This archive report was first published on 25 June 2021.
It's been nearly two decades since I was 22 years old and working as a sports reporter when I was raped by a major-league baseball player. For 18 years, I didn't tell anyone. I didn't say it out loud to myself, write it down, speak his name or allow myself to think about it beyond wishing hard that it would not have happened.
That all changed in January 2021, when I heard that the New York Mets' general manager, Jared Porter, was fired for sending sexually explicit texts and photographs to a female reporter in 2016. As I read accounts of other women's experiences with sexual harassment, the full force of my own assault hit me.
On a summer evening in 2002, I sat down in a hotel room with my interview subject, a prominent baseball player. We spoke for a few minutes as I asked some questions and he answered. Then he moved suddenly to kiss me. I said, no, no, I don't want that, but he pushed me over to the bed. I tried to shove him. I said no, stop, no, stop, over and over.
While it was happening, I couldn't process that it was happening to me. I said no, again and again. Too terrified to move, I froze. Afterward, I remember getting in my car, shaking, to drive home and looking at my blue-and-white skirt from Express and thinking, 'Why did I have to be wearing a skirt?' Because it was Texas in summer.
I knew that if I told anyone what happened, it would ruin my career. I was 22 with no track record, and at that time, most people in baseball would have rallied to protect the athlete. So I blamed myself. I must have been too nice, too trusting, too friendly and open. Even though I said no, it must have been a misunderstanding.
But the rape followed me at work, and in the rest of my life, I pushed away anything that brought traumatic memories back. I didn't really date until more than four years later; I didn't trust that intimacy. I kept people at a distance. It was easy to explain away this choice to others and myself.
There were smaller daily assaults that came and went. There was the time another sports reporter told me that he had heard a false rumor that I got my job covering the Rangers because I slept with a team executive. There was the coach who was a regular source for me who nicknamed me 'Legs.' Players commented that I must be wearing a thong under my pants since they couldn't see any panty lines, or maybe I wasn't wearing underwear at all.
I hope that by sharing my experiences, more women will feel comfortable speaking up when something is inappropriate. And I also hope more people working in these spaces will bring change, whether in big ways, as an executive empowered to hire more inclusively, or in small ways, speaking up when someone jokes that a woman slept her way to a job or a story.
