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The Letter I Wrote My Rapist

In the wake of publishing this story in the Atlantic, about how I reached out to the man who raped me on the night before my graduation from college and received an immediate apology, I’ve been inundated with requests from women (and men!) asking if they could read the letter, to use as a template for their own. I want to be extremely cautious about paying heed to my promise to this man to protect his anonymity—he did not ask for anonymity, I offered it—so I went through the letter sentence by sentence and redacted out all names, places, and other identifiers. But if it helps you (or someone else) in your own quest for restorative justice, feel free to steal any words you’d like.

September 18, 2018

Dear [redacted],

You may not remember me from college. We didn't even meet until the night before graduation. But I have never been able to forget that night or you. The memory, over these past 30 years, comes and goes, but it always pays a visit whenever I hear or read stories of sexual assault between acquaintances. As you can imagine, that's pretty much all the time these days, and this latest Kavanaugh hearing is no exception. In fact, it's been the straw that finally broke this aging camel's back. I realized I could not go on with my life until I finally wrote this letter. I'm shaking, even as I type it.

You were extremely drunk that night, so part of me wonders if you have any idea what I'm even talking about, but overcoming the trauma of that night has been the hardest and most painful work of my adult life. Also its leitmotif. Let me state it as simply as possible, for clarity's sake: you forced yourself on me and pushed yourself into me as I kept saying no.

I have never spoken your name publicly, and I never will. I spoke privately to one of my college roommates, [redacted], and to my friend, [redacted], the next morning, after the assault. I didn't even tell the psychologist at Harvard University Health services when I visited her the next day, between graduation and lunch with my family. [redacted] I just needed to speak with someone to ease the pain of it. To talk it through. To figure out what my rights were. To make a plan. What was I supposed to do, I asked, with this act of violation?

I've asked myself that same question nearly every day since.

The point of this letter is not to frighten you or hurt you or shame you or threaten you with exposure, but rather it is, selfishly, the obvious next step in my own battle to heal. If [redacted] holds any accuracy, you have lead a noble life, and I admire what you've done with it. You have [redacted], you have served your country [redacted] honorably, you have married a smart woman, you [redacted], and I'm assuming you've been a good father to your kids as well, should you have them. There's no way on earth I'd want to hurt any of your loved ones, and you have my solemn promise I never will. [redacted.]

I saw you one time after the assault, ironically at a pro-choice march [redacted] maybe a year or so later. I was living in Paris at the time but had been sent by my photo agency back to the States to cover it. You were [redacted], handing out pro-choice leaflets [redacted.] You saw me and gave me a warm hug hello. We spoke briefly about our work. I was so flummoxed, I mumbled something about having to get back to shooting the march and sank back into the crowd, shaking.

A few years ago, as an exercise, I tried to get into your head that night. I might have mangled it. I might have gotten some of it right. But the idea of this intellectual exercise, which I later published in The Nation, was to see the world from your perspective. To try to have empathy.

I don't hate you. I really don't. I don't hate anyone in general, but I want you to know I don't hate you specifically either. I don't even know what I want from you, in writing this letter, other than to relieve myself of this 30-year burden and to let you know that this thing has haunted me ever since. I recently saw this video, and I found it hopeful, the idea of a perpetrator and his victim finding a place of forgiveness, publicly, together. Perhaps we can privately find ours. Or not. It's up to you, and I will respect whatever choice you make.  

Tonight is the beginning of Yom Kippur, so I feel particularly bad sending this email today, of all days, as I imagine receiving this letter might be painful for you, and I'm sorry about that. But I just read Brett Kavanaugh's yearbook entry, which someone published online, and it once again triggered all the hurt from that night long ago, and as I sat frozen in front of a blank page that needs to be filled by the end of today for my work, I realized that if I didn't finally write and send this, I would never move forward or forgive myself. In fact, I nearly died last summer, after complications from a trachelectomy, and one of my thoughts as I was bleeding out and drifting into oblivion, my daughter weeping at my bedside, was my cowardice at not speaking up and lack of closure about that night. Will this email provide it? Maybe. Maybe not. But I hope it will at least provide a few stitches of mending.

Sincerely,

Deborah Copaken

TO HELL WITH "BITTERSWEET": IT'S JUST PAINFUL, EVERY TIME

"Bittersweet," they call it, when children leave the nest, but I'm here to tell you that they know nothing. Each time one of my children heads out into the world for a long stretch of time, I feel nothing but pain, without any sugar to coat it. Yeah, sure, it's sweet for the child, and knowing that my child is experiencing that sweetness of independence is, via the transitive property, sweet for me, but mostly? It's just...sad.

