by HJS

Let me catch you up to speed.

When I was a student at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (AMBS), I was sexually assaulted by a classmate.

I tried to get help from the seminary and the results were devastating. The assault happened ten years ago, my disclosure to AMBS, nine. In the spring of last year, 2018, I contacted the president of AMBS and asked that the school reevaluate its original administrative response to me. She agreed, and a team was put together to review my case. Interviews were had, negotiations were made. Ultimately, AMBS affirmed that the school mishandled my disclosure. The first weekend in June of this year, I traveled to Elkhart, Indiana, sat down in person with all the relevant AMBS parties, heard their acknowledgements of wrongdoing, received their apologies, asked questions, and talked about where we go from here. One of the places we agreed to go is to you, the public – the Mennonite public, the Christian public, the academic public, the public constituted by survivors everywhere and the people who love them.

There are three publications that will be coming out this week. The first is this one. It is (roughly) the account of the assault and its aftermath that I submitted to AMBS last year for its team to review. This narrative talks about the assault itself and my initial attempt to get help from AMBS. It represents what I knew of AMBS’s administrative response to my disclosure as it was happening and for the vast majority of the time since. In my recents meetings at AMBS, I learned a few pieces of new information that change certain dynamics of the experience I had. I decided not to weave that new information into this first publication, because I want this narrative to represent the reality I lived as it was apparent to me for the almost-decade between the time of the assault and this month’s opportunity for clarification. That said, I also want to be careful not to spread misinformation, so be on the lookout for text in this first account that is *marked with asterisks.* The asterisks mean that though the surrounding text represents the information I had at the time, I no longer think it is accurate in the way it is written.

The second publication is AMBS’s official response to my assertion that my original disclosure was mishandled. I had the opportunity to read this response ahead of time. It is composed with words and sentiment that I appreciate.

The third publication is another written by me. It tells of the process I have pursued with AMBS over the last year – what we did, what I learned, how it worked, what remains for the future. It also provides correction and clarification to segments highlighted with asterisks in this first account.

I share this third publication for a few reasons. For one, transparency is excellent ground on which to cultivate accountability. By my read, AMBS still has work to do, and that work gets done best when the varying communities to which the school is accountable are in the know. But also, I am sharing this third account because the process I went through with AMBS this past year was, though imperfect, successful. I was heard. I was respected. The process was hard but not reinjuring. I got what I needed, and I think AMBS is better off too. I want to tell you about this last year’s process because it offers a potential model for other institutions to follow when survivors call them to account. In my work as an advocate for other survivors of sexual violence I hear alarmingly often from church, school, and institutional leaders that while they want to support survivors there is no reasonable way to do what survivors are asking. The survivors are the problem. They make unreasonable demands. They can’t be appeased. They’re angry and want to burn everything down.

Well. I posed to AMBS every demand that my clients pose to the institutions that betrayed them. I spoke in the same demeanor. I insisted on the same forms of acknowledgement and restitution. I have no less rage than the next survivor, no more right to respect. If AMBS can pull off a process with me that I feel free to call a success, none of the rest of the church-related or academic institutions out there have excuses.

The bottom line is this: It can be done. It’s on you—church, community, and academic leaders—to get it done. I hope that the third publication in this series opens doors toward that end.

One final note. Mine is the only name that is disclosed in these publications, and that’s been my decision. Folks who know the AMBS community will likely know the identities of the AMBS administrators involved in my case, and that’s fine. More importantly, I’m not naming the person who assaulted me. This is tricky, right? If he is doing this to other people, saying his name might help to protect them. But naming him also puts me at increased risk for retaliation. And, right now, for real life reasons, though I am truly agonized by the possibility that he is hurting other people, I am prioritizing my health and sanity. These are the kinds of terrible decisions survivors are forced to make everyday because someone raped us. Also for self-protection, I have asked AMBS not disclose my perpetrator’s name. And I ask readers to please respect my decision. That said, if I ever have any reason to believe that the person who assaulted me is in a position of academic or religious leadership (currently, to my knowledge, he is not) you better bet I’ll speak up. And, if you are a survivor reading this who wonders if we might have been assaulted by the same person, I welcome hearing from you.

Ok. Here we go.

I call him Z.

