UNITED STATES
The New Yorker
By Rebecca Makkai , JUNE 8, 2016
Last week, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office released a victim-impact statement written by the twenty-three-year-old woman raped on the Stanford campus. The statement, which has gone viral, is sharp, clear, stunningly open, occasionally funny. Its author is a very good writer in the purest way: she makes us feel some sliver of what she felt.
I was startled to learn that she’d read this statement out loud in court to her assailant—that she hadn’t just been able to slip it under the judge’s door in the middle of the night and leave it at that. I wrote my own victim-impact statement at sixteen, and, on Monday, as I read about the Stanford case, I tried to remember what the procedure had been; I thought I had handed mine in like a term paper, or sent it through the mail. And then, on Monday night, it came back to me, twenty-two years after the fact: I did read my own statement out loud, in court, to my abuser. I’d had a choice, and I chose to do it. I might have been braver then than I am now.
That I didn’t remember this before has less to do with my blocking it out than with the fact that the memory is overshadowed by bigger plot points. Because as soon as I delivered the statement, I was accused of plagiarism.
It was the summer of 1994, and I’d been listening to “Janie’s Got a Gun” on repeat since May. That summer, I read James Joyce for the first time; I also still had an American Girl doll in my closet. I was ten years past learning to ride a two-wheeler; I was ten years from publishing my first short story. From the age of seven to thirteen, I had been sexually molested by a family friend who occasionally lived in our house; in the summer of 1994, I was a few months from losing my virginity to someone I liked. I was closer to a healthy sense of sexuality, both chronologically and emotionally, than I was to the abuse.
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