was tall and bald with a thick, wiry beard, and the other was pale and thin with a tattoo sleeve along his right arm. I remember those details well. I remember a lot about that night.
I was just learning how to drink outside of a frat house. I always ordered a rum and coke because it was quick to make and I liked the caffeine boost. One of my roommates ordered a paloma. I thought it was delicious and made a mental note to try that next.
We started dancing after our third round of drinks. I’m an awful dancer, but I’ve always enjoyed it. I’m usually a bit of a stuffy person, overly concerned about how I look and what others think of me, but after I’ve had a few drinks, I like to let loose a little. I was the one heading to the dance floor first, dragging my sorority sisters along, shaking my butt and twirling my hips. Even if I looked stupid doing it, I felt emboldened by the alcohol. I felt cool. Grownup.
I like to have a hard stop at four drinks - anything more than that, and I start to get pretty drunk. When my sisters went to the bar for another round, I decided to hold off. I stayed on the dance floor, moving my head from side to side to the beat of the music. It wasn’t anything particularly clubby, but it had enough of a beat to vibe to it. That was when he first approached me.
He came up behind me, so I didn’t really register his presence until he was touching me. He was pressed up against my back, moving his hips, trying to create contact with me. I kind of laughed him off and moved to the side, looking back at my friends at the bar. He took another step towards me, this time putting his hand on the small of my back.
I danced away from him again, ignoring his advances. He sauntered up next to me, holding out his hand and grinning.
“Come on,” he insisted. “Dance with me a little.”
“I’m ok,” I said, nodding my head at my friends at the bar. “I’m here with my girls.”
“But they’re not with you right now.” His words fell out cold and dark, contrasting with his unassuming appearance. I was getting a little weirded out.
“I’d rather not,” I said. “No offense, but I’m just here to hang out with my friends.”
“And I’m just here to hang out with you, so how could I not take offense to you refusing me?”
He pulled me towards him.
“Hey!” I said, yanking my arm away.
“Chill,” he snapped, looking around. Nobody seemed to be paying us much mind over the noise of the music. All of my friends were still trying to catch the bartenders’ attention, fighting off the small crowd starting to form to put in their orders.
I quickly walked towards my friends.
“Are you ok?” Maddy, my best friend from the sorority, gave me a worried look.
“Yeah, there’s just a weirdo here who won’t leave me alone.”
“The guy who was trying to dance with you?” She turned her head and stared directly at the guy.
“Don’t look! He’s going to know I’m talking about him.”
I couldn’t help following her gaze - he was staring at me. Like, right at me, like he was trying to beat me in a staring contest. I shivered.
“Can we maybe leave before you all order your next round? I’m honestly getting freaked out.”
“Ahh don’t sweat it, we’re here with you. I’ll make sure he backs off.”
She gave the guy the middle finger and laughed. He didn’t look away.
“Don’t do that!” I tried swatting her hand away, but she held it up to the sky, wiggling it around. I finally let out a laugh, but I was still uneasy.
I decided to take a shot to calm my nerves, and soon I was absorbed back into conversation with the other girls. We were talking about our upcoming midterms and how, for some of us, these were the last midterms we would ever take. It was a great feeling. I had almost completely forgotten about the guy as my sisters started getting ready to go. A few of them went off to the bathroom, others went to settle their tabs, and Maddy and I started making our way towards the door. That’s when the guy stepped in front of me again.
“Leaving so soon?”
“Yes, excuse me,” I said, politely so as to not set him off. Maddy did not feel the same.
“Hey buddy, back off,” she said.
“Come again?” He asked.
“I said back the fuck off, asshole. None of us want to fuck you, so leave us alone.”
That’s when he pulled it out.
“Holy shit,” I said, holding my arm out to stop Maddy from moving further. “That’s a knife.” I hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but the shock caused me to nearly scream it.
“A knife!” Maddy yelled. She looked at the bartenders. “This man has a knife! Hey, we need help!”
The bartenders looked up, briefly, and that’s when the guy stabbed me in the side. He drew it out, quickly, and I only had time to gasp before he went in a second time, and then casually strolled out. The music was loud, and it was crowded by now, so it seemed like nobody else noticed us much.
“He stabbed me!” I yelled, which was odd because I didn’t feel any pain when I yelled it, but then I noticed the wetness spreading, and when I put my hand over my hip, it came back with blood.
“He stabbed me!” I yelled a second time, and I sank to my knees.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
“You say Ms. Sinclair made an aggressive hand gesture to the defendant previously,” the defense attorney asked me.
“She gave him the middle finger,” I replied.
“But would you agree that the middle finger is an aggressive gesture?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. I winced. “It’s not a gesture of physical violence. It’s not like she mimicked stabbing him.”
“I see,” he responded. “So you believe my client was completely unprovoked in this encounter?”
