Underdog, page 4
Within a few sessions, I knew I’d found the right person. Karen was Jewish, she had a sense of humour and a tremendous empathy, and never once did she stand in judgment. I liken her work with me almost to that of an emotional tour guide. She let me talk and helped steer me in the right direction. I often describe my role as an investigative journalist, in getting to the bottom of mismanagement and corruption with any organization, as similar to peeling away the layers of an onion. That applied to me during my discussions with Karen. For the first year, I cried almost non-stop in every single forty-five-minute session with her as I revealed my deeply held secrets and anxieties. Slowly but surely – always with her guidance – I started to piece together the patterns of my life and the anger was replaced with an understanding of how I interacted with everyone, both friends and family. My emotional tour guide saw me through a sexual assault trial, my coming out, my breakup with my ex after twenty years of living in the closet, my wedding to Denise, and finally, but only in recent years, my acknowledgment of the deep denial I’d felt around my first assault. I know it was up to me to do the hard work, but I feel myself blessed to have had a therapeutic relationship with Karen.
The Sunday in August that led me to find Dr. Abrams began quite innocuously. Purchasing a storage bench from a store down the street from my condo, I offered the young salesman who served me an extra twenty-five dollars to assemble it after work. I thought nothing of inviting him into my condo because I lived only two doors down the hall from the lobby, which was manned with twenty-four-hour security. Besides, the store was a fixture in my Yorkville neighbourhood and I trusted the owners. I sensed something was wrong about twenty minutes into the young man’s visit when he suggested he’d made a mistake putting the bench together. As I peered at what he indicated was the supposed problem, he grabbed me and began caressing my buttocks. I retreated, trembling and in silent horror, to my open-concept kitchen. When I next looked out at him, he had his penis out of his pants. Then, somewhat nervously, the words came tumbling out of him. He told me he’d felt a “vibe” from me and that he’d always had a fantasy about having sex with an older woman in a situation like the one in which he found himself. He asked if he could kiss me. When I told him absolutely not, he persisted. He was now standing in the middle of my living room with his penis fully erect. I would write in the victim impact statement I read in court nine months later that I felt this was not really happening to me. Numb, strangely calm, and fearing somewhere in the recesses of my mind that he would force himself on me, I tried to act as if nothing had happened. I eventually convinced him to zip up his pants and leave. I don’t remember whether I paid him. I think I did. I do remember that a few minutes seemed like hours. Considering he could have raped me, I escaped relatively unscathed – physically at least.
Twenty-six years earlier, I had not been so lucky. The first time I was assaulted occurred on a raw and still bitterly cold St. Patrick’s Day while I was in my final few months of journalism studies at Carleton University. With a job in Toronto awaiting me when I graduated that May, I decided to sublet my bachelor apartment, putting an ad in the local newspaper. After I’d arranged with the man who answered my ad a time on St. Patrick’s morning for him to see my apartment, I asked the superintendent to be there with me. He refused, even chiding me for asking him. I was not a priority, he told me. Convincing myself that nothing could ever happen during the light of day and feeling foolish for asking the superintendent to be there, I didn’t want to bother my boyfriend at the time either. As I later learned, it ended up being the perfect time for an assault. Most people were away at work, and the two neighbours who were there and heard my screams chose not to get involved. One later told the police that she thought it was a baby crying. The other believed my cries to be over a domestic issue and she didn’t want to get involved.
Within a few minutes of his arrival, I made it pretty clear I was alone and that no one would be coming to keep me company during his tour of my tiny bachelor apartment. When I turned my back on him for just a moment, he struck, bludgeoning me several times on the back of the head with a lead pipe he had hidden in a pocket of his khaki-green duffle coat. With blood from my wounds streaming down my face and into my eyes, I could think of nothing but fighting back. As he continued to hit me, I turned around and tried to knee him in the balls while screaming at the top of my lungs for help. This only made him angrier and more desperate. To try to silence me, he pushed me to the ground, climbed on top of me, and squeezed his hands around my throat. At that point, all I could think of was how my family would take my death. With the blood roaring in my head and my own voice sounding like it was coming from within a deep tunnel, I finally and mercifully passed out. The Ottawa police later told me that was what saved me. Thinking he’d murdered me, my assailant fled. When I came to, I realized no one was coming to help. I don’t know how I had the presence of mind, but I dragged myself to my front door and locked it.
Then I called my boyfriend, shrieking hysterically. His lovely grandmother kept me talking while my boyfriend hurried over to my apartment. When he saw me with blood pouring from my head, he panicked and called the fire department instead of the police and EMS.
Later, lying traumatized in the emergency ward of Ottawa General Hospital, I replayed the interchange with my assailant in my mind many times. He had given me clues, but I chose to ignore them. He kept one hand in his coat pocket as we spoke. He changed his story. At first he told me he was in a rush because he had to catch a bus to Arnprior, a forty-four-minute drive west of Ottawa. A few minutes later, just before he assaulted me, he said he was in a hurry to take a flight to Montreal. It took the doctors two dozen stitches to sew my head together. I was left with a dent at the top of my head and a scar above my eyebrow. I suffered a concussion, a blackened eye, and an inability to talk because of the abrasions to my neck and throat.
