Victims Desperate to Recall What Most Want to Forget

As press conferences trumpeting news on the rape front go, the crowd was nothing short of stellar. In the small auditorium of a Santa Monica hospital, there was a county supervisor, a newly elected Los Angeles councilwoman, the mayor and police chief of Santa Monica.

The outgoing interim police chief of Los Angeles was there, as was his spectacularly suave looking successor. The U.S. attorney was there, and a top sheriff’s deputy, the dean of the UCLA School of Medicine, the new president of the Los Angeles Police Commission.

Even Dear Abby.

They came to support the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center’s new campaign, unveiled Monday, aimed at warning college students about the dangers of “rape drugs” Rohypnol and GHB. Because the rape center’s director, Gail Abarbanel, really knows how to throw a press conference, they had come as well to shake hands with the event’s big draw, U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

There were speeches, of course, by the big names. But the real drama was in the stories told by the women you’ve never heard of, the women who go by first names only. There was, for instance, Leilani.

Leilani was a sophomore last fall, returning to one of our “better” universities. Just before the semester began, she attended a frat party. The last thing she remembered before waking up on a strange couch, wet with the urine of strangers, her clothes half off, was being given a drink by a young man. Spiked, most likely with Rohypnol, but who knows?

The attractive qualities of the rape drugs--to rapists--are that they obliterate resistance and induce forgetfulness. Leilani tried to report that she’d been raped, but no evidence was taken, no prosecution ever sought. No one even thought to test her for the rape drugs, which quickly vanish from the body. How do you prosecute a crime, after all, that a victim cannot remember, cannot even be sure took place?

As the press conference ended and Reno ducked out, the ravenous TV cameras devoured Leilani. She had become, for the purposes of news, the all-important anecdote. Her eyes shone against their lights as reporters, microphones and lenses turned their intense, fleeting attention to her before dashing off to their deadlines.

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Sitting quietly in the audience among reporters, prosecutors, doctors and activists was another first-name-only woman. Tonia had joined Leilani in a private meeting with Janet Reno before the press conference, hoping to get, as she put it, some kind of “closure” on her experience. Tonia believes she was drugged, raped and sodomized by the owner of a Santa Monica club.

Tonia is not a college student, doesn’t go to rowdy frat parties. She is a 28-year-old mother, who lives in a gated suburban community in a half-million-dollar home. She owns a business; her husband is an executive in the financial industry. They have a live-in nanny, they drive nice cars.

“I am not,” says Tonia, “who this is supposed to happen to.”

In March 1996, she was celebrating her first big night out with friends 18 months after the birth of her baby. She believes she was slipped Rohypnol by the club owner because of the “hallucinatory” way she felt after three beers. Her memories are spotty and erratic: The man handed her the last beer, he took her to his convertible, then to his apartment. She sat on his sofa and tried to figure out how to call a taxi after he threw the phone at her. At one point, she woke up realizing, “that some part of his body is inside of me, but not knowing who he was.”

Seventy-two hours later, still woozy and sore, she called police. By then, the physical evidence was gone. The club owner had an explanation: She was drunk, he took her home, tucked her into his bed and slept on the sofa. “He has a memory and you don’t,” the prosecutor explained.

Case closed.

Not for Tonia, of course.

And when Abarbanel invited her to meet the attorney general, she wanted to know one thing: “Does this mean they’re going to reopen my case?”

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Last week, a Los Angeles prosecutor named Renee Korn had the pleasure of watching as two defendants were sentenced to very long prison terms for using the drug GHB to rape or attempt to rape at least eight women at a Lawndale warehouse over a period of two years. The sentences--77 years and 19 years--conclude what is thought to be the largest rape drug case in California. In a twist that was both ludicrous and lucky, the men had photographed themselves with their unconscious victims.

“I made a terrible opening statement,” said Korn, who was at Monday’s press conference. “But I don’t think the jury heard a word of my statement because I showed them the pictures, blown up to poster size. They are the most humiliating and degrading things I have ever seen.”

For better or worse, most rape drug victims will not have this kind of evidence. Without education and quick intervention to preserve evidence, they are condemned to suffer a paradoxical kind of torment. They want desperately to remember what most rape victims want desperately to forget.

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* Robin Abcarian co-hosts a morning talk show on radio station KTZN-AM (710). Her column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is Rabcarian@aol.com.