Maine Maritime Academy Makes Victims Feel So Alone

*This story was submitted to MLAA by the victim who is a graduate of Maine Maritime Academy.

I haven’t talked much about this out loud, and when I did it was with a therapist.  But after reading a recent account about a woman at Maine Maritime Academy who was raped and then screwed over by the school, I felt like I needed to tell my own story.  

I know there are many women who have gone through similar things at MMA, and I want them to know that they are not alone, even if that’s how the school makes you feel. 

I chose to attend MMA because I knew that I wanted to study marine biology and I knew I wanted to play softball at the college level.  I also knew that I wanted to go to a smaller college and to go somewhere that would prepare me to get a good job when I graduated.  From everything I’d read about MMA they had great job placement rates after graduation, which was a big factor in taking the risk to go to a school so far away from home.

I was not in the regiment, but I still had to live in the dorms.  There is one dorm for all students whether they are in the regiment or not, and the females are all grouped together away from the boys.  When I was there you had to live on campus for your first three years, even if you weren’t in the regiment, and there were almost no exceptions to this rule.  When I first got to MMA I was surprised by the environment in the dorms, because even though I was not in the regiment, I was living amidst what seemed like a bootcamp at times, and I had no idea that it was going to be like that.

I played on the softball team, and most of the women on the softball team were not in the regiment.  I don’t know why this was, but it seemed like the demands of the regiment made it difficult for women to play sports and also fulfill all of their other regimental duties.  

We started softball practice in the fall, and I was befriended by a senior on the softball team that I will call “X.” She was not in the regiment, either.  Because X was a senior, she was able to move out of the female dorm and live off campus.  She lived in a rented house that was right behind the dorms, but just off campus.  It was probably within 100 yards of the dorms, but because it was off campus she could have parties there and pretty much do what she wanted.  X lived in the house with one roommate who was also on the softball team.  

X threw a lot of small parties at her house where there was always alcohol.  She had taken me under her wing and had invited me to several parties at her house during my first weeks at the school.  The parties were pretty small, maybe 10 or 12 people total, and she was always inviting male students over to her parties.  But before this night I had never really interacted with any of the boys she invited.

In mid October X invited me to another party.  That night I was drinking like everyone else, but I was not drunk. There were about 10 people at her house that night.  I think there were 4 girls and 6 guys.  One guy who I thought would never take interest in me began showing interest in me that night.  I will call him “B.” I had never met B before and didn’t know anything about him other than that he was a senior at MMA and was friends with X.

At this point in my life I had only been intimate with one person, and that was my high school boyfriend.  But we had broken up right before I went away to college.  I was pretty naive and sheltered and had not had a lot of experiences.  At the party I noticed that B kept talking to X about me, and asking her questions like “how old is she?” and “is she willing to do things?” which I could tell meant sexual things, but I was still pretty clueless as to what was going on.

Eventually X came to me and told me that B liked me and that I should go downstairs with him.  At first I didn’t understand why she wanted me to go downstairs with him, so I asked her why.

When you walked in the front door of X’s house there was a living room to the left, and then her room was upstairs.  Her room was almost the entire 2nd floor and was maybe 200-300 square feet, and that’s where the parties were held.  There was no one downstairs in the living room, and that’s where she wanted me to go with B.  

This made me feel very uncomfortable and I said that I didn’t want to do it.  Then she began guilt tripping me.  She said, “I brought him here for a good time and it’s my fault if he’s not happy” and other things like that.  She also told me that I should do whatever he wanted to do with me.  I kept resisting but she continued making me feel guilty and manipulating me.  She was persistent and kept saying these things over and over in different ways, until eventually I felt like I didn’t have any option.  

Once I relented she told B and he led me down the stairs with him to the living room where we were alone.  We sat down on the couch and were talking, and then I heard people going down the stairs and then out the back door.  I could still hear the music coming from upstairs, but I no longer heard any voices.  At the time it did not occur to me that this was part of X’s plan, but now I think that it was.

After I heard people going outside B began kissing me.  Once he initiated physical contact, I repeatedly told him that I was uncomfortable and didn’t want to do this.  He became more aggressive and I began telling him very forcefully to stop.  He kept saying things like, “it’s ok, it won’t hurt, no one will know, everything is fine.” 

