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A VICTIM SPEAKS
Against her will

DEBEE TLUMACKI/The Patriot Ledger Grace, 22, talks about being raped by one of her best friends when she was 18. She is now a senior in college.

By Karen Eschbacher
The Patriot Ledger

He was her best friend.

Then one May night during their senior year in high school, Grace awoke to find her red flannel pajama pants pulled down and her friend astride her.

“I remember whispering, ‘No, what are you doing? You have a girlfriend. I don’t want you to do this,’” recalled Grace, whose name has been changed to protect her identity.

But her friend persisted.

Grace, 18 at the time, was a virgin.

Even as she lay there, held down in bed, she couldn’t admit that a friend she trusted and cared for could do this. She couldn’t call it rape, not even in her mind. She didn’t think to, didn’t know to.

Rapists wield knives and jump from behind bushes, she thought.

It would take nearly a year for her to come to terms with the truth.

“The thing I remember most is I remember feeling like, ‘This isn’t happening. Is he really on top of me? ... He’s my friend,” said Grace, now 22 and a senior at an area college.

Groggy and bewildered, she managed to push him away, then wrapped herself in a sleeping bag and moved onto the floor. She’s fairly certain she cried herself to sleep, though details still escape her.

All the while, a group of friends slept, oblivious to the attack, just feet away in the same room of his parents’ beach house, where they had come to celebrate the approaching end of the school year.

“I remember whispering, ‘No, what are you doing? You have a girlfriend. I don’t want you to do this.’” – Grace

The boy’s parents were asleep in another room.

Later, he would tell her that whatever happened, he did because he loved her, and she didn’t love him enough.

Grace believed him. He’d been a friend for three years, the boy she spoke with every night on the phone, her date to the junior prom.

“That’s how I felt with him. That no one else could love me the way he loved me,” Grace said. “If you believe that about someone, you don’t believe he could hurt you. You blame yourself.”

She tried to talk to her sister about what happened the next day, but the words just wouldn’t come.

Grace didn’t speak to her friend again for more than two weeks. But they shared the same social circle, and soon their relationship returned to normal. She left for college, and they stayed in touch. He kept telling her he loved her.

Nearly a year later, during spring break, he visited her house. She had just had her wisdom teeth removed.

“With my cheeks swollen and bruised he climbed on top of me and tried to take my clothes off,” she said. “I flipped out and said, ‘Get out of my house. I don’t want you to do this again.’”

She returned to school and ended the friendship. Flashbacks haunted her. She’d wake in the middle of the night screaming, sweating, but still she wouldn’t call it rape.

One night shortly after, Grace had been drinking. At a concert, she saw someone who looked like her friend, and the truth about that May night at the beach house came pouring out.

First, she told friends from college, later, friends from high school.

She began attending counseling sessions at the beginning of her sophomore year.

Grace never reported the assault to police because she couldn’t accept what happened as a crime, and because she feared the publicity and pain a criminal investigation and trial would bring.

Now, she visits high schools, sharing her story with the hope that other girls might learn to recognize date rape as a crime, and she wants boys to learn that, too.

When teens see a drunk couple going into a room, they should stop it.

“Don’t high-five it,” she said.

Karen Eschbacher may be reached at keschbacher@ledger.com.

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