THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 18, 1994 TAG: 9406180221
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY MARGARET TALEV\
DATELINE: 940618 LENGTH: Medium
When she woke Sunday morning, she and a male co-worker were in her bed, naked. She could not recall how either of them got there. She'd had a blackout.
{REST} ``Please tell me nothing happened last night,'' she remembers saying to him.
He was the first to tell her - but not the only one to know - that several things had happened, and that they'd had sex twice.
She says it was rape.
He told her she'd never said no, that she'd been awake and participating. He told her they made love for hours. She says she doesn't remember any of it.
\ Sarah'' is not her real name. She agreed to talk to warn others, but asked not to be identified. She had known the man less than a month. They had gone out on a date Friday night, and, she said, he had tried to kiss her, but she had told him she wanted to take things more slowly.
On that first date, they talked until 3 a.m., and she was looking forward to seeing him again.
On Saturday, she and her mother bought the wine, which she brought to the party about 11 p.m. Surrounded by new friends - including the man she would later accuse - she said she was going to drink, that she had cab money in her pocket, and that she wanted to make sure she got home alone that night. She was already drunk when she, the man and some others from the party left to go to some local bars. She remembers kissing him in the car. After that, she's blank.
By questioning the man she is accusing and several others who attended the party, she pieced together the sequence of the events that followed: They ended up at the man's apartment, where several of their friends were still partying. She has been told that the two of them ``went back in the back bedroom and had sex and everybody was listening at the door.''
She left the bedroom, other men at the apartment later told her, and sat down on a couch with them. They told her she was trying to ask where the man was with whom she had sex, although she was unable to remember his name. A mutual friend drove her and the man back to her home. She said the man told her he carried her to her bedroom, where they had sex again.
On Monday, she called a lawyer. She went to an Outer Banks police station, where she made a statement. Her parents came from out of town, and were present when she was questioned. She was taken to a hospital and tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Police also questioned the man, and friends of the two who had been with them at different points during the night.
But after her interview with police, Sarah declined to sign any statement swearing that she had been forced to have intercourse against her will.
And, she said, her counselors have told her that because she and the man were both so intoxicated, she doesn't have much of a case.
For days, she scrutinized her own actions. ``It must have been something I said . . . it must have been me. Like, I had to have said yes, because why would somebody do that to me? How am I supposed to know who is my friend and who aren't my friends? And that's the thing that I think is the scariest thing - that I know these guys and that they did this.''
She has talked at length with the man several times since that night, hoping that their conversations can give them both some understanding and some peace of mind. But some of the conclusions she has reached disturb her.
``He doesn't think that he violated me. What his thing is - that we were both drunk, one thing led to another, and he would have to be crazy to not have sex. He's like, `Unless you specifically said to me, `No . . .' ''
``I still feel compassion, and I feel sorry for him because he has to go through this, too,'' she said. ``His friends told me he's freaking out, like he'll just go sit out on the beach. Here he is thinking he might be spending the next 20 years of his life in jail because of something that he didn't realize he was doing wrong.
``I don't want him to go to jail, but I don't want this to happen again to anybody. I want these guys to understand how serious this is.''
{KEYWORDS} DATE RAPE RAPE ALCOHOL
by CNB