“Yes.” I winced again.
“I see.” He said. “How do you feel about Mr. Wilshire’s previous testimony that he did not see the defendant advance upon you when you first yelled about the knife?”
“I’d say that he didn’t even notice my friends in front of his face trying to pay for their drinks, so I’m not sure how he would have seen my attacker clearly.”
“Ok. And how about the fact that he saw you dancing with the defendant previously, and that it looked to him that you were having a good time? Or that he saw your friend, quote, make an ‘aggressive hand gesture’ to the defendant? Or that Ms. Sinclair seemed confrontational to him?”
“I would say he is exaggerating, and that it still wouldn’t explain why or how he stabbed me.” I tried to keep my voice level. The lawyer had said that anger would not work well in my favor with the jury. Jurors don’t seem to like angry victims.
“I see. And can you remind the jury how many drinks you had?”
“I had four in a two hour span,” I replied.
“Hmmm. While my client only had one in that same span.”
My lawyer had warned me that they would bring up the drinking bit.
“So, Ms. Sinclair testified that she had five drinks, you are testifying that you had four drinks, and my client only had one drink.”
“I am testifying that I had four drinks, yes.”
“Ok. So, describe that final encounter again. The defendant makes a remark to you as you are leaving. What was that remark?”
“It was a question. It was, ‘Leaving so soon?’”
“And how did you respond?”
“Yes I am, excuse me.”
“Interesting,” the lawyer mused. “Here is where your story differs from the defendant’s. He tells us that Ms. Sinclair escalated the situation immediately, and that you made a physical threat to him.”
“That is simply not true,” I said. “If the bar had cameras, it would back me up.” I could barely finish my words without cringing in pain.
“Do you need to take a break?”
“No,” I said, “I’m fine.” I was not fine, but I needed to make it through my testimony. I’d been preparing for so long for this moment.
“I see. Ok.” He smiled. “So it is a case of he said versus she said, then, wouldn’t you say? Since the bar did not have cameras?”
“No,” I replied. “There were other people at the bar, too.” I was breathless.
“None of whom were able to confirm what was said between the three of you. Just that it was two on one, and you were injured in the confrontation.”
. . . . . . . .
“His lack of criminal record is the biggest thing working against us,” my lawyer said. “If there was a pattern, this would be an open and shut case.”
“Or if the bartenders weren’t piece of shit human beings,” I said. “What the fuck kind of place doesn’t have any security cameras?”
“The bartenders aren’t reliable witnesses, so that won’t be our make or break,” he said. “The problem is trying to prove that the defendant, a regular guy on all accounts, was actually a psycho waiting to attack the first girl who turned him down. Unfortunately, that is trickier to do without establishing a pattern of him abusing or hating or harming women.
“And,” my lawyer continued, looking down at his papers, “there is the matter of his family.” The guy who stabbed me, Rob Wilshire, was of course the son of the local sheriff, a guy who had also just managed to go into remission for an aggressive stomach cancer.
I did not win my case. Or, rather, Rob did not lose his case.
I tried to move beyond the whole ordeal. All in all, it had taken away three years of my life. And most of my savings. And my parents’ savings. And my anonymity. Anytime someone Googled my name, it was the first thing that came up. This proved challenging for everything from job interviews to first dates to privacy. Whenever an assault case came up, I’d be used as an example of the girl who lost, the girl who lost to the white guy with the sheriff dad.
All of those things paled in comparison to the physical effects of the attack. Yes, there was the stabbing itself. He managed to nick my intestines, so I had surgery for that, spent time in the hospital recovering, and lost a ton of weight. Being laid up for so long honestly sucked. It was super boring and pretty painful. My friends were all spending the summer backpacking abroad or moving to new cities or starting their new careers. Meanwhile, I was stuck in a hospital. A few friends came by, namely Maddy who I think blamed herself a lot for the events even though I knew it wasn’t her fault. Even she stopped coming by when I told her that I didn’t blame her - I saw the relief, another burden removed for her.
. . . . . . . . .
While I was in recovery, my pain levels were higher than the medical team thought they should be. “By this point, you shouldn’t be experiencing such sharp pain anymore,” the surgeon told me after 4 weeks of recovery.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” I said, gasping from the stinging in my side. It was weird, I’ll admit. One moment I’d be feeling fine, and the next my side would hurt as bad as when I initially got stabbed. I didn’t burst into tears as much anymore, but it hurt the same.
“I wonder if some of this is phantom pain,” he said.
“I thought that was just with missing limbs and stuff.” I was annoyed that he didn’t have a physical explanation for me.
“That’s where it is more commonly referenced, but with these types of traumatic events, you’d be surprised at the body’s response system. It’s almost like a fight or flight, but instead your body is warning you with this pain reaction, as if telling you quite literally to watch out so you don’t actually get hurt again.”