Upon my release from the hospital, far too traumatized to return to my apartment for fear he’d be back to finish me off, I spent the next few days at the home of my boyfriend’s grandparents. The next morning, still reeling from the shock, I went to the police station, where I pored through books filled with various facial features to help the police artist compile a composite sketch. I wanted to ensure I did so before my memories began to fade. That composite would be distributed to every police vehicle and station in the city of Ottawa. The investigating officers told me that, from my description, my assailant easily had a hundred pounds on me. If caught, my attacker would be charged with attempted murder. But I was advised that a capture would most likely occur only if he attacked again. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
I never returned to my apartment. After a few days back at home in Hamilton, where I recuperated from the beating, the emotional trauma hit me so hard I was afraid to return to Ottawa at all. I would only agree to go back to school and finish my degree if I could live somewhere where there was plenty of protection. My mother Judy flew up to Ottawa a week later, and with my boyfriend’s help, I rented a room in the nurse’s residence at another hospital. The residence had twenty-four-hour security, and that, at least, was a comfort. I finished my degree requirements, started my new job in Toronto a month later than originally planned, and graduated in November of that year. I suppose I also graduated from the school of hard knocks, so to speak.
When I returned to Ottawa to work in the job for newly elected Prime Minister Joe Clark’s government a year later, I never followed up with the police to check on the status of the case. Eleven years later, when I started my journalism career at the Toronto Sun, I quickly came to realize that the Ottawa police, considered not the most efficient or effective at their crime-solving abilities, probably didn’t go out of their way to solve the crime or even conduct a proper investigation. That said, I could hardly point fingers since I, too, had put the attack behind me.
That was my first mistake. I wish I could say the trauma dissipated, but when anyone is attacked so violently and left for dead, life can never be the same without counselling, or at the very least deep and long introspection. As a result, I spent the next two decades in denial, quick to erupt in anger when I felt overwhelmed, treated unfairly, or when even the smallest things didn’t go my way.
As the Sun’s editor Lorrie Goldstein told me, the anger found its way into my writing. I’d never allowed myself the indulgence of looking within myself, preferring to engage in my drug of choice: workaholism. Already an obsessive-compulsive personality – meaning in my case that I needed to strive for perfection and fill every waking minute with activity – I was a perfect journalist, forever working long hours and going beyond the call of duty to get the story. The exclusive focus on work wreaked havoc on my personal life, keeping the spotlight off my closeted homosexuality.
In comparison to the first assault, the second attack was minor. But to my shock, it triggered memories of the first, resulting in a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Within days of the second assault, I fell apart emotionally and sank into a deep depression. For weeks afterward, I would wake up in the middle of the night, panicking and in a sweat. I came to call my Fridays off “Black Fridays” because, with less to keep my mind preoccupied, I would spend much of the day crying. When I could see that, after the first week, the trauma wasn’t subsiding, a kind counsellor at the Toronto Police Victim Services unit proposed I contact the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic – for women who have experienced violence – to make an appointment.
Unfortunately, I was told it would take at least a month for a spot to free up. I thought I could wait, but when my grandfather suddenly passed away, the combined stress and sadness proved insurmountable. A kind social worker friend of my ex, Ellie Levine, seeing that I was in chaos and knowing I didn’t know where to turn, got me right in to see Dr. Abrams.
Over the weeks and months that followed, I was blessed to get support from the most unexpected places, in addition to that very generous social worker friend who hooked me up with Dr. Abrams. A few days after the second assault, and still in shock, I had coffee with the city’s now retired auditor general, Jeff Griffiths. I tried to put on a brave face as I relayed to him what had happened. After all, my automatic go-to response – based on how I dealt with and was encouraged to deal with my first assault – was to try to make light of it and go on with my life. Mr. Griffiths was in the midst of a follow-up audit on the handling by Toronto police of sexual assault cases. His original review in 1999 had produced a scathing report with dozens of recommendations. After he heard what had transpired with the police response to my assault, he said it sounded to him like the cops had broken every rule of a protocol that had been put in place by then police chief Julian Fantino to ease reporting of such assaults and to ensure police investigators conducted regular and timely follow-up with victims. Mr. Griffiths would prove an invaluable friend and a sounding board, regularly reminding me of what the police were obligated to do. He was the kind of auditor general who was dogged about keeping up the pressure on those bureaucrats he audited. Five and ten years after his initial 1999 review, Mr. Griffiths did in-depth follow-ups to see how far the police had gone to implement his recommendations. His ground-breaking report has been reviewed and used by police forces across North America.