He then forced himself on me and began taking off  my clothes and holding me down against my will and I started crying.  I thought I said things loud enough for people upstairs to hear me, but no one came to check on me, and that’s when I realized that there wasn’t anyone up there.  I was saying, “No, I don't want to do this. Stop,” but he just ignored me and kept saying that everything is ok, everything is fine, don’t worry, etc.  

I was shaking and crying and fighting him, but he was so much stronger than me and I could not get him off of me.  Then my pants were off and he was on top of me and then he said, “oh shit, I don’t have a condom.”  

Right after he said he didn’t have a condom he said “Fuck it,” then flipped me over on my stomach on the couch. Because he didn’t have a condom, he decided to rape me anally. I cried and cried and tried to move away from him or make it stop.  I was still fighting him, but eventually I just gave up and laid there crying.  He didn’t stop until he had finished himself off.

It felt like it lasted forever, but it was only a couple minutes.  When he finished he turned me back over and said "was that as good for you as it was for me?" I was crying, but he had a huge smile on his face.  He thought it was funny.

That statement and his smile haunted me for years.  He knew what he had done.  He knew that this was not mutual.  Then he told me to put my pants back on and he went to the bathroom to clean himself up.  I put my pants on and stayed on the couch crying, and when he came out of the bathroom he went right past me out the front door without saying a word to me.

When I went to the bathroom I realized that I was bleeding pretty bad.  I continued bleeding for another day and was in pain for days.

Later X came back into her house and found me on the couch crying.  I told her that I wanted to go back to my dorm room and when I tried to tell her what happened she cut me off and told me that we would talk about it later.  

The next day at lunch in the mess hall she found me and we went for a walk.  I told her that B had raped me on her couch and she completely blew it off and then she said that it was my fault and that I could have said “No.”  Then I told her that he had anally raped me and she said, “you let someone do that to you?”  She told me that if I told anyone about what had happened I would be ridiculed and no one would believe me.  

I really didn’t want to be singled out, especially because I was already battling the depression of having no friends and being far out of state and being away from home for the first time.  So I decided I would try to bury the hurt.  But the next day at practice X began telling our teammates that I had hooked up with a guy at her house and that I had let him do anal and that I liked it.  Everyone on the softball team heard her story.  

Then in the locker room X played the song “What What (In the Butt)” by Samwell, and they all laughed their asses off and that became like my theme song.  X and at least 3 other upperclass softball players would sing “What What in the Butt” almost every time they saw me.  

It was unbelievably humiliating.  And that told me that I was never going to have anyone believe me or help me, so I knew I would just have to pretend like it never happened.  

They played and sang the song to me all year.  It wasn't hazing, but I guess they thought it was like an initiation or something.  X is the only one who knew that it had not been consensual.  Towards the end of the season once we were winning and they saw that I was a really good softball player they stopped playing the song.  It died off.  But from October through March they played it and sang it.

I think being cruel and manipulating people was X’s way of coping with the trauma that she had been through at MMA, which is an insight I gained through intensive therapy years after I had graduated from MMA.  Manipulating other people and tormenting them gave her a sense of control.

X told me that she had been sexually assaulted at MMA when she was a sophomore by a football player who was in the regiment, and that she got a restraining order against him.  That restraining order allowed her to get permission to move out of the female dorm and into her own place off campus before she was a senior.  I heard a bit of this story from X, and then her roommate told me the full story of what had happened.  

And then right around this time a man that X had been dating died in a car crash.  He had been a staff member at MMA and they were secretly dating, and I guess she probably didn’t know how to handle that either.

After that X would sometimes be nice to me.  She would be my friend and ally and ask me how I was doing, and then she would be cruel to me again.  It was an endless circle that didn't make sense and it was such a confusing and abusive relationship.  She had allowed this horrible thing to happen to me and then ridiculed me about it, but then she would sometimes be really nice to me.  I honestly still don't know how to process that.

Even after I was raped I would go to X’s parties sometimes because there wasn’t much else to do.  I was terrified I would see B again at her house, and I would ask X about him and ask her if I would see him again.  She just said don't worry about him, that he wasn’t going to be around and that he wouldn’t be at her parties.  He became like a ghost, and I never saw him again for the rest of that year.

X was such a manipulator, and I know of multiple girls that she coerced into having sex with her male friends.  There was one girl who was a class above me who would do anything X asked her to do.  There was another girl who was in the same class as me who would also go to X’s parties, and she eventually left the school, although no one knew exactly why.  I think something similar may have happened to her, but we never talked about it.  But after she left the school there became an awkward, tense vibe about the parties and I stopped going.

