“I’m low-key scared he’s going to sexually assault me.”
I read the GroupMe message over and over again in disbelief. A flare lit up in the night, then laughed away by friends either too unsure of how to interfere or too desensitized by rape’s prevalence to consider doing so.
Hours later, Marie’s* date would rape her.
The two met on Instagram. He followed her, they developed a casual friendship and a week later he asked her to his fraternity’s date function. As a freshman, she knew little of the conventions that govern such invitations, but agreed to go after assurance from friends that they would attend also.
In the following weeks, she would make clear her lack of interest in any physical or romantic relationship.
When he gushed about her cleavage during a Snapchat video call, she hung up and emphasized the reveal was unintentional. When he kissed her suddenly while watching The Office, she recoiled and left his fraternity house. When he asked about her sex life, she changed her mind about attending the date function, explaining she was afraid to be drunk around him.
With each rebuff, her rapist redoubled his pursuit, ultimately using guilt — in the form of desperate, essay-long apology texts — as a lever to make her reconsider. She gave in, but on the condition of zero sexual interaction.
“I set boundaries very, very explicit (sic),” she told me. “(I told him), ‘I don’t want to do anything with you ... not ever.’” Texts provided to the Alligator confirm this account.
On the night of the event, however, Marie felt her message hadn’t resonated. He commented perversely on her looks and refused suggestions to leave the privacy of his room at the pre-party. It was here — in a dimly lit, unsupervised space where he controlled the drink-making — that she sent that prescient message about her eventual assault. Shortly after, she would blackout, fragmenting her memory of the night for later recollections.
But her few memories are telling.
She says she went to the bathroom once at the venue, so visibly drunk that a random girl thought it appropriate to shove two fingers down her throat to make her vomit. She remembers being unable to stand on her own, to the point where fraternity risk managers told her date to escort her home early.
The pair left, but he didn’t take Marie home. He took her instead back to his fraternity house, where he proceeded to aggressively kiss her while she lied limp on his couch. Dissatisfied with this position, he then lifted her onto his bed, stripping her naked while muttering about her looks.
“I’m 17, I’m not on any birth control,” she remembers thinking at the time. “I was so close to passing out, so all I could say was ‘put on a condom.’”
He did, and in a crushing last-ditch effort to end the rape, Marie feigned unconsciousness. She explained: “He’s probably a nice person — if I just roll over and pretend I’m passed out, he’s gonna stop, right?”
He didn’t.
Instead, he repositioned atop her now-splayed-out body and removed the condom. This stirred something inside Marie, shocking her into sobriety long enough to scream out, shove him away, and escape the fraternity house.
Since that night a year ago, Marie has battled post-traumatic stress and panic disorder, she’s taken medical withdrawals from two semesters of class made impossible by crippling depression and she’s fought to convince herself the irrelevance of the question, “Why didn’t you just leave while you could?”
Would anyone with a straight face call this a drunken regret?
This level of lasting pain does not result from harmless drunken mistakes. It results from a failing in our collective willingness/ability to prevent tragedy.
Our student code of conduct pins responsibility for crimes on the person who initiates sexual contact, but UF should alter our code to include specifics about when the illegality of initiating such contact with someone who is blackout drunk, along with a list of telltale signs (vomiting, stumbling, slurred speech, etc.) that signal such a level of drunkenness has been met. The University of New Hampshire provides a good model for this approach.
Clearer student by-laws make litigating these cases in student court less ambiguous, and will encourage more survivors to come forward. This may not be the most we can do, but it’s something.
Shouldn’t we do something?
*Marie is not the actual name of the victim.
Champe Barton is a UF economics and behavioral and cognitive neuroscience senior. His column usually appears on Fridays.
