Forty-Three Years Later, I Will Not Be Silent

*** Content note: This article discusses sexual assault, trauma responses, and the harm of being silenced or denied support. Please read at your own pace and step away whenever you need to.

This past weekend, the story of Jane Doe and the seven Cornell University fraternity members she has accused of rape followed me from one Facebook post to the next, bringing with it a distress that remained long after I put down the screen. According to her civil complaint, the twenty-year-old student was subjected to repeated sexual assaults over several hours after being pressured to consume alcohol and drugs, with the final assault ending at approximately 5:45 in the morning. A screenshot included in the complaint shows a message sent to the fraternity’s group chat inviting other members upstairs to participate, reducing a young woman to a sexual opportunity to be circulated among peers. Her lawsuit describes failures by the university and those responsible for the fraternity to protect her, while her lawyer has challenged the adequacy of the investigation that followed her report to campus police. There was evidence to examine, including the messages, and there was a woman asking for help. Almost two years later, she is seeking accountability through a civil lawsuit while facing a public conversation in which even her anonymity is being challenged; broadcaster Megyn Kelly has announced that she will name her if her identity becomes known (Jane Doe v. Cornell University, Inc., et al., 2026; Media Matters for America, 2026). For survivors watching this unfold, the threat of public exposure adds another disturbing dimension to a familiar story: a woman describes sexual violence, seeks help, and then finds herself subjected to suspicion and hostility. Reading about Jane Doe’s struggle brought back the experience of being told that speaking about sexual assault made other people uncomfortable, and that I should just get over it and remain silent. I spent the entire week triggered, feeling how readily another woman’s struggle to be heard could make my own trauma present again.

I know, unfortunately, that the years between an assault and the present do not always provide the distance other people assume they should, because the passage of time and the body’s response to a traumatic reminder operate on different terms. A life can become full and substantial; we can work, study, love, laugh, make plans, and spend long stretches without consciously thinking about what happened, only to encounter another woman’s story and feel our bodies react before we have had time to understand why. For me, that is part of what it means to be triggered, a word now used so loosely that it can sound like an objection to something unpleasant, when it describes a reminder activating responses associated with an earlier threat. The brain’s systems for detecting danger can respond rapidly and outside conscious awareness, so recognizing that an assault happened forty-three years ago does not necessarily prevent a reaction that makes the threat feel as immediate as yesterday (Haskell & Randall, 2019). We may know exactly where we are and that no one is threatening us, while experiencing a tightening chest, tense muscles, altered breathing, or an urgent need to withdraw. Knowing we are safe and physically feeling safe do not always move together, particularly when something evokes the helplessness, violation, or betrayal associated with the original experience. I can recognize that the story on my screen belongs to someone else and still find that my thoughts have returned to places I had no intention of visiting, because understanding the source of a reaction does not immediately bring it to an end.

This can be difficult to convey to someone who understands memory primarily as a narrative we choose to recall, because reliving an assault bears little resemblance to deliberately remembering an event that remains comfortably situated in the past. I can still remember the exact shade of red of the interior of his Chrysler New Yorker, the smell of his disgusting aftershave, and the hairspray he used so profusely to hold his combover in place, details whose persistence I would gladly exchange for the ability to forget them. When the assault returns in a flashback or a nightmare, those details can acquire an immediacy that makes the intervening decades feel momentarily irrelevant. My husband is occasionally awakened by my screams when I dream that I am being assaulted, finding himself beside a woman who is safe in their bed but caught, in her sleep, in an experience from which she is again trying to escape. These episodes can reappear within a life that otherwise contains love, happiness, purpose, affection, and ordinary concerns, which makes them difficult to reconcile with the assumption that recovery should eventually place the experience beyond the reach of involuntary memory. The Department of Justice Canada’s report on sexual assault trauma recognizes nightmares, disrupted sleep, and reliving responses among its possible consequences, providing language for experiences that survivors may struggle to explain to people who have never endured them (Haskell & Randall, 2019).

When I say that sexual assault trauma never goes away, I am speaking from the experience of having carried it through forty-three years of a life that has continued to grow around it, with relationships, work, learning, and ambitions that have meaning in their own right. Healing has allowed me to build that life, although it has never given me the power to ensure that my sleep will always be free of the assault’s return. The expectation that a survivor should eventually stop being affected makes an occasional flashback or nightmare seem like evidence that she has failed to make sufficient progress. What I want those who have urged me to move on to recognize is the considerable life I have already lived beyond the assault, and the cruelty of making acknowledgement of that life depend on my silence about what can still hurt.