Weeks prior to the night my friendship with Z came to catastrophic end, he broke up with his long-term girlfriend and told me he wanted to be with me instead. I listened as he explained that he could open up to me more easily than he could with others. He felt comfortable with me. He could be himself. He cared about me. I let him know that, while I cared about him too, I wanted to be friends – real friends. I wasn’t interested in anything more.

Z called himself a feminist. We had both enrolled at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary the previous fall, and a few days into our program we bonded over a shared appreciation for human decency and sarcastic flare. I valued the campus culture of quiet sincerity. I did. But having recently finished university at a school of 40,000 I sometimes felt suffocated by it. Z was lighthearted. He seemed more aware than others that there is a whole world outside of quiet sincerity and that this world can be good. He was a breath of fresh air, and I was relieved to have him as a friend.

After he announced his love and I refused to return it, we continued spending time together. I didn’t see why we couldn’t handle this maturely. No need to end a good friendship over an unreciprocated crush, right? After all, we were seminary students. Surely, we of all people would treat each other with respect and work our way through this snag in our friendship.

Over the next weeks, I thought it odd that he made little effort to hide his interest, but I didn’t consider it my problem. I had made myself clear.

During this time, I was in what I can retrospectively describe as a verbally and emotionally abusive relationship with someone else. I’ll call him M. On the night in question, the night my friendship with Z exploded, M crossed a line. I don’t quite remember what he did. He might have slammed a gallon jug of water against the wall by my head. Maybe he spent one too many hours berating me for playing a game of table tennis with a male seminary colleague in the student lounge. Whatever it was, I felt one inch tall and overtaken by a new and strange energy. I had had enough. I wanted out – out of my relationship with M, out of the patterns of abuse that kept repeating and repeating and repeating in my life, and out of my carefully curated silence on all of it.

I went to Z’s on-campus apartment that he shared with some of our other mutual friends. I felt that I could be open with him. He had shared vulnerably about his feelings for me, and we had handled it well (or so I thought). I took that as a sign that I could be my genuine self with him too.

He invited me in. With the kind of exasperated, outraged, oh-no-he-didn’t energy that nurtures legitimate self-defense, I vented to Z about M. Z asked if I’d like a drink. I don’t drink often, but I said yes. On this night, I wanted a drink. He went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of mixed liquids. I didn’t ask what it was. I trusted him – just like you trust your friends. He opened a beer for himself.

The apartment was small and I wasn’t ready to bring Z’s roommates in on the difficult and embarrassing details of my life. Z moved us to his tiny bedroom for privacy. A bed, a desk, and a TV accounted for all the space in the room. Naturally, necessarily, I sat on the bed.

I was there for hours. We watched a few episodes of Scrubs, joked about things friends joke about, and every now and then I would bring the conversation back to M and declare with as much courage as I could that I would never let him drill me into the ground with his vitriol again.

In retrospect, the right thing for a friend to do when told that someone they care about is being verbally assaulted and emotionally controlled on the regular is to express concern and insist on getting that someone the kind of support that will remove them from harm’s way. He should have asked me what I needed in order to follow through on my desire to get safe. He should have said, “Hilary, it is not ok for M to treat you this way. We need to make a plan that will get you out of this.”

I don’t remember what he did say, but it wasn’t that. Mostly, he was quiet and ready to change the subject back to lighter fare as soon as I was willing.

At some point in the evening, he made me, and not himself, a second drink.

At another point, my charged indignation mellowed. Underneath was a pit of sorrow. And fear. And grief. On Scrubs commercial breaks I started to shift the conversation.

“This isn’t the first time this has happened.” 


“I think I might have been sexually assaulted the week before fall semester started.”

“I had one boyfriend who hacked into my email account so that he could keep tabs on me after we broke up. He screamed horrible things at me all the time.”

“I think I was sexually abused when I was a kid.”

“Honestly, if sexual assault is sexualized interaction without consent, I don’t even know how many times I’ve experienced it. That feels like the norm in my life. Do you think I’m overreacting? I’m probably overreacting.”

I told Z that, at the time, I had no power to resist advances that I didn’t want and that I felt dangerously at the mercy of the men in my life. I explained: It wasn’t that I had put up valiant fights and lost. All of these terrible things happened, I said, because the only reaction I had access to when sexually cornered was numb, dissociated acquiescence.

I was in a reflective headspace. I was putting the pieces together, trying to figure out how to get myself out of this life-consuming mess.

