twisted my arm to look into this thing. I didn’t volunteer. And now when I tell you what I think is going on, you’re trying to minimize it.”
I gripped the phone hard.
“Assume the worst, Margaret. You must assume the worst and you have to do that even if it pisses off some alumni or faculty or students or recruiters or coaches or whatever.
“It will accelerate, you know. If there’s no intervention the odds are she’ll be assaulted again. Probably hurt even worse. That’s the normal trajectory of these things. They. Get. Worse.”
I waited. When she didn’t respond, I changed tactics. If a frightened and abused woman student didn’t move her, investigations and lawsuits might. And no memo about the purity of intellectual freedom would protect us from that.
“Margaret, don’t you realize there are now nearly 100 pending Title IX investigations of colleges for mishandling sexual assault and sexual misconduct pending? Our university is currently not on that list. Do you want it to be? Anti-rape activism is on the rise on college campuses. Remember earlier this year when that guy, you know the one who was after Clinton for so long, Starr, got fired at Baylor? He and the football coach were axed because they failed to help victims of sexual assault. And don’t count on a misogynist climate in Washington D.C. to slow down the campus protests. Women’s activism is increasing, not decreasing.
“Just get off the dime and start the administrative wheels rolling. We have enough for an initial complaint. I’ll make it, for Christ’s sake. I talked to her. I saw the bruises. I heard enough to alarm me as to her safety and well being.
“In fact, consider this phone call the initial complaint. I’ll follow up in writing and have it to you by tomorrow.”
I was breathing heavily. There was silence on the other end of the phone. This time I would wait.
Margaret finally spoke.
“Thanks for talking to her, Kristin. I’ll talk to her again myself.”
And she hung up.
Great. The full administrative brush-off. Well, Margaret would soon realize that not only would I summarize my conversation with Ah-seong Kim in the complaint, I would summarize this conversation as well. If she didn’t shape up and do her job right, she could end up needing legal counsel.
But I realized I couldn’t write a complaint feeling like this. I had to get a grip first. I was vibrating with anger. This was far too close to what police work had been like for me. The kind of work I thought I’d left behind when I quit the force. Well, not all that close since now I was bringing up Jesus every second sentence, but I felt an all too familiar cold knot of frustration in my stomach, the frustration at all the kinds of violence that are covered up, pushed away, and that I was powerless to do anything about.
I turned my chair and gazed for a moment out the window at the same view that Ah-seong had focused on such a short while ago. Grey stone. Lots of very depressing grey stone. Bad choice for buildings in a metropolis nicknamed “The Grey City” for its constant leaden skies. Here it was October and what we had was pale yellow leaves and overcast skies instead of the brilliant hues of the trees and the blue skies of my native New England. Why did I stay in this walk-in refrigerator of a city with all its bad weather and bad memories?
I gave myself a little shake and turned to my computer. I opened a file and started summarizing the conversations I’d had that afternoon.
Then I stopped. It was no good. I needed more distance. I saved the few sentences I’d written and sent it to myself to work on later at home.
Besides distance, I realized, I would need to write this up using whatever was the university’s recommended format. I logged on to the section on University Policies and Procedures. I started to read about the published procedures for filing a complaint on sexual misconduct. There was an additional link for faculty, but when I clicked on it, I realized I needed an additional password.
I also needed more time to process my emotions before I wrote anything that would become part of an official complaint.
I looked out the window again, not seeing the grey this time, but other experiences with administrative duck and cover on Chicago’s police force and their endless, deliberate refusal to deal justly with police misconduct that only sent a clear signal to cops that they could continue to do what they wanted to whomever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
Until some lawsuit caught up with a few. No wonder Chicago was so broke, having to pay out millions and millions of dollars to victims of cops who should have been kicked off the force years before—shooting unarmed civilians, making false arrests, torturing suspects, raping and battering women, and persecuting whistleblowers on the bad cops.
Law and order. That’s what I’d wanted when I’d chosen the police academy. Law and order that would stand for the victims of injustice. Right out of the academy at twenty-four, I’d married a detective, Marco Ginelli, who believed the same as I did. Marco was as Italian as his name with thick, full dark hair always in need of a haircut, framing a face with deep brown eyes, a face full of passion and mischief and intelligence. A face that was fortunately reproduced in our twin boys, Sam and Mike, now aged six.
All that warmth and passion had entered my cold Scandinavian bloodstream and thawed my ice-queen defenses erected against the lovelessness of my childhood and the isolation from peers that my height had caused. When I’d been nearly six feet tall at age fourteen, my parents had actually taken me to a doctor to see if ‘something could be done about it’. Unconditional acceptance was not my parents’ strong suit. Besides, it was their families’ genes that made me so tall. But they’d made me feel like the ugly duckling come to life.
A huge bear of a man, Marco had enveloped my height and my defenses and I had started to melt into a human being. And yes, I was still in love with Marco, only he had been dead five years now, killed when he’d stopped a car containing suspected drug dealers on this same south side of Chicago, shot in the line of duty because his partner hadn’t gotten out of the car to give him back-up. Nobody really investigated. The failure of police procedure, if that was all it was, was brushed under the carpet with the old administrative two-step. Marco’s death only gave me the final excuse for leaving the force.
My own disillusionment with so-called law enforcement had begun much earlier, when I was still a rookie. Getting along, going along, doing what it took to get by and being punished, not even too subtly, by colleagues threatened by anyone who cared too much, who tried too hard or who wouldn’t look the other way when a few bucks changed hands, and most of all by men who were threatened by a blond Viking.
It was not whether I’d been sexually harassed by my fellow officers, it had only been how much and how often. It isn’t the sex. It’s about controlling women. It’s about power. It’s about letting women know you don’t belong here.
But the unwritten rule about police work was never, ever complain about another officer. I had finally complained—about the guy who was assigned to be Marco’s temporary partner the day he’d been killed.
Was it deliberate, a set up to send a message to both Marco and me? A set up that had gone lethally wrong, or was it meant to be lethal all along? I’d always believed the latter, but even the lawyer I’d hired hadn’t been able to make a case that stuck. My grief at Marco’s death and my leaden despair over my inability to do anything about it pushed me nearly to the brink. If I hadn’t had my baby boys to think about, I don’t honestly know what I would have done.
Put
