"One witness said he saw me lying bleeding on a sofa, but that he assumed I had been menstruating. Another witness claimed he saw me in a sheet lying on another floor bleeding, and then ran away. One witness tried to wake me up, but I only opened my eyes. One witness saw a man 'running out of a room, with blood all over his pants' and 'thought there had been a shooting,' so he and his companion ran away to avoid any possible trouble. The report ended with the assertion that I had been advised by the university that I could speak with the Commonwealth's attorney but that I and my parents had turned down this option in the presence of Dean Canevari. It also stated that all options had been offered to me and my family and that I refused them and was referred to counseling."
That's Liz Seccuro's synopsis of the University of Virginia's report about the gang rape that happened to her at the Phi Kappa Psi house in 1984, which she wrote about in her 2011 book, "Crash Into Me." It's from Chapter 10, "Dark Days and New Revelations."
What Dean Canevari had actually done was to bully and victim-blame Ms. Seccuro when she was a 17-year-old virgin who had just gotten gang-raped and she had tried to talk to him about what had happened. In a subsequent meeting with Ms. Seccuro at which her parents were also present, Dean Canevari said "Boys will be boys...We see a lot of this sort of thing...there's not much we can do about it," and tried to get Ms. Seccuro to transfer to another school, calling her "troubled." She describes that in Chapter 4, called "Sweeping It Under the Rug."
This is another quote from Chapter 4, describing Ms. Seccuro's physical condition during her first meeting with Dean Canevari:
"My cheekbone had an obvious bruise, my lip was swollen, and the black-and-blue finger marks on my arms became more pronounced. Breathing was still a challenge, as my ribcage felt constricted. On top of that, I was still intermittently bleeding vaginally."
Chapter 2, "High Ambitions," describes Ms. Seccuro as being from blue-collar New York, "the valedictorian of her all-Catholic girls' school," and "the first person in (her) family to attend college." She was the perfect target; young, naive, from far away, and from a family that had no social or professional connections to any power in Virginia.
When Ms. Seccuro contacted the University of Virginia in 2005, she was told that there was no record of her ever having spoken to anyone at the school about being raped. It wasn't until months after that 2005 denial that she finally got a redacted copy of the University of Virginia's report of its 1984 interviews with men who were at the Phi Kappa Psi house when she was given a drugged drink, forced into a room and gang-raped on the night of October 5, 1984.
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, June 30, 2016 @ 4:31 p.m.