I wanted support. I wanted to finally talk out loud about the terrors rattling around in my head and catching my breath. I wanted to let my guard down. What I wanted most was to be safe and not alone.

This is where the story breaks.

Literally, the narrative falls apart. From this point forward what I remember ceases to carry the quality of a smooth, connected sequence of events. The rest of that night feels in my mind like a cacophony of sharply edged fragments, none of which make sense on their own or together, any of which might slice my whole self right open if mishandled.

I remember being close to Z on the bed, too close, and curious about how I got there. I realized that I couldn’t remember the last… How long? Seconds? Minutes? More? It registered that a boundary was being crossed. It occurred to me that I should be upset. I remember wondering how he could justify moving into such an intimate proximity given all I had shared with him that night. My stomach fluttered. I think I blushed. I was smiling. And I felt nothing at all. My emotions were offline.

I remember a sensation across my body and mind that felt like some kind of substance-related alteration. I wondered if I was drunk. I had only had two drinks over the course of many hours and my alcohol tolerance is high. But my conscious awareness was fading in and out. I couldn’t think clearly or translate my thoughts into action. My body didn’t seem like it was under my control. Something was wrong.

(Both friends and professionals have since suggested that I was drugged. Some have wondered if I was so traumatically triggered by Z’s initial advance that I started dissociating. Both seem plausible, but short a confession from Z that he spiked my drink I’m sticking with what I know, which is that something was simply and desperately wrong.)

I remember fading into consciousness and realizing that Z’s face was about an inch from mine. I noticed that he was smiling and that I was too. I wondered why I was smiling and I came up with no answer. Without any affective feeling at all, this moment registered as disastrous. I wanted it to stop and became amused by the fact that I couldn’t seem to do or say anything that would secure that end.

(Are you wondering if maybe he mistook my empty smiles for consent? If he really can’t be blamed as long as my facial expression lacked horror? Don’t worry. I’ve asked those questions about 700 more times than you ever will. Do I think it’s possible that he genuinely thought I was into what was happening? Eh. Not likely (keep reading), but who knows? Maybe. Here’s the thing: I had told him clearly that I didn’t want to be anything more than friends. I was in a relationship. I was in a wildly vulnerable emotional state. I was relying on him to offer safe support in a moment of pretty serious crisis. I had been drinking. I had just explained to him that I did not have the psychological capacity to resist the kinds of advances he was making. There are no circumstances under which him pursuing or even consenting to sexual intimacy under these conditions is ok.)

I remember realizing my pants were off and that I didn’t know how that happened. He stood over me. He was acting irritated. An eternity of confusing and terrifying moments happened in an instant. He raped me. Even now, my mind glitches when I use that word: rape. Every time I say it I feel my sense of self split down the middle and an emptiness fill up my eyes. Is rape what happened to me? I say the word and I’m shot back into a void where I know nothing and am nothing, where I’m half naked on that bed in that apartment and he’s agitated and I don’t know how we got here.

But I say it anyway. It’s an act of faith. A declaration of solidarity with the millions of others who float in that void with me and struggle just as hard to name the source of fracture. He raped me.

I lost consciousness while it was happening. But in that first moment, before my mind went dark, I died.

That’s the only way I can explain it. Whatever I was before that night died when I felt – physically, viscerally – that my body was no longer my own.

(Blank space should be inserted here to mark the way my eyes just wandered to the wall and rested there, empty, as I now became again, for a few moments, what I was there on that bed: nothing.)

What I can only imagine was hours later, I woke up. It was the time of night when both the night owls and early risers are fast asleep. My clothes were on. All of them, somehow. Z was sleeping. I had a sense that something was not right but I couldn’t remember what it was. I nudged him awake to tell him I was leaving. I asked why we had fallen asleep, why it was so late. He said we had sex, duh Hilary. Jagged, scrambled flashes of the preceding hours blinked across my vision. Betrayal. A kiss. Sitting too close on the bed. Death. Possession. Empty smiles.

Me, ever the practical thinker, trying not to let the fear show on my face: “Did you… finish?”

His face changed, “No.” I shouldn’t have believed him, but I did.

His demeanor stiffened. Z jumped out of bed and hurriedly gathered my things. He told me I needed to leave and that he wasn’t going to be able to speak to me for a while.

