Angeles is an enormous, sprawling city with millions of people. The way I see it, there is no other explanation for what happened to me other than a miracle and, as I mentioned before, my faith has always played a powerful role in my life. What else could it be? What are the odds that I would be driving down that unfamiliar road at just that time, when I would usually be at work, but that day I would leave early and would happen upon the evil man who had attacked me being taken into police custody right in front of me?
As long as I draw breath, I will never forget that sight: that twisted, angry, wicked face emerging from the dark doorway into the light, followed by two big strapping cops.
That feeling, that amazing, jubilant, triumphant feeling I had at that moment—the relief and joy that, at long last, justice had indeed been found...is a feeling that I want to give to every victim of violent crime.
I know now that the way I behaved after my attack is perfectly normal for anyone who has been the victim of a violent crime; however, I also know that if it happened to me now, or to someone I love, I would encourage completely different steps following an attack.
In order to understand why I behaved the way I did after my attack, it is necessary to turn back the clock more than thirty years. Before the women’s movement. Before rape crises counselors. Before victim’s advocates. Before sensitivity seminars and modern laws and DNA evidence analysis and “post-traumatic stress disorder” counselors and even before women law enforcement officers (other than meter maids and undercover prostitutes). It was a different world back then for women who were victims of violent crime.
I have a friend who is a fine law enforcement officer now for a major metropolitan police force. When she was nineteen, she was attacked and raped by a stranger while walking to class on her college campus one night. She called the police and the male detectives who interviewed her not only acted as if she had somehow invited the attack or was otherwise being untruthful about it, but actually snickered and told jokes at her expense.
She vowed from that day that she would become a cop, “Because I knew then,” she told me, “that I could do a better job than that.”
Even if a woman showed clear signs of a beating or knifing when she reported the rape, she was very likely to be brutalized all over again when called upon to testify in court. Her past sexual history could be brought up and used against her, as well as whatever clothing she might have been wearing that could be construed as “seductive.”
For these reasons and many more, only one rape in ten was even reported and very few actually went to court.
Nowadays, thank God, the public is much better informed and educated about sexual assault. We know now that this is not a crime about sex at all, but about power and dominance and humiliation. If it were a crime that had anything to do with sexual attraction, then eighty-year old women and five-year-old children would not be raped.
A woman who is sexually assaulted now—especially in a major metropolitan area—is more than likely interviewed by a sympathetic detective (a female, if possible) and at the hospital during her examination will usually be accompanied by a rape crisis counselor, who will walk her through most of the judicial process. Her sexual history is off-limits to defense attorneys and she is treated with far more respect, in most cases, than could be expected thirty years ago.
At the very least, even if she chooses not to report the rape, she will have crisis hot lines she can call and someone to talk to, anonymously and free of charge, from anywhere in the country, at any time, day or night.
But none of those resources was available to the young Lois.
Over the years, I have since interviewed hundreds of rape victims and have found that certain things I did during the attack may have saved my life. For instance, moving my hips to force his ejaculation. This is not an unusual tactic for a victim to use in order to survive. It can cause unnecessary guilt later, making them fear that somehow they were encouraging the attack, but rest assured, it’s nothing like that. It’s pure survival, nothing less.
Some of the other things I’ve learned through the years of working with rape victims have, when I think about my own attack, made my blood run cold. Like significance of the fact that the whites of my eyes turned red.
I’ve now seen this several times in strangulation victims. I have to add—some of those victims were dead. (I’m sometimes called to the morgue to do sketches of unknown crime victims.) Whenever I see some poor girl who didn’t make it out alive, stark-staring eyes blood red, it just brings home to me all over again how very close I once came to death.
I now know the phenomenon is called petechial bleeding and what it means is that the force of the pressure on the veins and arteries in the throat is so powerful that the tiny blood vessels in the eyeball actually burst.
I didn’t know any of this, of course, back in 1972.
I also made plenty of mistakes following my attack. The first was not reporting the assault to the police. The second was the fact that I bathed away all the evidence of the crime.
Nowadays, of course, victims are urged not to bathe until they have had a chance to be examined by a doctor, so that semen and other evidence can be collected in a “rape kit” and saved for trial. So valuable is this evidence that it is crucial that a victim go to the hospital even before being interviewed—preferably in the company of a police officer who can secure the evidence and preserve the chain of evidence for trial.
But what I did is a very common reaction. The first thing most rape victims report is feeling “dirty.” But what they don’t realize is that the stain is not on their bodies but in their souls. This is a violation of the most private, most personal, most essential part of what gives a woman her sense of identity and once that secure wall has been breached, she can never again feel safe.
The man who attacked me in my home may not have killed my body, but he killed me, all right. He killed the me that I was and for the next couple of months, I was a dead woman walking. Now that we understand so much more about post-traumatic stress, my behavior was understandable. But of course, I didn’t know that then. In fact, even the term “post-traumatic stress” was not coined until a few years after my attack, by psychologists working with Vietnam veterans.
Still, my healing started on the day I saw justice done. That day, I came alive again.
This is what I want to give my witnesses: new life.
It would be a while, though, before I would be able to find my life’s work.
First I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And then...I had to come out of hiding.
But before I could do that, I had to do some hand-to-hand combat with my own demons.
“If I Can Just Get off That L.A. Freeway without Getting Killed or Caught”
I owe my career path as an artist to an obscure seventeenth-century Dutch master painter by the name of Johannes Vermeer.
I say “obscure,” because the name “Vermeer” is not usually the one mentioned by most people as the Dutch artist with whom they are most familiar. They’re more likely to say “Rembrandt,” for instance. Art lovers, of course, are well aware of the artist who brought to light everyday life in the