When I told my mother what had happened, she called and confronted the man who had assaulted me, my best friend’s father, who calmly and collectedly assured her that I was lying and that the assault had never occurred. I was hysterical, was given a sedative, and was told to go to school the next day as though nothing had happened, although my whole world had imploded and I could no longer understand how ordinary life was supposed to continue around it. His composure and my distress became part of an intolerable uncertainty in my parents’ minds about whom to believe, leaving me without the unequivocal support I needed after telling them what he had done. My father later told me that only when other girls disclosed that this man had attacked them too did he understand that I had been telling the truth. That admission hurt profoundly, because it meant that my own account had not been enough for him to believe me, and that his certainty had depended on learning that other girls had also been harmed. The hurt and betrayal of that response were, for me, more painful than the assault itself, because the people I had turned to for protection had left me carrying both the violation and the knowledge that they doubted whether it had happened.

That experience is why I cannot regard the response to disclosure as a secondary concern, something unfortunate that occurs after the real injury has already been inflicted. Telling someone about an assault can be an attempt to recover safety through a relationship we trust, particularly when we are children and depend upon adults to help us understand what has happened and decide what must follow. When that trust is met with doubt, the survivor may have to contend with the further loss of the protection she had counted on. Haskell and Randall describe how blame, rejection, and social isolation can intensify distress and obstruct access to support, giving a broader context to an injury I know through my own experience (Haskell & Randall, 2019). My father’s eventual belief could not give that fourteen-year-old girl the support she had needed when she first spoke, and his recognition of the truth did not erase the years in which I had known it alone.

The blame can also come from a family member from whom we might reasonably have expected compassion. My own sister once told me that the assault would never have happened to her, although she too had been in contact with him, because she considered herself stronger in character than I was. In her account, I could have prevented what happened by being stronger and saying no, as though my refusal had been absent rather than disregarded, and as though his decision to assault me could be explained by a deficiency in my character. I was fourteen years old, a young girl confronted by a physically strong, imposing man in his late forties whose higher social standing gave him an authority and credibility I could scarcely hope to challenge. Her judgment erased that imbalance, imagining that a child could overcome an adult man’s physical power through force of character and then defend herself on equal terms when he denied the assault. I had said no, and the responsibility for ignoring that refusal belonged to him; neither my age nor my vulnerability made me responsible for finding a way to stop him. My sister’s words nevertheless asked me to accept that someone with a stronger character would have escaped it. There is a particular betrayal in hearing a family member turn your violation into evidence of her own superiority, claiming an immunity she cannot establish while judging the child you were for violence an adult chose to commit. Such a response leaves the survivor defending both her account and her worth before someone from whom she had hoped for understanding.

Naming the man who assaulted me now would lead nowhere, although there is something bitter in knowing that even this possibility has outlived any opportunity to hold him accountable. When I confronted him about the assault, he denied it and dismissed me as crazy, then continued living his life as though nothing had happened, while I carried an experience he could simply refuse to acknowledge. He died a few years ago, leaving me with no possibility of confronting him again or hearing him accept responsibility for what he had done to a fourteen-year-old girl. My only consolation is that he died while his granddaughters were still very young, and I hope they escaped ever being assaulted by him. As for him, I hope he suffered, and I have no wish to soften that admission into something more comfortable for others to read. I know that whatever suffering he may have experienced could not undo the assault, restore the safety he took from me, or return the years in which its consequences remained mine to bear, but that knowledge does not oblige me to wish him peace. I have already been asked to say too little about what he did and to make too much room for other people’s comfort; I will not add a performance of forgiveness to those demands simply because he is dead.

When I first spoke publicly about my assault many years later, women came to me with accounts of their own, describing abuse by family members, cousins, grandfathers, fathers, and stepfathers, men whose access to them had come through relationships that should have offered protection. Their stories brought the subject into the ordinary settings of family life, where a child’s safety could depend on adults being willing to confront someone they knew, loved, depended upon, or preferred not to challenge. These women were speaking about people who belonged to their families, which meant that telling someone could threaten relationships far beyond the one with the person who had assaulted them. A disclosure might require a mother to reconsider her partner, a daughter to reconsider her father, or an entire family to acknowledge something about a relative whose presence had long been accepted without question. The child or woman who spoke could, therefore, become the person everyone wanted to manage, because her account demanded decisions they had been able to avoid while she remained silent. Listening to those women, I was struck by how much suffering could exist within a family without becoming part of the story that the family was prepared to tell about itself.