I couldn’t process it. I tried to suggest that we needed to talk about what had happened. We were friends. We work through things. We don’t abandon each other. But, in what felt like a matter of seconds, he had put my things in my hands, opened the door, pushed me out, and shut it. Literally. He physically ushered me out of his room and down the hall. His hands on my shoulders turning me away from him. His hands on my back pushing me through the door.

Out of sight, out of mind.

I stood there on the doorstep. It was a beautiful night. Cold. February in the Midwest. I looked at the other apartments and thought about how soundly their residents – my quiet and sincere seminary colleagues – must be sleeping. I was surprised by how bright it was outside. The stars were on their best behavior.

Focusing on the crunch of the frozen ground under my feet – it’s always been one of my favorite sounds – I walked across campus back to my apartment and slipped in without waking my roommate.

Stop. Take a breath.

The next days and weeks are a blur. The timeline is forever jumbled in my head, but all of the following happened at some point:


I was in pain, so I went to the bathroom and checked to see if I had any genital injuries. This was probably the day after. I felt a string and realized that I had a tampon in. It was crammed up against one wall of my vagina and took some effort to remove. When I finally got it out, I looked at it. Flat as a pancake. I sat there for several long minutes trying to decide whether or not I was brave enough to accept the implications of this new information.

With no affect whatsoever, I told a close friend the gist of what happened. At that time, she was a friend to both of us. I didn’t use words like “rape” or “assault” or “coercion.” My memory was shot and I didn’t understand what had happened. I was in traumatic shock – the kind where a person stares at a wall for three hours without realizing that a minute has gone by. I couldn’t imagine that Z would have knowingly hurt me. I thought there must have been a terrible but benign misunderstanding. Still, what I shared should have raised alarm. My friend was kind but didn’t express concern, at least not initially. For a good while, as if everything was normal, she went on spending time with Z in our mutual group of friends that I had depended upon and was suddenly without. With bounce and enthusiasm she would come into my apartment after spending an evening with them and tell me all about the fun that was had. Apparently, The Office was a must-see show. They had decided together that it was far superior to Scrubs.

Later, she would admit to me that she liked having me out of the equation because it put her in a position to feel more secure in our circle of friends. She loved me, but she thought I was more fun and more interesting and more beautiful than her. People liked me better. Or so she feared. In some meaningful way, my absence was a relief to her. When she admitted this, she also apologized and made a commitment to support me. From that point forward, she did.

(I’ll have you know, this friend whose initial response hurt so deeply became, over time, the person who refused to let me go through it alone. Eventually, she lost friends in order to remain mine. She let the pain of my life into hers. And she spoke up for me later when I had no voice left. Her decision to change course and stand with me after having initially done the opposite is precious proof to all of us that it is never too late to admit our mistakes and start again. I don’t know where I’d be if she hadn’t.)

Early on, I asked Z to come over so that we could talk. I wanted to work this out. I wanted to believe that it was a terribly unfortunate event that involved no malice or betrayal, and I thought that if we could talk through what happened and each own our mistakes we could move past the whole thing. He came to my apartment. I apologized for not communicating my boundaries clearly enough, for allowing things to go too far, for making him think that I was interested in him sexually, and for one zillion other things I should not have apologized for. I “owned” as many “mistakes” as I could think to attribute to myself, and then I told him that I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me and that I would forgive him readily. (My stomach knots and rebels as I write these words. Z, if you’re reading, I take it all back.) Z responded by agreeing that I had mistreated him. He wasn’t sure if he was going to forgive me. He spoke at length about how awful I had made him feel and then reiterated that we should keep our distance from each other. The ground I was trying to piece back together with the glue of communication, mutual accountability, forgiveness, and reconciliation crumbled again under my feet.

I saw him countless times a day. On a campus of 150 students, there is no refuge from the sight of one’s rapist. Every time I turned a corner I braced myself.

Over time, I grew upset that he refused to apologize. I had trusted him to be a friend and now I was a ghost in my own body. Every dream was a nightmare and I couldn’t eat. I had lost a whole cohort of friends, literally overnight. Breathing took effort. I felt I had to remember to make my heart beat or else it would stop. My life was gone, and he was refusing to show the slightest concern, much less take responsibility for his part in my erasure. Since he wasn’t speaking to me I wrote to him asking that he please acknowledge the ways he hurt me.

