On November 5, 2016, before I called the police department in my small town to potentially report my rape, I looked up the officers who worked there to try to figure out if any of them was well-acquainted with or related to my rapist. In the midst of being completely shattered, one of the first thoughts I had was “Will someone at the police department want to protect my rapist?”

* * *

The detective/sergeant was always kind to me. He didn’t ask the typical victim-blaming questions we all hear horror stories about. The bar for expectations of how rape victims are treated by law enforcement was (and is) desperately low, and for the simple fact that the officer told me he would do his job and didn’t overtly shame me in the process, I felt oh so lucky.

There is more to being trauma informed than not asking a rape victim what they were wearing. 

There is much, much more to being a competent detective than being moderately trauma-informed.

I wish I had a passionate detective assigned to my case. I wish I had a competent detective assigned to my case. I wish I didn’t wonder what might have happened if I had. I wish I didn’t have to deal with the consequences of an inaccurate record made by a biased detective.

I wish that reporting my rape to the police didn’t actively cause harm to me and my pursuit of justice. But it did. I wish this was not a reality that was possible for anyone.

* * *

THIS NEXT SECTION CONTAINS GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF SEXUAL ASSAULT AND EATING DISORDERS.

I had remained friends with Avery up until the day before I called the police. This was a direct result of the manipulation, grooming, and gaslighting that went on for years prior to the abuse and after. It took a lot for me to get to a point of being able to say that what he did to me was rape, and even when I got there, I still believed it was an accident, that my good friend Avery must have had no idea he didn’t have consent and that was at least partially my fault. 

Everything changed suddenly when I learned something that completely shattered everything I had believed. A light was cast onto his lies, and I could see him for what he was. The next day, I called the police. Three days later, I gave my first, “informal” statement (one that was not recorded in any way). One week after that, I gave my second, “formal” statement (one that was typed verbatim and reviewed by me).

Here’s the thing: There’s a huge difference between suddenly realizing that almost everything you believed for five to eight years was a lie and understanding what was real. Even today, going on eight more years after I reported to the police, I occasionally realize something new or have to fight bits of denial or misinformation. When I spoke to the police, the only reality I knew was that Avery was a rapist, he raped me, and he was dangerous. What he did to me was long, drawn out, and complicated. I had only just scratched the surface of what really happened.

Additionally, I was very aware of the stigma surrounding reporting rape. I obviously was never going to lie about this, but I felt this extra added pressure to make absolutely certain that I led with my mistakes. I take responsibility for my presentation of what happened in this regard. I regret that I softened his culpability. I wish that I had really grasped, 1, reality, and 2, that in an adversarial system, it is not my job to defend him.

Here’s the other thing: The detective took my accusations and wrote a report that is unrecognizable to the experience I had or the information I shared. Please note that Avery did not give a statement, so the report isn’t indicative of his perspective at all. 

It’s taken me this long to write about this in detail because it’s really hard for me to think about and I find it incredibly overwhelming. I’m struggling to find the words to describe the report, so I’m just going to share some of it. There were a wide variety of errors in the report ranging from mild, semantic, overlookable to egregious, fabrications, complete misrepresentations, hard to believe it’s anything but intentional. I’ll start with the worst of it. First I’m going to share a screenshot of my formal written statement at the time of my reporting – so this is what the detective was working with when he wrote his report.

And this is how the detective summarized these events:

So when I said I told him no, he still tried to force those things on me, he tried to make those things happen despite my physical and verbal protests, and if I didn’t successfully keep him from doing those things he probably would’ve done them, the detective described that as always asking for consent and then not forcing the issue when I said no and never forcing the behavior on me. I genuinely can’t use words to describe how it feels to read this. Every single time.

I described years of grooming behavior that the detective decided wasn’t worth noting in his report, instead beginning the narrative with the day that Avery first kissed me, an encounter which to this day I really struggle with labeling. I was uncomfortable in the moment and confused. He had been grooming me, and that affected my responses to him. He approached the situation in a way that was designed to avoid my protesting it. I didn’t explicitly consent, and I wasn’t really okay with what was happening. But I also did participate. I did kiss him. I tried to express discomfort before we kissed by bringing up his girlfriend, to which he responded by kissing me. I tried to express discomfort during the encounter by reminding him that everything that happened in that moment covered all of my sexual experience, to which he laughed and continued. I didn’t want him to touch me. I didn’t want to touch him. But there wasn’t physical force. Here is how I described that event to the police:

Here is how the detective described it:

I know this depiction is less overt than the first one I shared, but I look at it and I wonder why? Why would the detective choose to highlight that I didn’t tell him to stop or protest and leave out that Avery’s actions were making it so I questioned if it was really happening? Did I not make it clear enough that it was confusing and weird?

