Arabella Ribera came from a military family. Her brother was in the Air Force; her father, the Army.
In 1984, at age 18, she joined the Air Force, and was sent to Lowry. She had been in photography school there about three months when she was invited to a party off base. She got a ride with a man in her dorm and was caught off guard when he turned on her in the car and forced her to perform oral sex.
“I didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He grabbed me and pulled me down. … He wouldn’t let me go. I was choking. I thought I would die,” she recalled.
After that night, Ribera began to drink heavily. A few days later, walking home from drinking at the airmen’s club, the same man followed her to a remote part of the base and sodomized her again. She said she screamed and cried until he let her go.
The next week, when a master sergeant followed her into a bathroom and began putting his hands up her shirt, she “freaked out,” she said. He stopped, and told her the incident never happened, and that life would be hell if she told anyone.
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By that point, recalled Ribera, now 37, “I was shot.”
She never reported the assaults because of the threats and feeling that no one would believe her.
She began to drink heavily, in order to dull the fear and her inhibitions. She became promiscuous. “I was disgusted with myself. The guys I slept with, I didn’t even like.”
Being a female in the military, she said, meant “you had to fight tooth and nail to compete with the men. So I became one of the boys. Had a foul mouth like the men. Drank like them. I didn’t know how to be a lady anymore. I didn’t show emotion. I didn’t cry.”
Soon she became angry, and then violent. She left active duty in 1988, but stayed in the Reserves until 1993. A host of physical problems sent her to the Denver VA Hospital in 1996, where a doctor asked her if she had ever been sexually assaulted. “I said, ‘Yeah, but it’s no big deal.’ The doctor said, ‘Please, just report it.”‘
Months later, in an effort to get help, she did report her assaults to the VA. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of sexual trauma in the military, records show. Still, “I was in denial. I just wanted to get married and have kids.” But she couldn’t hold a job, and stopped dating.
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She began therapy, but at first reliving the trauma was too much to take. “I crawled on the floor, cried and cried and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’
“I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to live.”
She ended up in the VA Hospital. She attends group therapy with other women at the VA, and feels there is much she has overcome. “I blamed myself. … I want to help other women know that it’s not their fault, and they can get counseling.”
“Things need to change” in the military, she said. “It’s so ugly, you don’t want anyone else to go through it.”