How I wish I hadn’t. His response was as life-wrecking as the assault itself. Instead of offering a simple, “You’re right; I took advantage of you; I’m sorry,” he accused me of being the monster.

He said that he didn’t want to have sex with me but that I was relentless and made him do it. He said I “wasn’t myself,” that I “scared him,” and that he had “never seen me like that before.” He said, “I thought if I just gave you what you wanted you would calm down.” My mind started skipping. I couldn’t keep my eyes still long enough to read more than a few words at a time. That was the first moment I remembered pulling his hair. Just a flash of a memory. Was it real? Did his suggestion put the image in my mind? Was I the violent one? Did I do this to myself? To him?

These questions knocked a hole right through me. It seems pointless to try to describe to you, dear reader, the panic and sheer terror of entertaining the idea that I was responsible for my own rape. If you’ve been there, you know. If not, well, look hard at the middle of my chest, just beneath my collarbone, and you will be able to see through a terror-shaped hole to the other side. That’s the closest I can get you to understanding. True empathy – where you feel what I felt – is not an option here, or else you would die too.

Months later, Z and I met again to talk. I can’t tell you whether this happened in the spring of the same year or in the following September. What I do remember is that the weather was warm. There were flowers blooming. We met in a public space on campus but had the room to ourselves. There were couches. It was dark and clammy, which seemed like a deliberate offense to the sunny outdoors. I was guarded, spoke little, looked at him through slightly squinted eyes. I still thought this was a conflict we might be able to work through, but my naiveté was beginning to crack. I asked him how he was processing what happened between us now that a fair amount of time had passed. I was still waiting for him to acknowledge that he took advantage of me, abandoned me, broke my trust. I thought that if he would talk to me and admit it I would have a chance of putting myself back together.

That fucker. He admitted nothing. Instead, he explained at incredible length that he had seen a therapist at a local counseling center (initially for reasons unrelated to me) who helped him realize and accept that he was holding on to guilt that was not his to hold. This therapist, he pontificated, released him from feeling a sense of responsibility for my “reaction” to “our night together.” He understood now that if I were to “pressure” him to care for my feelings or assume responsibility for them I would be projecting inappropriately. He explained that it might take me some time to accept that my “hurt feelings” had nothing to do with his actions but were, rather, undisciplined spurts of my own trauma bleeding out from the bounds of previous abusive relationships. With a new freedom of mind and spirit he was doing much better now. He felt confident that he had done nothing wrong and was pleased to have worked with a professional who helped him see that. As if this was not a strong enough blow to knock me out he began to rehearse again his version of that night’s narrative, the version in which I was the monster.

His tone was eerie. It dripped of inauthentic sincerity. He was unnaturally self-assured. The whole thing felt like a TV show. Maybe I was being pranked. Maybe the hidden cameras would pop out any second, I’d get to meet Ashton Kutcher, and this God-awful nightmare would end. “Gotcha!” the friends I had lost would holler, laughing that I had nearly been sucked into the delusion.

He was still talking. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me,” he said, “but you were so frightening. I need more time before I’m going to be comfortable around you.”

No cameras.

I don’t know what I said. I don’t know how the conversation ended. I don’t know what I did next. I left in pieces. Shredded. Here’s what I couldn’t wrap my mind around: How could a person who was my friend and who had once professed to care about me– No, how could any person at all who did what he did so blatantly refuse to acknowledge it? How could he live with himself? How could he so easily expel his sense of care for me? How could he stand to keep me in such wrenching pain when he knew he had the ability to ease it? How could he walk away from me so effortlessly? How could he be so intentionally and maliciously manipulative? How could he lie this deliberately without flinching? The only sense I could make of it was that maybe he was right after all. I could not conceive of a world in which a human being who was once my true and close friend would be capable of treating me with such disregard. Even though his account of that night made me shake and stripped my experience of reality I could more easily believe that he was right than I could believe he was cruel. After all, this had happened before. Other men who were supposed to care about me had abused or sexually assaulted me and left. Maybe the problem wasn’t their behavior then either. I was the common denominator. Maybe I was making this happen and they were innocent bystanders who were unfortunate enough to fall into my path. Maybe they exited my life so abruptly because they had to protect themselves from me. My best friend had been relieved to have me out of the way. M was always telling me I was awful. Maybe he was right too. Maybe they were all right. Maybe I was just bad for everyone. Maybe what I needed was to become strong enough to accept and work to transform this terrible truth about myself. 

