Introduction | Kate's story | Jessica's story | Amanda's story | Jane's story | Closing

Kate remembers little about the night she was assaulted. Her last memories of the night are drinking two drinks and one shot she bought for herself, then sipping a drink a male KU senior she met at the bar bought for her.

“We were having fun,” Kate said. “It was a typical dollar night and he bought me a drink. He seemed nice enough.”

Kate suspects she was drugged. However, at the hospital she had more than three times the legal amount of alcohol in her blood and the doctor told her that at the time she was assaulted, it would have been affecting her body like surgical anesthesia.

She’s seen pictures her friends took that night at a local bar. In one, she has 10 shots lined up on the bar. Kate says she would never have deliberately drunk them all. But, with no memory of an attack, she can’t offer effective testimony in court. That is, if her case can ever be prosecuted. It has been under review by the district attorney since the assault in September.

What she knows of that night after he bought her the drink she has learned from police and friends who were with her. Her friends left her alone for only two minutes, but it was long enough for her to disappear outside with the young man who bought her the drink. Later police would tell Kate and her friends that witnesses saw a man on top of her, with her dress pulled up around her waist. Police also told Kate that passers-by, who saw the two on the ground behind a bush, approached them and pulled the man off of Kate. The man then fled on foot. After receiving a ride home from the passers-by, Kate arrived back at her sorority house, disheveled and drifting in and out of consciousness.

Haley, a friend and onetime roommate who saw Kate when the passers-by brought her home at about 3 a.m., said, “I don’t think she knew where she was. She couldn’t say words. It was all jibberish. She could walk but couldn’t actually say anything that made any sense.”

At first, Haley thought Kate had too many drinks, but she had never seen her this incoherent. Her sorority sisters called an ambulance and told the paramedics who picked Kate up that she would need a rape kit.

A recent study published in the Journal of American College Health found that 96 percent of the sexual assault victims who had been given “roofies,” the nickname for the sedative Rohypnol slipped into drinks by would-be rapists, had already consumed alcohol beforehand. Jessie Fazel, a nurse who examines victims of sexual assault at Lawrence Memorial Hospital, said a majority of the victims came to the hospital under the influence of alcohol, rather than “roofies.” She said that some would-be rapists also slipped over-the-counter drugs such as Benadryl and Visine into their intended victims’ drinks to intensify alcohol’s effect, but that voluntary alcohol consumption could incapacitate a potential victim just as effectively.

“I see lots of people who don’t know what happened or had a memory lapse who think they were drugged,” she said. “Lots of times we can’t tell if they blacked out from alcohol or medication.”

Thorough examination can reveal traces of a drug such as Rohypnol in the victim’s blood. Had Kate consented to the rape kit and exams, nurses could have contacted GaDuGi Rape Crisis Center and an advocate could have come to the hospital to accompany her through the painful and embarrassing exams.

Instead, Kate fled the hospital and called her parents. When she related what she remembered to her dad, Tom, who lives in Wichita, she cried for the first time since the assault.

“I started bawling,” Kate said. “Saying it out loud, telling my dad what happened, was so hard.”

Her father found it hard to listen.

“It was terrible,” he said. “She was still disoriented.”

He immediately left for Lawrence to make what he called the longest two-and-a-half hour drive of his life.

Kate didn’t take her KU test that day. Instead, she went to her mother’s house in Overland Park for two weeks, feeling numb. When she returned to campus, she struggled to resume a semblance of the life she had before the assault. She avoided going to class for fear of seeing her attacker on campus. She didn’t feel like going out, because it could happen again. Returning to her sorority house brought with it the pain of gossip and speculation about that night. Self-blame, guilt and shame overcame her when she heard talk of what she “should have done” to avoid it. Kate remembers hearing one friend say, “Maybe if she wasn’t so drunk it wouldn’t have happened.”

Introduction | Kate's story | Jessica's story | Amanda's story | Jane's story | Closing