Rape victims can retake control
She is a middle-class, attractive college student. She has had boyfriend troubles, as you might imagine of a girl of 19. She apparently has had significant emotional swings. And she has made poor decisions, the worst of which, it seems, was going to a famous basketball player’s hotel room in the middle of the night after finishing her shift at the front desk.
Neither of their lives will be the same, no matter what happens in the coming weeks and months in a Colorado courtroom. There will forever be a shadow over Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant even if he is found not guilty.
And if a jury finds that Bryant did, indeed, commit rape, then the young woman who pressed the charges might very well wonder whether justice was worth the price.
Bryant’s alleged victim has seen her name, her parents’ names, her photo and personal information plastered all over the Internet. In the public smear campaign that passed for a preliminary hearing the past two weeks in Colorado, she has heard herself portrayed in open court as a psycho slut desperate for attention.
It’s a wonder, after watching this that any woman recovering from such a nightmarish physical humiliation would subject herself, by pressing charges, to a legal one.
Tina Phan knows why. “Because you’ll regret it the rest of your life if you don’t,’ she said by phone the other day.
Phan insisted that her real name be used in the newspaper. Otherwise, she said, it would be too easy for people to dismiss her story. A young man she has known since the seventh grade raped her the morning of July 19 in her Terra Linda, Calif., apartment.
After they had attended the same late-night party in Novato, she had allowed him to sleep on the couch when he said he had no bus money to get home. Phan awoke the next morning to a chemical-soaked towel smashed against her face. She later learned it was toilet-bowl cleanser and Ajax. As she gasped for air and tried to scream, her attacker showed her a knife and told her to shut up. He raped her, telling her she was not the first and would not be the last.
Then he left, telling her not to move for 20 minutes. But Phan immediately locked the door and called her boyfriend’s mother, who rushed her to the hospital.
Phan’s attacker pleaded not guilty at first. When Phan refused to back off her story, he finally pleaded guilty. He will be sentenced Dec. 5 in Marin County, Calif.
Phan never returned to her apartment. She has been sleeping ever since on the couch in the home of her boyfriend’s mother.
The Bryant case and others raise questions about the strength of rape shield laws, designed to keep a victim from being publicly humiliated with irrelevant testimony about her sexual and psychological history.
“There’s a chilling effect from the publicized cases, absolutely,’ said Mary Anne Mcdonough, director of the victim/witness program at the Marin County district attorney’s office, where Phan’s case was prosecuted. But she says women need to know there is a system in place to support them. She tells women if they stick to the truth, then it is more likely their attacker will see they cannot be intimidated into dropping the charges.
There is a girl in Colorado two years older than Phan who says a famous basketball player raped her. There is little she can control – not her anonymity, not her image, not even her medical and psychological history. But at the end of the day, if the legal system works, then control will follow the path of truth.
(Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to at [email protected].)