Alexa's Statement at Trial

It is impossible to describe how being raped has affected me. A better question would be how it hasn't affected me. Nothing I say will ever allow anyone to fully understand what was taken from me that night.

This past year, I have attempted to rebuild my life. When I was raped, I was stripped of everything that was mine. I felt like a shell, as if someone scraped out all of my emotional insides and threw them on the floor. All that made me Alexa was thrown out the window. I would now have to learn how to function again.

What happened to me is an act, which for better or worse, is a part of me. After being raped, "me" is someone different than who I was for 18 years. Just because a year has passed, doesn't mean that when I close my eyes I don't see myself inside that bathroom stall being raped. My world turned upside down and flipped inside out.

No person could ever prepare him or herself for the emotional devastation that this crime causes. I would not wish this on anyone. This is the most devastating experience I could have ever imagined, and I know there is nothing worse than it. The most frustrating part is no matter how someone tries, no one can understand the pain I went through and am still going through. This is the loneliest feeling in the world.

Some days are decent. I only think about rape five or six times. Other days are worse, and I will think about it every second. My family has also been ravaged by the attack as well. My younger sister is afraid to stay in the house by herself; my mother and father are consumed with anger and pain. It hurts them that they cannot do anything to change what happened. They sent me out to a place they thought was safe. I was raped. They feel guilty.

All of these ways and more, which words cannot describe, are the effects this has taken on me. I feel like I have lost all of the capriciousness that makes a teenager young. I feel as if I have lived ten lifetimes and seen all the pain and hurt there is in this world and written on my heart and in the front of my mind. No amount of tears can wash it away.

~Alexa .........

(delivered at trial in Boston, January 26, 2001)