May 21, 2021
After Madison Campbell was sexually assaulted, she had an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to be touched by anyone, she remembers.
She didn’t want to tell her friends what happened, she didn’t want to talk to the police, she didn’t want to leave her dorm room ever again. In the hours that followed the crime, which occurred while she attended a study abroad program at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, she walked to a nearby pharmacy to buy black dye for her blond hair, and spend the following days and weeks rewatching Westworld.
Years later, it wasn’t just the assault that haunted her it was the fact that she had no evidence it ever happened. “I had no text messages, no photos saved. I didn’t save my clothes. I didn’t save anything. And so it would have been my word against his,” she told Quartz. “It’s really disgusting to me that I didn’t feel like I can get any sort of justice because I had I had nothing to prove that it happened.”
As sexual assault cases proliferate, judges must weigh accusers’ requests for anonymity against the tradition of open courts and fairness toward defendants.
Warning: Story contains descriptions of sexual violence.
Grace Pryor thinks back with remarkable clarity to that murky, nightmarish night six years ago, when she was stumbling back to her dorm room at Brevard College.
Pryor, now 26 and an aspiring doctor of audiology, knew she’d had too much Bacardi to be driving home in the early morning of April 12, 2015. But she was alert enough to remember the alleged rape by two basketball players she called friends.
In addition to that trauma were the stinging words of District Attorney Greg Newman, whose job Pryor thought was to uphold justice.
“He told me five different ways it was my fault. The one that resonates most is he said it was because I was wearing a crop top and leggings. It was pretty horrifying,” Pryor said.