“So you’re saying it’s psychological?”
“Yes and no. I don’t doubt you’re feeling pain, but the source of the pain might be psychological. I’m going to refer you to a psychotherapist before we discharge you so that you can get an additional evaluation.”
Long story short, I was told it was in my head. I had to make a list of the times I was triggered. My psychotherapist was unsurprised to find that I was always triggered by males. At first, I couldn’t find any sort of connection between these encounters. It’s not like I was getting threatened every time I interacted with a guy. And I did honestly feel like Rob had been an aberration. I’d had healthy relationships and interactions with men before that. I had an older brother. Close guy friends. A few exes that I still considered casual acquaintances.
So I started writing down the conversations I was having when I got triggered. And, much to my therapist’s delight, these conversations always revolved around some sort of conflict. I use conflict loosely - it was really any sort of conversation where I had to agree or disagree with what they were saying.
For example, if the male nurse came in and suggested, “We should get you some fresh sheets, don’t you think?”
And I’d respond,
“I’m actually ok for now, someone switched these out yesterday.” BOOM. Stabbing pain.
Or, if my brother said something like, “Lebron James is not the greatest basketball player of all time,” and I said, “Actually, he’s never gotten to play with as great of a team as MJ so it’s comparing apples to oranges,” BOOM. Stabbing pain.
“This is your mind working through the trauma of your experience,” my psychotherapist said. “It seems like a portion of you still believes that you are partially responsible for the attack. As such, your body is warning you everytime you disagree, thinking that this is what led to the incident.” She was delighted - I was one of the stranger cases of her career. I was not delighted. I didn’t even think I did blame myself, but I’ll admit I was nervous about the trial.
It kept happening. After I was discharged, after years of therapy, and during and after the trial. I could barely function like a normal human, let alone have a job or have fun. I was deeply depressed. My parents tried everything to get my life back. Unwavering support, tough love, therapy of all kinds, a dog, none of it worked. The unbearable part was that the more time passed, the more people thought I was faking it all. I tried explaining, over and over again, how the pain worked. It all came back to it being in my head, and that as long as it was in my head, it was my job to get my shit together and fix it.
And then the trial. I could barely get through my words during my cross-examination. I agonized over it, over how I must have sounded to the jury. I tried practicing, over and over, but anytime I countered, the stabbing pain was there. My lawyer said time and time again that the wrong reaction could sway the jury. The not-guilty verdict was crushing. I felt like I had nothing left to fight for.
. . . . . . .
I eventually got a job at a nonprofit for domestic violence victims. It was one of the only times that my past played in my favor. We had male victims that we supported, but a majority were women. If I had an attack (as I called them) with a male individual, they were understanding. Even if their pain wasn’t as overt, they could sympathize with what I was going through. I felt like I was starting to thrive.
I started regressing when I saw Rob in the news. He had become a beacon for “men’s rights,” “guilty until proven innocent,” etc, but it came to a head when I saw a billboard for his new talk show. The very first episode, his guest did a sketch on me. I seethed with anger, tears running down my face as I watched it on YouTube during my lunch break. I tried not to read any of the comments. At that moment, I decided that I needed to do more. I was tired of living my life in constant fear, in constant pain. I needed to take him down.
. . . . . . .
During my trial, my lawyer had mentioned that they found a potential witness. It was an ex girlfriend who claimed she might be willing to testify against him, but nothing ever came of it. I think she wasn’t allowed because our dispute wasn’t domestic. I honestly couldn’t remember, it had been a couple of years by now. But once it popped into my head, I was convinced that finding this ex-girlfriend could change everything.
I hired a PI, and he was able to find her relatively easy. She was willing to talk to me, so he arranged a time and place for us. It was at a coffee shop two hours away. I called in sick to work, something I basically never did, and was terrified to meet her.
When I got to the cafe, she was already sitting. We looked at each other, and I just knew. I started crying, and I saw she was doing the same as we hugged each other.
“How long have you been living with it?” I asked.
“Seven years.” She spoke barely above a whisper.
“What did he do to you?”
“He tried strangling me.”
“Holy shit.”
“Well, I heard you got stabbed, so that can’t be pleasant either.” I laughed, and it was genuine.
“I can’t believe it. For so long, I told myself it was just me. That I was too fucked up, too weak to move past it.”
“Maybe you are. Maybe I am too. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Why did he hurt you?” I asked. I knew it was forward, but everyone in the country already knew my most traumatic moment, so maybe I was a bit insensitive.
“I was breaking up with him, and he told me I couldn’t leave. I told him to go fuck himself, that of course I could leave, that it wasn’t up to him to decide. Maybe you reminded him of that at the bar.”
