The Woman Was No Help

(415 days into a rape report, I am forced to confront two government employees in a lobby. Here's audio.)

If you’re just joining us, this is a first-person saga about my pursuit of justice for a sexual assault.

You can read prior installments here:

1. May I Speak to a Woman? (How a Major California Agency Refused to Let Me Meet with a Woman for Almost 400 Days)

2. “You May Speak to a Woman” (A Major California Agency Has Finally Scheduled a Meeting with a Woman After 406 days)

3. I Met the Woman! (Sort of.)

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Today, my middle is missing.

I don’t know where it went.

It will be back, but til then,

I must look at trees and animals.

Touch grass, they say

And mean it or don’t

I must taste a fruit and hear music.

Hold a cat for longer than is necessary.

There is a book open on my desk, and a pen.

A mourning dove came without her mate,

and a hummingbird trilled at eye level with me.

I do not believe in signs

From anyone but me.

---

Last Tuesday, you’ll recall, I went to The Agency with my wonderful husband Drew.

Within minutes, The Woman escorted me out of my own meeting for trying to record it. (I described that here, in part 3).

The Woman walked us to the elevator.

I remember this well, the walk from the room to the door.

My body was fortifying itself against the environment, the crushing sense that everything around me was a manipulation.

The way the chairs were organized so that I could not see her screen.

Her cooing tone. “Of couuuuuurse!”

It was all an act. The theatrics of bureaucracy.

We packed up our things. I put the recorder, still on, in my pocket.

We walked silently to the elevator, and then stood inside, saying nothing as I wept.

I closed my eyes and centered myself, away from the threat.

---

Shame and propriety almost stopped me from releasing that.

Shame, because we are not supposed to be seen this vulnerable, if we want to be “taken seriously” by someone out there who is — and this is critical — taking things seriously.

Propriety, because I must keep your respect as a journalist, even as I report the story of my own suffering.

But neither shame nor propriety can overcome the atavistic power of PTSD. In the presence of a new injustice, you will melt down. You will demand your rights, and it will be ugly. The person who was wronged, and who has dedicated herself to justice, will make herself known, even when the body who carries her has failed to see her coming. I found myself confronted with the reality of my Guinea Pig status: by volunteering myself as a proxy for others, I must disclose the full horror of it.

PTSD is like this, and some people low-key hate PTSD victims because of it. We are frustrated, angry, hurt, self-important, and single-minded. We have no small talk, no polite patience for people who should already know how to help. We have offered that emotional labor before, and we are ready for help from those who are ready to give it, because they’ve already figured life out in the same way we have been forced to. There have been too many almosts.

We haven’t got the time, not because of the clock on the wall; it’s the hour glass in our guts, which flips at random to begin again. Each time we discover a friend is ignorant of the entire system which enabled our oppression. We simply haven’t got the time to explain it all to you.

All that’s left in me is fight.

---

Three years ago, I didn’t identify the several sexual assaults I had endured (two rapes; a medical assault; several public gropings, and more). This is typical for autistic women: we are more likely to be assaulted, more likely to be sexually groomed by an authority figure, and more likely to use our tremendous cognitive power to talk ourselves out of going to the cops or telling a friend right away.

If you think there is any chance you might be able to relabel the attack as anything else – especially if you know the guy – why on earth wouldn’t you?

I did what most autistic women do: I systematically ordered my world around those experiences so that they were not assaults, and so that the men who performed them were not assailants. It worked until it did not. You find yourself at the edge of a cliff, where once the road was wide.

---

On a plane last year, I finally listed my assaults.

I used California’s current laws.

There were nine.

I had only ever reported the last.

---

I redefined all nine at first.

Because it was confusing for me, and so I assumed it was confusing for them.

Or because the man had friends, and those friends were my friends.

Or because the man had power.

Or because they were movement men, those powerful creatures who float above social movements. Icons for young, attractive, justice-oriented women.

---

Movement Men exist everywhere. But my Movement Men were in the atheist movement and the animal rights movement.

The atheist movement (and its cousin, Organized Skepticism) is so casually sexist, I once called it the Doubting Men’s Club, and I stand by this. Skeptical men will paw at your body, pick on your sensitivity, and use tone policing to always one-up women for having emotional depth (their primary sin).

Nevertheless, I was so enamored of James Randi’s work that I stayed a while. Looking back, this behavior evokes my own pity. Who could take a job in a movement of men who respected her so little? The man who hired me was among the worst offenders, and I knew it before I even said yes. But I had so much to prove.

We have so much to prove.

---

I had always generally hated the men of organized skepticism – there were a few exceptions, most notably James Randi – but I thought I could change them. I gave talks called How to Be Nice and Using In-Group Language to Reach Out. I was begging these people to be nicer, to learn a little manners, to be a good advocate.

They told me how talented I was, but no one was listening. Not really.

By day, they condescended and bullied. The little blonde thing with the surprise public speaking talent. Decorated men were offended when the survey results came in, and my talks were more popular. They earned PhDs, you know. Their talks had more footnotes, you know. It must be the blonde thing.

At night, they tried to sleep with me.

---

But the people from animal rights had always been my people. They were the ones who mixed kindness and rationality together in a blend I could swallow. No one else seemed to manage it. Until that one guy, the vegan rapist.

When you work in animal rights, you see and hear a parade of awful things. You watch slaughter videos your meat-eating friends refuse to acknowledge. You cry yourself to sleep for the first several years.

Slowly, you are recognizing you will never actually win over most people. If you stay, you will need to fight for animals. This is hard, because you come to animal rights a living bleeding heart, with open hands, wanting to help the defenseless. It is gutting to be that good and have it not returned to you; to give up things you liked too (very sharp cheeses, the zoo, horseback riding), and realize most people are not willing to even try to be better than the basic ethical standards handed to them by era, family, culture. You worry about the ways you are not doing enough for other causes. All your coworkers have sleep deficits over caring too much.