I sank down to the heart of hell. I did not exist on the same plane as the flowers and the sun and all the people smiling. I could see them, but they might as well have been ash. Or I might as well have been ash. Or maybe I was.

Enter, Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary.

AMBS.  Our school.

At some point in the next academic year, I got brave. I had found a healthy dose of genuine support in a group of dear women friends, and I made an appointment with the campus pastor. My intention was to tell her the story and ask for help.

Walking into her office, my nerves were off the charts. I was afraid she would interpret what happened as irresponsible and religiously frowned upon premarital sex. I worried she would lose respect for me because I had taken two drinks and because I had failed to protect the boundaries of my body. If I couldn’t be trusted with my own body how could I be trusted with the lives and bodies of the people I was being trained to serve? My fear was largely fed by the social and theological ethos of the community, not by anything the campus pastor did to make me think that she, as an individual, would make these judgments. But, in that moment she represented the community to me. Terrified, I sat down. I opened my mouth. I spoke, and I did what I came to do.

Here again, I didn’t use words like “rape” to describe what had happened that night. I feared falsely accusing Z because I still worried in a spell of traumatic confusion that what happened could have been, like he claimed, my fault. I was anxious to know whether an outsider to the situation would take my perspective or his when presented with the facts. Because I hoped her response would give me some insight into whether or not I was the monster he said I was, I took care to present the events as evenly and unemotionally as I could. I explained that Z had given me something to drink, that I had been fading in and out of consciousness, and that he was sober. I shared that I didn’t feel in control of my body, that I had not wanted to be physically intimate with him, that I had told him as much many times, and that I was traumatized by what happened. I told the campus pastor about not knowing how my clothes came off, about dying. I explained that he found my behavior frightening, that I apologized to him for my (supposed) part in this, and that he refused to do the same. I asked her what AMBS could do to help.

Here’s what should have happened next.

As campus pastor, a person in whom students are encouraged to confide, AMBS should have made sure that she was trained well enough in matters of sexual violence to recognize that what I was describing was assault. She should have told me that it was assault and assured me that it wasn’t my fault. In a spirit of care and support, she should have encouraged me to file a report with the school and helped me to understand my legal options. I needed her – the authority figure – to validate the pain I was in and help me claim the word I was too terrified and ashamed to say: rape. And the conversation should not have ended with her. There should have been some kind of process. Someone should have been concerned enough about my sanity and safety to suggest a plan that would keep Z out of my presence on our microscopic campus. Someone should have at least raised a question about whether or not he should be allowed to continue as a student and earn his seminary degree.

None of this happened. Instead, the campus pastor told me that relationships can be confusing and that she was sorry that my relationship with Z had taken this turn. Her words and body language gave me the sense that she believed no one was to blame and that while she cared for the pain I was in she saw the events I described as the kind that just happen sometimes when young folks don’t communicate well enough before getting involved.

Fast forward: When Z’s graduation date finally rolled around a year or two later I panicked and my trauma symptoms intensified. I was horrified that the professors I respected were about to give him their blessing and commission him as an able leader in the church. That friend I mentioned earlier went to the campus pastor on my behalf to argue that it wasn’t right for the school to offer him its blessing. The campus pastor said that a degree from the seminary doesn’t mean that a person is fit for ministry and that Z had as much right to be affirmed as the next graduate. When it came time for the graduates to be commissioned I sat through the service numbly, with a steady stream of tears pouring silently down my face. I could feel myself teetering on the brink of death all over again.

Now, back to the campus pastor’s office where I made my initial disclosure. What she did do was ask me how I thought AMBS could help, and I (knowing little about what would actually be helpful to me in that moment) suggested that AMBS arrange for a qualified third party to meet separately with me and with Z in a process designed to request that he apologize to me. She suggested that we have someone from AMBS facilitate that process and for some blessed reason I found a well of internal strength to say no. It needed to be a third party. One of the seminary’s departments kept a picture of Z on their bulletin board. AMBS loved him too much to hear me.

The campus pastor told me that she would have a meeting with the dean to tell her what I had shared and to request permission to hire a qualified, non-AMBS third party like I had asked.

