The Lesson Here Is Listen to the Victim

By Emily Bazelon
New York Times
March 6, 2018

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/books/review/a-false-report-t-christian-miller-ken-armstrong.html

A FALSE REPORT

A True Story of Rape in America

By T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong

291 pp. Crown Publishers. $28.

In 2008, an 18-year-old named Marie reported that she’d been raped. A stranger with a knife entered her apartment in Lynnwood, Wash., while she was sleeping, she told the police, tied her up with one of her shoestrings and blindfolded and gagged her. He then took photographs that he threatened to post online if she went to the police.

It was a story out of a horror movie or a “Law & Order” script. Indeed, Marie’s foster mother, Peggy, thought of the TV show when she heard Marie recount her ordeal with, Peggy thought, an odd degree of emotional detachment. Peggy knew Marie to have a flair for drama, and she started to nurse doubt about whether her attention-getting tale was true. Another woman close to Marie, a second foster mother, was also uncertain. Peggy relayed her misgivings to the police, setting in motion a chain of disastrous decisions by the Lynnwood investigators that unraveled the life Marie was just beginning to make for herself, and gave T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong the title for their new book, “A False Report.”

Interrogated as if she were a suspect and pressured to recant, Marie wound up facing criminal charges for lying to the police. She was a teenager coming out of foster care and her sense of self and her support system was tentative and fragile. She lost her subsidized apartment and many of her friends. Her plans to get a driver’s license and go to college floated away in a sea of despair.

The John Grisham-worthy twist comes from the investigation of three rapes 1,300 miles away, in two suburbs and a city outside of Denver. The Police Departments in the three places in Colorado (Aurora, Golden and Westminster) pooled their clues and figured out they were probably looking for the same attacker. They found him — the break in the case came from a single detail about the spotting of a white truck. On the rapist’s computer, they found the photos he took of Marie. Years later, here was incontrovertible proof that she had told the truth.

The parallel tales allow Miller and Armstrong to juxtapose the damage of a botched rape investigation and the triumph of careful and skilled police work. Though stranger rape isn’t the norm for sexual assault, or the focus of the sexual misconduct fueling the #MeToo moment in which this book appears, it offers broadly relevant lessons. One of the valiant detectives in Colorado (this is a book that turns law enforcement characters into heroes) explains that her rule isn’t simply “believe your victim”; it’s “listen and verify,” which gives her space to refute or corroborate the account, depending on where the evidence takes her. Another detective in Aurora explains how he learned that there is no “right way” for a survivor to respond to an assault. The 65-year-old victim he interviewed was matter-of-fact rather than emotional, much like Marie, but he didn’t discount her credibility, and that withholding of judgment helped catch the serial attacker.

Miller and Armstrong point out a pattern in Lynnwood. The police there wrote off as unfounded 21 percent of the rape reports they received during the five years in which the book unfolds. That’s five times the national average. An external reviewer said that if the two police officers who interrogated Marie hadn’t documented their own “bullying and coercive” behavior, he “would have been skeptical” that such conduct actually happened. Though Miller and Armstrong don’t say so, it’s one more telling illustration of who does or doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

One of the two officers who blew Marie’s case comes across as a secondary villain. Jerry Rittgarn, who threatened Marie with jail if she failed a lie-detector test, left Lynnwood to work as a private investigator. He told Miller and Armstrong he would talk to them only if they paid him, while complaining about “victims who lie” and “a biased story.” The other officer, however, is introspective enough to be the book’s most complex figure. Sgt. Jeffrey Mason questioned whether he was qualified to do his job — after more than 20 years as a cop — when he learned he’d helped prosecute a vulnerable rape victim. When Marie asked for an apology, he showed up and said he was sorry; she found him sincere. Peggy disappointed Marie at first with her muted response but then expressed her intense regret and worked to repair their relationship.

In Lynnwood, the Police Department didn’t fire or discipline anyone, but it did try to learn from its mistakes, Miller and Armstrong reassuringly report. Lynnwood added training on the effect of trauma, which can cause rape victims’ memories to fragment, and adopted well-respected guidelines, which train police officers not to doubt a victim because he or she doesn’t behave as expected and — crucially — not to accuse one of lying without definite proof.

Miller and Armstrong tell their story plainly, expertly and well. It’s gripping and needs no dressing up. More confusing accounts of sexual assault, in which consent is disputed with anguish in a toxic swirl of partying and hook-up culture, have become part of the landscape, especially on college campuses. These contested stories divide our sympathies and spur angry debates. The doubt that Marie confronted, on the other hand, leaves no trail of did he or didn’t he. In its moral clarity, it’s possible to find Miller and Armstrong’s project comforting. There is a bad guy. His name is Marc O’Leary. He’s now in prison for life. (Actually, 327? years, so several lives.)

Miller and Armstrong interviewed O’Leary in prison but it seems, understandably, as if it was hard for them to get into his head. In recreated flashbacks that rely on phrases like “the beast wouldn’t rest” and “the monster would gather strength,” the authors show him stalking women and breaking into their homes by night. All the while, O’Leary was secretly operating a group of specialized porn sites. He was also playing guitar with his friends and planning to have a baby with his wife. “It sounds cliche, I guess, but it’s really kind of an actual Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in real life,” O’Leary said at his own trial. That plus some idea about the duality of man, which he got from reading Carl Jung, are about as deep as it gets.

Miller and Armstrong teamed up for the project that became this book when they discovered they were working on it separately. Miller was reporting on the Colorado angle for ProPublica, an investigative news organization, and Armstrong was chasing Marie’s story for the Marshall Project, a group that focuses on criminal justice journalism. They won a 2016 Pulitzer Prize for an article that led to this book (a Netflix series is also in the works).

Two years ago, “This American Life” ran an episode (narrated by Armstrong and the producer Robyn Semien) that can serve as a nice companion to the book by giving us Marie’s voice on tape. At 25, she is raw but also resilient. “It broke me,” she said of the doubt she was raped and its repercussions. But when the police told her O’Leary had been identified as her assailant, and that her criminal record would be expunged, she got her driver’s license and then a job as a truck driver. She is now married and has two children. Marie is a testament to the harm of poor police work that derails a rape investigation. But she’s also a person living her life. That’s the larger lesson of a nonfiction narrative like this one: It continues, beyond a book’s pages.