This morning, it was my 20-year-old daughter flying back to college after four months abroad and only ten days home in between, and I'm sitting here staring at this photo of her and her brothers watching the first Harry Potter movie last night, all snuggled up cozily in her bed, and all I can do is weep. She's taking organic chemistry this summer, so I won't get to see her until August, unless I fly out to Chicago to visit, which, given my finances these days, is doubtful.

What I realized, this time (and I'm not sure why this never struck me before), is that the aftermath of each departure of a child feels like a little death. Yes, I know it's not a real death, nor would I ever compare myself to a parent who's actually lost a child, but the grief and mourning are nevertheless extant and palpable. I was prepared for the fact that sending a child off into the world would be emotionally wrenching, but what I didn't understand is that you re-experience that pain anew after each subsequent reunion and departure.

I'm not offering any solutions or pithy aphorisms here, I'm just acknowledging how much it hurts, sending love and courage to all of you out there going through similar farewells, and giving you permission, as I've given myself, to mourn. 

SUNRISE

Sunrise is my sacred time, but I rarely get a chance to see it. This morning, however, I dropped off my son at the subway at 7 AM, saw that the sky was lightening, and figured I had around 20 minutes or so: just enough time to run into the woods near my apartment--I live in Manhattan, across the street from its only natural forest--and watch it rise. Because when things feel really dark, as they do right now, there's nothing like watching a giant, life-giving flameball pop up over the horizon to remind us that out of darkness light must always reappear.

BASE LAYERS AND A PLANE CRASH

My New Year's resolution this year was to keep a blog again. The last time I did so was in 2008, when my dad was dying, and I found that writing about his illness helped organize my scattered thoughts. Today I was just going to write a quick note to say, hey, it's been ten years, how's it going, y'all? Maybe mention the cold weather and the joys of thermal underwear, which I was told are now called "base layers" by the good people of Paragon Sports, who chortled at my anachronistic word choice when I said, "Where would I find thermal underwear, please?" Proving once again that aging is the slow act of becoming one's parents. My father used the word nifty well beyond its lifespan, the same way I still say pot when everyone, according to my kids, now calls it weed, duh, Mom. And yet what I wouldn't give to hear nifty one more time.

But last night, as the new year approached, I learned that the friend of friend's son was killed in a plane crash in Costa Rica with his entire family: three brothers, a father, a mother. Awful to contemplate such a loss, no matter one's distance from the tragedy, but then this morning I realized that this boy's mother was from my hometown, Potomac, MD, and that I knew her. And now frankly it's all I can think about. I didn't know Irene Steinberg, née Ginsberg, well, but I knew her well enough to have traced her smile from the New York Times photo accompanying the news back to the halls of Winston Churchill High School, where we were classmates.

It's always unsettling when you hear of the death of someone you know or once knew but not well. My first response is usually to chastise myself for not having taken the time to get to know the person better, either back then or now. Irene of the early 80's was smart, kind, and friendly. We were in many of the same classes together. Why weren't we better friends? Irene of the present day is/was my Facebook friend. Couldn't I have wished her happy birthday on her wall now and then? Or reached out via messenger to say hi? The Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen confronts these confusing feelings head on, the way the death in a community can bring that community together, even under false pretenses, and even via those who only knew the deceased tangentially.

Shari, a mutual friend, posted a recent photo of Irene and her as adults, and in lieu of knowing what else to say or do in the wake of Irene's death, I simply wrote under Shari's photo, "I'm so sorry. Tragic, horrible news. Sending love." Shari, whom I know in the same way as I knew Irene, that is to say with fondness from years ago but today only tangentially, immediately wrote back, "Thanks Deborah. Irene, Francine and I have all found inspiration from your writing." And that's when I finally allowed myself to cry. I cried for Irene, for her family, and for their loved ones' unbearable loss. I cried because they have been denied the gift I so blithely made fun of, of becoming their parents and using out-of-date words. But I also cried because it was an important reminder that words--even the wrong ones, even those seemingly written into the void--matter.

This might sound cliché and prescriptive and as shopworn as nifty, but my base layer takeaway from this senseless tragedy as we head into the new year and take stock of what we'd like to do better is this: life is short; love deeply; cherish the present moment now, while you still have it; when in doubt, reach out; and never, ever, be afraid to use your words.

Stay warm, everyone.