This is the sixth and last of a series of posts about what happened after I was raped.
Ultimately, this is how the criminal case against him played out:
Rollo was convicted of rape in the other woman’s case, the one he attacked after me. He was sentenced to five years in prison. I sobbed when I found out: five years was an insult, a person could get more for drugs. Austin explained my options. I could press charges against him in my case and testify at the trial. Or, I could decide not to press charges, in which case after completing his sentence Rollo would be sent to immigration detention and get deported to his home country, Sudan. He had been in the US illegally when he attacked me.
There’s famine and genocide and dire poverty. Even by the standards of Africa it is a very unfortunate nation. The fact that Rollo would be deported to Sudan changed the whole equation for me because being sent back there seemed like as bad or worse a punishment than serving a term in an American prison. American prisoners don’t starve, but I had read about people in Sudan starving. Furthermore, in Sudan, Rollo would not be my own country’s problem anymore, would not be a risk to American women. And he would be out of my hair forever.
I told Austin that I decided not to prosecute because I wanted Rollo to be sent to Sudan sooner rather than later. Austin said okay, and this was the last time I ever spoke to him.
I figured the story was over at this point. I posted about it on my blog and revealed Rollo’s real name. Later I got an email from a woman. She said she was the other woman he had attacked and had found my blog post when she Googled his name to look for press reports about her own rape. She asked if we could talk, so we talked on the phone and swapped stories. I felt I personally owed her a great deal for testifying against him, since if she hadn’t done so I would have felt obligated to do so. The woman said she had done it, in part, for me, that they had told her Rollo had attacked others. It felt like she had taken a bullet for me. But I don’t want to go into the details of everything she told me because it’s her story, not mine.
Later on as Rollo was still serving his five year sentence, I Googled his name again myself, to see if anything came up. To my horror I found a court of appeals document, where the court said his conviction had been overturned and laid out their reasoning.
I learned a lot about Rollo from the document: that he had a high school education in Sudan (which surprised me as most people in that country do not), had come to the US on some kind of visa and worked for UPS. After his visa expired he didn’t return home but stayed in United States. As far as overturning his conviction, it was a technicality pretty much. Before his trial, Rollo got fed up with his court appointed defense attorney requesting delays. He had asked so he could represent himself, because he wanted to take the case immediately to trial and his attorney did not. The judge had basically told him it was a terrible idea to represent himself, and ordered him back to jail to think it over until the next day, and when Rollo returned he had changed his mind and kept his attorney after all. The appeals court said he should have been allowed to represent himself immediately on request and so they overturned his conviction and sent him back for retrial.
I read this document (several months old by then) on a Friday. I called the police victim advocate whose number I had been given and said I would be willing to press charges and testify against Rollo in my case, since the other case seemed to be in jeopardy. The victim’s advocate said they’d look into what happened and call me back. I spent the weekend in a state of great anxiety and depression and anger. But on Monday the victim’s advocate called with great news: a higher court of appeals had issued a subsequent ruling and overturned the overturning of Rollo’s conviction. It’s just that THAT document didn’t turn up in my Google search. So Rollo was still a convicted rapist serving his time.
Years had passed since the rape. Every year, starting with the first year after, the entire month of June would be ruined for me. All month long I’d have intrusive thoughts, mainly violent images of what I wanted to do to my attacker. I wanted to cut him. Specifically I wanted to cut his face.
I had used a box cutter at the job I was fired from and had once slashed my own arm by accident at work, and I particularly remembered this injury because it didn’t bleed at all but burned terribly all night long and because it left a scar. I wanted to slash my box cutter across Rollo’s face that would scar him, so that every day when he looked in the mirror he’d see that scar and know who gave it to him and why. All June I’d be thinking about this. The rape was just on June 16, but the whole month was ruined. For years and years. My dad’s birthday is that month. Also Father’s Day. Lovely weather at that time of year. And all I could think about was wanting to cut Rollo.
Every anniversary of the attack I would make a blog post about it. At first anyway. Eventually I posted I thought Rollo had probably finished serving his sentence now. Someone who reads my blog contacted me to say they’d done some looking and Rollo was indeed out of prison and now he was in a certain immigration detention center.
I looked up the detention center and what I saw alarmed me. The facility was a low security facility designed for people who did not have criminal records other than immigration offenses. The facility also housed women and children as well as men. It seemed to me like Rollo might be able to attack women at this facility while he was waiting to get deported.
I didn’t want this to happen and was determined to do something about it. I contacted some people, among them a member of Congress (I forget if my member of Congress representing my district in Ohio or the person representing the part of Virginia where the rape happened), to express my concern. Their office looked into it and contacted me back to say nothing could be done, not by them anyway. I asked some friends to get involved as far as contacting people. I wanted Rollo moved to a different facility, but it was a Friday, once again, and a lot of offices were not open over the weekend.
After some dead ends I got in touch with a guy working at the facility where Rollo was at. I explained there was a rapist at his facility who had attacked multiple women and I was concerned about safety. It was an excellent call. The guy immediately knew who I was talking about even before I told him Rollo’s real name. He told me I had nothing to worry about because although this was a minimum security facility, they had a tiny maximum security section and Rollo was in there. He said the staff were aware of what he was capable of and Rollo couldn’t even use the toilet without someone seeing.
As far as I can remember (this was like 2014, maybe 2015 by now), the immigration guy also said Rollo had a court date, to go before a judge to explain why he should not be deported. As he had overstayed his visa and was subsequently convicted of rape, he didn’t have a chance of staying; he WOULD be deported to Sudan. The immigration guy said he wished I had been in touch earlier because he could have told me how to write to Rollo’s judge about my feelings to be considered by the court. My story could have been entered into the record anyway, even though Rollo was never convicted in my case. But unfortunately Rollo’s court date was tomorrow so there was no time for any letter to reach the judge.
I thanked the immigration man for his reassurance and felt much better about the whole situation. And so Rollo was deported.
After he was deported to Sudan, the violent intrusive thoughts constantly for the entire month of June stopped. The following year they didn’t happen, they didn’t come back.
I did still sometimes have problems though. One random day I started watching a random action movie with my boyfriend and there was a scene where these two main characters blunder upon a crime scene, the aftermath of a violent rape. I got very upset and started sobbing and suddenly remembered the month happened to be June. That sort of stuff in a movie or on TV didn’t used to bother me but this time I went hysterical. I also felt bad for having ruined what had been a pleasant evening with my boyfriend.
But it seems like time healed a lot of it, that and the fact that Rollo was in Sudan and no longer capable of appearing on my radar. I would remember the anniversary, when it happened. But on June 16, 2019, exactly ten years after the rape, I forgot all about the fact it was the anniversary. I didn’t remember till a couple of days later. To me, that is recovery.
My boyfriend and I married in 2020.
Some years after that, I stumbled across an article about a scandal in the sex crimes unit of the police department that had investigated my case. Officers had been outright refusing to investigate underage sex trafficking cases and occasionally became “customers” of the victims themselves. I stopped reading after this. I didn’t want to risk seeing any police officers’ names that I might recognize.
The Charley Project Blog 