After my assault I went straight into a downward spiral.  I felt completely isolated and alone, and I decided that I was going to kill myself.  I bought a huge amount of Tylenol as well as other over the counter painkillers and had them sitting on my desk.  One day a female staff member (“Y”) walked by the open door to my room and saw the bottles and stepped in to speak with me.  Y was in charge of the RA’s, and it was her job to monitor the RA’s to make sure they were doing their jobs.

Y asked me what all the bottles were for and I just kept telling her that I wanted to go home.  Then she told me that if I was thinking about suicide that Tylenol was one of the most painful and horrible ways to kill yourself because you are in agony for days before you actually die.  I told her that I didn’t care how bad the death was because it couldn’t be as bad as what I was feeling, and I did admit to her that I was contemplating suicide.

She called an emergency meeting with the MMA psychologist, and she accompanied me to the first session.  We never talked about suicide or my assault in that session.  I just talked about why I missed home.  After that session the psychologist set up a weekly meeting for us.

At the next session I was sitting across from him giving a long answer to a question he had asked me when he fell asleep.  While I was talking his eyes began fluttering and then they closed and then he began this very low quiet snoring.  I stopped speaking, got up out of my chair and went over to the couch where I just sat down to wait for him to wake up.  About 5 minutes later he woke up with a jolt, like he had heard a loud noise, but there hadn’t been any loud noise.

He said, “I'm sorry, I’m sorry.  You can continue.  Would you like to continue?"  I told him that I thought it was best if we just ended the session and reconvened the next week.

The next week he fell asleep in the middle of me speaking again.  It happened exactly like the first time, and I went over and sat down on the couch and 5-10 minutes later he jolted awake again.  I went to him a total of 5 times, and except for the first meeting where Y was present, he fell asleep in every one of our sessions, and each time for 5-10 minutes.  Finally I just lied to him and told him I’d gotten better and didn’t need to see him any more, although the truth was that he had made me feel worse.  Inside my head I told myself that I must be very boring for someone to fall asleep on me every time I went for therapy.  But now I see how absurd it was.  He was a licensed therapist paid by the school to help students and he couldn't even stay awake or stay conscious enough to help me.

I never ended up telling him about my assault because I never got comfortable enough with him.  But Y continued to check on me regularly.  I never told her about the assault either.  I just couldn’t talk about it.  But she saved my life.

The first person I told about my assault other than X was my younger sister.  I told her when she was first starting high school, because she asked me how it was possible that I had failed 2 classes at MMA during my first semester when I had been a straight A student in high school.  This was during my junior year at MMA.  She was much younger, so she didn't fully understand.

People wonder why women don’t come forward to report sexual assaults at MMA.  There are so many reasons.  One of the biggest factors is that I was terrified of having the whole thing turned around on me because I had been drinking underage when I was assaulted.  I saw myself potentially getting kicked off the softball team and getting kicked out of school.  My education was my future and I did not want to jeopardize it.  I’d already heard too many stories of women getting completely screwed over by the school.

I also knew that by reporting the assault I would probably get other innocent people who had been at the party in trouble as well, because we had all been drinking.  And then they would be angry with me.  I hope MMA puts in place a rule that says that if you are assaulted and come forward to report it that it doesn't matter if you were drinking or drinking underage.

But even when women try to play their assault off like it wasn’t a big deal, that doesn’t work.  There are so many effects that stay with you throughout the years.  Years later after lots of therapy I still find myself sometimes thinking that I deserve to have bad things happen to me.  But because of therapy I've learned that trying to hide trauma and trying to hide my depression doesn't help anyone.

My current partner is the first person I’ve been in a relationship with who knows about my assault and the bullying and ridicule that I endured afterwards.  I was shaking when I told him the details and about how mean everyone was to me.  He told me that I never had to see those people again and never had to live through that again.

He's been a rock for me and a great support system.  In all of my other relationships I always felt like I was hiding why I was so depressed, and I felt like I never accepted happy things or accepted love because I felt like I didn't deserve it. 

Recently I became a mother and it’s so amazing to have someone who looks at me with unconditional love.  I want to be a great mother.  It’s taken me years to recover from being assaulted at MMA, and I know it’s something I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life.  But things are pretty good for me now.

I hope sharing this story can help other women who have been through something like this.  

You are not alone.