Lori says she was raped in a children’s sandbox by a fellow Navy service member. She was 18 that April in 1981, and had been strolling with the sailor. She tried to fight, then finally took her mind elsewhere until it was over. “I knew I wasn’t getting away, and I wanted to just live through it.”
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Four days later she was taken by ambulance to the military hospital. She had contracted herpes, which she told the doctor was from her rape.
“The doctor wrinkled his nose,” she recalled. “I was so infected and swollen the speculum stuck and he used the heel of his hand to force it in. He brought in students, and he made them watch. He told one of them to shut me up so they shoved something in my mouth and held me down on the table.”
At the emergency room, a military police officer asked her what happened, she said, and then demanded, “What were you wearing?”
“I said, ‘A red T-shirt and jeans,’ and he said, ‘Well, what did you expect?'” she recalled. “I was treated like I had done something wrong and I asked for it.”
She identified her rapist, but doesn’t believe a formal report was ever filed. “Nothing ever happened to him.”
About a month after the rape, her face broke out in herpes lesions. The outbreaks still occur, Lori said, which is why she did not want to be fully identified or photographed. “It’s almost constant. Now when I look in the mirror and see those sores, I have to relive this, and it never goes away, and it never gets better.”
She also developed an eating disorder. “After I got back to the barracks, I stuck my fingers down my throat, and it hasn’t stopped since.”
She left the military in 1985, and was able to work only briefly at a post office. “Five or six days will pass, and I will not leave my front door.”
Over the years, Lori said, she has abused cocaine and alcohol. “I kicked them,” she said, “but I can’t kick the food.”
She gets disability payments for having PTSD caused by sexual trauma. Although the VA recognized the herpes as being “service connected,” it does not qualify as a disability, records show.
She’s been in and out of therapy for 20 years, she said, and on a variety of antidepressants.
“I’m a broken vase. You can plug the holes, but I’m starting to leak.”
