had decided it wouldn’t be fair to hold her assailant responsible. The things that defined her selfhood—her verve, her confidence, her eagerness—had been devastated just as they were reaching a peak. Everyone was technically doing what they were supposed to, and yet it felt like a glass structure was being constructed around some unfathomable rot.
The recent shift in the broader social understanding of sexual assault has been so dramatic and so overdue that it has obscured the fact that our systems still mostly fail on this particular topic—that, as demonstrated by the Kafkaesque Title IX bureaucracy, these systems are unequal to a crime that our culture actively manufactures. No crime is confounding and punitive the way rape is. No other violent offense comes with a built-in alibi that can instantly exonerate the criminal and place responsibility on the victim. There is no glorified interpersonal behavior that can be used to explain robbery or murder the way that sex can be used to explain rape. The best-case scenario for a rape victim in terms of adjudication is the worst-case scenario in terms of experience: for people to believe you deserve justice, you have to be destroyed. The fact that feminism is ascendant and accepted does not change this. The world that we believe in, that we’re attempting to make real and tangible, is still not the world that exists.
I’ve begun to think that there is no room for writing about sexual assault that relies on any sense of anomaly. The truth about rape is that it’s not exceptional. It’s not anomalous. And there is no way to make that into a satisfying story.
* * *
—
While writing this, I found Jackie’s long-dormant wedding registry on the internet. As I snooped through it, I pictured the house where she lives under a new last name—its cheerful kitchen, with red enamel apples on the paper-towel holder; the sign in the entryway that says, “Gratitude Turns What We Have into Enough.” I felt an awful contempt flooding through me. Earlier that day, I’d read her entry on Encyclopedia Dramatica, the troll Wikipedia: “Does this mean lying whore Jackie…owes us a free gangbang now?” it asked. “How about Sabrina Rubin Erdely? SHE deserves a good chokefucking, no?” I had recoiled, partly because of the language and partly out of a shocking sense of recognition: I resent the two of them, too. There’s a part of me that feels as if Jackie and Erdely inadvertently sentenced me to a life of writing about sexual violence—as if I learned to report on a subject so personal that it imprinted on me, as if I will always feel some irrational compulsion to try to undo or redeem two strangers’ mistakes.
But I know how easily anger is displaced on this particular topic. I know that what I really resent is sexual violence itself. I resent the boys who never thought for a second that they were doing anything wrong. I resent the men they’ve become, the power they’ve amassed through subordination, the self-interrogation they ostentatiously hold at bay. I hate the dirty river I’m standing in, not the journalist and the college student who capsized in it. I understand that we have all shared in the same project, in some way. Schambelan writes, in her n+1 essay:
This is the story I’ve come up with, about the story Jackie told: she did it out of rage. She had no idea she was enraged, but she was. Something had happened, and she wanted to tell other people, so that they would know what happened and how she felt. But when she tried to tell it—maybe to somebody else, maybe to herself—the story had no power. It didn’t sound, in the telling, anything like what it felt like in the living. It sounded ordinary, mundane, eminently forgettable, like a million things that had happened to a million other women—but that wasn’t what it felt like to her.
At the close of her piece, Schambelan guesses at what Jackie might have been trying to say. It “can’t be said reasonably,” she writes. “It must be said melodramatically. Something like: Look at this. Don’t you fucking dare not look….You’re going to know what we’ve decided is worth sacrificing, what price we’ve decided we’re willing to pay to maintain this league of men, and this time, you’re going to remember.”
When I think about Jackie now, I think about the year that I came within striking distance of this fevered derangement—never at UVA, only after I