Are you wondering if the dean noticed that my story was a tale of assault? *She didn’t. Or at least, I had no reason to believe that she did. We passed in the halls hundreds of times and she never spoke one word to me about what she knew of my living nightmare or what she thought about it.* A friend who, at the time, spoke to the dean on my behalf later shared with me that the dean had seemed to be of the opinion that I was responsible for what I suffered, or at least that I was to be blamed for not having the skills to have avoided harm in the first place.

The third party was hired. I’ll call her Layla. Layla was wonderful. She was a survivor of assault herself, and she told me gently but unequivocally that Z was in the wrong. Too little and too late, but precious all the same.

One afternoon a few months later, I walked through the halls of AMBS, heart racing, toward the room where I was scheduled to meet Z to hear his apology. The halls were dark and empty. The door to the room was open, blasting yellow light at me as I approached. A week or so prior, Layla had tried to prepare me for disappointment, but I had been waiting so long for this. I couldn’t help but hope. When I walked in Z was sitting across a conference table with Layla next to him. Without a word or even a flinch of expression, I sat down across from them. Layla broke the silence. “We’re here today because Z has prepared an apology. Z, will you please share what you’ve prepared with Hilary?”

He got out a folded piece of paper with a few lines typed on it. I can’t tell you his apology word for word, but it was your classic “I’m sorry that you felt hurt even though I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Thirty seconds and we were done. We both left the room in different directions, and as soon as he was out of sight I found myself flooded with wild and desperate rage. I had suffered so much and asked for so little. An apology. A sincere admission of wrongdoing. Words that acknowledged I was a human being who mattered. And he couldn’t be bothered.

Soon afterward I had a follow up meeting with the campus pastor. I remember two things about that meeting. 1) I was uncomfortable, heartbroken, and defeated but didn’t tell her so. 2) *At the dean’s recommendation,* she invited me to help pay for Layla’s services. She explained that since AMBS had gone out of their way to help in a conflict that students created between themselves, AMBS thought it would be fair for Z and me to share the expense. It wasn’t a demand. It was an invitation. “I’ll think about it,” I said, smiling. An image flashed across my vision: me on Z’s bed, smiling without knowing why, unable to show on my face the sense of betrayal that pierced me.

And, that’s the end.

Well, it was the end of something. My nightmares continued. I was diagnosed with PTSD. My whole life lost its color for a few years. Almost a decade later I am still working through the damage Z and those involved in the aftermath of his assault caused to my body and psyche and spirit. Today, I am a humanities trauma researcher. I know the ins and outs of the psychology and social patterns of sexual violence. I know that rapists hardly ever admit the harm they cause. I know that victims always struggle with feeling responsible. I know that blaming the victim is the most common and effective strategy our culture uses to protect perpetrators. But even as I write this I am swallowing hard as I type. My ability to trust my own memory and experience is still shaken by Z’s uncompromised insistence that I was the monster that night. So, really, this story has no end. That horrific night is present in all of my days.

Do you want to know the craziest part of this story?

I don’t hate Z. I don’t ever want to see or speak to him again my whole life long, but I don’t think he is a soulless monster. I don’t wish him to hate himself or live an impoverished life. Outside of the pain that accompanies human growth, accountability, and transformation, I don’t have any desire for him to suffer. His misery would do nothing for me.

Thinking of rapists as inhuman sometimes prevents us from realizing that rapists are our fathers and husbands and brothers, sometimes our sisters. We don’t fix this thing as long as we run from the truth that the majority of rapists are, in the mundane moments of their lives, entirely average and lovable. They are our friends.

Z was my friend. In the presence of those he has not sexually assaulted, he is average and lovable.

What I want for Z is not his ruin, but that he become inwardly strong enough to withstand the pressure of a conversion experience. I want him to stop hurting people. I want him to become able to look himself in the eye, admit the terrible things he has done – intentionally or not – and do right by me and all others from here forward. I want him to be surrounded by friends and family and professionals who will both hold him accountable and help him do this.

I also want him to quit calling himself a feminist. (Seriously, dude. Enough.)