You cry every day for a while, and then you find a solution.

You shrink your world – at least, the world of people you respect – to the people who can manage to make animal rights important, as you have made them important.

When people taunt you on the street: “I will eat a burger tonight in your honor!” you pretend it doesn’t hurt, but it does. Because they really might; they might go buy the burger, which pays the restaurant, which reorders the patty from the wholesaler, who sends another contract to the meat producers, who schedules the death of another animal who never asked for any of it.

So you fawn to the outside world, keep peddling a hope for a better tomorrow. But actually you are very vulnerable. Your allies are very few, and you are a tender thing. To make matters worst, you appear very strong.

Then someone – a bad guy in your ranks, a Movement Man – harms you, and you think:

If I tell the wider world, they will all eat burgers.

You really do; that’s what you think.

Or if it was a movement atheist:

If I tell the wider world, they’ll think it’s because he didn’t believe in God.

The movement predators use this thinking against you.

You don’t want them to eat the burger, do you?

You don’t want Organized Skepticism to look bad, do you?

If this sounds culty to you, it should. All human groups fall prey to cultic errors if not checked by outside forces.

Or, better, inside ones.

Whistleblowers.

---

Who Becomes a Whistleblower?

A few years ago, I spat into a tube for a genetics test called Nebula Genomics. It was, at the time, the most comprehensive consumer genetics report.

Immediately, I was struck by how statistically vulnerable I was to PTSD:

(A 94th percentile risk means that my PTSD risk – after a traumatic event – is higher than 94 out of 100 people.)

Someone who hadn’t ruined her brain with a Special Interest in trauma for the last seven years might have seen this result and thought, “Oh wow, I should be careful!”

But not Carrie Poppy. No, Sir.

Ha, I thought, that’s funny. I guess I just don’t have PTSD because I think about the things that have happened to me in such a healthy way.

Nothing could have been less accurate.

---

So anyway, where were we?

Last Tuesday.

The elevator.

[Do you need a cup of water btw? How are you doing? Stand up and stretch if you need to.]

The Woman and Drew and I walk to the elevator silently, but for my tearful gasps. For two and a half minutes, we say nothing.

We get to the lobby. We sit there for 45 minutes while The Woman calls her boss’ boss’ boss.

Drew and I, astonished by what we are experiencing, sit there, mostly quiet, wondering what will happen next. The security guard offers us water. He introduces himself.

We wait and wait.

Eventually, The Woman comes back down. She has a second woman with her, a silent woman. The Second Woman will be in our lives for about five minutes, and she will manage not to speak the entire time.

The Woman bites her lip. She has met rape victims. What I am saying is hitting; lodging, really.

But she sticks to the script.

I can go to the such-and-such with this other kind of complaint. I can do this or that. There are simply a million ways I can move forward now which do not involve them — her or her boss or her boss’ boss’ boss — ever taking responsibility.

She names a government form, with a nickname. They have mentioned it many times. In my monotropic obsession, I have learned the history of the woman it’s named after. I snap, I monologue, I tell them her story. It is too much like mine; it is unacceptably like mine. I go on and on.

To be honest with you, I cannot stop. I am in meltdown, and I am also removed and observing it.

But for the first time ever, I do not judge myself.

I refuse to call myself unprofessional for it. Every point I am hitting is a bullseye. I am simply right. I am crying, I am screaming, and I am absolutely correct.

I refuse to be ashamed of how much this man has hurt me, nor for my refusal to give up on stopping him.

Later, I hear my own voice, begging for a reasonable amount of humanity, and I am proud of myself.

---

I got outside, to the cool air. There are sounds of buses and cars and people getting coffee.

I think about PTSD, and about being chosen by fate to never let go of an injustice so profound, it is sure to harm others if left unchecked. Surely, evolution gave this recursive horror to a few of us for a reason: so that we will change the system.

“PTSD… it’s the whistleblower complex,” I think.

Grateful and lonely, I wait for Drew to exit the building.

When we get home, we regroup.

We talk about the tape.

“I’m afraid that if people hear that tape, they will feel sorry for you,” says Drew, “And you won’t like it.”

This is so fair. Drew knows I have found it hard to be pitied. I want so badly to remain in charge of my own story, to always be the reporter, to not let anyone worry for me.

I am always fine.

At times people have told me they were sorry for what I have been through — for the obvious, documented, terrible injustice — and I have even become angry, defensive. Internally, I say, “Why?! You think I won’t win?!”

As if they are seeing my future and not my past.

Their sorrow, Carrie, is for your past. It is for all you have been through. Feel victorious later. The future is simply not today. For once, can you accept that?

“It’s the hardest when I’m talking to someone who admires me,” I say, “and they’re sorry for me. It’s like I can’t lead them! I can’t help! I can’t do what I normally do!”

Mm, says Drew, that’s a lot. Then he remembers a time he felt the very same way, and slowly we realize: it must be how every single parent feels. If they can get over it, so can I.

When Drew asks me my goal in sharing the audio, I find out I actually need all the sorry I can get:

“It’s what you think I don’t want,” I surprise myself by saying. “A few years ago, I would not have believed it was this bad. Not unless a woman I respected dropped that audio, and she was bawling like that, 415 days in, 40 times ignored, 122 exhibits.”

Informed sympathy. Maybe if I show it, you’ll believe it’s this bad.

“That makes total sense,” he says.

The next thing, we say.

And the next thing.

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The next thing is in 27 minutes, so I have to go.

But before I do:

You gotta check out my best friend Claire in the LA Times for her report on LA housing services!