It’s the culmination of everything in the police report that makes it hard to believe that the detective just misunderstood.

Regarding the first rape on March 6th, here’s what I said versus what the detective wrote:

I don’t know why the detective decided to make up that Avery and I were standing up and kissing when he removed his pants and underwear, and that afterwards I seemingly willingly laid down on the bed. I can’t help but notice that by fabricating this small detail, it adds an element of active choice on my part that did not occur. Rather than freezing, in the detective’s fictionalized version of events, I knew Avery was naked on the bottom and then chose to lie down in bed with him. It’s subtle, and maybe to anyone else it doesn’t even stand out at all, but having lived it and reading someone else’s version of events, it jumps out at me. Especially because it’s completely a fabrication, and there are zero ways to justify it. 

It’s also incredibly distressing for me to read the detective claim that I said this was not abusive. Regarding the detective’s insistence that I said the rape wasn’t forceful, I take some responsibility for it, although I think the detective really ran with it. Rape is a violent act. I know that now. In the moment, I was comparing my rape to the classic stranger in the alley rape, where the victim fights and maybe the rapist has a weapon and there’s physical injuries as a result of it. I felt like it was my duty to make it clear that I was not claiming this was violent in that way. I felt afraid that by saying, yes, he was forceful, that I might be implying that he was forceful in some way other than with his penis, that I might inadvertently be painting an inaccurate picture and that would mean I would hurt rape victims everywhere by being someone who lied. 

Even then, I clearly didn’t say that he wasn’t forceful at all. I said he had to use force to get in. And he did. A lot. It was painful, and he knew it was painful. When I said it wasn’t particularly forceful how he was holding my legs apart but they were resisting, I was trying to make sure I wasn’t claiming that his holding of my legs was really painful or something like that. My legs didn’t get hurt from what he was doing. But he forced them apart while I tried to keep them together. That’s what I was trying to paint a picture of, and to me that’s obviously requiring force. It did require force. Maybe that’s not clear. I don’t know. I know I didn’t describe things particularly effectively and I regret that, but I also can see that I did not repeatedly say, as the detective claimed, that there was no force and no abuse when it came to intercourse. I was literally there reporting rape. In what world would I ever say it wasn’t abusive? Why did the detective write these things? It doesn’t feel okay that he did.

Why does the detective simply say I “confided in one friend” when what I said was “we sort of had to keep pretending everything was normal because it was a secret because I mean he had a girlfriend but I also begged him to like let me tell people or somebody because I felt like shit. […] I felt really alone. He refused to let me tell anyone, so our friends didn’t know. […] About a little over a month into it, he allowed me to tell XXXXXX specifically”? It doesn’t feel inconsequential that he forced me to keep it a secret, a classic abuse tactic, or that he controlled who I was allowed to tell when he finally let me.

Why does he say

when he knew I didn’t have my period for four years? I maybe wouldn’t have thought much about him leaving out the eating disorder if it weren’t for the fact that he not only left it out but specifically altered evidence of it. For this one, I can almost believe that he just didn’t find it relevant. But for one, there’s not going to be a lot of evidence in a case like this. Is evidence of the trauma not circumstantial evidence of the crime? And if he didn’t find it relevant, why did he specifically ask me about it in my formal statement, and then include absolutely none of this answer:

Why is the one and only mention of the existence of, let alone the content of, the 177 pages of messages and documents that I compiled for the detective this:

I didn’t know what might have evidentiary value and what didn’t. I wasn’t familiar with the law, what was admissible or not, or what exactly needed to be proved. So I did my best to compile what I could imagine somehow being relevant. I figured proving that intercourse occurred at all was important, and I had many messages to prove that had occurred. I had no idea how one might prove the lack of consent, but I sent evidence that Avery had been manipulative in the form of messages between us and evidence of the trauma it caused in the form the work I’d done in a self-help book and my private journal entries. I sent evidence of my confusion in the moment and beyond, as a result of his manipulation, in the form of messages I exchanged with someone else shortly after the rapes ended and more journal entries from before, during, and after the rapes. I sent photos of a bruise he caused “as a joke.”