“What a fucking psycho,” I said, groaning.
“I might as well get straight to it.” She sighed, looking me in the eye. “I know what you’re trying to do, but I’m not pressing charges.”
“Are you serious?” My stomach dropped. “What are we here for then? To commiserate? To suffer together, get our coffee, gossip and call it a day?”
“I’m not going to court. I’m serious. With all due respect, it didn’t bring you any sort of closure, and your case was way more clear cut than mine.”
“But if you formally pressed charges, then at least people would know he hurt women. That it wasn’t just me, or because my friend yelled at him for being an asshole, or because I was a bitch when I turned him down.”
“The jury knew that, and they didn’t care.”
Her words hit me like slaps. For all of the disappointment I had faced, I never had someone speak to me like this before. It was always sympathy from my family, quiet nods and balled fists, but never did they question my decision to come forward.
“Your case is different from mine. That’s why I couldn’t testify. Yours was an assault, a bar fight if you will. Mine was domestic violence. People care even less about that. And that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that I got back together with him after he did it.”
“What the fuck?” I asked.
“I don’t need your judgment. Even without our… circumstances. It’s actually more common for domestic abuse victims to return to their abuser. But, I don’t know, I couldn’t deal with the pain anymore, and I thought that maybe if I just got back together with him, then at least the pain would stop.”
“Did it?” I asked.
“No. It got worse.
“Oh.”
“I made sure to pack up and leave when he wasn’t home, but he still managed to give me some more marks in the time it took me to work up the courage again. I knew he was going to kill me if I didn’t get out.”
“When you went back,” I started. “Did you ask him about it? About the marks, the pain?”
“Not outright,” she said. “But the first time I disagreed with him on something it was small, like he told me to get detergent at the grocery store and I said no because I just got some more a few days before. And I made a choking or coughing noise, and his head kind of whipped up at me. He looked at me, and he looked at his hands, and he sort of smiled and said, “I think we could always use some extra detergent”
“So he knows,” I whispered. “He knows that he did this to us.”
“I think so,” she said. “I don’t know how. Maybe they all know how to do it.”
“Who all?”
“Men. All of them. I don’t know.”
“It can’t be,” I said, “or more people would believe us.”
“Not if they saw trials like yours. Maybe all of us are out there, thinking we made it all up. Or maybe it is just him that can do it. Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it matters,” I said. “It’s one psycho vs a world of psychos.”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “If all men are doing this, then it means nothing because nobody cares. If it’s just him, they didn’t believe he was at fault for stabbing you, so why would they believe that he can also cause us evil post-attack phantom pain? It’s insane. They already think we’re insane. They already won’t believe us, and they never will.”
“Well Jesus, that’s bleak.” I was shaking. “So you’re just going to keep sitting there and do nothing?”
“No, I’m just not going to take him to court again.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I found a loophole,” she said, a glint in her eye. “I found a way that won’t hurt you for speaking out.”
“No way. How?”
“You write about it. Online. And it won’t trigger you.”
“Are you serious?” If she was right, then I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t figured that part out yet.
“There’s a way around it,” she said. “It took me a while, and I’ll slip up, and it’s still annoying as hell, but you can beat this. I’m beating it. If you don’t say it aloud, then it doesn’t trigger the reaction. You can write it, text it, email it, it doesn’t matter.”
“I must have figured that out by now,” I said. “I don’t have any social media, but at least in a text or an email or something.”
“It’s easy to miss, especially if you’ve been ingrained to avoid saying no. I caught it when I went to college. We had a group chat for this one discussion group I was in, and this guy was trying to say that our essay was due on Wednesday, and I said, no, the essay is due on Monday, and he asked me, ‘Are you sure?’ and that’s when it hit me. And I said, ‘Yes, I’m sure, it’s due on Monday,’ and nothing happened. No choking, no punching, no kicking, nothing. I was free.”
“Holy shit,” I said. My brain was whirring.
“I don’t want to go to court, but I think we should start writing about it.”
“Like a blog?”
“No, like a network. Like a magazine. We could start with other women, those who had trials like yours, the ones who weren’t believed.”
“What would we write about?”
“The truth. What happened to us. How we feel. How we’re angry. How we’re suffering. And how we want them to pay.”
“Let me think it over,” I said. “That was a lot to take in.”
“I understand,” she said. “But you have my number. And we could do something big here. If there’s enough of us working together, then it doesn’t matter who believes us. We could write our own rules, our own justice.”
I recognized the look on her face. It was the look I had when my trial was starting, when I thought that justice couldn’t fail me. I wasn’t sure I was ready to go there.
“Before I go, I have to ask. Does the pain fade at all with time?”
“No,” she said. “It doesn’t. You just learn to live around it.”
So here I am, putting this out there. I see you. I hear you. I believe you. Join us.