Beginning two years ago, 63-year-old Navy veteran Genevieve Turentine began having panic attacks, chest pain, nausea and dizziness. While at a Department of Veterans Affairs women’s health clinic for a medical exam, Turentine said, she was asked on a questionnaire if she had ever been raped.
She answered yes and was referred to a psychiatrist. “I never cried so much,” she recalled of that first visit. “I used Kleenex after Kleenex, saying, ‘I’m sorry.”‘
She started going to group counseling for sexual trauma, and the memories began coming back:
It was spring of 1965, and Turentine was assigned to Naval Air Station Lemoore near Fresno, Calif. A fellow sailor had agreed to drive her to Los Angeles so she could visit a museum, she said, when he suggested they take a side trip to Yosemite National Park.
She recalled dozing in the car. “My next memory is of him on top of me, pulling at my clothes. I’m telling him to stop! Stop!” He raped her, then drove her to Los Angeles and dropped her off at a YMCA, she said. She said she did not report the attack for fear of being blamed.
“I felt so violated, confused, helpless, numb, powerless, angry, shamed and grossly traumatized,” she said.
She married and worked as a nurse until the physical symptoms from burying it caught up with her in 2000.
“Rape? Three years ago, I couldn’t say the word,” Turentine said. “I was in total denial.”
Now, she said, “I’m consumed by it. I want all the information I can get. If I can help just one woman, look what that’s done. You’ve saved a life.”
Turentine is now a rape-victim advocate and urges women to report abuse so the public is aware of the problem. “They don’t want to know what’s going on with their wives and their daughters and their sisters – but the American people need to know.”