My mother used to warn me before Christmas parties about uncles with wandering hands, particularly when alcohol was involved, and I now find myself returning to the extraordinary arrangement contained in that warning. Adults recognized a danger sufficiently well to alert a girl to it, yet the instruction was directed at the girl, who was expected to anticipate the behaviour and keep herself out of reach. I want to know why those uncles were not told, plainly and unequivocally, to keep their hands to themselves, and why their continued presence did not depend on respecting the children and women around them. The expression “wandering hands” itself makes deliberate touching sound almost accidental, as though a man’s hands had temporarily escaped his supervision and the sensible response was to stay clear of them. Alcohol supplied another familiar explanation, although being drunk did nothing to reduce a child’s vulnerability or make the touching acceptable. Whatever protective intention lay behind the warning, the practical burden remained with the girl: she had to watch, avoid, calculate, and hope that her precautions would be enough, while the adult whose behaviour required all that preparation remained part of the gathering.

That is the question I want to pursue beyond the Cornell story: why do we so often organize life around accommodating the person who poses the danger? A family can become remarkably resourceful when it comes to arranging who sits where, advising girls never to be alone with a particular relative, or explaining what he is like after a few drinks, while treating direct confrontation as the step that would cause an intolerable disruption. Those precautions reveal that something is already wrong, yet they can allow everyone to carry on without requiring the man himself to answer for it. Elsewhere, the same protection is maintained through requests to keep a disclosure within the family, worries about what the neighbours might hear, or concern that an accusation would devastate someone whose standing has taken years to establish. The person disclosing the assault is asked to weigh the consequences for everyone else, while her own wellbeing becomes a private difficulty she is expected to manage. When a girl is subsequently blamed for failing to prevent an assault, that arrangement becomes cruelly complete: first she is made responsible for avoiding his behaviour, and afterward she is judged for having been unable to stop it. The disruption began with the man who crossed the boundary, and protecting a child requires adults to confront him, even when doing so changes the atmosphere at Christmas.

Against that expectation of silence, #MeToo offered the possibility of being heard. For a time, sexual violence occupied a place in public conversation that made familiar evasions harder to sustain, as women described experiences that had previously been treated as isolated, exaggerated, or too uncomfortable to discuss. The movement itself began with Tarana Burke in 2006, with a particular commitment to supporting young women of colour from communities with limited resources, well before the hashtag became internationally prominent in 2017. Much of the attention that followed centred on famous men, powerful employers, and women whose careers had been made vulnerable to sexual demands, although the experiences brought forward extended far beyond the workplace. That distinction matters to me because the women who spoke to me about relatives were describing the same abuse of access and power within relationships that seldom make headlines. The movement offered a language of recognition that could reach a woman whose assailant had no public profile, and whose disclosure would never become a news story. Its promise was that her experience mattered even when neither she nor the man who harmed her was famous. (Canadian Women’s Foundation, n.d.-b)

The effect of that public recognition was visible in Canada. Statistics Canada found that police-reported sexual assaults peaked in October 2017, coinciding with the spread of #MeToo, and that reports in October and November were higher than in any other month since comparable records began in 2009. Reports involving assaults that had occurred more than a decade earlier also increased (Rotenberg & Cotter, 2018). These findings cannot tell us what led each individual to report, but they show how concentrated public attention can coincide with people bringing forward experiences they had carried for years. That possibility carries a responsibility for those encouraging disclosure: the moment a woman decides to tell may begin a difficult encounter with relatives, employers, police, or the institutions from which she is seeking help. A campaign that encourages her to speak has also raised an expectation about what will happen when she does.

The Canadian Women’s Foundation documented that tension in 2018, when sexual assault service providers described increases in requests for support following #MeToo and other prominent cases, alongside waiting lists and resources that could not meet the demand. Those accounts belong to that period, but the question they raised remains essential: what have we made available to the people we have encouraged to come forward? A public invitation to disclose can offer recognition and solidarity while also bringing memories, grief, and unresolved questions close to the surface. The woman who answers that invitation may need counselling, an advocate, assistance navigating a complaint, or someone willing to remain beside her through an outcome that takes much longer than the public conversation. She may also need help years later, when another story reawakens the experience she thought she had placed at a manageable distance. Support worthy of the invitation must extend beyond the moment when speaking is praised, with services and relationships able to withstand the less visible, less easily celebrated work that follows. (Canadian Women’s Foundation, n.d.-a)

