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‘A Poison in the System’: The Epidemic of Military Sexual Assault [1]

['Melinda Wenner Moyer']

Date: 2021-08-03

Soon, her fear gave way to self-loathing. She woke up every morning angry that she’d woken up at all. She began to believe that she deserved the attack and that the world would be better off without her. “It kind of tied back into the misogynistic view of myself,” she says. “I’m not as fast. I’m not as strong. It was a very weird rabbit hole that I went down of, well, maybe it was my fault. And maybe I was asking for it. And maybe I’m the bad person, and I’m the burden. And I’m just better off gone.”

Over the next four years, Shmorgoner tried to kill herself six times. She can still feel the scars on her wrists, but they are now mostly hidden by tattoos. Somehow, she always stopped just short of cutting deeply enough to die. “I don’t know what stopped me,” she says. “I was very prepared and pretty unafraid to take my own life.” Shmorgoner bore the pain and trauma of her rape without telling anyone, all while deploying to Bahrain, Japan and Australia as a computer-and-telephone technician and then returning to the United States to work on Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego in the same role.

In 2017, she met Ecko Arnold, another Marine who had also been sexually assaulted while on active duty. “Everything she told me about herself, I saw it in myself,” she recalls. That’s when Shmorgoner, whose friends call her Shmo, finally opened up. She told Arnold what happened, and Arnold encouraged Shmorgoner to report her rape. Shmorgoner first filed what in the military is called a restricted report in October 2017. This category of report allows a complainant to disclose what happened and receive counseling and health care, but the details remain confidential, with no investigation pursued. A month later, she filed an unrestricted report, too, initiating a rape investigation.

The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (N.C.I.S.) then began investigating. Shmorgoner had to tell the investigating agent, over and over again and in painstaking detail, what she could remember from that afternoon. By that point, her assailant was in Hawaii, and N.C.I.S. organized and recorded a phone call between her and the perpetrator to see if he would confess to the rape. The agent coached her on what to say and how to say it. It was the first time she had an extended conversation with her assailant since the assault, and she was terrified. “That was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done,” she says.

Shmorgoner started the telephone conversation casually, asking him about Hawaii and his job. Then she shifted the conversation to the assault. “I told him: ‘Hey, that really hurt me. I didn’t want to, we weren’t romantically involved,’” she says. “He ended up apologizing and said, ‘I’m sorry.’” An N.C.I.S. officer who was in the room with her signaled that she’d gotten what they needed and that she could end the call.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/magazine/military-sexual-assault.html

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