Speaking Out Helps Rape Survivor Rebuild Life Published April 25, 2008 By Susan Griggs Keesler News KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, MISS. -- Editor's note: These stories are the last of a four-part series in conjunction with the observance of April as Sexual Assault Awareness Month. July 11, 2003, the day Senior Airman Tiffany Thompson was raped, is the day her former life ended and her current life began. "I've changed -- it was the death of who I used to be, a happy, bubbly, naive person who walked around believing the world is good," she explained. "Now I live by myself with my daughter, and when things go bump in the night, I wake up. If I'm walking around and it's even a little dark out, I turn around." Airman Thompson, a divorced mom with a 15-month-old daughter, Alexys, is an air traffic control instructor in the 334th Training Squadron. She was the speaker April 15 at a candlelight vigil in Enid, Okla., for Survivors of Violent Crime Month and Sexual Assault Awareness Month. After she completed technical training at Keesler nearly five years ago, she went home to Nicollet, Minn., on leave and to work as a recruiter's assistant. "It was my coming-home party," she remembered. "I ran into a good friend's brother at a bar with some of my friends -- I had known him since junior high. I was with my friends and I felt safe -- I let other people get my drinks, and I never should have done that." After a couple of hours and only two drinks, Airman Thompson had no recollection of the next 24 hours. When she woke up, she was in her parents' pop-up camper getting wet from the rain. She didn't automatically realize what had happened to her and started walking around in a daze. Later, she went on a tubing trip with her friends. "I was trying to forget something, but I really didn't know what it was," Airman Thompson admitted. "That was a big mistake on my part because when you're assaulted, you're supposed to go to an emergency room before you shower, eat, drink or go to the bathroom." A good friend told her what he had heard and said he thought it was important for her to see a doctor. Around midnight, she went to the emergency room. "I sat alone in a tiny examining room for about four hours before I saw a doctor or nurse," Airman Thompson recalled. "Since it wasn't a military situation and we weren't near a military base, the state supplied a victim advocate, but it was another three hours before she arrived. "As I sat there in that paper robe, they brought in a male police officer who asked me if I wanted to make a report -- I just wanted him to go away," she went on. "It should have been a female, or they should have let me put clothes on." The victim advocate "gave me some handouts and left. She didn't even give me a phone number to call." Soon, Airman Thompson's situation became a military issue. "The recruiter I was assisting wondered why I didn't show up, so I told him what happened," she said. "At the time, I didn't know it wasn't legal, but he gave me a direct order to report it to the cops or he'd write me an Article 15. "The recruiter probably did everything wrong. You're not supposed to touch a victim, but he wanted to hug me and I wanted to scream -- he didn't know any better." Airman Thompson talked to an investigator, which started the court case. She had to call the perpetrator, meet him at a restaurant and wear a wire. Police sat nearby ready to make an arrest. "He started telling me he was sorry and I asked him what he was sorry for -- I wanted to get as much information as I could," Airman Thompson said. "He actually admitted that he raped me, but not that he drugged me. I asked him if he knew I'd been drinking and wasn't coherent, and he said yes." All of a sudden, the police took him away, and Airman Thompson didn't have to see him again until court day. "That's the last time I've cried," she explained. "Sometimes I want to cry, but I can't -- even when my baby girl was born." Airman Thompson arrived for her first assignment at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., about a month after the incident. After a 10-hour drive, she was taking a shower when she heard a knock at the door of her dorm room. "It was my first sergeant," she recalled. "It was about four in the afternoon and he had called mental health and made them stay open, and he was going to drag me there. I didn't know he had no right to do that. They asked me a lot of questions -- they made me feel like I was going crazy. "I dived into training to get my upgrade -- it was a way to forget what had happened," Airman Thompson pointed out. "A couple of times I wanted to stop training because of all the phone calls back and forth about the case, but it wasn't possible." When she went back to Minnesota for court, Krista, a friend from tech school who'd become her confidante and supporter, went with her. "I had trouble seeing my family," she said. "My grandma told my dad that things like that don't just happen -- I must have done something to deserve it. I'm still mad at her. She's ignorant, and that's not her fault. I've tried to talk to her about it, but she won't listen or apologize." Airman Thompson knew a plea bargain had been negotiated for her rapist, but she wanted to go to court to read her victim's impact statement. She didn't want her parents there. "I was trying to protect my parents, while they wanted to protect me," she commented. "As we waited, all of a sudden I needed my daddy. I called and said, 'Daddy ...' and he said, 'I'll be right there.'" The young man's mom had called Airman Thompson's mom to ask her to have mercy on her son, and Airman Thompson was angry about it. As they walked into the court, she saw her rapist between his parents, smiling. "I wanted to kill him, but I was scared," she remembered. In court, when she rose to give her statement, the young man's parents walked out of the courtroom. "I knew it would hurt his parents, but I didn't care," she said. "Then they put him in cuffs and took him away to serve a four-year sentence." A sense of relief swept over Airman Thompson as they left the courthouse. "I felt like a person who'd smoked for 40 years getting that first breath of clean, fresh air," she recalled. "I felt 12 times better. It was a big step in my recovery. Is four years long enough? I don't think so, but I've learned it's more than a lot of people get." Back at Vance, she was assigned a victim advocate, but at the time, the program wasn't very helpful. There was no real training for volunteers, very little privacy and little discussion of available services. However, after the Air Force implemented its new victim advocate program in June 2005 with 40 hours of mandatory training, Airman Thompson saw a difference. "I was assigned the same victim advocate, and even now, we still talk," she said. "She sincerely wanted to help me under the old program, but she didn't have any training." Her first exposure to the new program came during a briefing at Vance. "During the film, I ran out of the theater and the base's sexual assault response coordinator chased me, but I wouldn't stop," she remarked. "A few weeks later, I went to the SARC office and that was the beginning of a new stage of my healing. A year later, I was a victim advocate. "After victim advocate training, I realized that being quiet doesn't do anything for me," she added. "If I can help, let me help -- it's the best coping mechanism for me." Airman Thompson's rapist was released from prison Nov. 28 -- the same day she arrived at Keesler. "I haven't been home since because he's there," she said. "It's not that I'm scared -- I'm uncomfortable." Sometimes she still has flashbacks and wakes up with handprints on her arms, but "it gets better every day. Some days are still a little worse than others, sometimes it's still hard to get up and face the day, sometimes I just need to feel bad for myself for a little while. I take it minute by minute