He Said, They Said

Standing in the dark bathroom in her bra and panties, her hand to her mouth, she sobbed. Strange noises came from her, grief unfurling from someplace inside her. And yet, at the same time, her mind was racing. It determined, almost independent of herself, that she must immediately get beyond what had happened. She reasoned that he hadn’t threatened her life, hadn’t borne a knife or a gun. The city was an unfamiliar place. If she left now, where would she go? What would she do? Most of all, she became instantaneously determined that she would not suffer from this — she would avoid the post-traumatic stress she’d seen firsthand as she studied to become a counselor. She would accomplish this by ignoring, by attempting to discard, the few distinct images that had managed, somehow, to make inroads deep in her mind, into memory.

Her naked feet trod back across the tile. In his bedroom, she pulled back the covers, slid back in bed with him, beside him. …

In the morning, she awoke once again, finally, fully, if groggily, to sunlight: a bedroom painted white, Ikea furniture, a bookshelf full of medical texts, blue-striped Nautica-brand sheets. And to his face. His green eyes stared across the pillow at hers. He smiled.

He moved his naked body toward her, pulled her closer to him, tucked his body into hers. Once again, his hands crept over her. This time, she says, she let him inside her willingly.

Unprotected, once again, he climaxed. They lay there, side by side. As the room filled with morning light, they talked, enjoyed each other’s company. They had sex again. Again he finished inside her. At last, well into the afternoon, they got up and dressed, she in the same clothes from last night, he in a fresh pair of scrubs.

He told her he’d like to see her again, and how much he’d enjoyed her. To the man she was sure a few hours ago had raped her, the man with whom she was about to embark on a three-month relationship, she said Me too.

How, I asked Rachael one day last summer, how could she do it? “I don’t know,” she said, looking me in the eyes. “He had taken away my power. I guess it was an attempt on my part to regain some of the power I’d lost. But honestly, I don’t really know why.”


TWO YEARS WOULD PASS before Rachael*, contacted by authorities, would tell the story of that night. Despite the fact that they determined her allegations to be credible, her story wasn’t one of those presented during Jeffrey Marsalis’s second rape trial last June, which ended, after nearly four weeks of testimony, with him convicted of just two counts of sexual assault. He was acquitted of raping six of the seven alleged victims in the case (the jury hanged on a single rape charge) as well as impersonating a public servant, for allegedly convincing several women that he was a CIA assassin who spent time in caves in Afghanistan following September 11th and carried a CIA-issued pistol he’d nicknamed Priscilla and talked to in an Elvis voice. Instead, Rachael is one of a staggering number of Philadelphia-area women whom authorities believe Marsalis assaulted but whose alleged rapes he’s yet to be formally charged with, and probably never will be. The reason is contained within Rachael’s story: Many of the women — almost all of whom didn’t come forward on their own, but instead were contacted by authorities — had reengaged Marsalis after the fact or otherwise behaved toward him in ways that seem counterintuitive, badly damaging their credibility.