But it was not just the support from unexpected places that helped my healing. What kept me from succumbing to my crippling depression was a determination to get my day in court – the kind of closure I was denied twenty-six years before with my first assault. I soon realized that getting justice would prove to be as much of an uphill battle as facing my demons with Dr. Abrams. Like so many other victims of assault, sexual and otherwise, my ordeal had merely begun with the assault itself. Over the next nine months, I would feel repeatedly betrayed by a system that is supposed to help victims – by jaded cops untrained in sexual assault cases, by a women’s support network that appeared to pick and choose who it helped, and by an overstretched legal system that tried to strong-arm victims into dropping their cases. I was careful throughout never to talk about my first assault, except to Dr. Abrams and a very few close friends as a way of explaining why I’d fallen so completely apart. Despite my profile as a journalist, I was forever afraid that if the cops or court officials found out what had happened to me twenty-six years earlier in Ottawa, they would take me even less seriously than they did at the time. (I quickly discovered why more than 80 per cent of Canadian women who suffer a sexual assault do not report it. Put simply, they are afraid of being victimized all over again by the police and the court system.)
Mine was a textbook case of incompetence and apathy by all parties involved. In the seventy-two hours following my assault, I found myself repeating my story eight times to the first responders and then to the investigating police officers located in the division representing my Toronto neighbourhood – as if I was being tested to see if my story would stand up under repeated scrutiny. In the first week after the assault, I came into the police station and recorded my statement, only to be told the camera hadn’t worked, forcing me to repeat it a second time.
Although my assailant was arrested the day after the assault, right in the store employing him—Structube – his manager denied all culpability, claiming the incident had taken place outside the store and after working hours. She even refused to do the bare minimum and apologize for what had happened. To further rub my nose in it, my assailant retained his employment, and at that location instead of being transferred to another store or put on leave until the court case was settled.
The real culprit was the police. Given the circumstances – the store was right down the street from my condo – they could have made it a condition of my assailant’s bail that he was not allowed within a safe distance of my residence. Instead, and without my knowledge until it was too late, he was merely ordered not to come within one hundred metres of my home, which is nothing – forcing me for the next nine months to live in fear that I’d run into him. And I did, three times.
When I told the investigating officer that it was difficult to walk by the store, he chided me, saying that if it were him and it bothered him as much as it bothered me, he would walk out of his way, even if it meant adding thirty extra minutes to his route to work, to avoid such an encounter. Disgusted with his lack of empathy, his victim-shaming and poor follow-up, I blew up at him, and he blew up at me. We eventually calmed down and reached a truce, and to his credit, from that day forward, he was much gentler and more helpful in his approach to my case. Just before Christmas (and nearly four months after the assault) he contacted me to say the Crown was considering dropping the charges but he’d be recommending against that. I made it clear I would not allow that to happen and thanked him for his vote of confidence.
The system set up to provide counselling support to victims in crisis wasn’t much better. Aside from the Toronto Police Victim Services, which was only a stopgap measure, I found myself repeatedly pouring out my story to various counselling agencies, only to find out they either had a long waiting list or to not hear back from them again. I never once told any of them I was a journalist, although some probably recognized my name. Throughout, I wondered – if I’d presented as more vulnerable (and perhaps less affluent), would they have found me an opening much faster? I will never know.
The Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic, about which I’d heard wonderful things, contacted me after three months – long after I started counselling with Dr. Abrams – to tell me a spot had opened up. That was not the only agency to leave me hanging. About two weeks after the assault, I met with the assistant coordinator with the provincial Victim/Witness Assistance Program who was charged with acting as an advocate as my case proceeded to a plea or to trial. I poured my heart out to her that day, never to hear from her again. It was only when I tried to reach her three months later that I found out she’d been assigned to a new job a few weeks after we met. No one new had been put on my case. I was left to fend for myself over the Christmas holidays, as I wrote my victim impact statement in preparation for a January pre-trial conference on the case.
The Victim/Witness Assistance Program reluctantly agreed to set up a meeting with the Crown attorney, Chris Punter, in early January after I insisted on it. And I did hear from a new case worker with the provincial courts in March, but it was long after I’d written my own victim impact statement, built up a wonderful support network, and taken significant steps on my journey of self-discovery with Dr. Abrams. By 2005, after seven years as a columnist at City Hall, I was well enough known to police and the courts for my scrappy approach to political reporting. Yet I never asked for, or expected, special treatment. I only wanted to be treated fairly and with respect. But when that didn’t happen, I was more than dogged about getting my day in court. I wanted to be the voice for others in my predicament who did not have a voice, or who felt battered even more by the system. Still, it was only after I met with Mr. Punter and two officers from the Victim/Witness Assistance Program that I started to feel they were taking my case seriously. Although I never indicated who I was, Mr. Punter made reference to my column in the Toronto Sun, suggesting to me that it was partly my profile that had helped attach more of a seriousness to the case. I could only imagine how others without a column were treated. He told me my assailant wanted to plead guilty to common assault, but given the brazenness of the attack, the Crown would only accept a guilty plea to the original charge of sexual assault. That would get him listed on the national sex offender registry, but it was unlikely he’d get jail time because it was a first offence. Mr. Punter also offered little hope that any judge would include an order in the sentencing subsequently causing my assailant to lose his job. I insisted that I would deliver my victim impact statement in person to try to make whichever judge heard the case understand what it was like to walk regularly by Structube and see my assailant waiting on other women as if nothing had happened. The Crown agreed that would have far better impact, if I could handle doing it.