When I think about how #MeToo seemed to recede, I am thinking of the distance between the urgency of that public moment and the ordinary responses survivors still encounter. The people and organizations doing the work have continued, and the movement’s influence cannot be reduced to how often its name appears in a news feed. Yet the expectation that widespread recognition would produce a lasting refusal to tolerate sexual violence is difficult to reconcile with the familiar excuses that return whenever another case becomes prominent. The discussion shifts toward whether women have gone too far, whether men are now afraid, whether a person’s career should be damaged, or whether enough time has passed for everyone to stop talking about it. I worry that the attention surrounding Cornell could follow a similar trajectory, with an intense period of outrage and demands for answers giving way to another story while Jane Doe continues living with what brought her into public view. The university setting may come to define her case, just as workplace power defined much of the public discussion of #MeToo, allowing people outside those settings to regard the issue as belonging elsewhere. Meanwhile, women whose experiences involve a relative, a partner, a neighbour, or a trusted adult still have to consider whether speaking will bring help or cost them the relationships upon which they depend. I do not want another generation to inherit the same invitation to speak, followed by the same impatience once their speaking becomes inconvenient.

The price of that fading attention is ultimately paid by people whose lives do not return to normal simply because the discussion has moved on. A woman may still be trying to complete her education, remain employed, afford care, protect a relationship, or regain confidence in the people around her while others consider the subject exhausted. Men and boys who have been assaulted also need recognition and support, and nothing in that obligation diminishes the disproportionate burden carried by women and girls. In its analysis of sexual assaults reported to police between 2015 and 2019, Statistics Canada found that women and girls accounted for eighty-nine per cent of victims. The same report, drawing on the 2019 victimization survey, noted that only six per cent of sexual assaults were reported to police. The first figure describes police records, while the second draws on self-reported experiences, making visible how little of this violence reaches a formal process at all. Much of the aftermath is carried in private lives, beyond the reach of a headline, where the quality of a response may depend on whether one person is willing to listen and another is willing to act. (Cotter, 2024)

My decision to speak is my own, and I want to be clear that maintaining attention to sexual violence must not become another demand placed on survivors. Some people will choose privacy, some will speak only to a few trusted individuals, and some will have neither the safety nor the resources to withstand public exposure. Their choices deserve respect, especially when disclosure could affect housing, financial security, family relationships, or access to care. The responsibility for keeping this issue in view belongs to far more people than those who have been assaulted: to adults who hear a child describe an unwanted encounter, friends who witness a boundary being crossed, colleagues who know about a pattern of harassment, and people with authority to investigate complaints or provide protection. A person does not need to publish her most painful experience to make sexual violence worthy of concern, and communities should be able to maintain that concern without requiring a new account of suffering every time their attention begins to wander. The point of listening to survivors is to learn enough to act responsibly, including when the next person who needs protection cannot yet speak.

Within a family, responsibility becomes concrete when a disclosure threatens the convenience of continuing as before. A child who says she is afraid of a particular adult needs protection and a careful response, and adults who feel uncertain about what to do can seek guidance from people trained to respond to sexual violence. Affection, dependence, and a long shared history can make confronting a relative painful, but protecting someone requires a willingness to accept consequences ourselves instead of arranging for the most vulnerable person to carry them. The possibility of family conflict deserves far less weight than a child’s safety, and a man’s standing should never exempt his conduct from scrutiny. The adults who take a disclosure seriously may have to change relationships they once valued; asking a child to remain exposed to danger preserves those relationships at her expense.

Institutions have their own version of that choice, particularly when a complaint implicates people whose success, influence, or financial contributions are important to them, and their response begins with how seriously they teach employees to regard the conduct their policies prohibit. While working at CMHC, I watched an online presentation prepared by human resources that combined psychological and sexual harassment into a single session, using cartoon characters to depict examples of both. Although these forms of harassment can overlap, the presentation gave me the impression that their distinct dynamics and consequences had been compressed into a convenient administrative exercise, with little thought given to the employees watching who might have experienced either or both. I found the use of cartoon characters thoughtless and in poor taste, and felt that a subject involving humiliation, coercion, fear, and abuse of power was being held up to ridicule rather than treated with the seriousness it deserved. An organization may regard such material as accessible or engaging, but it should also consider what it communicates to someone deciding whether that same organization can be trusted with a disclosure.

Policies have meaning through the care with which they are taught and applied, including whether complaints receive a competent investigation, whether information is followed up, whether complainants understand their options, and whether support is available throughout the process. Independent scrutiny matters when those responsibilities have been neglected, because an institution’s confidence in its own procedures offers little reassurance to someone who has experienced their failure. The work requires sustained resources, training, and oversight, with its quality assessed through what happens to people who seek help; neither a completed presentation nor an eloquent statement issued during a controversy can substitute for evidence that the institution takes their safety and dignity seriously.

