Denise Frame had just turned 18 and graduated from Marine boot camp when a fellow Marine followed her back to her barracks at Camp Johnson in Jacksonville, N.C.
“I opened the door; it was him. ‘Bet you never expected me.’ He pushed my arms against the steel railings of my porch, raped me. Then he left. I sat in the shower and cried. Didn’t know who to report it to.”
She confided in her roommate. About a month after the January 1988 rape, Frame said, her roommate told a corporal what had happened.
Frame said an officer “told me I could go to sick bay to get checked for AIDS, STDs,” she said, “but not tell them why I was there.”
Then military investigators began asking her questions, she said. “How did I dress? Did I provoke him? Did I invite him in?”
“When they found out I had left my door unlocked, they said it was my fault,” she said. “I couldn’t handle it.” Soon she asked them to withdraw the rape charge.
Her commanders then charged her with having a male in her room and demoted her a rank, records show.
Her attacker was charged with consensual sodomy, she said. She has no idea what happened to him.
After that, she said, she resolved to never report anything else. She said she was raped twice more by fellow service members.
She got married and had a daughter and was given an honorable discharge.
“I thought I was handling life pretty good,” she said.
She moved to upstate New York, where she worked at various jobs, including as a developmental aide for the handicapped.
Then a co-worker began to call her names and follow her, but when she reported him, she was transferred, she said.
“It was like what the military did – punish me for being a victim.”
Now 34, she goes to counseling for sexual trauma. “I said, ‘I need help. I’m going crazy.”‘