I do not believe the officer ever attempted to review any of it. There is no evidence that he did. When ultimately the case was not prosecuted due to a lack of evidence, it seems kind of weird that possible evidence was never even reviewed.

And then there’s this:

Why, when the detective was told that there was a witness to Avery apologizing to me when I confronted him, and why, when the detective was told that Avery affirmatively admitted to raping me, did the detective describe it like this:

I’m pretty sure there’s a big difference between not objecting and saying yes.

I’m pretty sure that’s true in a couple of ways. Maybe the detective just doesn’t understand that at all.

* * *

When all was said and done, the officer wrote this report, sent it off to the prosecutors, and told me by the way, in New Jersey if you want a copy of this thing you need to get a lawyer to request it for you. 

I didn’t care about seeing the police report. I assumed it was accurate. When I met with the prosecutors on November 30, 2016, to have them tell me that they weren’t going to prosecute my rapist, I hadn’t seen the police report. I didn’t know that it effectively said “yeah, she’s saying he raped her without force or abuse and also that he would always ask first and when she said no he respected that.” I didn’t know that it didn’t include any of the evidence I had provided. I didn’t know how much was left out. I to this day do not know if the prosecutors had a copy of my written statement. I did not know what the prosecutors were basing their decision on, and given the completely ineffective and incomplete job the police did, I have no idea what the point of the middle man even was.

* * *

I didn’t see the police report until August 9, 2017, over eight months after that meeting with the prosecutors. I only received a copy of it after my prospective civil lawyer had reached out to the police department, and weeks later, after the lawyer had no luck, he asked if I would call to speak to the detective – who had ghosted me and was holding my journal hostage in violation of the New Jersey Crime Victims Bill of Rights N.J.S.A. § 52:4B-36(l). I wasn’t able to reach him and was told to call back the following week to talk to someone different. When I spoke to that person, she told me she had to get permission from the prosecutors to release the report. Eventually, the lawyer finally got a copy and gave it to me. 

When I finally saw it I was devastated, confused, angry, shocked, shaking. These were my emails to the lawyer immediately when I saw it.

In case you’re wondering, on January 1, 2019, I finally got my notebook back from the police, after pretty extensive and assertive effort on my part. The case had been closed for over two years. The case had only ever been open for a couple of weeks.

And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t see a copy of my formal written statement until January of 2022, at my deposition, over five years after I made the report. The first time I ever saw it, I received it from Avery’s lawyer.

* * *

If that was the end of the police report saga, it would have been bad enough. But that’s not the end. 

In pursuing justice through the civil lawsuit, it should come as no surprise that the police report has been helpful for my rapist. His lawyers have been able to use it to claim that what the detective wrote is what happened. Despite the fact that my written statement to the police directly contradicts it, my rapist can now use the detective’s words to say that my story changed. Despite the fact that from the moment I saw the police report, I was beyond upset about its inaccuracies, it somehow gets to purport to be evidence of what occurred. I don’t know if the detective wanted to protect Avery. I don’t know if he just saw the case as a lost cause from the beginning, so he didn’t try. I don’t know if he’s just bad at his job and puts no effort into fact checking his reports. I don’t know if it’s just inexperience in these types of cases in a safe little town where nothing bad ever happens or gets talked about. Whatever the reason may be, it’s caused lasting harm, and there’s no excuse.

Here’s some e-mails to my lawyer over the years to demonstrate the ways that the police report has continued to come up in my civil case against my rapist.

In particular, this next one was in response to yet another document Avery’s legal team had me fill out:

This one was only 13 pages, and it consisted of 66 true or false questions that essentially picked out lines of the police report verbatim, asked me 1) if what the police report said was true and then 2) if it’s true that I told the police that. Theoretically this could’ve been actually helpful to have us all get on the same page about what I actually said versus what the police got wrong. But in an adversarial system, in a world where my rapist’s goal is to evade accountability, the point isn’t to truth seek but rather to lock me into answers with binary questions that they can later try to spin to make it look like I’m lying. The point is to have the detective come and protect his own ass and swear that he was never wrong about anything, that everything he wrote was true and accurate, and then hope a jury believes a man in uniform over a woman they’re trying to break.