Public attention has a role in making those practices possible, provided we use it for more than repeating the most disturbing details of a case. We can follow whether promised reviews are completed, whether findings are made available, whether recommendations receive resources, and whether survivors have access to the services the institutions around them encourage them to seek. We can question attempts to expose a complainant’s identity for public scrutiny and decline to circulate information that makes her more vulnerable. We can also keep examining the ordinary assumptions that allow sexual violence to be minimized between scandals, including the notion that respected men are unlikely to offend, that a girl could prevent an assault by being more assertive, or that continued distress reflects a failure of character. These assumptions connect the public story to private life, and challenging them requires patience after the initial anger subsides. What matters is whether the next survivor encounters a better response because people paid attention to this one, and whether the people entrusted with protection understand that their responsibilities will still be examined months and years later.

The assault at fourteen was followed, over the years, by other experiences that made it impossible to regard what had happened as an isolated encounter with one dangerous man. At sixteen, I was groped by an employer; at eighteen, I was stalked by a disturbed young man; at twenty-three, a boyfriend violently grabbed me by the throat and pushed me into a wall; and in my forties, I was drugged at a business conference I was attending with my husband. In my mid-fifties, a total stranger offered me a ride while I was walking along a sidewalk, an unsolicited approach encountered against the history of everything that had preceded it. These incidents differed in their nature and severity, but the assaults and stalking had already made the possibility of danger part of how I experienced the world. They occurred at different ages and in different settings, involving work, an intimate relationship, a professional event, and the ordinary business of being out in public. I have had enough of sexual violence, intimidation, and unwanted intrusions being treated as conditions women must learn to navigate throughout their lives, as though the reasonable response were always another precaution for us to take. A girl learns which relatives to avoid, a young employee learns to anticipate an employer’s hands, and a woman learns that even attending a conference with her husband offers no guarantee of safety, while each incident can be explained away as an individual misfortune. The repetition makes that explanation inadequate, because what has become familiar has been allowed to pass for normal, and I refuse to accept familiarity as a reason to tolerate behaviour that violates our safety, autonomy, and dignity.

The Cornell story has brought these questions close again, but they will remain when its place in the news becomes smaller, just as they remained after the first surge of #MeToo. We cannot keep inviting women to break their silence and then withdrawing our attention before the people and institutions around them have changed their response. I want the concern expressed for Jane Doe to endure long enough to affect what happens to the next woman, and to reach the child whose fear has yet to be taken seriously in her own home. The image of my torn Cornell certificate accompanying this article expresses that solidarity, along with my refusal to let the prestige of an institution outweigh the scrutiny its response to sexual violence deserves. A certificate bearing my name represents work I undertook and knowledge I earned, but my association with Cornell also gives me a reason to speak when a woman seeking accountability describes having been failed by it. That responsibility requires more of us than sharing a story, and more of the adults around a girl than teaching her which men to avoid; it requires us to confront the behaviour we already know about, refuse the excuses that make it easier to tolerate, and remain willing to hear a survivor after the subject has ceased to be fashionable. I can acknowledge the life I have built and the people who love me while insisting that what happened deserves to be named, because gratitude for the present does not require silence about the past. I have been asked to protect other people’s comfort for long enough, and I will no longer cooperate with an arrangement that leaves the person harmed carrying the consequences while everyone else is free to move on.

References

Canadian Women’s Foundation. (n.d.-a). Q&A: Support needs spike after #MeToo. Read source

Canadian Women’s Foundation. (n.d.-b). The facts about the #MeToo movement and its impact in Canada. Read source

Cotter, A. (2024). Criminal justice outcomes of sexual assault in Canada, 2015 to 2019. Statistics Canada. Read source

Haskell, L., & Randall, M. (2019). The impact of trauma on adult sexual assault victims. Department of Justice Canada. Read source

Rotenberg, C., & Cotter, A. (2018). Police-reported sexual assaults in Canada before and after #MeToo, 2016 and 2017.Statistics Canada. Read source

Sources for the Cornell opening

Jane Doe v. Cornell University, Inc., et al. (2026, September 14). Complaint, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, Index No. 161704/2026. Read complaint

Media Matters for America. (2026, September 30). Megyn Kelly on Jane Doe in the Cornell sexual assault case: “If her identity is revealed, I am going to name her.” Recording and transcript of The Megyn Kelly Show. Read source