Type of Aggie currently: Undergraduate
Classification/age at time: Freshman
Location of crime: Off-campus
Was the crime reported: No
Reasoning for decision to report or not report: "He was my boyfriend at the time and I didn’t believe anything would come of it; my word against his and he convinced me I was overreacting"
"It was after prom. My 3 best friends and all our moms were at an Air b’n’b. We were all in the living room, my boyfriend at the time and I on the floor, my friends on the couch and the floor a few feet away. What happened next is a bit of a blur. All I remember is mildly messing around under a blanket and then out of nowhere he was inside of me. I immediately froze, torn between yelling or kicking back (he was behind me and I faced the door), or just waiting for him to stop. A million questions flooded my head and I just laid there until he finally stopped. When I woke up the next morning, the shock of it all left me without a memory of it until a similar incident about 3 months later.
"I had just started college, about a month into the semester, and I got sick. The medicine I had been prescribed wasn’t working and I was miserable, so my mom came and brought me home. She took me to a doctor and thankfully the medication she prescribed worked. I was still sick, and I barely had a voice. My boyfriend at the time (same as previous incident) came over to the house, and I did want to see him. I was working on homework when he started trying to convince me to go out to his truck. Eventually we did, after his constant prodding, but I still didn’t want to go very far that night, as I wasn’t feeling well and was tired. He guilted me into a lot of things, but I had told him adamantly on multiple occasions prior that I didn’t want him to do one thing. That night he kept pushing and pushing, and I kept asking what he was doing and telling him to stop. He would stop, for a moment, but then he would do the same thing a few seconds later. He lied to me about one of the things he was doing, knowing I probably wouldn’t have consented. And once when I asked him nervously what he was doing, all he said was ‘this’ and proceeded to do the one thing I’d asked him not to. I said no several times when the realization hit me, but my voice was weak and he claimed he couldn’t hear me, or heard something but didn’t know what, etc. I finally got the courage to tell him to stop, which thankfully he did, because I couldn’t move and barely got the word out. Later that night he told me he had basically raped me, and I didn’t know what to say. He was a criminal justice major and knew what he had done, but I didn’t grasp it fully for months.
"After that night I remembered the first incident, but I still didn’t know what to feel. His story kept changing, and he tried to make me move on, always wanting to just get over it. He didn’t want to lose me, he claimed, but in all honesty he just didn’t want to go to prison. He knew I still cared about him and warned me that if I reported him, it would be out of my hands. His constant change of story and refusing to acknowledge what had happened left me confused and hurt. Eventually I broke up with him, and even then he told me ‘I’m sorry you remember it that way’.
" I am a survivor. I have PTSD and a number of related mental health challenges, but I am healing. I have learned a lot in the past year, and I’m so grateful to my friends and family for sticking by me through so much. If you’re reading this, thank you for listening to my story, thank you for caring. Please learn from my mistakes and those of my ex, teach others to do the same, and know that I’m praying for you."