Airing Voices of Assault Victims

It does not get much tougher than this, letting the whole world know something so personal, so painful that you may not have shared it with friends, even family.

But on Saturday morning, two dozen rape and molestation survivors assembled on a sound stage in Hollywood for an event that they hope will strip away the notion that they--and millions of others nationwide--are just victims.

“I am still learning to trust,” Laurie Woolfe, 29, said, staring into a television camera and tugging at her sweater until its sleeves covered her hands like mittens.

Ever since she was molested at age 9 by a male baby-sitter, the Los Angeles receptionist said she has trusted women more than men. But for the past two years, she said, she has had a good relationship with her boyfriend. And notwithstanding the awful memory of what happened, she said into the camera, she has moved on.

“I am happy. I am not sad,” she said.

“I am a survivor.”

The “Survivors” public service announcement, filmed throughout the day and early evening Saturday, is slated to begin airing throughout Los Angeles next month. Although it may eventually be broadcast nationwide, the immediate goal of the spot is to draw attention to another unique event: the April 17 gathering at the Los Angeles Central Library of women who have survived rape and those, including authors and artists, who “have given them voice.”

The event, organized by the survivors’ group, the Rainbow Sisters Project, is designed to coincide with Sexual Assault Awareness Month and draw attention to a crime that continues to be a nationwide plague. Even as law enforcement authorities laud a drop in most violent crimes, rapes remain so prevalent that federal agencies reported last year that one in seven American women and one in 48 men have been raped in their lifetimes.

“What we are telling rape survivors is that they don’t need to be ashamed by what happened, they don’t need to be silenced by what happened,” said Karen Pomer, co-chairwoman of the Rainbow Sisters Project. “And this is an effort to hear from those who have survived.”

A few, such as Betty Liebert, 43, of Hermosa Beach, already have gone public with their stories.

Knocked unconscious and then raped in her van nine years ago as she left a restaurant, Liebert has told a newspaper and a television newsmagazine about her ordeal. “It is not an easy thing but it is something I feel very strongly about,” she said Saturday, anxiously awaiting her time before the camera.

“Five years ago, you couldn’t have gotten me out of my house,” Liebert said.

But now, she said, speaking out is empowering. “It makes me feel like I have a sword in my hand. Like I can do battle,” she said. “Because I never got that chance before.”

Still, most of those assembled Saturday had never shared the stories of their sexual assaults in public. Some said their appearances in the public service announcement would surprise even their friends and family.

“My parents don’t know,” 34-year-old Talia Pierson of Los Angeles said of her date rape 20 years ago.

“At the time, I thought they wouldn’t believe me,” Pierson recalled. “Then it became a moot point. And then it just became part of my life.”

So, the freelance casting director said, helping with--and appearing on--the public service announcement seemed a logical way to tell her story. “If I went to my mother and brought it up, it would be just dredging up the past,” Pierson said. “But this is not like that, this is about the recognition that I have survived.”

As such, Pierson said, “the significance for me is that it is very important that the shame of rape be put in the right camp. And that is not anyone on this set today.”

Greeting each woman with a warm smile and a comforting hug before their appearance, director Kate Miller said her goal was simple.

“This is giving everyone an opportunity in a safe place to speak long and strong and proud,” said Miller, who herself was raped, along with several friends, during a brutal home invasion robbery four years ago.

Gently questioning the women about their feelings over the course of the filming, Miller said the event had great personal significance for her.

“I am hoping,” she said, “to take back some of the power and control that was taken from my friends and me that day.”

Rosanna Hill, co-coordinator of the Rainbow Sisters Project, said the public service announcement is directed not only at those who have survived assaults but those who have been spared.

“Putting a face on the survivors humanizes it, personalizes it,” Hill said. “If people could imagine that it was their sister or their mother, it brings it closer to home and they can understand the crime.”

That, Hill and others said, is what made Saturday’s event so special.

“For every woman here, there were 20 who thought about coming,” Hill said. “It was a very big deal for them to come here.”

But they did.

“I am determined to dissolve this aura of shame,” Pam Spencer, of Marina del Rey, declared as she took her place before the camera.

At 53, Spencer is two decades past a brutal rape and beating that occurred when she lived alone in Kansas.

To this day, Spencer said, she credits the “best acting job of my life” with saving her because she persuaded her attacker that she would not call the police if he let her fall back asleep.

And to this day, she added, she cannot shake the memory of a police detective callously asking her if she had been sexually gratified during her rape. “I still think about confronting him someday,” she said, “I think I will.”

But all those memories were secondary to the message she really wanted to share on a sound stage that fell hush when Spencer began speaking.

“I am happy,” she said.

“I am a mother.

“I am a strong woman.

“I am healing.”