For me, and for a million other survivors like me, rage is precious. It is a guttural spring of life powerful enough to break through the sticky thick film of trauma that covers and threatens to suffocate us. I have plenty of rage, and it is righteous. But if you are in this with me you have to hold the tension with me. The kind of accountability that I most want Z to bear – the kind that demands a fundamental transformation of heart, mind, and behavior – is one and the same thing with his survival. And, survival is the goal. Not biological survival. Not sheer livingness. The kind of survival I’m after is the kind that makes us awake and sensitive to the worth of ourselves and every other living being. Survival means authenticity, connectedness, ethical integrity, and an unshakable knowledge that respecting oneself and doing right by those who have been wronged are two sides of the same coin. I want that kind of survival for all of us. For me. For you. For AMBS. For Z. For every one of us.

Cursed be all that gets in survival’s way.

That’s how we stop this thing. We stare death and fear and shame in the face and we say, no thank you. Not today. Today, we rage. Today, we survive. Today, we call death dealers to account. And tomorrow, we’ll try again.

It’s a long road to resilience.

That night may remain with me, may tug and scrape at me, but I’ve pulled the color back into my world. I have wound my roots so far into the earth that – wait for it – no storm can shake my fucking inmost calm. I am a mountain. I teem with life and I will love and fight and play my way straight through every prayer and ploy designed to throw me into the sea. Faith does move mountains, but for that to work you have to win our Mother’s favor. Dare I say, if you are standing in between me and a life that is free, you don’t have it.

Therefore, AMBS, it’s time we had a heart-to-heart.

You have a responsibility to acknowledge the harm that was done, to apologize, and to show me the respect and care I should have received when I was a student. I am asking you for this now not because I want to shame the school or any of the AMBS personnel involved in my heartache. I’ve lived through torrents of shame, and I wish it upon no one. Shame gets us nowhere. Let’s be done with it. I am asking you for this now because AMBS has the power to offer me some degree of relief and peace, and I want that for myself. I want it for the others like me (and I am rock solid certain there are others) who will be validated vicariously through your acts of respect for me. I want it for the students who grace your halls in years to come. If you walk this road with me you will learn something, and you will be more able to offer them what you should have offered me the first time around. I will never be wholly unburdened, but I want you to take back the weight of this mess that is yours – and not mine – to hold.

Here’s how you can do that:

Listen to me the way you teach your students to listen – with your whole hearts, defenses down, respect way the hell up.

Tell me who, in addition to the campus pastor and dean, knew what I reported, and offer me in-person apologies from everyone who had the opportunity to intervene in the aftermath of my assault and didn’t. Again, please hear me. I have no desire to shame you. When you apologize to me, you validate that the hurt I have felt is real and worthy of being acknowledged. Because sexual assault, and this assault in particular, is an act that breaks and scatters the victim by denying that her experience is real, you hand shards of myself back to me when you witness and affirm that my reality is, in fact, reality.

Publicly acknowledge that my quasi-report was mishandled, and make a public apology on behalf of the seminary. Here and with respect to the apologies I’ve requested from individuals, it should go without saying that an “apology” like the one Z offered will not fly.

Make plans to work with a credible, victim-centered, outside consultant to review and revamp the school’s sexual misconduct policy. Bracket the money question. We’ll get there, but we need to acknowledge first that words are only important when they are backed by action.

Lastly, publicly support me in publishing this account. I want you to join me, AMBS. Take this risk with me; throw your lot in with mine. Can you imagine what it would feel like to do this together?

My life would not be the only one changed.

And, friends, there we have it.

This account is incomplete. You will not be able to tell, but the silence that fills the page takes up far more space than the words. Years ago, the silence was sharp and empty. Today, it is full with grief that reminds me I have died, full with breath that reminds me I survived, full with appreciation for the scores of unnamed friends and supporters who have made this new life good. I am a mountain, tender and strong, steady and deep, teeming with life and color, calm through the storms that rage, and most importantly: I am here to stay.

AMBS, what say you?

*****

I presented an approximate version of this account to AMBS in December of 2018. Today, as I release these words into the world, AMBS has published its official response. You, dear reader, can move from my account to AMBS’s response in the course of an afternoon. For me, there were months of waiting – years, if you count all the time this narrative lived in me before I brought it to the seminary this second time around. AMBS’s official response to me is the result of a long, complex, sensitive process – a story in itself.

For the moment, I will let the weight of my testimony and AMBS’s formal response sit. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you something about the process that got us from the former to the latter, where we stand now, and the shape of the hope I hold for the future.

Thank you, sincerely, for reading. Thank you for being with me as I tell this story.