‘This happened’: A grad student refused to recant her rape accusation even after police arrested her and said she lied

WASHINGTON (DC)
The Washington Post

October 29, 2019

By Katie Shepherd

In the shadow of a red-brick hospital surrounded by neatly manicured grass, a University of Kansas graduate student told three police officers she had been recently raped following a night of drinking with close friends during homecoming weekend in September 2018. She said she didn’t want to press charges or file a formal police report — she just wanted to preserve any evidence in case another woman ever came forward with a similar accusation.

The police asked to look at her phone. She handed it over.

In one of the messages, sent just 16 minutes before the woman met with the officers at the hospital, she called the encounter “borderline rape,” KCTV reported, and said she had “the bruises and statements to prove it.” In other texts sent to a friend in the hours after the 30-year-old woman woke up — still drunk, naked and confused in the Lawrence, Kan., apartment of her then-boyfriend’s best friend — she expressed regret and made jokes about what had happened.

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