* * *

On January 26, 2022, the detective was deposed. He had been an officer since July of 2001, and in that time he had been deposed twice and testified in court under ten times. He had been a detective for seven years and had even supervised the detective bureau. He was made lead detective the year I was raped, 2011. When I reported my rape in 2016, he was “kind of his own entity,” which I believe meant he was the only detective at the time. The person overseeing him, in the detective’s own words, “was pretty hands off.” He had received either an 18 or 8 hour training about the Sexual Assault Response Team, its functions, and “obviously, the sensitivity of dealing with a potential sexual assault victim” in 2009. He had also had one training with what seems like the lead SANE nurse (aka the person who does a rape kit at a hospital.) Prior to my case, he estimated he had investigated a sexual assault three or four times. Between my reporting in 2016 and his deposition in 2022, he had not investigated any additional sexual assaults.

The majority of his deposition was him reading nearly verbatim his report. Avery’s lawyer would ask “Then did she say [reads from report]”? And the detective would answer, “Yes, she said [reads from report.]” It was abundantly clear that the detective had no independent recollection of meeting with me and that he was at best completely confident that he would never make a mistake in his report writing. If Avery’s lawyer ever went off script and asked for the detective to elaborate, with no hesitation, the detective would fill in the blanks as if he was an improviser whose role was to protect the rapist. That is to say, he was often completely wrong about things, but curiously, when he didn’t have memory of something, the thing he would make up would sway in the favor of Avery isn’t a rapist.

Here’s a fun demonstration of this:

Reminder that my formal statement to this detective includes the fact that Avery admitted it. Additionally, I told people immediately after this conversation what he had said. Avery also told someone immediately after the conversation that he admitted it to me, and I have evidence of that as well. Avery’s lawyer wants to say that I changed my story a week after my first statement to the detective, and that’s why there’s contradictions between the detective’s report and my written statement. The detective is happy to further that narrative. My question is, if the detective 100% would have included in his report that Avery admitted to raping me, rather than not objecting or denying this, why is it in my formal statement and not in his report? Like, it’s objectively false. He didn’t include it, even though it’s there.

Continuing on that same line, here’s another example:

The more upsetting these are, the harder it is to make commentary on them. Hopefully they speak for themselves. I didn’t mention earlier that the police report twice said that he and I were boyfriend and girlfriend, which was never true, never something Avery would claim, never something I would claim. I don’t know, what words do you use to describe how you feel knowing the detective investigating your rape decided independently that your rapist was your boyfriend because he put his penis in you without your consent?

On an escalating note, what words do you use to describe how you feel knowing the detective investigating your rape decided independently that you were enamored with your rapist?

1) Triangulation is an abuse tactic, one that Avery utilized in many different ways. 2) The smiley face thing is a great example of the detective completely fabricating something instead of saying “I don’t remember.” Admittedly, the smiley faces aren’t a very significant thing, and it would’ve been fine if the detective didn’t remember or hadn’t even written that down to begin with. In the year following the rapes, conversations I had with Avery were very confusing, passive aggressive, manipulative, weird. In that time period, he would often say things that were upsetting, and I believed he knew they were, but with a smiley face. Which is an awful lot like how he would use laughter in the moment to make abuse and rape seem like jokes I was in on. The smiley faces would make me really angry, and I guess I mentioned it to the detective. Again, it’s not an important detail, but the detective’s answer in his deposition was fully made up. Why? 

Finally, there’s this. This was my lawyer cross-examining the detective:

Pro tip to humans: According to some detective sergeants, if your platonic best friend tells you you’re pretty and you still hang out with him afterwards, you are attracted to him. Same goes for if one random day before he ever puts the moves on you, he sends you one single random sext that makes you uncomfortable. And if months later he forces his penis inside of you, it is not rape, because you’re, you know, obviously being a vessel for his genitals voluntarily.

I could never claim that my rape case would have been easy to prosecute. Working in this field, I see not guilty verdicts in sex assault cases too often. I don’t get to see all the cases like mine that the prosecutors decline to prosecute. It sucks. But you know what absolutely, positively did not help? The incompetence of the detective in my case.

* * *

When I reported my rape, the detective had told me that I could get a restraining order against my rapist. I told him that I didn’t want to because I believed it was possible my rapist might contact me and confess again, only this time I had downloaded a call recorder on my phone.

