E. Jean Carroll was a painful reminder of my rape in North Philly 20 years ago, still unsolved

In TV crime shows, there is always a chalk outline of a body. For months after I was raped in a neighbor’s yard, there was an imprint of my body in a bed of ivy. I saw it every day from my front porch until the first snow covered it. A clear, distinct imprint, the outline of the crime against me.

That crime wasn’t solved. Not in 60 minutes, not in 20 years. It has haunted me ever since.

It was a beautiful, sunny September afternoon. My tree-lined side street in North Philly was quiet — kids had just gone back to school. I was in my front garden taking my trash cans up from the street on trash day when a voice from the sidewalk asked if he could help. I smiled at him, laughed lightly, said thanks, I was good, and turned my back as women do to end conversations with men who are strangers.

It took mere seconds for him to grab me. It was so fast, it took my breath away. As he locked my arms behind me and shoved me forward, he told me that if I screamed, he would kill me. He pushed me into my neighbor’s ivy-covered yard, which is totally hidden from the sidewalk and street.

I was beaten and bitten, sodomized and raped. I couldn’t scream. He pinned my arms beneath me so I couldn’t move. He told me he would kill me when he was done.

He didn’t kill me, but for weeks afterward, part of me wished he had. Rape upended my life. For months the evidence of his violence was visible on my body — to me and to my spouse, a third and unwelcome party in our most intimate moments.

When I called the rape crisis center where I had been a volunteer in college, I felt no empathy from the woman on the other end of the phone. She told me I needed to get a pill in case I was pregnant and get checked for sexually transmitted infections such as HIV. She told me sternly that if I didn’t call the police, other women could be raped and it would be my fault.

I did as I was told and called 911. I made the report that few women ever make.

The longest-running prime-time series on TV, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, regularly centers on solving cases of rape. On SVU, victims get help and rapists get justice. Lead detective Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay, who has taken on a real-life role against sexual assault by getting the backlog of rape kits tested, is an iconic pop-culture figure. But no women handled my case. Not the officers who came to my house to take the initial call and view the scene with me, nor at the SVU, to which I was driven in the back of a locked police car like a perpetrator, my neighbors watching as I was taken away. Unlike on TV, I was not allowed to have either my spouse or my best friend, a social worker who heads a domestic violence agency, with me as I gave my report.

The first thing the SVU detective said to me was, “If you are lying, we will prosecute you.” I felt my heart race. This wasn’t an idle threat: Between 2013-2018, more than 120 women in the U.S. were charged with reporting a “false rape.”

He told me women were always trying to get back at their boyfriends by claiming they were raped. (This is not true; the actual number of false reports is minuscule.)

My spouse was with me as I stood semi-naked while my detective and one other photographed my injuries — the bites on my breasts, the bruises the size of dinner plates on my thighs, back, and buttocks, the bruises in the shape of fingerprints on my arms, the cuts on my legs. All to prove that I was, in fact, a victim. Seeing my injuries, my detective was gentler, telling me he had two daughters.

Sexual assaults are among the most prevalent crimes in the U.S. They are also among the least reported.

One out of every six American women has been the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime. Someone is sexually assaulted in this country every 68 seconds. There are nearly a half-million women raped each year in the U.S. FBI data from 2018 showed that rates of other violent crimes — robbery, car thefts — had fallen steadily for decades, while rapes had risen, steadily, in the previous six years.

In Philadelphia, gun violence has occluded all other crime. But people are likely raped in this city every day and it never makes the news. Why not?

Although the U.S. incarcerates more people than any other nation, rapists are among the least prosecuted criminals. After my car was stolen, Philly police called me four times; I got zero calls from my SVU detective after I was raped. Fewer than 1% of rapes lead to felony convictions, and at least two-thirds of rapists get away with it altogether, as rape cases like mine are never cleared.

All this despite #MeToo, despite high-profile rapists like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly being prosecuted after decades of sexual predation.

The default is still the same: Rapists are still presumed innocent and rape victims presumed suspect. When U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual assault during his confirmation hearings, which led to death threats against his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, donations and interest in men’s rights organizations soared from Kavanaugh supporters.

This month, former President Donald Trump was found guilty of sexual abuse against writer E. Jean Carroll, a moment that led rape survivors to feel hope that things might change. But the next night on live national TV, Trump invented a scenario in which he was a victim and she a slutty 60-year-old trolling for sex at a department store, and the audience of New Hampshire voters laughed. They laughed.

That response is anomalous only in that it was on live TV. Trump thought he could spin a story about a violent rape he perpetrated because rape is still, several waves of feminism notwithstanding, not taken seriously enough by police, by the criminal justice system, by victims themselves.

Trump’s actions at the CNN town hall have led Carroll, who was awarded $5 million in punitive and compensatory damages in the initial verdict, to seek further damages. Her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, asserted that Trump’s repeated denials that he sexually abused Carroll “show the depth of his malice” and merit heavy damages.

After I was raped, I kept calling the SVU for updates. There were none. I called the Philadelphia Police Department again this week, 20 years later, asking for the police report for this story. They told me my case was archived but still open.

The effects of a rape are long-lasting. At least 90% of victims experience emotional and physical consequences, including post-traumatic stress disorder and a higher risk of suicide. I was diagnosed with complex PTSD after the assault. Rape impacts the victim and those closest to them. It’s a trauma that is relentless as it is limitless. A new neighbor tore out that ivy, but I retain a physical and emotional imprint that keeps me tethered to that assault. The lack of justice, more so.

The myriad of data states emphatically that the trauma of rape and sexual assault is ongoing, that victims are not being heard, nor their cases addressed as assiduously as other crimes, and that rape victims are lost in our criminal justice system. That must change: more SVU detectives, more prosecutions, ending backlogs of rape kits.

Rape victims are told to embrace the word survivor, but that elides what happened to us, the violence and terror we endured, and its painful aftermath. Until the criminal justice system prioritizes rape as a crime and prosecutes rapists with more fervor, we are not survivors. We are victims searching for justice.

Victoria A. Brownworth is a Philadelphia writer and reporter. Her most recent novel, “Ordinary Mayhem,” addresses rape and other crimes against women. She won the 2023 NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists award for investigative reporting.