There’s something called a pretext phone call that some law enforcement agencies use, primarily in sexual assault cases, where on a recorded phone call, a victim or parent of a victim confronts an offender with the allegations. The police don’t tell the victim what to say, but they  can give guidance, especially when it comes to helping a victim understand what legally would be helpful to get the offender to say. It’s a tool that I have seen in my work countless times, and it is often the biggest piece of evidence in a sex assault case. 

I don’t know if this is ever done in New Jersey or not. I know that New Jersey is a one-party consent state, so legally the offender wouldn’t need to know the call was being recorded. I know that proving sexual assault beyond a reasonable doubt is an often impossible task, one where there is a recognizable deficit and where having tools like a pretext call are incredibly useful. I know that the kinds of cases that utilize the pretext call are ones just like mine, where the victim and offender have some kind of relationship where a phone call could happen without it being an obvious red flag. The very relationship that complicates a jury’s ability to believe a victim is the thing that makes the potential of a pretext call so powerful. I didn’t know about pretext phone calls in 2016. It wasn’t my job to. I didn’t know what the elements of the law of sexual assault were and what evidence might be permissible and useful to prove them. It wasn’t my job to. 

The detective and the prosecutors, who said we believe you but we can’t prove it in court, were the ones who could have known, whose jobs it was to know. There’s a lot about the criminal justice system that makes it difficult for justice to be served in sexual assault cases, and so much of it is a complex problem where it’s unclear who can fix it or how. This is not one of them. It is not acceptable to look at these cases completely at face value and say, “welp, there’s no evidence, sorry!” Not when these cases happen in private, behind closed doors, protected by shame and taboo. Evidence goes beyond physical injury, photographs, and surveillance. I know, really, how it’s a growing problem in any type of case that juries expect to see the cut and dry forensics they see on TV. But that’s not an excuse to not try. Investigators of these crimes need to stop looking at these cases for how classically winnable they are and start addressing the gaps. 

It’s not good enough to say, “Well, this happened more than once, which makes it complicated. You stayed friends with him, which makes it complicated. You didn’t report it for five years, which makes it complicated.” Guess what else I didn’t know about in 2016? There are people who testify as blind experts on victim behavior. These are psychologists who never look at the facts of the case, but they come in front of a jury blind and discuss what we know about how victims of sexual assault behave. These experts are permitted to testify specifically because courts recognize that laypeople (and apparently some detectives) can’t intuit these things, because it’s not intuitive if you haven’t been through it. The recognized behavior of victims of sexual assault is held against them, and these experts exist to educate a jury to equalize the playing field. All of the things that made my case complicated are things I’ve now personally watched experts testify about in court are normal behaviors of victims.

* * *

All of this makes me feel really upset, angry, hopeless. But I want to close out with trying to learn from it. What mistakes happened in my case that could have been avoided?

My interviews should have been, or at least had the option to be, video recorded.

My detective should have had vastly more training specifically on sexual assault, abuse, victim behavior, and also writing reports. He should have had some training to recognize that a victim might be downplaying what happened, blaming themselves, and have interviewing skills to help bring out the truth. He also should have had a supervisor who was actually overseeing his work. 

There should have been a victim advocate at the police station who could have educated me on what evidence might be helpful, what the law requires, and ways that I could assist in furthering the investigation. There should have been a pretext call in my case.

My detective should have had some of the knowledge himself that could be imparted to a jury by a blind expert. Instead of seeing common behaviors of an abuse victim as a barrier to prosecution – let alone as evidence of attraction between a victim and an abuser? – he should have known that there was at least a way to try to combat those complications. Also seems like he lacked knowledge he should have had that attraction does not equal consent, nor does being in a relationship.

I should have been given a copy of my own police report by default, and certainly before prosecutorial decisions were made. I should have been asked to review it and been able to request corrections.

Frankly, in my case, I would have been better off talking directly to the prosecutors rather than the police. If there is going to be a middle man, they should offer something other than a bad game of telephone. 

Most of the things I mentioned the police could have done or offered, the prosecutors could have as well.

I don’t know what would be allowable in court, but the prosecutors should expand their view of what might be evidence in a case like this. Sexual trauma is circumstantial evidence of a sex crime. There are experts who can testify about common reactions to trauma, and in sex crimes, often the only evidence is the victim’s word. Unless we start considering that evidence of the victim’s trauma is evidence, too. 

I don’t know how to end this. I’ve had this story inside of me for a long time, and I wish that I could articulate it better than I feel able to. This shouldn’t have happened. I hope that somehow by sharing this, maybe some of it won’t happen to someone else.